"Consider yourself the luckiest guy in this room," said the Mechanic.
"But I'm dying," I said.
"But nothing."
I found new doctors, furnished myself with further opinions. They slid me through tubes, onto tables, gurneys, toggled instruments that seemed forged in sterile smithies somewhere, cold bays carved deep into germless rock. They siphoned me, decanted me, bottled and labeled me, my blood, my snot, my waste, whatever coursed through me or sat in me, vatted, casked, the distillations of the guts, the body's gurgling treatment plant. They called me back, called me in, peeked into the corridor, closed the door.
The one with the eyeglasses sighed as she slid them off.
The one with the mustache stroked the bristles into place.
The fat one farted, made a meek look.
"Who can be certain?" they all began. There was concurrence about the uncertainty of certainty. There was concurrence about me.
I was dying of something.
It had no name.
Nobody wanted to venture one now.
I thought about Greta. I daydreamed about Clarice. I wondered if their industry had a tradition of charity work. I sat at home with Cudahy waiting for the symptoms to declare themselves. There had to be symptoms. Death could not precede the symptoms. My symptoms were late bloomers, but bloom they must. They owed me that much, whatever tribe of misery they hailed from: trembling, confusion, amnesia, aphasia, fevers, nomas, blebs. Dizziness, fatigue. Labored breathing. Loosened bowels. Blindness, boils, bedsore'd ravings, sears, flares, wens. Who knew? Nobody had ever done this kind of dying. Oh pioneer, the Patient Zero, the Subject Steve, the me of my given name, the me of my given fate, the chump of mysterium, the presymptomatic simp.
Did I deserve it?
Sure, like you deserve it.
Maybe only for being born.
Maybe only for wanting to be.
Because I did want to be. I wanted to stick around, stay in play. Who doesn't? you ask. Some doesn't, I reply. Me, I'd been there before, the brink, the brink of the blank. I'd come close with Maryse, closer by my lonesome. I'd practiced noose knots, stocked up on pills and gin. Maybe I wasn't the most likely candidate, but I definitely rated dark horse in the auto-snuff sweepstakes. I'd lived enough days when the days didn't end fast enough, days so chock full of me.
But now all I could think was: Let me live! Banish me, shun me, shoo me away, argue me off, but let me fucking live!
Already I was nostalgic for my sorrows. I wanted to savor heartsmash again, desertion, distraction, desolate nights, all the aches and bruises, love's bunions, the mind's bum knee. My mouth watered for bitter fruit. My belly panged for crow. There were no disaffected daughters in the patent-pending nonstate, no wife-pilfering Williams, no medallions of pampered meat. There were no tax forms to fudge, no binges to regret, no sweet depletions of the soul. There was nothing save a nothingness shot through with utter nothingness.
I wanted to keep myself in the realm of somethings, even all the awful somethings.
I wanted the cure.
I got curatives. I got pills, chemical injections, cautious portions of radiation served up by aproned technicians, junior chefs in the kitchens of deep frequencies. I got everything everyone got for dying of everything else, of known killers, named decimations.
I was still insured and they had all sorts of notions at their disposal, long shots, Hail Marys to spare.
"Nothing to lose," was their mantra. "Everything to be gained."
Loss gained. Loss never paused. Nothing took. The pills, the shots, rays, they made me sick. The symptoms! The symptoms had arrived! I thinned, I curdled, I shed.
Cudahy nursed me, nurses doctored me, and all seemed for naught. I was some sort of deliquescing human unit shuttled between home sofa and hospital cot. I sipped nutritional shakes from tin containers, dribbled them out on bathroom tiles, Cudahy's shoes. It was Cudahy who stood by me, truly, in toilet stalls, in taxi lines, in vestibules of vague stink. Maybe we were bound together by the beet fields of our boyhood, or the sweaty secrets of our fathers. I didn't think too hard about it. I was too weak, too grateful. I'd sent Fiona home. I required a secret fiefdom of shamelessness now.
The Further Opinions admitted to varying degrees of bewilderment. A surgeon named Lovinger wanted to cut. She just appeared one day, a voluptuous phantom there in x-ray where I loitered in my paper smock.
"I want to gut you," she said, "get a look-see. I've got a hunch. I'm a good huncher. This conversation is just between us. I can cut like nobody's business. Can I cut you?"
"I don't know," I said.
"I'm your last best hope."
Lovinger laid her hands on my shoulders. Supple, milky hands. A tiny Hebrew letter on a chain swung above the slope of her breast. She said it stood for life. It looked like a little ski-lift chair. I pictured us in it, an Alpine idyll with my surgeon-lover, Lovinger.
"Okay," I said. "Let's cut."
I was borne off in a whirl of orderlies to the new meat ward. My suitemate was an old man, a warren of tubes, puffs of rotted hair. The skin on his face looked blasted underneath, blood bombs gone off in secret detonations. The Los Alamos of all of us. Other men, younger men, slightly less ravaged versions of him, sat grave and dainty on the edges of his bed.
"You're just here for the money," the man said. "Save your breath. It's all going to the Elks. And the black kids. I promised scholarships."
"Dad, we really should discuss this."
The old man turned to me. I saw arid eons in his eyes.
"Fathers and sons," I said.
"The daughters killed me, too. And the daughters-in-law. All of them. Everybody. Except the Elks. I extend my gratitude to the Elks. They made a place for me. Saturday nights, some cards, some laughs. I'm a businessman, but I never forgot where I came from. I used to go down to the tough schools and make speeches to the black kids. They understand hardship. I told them if they didn't get knocked up or join those machine-gun gangs I'd send them to college. Maybe it's a waste, but if we get one good fellow out of it, one Washington Irving, it'll all be worth it."
"Dad, please."
"The papers are drawn up, Randy. You're Randy, right?"
He put out a crusted hand. The nearest son took it, started to cry.
"Christ," said the old man, "what I wouldn't give for a tough black son."
I slid out of bed, stood.
"Where you going?"
"I smell encroaching nothingness," I said.
"I know what you're smelling," said the old man. "It's not my fault. It's because the girl hasn't come. I keep pushing the button and she never comes."
The surgeon Lovinger caught up with me in the lobby.
"You've got to let me cut," she said. "I've got us a room and everything."
Cudahy was waiting for me out on the curb. The taxi driver took us through the park.
"Detour," he said. "Parade."
"What parade?" I said.
"Landlord Day," said the driver. "See the float?"
A great papier-mache tenement house was rolling down the avenue. Men in matching motor caps carried signs: "Rent Control Is Mind Control."
"It's all about the little man," said Cudahy.
"The little man?" said the driver.
"The little lord," said Cudahy.
There was an old movie on TV about android gladiators. It was set in the future, the late seventies. Cudahy sat beside me, cubing feta cheese.
"You know," he said, " 'robot' is a Czech word. I can't remember what it means. Here, this came."
He pushed an open envelope across the cutting board, shrugged when he saw me rub at the vinegar stains.
Dear Enrollee:
This notice hereby notifies you that your health plan has reached its maximum amount of maximum expenditure. We want to thank you for being such a faithful and valued customer.