“There doesn’t have to be a first cause in order for us to believe in our obligation to understand. It’s just another excuse for your laziness,” she said.
Maria is often tempted to accuse other people of laziness because, in fact, she does work very hard, loves activity, is impatient with rest. So this enforced inactivity is more anguishing to her than it might be to another temperament. Jack was a man who enjoyed leisure, and she enjoyed herself with him a great deal. He could make anything a pleasure—lunch, a walk, choosing a melon, a tomato, not just sex—
the sex,
as she called it to herself and her friends, acknowledging how much she misses it. But she tells herself, she’s told her friends, it wasn’t worth it. When she was explaining to Devorah why her relationship with Jack was so unsatisfactory she said that when she would try to lean her spirit against him, she felt she was leaning on a cloud. And then he wanted to get married. Wanted that domestic life—“Time for a drink, darling. . . . When did you say dinner was? Maybe we’ll walk around the block afterward. . . . And where will we go for vacation this year?”—which made her feel she was in a rifle sight, ready to be shot dead. She thinks how little good Jack Rappaport would do her now. What
would
be good for her now? What would be good for Pearl?
23
“Midazolam,” the doctor says to the nurse. “It’s best for the purpose. Takes away pain, induces amnesia. Sewing the tube to her nose will be quite a difficult procedure. She may remember something of it, but the memory, if any, will be vague.”
A needle in her arm. Midazolam. Let us dazzle madame with Midazolam. Pearl smiles at the joke she’s made.
Her lightness is returning. Nothing matters. “Not to be trusted,” the doctor says. She is not be trusted? “Remarkable,” the doctor says, “the strength, the determination. All used against herself.” Myself, do you mean my life? Oh, that. “We can’t have you pulling the feeding tubes out anymore,” the doctor says. “You’re very weak. You’re very dehydrated. We’re trying to keep you alive.” Are you speaking to me? How odd that someone would be speaking to her. “That’s why we’re sewing this tube to your nose so you won’t be able to pull it out.”
The doctor must be joking. They could not do anything so funny. She used to sew. You sew cloth to cloth; you might embroider. You did not sew things to noses. It was not a thing human beings did to other human beings, sewing things into their flesh. Yet they seem to be doing it. She understands it ought to be hurting, but it doesn’t matter; it ought to hurt. A needle breaks through the skin of her nose. A sound like
crunch
. In and out the needle goes. A stitch in time saves nine. They are coming at her once again. Another tube, this time soft, like a piece of spaghetti. Why are they putting spaghetti in my nose? She feels she has become a cartoon character, a joke figure. Spaghetti in her nose, thread in and out. Well, noses are a funny part. Her lightness is back again. She swims above them; she sees herself on a bed, or what they think is her real self, the one they are sewing something into. But she knows she is above them. They are doing this thing to someone who is not the real her.
The amnesia will be a blessing, the doctor says. But Pearl knows there is no need for amnesia. There is nothing to remember, therefore nothing to forget.
Remembrance. Forgetting. The theory that pain is real only if it is remembered. This is a troubling paradox. Hazel Morrisey believes it, she has to believe it, or she wouldn’t be able to do what she does. Sometimes she wonders about the connection between pain and memory. It is always said that if women remembered the pain of labor there would never be any second children born. Yet she remembers the pain of her labor. She has tried to determine the nature, the quality of her memory.
But we can ask the question: When the sufferer is suffering, isn’t it an eternal present, like the mind of God? Would suffering be diminished if the sufferer were able to say, But I know I won’t remember this, after all, so it must be all right?
Hazel Morrisey must believe that this drug, Midazolam, will make the pain nonexistent. That the eternal present will quite soon be nothing but a blur, an absence, the self gone from the self, the sufferer an empty vessel, without language and outside of time.
She makes herself see Pearl in ten years, coming back to Ireland, showing the doctor her beautiful children, saying,
Thank you for keeping me alive
. This is what she is thinking with the part of her brain that is not sticking a needle, threaded with catgut, into the nostril of this girl whose eyes are closed, who she has to believe is feeling nothing of what she does.
24
After his shower Joseph cleans, with a traveling nail brush, the immaculate space between the flesh of his fingers and his nails. He flosses his teeth. He picks up his coat and closes the door of his room behind him. He takes the stairs, rather than the elevator, down to Maria’s room. He knocks lightly on the door. Once, twice, no answer. He uses the key, which isn’t a key, just a plastic strip. He hears that she is in the shower. He answers the ringing phone, not really a ring but something between a buzz and a purr.
It’s Caroline Wolf from the embassy. Her voice sounds neutral, pleasant. Nevertheless he asks, “Is anything wrong?”
Instead of answering, she asks, “Are you a family member?”
The question makes him feel exposed and he resents it, yet he is conscious of the paltriness of his answer.
“Not exactly. A close family friend.”
There is only one legal member of his family now—his mother—with whom he has the connection that grants—what? Access, the right to information, the right to exert your will. He had it once with Devorah: that was marriage, the law taking the place of blood. But he had very little real knowledge of her; he didn’t understand the person she had come to be, he didn’t know she’d gone back to her family. So what good did the force of the law do him? It meant he had the right to dispose of her dead body, but he had given it back to her parents; he had felt he had no moral claim. Certainly, Caroline Wolf would think he had no claim to Pearl, no authority. Friend of the family. Close family friend. Invited to dinners and ceremonial occasions. Counted on in times of emergency or distress.
Maria, wrapped in a towel, runs out of the bathroom toward him. He gives her the phone, saying to Caroline Wolf, puzzling her perhaps (who is this man in the hotel room?), “Here’s Ms. Meyers now.”
Caroline Wolf gets the full brunt of Maria’s rage. He is sorry for her, but this is what she’s trained for. She’s a diplomat; she probably dreams of standing patiently while Yasir Arafat rages, or Ian Paisley. Maria is, after all, not much compared to them.
She is insisting on being given the names of lawyers. The room is dim; only the bedside lamp is on. The lights are activated only from wall switches, and she can’t turn them on from the phone.
“For God’s sake, Joseph, get some light in here.”
The lights are harsh, embittering the room’s unnatural colors. She gestures to him, pointing to pencil and paper. She snaps her fingers. As if he were a servant. Like his mother.
He excuses her incivility. Would we excuse it in his place? Would we tell ourselves, like him, that she’s upset, exhausted—that’s why she pointed, snapped her fingers—she wouldn’t behave like this under ordinary circumstances? In all the years he’s known her, she’s never snapped her fingers or pointed for him to do something, get something. Yet he knows the inclination has always been there: the impulse to give orders, to be served. As the impulse to serve is in him.
Joseph doesn’t want to think what this means. It is for us, not him, to consider. But we don’t like to think about it. Servants and masters: it seems an old idea, neatly disposed of, like a defunct factory once devoted to the manufacture of corsets. But Joseph knows his mother prepared the food that Maria and her father ate, washed the clothes they wore. He remembers her holding up a pair of Dr. Meyers’s underwear, with a thin line of shit along the seam, and saying, “He thinks he doesn’t even have to wipe his ass because he has some dumb Polack to clean up after him.” And holding one of Maria’s brushes, combing the strands of hair out and saying, “Filthy, filthy,” loud enough for Maria to hear. He knew she wanted Maria to hear. How can he forget this? It is even kinder of him than it might be for one of us to forgive Maria for snapping her fingers and pointing at the thing she wanted fetched. We must ask ourselves: Burdened by the memories, the scenes, the images that Joseph carries, would we be capable of such kindess, such understanding? I fear that we would not.
Sitting in this ugly room, it’s as if a field of force has bloomed around Maria. A line, transparent, sizzling blue, seems to trace the outline of her body.
But she’s getting nowhere. From what he can hear, the bureaucratic buck is being passed. Maria can’t speak like this professionally; she can’t get people to do things by shrieking and cursing at them as she’s doing now.
He’s never seen Maria at work, but I can tell you what she’s like: incisive, jokey, coaxing, able to listen; able to make decisions, even hard ones, and stick to them; able to walk into a room of children and see the problem, think of a solution. People who work with her love her. They are less critical of her than people in other areas of her life. Maria is an excellent boss. As a boss, no one can accuse her of being bossy. She would never talk to a colleague or an employee as she is talking to Caroline Wolf. She is terrified, uncomprehending, frustrated. How would any of us behave in a situation like this? Her daughter may be dying. Her daughter is in the hands of a doctor she doesn’t know, doesn’t like, doesn’t trust. Her daughter refuses to see her.
“What kind of fantastic bullshit is this?” Maria is saying to Caroline Wolf. “What kind of power does the medical establishment have in this country? What is this, Russia under Brezhnev? I’m an American citizen. This is a clear human rights violation. I insist that you give me the names of some lawyers who can help me.”
He sees words clanging against one another, dark blue iron rings in the dove-colored air:
citizen, rights, violation
. She can do this because she has a tie of blood to Pearl, a legal tie. None of these words would be available to him.
Caroline Wolf, he can tell, intends to resist her. She must be saying, I’ll get back to you with those names.
“What do you mean, get back?” Maria shouts. “Get back from where, Timbuktu?”
He wants to laugh at the use of the name so archaically suggesting the impossible place at the impossible distance. Timbuktu. No one uses that word anymore, no one even thinks of it. What happened to Timbuktu, he wonders? Was it only a place in the mind?
He can tell Maria is frustrated by the shortness of the telephone cord. She has to sit. She cannot pace as she usually does when she talks on the phone. She has no scope, no way to express her physical force except by grabbing at her hair, her remarkable hair, long and curly, gray now. Once it rippled, blue-black; she and Devorah would walk down the street together, and everyone loved them for their hair.
“What do you mean, it’s a holiday? Does this seem like a holiday situation? Are we into chestnuts roasting on an open fire?”
Caroline Wolf must be telling her she has other cases.
“I don’t think any of your other cases can possibly have this urgency.”
Caroline Wolf has ended the conversation. Maria puts down the phone. Caroline Wolf didn’t use the words, but Maria heard them in her voice:
There is nothing you can do.
Joseph looks out the window at a courtyard filled with hunks of plaster, rusting lengths of gutter, broken pipe. Maria looks at her watch.
It is only three o’clock. Only ten a.m. in New York. He wonders what she thinks her lawyer friends can do for her, go over the doctor’s head? Insist on the primacy of her rights over Pearl’s?
And it is quite hard to understand, really, that ten o’clock in one place means three in another, that someone (Who is it? Will we ever know?) has sliced the map up like a birthday cake, sectioned the globe like an orange, so that three o’clock and ten o’clock mean the same thing.
It isn’t difficult to see how words spin through her brain like the close-up of a 78 record in a fifties movie about teenagers at a dance. Maria is very frightened; she is very tired. What she is experiencing most intensely, though, is rage at the idea that ten o’clock in one place means three in the place she is now.
25
Pearl hears a sound like horses tramping. Are they bringing horses into her room? They are sewing things to her nose; now they are bringing in horses to look at her. This is the doctor’s voice. She is talking to the trooping horses.
“This case, Pearl Meyers, twenty, is a complex one and brings together a lot of elements in your training. Clinically, it could be described as anorexia. As physicians specializing in psychiatry, I would ask you to understand that the psychological issues are more complex. We won’t go into them here; I’m assuming you’ve read the literature and we’ll discuss this case later in detail in that context. But we must remember that in anorexia the connections between the mind and the body are inextricable. I would draw your attention to the acute physical symptoms, mostly a result of severe dehydration. Although the patient won’t cooperate by giving us a full history, she writes that she hasn’t eaten in six weeks and hasn’t drunk in several days. It’s no wonder that she had trouble producing urine. Also tears. I’ve not seen this extreme a case before except in an infant. What would be some of the side effects of such severe dehydration?”
One of the horses speaks. “Kidney failure,” he says.
“Right,” says the doctor. “Anything else?”
“Drop in blood pressure.”
“Yes. You’ll note that the blood pressure dropped drastically when she moved from a standing to a sitting position. What risks would go along with hydration?”
“Risk of severe arrhythmia followed by cardiac arrest.”
“Very good,” the doctor says.
The horses take their fences quickly; they fly over and do not knock down any of the bars.
“We’ve had to take extreme measures with Ms. Meyers. She pulled the feeding tube from her throat; you can imagine the determination that took. We originally had her in restraints, but I’m very opposed to restraints; I’ve seen too much long-term trauma from them. But we did sew a narrow feeding tube to the side of the right nostril so she can’t pull it out, an extreme measure to be sure. It’s too easy for us to forget that anorexia can be a fatal disease. Starvation is starvation, whether it’s in the developed world or in an African country.”
“Yes, but starvation in a poor country is never voluntary. This kind of anorexia is always a disease of the affluent.”
The doctor puts her hand on Pearl’s arm. “Perhaps you’d be happier in another specialty, Mr. Lenehan. Orthopedics. Dermatology.”
The horses make a snickering sound. One of them, Mr. Lenehan, has knocked the bar. The doctor’s hand is cool on her arm. Her nails are square and short. She wears a wedding ring. The horses troop away.
“I know you’re no stranger to stupidity,” the doctor says. “I’ll try to keep you from that sort of thing ever again.”
What is she saying, that she will keep the horses away? She thinks of the horse she saw with Stevie in Mayo; its legs in the air, its dead eyes open, its teeth exposed. So that is death too. Her death is moving farther from her. No longer the companion at the clear end of the white road. Harder to get a glimpse of. Vaguer now.