Nothing was right. His leg felt funny; it seemed to trail along insensibly, clumsily. He stopped and leaned against the dead-green wall and kneaded the muscles of his thigh. Sweat glistened in his hairline.
“Edward.”
“Edward.”
It was the old woman in the wheelchair beside him.
Ogle looked down at her. She was restrained loosely in the chair by cotton straps that prevented her from falling out. These she hung against like a boxer on the ropes. Patches of pink, scurfy scalp showed through thin hair which had been subjected to attempts to resurrect its youthfulness by means of a rinse. Her mild blue eyes were rendered innocent by a glaze of cataracts, and a sprout of coarse white hairs on her chin made Ogle think of elderly Chinese gentlemen. What might have been a placid face was rendered angry by scabby sores which, shining with ointment, crept down her face to lose themselves in the wattles and creases of her neck.
“Edward!”
Suddenly it struck Ogle that she was speaking to him.
“Me?” he said. “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m not Edward.”
She waggled her head and crooked a finger at him vigorously. He moved a little closer. A hand darted out and snared his sleeve.
“Edward, my dear,” she said peevishly. “Where have you been?” She lost her train of thought and her eyes shifted unsteadily as she ransacked her memory. “Been. Been. Been,” she repeated vaguely. “Look what they do to me,” she said, seizing another subject and plucking at her cotton straps. “Untie me.”
“Look, lady, you’re mistaken. My name isn’t Edward. It’s Tom. Tom Ogle,” he replied uneasily.
“Nonsense, Edward. Untie me this moment. And we’ll go home.”
“No, we won’t,” said Ogle, tugging gently against her grip, attempting to retrieve his sleeve.
“Very well,” she said with a sigh. “As you wish. Home is, after all, where the heart is.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” explained Ogle.
“As if I don’t know my Edward,” she said. “Don’t be silly, my dear man.”
“Let go of me, lady. I mean it.”
She began to cry brokenly. “Been. Been. Been,” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t go away. Where have you been all these years, Edward?”
He bent towards her, trying to work her fingers loose from his sleeve. Her other hand shot up and caught him at the nape of the neck.
“Kiss me, Edward,” she said, “for old times’ sake.”
He thought he caught a whiff of a colostomy bag. He saw in detail the pitted, cracked sores, the old, milky eyes. “You can go to hell,” he said. “You can all go to hell. I just want to be left alone. Just leave me alone. It’s all I ask.”
Barbara did not come the next day as she had promised. She did not come the following day. She did not come at all. Ogle did not trouble to phone her again; he was too proud.
He stood by the window and observed life go on outside the hospital as if he were watching a movie screen. The sprinklers waved majestic plumes of silver in the summer air, the green lawns sizzled cinematically in the heat. Nurses spread their sweaters on the grass and sat down on them to eat their lunches. At that distance their imperfections were obliterated. And Ogle desired their images, like those of starlets, fervently but abstractly.
He began to prowl the hospital hallways with his hands thrust belligerently in his bathrobe pockets. On his journeys he discovered a good many things: a burn ward where he heard the voices of scalded children crying in the distance, where visitors were fitted with surgical masks before being allowed to pay their visits. A room full of amputees who brandished the stumps of their arms like blunt antennae while they argued. And finally, the physical-therapy room.
The therapy room was almost empty when he came across it. A female therapist was sitting on a hard, straight-backed chair with her hands folded sedately in her lap while she watched a man with flopping, nerveless legs swing his body along between two parallel bars that stood at hip height.
The room was not provided with much equipment: an exercise bicycle stood against one wall; there was a system of weights and pulleys; some tumbling-mats. Ogle walked directly to a basketball lying in the middle of the floor and picked it up.
He relished the pebbly grain with his fingertips. He had played the game in high school and had loved its speed, grace and fluid, intricate ballet.
A hoop was fixed on the back wall. He launched a shot at it; the arc was all wrong, too flat. The ball bounded off the backboard and rattled the rim of the basket.
Jarred by the noise, the therapist unfolded her hands and watched him quizzically. Ogle was stripping off his bathrobe. He wriggled out of his pyjama top and shucked off his slippers. Barefoot, he gathered up the ball, dribbled lazily around an imaginary key, feinted to his right and lofted a soft, one-handed jumper.
His left leg almost folded up under him when he came down. He kicked it out in front of him several times and waggled his ankle. With a look of determination on his face he squeezed the ball, deked, spun and drove for the basket. The leg did not respond properly; it felt weak and rubbery.
The therapist made up her mind. She started towards him. Ogle was massaging his thigh and muttering angrily under his breath. “Come on,” he said. “Come on. Work.”
“Excuse me,” said the woman, “but I have no one on the list for eleven-thirty. Are you scheduled for eleven- thirty?”
Ogle looked up at her as if this question were an unpardonable imposition. His concern for his leg was verging on hysteria. “I’ve got a problem here,” he said. “This damn leg isn’t working right.”
“Please,” she said, “who told you to come here? Are you sure you were scheduled for eleven-thirty? Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention. Sometimes I think they don’t know what they are doing downstairs. They know Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention.”
“Fine,” said Ogle. “You look after Mr. Krantz. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just shoot a few hoops.”
“Who’s your doctor?” she said, becoming suspicious.
“Zorba the Greek,” said Ogle, turning his back on her and dragging his leg after him to the basketball.
“You’re not supposed to be in here, are you?” she said. “You can’t just walk in here. This isn’t a games room, it’s a
“Oops,” said Ogle, “there went Krantz.”
She cast a desperate look over her shoulder at Krantz trying to haul himself back up on the bar, hand over hand, after a plunge to the mats. “If you’re not out of here in one minute,” she said, “I’m calling security.”
“Sure thing,” said Ogle, “but don’t forget Humpty Dumpty over there. He wants your
“One minute,” she grimly reiterated.
“Hey, you dumb bitch!” he shouted in his fear and frustration. “Lay off, I got a fucking problem here. Don’t you listen? I got a fucking problem!”
She looked as if she had been slapped. “I won’t tolerate that,” she said. “I don’t have to tolerate that.”
Ogle slammed the ball into the floor. “I’ve had it!” he yelled. “You, lady, can go piss up a rope! I have had it with this fucking place!”
“You are obviously crazy,” she said, turning away. “I’m calling security.”
Ogle climbed onto the stationary bicycle and began to pedal. He buried his head between the handlebars like a racing cyclist and his legs spun. Occasionally his left foot slid off the pedal and he barked his shin, but he kept at it. His back began to shine with sweat; his lungs swelled and collapsed like bellows.
Krantz had hauled himself upright and was staring at him with a bemused look on his face.
“Hey, Krantz,” yelled Ogle, “look at the world-famous bicycle racer sweep up the cobbled streets of Monte Carlo.”
“Give her shit!” shouted Krantz gleefully.
Ogle jacked his butt in the air and began to really pump.
