When she had limped up to the third floor the cat was there to greet her, or to accuse her of neglect. He was a country cat and had lived on mice and chipmunks and on birds. He now spent his days watching the grackles, blue jays, and giant crows. These look much bigger than crows in the woods-perhaps because of the smaller scale of domesticated city plants. Late in the afternoon they sound off from our rooftop like metal-saws.
I suppose it served some biological purpose but I was not interested. I was deaf to theory just then-just as I refused to think of what I was doing as a struggle for existence. If I had stopped to consider it, I would have been aware that I was underground digging myself out with bare hands. Some would have thought well of my tenacity or loyalty to life. To me it was no such thing-it was as dull as potatoes.
Rosamund after looking into the bare fridge (there was no time to shop) chewed some cheese rinds and then with her hair protected by a tall cone of turkish towels she stood under a hot shower. In bed, she telephoned her parents and chatted with them. Her alarm was set for seven, and she was at the hospital very early in the morning. She could name all the drugs prescribed for me, and the doctors found that she could tell them how I had reacted to each one, what I was allergic to, or what my blood-pressure readings had been the day before yesterday. There was an extended sorting apparatus in the pretty woman's head. She told me, confidently, that we would live to be very old, well into the coming century. She said I was a prodigy. I saw myself rather as a sort of freak.
There was no subject raised which she didn't immediately understand. Ravelstein would have been well pleased with her. Of course he'd never had my advantage, the access to her that I had. And after the crisis Rosamund said she never doubted that I would survive. And I seemed to believe that I wouldn't die because I had things to do. Ravelstein expected me to make good on my promise to write the memoir he had commissioned. To keep my word I'd have to live. Of course there was an obvious corollary: Once the memoir was written, I lost my protection, and I became as expend able as anybody else.
"But that couldn't apply to you," said Rosamund. "Once you had felt your way _up__ to it, nothing could have held you back. Besides, you'd survive for my sake."
I often recalled asking Ravelstein which of his friends were likely to follow him soon. "To keep you company," was the way I put it. And after he had thoroughly examined my color, my wrinkles, my looks, he said that I was the likeliest to follow. He was like that. If you asked him to be direct he wouldn't spare you. His clarity was like a fast-freezing fluid. Did he mean that I would be the first of his friends to join him in the afterlife? This was what the tone of our exchange suggested. But then he didn't believe in an afterlife. Plato, by whom he was guided in such matters, often spoke of a life-to-come but it was difficult to say how seriously he took this. I was not about to get into the rink with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics. One bump of his powerful belly and I'd be out of the brilliant ring and back again in the noisy dark.
He had, however, asked me what I imagined death would be like-and when I said that the pictures would stop he reflected seriously on my answer, came to a full stop, and considered what I might mean by this. No one can give up on the pictures-the pictures might, yes they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be _the__ end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just _talk__ tough.
So when I made my remark about the pictures, Ravelstein had given me his explosive laugh-stammer: "Har har." But he had some regard-some respect for the answer.
But then he let himself go so far as to say, "You look as if you might by and by be joining me."
This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures _do__ stop.
Roughly forty percent of intensive care patients die in the intensive care unit. Of the remainder some twenty percent are permanently disabled. These invalids are sent to what the health industry calls "chronic care facilities." They can never be expected to lead nor mal lives. The rest, the lucky ones, are said to be "on the floor."
On the floor, I was no longer attended by the ICU team of physicians. Worn out by hundreds of hours in the unit, two of them now stopped by to say that they were going on holiday. Because I was one of their great successes they looked me up on the floor to say good bye. Dr. Alba brought chicken soup from her own kitchen. Dr. Bertolucci's gift was a homemade lasagna dish and a supplement of meatballs in tomato sauce, like the one I had eaten in intensive care. I was still unable to feed myself. The spoon shook in my hand and rattled the dish; I couldn't bring it to my mouth. Dr. Bertolucci came to dine with Rosamund and me. Far from normal, I kept bringing the conversation back to the subject of cannibalism. But Dr. Bertolucci was very pleased with me saying, "You're just about out of the woods." He had saved my life. I was sitting up, eating a dinner the doctor himself had cooked, and chatting, nattering away. Rosamund too was pleased and excited. This was my first night on the floor, and I wouldn't be going to a chronic care institution to begin a cripple's life.
When I was transferred to the floor the neurology resident gave me a preliminary examination. My medical history in a thick binder was available at the nurse's station. Rosamund had kept a journal of her own during the weeks of crisis and the resident questioned her too.
That same night, Dr. Bakst, the chief neurologist, appeared at midnight and he too questioned her. She had been asleep in the armchair beside the bed.
I had been treated for pneumonia and heart failure. And though I was on the floor, I was not out of the woods. Not yet. Not quite. What my problems were is only partly relevant here. Let me say quite simply that things were far from normal, and that my future was still uncertain.
Dr. Bakst came with his packet of pins. Examining me-sticking pins into my face-he discovered that my upper lip was (to put it in my own way) lame. Even when I spoke or laughed it was strangely immobile or partially paralyzed. He put me through some simple tests-I failed them. At various times he asked me to draw clock-faces. I was unable at first to draw anything. My hands were useless. I had no control of them at all. It was impossible for me to eat my soup or to sign my name. I couldn't manage a pen. When he said, "Do me a clock," a crabbed zero was all I could draw. My symptoms seemed to Dr. Bakst to be due to poisoning. Bйdier in Saint Martin had served me a toxic fish. The neurologist said that I was a victim of cigua toxin. I was now willing to believe the worst about the Caribbean. The French doctor I saw there had diagnosed my trouble as dengue. He might, just possibly, have known better. An Australian cigua-toxin expert described the symptoms of that disease on the telephone to Dr. Bakst in Boston. Some of Bakst's Boston colleagues did not accept the diagnosis. I was partial to Bakst, however, for reasons which had little to do with medicine, strictly speaking.
To put matters plainly, I had to decide whether I should or should not make efforts to recover. I had for long weeks been un conscious, my body was wasted-unrecognizable. My sphincters were confused and I wasn't so much walking as stumbling-hanging on to a metal frame. I had once been the youngest of a large family. I now had adult children of my own. When they came to visit, those that had inherited my features gave me the feeling that I was being looked at by my own eyes-still germane but soon to be re placed by a later model. Ravelstein would have advised me to keep my head. I felt very nearly done for but I was, however damaged, sick of it all, not yet discharged from the service.