Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

lay in the pleasant, sunny corner room of a New York hospital, I had plenty of time to wonder what my life would be like without him. After that first vascular operation, when the young surgeon who had performed it a hundred times before without mishap sliced neatly into Father’s neck, replacing an inch or so of blocked artery—right carotid, to use the correct terminology—with a more efficient (impervious to shrinkage and hardening, unlike the real flesh and blood which constituted the rest of his body) segment of plastic—after that, there was the strain of the repeat operation, six days later, to remove the clot that had developed in his contralateral left artery. For a more sweeping diagnosis: what we had here was occlusion of the carotid vessels—two great arteries, I remembered from biology, one on either side of the neck, which carry blood to the brain. Or, in a grandiloquent summation: “Extensive arteriosclerosis”—i.e., thickening of the blood vessels—“of the entire vascular system, most marked in the region of the brain and the blood supply to the heart and aorta”—that last being another of the big guys, the main trunk of the arterial system. And certainly after that, it didn’t look as if this particular time this particular surgical intervention was going to be an unqualified success. It didn’t look that way to us, although the surgeon was insuperably cheerful every morning as he made his rounds.

“Seems to be a slight improvement since yesterday.”

And, “We simply don’t know enough about the brain’s ability to regenerate itself. Remarkable organ, the brain.”

We—Pamela, Bill, and I, and, later, Pamela’s son, Winston—would stand, arms crossed, unified for the first and last time behind the impenetrable revetments of family crisis.

Yes, our eyes would answer the brilliant young surgeon, do go on. Tell us more. Tell us why, if he’s better this morning, there are two new catheters running out of his nose and mouth or arms and legs or urethra and colon that simply weren’t there last night; seemingly more yards of flexible plastic tubes flowing out of him than of arteries circulating within him. And to think it was all because of that one little inch of plastic tubing we allowed to be implanted in his neck and grafted to his right carotid—a miracle inch, we were advised, that would save his life.

Daily we waited for the doctor to wind up his cheery forecast. Then—politely—it would be our turn. Father, we pointed out with all due respect for the doctor’s chipper medical prognosis, was getting worse instead of better.

One morning, Bill, Winston, and I were gathered in the hall by the elevators when the doctor breezed out looking as if he’d come from a bracing game of tennis. He was a good-looking man in an Ivy League way; he always looked appropriately scrubbed down and disinfected. His eyes looked directly at us without wavering or blinking, an attitude that may have reassured some of his other patients’ kin but had the reverse effect on our group. “I don’t trust folks who don’t blink,” remarked Bill. To which I’d said, “Well, he’s wearing blinders; how else can he wade through the drek he has to face every day?”

“Good morning, Haywards. And Mr. Churchill. How is our patient this morning?”

“Worse,” I said.

“Well, now—”

“Now, look, Doctor,” interjected Winston, whose sober pinstriped suit and Turnbull & Asser shirt lent Bill’s and my appearance a measure of respectability, “I haven’t been here all along, I admit, but it is evident to me that Leland doesn’t seem to be making any sense. It’s not that he’s delirious and he’s not potty or senile. It’s something else. And he’s not improving.”

The doctor looked serene. “We can’t tell at this point whether or not—”

“Oh, yes, we can,” I interrupted. “That is to say, we can. We ought to be able to, we’ve known him for thirty-odd years. And since one or another of us is in the room with him all day every day—”

“Our empirical observations should have some value,” drawled Bill.

“He was definitely improved last night,” said the doctor imperturbably. “We talked at length about photography.”

The vein in Bill’s temple began to pulsate. “Look, Doc, you’re not in there all day. Stick around. You’ll see what we’re talking about.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are moments—”

“Moments, hell,” said Bill. The passion in him that I sometimes thought had solidified into ice was flowing. “Look, we know all about the trauma to his brain. It’s a wrap on that dialogue. We also know that the consensus is we should cool it because there is this possibility he may regain some of his faculties. But let me tell you that the gray matter in the middle is dead—and there ain’t no way—”

“D-Doctor.” Winston was stuttering slightly. His face was flushing as red as Bill’s was getting white. “Every day the family comes here and looks to see—it’s been weeks now—if there’s any improvement—”

“To his head, Doctor.” I re-entered the fray. “To his head. You can understand that’s what really scares us. It’s bad enough dealing with the physical stuff, the surgery and bandages and so on, the by-products, but that’s secondary when we’re faced now with something that’s happened to his mind. As a result of all this.”

The doctor shook his head and a bemused smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. He looked like a beleaguered math teacher.

“You know, I don’t understand your family at all,” he said. “I’ve never encountered anything like it. Most people would be grateful to have him alive.”

“But, Doctor,” I said, feeling my intestines tighten, “what possible good is it for him to be alive if he can’t use his mind? How do you think—if he were given a choice—he would feel about living like that? This is no dimwit, this is a very intelligent, active man.”

“Certainly he’s still aware enough to know what’s going on,” said Bill, “and to hate it. Poor son of a bitch just doesn’t happen to have a gun lying under his saddlebag