‘Of course he will. A hospital gym,’ I went on, ‘it’s a contradiction – like a Young Conservative. Anyway, he’ll be back in the guest house tomorrow.’
We went over. Christopher sat resting, sober faced, on the ground floor of the little stairway that led nowhere.
‘You’ll be out of here tomorrow,’ said Blue.
And I said, ‘In time for the Republican debate. Think of all you’ll learn at the feet of Herman Cain and Rick Santorum.’
‘Cat, you ought to lie down for a while,’ said Blue. ‘Rest up for your homecoming.’
—————
It was the evening of May 5, and he was home. At the dinner table in the garden he raised an arm for silence and said,
‘I can’t…I can’t breathe.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t breathe.’
The speed of time
This took place at around seven-thirty. Blue, Christopher, and I got back to the Zilkha annex at three in the morning.
He could survive without eating and drinking and (more doubtfully) without speaking, but he couldn’t survive without breathing. Christopher was under attack from ‘dyspnoea’, to use the typically melodious medical name for it: a condition best understood as air hunger. To Joseph Conrad the exercise of captaincy seemed the ‘most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing’. What was breathing as natural as? ‘I imagined I could not have lived without it.’ As natural, then, as living.
Within minutes Blue was steering us towards the looming heights of MD Anderson…Christopher stayed silent, slightly hunched over in his seat with a concentrating look on his face, and now and then his eyes would swell and widen.
There was no waiting-room period. The three of us were at once ushered into a warren of cubicles and labs, and a stream of specialists came and bent over him one after the other, and then sailed off again; and nobody was there when his air hunger suddenly increased.
Dyspnoea brings with it mortal fear, a clinical condition in its own right. Christopher was facing it without obvious physical strain. But I wasn’t – I was in fact making something of a spectacle of myself, pacing the floor and waving my arms and yelling out, ‘He can’t breathe!’
And from then on there was always someone sticking an instrument down his throat or sticking another instrument up his nose or kneading his neck and shoulders or making him cough or sniff or snort or stand or sit…
‘This can’t be right,’ I said, staring at my watch and pouring myself a huge glass of wine. ‘I thought it was about ten-thirty at the latest. Unbelievable how quickly that all seemed to go…’
We were settling down on the porch in the dusty Dixie night.
‘I bet it didn’t feel that way to you, Hitch.’
‘No.’ He drew on his Rothmans. ‘From my point of view there were certain uh, longueurs. But I see what you mean – in the sense of never a dull moment.’
Exhaustively and exhaustingly pinched and poked, Christopher now looked battered, and spiritually battered, too. The medics went about their work with impressive vocational drive; but it was the pathology that interested them, exclusively, and not the patient. Hitch himself was no more than a delivery boy or a beast of burden, bearing this savoury load, this disease, for their delectation.
‘Many strange divestments’, he said, ‘await you in the land of the sick…Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some catching up to get done – in the rethink parlour.’
Meaning the toilet…‘Blue,’ I said ruminatively, ‘have you heard about the new money spinner in the healthcare business – the Walk-In Medical Centers? You show up off the street, you get dealt with, and you pay your bill. The great thing about Walk-Ins is this. Having walked in, you can then walk out. Hitch can’t walk out. I can walk out whenever I want, and even you, you get some…respite if just for ten minutes. But he doesn’t, he never does. He’s always in it, he’s never not in it.’
She faced me levelly, not drinking but levelly smoking. She said,
‘He can’t get out, not for the duration. He says it isn’t like a war, but it is, even if you’re a civilian. All you can do is wait for it to end.’
‘Wait for it to roll through villages. But he’s a warhorse. And he’s still an ox.’
‘He’s still an ox.’
Christopher returned. We stayed up till dawn, with our computers on YouTube, laughing and weeping at the songs of our youth.
Mortal combat
‘Christ, Chreestophairr,’ I said (this was the way Eleni Meleagrou used to say it), ‘for a while you were as bad off as Japan. Earthquake, nuclear accident, tsunami.’
‘Well, when sorrows come, Little Keith, they come not single spies…’
‘True, O Hitch. It’s much better now, your voice.*6 You’re perfectly audible. You just sound a bit like Bob.’ A reference to Whispering Bob Conquest, who was piano all his life. ‘Only much louder.’
‘Good. The trouble is, I keep thinking it’s going to come back again. I mean go away again…Let’s do one more.’
‘Two more.’
Some days had passed and the out-patient was an in-patient all over again. I don’t think he was often seen in the hospital gym, but twice a day he would do ‘laps’ in the Texan-scale atrium, and I or Blue would accompany him as his personal trainer. Each circuit took ten or fifteen minutes, and we always did two or three of them. Now in his dressing gown he moved slowly by my side, not a shuffler, more like a wader, making steady progress through a countervailing medium – through an element that never sleeps and never tires. He said,
‘How did the idea of combat get itself attached to cancer? They never say, So and so pegged out after a long battle against heart disease or brain death. Or old age.’
‘You won’t remember, but I lectured you about this one night here in Houston when you were half asleep.’ And I repeated some of what I’d said.
‘Yeah, but you can’t make war when you’re this bad
