Collected Stories, page 61
The City of the Living
At a certain moment he looked around him and was overcome by a feeling almost like terror at how strange this all was.
Not even the international familiarity of washbowl and water closet, not even the familiar labels of pill bottles on his table or the familiar carbolic reek of disinfectant, could make him quite accept the fact that this was happening to him and his son, and in this place. The darkened room next door was real to him, and this bathroom with its iron shutters open to night and the mosquitoes, but their reality was an imprecise reality of nightmare. It was hard to keep from believing that under the ghostly mosquito net in the next room lay not his son but someone with a strange face, or no face at all; and that in this tiled cell sat not himself but some alien enduring an ordeal by light and silence.
Outside the window, across the tops of the palms whose occasional dry clashing was the only sound he heard, were the unseen minaret from which the muezzin had cried the hour of prayer at the oncoming of dark, the unseen mud houses of Moslems and Copts, the fluted lotus columns, the secret shine of the Nile, the mud flats spreading towards the rims that guarded the Valley of the Kings. Against his windows the ancient dark of Egypt sucked like the vacuum created by wind under a lee wall. It made him conscious of the beating of his heart.
Turning from the outside dark and the soft clash of palms, he listened at the bedroom door, opened it and slipped in. He could not see the face but only the vague shape under the net. Yet he thought he felt the fever through sheet and net and three feet of air, and when he slipped his hand under to touch the boy’s forehead he felt how tentative and fearful a gesture that was.
The luminous hands of his watch showed only one thirty-five. More Chloromycetin at two. He was tempted to get the thermometer and see if the heavy dosages since noon had brought the fever down at all. But it wouldn’t be fair to wake the boy. He needed the sleep—if it was sleep.
Back in the bathroom with his eye to the narrowing crack of the door he watched the sickroom gather its darkness. The netted bed retreated, the shiny bathroom was restored to him, with the vacuum of night at its windows. He stepped out onto the narrow iron balcony, and as he did so something crashed and scrambled in the top of a palm on a level with the rail, almost in his face. Fright, and the thought that whatever it was had been crouched there looking in at him, froze him rigid; and he heard first the pound of his heart, then a small rustling, then silence, then the mosquitoes gathering with a thin whine around his head. Whatever had been among the palm fronds, rat or monkey or bird, was quiet. And there was no sound from the town either, not even the bark of a dog.
Above him the sky was the rich blue-black he had seen in fine Persian rugs, with the Milky Way a pale cloud across it and many brilliant dry stars. He thought of shepherds watching their flocks by night and Arab astronomers among the cumbersome stone instruments of their observatories, and he looked for lights but saw only a mysterious red glow like a cigar end in the blackness beyond the Nile, where the City of the Dead had extended in the time of ancient Thebes. He had no idea what it might be. It hung there as enigmatic and watchful as himself on the balcony or his stealthy neighbor in the palm top. After a time it faded. Though he looked hard he saw not a glint, not a reflected glimmer of a star, from the river sweeping the town’s flank.
A fumbling from behind him sent his hand instantly to the light chain above the washbowl, and as he turned the boy came in, blinking and stumbling, holding up his pajamas with one hand, and groped numbly past and dropped on the toilet and was racked with explosive diarrhea. With a groan he put his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands; to his father’s scared eyes he looked fatally skinny, his arms pipestems too weak for the big man’s hands. His face when he lifted it was puffed at the eyes with fever and sleep but wasted to skeleton thinness along the jaws.
The father held his hand against the boy’s forehead to help the weak neck. The forehead was very hot, the lips glazed like agate. “Better now?”
The boy bent his head but sat still. In a moment he was racked again. His stench was almost unbearable. Holding his breath against the smell, the father shook down the thermometer and put it to the agate lips. They opened obediently, even in the midst of a spasm—how touchingly obedient he was in his sickness—and the two sat on, the boy absorbed with his inward war, the father unwilling to say anything that might demand his son’s strength for an answer. Sitting on the tub’s edge, he removed the thermometer and read it. A hundred and two and a half, exactly what it had been since the night before.
He saw the boy’s foot and skinny leg, the Achilles’ tendon standing out from the heel, the long body jack-knifed in an agony of cramps, and the feeling that came over him was like the slipping of a knot or the fraying of a rope that had held something secure until then. He looked with horror at the way the disease had wasted his son in barely more than a day, and he drew into his lungs the inhuman, poisonous stench of the sickness. That was the moment when it first occurred to him that the boy could die.
The thermometer rattled in the glass of germicide as he put it back. With an arm around the skinny shoulders he helped the boy back to bed, where he fed Chloromycetin capsules one by one into the obedient mouth and after each one offered the water glass to the enameled lips. He smoothed the sheet and turned the pillow. “Now back to sleep,” he said.
For a moment he continued to stare fascinated at the wasted face, the closed eyes. He was talking to a nothing, to a silence. The boy had folded back into the bed with a little groan and had moved nothing but his lips since. The act of drawing the sheet up to his chin was so intimately associated in the father’s mind with the last act of a deathbed that he ground his teeth. In one fierce grab he caught a mosquito that had got in under the net. Then he tucked in the edges and tiptoed out. Looking back from the door, he felt guilt in him like a knife for all the things he might have done and had failed to do. There was a darkness in his mind where this only child had been. Already the memory of him was all but unbearable.
In the harsh light of the bathroom he felt trapped like an animal in a flashlight beam. The sight of his own trapped eyes glittering was an intense, dreamlike plausibility until he realized that he was looking into a mirror. Darkness would have been a relief, but not the darkness outside. He had a fantasy that the light and the unreal solidity of brass and porcelain, himself and the stench of his son’s sickness might all be sucked out into the night and lost. It was better to cling to this, to his separateness and identity, for somehow, at some totally unbearable crisis in his dream of personal pain and loss, he had a faith that he might waken and be saved.
In the end he found occupation in the routines of a sickbed vigil. He scrubbed the toilet and dumped disinfectant in it, washed his hands a long time in germicidal water, drove the mosquitoes out of the room with the DDT bomb. But those jobs, treat them as carefully as he might, lasted him no more than twenty minutes. Then he was back again, caught between the light and the darkness, the only wakeful thing in all the dark city of Thebes except for the animal in the palm top and whoever was responsible for the red glow across the river. The thought of the light raised sudden goose flesh on him, as if grave robbers or vampires prowled there.
After a while he got out his briefcase and set about bringing his correspondence up to date. That morning he had filled his pen at the hotel desk. At the same time, as if with foresight, he had picked up a new supply of hotel stationery. He had Egyptian stamps folded into a slip of waxed paper in the briefcase. He comforted himself with his own efficient work habits, and he cleaned up several things:
A note to the American Express in Rome returning some unused railroad tickets for refund. A letter of recommendation for a junior colleague trying for a Government job. A word to his secretary saying briefly that illness had changed their plans so that it didn’t look as if any mail should be sent to Athens at all. Send anything up to December first to Rome.
The three stamped and addressed envelopes gave him such satisfaction that he wished he had fifty to do. He addressed the two picture postcards he found and wished there were more. But if no more cards and no more details to clear up, then a personal letter or two. With a sheet of stationery before him and his full pen in his hand, his eyes a little scratchy from sleeplessness, he considered whom he should write to. Not instantly, but over a period of seconds or minutes, it occurred to him that there was no one.
Not for the kind of letter he wanted and feared to write. He had no family closer than cousins, strangers he had not seen for years. His wife was worse than a stranger—an enemy—and though he owed her reports on their son’s health and a monthly alimony check he owed her no more than that, and from her he could expect nothing at all. Friends? To what golf companion or bridge companion or house-party acquaintance or business associate could he write a letter beginning, as it must, “My son is in the next room very sick, perhaps dying, with typhoid …”?
He put his hands palms down on the desk and held them there a moment before he crumpled the sheet on which he had written the date and a confident “Dear …” Dear who? I am sitting in the bathroom of a hotel in Luxor, Egypt, at nearly three in the morning, and I am just beginning to realize that here or anywhere else I am almost completely alone. I have spent my life avoiding entanglements. I breathed a sigh of relief when Ruth left. The only person I have cared about is this boy in the next room, and he is half a stranger. You should hear the machinery creak when we try to talk to each other. And I have to go and bring him into this rotten country where everybody is stuffed to the eyes with germs. …
On a new sheet of paper he wrote, lifting his face while he tried to remember the figures, certain statistics on Egyptian public health he had read somewhere.
Trachoma .................. 97 percent
Bilharziasis .................. 96 percent
Syphilis .................. 20 percent
Tuberculosis .................. ? percent
Cholera?
Typhoid?
It seemed important to have them down. He wished he had clipped the newspaper or World Health report or whatever he had seen them in. For a moment’s flash of memory he remembered Giles at the Mahdi Club in Cairo saying to him quietly as they waited for the boy to wipe off their bowls and hand them back, “Wash your hands in carbolic water after we go in. This kid’s got a beautiful case of pink-eye.” He saw himself quoting Egyptian health statistics to head-wagging men who dropped in to the office, or to people who listened to him around grate fires. It’s no joke, he heard himself say. Practically every Egyptian you see is one-eyed, and they’ve all got bilharzia worms. All the filth diseases, of course—cholera and typhoid are endemic. It was typhoid that nearly got Dan, you know, in Luxor.
He listened, hypnotized by the even, world-traveled voice, and raised a hand to brush away a mosquito and smelled the germicide, and said to himself that if the hotel doctor and the manager hadn’t been decent Dan might be in a fever hospital right now instead of quarantined in this wing. He went back over his remarks, polishing them, and came to the word “nearly” and stopped.
The thing that he wanted to think about or write about as an adventure of the trip, successfully passed, rose up before him suddenly and blanked his whole mind with fear. Controlling himself, forcing the discipline, he picked up papers and one by one put them away in the briefcase, refolding the stamps into their waxed paper. Under some odds and ends of folders he found the return envelope of an insurance company. A premium due. With relief, escaping, he opened the checkbook and unscrewed the pen and wrote the check neatly and tore it out. It lay in his hand, a yellow slip like thousands he had written, a bond with the order and security of home. A checkbook wasn’t any good here, of course, but in any good international bank on proper identification and after a reasonable delay, it would … they had to know who you were, that was all. Just a little of the machinery of security, a passport, letter of credit, the usual identifications, maybe filling out a form or two …
Robert Chapman, age forty-two; nationality, American; place of birth, Sacramento, California; residence, San Francisco; education, B.A. University of California, 1931. Married? Divorced. Children? One son, Daniel. Member Bohemian Club of San Francisco, Mill Valley Club, Kiwanis. Property: one-twelfth of a co-operative apartment house on Green Street, week-end cottage Carmel, certain bonds, Oldsmobile hard-top convertible. Income around eighteen thousand annually. Contributions: the usual good causes, Community Fund, Red Cross, Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club’s conservation program. Insurance program the usual—forty thousand straight life plus annuity plan.
I believe in insurance, he told the smooth-faced, gray-haired man across the desk. Always have. My parents bought my first policy for me when I was ten, and I’ve added to it according to a careful plan from time to time. I’ve known too many people who were wiped out for lack of it. I carry a hundred thousand—fifty thousand on my car, plus all the rest except the freak stuff. Personal injury, property damage, collision, fire, theft—they all pay, even if you never have to collect on them. Real property too. My place at Carmel has comprehensive coverage, practically every sort of damage or accident—window breakage, hail, wind, fire, earthquake, falling airplanes. I carry a twenty-five-dollar deductible personal-property floater. It’s indispensable, when you’re traveling especially. Protects you wherever you are. Same with my health-plan membership. Anywhere in the world I’m protected on my medical and hospital bills.
For that matter, he said, smiling, my physician gave me some good advice before this last trip. He prescribed me a little kit of pills—penicillin tablets, Empirin, sulfaguanidine, Dramamine against travel sickness, Chloromycetin and Aureomycin in case we got sick anywhere out of reach of medical care and had a real emergency. I can tell you we were glad of that doctor’s advice when we got way up the Nile, in Luxor, and my son, Dan, in spite of inoculations and everything, came down with typhoid. …
Neatly he folded the check and folded a sheet of stationery around it and the premium notice and put them in the return envelope, half irritated that they made it so easy. A man didn’t mind addressing an envelope.
His face was greasy with sweat. Restlessly he rose and washed in cool water, looked at his shadowed eyes in the mirror, turned away, slipped into the bedroom and eased into the chair by the bedside. The breathings and the spasmodic small twitchings made the boy under the net seem utterly vulnerable somehow. In the dark, his eyes tiredly closed, he sat for an indefinite time seeing red shapes flow and change in the pocket of his lids. Among them, abruptly, coned with light like an operating table, appeared his son, dead, openmouthed, horribly wasted, and he awoke with a shudder and found his shirt clammy and his lungs laboring at the close air. His watch read twenty minutes to four.
To wait until four was impossible. He opened the bathroom door wide to let in light, and brought the capsules and a glass of water. The boy awoke at a touch, his dry lips working, his eyelids struggling open, and lifted his head weakly to swallow the medicine.
“How do you feel now? Better?”
“Hot,” the stiff lips said.
“Would you like a damp towel on your eyes?”
“Yes.”
The father slipped the thermometer into the boy’s mouth and went into the bathroom. The disease-and-disinfectant smell was newly obnoxious to him as he wrung out the towel. When he returned, the boy had turned his head and the thermometer had slipped half out of his parted lips. With a swift searching of the emaciated face the father took it and held it to the light. At first the hairline of mercury would not reveal itself, and helpless anger shook him at people who would make an instrument nobody could read. Then he caught the glittering line, twisted carefully. Its end lay at 102°.
Down half a degree? Suspiciously he felt the forehead, but it was wet from the towel. The dry, slippery hands were still hot. But less hot than they had been? Or had the thermometer slipped out long enough to make the reading inaccurate?
Starting to take the temperature again, he stopped, and then he deliberately pulled down and tucked in the net. He did this, he knew, not out of reassured hope but out of cowardice. His heart had leaped so at that half degree of hope that he did not want to find he had been wrong. In a minute or two he was back in the bathroom, sitting at the table before his worthless and undemanding briefcase and the little pile of cards and envelopes. He felt exposed to all the eyes of Luxor; once, after the Long Beach earthquake in 1933, he had seen a man shaving in such a bathroom as this, with the whole outside wall peeled away, and he stood there before the mirror at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, with his suspenders down and the world looking in. It was a ridiculous image. But he did not get up and pull down the shutters and close himself in.
His eyes were full of the pattern of square tile three feet before his eyes. He found that by squinting or widening his eyes he could make the squares begin to dissolve and spin in a vortex of glittering planes and reflections. When he wanted to he took hold again and forced the spinning to stop and the tiles to settle back to order. Then he narrowed his eyes again and watched the spinning recommence.
Some level of mind apart from his intense concentration told him, without heat, that he could hypnotize himself that way, and some other layer still deeper and more cunning smiled at that warning. He held the squares firmly in focus for a minute, stretched them, let them spin, brought them back under the discipline of will and eye, relaxed again and let them spin, enjoying the control he had of them and of himself. It was as if the whole back of his head was a hollow full of bees.
He was facing the blank wall and his neck was stiff. His head ached dully and his eyes were scratchy in the tired light of the bathroom. The muezzin was crying prayer again across the housetops of Thebes, the open shutters gave not on darkness but on gray twilight, and at the end of his reach of vision, against a sky palely lavender, he saw the minaret and the jutting balcony high up, and on the balcony the small black movement. He could distinguish no words in the rise and fall of the muezzin’s cry; it was as empty of meaning as a yodel.
