It was an hour until someone found him, two hours more until someone took the trouble to call the police. The police arrived when Bremen was struggling up to a half-conscious state; they seemed surprised to find him alive. Bremen heard the car radio squawk as one of the officers called for an ambulance, he closed his eyes for a brief second, and when he opened them, there were paramedics around him and they were lifting him onto a wheeled stretcher. The paramedics wore clear plastic gloves and Bremen noticed how they worked to keep from getting his blood on themselves. He did not remember the ride to the hospital.
The emergency room was crowded. A team consisting of a Pakistani doctor and two exhausted interns dealt with his knife slash, gave him a hurried injection, and began stitching before the local anesthetic took effect. Then they left him to deal with some other patient. Bremen drifted in and out of consciousness for an hour and a half while he waited for them to return. When they did, the Pakistani doctor was gone, replaced by a young black doctor with rings of exhaustion under her heavy-lidded eyes, but the interns were the same.
They pronounced his nose broken, set a metal bar in place there with tape, found two broken ribs and taped them, prodded his bruised kidneys until he almost fainted with the pain, and then had him urinate into a plastic bedpan. Bremen opened his eyes long enough to see that his urine was pink. One of the interns told him that his left arm was dislocated and made him hold it up while they rigged a sling. The doctor returned and peered in Bremen’s mouth. His lips were so swollen that the touch of the tongue depressor made him stifle a cry of pain. The doctor announced that he had been lucky—only one tooth had actually been knocked out. Did he have a dentist?
Bremen grunted an answer made more vague by his swollen lips. They gave him another shot. Bremen could feel the medics’ fatigue as palpable as a thick tent canvas covering them all. None of the three had slept more than five hours during the past thirty. Their exhaustion made Bremen sleepier than the shot had.
He opened his eyes to find a police officer there. She was stolid, her gunbelt, belt radio, flashlight, and other items swinging from heavy hips. She had smudged eyes and blotchy skin. She asked Bremen again for his name and address.
Bremen blinked, thought of the authorities and Vanni Fucci, although he had to strain to remember through the painkiller haze who Vanni Fucci was. He gave the officer the name and address of Frank Lowell, the head of his department at Haverford. His buddy who was busy saving Bremen’s job for him.
“You’re a long way from home, Mr. Lowell,” said the officer. Bremen’s left eye was swollen shut and his right one was too blurry to read the name tag over her badge. He mumbled something.
“Can you describe the assailants?” she asked, rooting in her blouse pocket for a pencil. Bremen’s vision focused long enough for him to make out the childish scrawls in her notebook. She dotted her
“I heard one of them call the other … the tallest … Red,” he said, knowing that they called each other nothing during the attack. But one of them had
Suddenly Bremen realized that the neurobabble around him was a distant thing. Even the surges of pain and panic from the other patients in the emergency room, the mental cries and catcalls from the dark rooms stacked above him like crates of misery … all were muted. Bremen smiled at the officer and blessed the painkiller, whatever it had been.
“Your wallet is missing,” said the cop. “Your ID is gone, your insurance card, everything.…” The officer eyed him, and even through the fog of medication Bremen could feel her suspicion: he looked like a derelict, but they had checked his arms, thighs, and feet … no track marks … and while his urine had held ample blood, there had been no immediate trace of drugs or alcohol. Bremen felt her decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“You’ll spend the night here in observation, Mr. Lowell,” she said. “You told Dr. Chalbatt that you had no one to call here in the Denver area, so Dr. Elkhart isn’t too keen on turning you loose tonight without supervision. They’ll book you in as soon as there’s a room available, monitor the bruised kidney overnight, and take another look at you tomorrow. We’ll send someone over in the morning to go over the assault and battery with you.”
Bremen closed his eyes and nodded slowly, but when he opened his eyes again, he was alone on a gurney in an echoing hallway. The clock read 4:23. A woman in a pink sweater came by, adjusted his blanket, and said, “There should be a room available anytime now.” Then she was gone and Bremen fought going back to sleep.
He had been an idiot to give the police officer Frank Lowell’s name and address. Someone would call Frank’s home in the morning, a description would be given, and Bremen would be sitting in custody, answering questions about his burned farmhouse … and possibly about a body found in a Florida swamp.
Bremen moaned and sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the gurney. He almost fell off. He stared at his bare toes and realized that he was in a paper-thin gown; there was a plastic hospital bracelet on his left wrist.
He slid off the cart, went to his knees, and used his good hand to feel around on the shelf under the cart. His clothes were stacked there, bloodstained and ripped though they were. Bremen checked the hall … it was still empty, although rubber soles squeaked just out of sight around the corner … and then he was hobbling to a supply closet down the hall, dressing painfully … finally giving up and draping the shirt over his slinged arm like a cape … and then out. Before he left the supply closet, he rummaged in a hamper of soiled clothing, came up with a white cotton intern’s jacket, and tugged it on, knowing how little warmth it would give out in the streets.
He checked the hall, waited until there was no noise, and moved as quickly as he could to a side door.
It was snowing outside. Bremen scurried way down an alley, not knowing where he was or where he was headed. Overhead, between the dark cliffs c buildings, the sky showed no hint of dawn.
EYES
I do not mean to suggest that Jeremy and Gail are the perfect couple, never disagreeing, never arguing, never disappointing one another. It is true that sometimes their mindtouch is more of an invitation to discord than a binding force.
Their closeness acts like a magnifying mirror for their smallest faults. Gail’s temper is fast to ignite and even faster to burn; Jeremy grows quickly tired of that. She cannot stand his slow, Scandinavian evenness in the face of even the most absurd provocation. Sometimes they fight about his refusal to fight.
Each decides early in the marriage that couples should be given biorhythm exams before the wedding rather than blood tests. Gail is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type who enjoys the morning above all else. Jeremy loves the late night and does his best work at the chalkboard after one A.M. Mornings are anathema to him, and on those days when he does not have classes, he rarely stirs before 9:30. Gail does not enjoy mindtouch with him before his second cup of coffee, and even then says that it is like achieving telepathy with a surly bear half-risen from hibernation.
Their tastes, complementary in so many important areas, are flatly divergent on some equally important things. Gail loves reading and lives for the written word; Jeremy rarely reads anything outside his field and considers novels a waste of time. Jeremy will come down from the study at three A.M. and happily plop down in front of a documentary; Gail has little time for documentaries. Gail loves sports and would spend every fall weekend at a football game if she could; Jeremy is bored by sports and agrees with George Will’s definition of football as the “desecration of autumn.”
With music, Gail plays the piano, French horn, clarinet, and guitar; Jeremy cannot hold a tune. When listening to music, Jeremy admires the mathematical baroqueness of Bach; Gail enjoys the unprogrammable humanity of Mozart. Each enjoys art, but their visits to galleries and art museums become telepathic battlefields: Jeremy admiring the abstract exactitude of Josef Albers’s
On political issues Gail is hopeful, Jeremy is cynical. On social issues Gail is liberal in the finest tradition of the word, Jeremy is indifferent.
