Man Descending

purple iridescence. A coronary patient took his first post-convalescent, tremulous steps, his face vibrant with fear and his bathrobe fallen open to display a livid blue scar on his chest. A diabetic who had lost a leg to gangrene swung by on crutches, his face grey and wrinkled with anxiety and concentration.

And as Ogle watched them troop by, he wrung his wet palms together and shuffled his cold feet in his slippers. There was little else to do. There were no visitors to relieve the monotony because Ogle had never troubled to make friends. He was an essentially shy man who had early learned to disguise his timidity with rancour, and who had, given time and practice, transformed his mouth into a cynical gash in what otherwise would have been an open and frank face. He had the neurotic’s partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular. Most people didn’t care for his desperate, crabbed views. Of course, the people from the office had felt obligated to send him a get-well card and flowers (they couldn’t ignore him; he had keeled over at their feet), but no one had troubled to visit him.

His days were spent waiting, being directed here and there, from X-ray to lab, from pillar to post. He dozed and ate and lived the elemental life of a prisoner, shaving with an exactitude that could never be duplicated outside the walls of the hospital, moving his bowels with the patience of Job, brushing each tooth many times over. He murdered each day minute by minute.

When night came he found he couldn’t sleep. He hid this fact from the nurses to avoid medication. His only previous experience with sleeping-pills had left him with the feeling that he was toppling blindly into a grave.

By ten o’clock every night Morissey was dead to the world, enjoying, Ogle imagined, the dreamless sleep of the blessed. By eleven the ward came alive with the sounds of night terrors. The dying made broken cries; those made bitter by pain piped complaints to the staff in querulous voices. A stroke victim, never seen but much discussed by Morissey, tunelessly struck up “God Save the Queen” to ring down the curtain on the day, and a senile clergyman across the hall began a litany of blasphemies triggered out of his subconscious by a plaque-clogged artery in the brain.

During the course of a night Ogle slept by moments, but woke often with a start that jerked him upright in bed, shivering. His fingers trembled as he scrubbed his face and squeezed his eyelids tight. And every night at three o’clock he smelled the coffee percolating at the nurses’ station as they took their shift break. By association, that aroma awakened another hunger. Ogle was prompted to swing his legs out of bed, pull open the drawer of his night table and take out a cigarette and matches. Then, his bare feet sticking to the linoleum, he padded across the room to the can, carefully skirted the foot of Morissey’s bed, and paused for a moment at the window to look out on the city.

He was always surprised and a little exalted by the number of lighted windows burning so bravely in the night. What did they signify? A sick child? A tired domestic dispute lengthening, with tears and recriminations, past resolve? A happy, drunken party? A couple achingly grinding out the night’s last session of love? He never speculated for long, but took a little comfort from those terrestrial, temporal stars in the night.

The sudden glare of the light in the bathroom glancing off rubbed enamel and spanking bright tiles hurt his eyes. The place smelled of antiseptic and somebody else’s turds.

Ogle examined his face in the mirror over the sink. It seemed to him that the left side of his face had altered, although he couldn’t be sure. There was a sensual droop to the eyelid, and the corner of his mouth felt a little slack and lacking in decision. He flexed the fingers of his left hand and made a weak fist; he felt faint.

He sat down on the toilet seat, lit his cigarette, entwined his long legs about one another and meditatively scratched his shin. All he wanted now was four ounces of Scotch, neat. That would make this an occasion. The cigarette smoke hovered around his head, a blue nimbus.

“A drink, a drink,” he declaimed to the opposite wall, hoisting an imaginary glass, “my sterile, christly kingdom for a drink.” Ogle attempted a suitably ironic smile but the stiff, resisting muscles of his face informed him he had failed and produced only a grimace. There is something radically wrong here, he thought.

On the other side of the door, Morissey spoke indistinctly to a character in his dreams.

“Die in your sleep, you old prick,” Ogle answered him. It had been brewing for some time. Ogle believed he hated his doctor. Dr. Bartlett didn’t care for Ogle’s attitude.

It might have had to do with the similarity in their ages. They had rubbed up against some of the same experiences, but had been weathered into very different shapes. Ogle, for all his cynicism, had carried placards denouncing the Vietnamese war and occupied a corporate recruiting office. He was sure Bartlett was the type who had watched these kinds of proceedings aloofly from a dormitory window. And convictions had had nothing to do with it.

Ogle had retained his pony-tail until economic necessity of the direst kind had forced him to relinquish it. Bartlett, with his unformed face of shaded planes, had attempted to distinguish and hearten a moist, indistinct mouth with a twitch of coppery hair on his upper lip. Ogle was convinced that growing it was the bravest thing Bartlett had ever done.

So, on the morning of the seventh day of his hospital stay, Ogle was waiting for Bartlett with the Gideon Bible resting open on his lap. He had taken to skimming it when all else failed to relieve his boredom. He had come across and marked a passage in 2 Chronicles with Bartlett in mind.

At about ten o’clock Bartlett stuck his head around the door jamb. “Good morning,” he said, “I thought I’d just pop in on you for a minute.” Popping in was the word for it.

“Good morning,” said Ogle.

“Keeping busy, I see,” said Bartlett professionally, indicating the Bible.

“Nothing like ‘The Good Book’,” said Ogle, smiting the cover.

Bartlett, who was never sure when Ogle was pulling his leg, yet loath to offend religious sensibilities, said, “I suppose so.”

“Take this here,” said Ogle, clearing his throat. “ ‘And Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers…’ What do you make of that, Doc?” said Ogle, feigning naivete.

“Very amusing, Mr. Ogle,” said Bartlett stiffly, removing a pen-light from his shirt pocket. He drew the blind at the window and went to work. “Follow the light, please,” he said, bending over Ogle and breathing a gust of warm Sen-Sen into his face. Ogle chased the light until his eye ached. “The other now. Very good. Thank you.” Bartlett snapped off the light.

“Gazing in the windows of the soul. And what did we see?” Ogle said glibly.

Bartlett extended a stubby hand with square, pink nails. “Squeeze my hand, please. Right first. Fine. Now the left.”

Ogle bore down with his left hand and felt a stain of weakness radiate from his shoulder and lodge under his rib cage. His heart caught the contagion and began to drum. He shrugged apologetically to the doctor. “Not enough breakfast, I guess,” he said, visibly discomfited.

“Yes,” said Bartlett. “No better, eh? What about the dizzy spells? Any more faintness, weakness?”

“No,” lied Ogle.

“Please stand up,” said Bartlett. His square, strong hands pushed at Ogle’s shoulders, attempting to throw them back into a military posture. “Heels together, hands at your side. Good. Good.” He paused. “Now close your eyes.”

“No tricks now, Doctor.”

“Close your eyes, please.”

He did. Something whirled in his head with crazy, wrenching speed, like a flywheel torn loose. His eyes sprang open in time to see the bed rush into his face. A muffled blow of mattress, pillows, bedclothes, and he was breathless, face down on the bed.

“Oh, how the mighty are brought low,” he said in a choked voice.

“You’re all right, aren’t you?” said Bartlett with some concern. “I tried to catch you, but you went down too quickly.”

Ogle turned over on his back and flung his forearm across his eyes. What is this? he asked himself. What is wrong with me?

“Yeah. Just fine. Hunky-dory.”

“Well now, about dizzy spells…”