Little Deaths, page 9
In the main living room everyone reached for a glass. I thought I’d try to get one for myself, just to test Georgie’s reaction. She was on the ball, all right, whipping out a short riding crop—much to my surprise—with which she beat me twice on the arm. I was surprised because the only other couple I knew who kept a riding crop were my parents. To my knowledge they never used it because their, relationship seemed as close to perfect as you could get. They had matching holes pierced through the nasal septum and both wore rings. Whoever had the benefit of the swing led the other with a thin chain. When the swing changed, they seemed to accept the fact mutually and switch the favour of the chain. Of course, their relationship was the exception rather than the rule.
Georgie’s second stroke with the crop raised a thin red stripe. That’s what I don’t like about love affairs—the blood. My own or anybody else’s. But in most cases it’s inevitable.
‘Don’t touch, darling,’ Georgie said gently. ‘We’re not at home now. These are my friends.’ Then she kissed me slowly and deeply, probing the hole in my cheek, much to everyone’s enjoyment.
Out of the twenty or so people in the room, the host and his black partner were obviously very much in love. Probably, like Georgie and myself, they had only recently met. There were several single people and a few other couples at various stages of getting to know each other. One woman wore a hood and had been hobbled with nylon fishing line, but she kept a respectful two paces behind her partner, a tall, thin man with silver hair and four fingers missing on his left hand. At regular intervals he would turn and run his good hand under the folds of her tunic and she would appear to shiver. It was hard to tell if her reaction was one of pleasure or disgust. Another couple stood at opposite sides of the room, each partner flirting wildly with other people. Every so often one would tug the long thin flex that snaked across the wooden floor between them. They looked as if they were hungry for new experiences but reluctant to throw away what they’d got.
I felt my head being pulled round. Georgie was unclasping the chain from the ring. She smiled at me indulgently as she held on to the ring itself and said, ‘Go on, have a run about.’
She was taking a chance. The other women gathered round me, hands reaching out to pet me and stroke my head. One or two touched the ring and threaded it round through the hole. It hurt but I tried to put a brave face on it for Georgie’s sake. There were at least a dozen women touching me. It only needed one to take a fancy to me and snap some kind of lead or chain on to my ring and Georgie would have lost me. I imagine that the risk gave her some pleasure because she seemed to be enjoying herself as she watched the frenzy of hands and bared teeth.
There was something about the episode which struck me as less than tasteful and I felt it reflected badly on Georgie. This was probably the moment—when she snapped the chain back on the ring, all but smirking with self-congratulation—that I began to love her slightly less and the swing began. In the car on the way back to her place I think we were probably about level, but I was the one who was chained up. The thing about relationships, of course, is that when you’re in one, all the normal rules by which you live change. Georgie had had to wait for something to happen to me in the first place before she could put the ring on me. Had she just marched up and pierced a hole in my cheek, it would have been rape—an act upon which society still frowns. But when you love somebody, the gloves are off. Georgie should perhaps have taken my docility less for granted.
I watched her at the wheel as she negotiated the ill-lit rainy streets north of the city, her dry lips constantly fluttering. At one point she turned her head and looked at me and gave me a smile. Sickly in the orange glimmer of street lighting and the green display of the car’s dash, her face seemed years older than the one I’d seen on the football field, awash in early sunlight.
With a sudden movement I reached for the handbrake and jerked it up.
The rear of the car pitched up in the air and the front wheels swivelled, the steering wheel spun out of control and Georgie’s head punched into the windscreen, which shattered like a huge chandelier crashing to a wooden floor. I had braced myself adequately and was still sitting in my seat unharmed when the car stopped moving. I unclipped my chain from the door handle and looked at Georgie. She was bent in half, her face on the bonnet, her legs stuck under the wrenched steering column.
I walked to the nearest phone and called an ambulance.
When Georgie came home from hospital she was in a wheelchair. Because I had sold her flat while she was in intensive care, she stayed at my place. The swing had happened and I started leaving things out of reach on high shelves and on top of cupboards. We were still sleeping together but the relationship—like Georgie—wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t need to chain her. Her legs were useless and I lived on the fourth floor. There was no lift. The hole in my cheek healed up nicely, leaving a neat scar. I went out to work as normal and thought about her sometimes as I sat at my desk looking for pierced ears among the secretaries and personal assistants.
She took to ringing me at work to tell me she couldn’t wait for me to come home, so one night when I got home I ripped out the phone and bound her wrists behind the back of the wheelchair. I should have been enjoying myself both at home—where I should have been grateful for Georgie’s attention—and at work, and in the pubs and clubs, sitting waiting for someone to fall on a smashed glass. But I felt increasingly numb, unable to appreciate what I’d got. I began to have serious doubts about the swing and only realized what was really going on one day when I stayed late to finish sorting some papers at work.
A very attractive woman whom I’d noticed looking at me several times over the past couple of weeks came into my office and leaned against the desk facing me. She made much of the short skirt she was wearing. ‘Your wife loves you very much, doesn’t she?’ she said.
‘She’s not my wife but yes,’ I answered.
‘That’s what makes you so attractive.’
Then she took the long thin letter opener from my stationery holder and, laying her left hand flat on my desk, plunged the blade of the letter opener into the middle of it. Although clearly close to fainting, she managed to pull the blade out of the desktop in which it had become embedded and show me the palm of her hand. Blood dripped from the fresh hole.
Clearly the swing was in Georgie’s favour again, because I felt no desire for this other woman. I just watched her bleed for a few moments before picking up the phone to dial Georgie. The number was unobtainable and I remembered why. ‘I love you,’ I whispered desperately into the receiver.
SAHIB
by
J. Calvin Pierce
‘Sahib’ differs in both form (journal entries) and era (nineteenth century) from most of the other stories in this book.
Here, a young doctor is consulted by a cruel and self-righteous man about a mysterious and embarrassing ailment.
SAHIB
September 22nd, 1911
The hour is late, the weather vile, the shops long since shut. I am, for the time, a captive in my own rooms. The rain beats against the window; the street below is awash and deserted. I am prevented even from walking to my office, a mere block away. At any rate I am safe from interruption. It would be a serious illness or injury indeed that would send any Londoner abroad in search of a physician on a night like this.
Isolated thus, and yet unwilling to defer this task for even a few hours longer, I find that, for lack of other paper, I must press into use my devotional book, which has heretofore served for the recording of prayers, bits of scripture and points of interest from sermons, to write of matters that it would not be seemly to commit to the pages of my professional journal. I hope the religious content of the leaves that precede this private medical diary will be an omen of good, presaging the relief of the sufferer in my care, and serve to ameliorate the evils, hysterical imaginings though they must be, that will be written of here.
I was called a fortnight ago to the town house of a Colonel Peter Burgess, late of the tropics, who has urgently returned to England for medical treatment. How I came to be chosen, I understood to some degree before the revelations of this afternoon. Now I understand still more. How to say such things to any man, any stranger? I suspect Colonel Burgess thought that to confide in one younger than himself would be less damaging to his pride than to lay his fancies bare to the judgment of a physician of established reputation.
This I am not, but I flatter myself I have some skill, and I must pray God to aid me in the relief of this poor man’s anguish and suffering, which I fear come as much from the disorder of his mind as his body.
Here I mean to repeat what I have heard from Colonel Burgess, but his words I shall not always transcribe. His own ills leave him little patience for niceties. That, combined with a certain native directness, if not coarseness, persuades him at times to relate what he has experienced in language that is, for me, if merely burdensome to hear, impossible to write. I must paraphrase, and in doing that must yet say more than I should wish.
On that first day I was conducted by his military servant to his sitting room. There I was greeted by a sight for which I had not prepared myself. I had thought to visit a man debilitated, wasted by some tropical pestilence, perhaps dying and beyond the help of my skills. Instead I found a hugely fat man, certainly twenty-five stone, seated in an oversize chair and staring from a window. He acknowledged me with a curt nod and dismissed his corporal.
He told me that, six months before, he had been fit and lean, weighing no more than eleven stone, which meant that since then his weight had increased by approximately one pound per day. This was scarcely to be believed, but the corporal later confirmed it, as did Mrs Burgess when I spoke with her.
In that first interview with my patient, I at once confessed myself to be confronted with a complaint for which I was acquainted with no precedent. I began to speak of the eminent physicians we must have recourse to. His reaction was almost violent in its intensity. He seized my hands as he might have those of some dear friend or family member.
‘No,’ he cried. ‘I will have no parade of bearded doctors come here to judge me—to look solemn and shake their heads.’ He stared at me fixedly, whether to implore or intimidate I could not tell. ‘You must treat me by yourself, and leave me yet some little shred of dignity.’ He released my hands and turned away as though finding his own display of emotion distasteful.
Seeing his state, I agreed to his terms, hoping in due course to influence him to another, wiser path. I began to discuss with him the history of his complaint. The only other symptom he could—or would then—report was the irresistible daytime slumber that overtook him at unexpected moments.
‘It is perhaps just as well,’ I offered. ‘The body must have rest to make its repairs, marshal its defences.’
‘It is not a restful sleep,’ was all that he would say then. How much those few words concealed I learned today.
It was necessary that I visit him daily, as my plan of action was to begin him at once on a strict fast, and I dared not set him such a course without monitoring his health. As to exercise, he would not go out by day. He and the corporal walked in a nearby public garden late at night when there would be no one abroad to see him.
It was at such an hour, and such an hour only, that he would consent to visit my office, though visit it he must, for he would not hear of having a scale in his home. Late that night I recorded his weight as nearly one hundred and sixty kilograms. Over twenty-five stone; over three hundred and fifty pounds.
‘Some wretched tropical humour,’ was the colonel’s diagnosis, adding his opinion that he had been ‘poisoned by unwholesome air’. He insisted that his diet had never altered, that his gain in weight had not been brought on by any change in habits. His wife, whom I saw on my second visit, confirmed this to me in a private talk we had as she accompanied me to the door.
Cynthia Burgess herself showed signs of the trials of the recent months. If one was struck first with her remarkable beauty, one soon after noticed the traces of fatigue that had begun to engrave themselves around her eyes, her mouth.
But what beauty! I have seen her a number of times now in the past two weeks, and yet I am never prepared for the effect her presence has on me. A striking figure, clear complexion, a fetching eye—these things are not uncommon. But the beauty of Cynthia Burgess is not the sum of a catalogue of perfections; she has rather a force of attraction than a list of excellences that one can enumerate. Her beauty’ cannot so much be seen as felt, almost breathed. An emanation.
I cannot say I take much pleasure in her talk; it is confined to answering questions about her husband. It is not her conversation, but her speech or, more exactly, her voice that captivates one so. It is low in pitch, dark in timbre, and seems to inhabit the ear like the murmurings of some exotic musical instrument. One does not care what she may say, if only she will speak.
I make no apology for being susceptible to charms that few men who retain breath and blood could resist. And in this journal I further make no apology for delineating them, for they may shed light on, or even in some strange way be at the root of the torment that was only today revealed to me.
Sadly, Peter Burgess can now take no pleasure in the company of his wife. If she enters his room, he becomes silent. I can see it is at the cost of considerable effort that he brings himself to look at her. She stays away, therefore, though I must suppose it gives her pain. But she is brave, and hides it well. I believe her sole concern is that her husband has as much comfort as he can achieve. No doubt she feels that it tortures this proud man for his wife to see him brought to such a state.
That is a belief I shared with her until today.
In the first week of treatment the colonel was gloomy and dispirited. I made no progress in my efforts to draw him out, but I continued in those efforts all the same. I was convinced even before the second time I weighed him that the problem was not entirely a somatic one. The physical aspect, dealing with my patient’s obesity, I expected to be a simple matter. Though the body resists, a fast can have dramatic results, or so I have read, and so the records of many wars and famines tell us.
Nonetheless, when he came to be weighed the second time, seven days having intervened, he had gained nearly half a stone, some seven pounds. The next day I interrogated the corporal closely. I was determined not to have my patient eat himself to death while I fancied he was fasting.
The patient himself claims to suffer no inconvenience from the strict regimen, I suppose because his general misery serves to mask any particular pain. In recent days, though, he has begun to feel that effect that the close attendance of a physician often brings. He has begun to give over the superintendence and some of the worry of his disease to me. There are those who say this is the chief good a medical man can do, and that if only we would leave off doing harm, we should be worth our fees.
In any event, I welcome it, for it makes this stiff man more easy with me. I first noticed it the day after he was disappointed by the scale. I began then to hope he might eventually speak of more than his physical symptoms, for I had formed the notion of treating the whole man.
And now today he has at once gratified and shocked me. I am gratified that I have so far advanced in his trust that he begins to tell me his secrets. I am shocked—perhaps I am naïve—at their nature.
He had begun, this second week, to tell me of the horrors that infested his dreams. In sleep he found himself pursued by a pack of voracious gnomes with pincer claws and tiny pointed teeth. He left his bed each morning more weary than he had entered it. Today I determined to see if I could not probe this wound. Might not a psychical injury be cleansed and healed like a physical one?
This afternoon I asked him if he didn’t think the slumbers he sometimes fell into during the day did not stem from the rest-’ lessness of his nights. I mentioned this simply to broach the subject of his nightmares, but it was not of those we were to speak.
He laughed. As always, his laughter was without mirth. Had anything the power to cheer this troubled man, I wonder how he might express the unaccustomed emotion.
‘You think,’ he said, ‘that these fits of sleep might be sent as relief?’ Again he laughed, turning his eyes heavenward. ‘I wish you could prescribe a powder that would relieve me of such relief.’ For a moment he said nothing. I had grown used to the silences that often punctuated his speech, but on this occasion he went on.
‘Shall I tell you something of these intervals of repose?’ He spoke without looking directly at me, as though addressing a person in another part of the room.
I encouraged him with a nod and a few words, fearing to do something to make him change his mind. I did not seek his eye, but studied my hands folded in my lap. There ensued a silence which I was resolved not to break. At length he spoke.
‘To see my wife is to know what there is to know of her. She is a fresh, plain English girl. No beauty, to be sure, but presentable enough.’
To hear Mrs Burgess so inaccurately described nearly brought a protest to my lips unbidden. Had I not known better, I should have thought I had been talking to the wrong woman, some dark beauty that shared their house, or some voluptuous phantom that haunted it. It was as though Colonel Burgess held in his hands a rare orchid and described it to me as a daisy.
‘As to carnality—don’t start, sir; you are to hear much worse—I have long since resigned myself to the fact that in that respect she will remain forever the innocent …
‘And that is what makes these dreams so vile!’ He turned from the window to face me.
‘When you dream, doctor, do you ever see images that could not be distinguished from reality? That even when you wake and recall them, still might have been events that actually took place, with nothing of the dream-image about them?’
