The One-Eyed Man Page 4

  Ten hours later, as I knocked on the coffee shop window, it was the cat I thought of. Although strictly speaking this was less a thought, I suppose, and more a spasm of indistinct anxiety over how long it would take someone, after I’d been shot dead, to discover Meowser crouched in a dark corner of the house, his innate friendliness supplanted by distrust of a world that had stolen his human companions and left him hungry and alone.

  Or maybe I was being sentimental. After all, Meowser would’ve eaten me with good appetite if I died and no other food was available. There were documented cases of such.

  In any event, it was the cat I thought of when the man simultaneously turned toward the sound of my knocking and pulled the trigger on his .38. I was pushed back hard, as though shoved rather than shot, and I fell to the pavement while shards of glass tinkled like sleet all around me. For a few moments I lay there, trying to understand what had happened, listening to the girl moan on the other side of the now-empty window frame. The sound came from her long and low, like the pealing of church bells, and it occurred to me, in a distant way, that if she had breath to cry that meant she was still alive. After a while I tried to get myself up off the sidewalk, but my left arm didn’t seem to want to work, so I lay down again and waited, though for what I had little idea.

  By and by the faces of two men blocked the night sky above me; one wore a baseball cap, the other was hatless and bald.

  “Oh shit,” the one in the cap said.

  The bald man reached down toward me. “C’mon, let’s get him out of this glass,” he said.

  Hands grasped and lifted, sending a jolt of pain through my shoulder, and I groaned in inarticulate protest. Pebbles of glass crunched under our feet as the men guided me to a bench in front of the shop. I could still hear the girl crying, quieter now, and also sirens in the distance echoing up the hill.

  “Have a seat, buddy, ambulance’ll be here any minute,” the bald man told me. I did as instructed, collapsing onto the bench with enough force to make my shoulder sing anew. The bald man looked at his palms, stained with a black wetness I did not immediately recognize as blood, and wiped them on the front of his jeans.

  “Someone,” I said, “should check on the girl.”

  “What girl?” the man in the cap asked.

  “In the coffee shop,” I said. “Just follow the sound of weeping.”

  “I’ll go,” the bald man said to the man in the cap. “Steve, stay here with him.”

  Steve and I watched as the bald man tried the door and, finding it locked, opted instead to climb through the open window frame. He hopped down and disappeared into the shop’s interior. I half expected to hear another gunshot—or a series of them—but there was nothing but the sound of sirens, ever louder.

  Steve looked at me again. “Jesus, you’re bleedin’ bad,” he said.

  I leaned back against the bench. “I think this is the part,” I said, “where you’re supposed to assure me I’ll be okay.”

  Steve didn’t respond. Instead he glanced down the street, in the direction of the approaching emergency vehicles, and said, “Come on, hurry up already.”

  “Never a cop around when you need one,” I said.

  “I guess the hell not,” Steve said.

  “While we’re on the subject of municipal ineptitude,” I said. “The crossing signal.”

  Steve looked at me again, perplexed. “Hey,” he said. “Stay with me, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What I meant was that crossing signal there, in front of us. It’s broken. That’s the whole reason I’m here in the first place.”

  Judging by his expression, Steve again failed to register what I meant.

  “I should probably write a letter to the city,” I told him.

  The bald man appeared in the window frame again. “She’s okay,” he called to us. “Scared, but okay.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Steve hooked a thumb in my direction. “He’s not doing so hot,” he said to the bald man. “Talking gibberish.”

  “I’m perfectly lucid,” I said, rising to my feet by way of demonstration. “And I think I’d like to go. My cat needs to be fed, and this letter to the city is sort of writing itself right now. I’d like to get it down on paper before I forget.”

  “You see?” Steve said to the bald man.

  “I’ll find something to try and stop the bleeding,” the bald man told Steve. He disappeared inside again.

  The crossing signal on the opposite side of the street, interestingly enough, seemed to be functioning just fine—it displayed, in encouraging crystalline LED light, the outline of a man walking. So I walked, albeit a bit unsteadily.

  Behind me I heard Steve call out. “Guy,” he said, “where are you going, you fucking got shot.”

  But I hadn’t eaten all day, hadn’t had a thing to drink all day, and I was cold and tired and the cat needed to be fed, and now that I was on my feet I just wanted to be home. So I ignored Steve’s entreaties and crossed the street, still composing the letter of complaint in my head. I intended to use a fairly light, casual tone, while simultaneously making clear that, in my view, crossing signals were an important component of public safety and warranted the same prompt attention that would be afforded, say, a broken traffic light.

  I’d covered maybe half the distance to my house when police strobes suddenly blazed all around, deflecting off of tree trunks and vinyl siding, chasing shadows around the neighborhood at the speed of light. Behind me a car screeched to a stop, and I heard two doors open.

  “Stop right there!” someone yelled. I surmised, though I could not confirm visually, that for the second time that night a firearm was being pointed at me. “Hands, motherfucker! Let me see your hands!”

  I raised my good arm overhead, extended the other as far out to my side as I could, and turned to face the blinding lumens of a roof-mounted spotlight.

  “Down on the ground, now!” I was told.

  And I obeyed this directive, however unintentionally, by passing out.

  4

  AS MUCH AS SHE NEEDS

  Sarah died as she had lived, which is to say: furiously.

  I’m referring here to the very last day of her life, during which she flailed through something called the agonal phase.

  Depending on one’s perspective, “agonal” is either an apt and evocative description of the phenomenon, or an inaccurate, perhaps even hyperbolic description of the phenomenon.

  Apt because during this time the dying person often thrashes about, throws her head from side to side, makes strange animal noises, and generally behaves as if she were in tremendous discomfort.

  Inaccurate and perhaps hyperbolic because neuroscientists agree that the agonal phase is a cognitive state resembling deep surgical sedation, and so despite all the gasping and moaning the person experiences no discomfort—let alone agony—whatsoever.

  On average it lasts for two minutes, give or take.

  Sarah’s, by contrast, went on all day and into the night.

  This was by no means the only way in which she was exceptional.

  “I know it seems awful,” the hospice nurse said while I sat at Sarah’s bedside and held her hand. “But I’ve done this many, many times, and she can’t feel anything. She’s miles away.”

  Every half minute or so, Sarah would heave for breath and squeeze my hand with a strength I’d never known her to possess. Each time it felt like the small bones in my hand might crack. I winced and held on despite the fact that Sarah could not feel or know anything, and thus could not care less whether I was holding her hand.

  “I’m here,” I told her over and over. “Okay, okay. Easy. I’m here, Sarah. I’m here.”

  As the first hour passed, the nurse expressed surprise that Sarah was still alive, and began uttering platitudes that had no basis in either medicine or human physiology.

  “She’s not ready to leave you yet,” the nurse said. Also: “It’s amazing sometimes how long people hold
on, out of love.”

  When it was over, I learned that patients whose cancer migrates to the lungs, as Sarah’s had, could sometimes struggle for hours before finally expiring. This seemed, for reasons both scientific and personal, a much more likely explanation for her protracted agonal period than any reluctance on her part to leave me.

  But I nodded along, pretending to share the nurse’s amazement at the power of love to forestall death. I held Sarah’s hand and stroked her cheek and separated her lips as the nurse squirted morphine from a wide-gauge syringe. I read aloud: Tolstoy, bits of levity from Nora Ephron, Robert Lowell’s visions of New England, where Sarah and I had grown up, met, fallen in love.

  Though I made no phone calls, people arrived throughout the day, summoned by a force they could not name—and like the Magi, they bore gifts.

  “We just felt like we should drop by,” Alice said, proffering a baking pan full of manicotti. Behind her in the doorway stood Tony with a vase of flowers, strange blossoms in muted earth tones (months later, when Alice was out of earshot, he apologized for the grim arrangement, referring to it as “FTD’s ‘Sorry Your Wife Is Dying’ bouquet”).

  After that, friends showed up every half hour or so. As the house filled, Alice took over the minor domestic duties—keeping coffee on, answering the door, policing those who neglected to remove their shoes—while I continued my hand-pulverizing vigil at Sarah’s bedside. People took turns sitting in the only other chair in the room, on the opposite side of the bed. Hardly anyone spoke to me. No one except Alice ventured to take Sarah’s right hand, even though every half minute or so she seized up like someone being hit with a defibrillator and waved that hand around in a sort of grotesque invitation. Most visitors, the first couple of times this happened after they took a seat, recoiled in spite of themselves. Maybe they were afraid of how Sarah’s hand would feel—and they were right to be afraid, because her hand was hard and cold, like she was not a person but rather one of those antique dolls with the porcelain eyes that stare and stare. So they watched Sarah thrash and listened to her moan for as long as they could bear to do so, then stood and withdrew to the light and warmth of the kitchen.

  Much as I might have wanted to, I certainly couldn’t blame them for excusing themselves. Watching someone die isn’t just unpleasant, it’s also pretty dull. At least in the kitchen there was hot coffee and conversation, people eating casserole from paper plates, sharing hugs and gossip and opinions about sporting events. It became a sort of safe zone, like the designated spot in a children’s game where one is immune from being made “it.”

  Eventually everyone served their time at Sarah’s bedside, and I slept, my forehead pressed against the hard raised seam at the edge of the mattress. Evening had flowed like a black liquid into the corners of the room when Alice woke me and insisted that I take a mug of tea. I looked up, blinking and mute, and Alice gazed at me and used her free hand to touch an indentation the mattress had left in my forehead. Her thumb was hot from holding the mug, and for just an instant it burned me. Alice traced the line in my skin and cooed mournfully, her head tilted to the side and her eyes brimming, an empathic tenderness the likes of which she almost certainly had never shared with Tony, and suddenly I was relieved of thinking about Sarah and instead free to marvel at the ways in which human relationships defied neat categorization and constraint, how Alice and I, until now mindlessly chaste in our interactions, were here thrust by grief into a moment as physically and emotionally intimate as sex, and thus could have been rightly accused of violating the covenant of both our marriages—in front of my dying wife, no less. And I almost confessed to Alice then, almost told her that I was responsible for the fact that my Sarah was dying, and how the worst part of being guilty was having no one suspect you in the least. But then I noticed my hand ached as if someone had been pounding on it with a claw hammer, and this drew my attention away. I looked down, and Alice pulled her thumb away from my forehead, and the moment ended. Alice set the mug of tea on the nightstand and said, “Drink that, you.” She left me there, flexing my hand and contemplating the bruises gathering on the meat between my thumb and forefinger, purple marks the exact size and shape of Sarah’s fingertips.

  Sarah continued to seize and sigh. Dinnertime slipped on toward full night and sleet began to scratch at the windows. By and by people rinsed their coffee cups, tossed their paper plates in the trash, and gathered their things to go. They drifted into the bedroom, regretful sounds issuing from their throats, eyes wet and helpless. They squeezed my shoulder, kissed Sarah’s forehead, took their leave. Soon the hospice nurse had to go as well. She pressed eight syringes of morphine into my hand and told me to give Sarah “as much as she needs.”

  She held my gaze for a moment after she said this. When she left, I put the syringes in the nightstand.

  Tony and Alice stayed on after everyone else had departed. While Alice sat with Sarah, Tony and I huddled outside under the overhang on the top step and shared a cigarette. It was early morning now, and the sleet had changed over to a chill rain that puddled on the ice coating the driveway.

  “The nurse gave me enough morphine to kill Sarah,” I told Tony.

  “What?”

  I dragged on the cigarette, handed it over, and repeated myself.

  “But that’s just so you have what you need to get through the night, right?” Tony said. “She doesn’t actually want you to give her an overdose.”

  “I think she does,” I said. “Or at least she wants me to have the option.”

  “But she didn’t actually say ‘Here’s a bunch of morphine, give your wife an overdose.’”

  “‘Give her as much as she needs’ were her exact words.”

  Tony gave the cigarette back to me and peered out into the darkness. “We’re good enough friends that I can say what I’m thinking, right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Because it seems to me the nurse didn’t mean anything but exactly what she said. I think you heard what you wanted to hear.”

  “Just so I understand,” I said, “you’re saying, in essence, that I want someone to tell me it’s okay to kill my wife.”

  “Not in so many words, K.,” Tony said. “Jesus. But that said? If it’s me? With what’s going on in there? I’d give it some serious thought, man. I really would.”

  I flicked the cigarette into the driveway, where it landed in a puddle and hissed out. “I think,” I said, “that we should probably go back inside.”

  As the darkest part of the night went on and Sarah continued to thrash her covers, I kept remembering those syringes. At first the thought of them would flit through my mind for just an instant, usually in the moments when Sarah seized up and her eyes flew open, furious yet vacant, and she sucked at the air like a fish in the bottom of a boat. Alice kept her seat on the opposite side of the bed, her eyes closed and her lips moving silently, and Tony stood in the bedroom doorway looking stricken, every once in a while bowing his head and running a hand through his hair or kneading the muscles in the back of his neck.

  Around three A.M. my cell phone buzzed. It was Peggy, Sarah’s mother, calling from the road.

  “Is she gone yet?” Peggy asked.

  “How far away are you?” I asked.

  “Three, four hours,” she said. “I’m on goddamn ever-loving 84 in Hartford.”

  “She isn’t gone yet,” I told Peggy.

  “And you know what I’m thinking, as I drive through Hartford?” Peggy asked. “I’m thinking there’s very little wrong with the health-care system that couldn’t be solved by dropping a smallish nuclear weapon on this town.”

  “Peggy,” I said.

  “They’re fucking vampires,” Peggy said.

  “Okay.” I rubbed at my eyes.

  “How much longer?” Peggy asked.

  “Until what?”

  “How much longer,” Peggy said slowly, “does my daughter have?”

  “It’s hard to say,” I said. “She’s hanging on p
retty tight.”

  Then I told Peggy about the hospice nurse, and the syringes in the nightstand drawer. Several moments passed, during which the only sound between us was the sharp inhalations of Peggy smoking one of her Winston Lights.

  “What are you waiting for?” she said finally.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Not me, I hope,” she said.

  “You think I should give Sarah the morphine?”

  “I think it’s your decision,” Peggy said. “But if I have a vote.”

  I stood and walked out of the room, squeezing past Tony in the doorway. “I don’t know if ‘votes’ are really what we’re talking about,” I said. “Maybe more like … I don’t know, Peggy. I’m pretty exhausted, and my wife is dying at a rate that suddenly everyone but me seems to think is not fast enough.”

  Predictably, this inspired little overt sympathy, or even fellow feeling, in Peggy. “Is she uncomfortable?” she asked.

  “She seems like it,” I said. “But the nurse insists she can’t feel anything. That she’s basically comatose.”

  “What is she doing, exactly?”

  “I’d rather not describe it in detail, Peggy,” I said. “Suffice to say that most people would think yeah, that looks awful and someone should do something about it.”

  “So be practical,” Peggy said. “For Christ’s sake, K.”

  Understand, this did not seem at all strange, coming from her.

  “Alright,” I said. “Maybe I should just go grab a big rock and do the job right. Wouldn’t want to take the chance that the morphine won’t work.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Peggy said flatly.

  “I think I will, actually,” I said. “Considering that I’m the one whose wife is dying, I think I will be an asshole, if I feel like it.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “Get here as soon as you can, Peggy,” I said, and hung up.

  The bedroom air was thick with the discomfort of those who have overheard an argument to which they are not a party, and neither Tony nor Alice looked in my direction as I came back in. Neither said anything when I took my seat again, gazed at my wife, opened the nightstand drawer, and pulled out one of the syringes. Neither said anything several moments later, when I pulled out the rest. They remained silent when I tossed the last empty syringe in the trash and crawled onto the bed next to Sarah, though Tony did come around the bed, remove the small grocery bag containing the syringes from the trash can, and leave the house for several minutes before returning empty-handed to watch as Sarah took a final, choking breath.