Chapter 28. After Hopiland
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover
The next morning Arthur was waiting for Lucia to come start chores when there was a knock on the kitchen door and Jackie and her 2-year-old son Nathan entered. By the time Lucia breezed in, her face covered with dry cracked green clay she had put on wet the night before (Nathan whimpered, frightened of the green-faced lady), Jackie had already bagged the first wave. Arthur pressed on his transverse and descending colon to help move the faeces; the pressure also caused his bladder to spasm and he voided around the catheter.
“Looks like the catheter should be changed when we’re done,” he said.
“How long’s it been since the last change?” Jackie said.
“Only a week, but it’s already blocked and I’m spasming around it. See?" He pointed at the wet spot. "We were lucky this didn't happen on the road!"
Chores done, Jackie and Lucia set up the equipment they would use changing the catheter. Jackie used a syringe to deflate the balloon that held the old catheter in place, slid the old tube out and, after donning sterile gloves, slid the new tube into Arthur’s penis past his prostate, where it would sometimes catch momentarily, and into his bladder. Then, using a preloaded 10-cc syringe without a needle, she put eight ccs of sterile water into the channel that led to the balloon, inflating it, and drew the tube back out of his penis a few inches until she felt the balloon lodge at the neck of his bladder.
By the time she was done Arthur was sweat-soaked. The pupil of his right eye was normal but his left pupil was dilated to almost twice its normal size. He felt a numbed searing through his abdomen, a heatless burning spreading through his groin, and pressure that soon became a flutter of pain in his left temple. Though he didn't yet know the word, he was dysreflexic. Occasionally there was a symptomless change, even series of changes, but symptoms like those he was having were of late the norm and, if they resolved in the next half hour or so and didn’t recur later in the day, the change would not have been a hard one.
Jackie looked at him with concern.
"You okay?" she asked.
He nodded, too delicate to speak. He reached to feel if the dry pad that had been placed under him was still dry and learned it wasn’t. He felt for his penis, found it, and discovered to his surprise that the catheter wasn't in it. The bulb had deflated, who knew how or why, and the tube slipped out.
"Better," said Arthur.
"Is the catheter okay?" said Jackie.
"No. Look," he said. He held it up where she could see it. "I couldn't have asked for better timing, though, having you here," he said. "This would've really sucked on the road."
He spoke softly, moving his lips as little as he could; speaking at all caused his symptoms to intensify.
Jackie put in another catheter. Arthur's penis disappeared inside him and sweat rolled in great beads off his face. It was one of those days. He had Jackie inject him with Demerol and his sweating soon slowed and stopped. The new catheter had settled into place, and the drug allowed his body to relax and his blood pressure drop to normal. His penis' circumcised head, an unhealthy blue-tinted white, had reemerged. Jackie put aloe on his toe, which was oozing clear liquid, and helped him out of bed into his chair; she left him sitting in the kitchen doorway facing south, in the sun at the top of the ramp. He had survived the trip with only minor injuries and was feeling the Demerol, which he liked.
Outside, he and Lucia talked in the sun. Daniel had a circle scheduled in Tucson five days hence, March second.
“Do you want to see him?” she said.
"March 2? Sure," said Arthur, "Sign me up." He couldn't believe Daniel would let him at him March 2. What would Dr. Lang have to say? He doubted it would be, "I told you so."
In the afternoon Arthur, naked, was lying between Alice's house and the third house in the row. The back of his chair was down, a chaise longue on wheels. Alice lay on the ground next to him on an oversized towel, also naked, their first time together nude.
"Well," said Lucia, standing over Arthur's chair, "what is this, the fucking Riviera or something?"
"Get 'em off, white bitch," said Arthur, opening one eye and squinting up at her. He opened his other eye, spread his arms, and shouted, "Strip, strip, strip!"
"Has he been drinking coffee again?" Lucia asked Alice.
"Beats me," said Alice.
"You should be so lucky," said Arthur. Lucia hesitated. "News?" said Arthur.
"I don't think Daniel's coming," said Lucia.
"Why not?"
"Well," she said, "when I got to the office I found a message to call the Rev. Sperry, so I did, and her husband is in the hospital. He had a heart attack. Then just a few hours ago I got a call from Washington State from a friend of Daniel's."
"Dead or alive?"
"I didn't ask," Lucia said. "But Daniel lives at his Center, you know, and he came home last night from a day away and went inside and the furniture was all gone--all of it and all the clothes from the closets and pictures from the walls and even the telephone wires were cut at the wall and taken away."
"A radical dematerialization,” Arthur said. "Has he looked for the stuff on the astral?"
_____
Two days later nothing of Daniel's had been found. Arthur was up and out at ten. He crept the three blocks from his house to Stephen and Carol's for coffee as, except on the three days of the trip to Second Mesa, he’d done daily since mid-February. He wondered if there were better electric wheelchairs available; he’d gotten this one years ago. Stephen and Carol were home and Arthur joined them on their back porch by their garden; just before leaving he had two hits of pot.
As soon as he got home he began to write about the trip to Hopiland; he was glad to be writing again after four weeks away from the typewriter. He slammed away for hours, this chapter the longest yet. Perhaps he could hit his stride again, keep the words coming, go back and pick up the weddings, write about Nadine and Tara.
Nadine had been a year behind Lee at Godwin High. Arthur had been the first man she had ever seen naked, when she was thirteen. They had never made love. Nadine had moved from Godwin to Tucson in December and soon rented a house with Tara, who was studying hydrology at the university and had posted a note looking for a housemate on the Food Conspiracy bulletin board. Tara was 23 and from Boston.
Nadine had introduced Arthur and Tara at The Shanty three days after Rusty's Valentines-Day return; each of them had drunk enough to have a loose tongue and relaxed inhibitions. Tara's initial instinct had been to pity him and she had cried, but that had soon mostly passed; she was interested and curious; still, pity now and then resurfaced.
"You're a man," she said. "It must be terrible."
He laughed. "It's worse for a man to be like this than a woman?"
"Yes," she said.
"No," said Arthur.
"Yes," she said. "A man has to lead. A woman has to be led."
"No," said Arthur, the feminist of the two.
"You can't feel?" she said. "But what about sex?"
"Sex is different now," said Arthur, "and I would have it different than it is, but even as it is I like it—and more than like it!"
"But what does it feel like?"
"It feels like I'm being touched; it feels that way even when I can't feel how I'm being touched. I wasn't for a long time. My brother-in-law Jake was recently talking to a friend of his who said to him that because I felt things on so little of my body, imagine how heightened my sensitivity must be where I do feel. I thought then it was a romantic idea. It doesn't work that way for me. I don't feel more where I can, but I well may appreciate any sexual feeling at all more. A friend of mine recently told me after he'd slept with a woman that it had been 'nothing special.' For me it's always special, and I hope it stays that way."
“Do you have erections?”
“Yes, but I don’t think they’re psychogenic—aren’t because I’m excited, are because I’m being directly physically stimulated.”
"But do you come?"
She had dark eyelashes, deep brown eyes, was aglow and beautiful. He was surprised and glad that she was asking explicitly sexual questions.
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't know. The orgasm center is separate from the erection center and the ejaculation center, I think; I don't have orgasms and don't ejaculate. Maybe I even do and don't know it; and maybe I will. I don’t really know if orgasm is a function of the autonomic or the central nervous system--I think it must be autonomic. But whatever doesn't happen something does happen, even if it's spermless, partly unbelievable, and incomplete. Life's like that."
"It isn't fair," she said.
She was crying again.
"Fairshmare," said Arthur.
It didn't seem unfair to him, just random. Why should--by what mechanism, other than chance, could--a given person be spared a given unlikelihood?
"I'd kill myself," said Tara.
"It's an option," he said. "I felt more suicidal before I was hurt than after."
"I would kill myself," she repeated.
"Hard to know," Arthur said. "People surprise themselves often as not."
"Your eyes are so blue," she said.
"That's more like it," he said.
"I wish I were a man," she said.
"You don't know what you wish for," Arthur said.
"Men can do anything," she said.
"Hardly," said Arthur. "I was reading Anne Frank last month and she begins to bleed and all of sudden she has this magical secret with herself that she's fertile and life can grow inside her. The result of our sex, male sex, is completely exterior to us. We're supposed to make sense of it or something. I would think life would make more sense to you women because you know you can be more than just you. Life's real when you're pregnant, even when like Anne Frank you just know you can get pregnant, in a way men never feel; though certainly some of us do get it, especially with fatherhood. It's like men have to imagine life, an other’s life. When you wish to be a man you don't know what you're wishing for. It's only the man in you trying to be your spokesman but not paying any attention to the woman you are who was just crying because I'm paralyzed."
"You're so strong," she said, smiling.
"Tequila," he said. "Men and women, masculine-feminine, I'm not clear on how to tell them apart. Except I want the women; they interest me every way men do and sexually in a way men don't. I don't know why."
"A woman and man complete each other."
"Love completes us."
After closing-time Tara and Arthur had gone to Stephen and Carol's with a few friends, including Nadine. At 3 A.M. he had asked if she would walk him home. He could not remember, immediately afterward or ever, how he had phrased his question. Had he explicitly asked her to sleep with him? Implied he wanted her to, as he certainly did? Whatever he had said, she had stood, looked confused, said something to Arthur he didn't quite hear, and abruptly left not just the room but the house.
"What did I say?" he said a minute later, arms spread.
"Did she leave?" said Carol, surprised.
"I think so," said Arthur.
She had indeed, and he never again spoke to her intimately; he didn't see her at all in the next two weeks, though he went by her house on Third Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues a half a dozen times and thought about her every day.
He liked women, liked to listen to them and talk to them, touch them and be touched by them. He and Nadine drew closer. The world of wearing nylons and working as a paralegal was a few months in her past; black hair was already curling on her strong calves. She was full of anger and hope and excitement. She planned to pick fruit this summer and was about to meet the father of her first child. The senselessness of bopping about the streets thinking of Tara pleased Arthur; Nadine talked of her to him every day.
"I hate men," Tara said to Nadine.
"It must be terrible for you to be like that," said Nadine, who liked men.
"Do you think she meant she liked women, liked you?" Arthur said. Nadine didn't think so.
He had called Tara three times after that first night. Once Nadine had told him that she wasn't home and twice no one had answered.
_____
March 2 Lee came in from Rusty's truck. She threw the covers off Arthur, cocked her head as though she were sizing up an item of merchandise, and announced with mock perplexity that he still looked paralyzed. It wasn't that he was still paralyzed, though, that hurt; anything else would have been an emotional boost, no doubt, but what hurt were the lingering effects of his journey to Charles' door, pain all up and down his spinal column and sore muscles, and the ongoing succession of mostly cloudy days since his return. He was smoking pot compulsively again, exhausting himself with it as he studied chess with a book and a board at his desk. He had written on only one day since Hopiland, though today he would force himself to write a page entitled March two. He had finished Gravity's Rainbow the day before leaving for Second Mesa and since started nothing new. He just wanted to stretch and get out in the sun, trip around town a little, breathe the outside air, maybe drop by Tara's. If she wasn't there maybe Nadine would be.
Mona, who would soon be in Tucson, passed the lock of Arthur's hair to the spiritualist Kenneth, who held it in his hand with no doubt in his mind, light-headed from the healing surge passing through him, the love.
THE END
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover