Night Shift(123)

- I don't mind.

She puffs again and holds the filter against her lips so long that he glances away from it to her eyes and sees they are closed.

- Mom?

The eyes open a little, vaguely.

- Johnny?

Right.

- How long have you been here?

- Not long. I think I better go. Let you sleep.

- Hnnnnn.

He snuffs the cigarette in her ashtray and slinks from the room, thinking: I want to talk to that doctor. Goddamn it, I want to talk to the doctor who did that.

Getting into the elevator he thinks that the word 'doctor' becomes a synonym for 'man' after a certain degree of proficiency in the trade has been reached, as if it was an expected, provisioned thing that doctors must be cruel and thus attain a special degree of humanity. But

'I don't think she can really go on much longer,' he tells his brother later that night. His brother lives in Andover, seventy miles west. He only gets to the hospital once or twice a week.

'But is her pain better?' Kev asks.

'She says she itches.' He has the pills in his sweater pocket. His wife is safely asleep. He takes them out, stolen loot from his mother's empty house, where they all once lived with the grandparents. He turns the box over and over in his hand as he talked, like a rabbit's foot.

'Well then, she's better.' For Kev everything is always better, as if life moved towards some sublime vertex. It is a view the younger brother does not share.

'She's paralyzed.'

'Does it matter at this point?'

'Of course it matters!' he bursts out, thinking of her legs under the white ribbed sheet.

'John, she's dying.'

'She's not dead yet.' This in fact is what horrifies him. The conversation will go around in circles from here, the profits accruing to the telephone company, but this is the nub. Not dead yet. Just lying in that room with a hospital tag on her wrist, listening to phantom radios up and down the hail. And she's going to have to come to grips with time, the doctor says. He is a big man with a red, sandy beard. He stands maybe six foot four, and his shoulders are heroic. The doctor led him tactfully out into the hall when she began to nod off.

The doctor continues:

- You see, some motor impairment is almost unavoidable in an operation like the 'cortotomy'. Your mother has some movement in the left hand now. She may reasonably expect to recover her right hand in two to four weeks.

- Will she walk?

The doctor looks at the drilled-cork ceiling of the corridor judiciously. His beard crawls all the way down to the collar of his plaid shirt, and for some ridiculous reason Johnny thinks of Algernon Swinburne; why, he could not say. This man is the opposite of poor Swinburne in every way.

- I should say not. She's lost too much ground.

- She's going to be bedridden for the rest of her life?

- I think that's a fair assumption, yes.

He begins to feel some admiration for this man who he hoped would be safely hateful. Disgust follows the feeling; must he accord admiration for the simple truth?

- How long can she live like that?

- It's hard to say. (That's more like it.) The tumour is blocking one of her kidneys now. The other one is operating fine. When the tumour blocks it, she'll go to sleep.

- A uremic coma?

- Yes, the doctor says, but a little more cautiously. 'Uremia' is a techno-pathological term usually the property of doctors and medical examiners alone. But Johnny knows it because his grandmother died of the same thing, although there was no cancer involved. Her kidneys simply packed it in and she died floating in internal piss up to her rib-cage. She died in bed, at home, at dinnertime. Johnny was the one who first suspected she was truly dead this time and not just sleeping in the comatose, open-mouthed way that old people have. Two small tears had squeezed out of her eyes. Her old toothless mouth was drawn in, reminding him of a tomato that has been hollowed out, perhaps to hold egg salad, and then left forgotten on the kitchen shelf for a stretch of days. He held a round cosmetic mirror to her mouth for a minute, and when the glass did not fog and hide the image of her tomato mouth, he called for his mother. All of that had seemed as right as this did wrong.

- She says she still had pain. And that she itches.

The doctor taps his head solemnly, like Victor DeGroot in the old psychiatrist cartoons.

-

She imagines the pain. But it is nonetheless real. Real to her. That is why time is so important.. Your mother can no longer count time in terms of seconds and minutes and hours. She must restructure those units into days and weeks and months. He realizes what this burly man with the beard is saying, and it boggles him. A bell dings softly. He cannot talk mort to this man. He is a technical man. He talks smoothly of time, as though he has gripped the concept as easily as a fishing rod. Perhaps he has.

- Can you do anything more for her?

- Very little.

But his manner is serene, as if this were right. He is, after all, 'not offering false hope'.

- Can it be worse than a coma?

- Of course it can. We can't chart these things with any real degree of accuracy. It's like having a shark loose in your body. She may bloat.

- Bloat?

- Her abdomen may swell and then go down and then swell again. But why dwell on such things now? I believe we can safely say that they would do the job, but suppose they don't? Or suppose they catch me? I don't want to go to court on a mercy-killing charge. Not even if I can beat it. I have no causes to grind. He thinks of newspaper headlines screaming MATUCIDE and grimaces.