Less(55)
I recall Arthur Less, at a rooftop party, telling me his recurring dream:
“A parable, really,” he said, holding his beer to his chest. “I’m walking through a dark wood, like Dante, and an old woman comes up to me and says, ‘Lucky you, you’ve left it all behind you. You’re finished with love. Think of how much time you’ll have for more important things!’ And she leaves me, and I go on—I think I’m usually riding a horse at this point; it’s a very medieval dream. You aren’t in it, by the way, in case you’re getting bored.”
I replied I had my own dreams.
“And I keep riding through this dark wood and come out onto a large white plain with a mountain in the distance. And a farmer is there, and he waves at me, and he says sort of the same thing. ‘More important things ahead for you!’ And I ride up the mountain. I can tell you’re not listening. It gets really good. I ride up the mountain, and at the top is a cave and a priest—you know, like in a cartoon. And I say I’m ready. And he says for what? And I say to think about more important things. And he asks, ‘More important than what?’ ‘More important than love.’ And he looks at me like I’m crazy and says, ‘What could be more important than love?’”
We stood quietly as a cloud went over the sun and sent a chill across the roof. Less looked over the railing at the street below.
“Well, that’s my dream.”
Less opens his eyes to an image from a war movie—an army-green airplane propeller chopping briskly at the air—no, not a propeller. Ceiling fan. The whispering in the corner is, however, indeed Malayalam. Shadows are moving on the ceiling in a puppet play of life. And now they are speaking English. Bits of his dream are still glistening on the edges of everything, dew lit, evaporating. Hospital room.
He remembers his scream in the night, and the pastor running in (wearing only a dhoti and carrying his daughter), the kind man arranging for a church member to drive Less to the hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, Rupali’s worried good-bye, the long painful hours in the waiting room, whose only solace was a supernatural vending machine that produced, in change, more than it took in, the casting call of nurses—from seen-it-all-before battle-axes to pretty ingenues—before Less was allowed an X-ray of his right foot (beautiful archipelago of bones), which confirmed, alas, a fractured ankle and, buried deep in the pad of his foot, one half of a needle, at which point he received his first procedure—done by a female doctor with collagen lips who called his injury “bullshit” (“Why does this man have a sewing needle?”) and was unable to retrieve the object—and, that having failed, his foot now in a temporary splint, Less was assigned a hospital room, a chamber he shared with an elderly laborer who had spent twenty years in Vallejo, California, and had Spanish but not English, then was prepared for the next morning’s surgery, requiring a variety of gurney changes and anesthetic injections until he was finally thrust into a pristine operating theater whose motile X-ray machine allowed the surgeon (an affable man with a Hercule Poirot mustache) to produce for Less, within five minutes, and with the additional use of a pocket magnet, the trifling source of his injury (held before his eyes with tweezers), after which his foot was fitted into a bootlike splint and our protagonist was given a strong painkiller, which put him almost instantly into an exhausted sleep.
And now he is looking around the room and considering his situation. His paper gown is green as the Statue of Liberty’s, and his fracture is safe in its black plastic boot. His blue suit is presumably lining the den of some feral dog family. A portly nurse is busying herself with some paperwork in the corner, her bifocals giving her the appearance of the four-eyed fish (Anableps anableps) that can see both above and below water. He must have made noise; her head turns, and she shouts in Malayalam. Impressively, the result is that his mustachioed surgeon appears through the door, white coat swinging, smiling and gesturing at Less’s foot as a plumber might at a repaired kitchen sink.
“Mr. Less, you are awake! So now you will no longer set off the metal detectors, bing bing bing! We are all curious,” the doctor asks, leaning down. “Why does a man have a sewing needle?”
“To mend things. To put on missing buttons.”
“This is a great hazard in your profession?”
“Apparently a needle is a greater one.” Less feels he does not even sound like himself anymore. “When can I go back to the retreat, Doctor?”
“Oh!” he says, searching his pockets and producing an envelope. “The retreat has sent this for you.”
On the envelope is written: Very sorry. Less opens it, and out flutters a scrap of bright-blue fabric. Lost forever, then. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less.
The doctor goes on: “The retreat has contacted your friend, who will come and pick you up momentarily.”
Less asks if this is Rupali or, perhaps, the pastor.
“Search me!” the doctor says, this Americanese standing out in his otherwise British English. “But you cannot return to the retreat, a place like that. Stairs! Climbing a hill! No, no, stay off the foot for three weeks at least. Your friend has accommodations. None of that American jogging!”
Cannot return? But—his book! A knock at the door as Less puzzles over where these new accommodations might be, but the answer is instantly provided as the door opens.