The Living End (8 page)

“They may be right of course,” Quiz said, though I hate to admit it. Damned vultures. Death with dignity indeed! Folderol. Fiddlededee. The only reason they want to pull the plugs is to get at his fortune and power. All those millions!”

“Don’t let them,” Ladlehaus screamed.

“Don’t let them get at my fortune and power. Oh I know you can’t hear me, but look, look at the machine.

I’ll squeeze out my best brain waves for you. Don’t let them. Those millions are mine. I earned them.”

“It’s a shame,” the nurse said, “after all the good he’s done.”

“All the good, yes,” Ladlehaus said, “all the millions, all the good I’ve done.”

“Look at these, Doctor, would you? They’re slightly different from the others. What do you make of them?”

“Flyspecks, I should think, scratchings of coma dream. But let me have them. Perhaps the judge will grant a stay.”

Ladlehaus hoped.

“Uncle Jay, you high table, five star, Hall of Fame prickl You mashed potato! You spinach leaf! Do you recognize my voice, you bloodless fake? It’s your nephew Jack-Rita’s husband. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, you cabbage! I’m going to tamper your charts and splash in your brain waves. But I’ll give you a fighting chance. If you’re not dead scream ‘no,” or forever hold your peace.”

“No! No!”

“So. Silence. Ashes to ashes, you salad. just a slight adjustment of the tone arm on your electroencephalogram and- Why, Nurse, you startled me. I was just looking at my uncle’s charts here.”

“Sir, no one is permitted in the Intensive Care Unit unless accompanied by the patient’s physician.”

“I’m his nephew. I thought, seeing he’s dying and all, I’d look in on him and say goodbye in private.”

“No one is permitted in the Intensive Care Unit, no one. If you were Mrs. Ladlehaus herself I’d have to tell you the same thing.”

“Mrs. LaThe blonde bombshell? Me? That twat?”

“You’ll have to leave.”

“Just going, just going. So long, Unc, see you around the victory garden.”

“That will be all, sir. Do I have to call an orderly?”

“Call a garbage truck.”

“Orderly!” “I’m going, I’m going.”

“Thank you, Nurse.”

Ladlehaus was hopeful.

“Well?”

“It’s bad. Here.”

“This is a court order.”

“It’s the court order.” I In sorry.

“Step in, please, Deputy. This is Deputy Evers, Nurse.”

“Ma’am.”

“He’s here to see that we comply with the order.”

“Wait!”

“Wait a moment, Doctor.”

“Nurse?”

“It’s just that I know your convictions about such things. Deputy Evers, this man has taken the Hippocratic oath. Pulling the plug on Mr. Ladlehaus’s life support systems would be a violation of everything the doctor believes. It would go against nature and inclination, and do an injustice not only to his conscience but to his training. I can’t let him do that.”

“I’m sorry, ma’ am but the court or-” “I read the court order, Deputy. I know what it says. What I say is that I can’t let him do it.”

“Look, lady-‘ “I’ll do it myself.”

“Nurse!”

“Please, Doctor. I’m only grateful it was me on duty when the order came down. Deputy, you won’t say a word about this. Not if you’re a Christian.”

“I don’t know. The order says- Sure. Go ahead.”

“Do it now, Nurse. Pull them. The man’s all but dead anyway. He has only his coma dream. You pull that, too, the moment you remove those plugs.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s why I fought so hard to keep him on the L.S.S. But go ahead. The law’s the law.”

“Someone better do it,” the deputy said.

“I’ll do it now, said the goodhearted nurse.

“When I’m geting better?” Ladlehaus cried.

“When I can hear everything you say? When I can practically taste the iodoform in here? When I no longer dream I was ever in Hell? When I have my millions and my power? When I have my blonde bombshell?”

“Pop,” the nurse said.

And poor, dead, puzzled, grounded LadIehaus heard their mean duet laughter and died again, and once again, and kept on dying, in their presence dying, dying beneath them, with each spike and trough of their laughter.

0 * 0 “His name is Quiz.”

They were near him again, not all but some, and this time the man Quiz did not bother to shoo them off.

Ladlehaus sensed arrangement, order. Not the wide barracks of death now-he knew where he was, the child had told him-but rows of folding chairs. He sensed they were chairs, had sensed it that afternoon when a disgruntled Quiz had snapped them into place in the grass, aligned them, something martial in their positioning, discrete as reviewing stand.

Behind him he heard the gruff shuffle of men’s good shoes as they sidestepped along the cement ledges of the grandstand. (He couldn’t know this, couldn’t smell the lightly perfumed faces of the women or the crisp aftershaves and colognes of the men. For him the soft rustle of the women’s dresses might have been the languid swish of flags in a low wind, the brusque adjustments of the men’s trousers like in-gulps of hushed breath.) He listened carefully, but could not make out the words of the adults.

“After the recital my daddy is taking us to Howard Johnson’s. I’m going to have a coffee ice cream soda.”

“Coffee ice cream keeps me up.”

They’re some more of his accomplices, Ladlehaus thought. They’re going to take me for another ride.

Then a woman made an announcement. He listened for some quaver of theatricality in the voice that would give her away, reveal her as the 11 nurse” in a different role. Talk always sounded like talk, never like a speech. Something read aloud or memorized or even willfully extemporaneous could never pass for the flat, halting, intimate flow of unmanaged monologue or conversation. Even a man on the radio, scriptless and talking apparently as he might talk among his friends in a lunchroom, sounded compromised by the weight of his thousand listeners. Even a child at prayer did. But the woman was marvelous. Ladlehaus had to admire the cast Quiz had assembled. She wanted to thank Miss Martin and Miss Boal for their generous and untiring assistance in putting together tonight’s program, extending right down to helping the students tune their instruments. She mustn’t forget to thank the principal, Dr.

Mazlish, for opening up the facilities of the high school to the Community Association of Schools of Arts, or CASA, as it had come to be known. She particularly wanted to thank the parents for encouraging and, she supposed, at times insisting that the children practice their instruments. And, as coordinator for the program, now in its third year, she particularly wanted to thank the children themselves for the devotion they showed to their music and for their willingness to share their accomplishments with the good audience of parents, relatives, and friends who had come out to hear them tonight. Tonight’s recital was only the first. There would be three others with different young performers during the course of the summer. She regretted that the dates for these had not yet been settled or they would have been printed on the back of the program. Speaking of the program, she said, Angela Kinds and Mark Koehler, though listed, would be unable to perform this evening. They would be rescheduled for one of the recitals later in the summer. In the event of inclement weather, she added, arrangements would be made to hold those indoors.

She was magnificent. It was perfectly obvious to Ladlehaus that she had done the whole thing working from small white note cards held discreetly in her right hand.

He had forgotten about music, forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence-all the snug coups of correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped his mind and he’d forgotten that here was where the world dovetailed with self, where self tallied with sympathy and distraction alike. He had forgotten dirge and dead- march, scherzo, rondo, jig and reel. He had forgotten the civilized sound of a cello, or that violins indeed sounded like the woe of gypsies. He had not remembered the guitar, lost the sound of flutes, had no recall for the stirring, percussive thump in melody-all the gay kindling points of blood, the incredible flexibility of a piano.

What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.

A child played “Lightly Row.” He wept. They had Waxman’s “The Puzzle,” Gesanbuch’s “Sun of My Soul.” He wept. Bartok’s “Maypole Dance” was played, Lully’s Gavotte. There was Bach’s Prelude in F, Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat Major, Bohm’s “Gypsy” and Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” He wept for all of them. One of the advanced students-he knew they were students now; professionals would have played better, actors not as well-gave them-for it was “them” now too, the dead man subsumed with the living -Brower Is Three Etudes, and Ladlehaus: sighed, his moods flagrant, ventriloquized by the homeopathic instance of the music, the dead man made generous, tolerant, supportive of all life’s magnificent displacements. Why, I myself am a musician, he thought, my sighs music, my small luxurious whimpers, my soul’s high tempo, its brisk tattoo and call to colors. There is a God, the man who had spoken to Him thought, and murmured, “It’s beautiful. The Lord is with me.”

And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.

“I was drawn by the music,” God said.

“I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”

“Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.

“That one too,” God said more softly.

“His “Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”

“No,” Ladlehaus said.

“I give him six months,” He said confidently.

“No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”

“Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”

Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.

“Hold it down, hold it down, you!”

“Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.

The caretaker blenebed. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal.

“He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlebaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker.

“What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free.

I eat corrective lunch!” “Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed.

“Get him. He’s a composer!”

And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlebaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.

It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion.

It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.

A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlebaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.

But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.

PART III The State of the Art

Quiz, in Hell, was making the point that he had been slain.

“You’re dead, you’re a dead man, just one more goner,” Lesefario said.

“No, no. My pop’s a dead man, all the folks on the old man’s side with their bad histories and amok blood counts-they’re dead men. I was definitely slain. Smited. Blasted. Here today gone today. Slain absolutely. And none of the amenities, let me tell you, no last words or final cigarette, the blindfold unoffered. It was as if I’d gotten in to start my car and-boom! Like someone ambushed, snuffed by unions, eating in restaurants and rushed by hit men.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“I’ve got my suspicions, I’m working on it, I have some leads. I’ve-Hey- Where are you going? Hey.”

But Lesefario was gone, vanished in Hell’s vast smoke screen, the fiery fog that was its climate.

Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat-fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates,” the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence. Damnation strictly physical, nothing personal, Hell’s lawless marathon removed from character.

“Sure,” someone had said, “we hit the Wall with every step. It’s all Wall down here. It’s wall-to-wall Wall. What, did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker’s oven? That all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough, the insignificant heat bringing you out, fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies? You think we’re birthday cake? We’re fucking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.”

So if Lesefario ran it was his fate to do so, only his body’s kindled imperatives. But he might have run anyway, getting as far as he could from Quiz and his crazy talk about suspicions and leads, angrier at who’d put him there than at his oiled rag presence itself, holding a grudge which in others went up faster than fat, resentment as useless in these primed, mideast circumstances as hope or apology. Also, it made Lesefario wistful, nostalgic, all that talk of slaying and snuffing. It was George’s own last memory. He’d been a clerk in Ellerbee’s liquor store in Minneapolis, an employee who’d worked for the younger man fifteen years, whose crimes were almost victimless, a little harmless chiseling making change and, once, the purchase of some hijacked wine at discount. Certainly nothing that would warrant the final confrontation with the stickup men who’d taken first Ellerbee’s money, then his clerk’s life, shooting him down for no reason, for target practice.