Sixteen

I hadn't seen my parents in quite some time. Weeks would often go by before I opened their letters, and sometimes I didn't open them at all. Now, because of events at the hospital, I wanted to lie down on their big couch in the sunny living room and fall asleep while a Big Eight basketball game was being played on the black-and-white television. I wanted to eat some of my mother's chicken and dumplings, then sit with my dad on the porch, watching cars pass on Route 31 in the distance. It would be a nice change of pace from lugging corpses.

Dave had a theory about why I never got in touch with them. He said it was guilt. I really wanted to be in Vietnam getting killed like all the rest. Not contacting my parents was a way of dying.

"When's the last time you talked to your parents?" I asked.

"Last year sometime."

"Maybe you think you ought to be dead in some rice field."

"The difference is, I'm no CO, man. If I was a CO, I'd want to be dead in a rice field," Dave said moving towards the front door.

"Bite it, Dave. You're a fake."

"What do you mean, a fake?" he said, fingering his long black hair, which he always kept nice with Prell and conditioner.

"You're a fake hippie. You do all the right things like writing poems and casting your penis in plaster, but you don't really believe in anything."

"That's not true. I believe in the Hobbit, the Rolling Stones, and Richard Brautigan."

"Well, that just goes to prove it," I said. "That's all fake. If you were for real, you'd have said J. D. Salinger."

"You're just screwed up," he said with a smile, and gave me a fake karate chop to the stomach.

We decided to be friends, and I had the day off, so Dave dusted off some mescaline he'd been saving for a rainy day. I had one acid trip to my credit, but it hadn't gone well. My legs seemed to lose all their feeling, and I scooted around the apartment on my backside, while Dave and Penelope tried to talk me down. The cells of my body were as loose as smoke, mingling with the atomic particles of wallpaper. I leaned against the wall and became absorbed into it.

I liked alcohol best and I had been drinking a lot of it lately. It settled me down after work and I could sleep with heavy eyes and a smile knowing I had defeated the dreams that were going to have to wait for another time. I was probably going through a case of Olympia beer every three or four days. It was amazing how fast those bottles collect on the kitchen floor near the door.

So Dave and I had a sort of blood-brother ceremony. He had his acid and I had four beers in succession.

It was a nice day, so Dave and I headed for Lincoln Park. Families were touring the zoo, and a young working-class couple was fishing in the lagoon. A couple of hippies were throwing a yellow Frisbee for their dog to catch, but it was clumsy. Suddenly they flung it hard in our direction, and I knew I was drunk when the plastic disk missed Dave's head and struck me between the eyes. All I saw was banana yellow and then wham. I'd forgotten to put up my hand to catch it. Dave missed the whole thing. He continued walking, gawking at the park as if it were television, a smile slapped onto his face. It reminded me of the time we were stopped by a cop while he was smoking a huge joint and he popped it into his mouth. When I got back to the car from getting my ticket, his teeth were green from eating it.

At Lonnie's, an outdoor restaurant on Clark Street, we ordered a hamburger and beer, but after a couple of bites I made the mistake of looking at it -- a quarter pound of flesh on a sesame-seed bun. Its purple pinkness astonished me, it was as if I'd taken a bite from the side of a cow. When Dave heard this, he put down his hamburger, took a pen from the pocket of his jeans, and began to write all over the paper tablecloth. I could read some of the magnified script as it orbited toward my plate -- it was about the animal nature of man, man the killer and eater.

I liked Dave, but things were changing around the old dump. Edgar was somewhere in Europe, and Carlo had come up with a new scam. He'd been awarded a lectureship in the Art of Social Change by New Left College. He now wore a full-blown Afro, beads, and dashiki, and had moved to the college's suburban campus, where he was quite a hit. New Left had only one department, which they called Revolutionary Arts, and you could get credit for life experience. For instance, if you went to church as a kid and challenged the Sunday-school teacher, you could get four hours' credit in the Spirituality Today class. Nobody attended class, of course, because that was too uptight. Tuition was required, but otherwise you could do what you wanted. Carlo said the Revolutionary Arts Department was cochaired by all college faculty and that decisions had to be unanimous. That was no problem, since everybody thought the same way. Decisions just came to them, like the weather. The faculty agreed with Rousseau that education should be nonspecific. Nothing should be learned by rote, and facts themselves were unimportant. What mattered was the development of a personal stance or attitude in the world. The dean of the college, Marlin Winesap, was impressed with Carlo's anarchic personality, and he wanted that communicated to the students. It didn't matter that Carlo had no degree, not even from high school. His prison experience was training enough. As for the hierarchy implied in the existence of a dean, Winesap said his position existed, like good government, only to do away with itself. The happiest moment in his life, he told Carlo, would come when the students and faculty dragged him from his air-conditioned office with sauna and wet bar and set fire to the administration building. Unfortunately, he said, shaking his great mane of white hair, the level of education at the college was not yet that advanced. The problem was how to instruct the students without using corrective teaching methods. It was wrong, perhaps even evil, to ask them to revise their behavior. One could not revise his breathing or the way he walked across the room. That came spontaneously from the soul. Where could they get students with enough fire?

"I couldn't believe that shit," said Carlo. "Ol' Winesap got down on his hands and knees and crawled around the office like a fuckin' dog. He said the world was turning to stone, man, because there was too much logic."

I asked him how much he got paid at New Left College.

"It's on commission," he said. "Twenty percent of new tuitions we bring in. Plus all the white pussy a youngblood needs." Watching his spending habits as of late, Carlo was probably bringing in a thousand or more a month.

It was obvious that Carlo liked his new position, but the suburbs began to change him. We saw him less and less. The last time he came around, he was wearing his academic dashiki and had two white transvestites on his arm. They were going out for pizza, they said, and wondered if we'd like to go along. No, thanks, I stammered, but Randy put down his comic book and went with them. He reported later that the transvestites, who wore blue denim miniskirts and platform shoes, were commodities brokers from Winnetka. In spite of their conservative politics, he'd found them intellectually stimulating.

After pizza he and Carlo were picked up by some rich lady in her fifties in a limousine who drove them to a cemetery and asked Carlo to make love on her former lover's grave. The fee was two hundred dollars, but Carlo refused it. The situation was too weird, since the chauffeur was the woman's current lover, and would be watching from the driver's seat, headlights blazing. Randy and I shook our heads at each other. We felt Carlo had made the correct decision.

Randy said he and Carlo had decided nothing was innately wrong in the way people dressed. If a man wanted to wear kilts or negligees down the street, that was his business. In fact, the fashion statement was, in a real sense, the final statement of the revolution. When everyone felt free enough to risk the ridiculous, society would be truly free, not before.

"Did you sleep with her?" I asked.

"Sure," he said proudly. He winked and went into another room.

It made me feel better about Randy. He had always been so self-conscious and anxious, which made him the perfect victim, and here he was, the seducer and flirt. If this could happen after being beaten up by your girl friend, world peace was possible.

It was the Fourth of July, and I had trouble getting to work because of all the traffic on Lake Shore Drive where the annual Air Show was going on. Sitting on bleachers, the family audience watched their country's war machines fly over Lake Michigan. As I sat in the middle of a traffic jam, ten minutes late for work, an enormous jet flew in at high speed, braked in the air, and floated over the harbor like an ancient reptile. The exhaust from its ventral jet make the water concave in an area the size of a baseball diamond. Its power was disgusting and frightening. Then the Blue Angels streaked out of the horizon, the four planes peeling off from the center. The picture they painted in jet exhaust was that of a flower. The crowd sighed and clapped at the beauty of it all.

That night nobody died at the hospital, but a black nursing aide named Ida came to work beaten up. One eye was nearly closed and the cornea of the other was red with blood. She looked like she needed to be hospitalized.

"What happened?" I asked Linda Ruh, the nurse on Six North.

"Ida was raped last night on her way home from work," she said as she put the six o'clock med tray together.

"She looks terrible," I said. "Why is she at work?"

"She called in sick," Linda said, "but Graven wouldn't let her take the day off. She said if she didn't show up, she was fired."

Malvinia Graven was probably the most feared nursing supervisor. She was of the old school and gave no slack. When she came onto a unit, everyone sat up straight and tried to look busy.

"It isn't fair," I said. "She was really raped?"

"He pulled her behind an elementary school," Linda said, "and stuck a gun in her mouth."

I went into the supply room where Ida was collecting towels for the bedbaths she had to give.

"Hi, Holder," she said.

"I heard what happened," I said. "I'm sorry."

"That bitch Graven is gonna get it someday," she said with surprising heat. She was usually very mild-mannered and one of the best aides in the hospital. I knew she couldn't afford to lose the job, because she had three small children and no husband. She could have made more money on welfare than on an aide's salary, but she was too proud to accept it. At that moment, I hated Graven, the United States Air Force, apple pie, hamburgers, and the sky over Montana. Life had never seemed more outrageous.

"Maybe Graven will fall down a laundry chute and die," I said, but as soon as I said it, Ida's face told me to shut up and turn around. There was Malvinia Graven, clipboard in hand, regarding me with cold fury. She didn't say anything, but I knew I was in for some serious trouble. Blue veins stood up on the backs of her hands, and her gray eyes quivered.

Around ten o' clock that night, Barbara, Ed, and I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, where there was an exercise deck and solarium for ambulatory patients. It was rarely used, but now and then you'd see some sturdy soul out there, struggling in the wind. There was something about the place that communicated sadness. In one corner of the solarium, old hospital furniture and equipment was stacked in disarray. Behind the heap, where you would least expect an office, a door opened and a small man in a rumpled suit walked rapidly toward the elevator, holding a sheaf of rumpled papers. This figure was David Timor, whose job was making out employee schedules. That was all he did, high above the city, in a room with windows. All evening he filled out grids with names and dates, in two-week segments. You could request a certain schedule, but it was finally David Timor's decision, filling in an O for a day off with impeccable penmanship. According to Romona, who had told us of his existence, he never mixed with any of the other employees. As far as I knew, this was the first time any regular employees had seen him. The moment was eerie and giddy, as if we'd come across an obscure salamander that was only rumored to exist. We couldn't help laughing, because of the way he carried himself, like a common little god. When he saw us, he scuttled into a stairwell and was gone.

Seeing him reminded me that a patient was rumored to live on the eighteenth floor. His name was Harms and he had been there for years -- wealthy, eccentric, and chronically ill. After he donated a few million dollars to the hospital, they converted a storeroom into a penthouse, where private nurses tended him around the clock. In fact, his was the only room on the eighteenth floor. One floor below, in the fenced-in exercise area, we could see the lights of his room, mysterious and yellow. Nobody ever saw Harms except for nurses and doctors, and I often wondered if he wasn't a myth, like the phantom of the opera. Timor was his gnomic assistant, and Malvinia Graven, with her Medusan disposition and transparent teeth, was the agent of change, the one who went forth from this high place.

Our plan was to watch the fireworks display over Oak Street Beach, some of which had already started. You could hear dull thuds and explosive static. After a while, the show grew in intensity, and the near sky filled with light. The deck on which we stood was brightly lit for a moment, then shivered into darkness. It was like the flares in Vietnam, I imagined, but no enemy soldiers flickered along the horizon. Barbara put her arm around me when Ed wasn't looking, but she nervously dropped it after a while. The fireworks didn't please her very much and she wanted to go back inside. Ed was having a wonderful time. He'd noticed other fireworks displays all over the city and ran over from one parapet to another, pointing at them. One was on the West Side, perhaps in Garfield Park. Another was on the South Side, in Comiskey Park, where the White Sox had just finished a game. Two displays of lesser intensity could be seen farther out, perhaps in the suburbs. You couldn't hear them, but they gave you a sense of fireworks going off all over the country at that moment, in the small towns and fading cities, in ball parks and broken-down drive-in theaters. You could imagine the faces of a Norman Rockwell drawing. They were tense with history, because they knew someone fighting in Vietnam, and the fireworks made his peril real to them.

Barbara asked me to come home with her that night, and when I gave an excuse she looked hurt. I couldn't tell her that Gary Janush had called from his home with news about Malvinia Graven. She'd called repeatedly, asking for my resignation. He said he'd try to protect me, but his own job was in jeopardy, and Normal Cane had already spoken of me with suspicion. If my involvement in the demonstration and the insult to Graven were put together, I didn't stand a chance. That was too bad, he said, because I had only two months to go. At any rate, there would be a meeting tomorrow to decide my fate, and I wasn't invited.

The apartment on Halsted was desolate and dreary. When I turned on the kitchen light, cockroaches exploded out of the sink and headed for every crack and crevice. Nobody else appeared to be at home. All the bedroom doors were open except for Penelope's. I knocked on it, and when there was no answer, I entered. The room was extremely small. There was space enough for the bed and a small nightstand, but there wasn't even a closet. A small pile of her sad-looking clothes occupied one corner. They were dark and musty, and, standing near them, I could smell camphor, wool, lonesomeness, and weekends. There was also the unexpected smell of men's cologne. I thought it was probably Edgar's.

My face in Penelope's small antique mirror was a shock. It was known to me, but it was new. It seemed to belong to someone of vast inexperience, or even to a person who had never had an experience. There was intelligence in the eyes, but, on the whole, this was the icon of a face, the drawing of a face, faceness. I pushed the rubbery features with my fingers, as Crank Triplett had done to his dead son.

Exhausted, I lay down on the bed, which was far too short, even for me, and narrow, nearly, as a bench. The ceiling looked very distant, as if drifting out of reach. During the day, light came into the room feebly, colored by years of dirt on the glass. It was as if the light withdrew at the very moment it entered. For all I knew, someone from the government was watching me even now, taking notes and smiling. It was the smile of that invisible agent that crossed my mind as I drifted off to sleep, arms and legs askew. Not even the drowned, floating underwater, ever slept so soundly.

I awoke at four in the morning, staggered down the hall, and peeked into my own bedroom. Penelope wasn't there. An emptiness filled the apartment that was change itself. None of us were the same as yesterday, and we would be even more different tomorrow. I wanted this change to stop. I wanted leaves to stop falling, and meat to stop rotting. The rivers could all stop flowing, as far as I was concerned. We needed a little stability here.

A cigarette glowed in the dark of the front room. It was probably Randy scrunched down on the couch, having intense and dark thoughts. Instead, it was Penelope and Randy, sharing his cigarette. They were also entirely naked.

"Hello," said Penelope crisply and brightly. "Did we have a good sleep?"

"I should be asking you that question," I said.

"It's the bed," she said, stroking Randy's chest with one hand. "It puts one into a virtual coma."

I studied their bodies. In spite of her limp, Penelope had no signs of a crippling injury, and she was better put together than I had thought. In fact, shocked, she looked a lot better naked than she did dressed. In the nude, she had the confidence of a professional model. It was I who felt ill at ease, slumped in a canvas chair, shaking the sleep out of my head. Randy gave me a look of mixed snideness and pity. Disengaging himself from Penelope's arms, he leaned forward, his round face illuminated by the available light from the hall.

"What's the matter, Holder?" Randy said.

"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about things at work. About things in general."

"You should take a break from that place," Randy said. "It's not good to be around death so much."

"Maybe you're right. Every time I take a body to the morgue, I think, This will be me someday. Somebody will wrap me in cloth, load me onto a car, and drop me onto a cold slab. They won't know who I was or what I thought about life. It won't matter; I'll just be dead."

Wind came through the window behind Penelope, the slightly chill wind of early morning. She shivered and reached for her purple top, which was on the floor beside her. It immediately made her smaller and mousier. As Penelope retreated into a more timid persona, Randy also seemed less confident. His eyes made an anxious accounting of the room, and he puffed nervously on the cigarette.

"Either of you want a beer?" I asked standing up from a chair I had sat down in. Suddenly the hospital topic and the wind made me thirsty.

"It's five in the morning," said Randy.

"I don't know how you can stand that job," said Penelope. "It would drive me absolutely into an asylum."

"The job is all right, actually," I said. "The people are nice, and you more or less get used to the bodies. There are exceptions, of course. The other day, when we pulled back the curtains, the corpse was sitting up in bed. My friend Ed and I jumped back about six feet."

Randy was interested in the story. He liked all my morbid stories about the hospital, because they fit into his superhero conception of the world.

"How can a corpse sit up?" asked Penelope.

"It was actually an old lady with a humpback that made her appear to be sitting," I said. "It wasn't only her position that was scary. It was also her height. She was only four feet tall."

"Like Isis," said Randy, more or less to himself. Lost in thought, he tapped cigarette ashes onto the coffee table.

A shudder ran through Penelope and she began to look around on the floor for another article of clothing. She slipped a man's blue sock onto her right foot, but made no attempt to find its mate.

"The body was so light," I said, "you could reach over with one hand, pick it up like a satchel, and lift it onto the cart. It couldn't have weighed over fifty pounds."

"Is that what you did?" asked Randy.

"Actually, I picked it up with both hands, gripping the sheet from above, swung it around . . ."

"Like a derrick," said Randy.

". . . and lowered it onto the cart. But the body still looked like it was sitting up. We had to push the head down in order to get the slab back in the wall. Ed said it was like shoving a kid downhill on a sled."

"Disgusting," said Penelope.

"Once we had a body that dripped blood all over our pants and shoes," I remembering how Ed and I had to change into surgical trousers for the rest of the shift.

"Stop right there!" said Penelope, pointing at me with one of her shoes.

"I can't," I said and I went to the fridge to get the first beer of the day.

I stopped by Gary Janush's office before the evening shift started the next day. As soon as I entered, he rose and came to the door. The news wasn't good. Graven and Cane had indeed gotten together. They wanted me fired and insisted a letter go to the draft board, notifying them of my behavior. He walked me down the hall, where we could talk without the secretary hearing. We stopped in front of room 785. Inside a teenage girl in a body cast looked at us quizzically, as if we were discussing her.

"I made the best deal I could," Gary said, "but my own position isn't the best. Graven wants to get rid of the management program altogether."

"I understand," I said.

"We worked something out with Bolger," he said, looking down the hall at an open window. "We can keep the management program for one more year if you agree to leave."

"Leave!" I whispered loudly. "You want me to leave? I didn't do anything, Gary."

"Don't make so much noise," he said, looking fearfully at the nursing station. "The fact is, Holder, I had to make a deal. If I let you go now, I can save twenty-five other jobs. It's like bleeding. You've got to stop the bleeding of the patient who dies."

"That's just great," I said. "Thanks for your help, Gary."

"I busted my ass for you, Jim," he said, offering his hand, which I let freeze in the air.

"No," I said. "I busted my ass for you!" I must have spoken loudly, because everyone at the station was staring at us.

"Look," he said with surprising heat. "You must have fucked up or things would never have gone this far. I tried for you, I really did. . . ." His voice trailed off. He stopped looking at me directly. He said I had until the end of the week. Meanwhile, they were sending notice of my termination to the draft board. Cane had insisted on it.

Janush turned and walked back to his office, but I knew it was no use to follow him. I stood in the hall feeling like a tunnel had opened beneath my feet. The girl in the body cast motioned to me. "Hey, you," she said, "how about some service around here?"

"What's the problem?" I said.

"The service here is shit," she said. "Why don't you do something about it?"

"You shouldn't talk like that. Your mother wouldn't like it," I said, leaving the room.

The American Friends Service Committee, I discovered the next morning, was located on LaSalle Street, in an old building near the Midwest Commodities Exchange. Rumpled brokers stood on the street, their pockets bulging with pieces of paper, smoking cigarettes and talking conspiratorially. I'd heard they traded in things like plywood, gold, and pork bellies -- anything that had a price subject to fluctuation. If they had bought some wheat and disaster struck the crop, sending prices sky-high, they were enormous winners. In a sense, they were betting against nature, against some principle of fertility itself. I had heard that even farmers had begun to protect themselves by buying futures, betting, in effect, that their own crops would fail. It was a far cry from the image of agriculture I possessed from attending the Church of Peace, where the pastor prayed for rain in times of drought, for sunshine when the fields were too moist to support the weight of a cornpicker.

The Merkel Building, where the Friends had their office, was on the verge of being condemned. Nothing was rented, and the old elevator, with open grating, revealed one empty dentist's office after another on the way to the fourth floor. The operator, who was very old, wore the uniform of a security service, but his black holster was empty, as if someone had stolen his weapon and he didn't know it yet.

The Service Committee was at the end of the hall. The office consisted of two large rooms with old desks and a few antiwar posters on the wall, including the famous one of a Chicago cop leaning on his motorcycle and giving the photographer the finger. Another had a large photo of a gas mask, superimposed with an excerpt from Shakespeare that began, "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!"

Two counselors were on duty, young men with white shirts, black vests, and wireless granny glasses. As I watched them counsel the men ahead of me, I realized they were twins of some kind. There was a basic resemblance, but one was puffier in the face and looked like he'd been in a motorcycle accident. While I waited, I looked through a black ring binder that was on the table. It was a list of available CO jobs, and it wasn't in very good shape. Pages had been torn out, and much of what was left didn't look current. There was a job as a milk tester and collector of bull semen in Delaware. There was another working as a laboratory animal in New Jersey. You let them inject you with drugs, and they hooked you up to a machine that measured the resulting spasms. There was another working in a home for children who liked to set fires, or so I gathered from the garbled description the home's administrator had provided. That was about it.

"We don't recommend any of those," said the thinner twin, who sat down across from me. He reminded me of the heartthrob Communist youth in Dr. Zhivago.

"Why not?"

"We keep those around for the CO types who want to cooperate with the system," he said, straddling the folding chair and twisting an old copy of a newspaper in his hands. "Our thrust is to defeat the war machine altogether. We do that by recommending resistance."

"You mean you tell all these guys to go to Canada?"

"Or to jail," he said calmly. "In fact, jail is the higher form of resistance ethically. Judges put the sentence at an average of twenty-six months."

I looked around the room. Most of the previous clients had left, but one guy in secondhand fatigues and blue jeans was reading a pamphlet called Doing Time.

"Name's Rudy," said the counselor, extending his hand.

"Holder," I said.

"That's my brother Carl," he said proudly, indicating the other counselor. "He just got out of Leavenworth -- thirty-six straight months?"

"That's great," I said.

"Yeah, Carl's the best," he said, and the brother looked in our direction. A thick red scar ran across Carl's neck and into his hair behind the ear. His lower lip looked like it had been sewn back together.

"Are you identical twins?" I asked.

"We used to be," said Rudy, looking down at the backs of his hands. It was clear that Carl's injuries had occurred in prison, but I didn't have the nerve to ask what had happened.

"What about you?" I asked. "Have you been in jail, too?"

"I was convicted the same time as Carl," he said a little sadly, "but my lawyer's appeals have slowed everything down. To tell the truth, I'd like to have it over by now."

I explained my case to him, and he studied the floor for a minute. "I'm afraid we can't be of much help," he said, "unless you want to go the resistance route. Then we can provide legal services. Our priorities, frankly, are as follows: jail, going underground, and Canada. Most of the COs just figure things out for themselves." He said "COs" with a hint of sarcasm, as if it were ethically akin to selling used cars.

"I don't get it," I said, my face getting red. "You act like being a CO is the same as serving in the army."

He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

"COs do a lot of good," I said. "They help people in hospitals and things like that. They also aren't in Vietnam, killing a lot of innocent people . . . killing anyone for that matter." But my indignation was hollow, because I'd already begun to wonder if Rudy wasn't right.

A guy wearing a lumber jacket and work boots entered the office with his girl friend, who wore an India-print dress and long earrings. He had a batch of papers in his hands. They both looked worried.

"Gotta go now," Rudy said, rising. "Good luck to you." He walked over to the couple, an earnest conversation began. It was obvious that the kid had been drafted, and I could see Canada all over his girl friend's face.

I was lost in thought when Carl tapped me on the shoulder. This close, his scars were frightening, but his eyes and voice were gentle. "Consider prison," he said. "It's what you can do for your country."