Time's Arrow

There is a fire-tinge of violence to it here in New York, as there is to everything in this city, which just won’t slow down like the other city did and get more innocent and less crazy and less dirty-colorful. It makes our earlier romancing—where love would sadly bloom in a parking lot or with bitter words before a shop window dribbling with rain—seem downright courtly. For instance. He gets up at two in the morning and ventures out for a stroll. We’re on Sixth Avenue, puffing on a prosaic perfecto and minding our own business—when John turns down Twenty-second Street, breaks into a run, and starts loosening his pants.… Now what? Those pants of his were around his knees when he slammed through the double doors of the brownstone, and around his ankles as he stumbled at speed up the first flight of stairs. We hopped straight into this apartment, straight into the bright bedroom—and turned. I have to say that the situation didn’t look very promising. There was a woman in the bed, right enough. But there was a man there too. Fully clothed, enormous in midnight-blue serge suit and peaked cap, he knelt above her, rhythmically slapping her face with a pendulum action of his heavy-gloved hand. No, this didn’t look like our kind of thing at all. Warily John slipped out of his socks and shirt. You have to give him credit: he keeps his cool and works the percentages. Now the two men moved strangely past each other; and with some diffidence John climbed into bed. The other guy stared at us, with raised, with churning face. Then he did some shouting and strode out of there—though he paused, and thoughtfully dimmed the lights, as he left the room. We heard his boots on the stairs. The lady clutched me.

  “My husband!” she explained.

  Who cared? Instantly John invaded her. With zero foreplay. No hair-stroking or sighing or staring sorrowfully at the ceiling, not for her. No extra-loud snoring or anything, not for this baby.… Soon afterward she took up a position at the hospital. Nurse Davis. We still date. Her husband, Dennis, is a nightwatchman. She keeps saying she’s glad Dennis doesn’t know about us and she hopes he never finds out. What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember. And I suppose, in our case, John and I should exchange high fives in squalid thanks to this human talent for forgetting: forgetting, not as a process of erosion and waste, but as an activity. John forgets. Nurse Davis forgets. The husband, Dennis, shuddering in the cold on his way to work, on his way to watch the night, forgets.

  Largely out of a sense of duty I search for connections between the two interests, between the two kinds of female body. One body wallows on a barge of pillows, with warmly tousled gaze and smelling of fresh bread (you’ll get no argument from me there: women are great); the other body lies flat and cold on a table down whose eaves blood runs, like a sunset. John attends them both with his animal parts thickened. Here’s another one, he seems to think. Another face with its bridal train of hair. Another thigh of astonishing might. Another female belly.

  With the children, at the hospital, in Pediatrics, where the light is never off, where the little victims whom we patiently deform lie drugged and lost and itching—with the children John is at his briskest. He surges through the wards snatching toy and lollipop, wearing a skull’s smile. No feeling tone. Only the men get to him. Funnily enough. He meets their eyes with a look that almost confesses. Confesses that they have a right which he hereby violates. And what is this right? It is the right to life and love.

  With the men, the doctor’s cultural performance is at its most tenuous. It is abruptly open to question, this idea the doctors hold in secret, that they must wield the special power; because if the power remains unused, then it will become unmoored, and turn back against their own lives.

  Carter was an exception, to this and to everything else, but I used to feel that I was roughly the same age as the reigning American president. People said I resembled Gerry Ford, though of course I’m a lot more handsome than that now. I was younger than LBJ, at least to start with, and I’m definitely older then JFK, who’s even handsomer than I am. JFK: flown down from Washington and flung together by the doctors’ knives and the sniper’s bullets and introduced onto the streets of Dallas and a hero’s welcome.

  Now despite years of steady disarmament they’re all talking about nuclear war again, and more intensely than ever before. I wish I could put their minds at rest. It isn’t going to happen. Come on: imagine the preparations that would be needed. No one’s even started. No one’s ready.

  Remember the punks? They were ready. The experiments in mortification they performed on their own faces—the piercings, the pallor. The punks had made a start. They were ready. But they vanished decades ago.

  Here’s a little moment I’d like to share.

  I’m in the waiting room of the Peter Pan Ward, shooting the breeze with Nurse Judge. There is another woman there, a Mrs. Goldman. Because she is a woman, John glances at her from time to time: because she is a woman. But she is also a mother: she has a baby at her feet, and a further child, a three-year-old girl, whose hips we have decided to destroy. The girl is lying in the Peter Pan Ward with her lower half in plaster. She’s been there for months—it’s a long-term project.… Mrs. Goldman is reading a magazine, with the baby at her feet. We’ve seen this pair before. The baby is shrinking fast, and can’t really crawl now though its struggles are something to see. But wait a minute. The baby is crawling, only one or two panting inches at a time—but crawling forward. And the mother with the magazine, the glossy pages ticking past her face: she’s reading, or skimming, forward. Hey! Christ, how long has it been since I …? Anyhow, it’s soon over, this lucid interval. The mother is reading backward again, and the baby is merely weeping. It wants its diaper changed, or it’s hungry. It wants its diaper filled, with new shit from the trash. I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever.

  You have to harden your heart to pain and suffering. And quick. Like right away at the very latest.

  We couldn’t get through half an hour of this without the necessary conditions, humanly. We’re real antic about it. Among the tepid metal and tile of the locker room, or slumped over the paper cups and coffee balloons of the commissary—Johnny’s there, with unspeakable skid marks all over his smock. Our victims we call stiffs and slabs and sides—and fuck-ups, and organ donors.

  “Not like the blob. You see the blob?”

  “Ah, she ain’t so bad off.”

  “You see the splat case?”

  It isn’t much, but I’ll say this for Dr. John Young. He takes no pleasure in his work. The self is a muffled self: it wears a suit of protective clothing. This despite the overtime he voluntarily puts in. Opinions of him vary: he is “incredibly dedicated”; he is “a glutton for punishment”; he is a “saint”; he is “a fucking maniac.” “Well,” says John, and shrugs lightly, “you do what you do best.”

  Johnny is stronger than the other doctors, the brothers, the sisters. They’re forever faltering, rocking on their platforms. Johnny needs no encouragement—but he gives it. Here’s Byron, who looks like Bluto, with his breadth of black beard, and body hair sprouting luxuriantly through his shoulder laces.

  “Talk to me, Byron.”

  “Johnny, look at me, I’m losing it.”

  “Who told you it was going to be easy?”

  “I’m not up to this shit.”

  And so on. It never helps. They’re in far worse shape, as always, when John’s done. Byron rocks away, very hairy, very clean, wringing his hands, like an impeccable spider in his green fatigues.

  And the body beneath is so tired all the time. It never ends. I work a lot with Witney. Witney? Thirty-two, tall, rubber-lipped, pop-eyed, very smart but no culture so just wised-up: that’s Witney. He thinks he’s cool; he talks about Korea, and how, compared to that, this is nothing. No big deal. There was this incident with Witney when, I don’t know—oh yeah. We’d just totaled a couple of teenage boys. Their mothers had brought them in and then got the hell out soon after we started work, staying only to witness the
methodical unraveling of the soaked bandages. We took the stitches out and swabbed the boys with blood. I remember Witney’s skillful insertion of some kind of crossbow bolt; me, I was wedging shards of brown glass into the other boy’s crown. And we both, as they say, cracked up: we laughed at each other, full face, showing at last with teeth and tongue and tonsils the mortal hilarity that sniggers behind everything we do here. Our laughter, together with the boys’ cries and whimpers. Oh yeah. And Witney goes, to my one, “Expecting a break-in, kid? You look like a garden wall.” Or something like that, which seemed to calm us both, as jokes will. Humor keeps you steady, after all, even when the shit’s coming down. Our hilarity contained terror, of course it did, terror of our own fragility. Our own mutilation. Who might commit it? How can we avert it? Soon Witney and I were busy elsewhere with hacksaw and medium chisel, attaching a farcically mangled leg to an unknown and shrouded figure, at the thigh, in a kind of rain of blood, a snow of bone.

  The city—it is the city that will have to heal them, with knifeblade and automobile, nightstick, gunshot. The local passions of love and hate. The loose cables and rogue masonry of the telekinetic city.

  There is the Laundry Room on the second floor, scene of trysts and quickies and what the team here call knee-tremblers, which is when you do it standing up. I have been there with Nurse Davis. I now go there with Nurse Tremlett.

  There are two Recovery Rooms on the fourth floor where it’s usually okay. I used to go there with Nurse Cobretti. I hope to go there soon with Nurses Sammon and Booker. Sometimes I don’t even bother to take off my gown, which is all smeared and tiretracked. I just kick off my clogs.

  There is a nurse called Nurse Elliott who is always sneering at me without meeting my eye. In the elevator yesterday, under her breath, she called me an asshole. I know the signs—when a woman is leading me on. She’s just slipped into the Laundry Room. After a minute or two I follow her through the door. She stands by the window, checking her face in the silver compact. I walk toward her with my knees trembling.

  John will look in on these nurses after hours in their studios and boardinghouses, in their chambers and parlors, but it’s only the very special nurses who in any way establish themselves at his attractive address. With the very special nurses John adopts a markedly different amatory style. This style I would designate as above all thorough. You could say it’s a return to his earlier mode, but ramified by increased stamina. There is a kind of duty roster of the things he needs to do. All that can be done will be done—generally right away, too. He seems to search their bodies. He seems to search their bodies, for undivulged openings, new incisions.

  And guess who’s started showing up, intermittently to begin with but now on a twice-monthly basis. Irene. John took it coolly enough, but for me it was the tenderest agony, particularly at first. And the funny thing is: I thought I was more or less over Irene. I hadn’t been thinking about her that much, just a few times a day, and seldom imagined that I’d glimpsed her here or there on the street, on a bus, in the Superette, in the hospital, on a passing airplane five miles high. Over Irene? Fine chance. Maybe you’re doomed in the heart, as they say, and you’re never over your first love. And then this nightmare complication: I can’t stand the way he treats her. To him she is—how can I put this?—soon assimilated. She is instantaneously assimilated. The tiredest glance, the flattest smile assimilates her. It’s an impossible situation. John isn’t thorough with Irene. She should get so lucky. It’s one of those triangular things. I love her but she loves him and he loves no one. At night she lies there blinking with neglect. John lies folded over the other way. I burn for her.

  The years have been kind to Irene, though she’s still a lot more tired and worn than even the roughest of our nurses. I note this, and harp on her imperfections, as a defense mechanism. Yes, I am always hopelessly trying to poison myself against her. She could certainly be tidier around the apartment, which is usually so spick-and-span when she arrives. I’m at one with John on this. We do abhor dust and dirt, and stains on the bathtub, and any kind of filth.

  * * *

  Time passes. Cars are fatter and fewer, and imitate animals with their fins and wings.

  Syringes are no longer disposable. At the hospital there’s generally a greater emphasis on make-do and catch-as-catch-can. We even use pipettes: so unhygienic. And they’ve phased out cottonoid, which is a drag.

  The standing of doctors in society is higher than ever. We walk tall, no longer cowed by writs.

  You don’t see cyclists wearing those doctor’s masks. There are no more warnings, on polleny days, for asthmatics and hay-fever sufferers.

  Everyone smokes and drinks and messes around. No one works out.

  Last week they came and took away my color TV. They gave me a black-and-white one. I made on the deal, but when I switched it on my first thought was: uh-oh. There goes world opinion.

  But world opinion, as a force, went long ago, really. You can’t say exactly when it happened. After the moon shot, I remember, a little light went out in everybody’s head; suddenly the world seemed cozier, more local, fuggier. World opinion, on the other hand, disappeared slowly. Like dental self-consciousness. You see ogreish smiles all over the place these days, and nobody minds. People don’t mind so much what other people are like. So people can be what they are, not minding if others mind.

  Clothes everywhere become more innocent. Everyone becomes more innocent, constantly forgetting. Central Park is cleaner but no safer. We are fewer.

  Picture me now in the operating room, on the black tile floor, under the kettle lights, with a mild headache and half a hard-on, spooning tumor into the human body. I rest for a moment, availing myself of the leather bike seat on its stiff chrome stand. The scrub nurse, Nurse del Puablo, is giving me the eye. This is all she can give me, in her surgical yashmak. I have slept with her. So have Byron and Witney. Nurse del Puablo is widely and justly celebrated for her skilled hands, hot thighs and soft lips, her pretty belly, bad ass and good tits.

  I want to get this tumor packed in nice and firm. I say, “Bayonet … Mosquito … Sucker … Clamp.”

  At night the hospital creaks and ticks with cullings and triage.

  On their final date, John and Nurse del Puablo went to the Metropolitan Museum. John doesn’t care for the paintings, and there’s no financial incentive, but he feels that it’s expected of him, by nurses, and by the stone and metal hydra called society. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way. The invisible speedlines suggest a different nexus of sequence and process. That thought again. It always strangely disquiets me. I wonder: is this the case with all the arts? Well, it’s not the case with music. It’s not the case with opera, where everyone walks backward and sounds god-awful.

  Every Christmas we get a card from the Reverend, informing us that the weather is temperate. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But I know what he means.

  The hospital is like a permanent November. One walks through sun and rain, one walks through all kinds of weather to get there, but once sucked inside by the blatting doors, everything is desperately and essentially gray. Through these windows, at evening, the clouds look like bandages and cottonoid.

  All the intelligent pain of the victims, all the dreams of the unlistened to, all the entreating eyes: all this is swept up in the fierce rhythm of the hospital.

  “You do good work, Doctor,” everyone here tells me. I deny this. I immolate myself in denial. If I died, would he stop? If I am his soul, and there were soul-loss or soul-death, would that stop him? Or would it make him even freer?

  I am not fond of these paradoxes, if paradoxes they are; and I don’t expect everybody—or indeed anybody—to see it my way. But you can’t end yourself, not here. I am familiar with the idea of suicide. Once life is running, though, you can’t end it. You’re not at liberty to do that. We’re all here for the duration. Life will end. I know exactly
how long I’ve got. It looks like forever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me—and me only.

  The Reverend’s Christmas card is born from fire. In the Doctor’s grate.

  On the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, every morning, there is a circular pool of mulch, like a vast bread pizza, like a physical calamity awaiting clearance by some twelve-foot drunk or mutant dog sickened by its own size. No. An old lady descends from the black branches of the fire escape every morning and wearily gathers it all up and clambers home with it in paper bags: the food left for her by the birds.

  Every Monday morning, in Dr. Hotchkiss’s rooms on the ninth floor, we have Mortality Conference. Diseased organs are passed from doctor to doctor on plastic lunch trays.

  * * *

  John has become more appreciative of Irene. After several desultory attempts, followed by a brief (and nurse-crammed) estrangement and then one big fight, he has reestablished their relationship on a sexual footing. I find I am not as pleased by this as I thought I might be. Jealousy is a new one on me, and amply terrible.

  Are we to jump to the unlikely conclusion that John’s heart has at last been melted by the love of a good woman? A fat woman, too, of a certain age, one who forgives everything and looks over us when we sleep—who is, let’s face it, more like a mother than a lover? The turning point or empowering moment came with the telling of Irene’s “secret.” Her words themselves broke a long silence.

  “She was a girl,” said Irene. “She’s with foster parents now. In Pennsylvania. I couldn’t look after her. I was suicidal.”

  John snorted and said, “That makes two of us.”

  “There’s something I never told you. I had a child.”

  They were in bed together at the time, staring sadly at the ceiling. Then one thing led to another.

  It’s paradoxical, because John doesn’t like women who have children. They can have husbands. They can have as many boyfriends as they want. But no kids. When he accidentally gets talking to women who have children, it’s practically the first question he asks them—it’s the first test they face. And then nothing ever comes of it. Lots of nurses, plenty of sisters. Many matrons. But no mothers.