Piecework

These are personal pieces, about living and about not dying. With any luck, they won’t be the last about either subject.

52

I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone where I am no longer young and not yet old. This stage of a human life is called, of course, middle age. Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, I am not in the middle of my life, for there is little chance that I will live to 104. But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, and this sometimes causes personal astonishment. In the course of my time here, I have seen much of the world, loved women, fathered children, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons and heard the chimes at midnight. That is to say, I have lived a life. I am far from finished with that splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition called middle age: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death.

Above all, the acceptance of certain death is what distinguishes this age of man. For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about the waste of time and opportunities; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency. This is the time of life when men throw over careers to try painting in the South of France; they leave wives for ballerinas; they hole up in mountain cabins to read Proust; they gaze at the shotgun on the wall of the den and see only the quarry of the self. / am going to die, the man whispers to himself. Sooner than later. This dramatic sense of the inevitable doesn’t resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in command of his youth. Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it has when you are young. If you have reached middle age, you have already chosen to live. But the warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as sunset. The most obvious are physical.

One summer, after a grueling winter of work, I discovered I had grown a paunch. A bathroom scale told me that I had gained only ten pounds, but the suety paunch, noticed suddenly in the window of a store, made me look like another person, some chunky middle-aged stranger going about his mundane business. The paunch would not go away, and I have been unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescent vanity to work it off. At the same time, white patches appeared in my beard and a few white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp. Because I do not shave, and thus don’t engage in morning ablutions, I see my face less frequently than I did when young; these changes were sudden reminders of the inevitable.

Three years ago, I awoke with a terrible pain in my left shoulder; the day before, I had been lifting free weights just to see what I could do; I was sure I had merely pulled a muscle. But the pain went on for months, ruining sleep, aching at all hours. I assumed comical positions in bed, searching for stillness. I found myself unable to pitch quarters into the receptacles at toll booths. I thought: I might live the rest of my life with this pain. I was wrong, of course; the pain was cured with a few shots of cortisone. But the hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when young is gone.

Sometimes I hear my own labored breathing and instantly remember the emphysemic sounds of my father’s final years. Fifteen years ago I discovered with alarm that I could not read a Scoreboard without glasses; now I don spectacles to watch the evening news. In my twenties, I once worked seventy-three hours straight without sleep, belting down waterfalls of coffee, smoking too many cigarettes, listening through the nighttime hours to Symphony Sid. What I then lacked in craft I made up for with energy. Now I take naps in the afternoon. I have been a fortunate man, free of diseases, with few physical injuries. But now I go each year for the physical examination by the doctor and dread the first appearance of blood in the stool or the spot on the X ray.

Some of the minor warning signs are mental. I cannot, for example, remember any additional names or numbers. I am introduced to a stranger at a dinner party and the new name breaks into letters and flies around the room like dead leaves in an autumn wind. In the past year, I have moved with my wife into a small city apartment and a house in the country; I must carry the telephone numbers and the zip codes in my wallet. Once I hauled around in my head the batting averages of entire baseball teams; now I must search them out each day in the newspaper. My memory of the days and nights of my youth remains fine; it is last year that is a blur. It’s as if one of the directories in my brain has reached its full capacity and will accept no more bytes.

None of these small events is original to me, of course. I’m aware that some variation of them has happened to all aging human beings from the beginning of time. As a reporter I’ve witnessed much of the grief of other human beings, the astonishing variety of their final days. And I knew, watching my father get old and then die, that aging was inevitable; it had happened to him, and I’d seen it happen to my friends. Still, it was a cause of some wonder to undergo changes that had not been willed, that hadn’t enlisted my personal collaboration.

To acknowledge the inevitability of death, however, is not to fear it. I was more afraid of death at thirty-five than I am now. My night thoughts that year were haunted by visions of the sudden end of my life. Images of violence, carried over from my work as a reporter, roamed freely through my dreams. Before sleep, I would act out imaginary struggles with the knife-wielding intruder who was somewhere out in those shadowed streets. I did a lot of drinking that year. I slept too often with the light on.

In middle age, I recognize that most of my fear at thirty-five came from a sense of incompletion. That age is a more critical one for American men than is fifty, because the majority of us have grown up obsessed with sports. At thirty-five, a third baseman is an aged veteran, a football player has been trampled into retirement, a prizefighter is tending bar somewhere, wearing ridges of old scar tissue as the sad ornaments of his trade.

But at thirty-five, I often felt as if I was only beginning to live (and of course I was right). I wanted more time, and the prospect of death filled me with panic. There were still too many books that I wanted to write and countries to see and women to love. I hadn’t read Balzac or Henry James. I had never been to the Pitti Palace. I wanted to see my daughters walk autonomously in the world. This is the only life I will ever lead (I murmured on morose midnights at the bar of the Lion’s Head), and to end it in my thirties would be unfair.

Today, I accept the inevitable more serenely. I know that I will never write as many books as Georges Simenon or read as many as Edmund Wilson. Nor will I enter a game in late September to triple up the alley in center field and win a pennant for the Mets. But my daughters live on their own in the world. I have read much of Henry James and the best of Balzac and have walked the marbled acres of the Pitti Palace. Middle age is part of the process of completion of a life, and that is why I’ve come to lose the fear of death. I’ve now lived long enough to understand that dying is as natural a part of living as the falling of a leaf.

And yet, sometimes I wake up in the mornings (usually in an unfamiliar room in a strange city) and in the moments between sleep and true consciousness, I am once again in the apartment on Calle Bahia de Morlaco in Mexico City when I was twenty-one, full of possibilities, with my whole life spread out before me. When I realize where I truly am, and that I am fifty-two and no longer that confused and romantic boy, I am filled with an anguished sadness.

In the three decades since I left Mexico (I was a student of painting there on the GI Bill), I have committed my share of stupidities. The first time around, I was a dreadful husband. I tried to be a good father but made many mistakes. As a young newspaper columnist, drunk with language, I occasionally succumbed to mindless self-righteousness, coming down viciously on public men when I could not bear such an assault myself. I treated some women badly and failed others. There were other sins, mortal and venial.

But in middle age, you learn to forgive yourself. Faced with the enormous crimes of the world (and particularly the horrors of this appalling century), you acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misdemeanors. You have slowly recognized the cyclical nature of society’s enthusiasms, from compassion to indifference, from generosity to meanness, liberalism to conservatism and back, as the pendulum cuts its inexorable arc in the air. And you know that such cycles are true of individuals too. Each of us goes from the problems of others to the problems of the self and back again, over and over, for the duration of our lives. And most often, we measure our own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, against the experiences of others. In middle age, I know that it is already too late to agonize over my personal failings. As Popeye once said, “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all I yam.” The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I’m sometimes comforted by remembering that to many people I was also kind. For good or ill, I remain human. That is to say, imperfect.

And yet I would be a liar if I suggested that I have no regrets. It is that emotion (not guilt or remorse) that comes to me in half-sleep. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my young manhood drinking; I had some great good times, but I passed too much time impaired. A few of those years are completely lost from memory, and memory is a man’s only durable inheritance (I retired from drinking in 1972, with the title). I’ve employed too much of my talent at potboiling, executing other men’s visions for the movies or television, in order to feed and clothe and house my children and to ward off a slum kid’s fear of poverty; at twenty-one, growing up in the ’50s when the worst of all sins was “selling out,” I could not foresee any of that. Through sloth or absorption in work, I allowed some good friendships to wither. I too rashly sold a house I loved and years later still walk its halls and open all of its closets.

I also regret the loss of the illusions of my youth. This is so familiar a process, of course, that it is a cliché. Better men than I, from the anonymous author of the Book of Ecclesiastes to André Malraux, have acquired the same sorrowful knowledge. It’s difficult to explain to the young the heady excitement that attended the election of John F. Kennedy or the aching hole his death blew through this country. More impossible still to tell them that there actually was a time, when I was young, when Americans thought that change could be effected through politics. When Fidel Castro triumphed over Fulgencio Batista on New Year’s Day in 1959,1 cheered with all my friends; now poor Fidel is just another aging Stalinist. Once I embraced the hope for a democratic socialism. There was so much injustice in the world, from Harlem to Southeast Asia, that I wanted to believe in the generous theory of the creed. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in one of his essays, “When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.”

But soon that theory shriveled away, as I read both Marx and history and witnessed the spectacle of “socialist” tanks in Czechoslovakia, the atrocities of Pol Pot, the crushing of Solidarity in Poland. There might again be a time when young Americans will be moved by political idealism or faith in a theory; alas, I won’t be able to join them.

For any truly conscious middle-aged American must recognize that belief is the great killer of the century. Political belief has slaughtered millions. Religious belief has slaughtered the rest. Agree with me or die has been the essential slogan of the believers, at home and abroad, and you could fill every line of every page of every newspaper in the world with the names of their victims and still not have sufficient room. And yet we cannot seem to ever get free of them; charlatans pose as wise men; hustlers offer themselves as redeemers. And in come the brawny young men with the shovels, to turn the earth and bury the dead.

So in middle age, I am permanently secular. Television preachers provide inexhaustible entertainment, on screen and in motel rooms. And I am moved to outbursts of crazy laughter at the irrational gibberish of the New Age pitchmen, whose public appeal so perfectly mirrors that of the Swaggarts and Bakkers. Both represent some peculiarly American mixture of political exhaustion and the fear of death. Here (they say): grip this crucifix or this crystal and place your faith in the unseeable. Don’t worry about the homeless, the starving, the injured, the humiliated; this life is a mere vestibule through which you must pass to greater happiness on the other side of death. Great stuff. But when they start running for the presidency or proclaiming on The Oprah Winfrey Show that they are God, I begin to check the locks on my door.

The basic question in middle age might be this: How can I live the rest of my life with a modicum of grace?

For many men, the heart of the matter sometimes becomes sexual desire. In spite of the Leather Elbow School of American Literature (aging professor with leather elbows sewn on his corduroy jacket falls in love with hot sophomore), I’m convinced that most middle-aged men aren’t interested in involvements with very young women. It is not that sex has lost its power; if anything, the drive is stronger, because you know what you are doing at last, you have the accumulated sensations of a lifetime packed within you.

But very few young women can join middle-aged men in the exacting voyage of a love affair, never mind embark on the ardent passage of a marriage. Sensible men know this. Unless they have recently emerged from monasteries, middle-aged men simply know too much for young women — about sex, about themselves, and about the world. And most such men are not yet old enough to be cast in the role of sage. In the last years before I married again (fifteen years after my first marriage ended), I met some enchanting young women. They possessed a fresh beauty. They were intelligent. They had common sense. But I couldn’t bring myself to explain again who Sandy Koufax was, or Flattop, or to recite the lyrics of “Teach Me Tonight.” I couldn’t describe the rules of stickball or nights at Birdland. None could believe that there was once a world without television and that I had lived in it. Their myths were not mine.

So, like most sensible middle-aged men, those who have learned to adjust their emotional thermostats, I let them pass by. Their young, taut bodies were delightful to gaze upon, but they only reminded me of the serrated flesh of my own aging carcass. They were of an age when they could still expect ecstasy, some gigantic removal from the planet in the union of love and sex; I envied this blind romantic faith but I also knew better. I also did not want to become a comic figure, the dirty old man of song and story, who gets older and older while the women remain the same age. And I suppose, too, that I feared an inability to perform; all aging men do. Was it possible (I asked myself at the midnight hour) that I once made love eight times in a single day, to two different women? And answered: yes, but no more.

But if my own experience can stand for that of others, then sexual desire certainly does not wane as you move into middle age. It does assume its proper part in the larger drama of the completion of a life. And any life is obviously more than sexual bliss or its denial. I have friends who have been searching in vain for two decades for some simple explanation of the meaning of life. I’m convinced that there is no such meaning. I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful, and I embrace them when I can. They are part of living, and living does have a value. When we’re gone, the world vanishes forever. We lose baseball and Vermeer, the poetry of Yeats and the moves of Fred Astaire, wives and children, brothers and sisters, the smell of dogs in winter and the sound of bees on a summer afternoon.

Knowing what you will soon lose makes living even more precious, and the middle-aged man becomes infinitely more concerned with time. I find myself more conscious of light, because light is the most primitive measure of time; I spend as many hours as possible in the country, where the movement of the sun is so much more obvious and poignant than it is in the city. I arrange my social life in different ways, avoiding whenever possible the brittle chatter of cocktail parties, the strained social performances at formal dinners. I try to avoid all fads and fashions and to be skeptical of flattery. I seldom read books when they are published and find myself drawn back to the classics, to a few books that I first read years ago and failed to understand and that now seem to be about my own time on earth. More frequently now, I read history, biographies, memoirs, and journals because they have the effect of lengthening my life backward into the past, and because the complicated stories of other lives layer and multiply my own.

And because living seems more extraordinary than ever, I sleep less. In this, among so many other things, I resemble my father. In the last thirty years of his life (he died at eighty), he rose before dawn, rattling teacups, furious in some inarticulate way if his sons slept late. He never said so, but I’m certain now that the fury was about the waste of living. We have these dwindling hours and days to savor and use; it is almost sinful to occupy them with death’s sweet brother, sleep. Ancl so I am awake. Look (I say to my wife, her hand warm in the chilly dawn): the snow is melting in the fields outside the house. The trees are noisy with birds. The lake is making churning sounds, as the ice breaks and the bass stir at the bottom. In a few more weeks, they’ll be playing the first games of another season, and we can watch a fresh new rookie try to hit the curveball. The world will soon be green again. We’ll read Trollope beside the pond. And around these parts, fruit always ripens in the autumn.

REPRIEVE

That evening, when I returned to the hotel room in Miami, the message light was blinking on the telephone like an extra pulse. I sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and dialed the operator. My wife had called. And two sources for the story I was reporting. And my doctor… my doctor? Calling me from New York? The weariness vanished. In fifteen years, he’d never once called me anywhere unless I’d called him first. A week earlier I had submitted to my annual physical. All was normal. But here he was, calling me in a hotel in Miami. I glanced at my watch: a few minutes before 7:00. Probably gone home, but I called his office anyway. He was still there. And he went straight to the point.

“Last week’s chest X ray?” he said. “Well, we looked at it again and there’s something on it we don’t like. …”

I laughed out loud. I’d been expecting some variation of this sentence for years. After all, I was a three-packs-a-day man, and at fifty-something, each year’s physical was a kind of lottery. When it was over, and I was declared healthy, I always thought: Okay, got away with it again. Now, a few days after granting me my latest pass, the doctor was suddenly taking it back.

“What don’t you like?”

“It’s small, a dot really, on the upper part of your right lung.”

“What is it?” I asked.

A pause, and then the doctor said: “When are you coming home?”

I flew home the next day and soon began a new rhythm of days and nights. I had no symptoms of anything: no cough, no rebellious blood, no weakness, no pain; but I swiftly entered the strange and private universe of the sick. My doctor sent me to another man, who specialized in the lungs. He in turn dispatched me to NYU Medical Center for a CAT scan. That propelled me down many bland new corridors to a series of desks where I was asked to pay first and be tested later. This was something new to me in my life in America, and oddly original; it was like a restaurant extorting payment before serving me food. At every step of this process, money came first. There was a wonderfully cynical assumption behind the most elemental contact in this new world: You are all potential deadbeats.

So I paid to have blood taken from my arms, to breathe into various machines, to swallow and be injected with chemicals. The good doctors and the excellent technicians hadn’t devised the system of stand and deliver, of course; it must have evolved over the past few decades in the grand republic we all share with the boys from HUD, the S&L’s, and the Medellin Cartel. Nobody else I told was surprised. But all of this was new to me. I’m one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick. Over the previous thirty-five years, I had been in a hospital only three times as a patient: for the repair of a broken hand and then a broken cheekbone (both sustained while serving my apprenticeship as a young idiot); and finally for the removal of a small cyst over my right eye. As a reporter, of course, I’d been in dozens of hospitals, in pursuit of the usual portion of human folly and calamity; over the years, I’d served emergency-room death watches on shot cops and raped nuns and wounded presidents of the United States. But such duties were really only paid tours in the region of melodrama. The attendant pain, fear, and odor of death were part of my craft, but not my life. Now I was on a private tour.

“What are you looking for?” I asked at an early point in this process.

The doctor shrugged, smiled, and said: “The truth.”

He meant the truth about the spot on my lung, of course, not some grander insight into the meaning of the world. But even this limited truth wasn’t easy. The spot was the size of a bread crumb and it was high up behind a rib. There were four possibilities: i) lung cancer, caused by smoking an estimated 780,000 cigarettes over the previous three decades; 2) a fungus unique to the American Southwest and northern Mexico, both regions that I’d visited in the past two years; 3) a tumor caused by the asbestos I’d worked on for two months in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when I was sixteen; 4) tuberculosis. I am a fatalist about most things. Naturally, I was certain it was cancer.

“I don’t think so,” said my wife.

“Well, we’ll soon find out.”

It wasn’t that easy. For all of the modern technology, the various experts couldn’t decide precisely what was in my lung. They did one test to see if I’d been exposed recently to tuberculosis; the result was negative. The same was true about the fungus. The asbestos remained a possibility. So, obviously, did cancer. The big possibility. But, still, the doctors weren’t certain. They wanted …the truth. They asked me to undergo a bronchoscopy. This meant I’d stay overnight at the hospital, and then, with a local anesthetic, a tube would be passed down my throat into my lung to get as close as possible to the Thing. I agreed.

In the hospital for the bronchoscopy, I noticed something odd about myself: I had no fear. I’m no braver than the average man, but none of this made me tremble or weep or fall into pools of self-pity. I lost no sleep, either to a runaway imagination or to bad dreams. Of course, a bronchoscopy was hardly a major operation, but it wasn’t a day off either. And it might tell me that I had cancer, a word that seems to fill most Americans with dread. But instead of fear, regrets, or remorse, I found myself living almost entirely in the present tense: This happens, this happens, and this happens. If anything, the lack of fear made me sad. A lifetime of reporting had done its work; I’d been cheated of a basic human reaction.

Early one morning, I was wheeled down corridors on a gurney. I held my wife’s hand before vanishing into the operating room. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by drugs. They entered my throat. I woke later from an exhausted sleep.

“We couldn’t get close enough,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

“You mean the bronchoscopy was for nothing?”

“Not exactly. But -”

“But you still don’t know what’s in my lung…”

A pause. “Yes.”

“So…”

“I want you to see a man …he’s the best thoracic surgeon in New York.”

“You have to operate?”

“Maybe.”

I was learning that doctors are reporters, too; some operations are diagnostic, explorations of the unknown; they are done in order to discover the facts. I took a few more tests, and while waiting for results, went away for ten days to stop smoking (that is another story). But because of the location of the Thing (behind a rib, high in the lung), nothing was clear; only a surgeon, opening my right lung with his knife, could give me that clarity. I had to choose: undergo the chest operation immediately or wait and see what happens in the uncertain future. If the Thing was indeed a tumorous cancer, it could be removed in this same operation, along with a larger section of my lung that might be cancerous. I would lose about 20 percent of my lung capacity, but there was a good chance, given the size of the Thing and the fact that we’d found it at an early stage, that I could live a reasonably long life. On the other hand, if I waited, we might discover that the Thing wasn’t cancer. It might remain at its present size; it could even vanish. So I was also learning that much of medicine, like so much of life, is best described in the subjunctive.

In the end, I couldn’t bear the possibility of months of uncertainty, waiting to see whether the Thing got larger. I talked it over with my wife. I took a few walks around the block. Finally, I called the doctor.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

A few days later, I was in the hospital, with more demands for payment, more papers to sign. They even took money for the telephone and use of a TV. God bless America. From one side of the room I could see the Chrysler Building, still the most elegant in the city, from the other, the East River. I stacked books beside the bed, along with a folder full of letters to be answered. “This might even be fun,” I said to my wife, who looked dubious. “I haven’t had any time off for almost twenty years. …”

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” she said.

Late that night, alone in a drowsy fog, I began to think for the first time about death. Hell, this goddamned thing probably was cancer. Maybe it was worse than they were saying. Maybe something would go wrong on the operating table, some stupid failure of my body or their skill; it had happened to men I knew (such as John D. MacDonald); it could happen to me. But I didn’t begin to summarize my life, searching for its meaning or drafting some imaginary farewell. Instead, I began to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my wife and daughters, my brothers and sister and my friends. Their faces moved in and out of my consciousness; I spoke to some and hugged others. Then I saw and heard some of those other people, places, and things that made my life a life: Ben Webster and Cuco Sanchez, Hank Williams, Max Roach and Ray Charles; tabloid headlines, the poems of Yeats, and the faces of gangsters in the paintings of Jack Levine. I saw light spilling down the valleys of Mexico. I was reading Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, Elmore Leonard and Garcia Marquez. I sat in the Lion’s Head and the Plaza Athénée and John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street. It seemed absurd, even outrageous, to think that I’d never again see Casablanca, read Hemingway or Rebecca West or V. S. Pritchett, never again look upon the paintings of Tamayo, never, goddammit, finish Proust. If I died now I’d never know whether Tyson could really fight. I’d never see another World Series. And what about the books I hadn’t written? The places I hadn’t visited out there in the scary world? What would happen to my library? And the cabinets full of files? And what about all the words I hadn’t written (or said) to the people I truly cared about, people I often didn’t see much because I was so busy working? As soon as this was over, I had to call Fred Exley. I had to write to my friends Sam Pilch and Tim Lee. I had to track down … I was thinking such things, and certain I could hear Billie Holiday singing “Miss Brown to You,” when I fell into a dreamless sleep.

Early in the morning, a nurse gave me some pills; another injected me with some nameless drug; a man who looked like John Coltrane shaved my chest and pubic hair. My wife looked concerned. I made some bad jokes as they moved me onto a gurney. I made a few more on the way down the hall. Then I thought this was a kind of dumb Ronald Reagan act and shut up. I kissed my wife’s hand. They wheeled me into the operating room. They placed something over my face and I was gone.

From that long, drugged morning, I remember only a vision of Cardinal O’Connor in a gray sweat shirt, playing handball at one of those Coney Island courts that seem to have been painted by Ben Shahn. The good cardinal was sweating hard, great dark blotches staining his shirt, and he said nothing as he batted the small black ball against the unyielding wall. I’m not a religious man and don’t know O’Connor, but his cameo appearance in my delirium certainly cheered me up. I was suddenly awake. My wife smiled and kissed me. There were feeding tubes in my arms, two tubes draining my slashed lung, other tubes carrying away wastes. And I hurt. Oh, yeah, I hurt. Not a sharp, stabbing pain. It was more generalized, as if some giant had lifted me up and then slammed me viciously to the ground. This was not a trip to the beach. I hurt. I fucking well hurt.

“Not cancer,” my wife whispered. “Tu-ber-cu-lo-sis. …”

I have a memory of someone shouting, “Not cancer! Not cancer!” while I was under. But I don’t trust that memory as a fact. I must have invented it later. I remember nothing of my time on the operating table, although I was there for more than three hours, with another four in intensive care. The surgeon made an incision from under my right pectoral muscle across my back. About twelve inches long. He cut delicately into the lung and found the Thing. Then they all waited while it was analyzed.

And it wasn’t cancer.

The nodule, shaped like a tiny Cheerio, was a necrotizing granuloma, caused by tuberculosis. It was not contagious, being already dead. They sewed me up.

I smiled (she told me) and fell asleep. Later I would talk to friends about the epidemic of TB that is moving through American cities, passed along by our derelict armies. “They cough,” the doctor told me, “and twenty minutes later you can walk through it, and-…” Later, I would make jokes with visitors and eat ice cream and smell the great garlands of arriving flowers. A lovely nurse from Haiti would wash me, soaping my face, arms, genitals — a Catherine Barkley without the sentimentality — but every last erotic impulse, alas, was erased by pain. After midnight, the man in the next bed ripped at the trache in his throat, the strangled sounds (uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh) rose from him in agonized protest while his wife screamed at him in Yiddish. Later, I would at last have my ’60s experience all in one night, drugs lifting this old whiskey drinker into distended bands of time and color and sound while the words of friends and strangers mixed together in the slippery mist of a ruptured consciousness.

But for that long moment, coming back from the anesthetized emptiness, those two words seemed the most lucid and important of all.

Not cancer.

“Not cancer,” my wife said again.

“Hand me the dice,” I said.