“Karen won’t mind, will she?” he asked again.
“No,” Jerry said, “she won’t mind.”
“I’m sorry I won’t be much company this evening,” he said. They were each carrying a basket. Jim knew he’d want a beer afterward, and maybe some ice cream and yogurt.
“It’s okay,” Jerry said.
The commissary was an explosion of bounty and light. The high overhead fluorescent lights glared and reflected in all directions, and the floor was sparkling white. The plastic wrappings of each product glinted under the high pulsing lights, and the aisles of the store were crowded with shoppers pushing steel carts piled to overflowing with packages—toilet paper, of course, and five-liter bottles of Diet Coke, and sponges, and potato chips. The commissary was as crowded with retired military personnel as it was with those still serving in active duty, and it was the retired soldiers and sailors who seemed most determined, willful, to exploit the benefits of their previous enlistment, though in their movements they bore also a vacationlike camaraderie. Jerry watched with fascination as the ex-soldiers, men and women, middle-aged and old-aged, pushed those shopping carts up and down the aisles like looters.
Frozen pizzas for a dollar, cans of soda pop a dime each. Plastic binoculars for their grandchildren, cartoon videos for two dollars. Jelly beans, coffee beans, and fifty-pound sacks of navy beans. The prices all seemed arrested, as if halted in their natural growth twenty-five or thirty years ago, or even longer; and the old sailors and infantrymen, the battleship mechanics and howitzer specialists, the Seals and the Green Berets, fell upon these prices, these offerings, voracious now in their waning years to get back some fragment of all that which they had given. As if it might all yet balance.
After a while the intensity of the shopping made Jerry a little queasy, and he was reminded, in almost hallucinogenic fashion, of a vast warehouse filled with tens of thousands of termites or carpenter ants, each one chewing and gnawing in full frenzy, eating out the hollowed middle of a structure that was sure to collapse at any moment, and he could barely stand to stay inside any longer.
After Jim paid for his purchases and came back outside, Jim tilted his head to look up at the winter sky. A thin sheet of haze was advancing upon the sun, a shoal of clouds bringing in weather from the west. Jim glanced at his watch. He had thirty minutes left before his operation, and Jerry felt that he too was under the gun—that though he might have slightly more time than Jim, the clock was beginning to move fast for him too, now, and that he himself might have only two or three days left before some final or important convocation, summons, or termination—though what powerful event might rest in his own destiny, and such a short notice away, he could not begin to say.
…
By the time they got to the clinic, Jim was more jittery than ever, and it did not help matters that everyone else in the crowded waiting room appeared to be as old as Methuselah. Except for the nurses, interns, and physicians, Jim and Jerry were the only citizens of vigor present.
The clinic was set up to maximize a steady high-volume flow of clients, with all the surgeons working on all the patients in a great common room, just beyond the receptionist’s desk. The operating room was separated from the waiting area by only a glass wall, so that the friends and family could stand and watch the progress of the operation. They couldn’t necessarily see the details, but they could see the doctor-in-blue bent over the skull of their patient and could tell by the patient’s stillness the depth of the anesthesia’s hold or, by the groggy stirrings, the degree of recovery. The operating room was lit brilliantly and had about it the air of a large and busy garage on a Friday evening, with all the mechanics hurrying to finish in time for the weekend.
Most of the mates and accomplices of the patients chose however to ignore the glass wall and sat with their heads tucked in magazines, or fretting with needlework or cross-stitch, chatting with one another about, among other things, the number of times they had been to Branson, Missouri. Jerry listened to one such conversation that went on for ten minutes about a split pea soup that had evidently been a staple of a cafeteria there, as well as a favorite of both seniors. Then they began talking about the prune pies they had had for dessert.
Jerry got up and stood at the wall for a long time and tried to watch his friend, but Jim was wheeled to the very back of the room and Dr. Le Page had his own back turned to the wall, so that all Jerry could see were Jim’s big feet. After a while he sat back down and read a book, surrounded by the casual, almost dreamy murmurings of the sighted.
…
Jim and Jerry had been told the surgery would take only one hour, but it was three and a half hours before Jim emerged, his face even more swollen and discolored, with a pirate’s eye patch and mummy-wrap swathing the entire left side. Dr. Le Page did not seem to be up to any of his tricks that time, and he went out of his way to meet with Jerry and to tell him that he felt confident that he had gotten it right this time, and Jerry could see, for the first time, in both Dr. Le Page’s confidence and terseness, how much the doctor had been bothered by the failure of the first surgery.
“It took a long time because we
