The Two Kinds of Decay

Attention

My three temporary central lines had been precarious and depended on my staying in bed, supine, because if I moved too much, they would fall out and I would bleed. They went in pretty close to my heart, so I wouldn’t bleed long.

After my permanent line was implanted, I could go to the hospital for treatments without having to stay the night.

Along with plasma replacement, I was now trying a treatment that a new study had shown to be more effective: a massive infusion of gamma globulin, a molecular component of the immune system.

The study showed that gamma globulin seemed to make the immune system stop forming rogue antibodies.

Each of my gamma infusions was less than a quart of liquid, but the infusion of that quart lasted from eight to twelve hours because the human body cannot take concentrated infusions of that particular protein any faster.

A liquid flowed from a machine into my heart. The mechanism was very simple.

After the first infusion, the insurance company sent the bill to my father by mistake. The infusion cost the insurance company thirty-five thousand dollars.

Eight or ten times during the infusion I walked myself carefully to the bathroom, dragging the machine and the bag and the tubing, the end of which was sewn to the outside of my body.

And I walked back again, to the blue reclining lounge chair in the small room.

Sometimes another person was there. We all wore appliances in our chests. The tubes were sewn to us and connected to the tubes of the machines that moved the liquids into us.

Before then, if I had to ride a train for half an hour or stand in a line at a shop for five minutes, I picked something up, or turned to someone, or ingested something, so the time would be filled with what I picked up or took in.

And also since then — but maybe not quite so much.

I say “the time would be filled,” but the time was not so much filled as overfilled.

The time was already full before I put the new thing in. I overfilled my time, I think, to hide what was already there.

Some things are so horrible they need to be hidden right after they become visible. They are too horrible to be seen except very slowly, or in very small amounts. Or they are too beautiful.

There was a television set above my chair that received fifteen or twenty channels.

Here is a logical sequence of things to do in that small room. You arrive. You sit in the chair. You unbutton your shirt or take it off and put on a hospital gown that opens near your heart. You take the tubes in your hand and give them to the nurse. The nurse connects your tubes to the tubes of a machine that some fluid has been put into. The pump is turned on. You button your shirt around the tubes as best you can. You arrange yourself in a blue reclining chair. You press the button on the control that lights the television screen. You press it again until the screen changes to an agreeable picture. And you watch it. You get up and go to the toilet once every hour or two, pushing the pump on its casters. Once or twice, food arrives, and you eat. But mostly you read a book you have brought, or if you have not brought one, you watch the television, or you sleep.

After the first long infusion I felt different. Of course. The medicine was new. The experience was new. I was still in my first year of Latin, used to thinking hard before the meaning came. My parents came into the room to wheel me outside to their car and take me home. And they asked me what I had read and what I had watched on the television.

I had lain there in the reclining chair for ten hours, but I hadn’t read anything or watched the television.

I was going to say I had lain there for ten hours, waiting. But I hadn’t been waiting. I hadn’t been anticipating the next moment. I think it was the first time in my life, which had lasted twenty-one years so far, that I hadn’t done that.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything.

I was unaware I was doing anything except nothing.