A tap on the door was instantly followed by a flight attendant pushing a drinks trolley – or so for an instant I thought. It was in fact a wheeled tray of vials and tubes steered by a nurse who sang out,
‘Good afternoon!’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Christopher. ‘Ah. Blood work. I used to tell my visitors, This’ll only take a minute and it doesn’t hurt. Both claims are no longer true.’ He looked to his left. ‘And how are you, my dear?’
‘Great! And how are you doing today?’
‘Medium cool, thank you…Mart, this young lady’s prepping me for a PIC line, which is a uh, a peripherally inserted catheter. Once that’s in, there’ll be no more probing around for usable veins. Ten minutes. Go and have a quick burn.’
…Outside on the plant-lined pathway I lit up and strolled back and forth. Has all this put you off smoking? asked Alexander on one of his recent visits. No, I said. What it’s done is put me off medical treatment. So I dragged and puffed and stared at the dusty flora, each little bush and shrub on its midden of cigarette ends, which looked almost decoratively organic, like thick white catkins…
‘Success?’ I said, as the blood lady was rattling off to her next customer.
‘Yeah, as far as it went. For the actual insertion, the blood lady said she’ll need the help of at least one or two blood blokes. Where were we?’
‘Our tragic Scandinavian. Then what?’
‘Ah. Well once they’d cleaned him out the droogs took him off into the wilderness and left him naked in a paddy field miles from town. They beat him up of course – but get this. They smeared him with dogshit. All over his face and hair.’
‘…What was that in aid of? Why?’
‘Why. A very interesting question. Which I’m sure he asked himself – accustomed as he was to balancing divine providence against the existence of evil. Anyway, he flew without incident back to Stockholm or Oslo. That was three years ago. And, it’s a funny thing, but he hasn’t said a word since.’
‘Christ.’
‘Mm. Most unfortunate. He’s in a darkened room in some cackle-factory up in the tundra. But wouldn’t you agree, Little Keith, that Mexico’s much maligned? You’d never guess that the murder rate in Mexico City is much lower than St Louis.’
I said, ‘From what I saw they’re a lovely people. And you know, I was in a two-hour traffic jam in Xalapa and I didn’t hear a single horn.’
He and I talked of Mexico until the arrival of Blue, and then Alexander, and we got ready to go. Here was another thing Christopher would have been doing otherwise: joining us that night for rounds of cocktails and a three-course meal. We all commiserated in our different ways. I said,
‘You awe me, Hitch. You don’t have an issue with us going off to a snazzy grill? You don’t find it uh, concerning? You’re comfortable with that?’
‘Of course,’ he said, picking up his book. ‘I’d much rather think about you doing it than think about you not doing it. I do like to feel it’s getting done.’
‘That’s good in you, Hitch. And listen, Xalapa’s on every October and we’ll go there together a year from now. Let’s shake on it. Xalapa, in 2012.’
—————
The examined death
The Hitchenses, as a couple, were returning to Michael’s guest house less and less often. Blue slept there (except during crises), and so did I whenever I flew down: waking up to a leisurely breakfast with Blue on the sunny porch, both of us eating cereal laced with berries, and getting through enormous quantities of caffeine and tobacco. Blue and I, we were calm and companionable; when we talked about Christopher’s condition, we scoffed at his cringeing tumours and his punily curable pneumonias. Around noon we would climb into one of Michael’s cars and make the brief journey to the Tower.
And there would be Christopher, for whom ‘every passing day represents more and more’ – as he wrote that same month – being ‘relentlessly subtracted from less and less’.
—————
Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
Christopher summarised ‘the notorious stage theory’ in his first dispatch from the sickroom (September 2010). And only the other day, eight years later, did I learn that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s subject was not mortal illness; it was bereavement.
Which of course changes everything. In the case of bereavement, you are negotiating psychic terms with someone who is already dead – and not with someone who may yet survive.
So the stages would have to be revised. It wasn’t denial that ensnared us, all three of us, Blue, me, and (to an unknowable but I think lesser extent) the patient himself. It was more like hardened hope, or blind faith, or adamantine wishfulness.
About six months after the diagnosis I wrote a long piece about Christopher; in the London Observer, and I cleared it with him and with Blue, and also with Ian, who said (I am conflating emails and phone calls),
‘Here and there you’re too severe, I think. When you quote the more minor Hitch. I mean you’re not wrong, but…’
‘Well he and I have a tradition of being hard on each other not in person but in print. If it didn’t have some vinegar in it he’d find it – oily.’
‘I agree with your general point. And I agree about puns. But a couple of the examples you give, and what you say about them. Does he need to see that now?’
‘Now?’
‘Now he’s dying.’
I felt a jolt and had a strong impulse to say, with real indignation, ‘But he’s not dying’…I didn’t say it. I just thought it. I just thought: But he’s not dying.
A minute later I rolled a cigarette and went outside to the stone-paved garden behind the house on Regent’s Park Road,
