Ravelstein

When I was transferred to the floor the neurology resident gave me a preliminary examination. My medical history in a thick binder was available at the nurse's station. Rosamund had kept a journal of her own during the weeks of crisis and the resident questioned her too.

That same night, Dr. Bakst, the chief neurologist, appeared at midnight and he too questioned her. She had been asleep in the armchair beside the bed.

I had been treated for pneumonia and heart failure. And though I was on the floor, I was not out of the woods. Not yet. Not quite. What my problems were is only partly relevant here. Let me say quite simply that things were far from normal, and that my future was still uncertain.

Dr. Bakst came with his packet of pins. Examining me-sticking pins into my face-he discovered that my upper lip was (to put it in my own way) lame. Even when I spoke or laughed it was strangely immobile or partially paralyzed. He put me through some simple tests-I failed them. At various times he asked me to draw clock-faces. I was unable at first to draw anything. My hands were useless. I had no control of them at all. It was impossible for me to eat my soup or to sign my name. I couldn't manage a pen. When he said, "Do me a clock," a crabbed zero was all I could draw. My symptoms seemed to Dr. Bakst to be due to poisoning. Bйdier in Saint Martin had served me a toxic fish. The neurologist said that I was a victim of cigua toxin. I was now willing to believe the worst about the Caribbean. The French doctor I saw there had diagnosed my trouble as dengue. He might, just possibly, have known better. An Australian cigua-toxin expert described the symptoms of that disease on the telephone to Dr. Bakst in Boston. Some of Bakst's Boston colleagues did not accept the diagnosis. I was partial to Bakst, however, for reasons which had little to do with medicine, strictly speaking.

To put matters plainly, I had to decide whether I should or should not make efforts to recover. I had for long weeks been un conscious, my body was wasted-unrecognizable. My sphincters were confused and I wasn't so much walking as stumbling-hanging on to a metal frame. I had once been the youngest of a large family. I now had adult children of my own. When they came to visit, those that had inherited my features gave me the feeling that I was being looked at by my own eyes-still germane but soon to be re placed by a later model. Ravelstein would have advised me to keep my head. I felt very nearly done for but I was, however damaged, sick of it all, not yet discharged from the service.

Rosamund was determined that I should go on living. It was she, of course, who had saved me-flew me back from the Caribbean just in time, saw me through intensive care, sleeping in a chair be side my bed. When I struggled to breathe she would raise the oxy gen mask to swab the inside of my mouth. It was not until the respirator was brought in that she went home for an hour to change into clean clothing.

The one physician who came regularly to visit me was Dr. Bakst. He came irregularly, too-at odd hours. He would say, "Draw me a clock at 10:47." Or, "What is today's date? Now, don t tell me you live on a superior plane and don't have to know exact dates. I want specific answers from you." Or, "Multiply seventy-two by ninety-three-and now… divide five thousand three hundred and twenty-two by forty-six."

Thank God I had kept my multiplication tables in good order. He had no wish to discuss "deeper" questions with me-or questions relating to the extent of my recovery.

At the age of eight I had had to recover from peritonitis complicated by pneumonia. Returning from the hospital what I needed to decide was whether I was going to be a lifelong invalid with two older brothers hating me for monopolizing the affection and concern of our parents. How such decisions are made in childhood is beyond comprehension. I see now, however, that I chose not to be a weakling. In some junk shop I turned up a book on physical fitness by Walter P. Camp, and I did as the famous football coach had done-I carried full coal-scuttles at arm's length up from the cellar. I chinned myself, I worked out with a punching bag and Turnverein Indian clubs. I studied an inspirational tract called _How to Get Strong and How to Stay So__. I told everyone I was in training. This was no exaggeration. And the fact was that I had no gift for sports. Still the choice I had made at the age of eight remained effective. Some seventy years later I was preparing to do it again.

By a rare coincidence, Dr. Bakst had another patient upstairs with cigua toxin. She had been infected on a trip to Florida. The toxin ravages the nervous system but is soon excreted, so that in a few days there is no sign of it. Luckily in her case the disease was caught in an early stage, and after the fish-carried poison was filtered out of her bloodstream she was well enough to go home.

I was still pushing the walking frame through winding corridors, determined to recover the use of my legs. I was held upright in the shower and felt humiliated as I was soaped and rinsed by kindly nurses who had seen everything and were not shocked by my body.

I assumed that my senior neurologist and good angel was familiar with cases like mine and knew exactly "where I was at." My damaged hands and legs would wither and my sense of balance would be lost if the small muscles were allowed to atrophy. If I were inclined that way, I could decide not to make the effort. You do get tired of performing the tricks, kneading the ball of putty and fitting jigsaw puzzles together only to see, when you examined yourself, the long wrinkles of your desiccated inner arms.

It's only now that I come to understand how much tact there was in the doctor's conduct and to see that he knew perfectly well I would disintegrate if I didn't do the drill he prescribed. I loathed the drill but I couldn't allow myself to fall apart. Moreover, I owed it to Rosamund to work at recovery. Yes, I was tempted to drop out, but she had concentrated her soul entirely on my survival. My quit ting would be an insult to her. And, lastly, to live necessarily meant to do what I had always done, and I had to be strong enough to perform independently the jobs of which my life consisted.

Dr. Bakst was a crack diagnostician, I considered, but in my case his diagnosis had been challenged. Ciguatera toxin is a tropical disease. The toxin is carried by reef-feeding fish-"piscavores" the doctor called them. No amount of broiling or boiling could destroy the poison carried by the red snapper set before me by Bйdier, a tough guy playing the Frenchiest of French hosts. He had come to the tropics to make money to educate his little daughters-they no longer get a _dot__, they get an education. (Ravelstein, who haunts these personalities and occasions, would have preferred to have me say _dot__, not dowry.) Beyond playing the role Bйdier owed his clients nothing. They took their chances with the piscavores of the coral reef, as he did with his investments. Neither Bйdier nor the doctor who had told me that I had dengue answered the inquiries from Boston.

At my age one has had a considerable experience of the ins and outs, the dodges that accompany self-interest. All such considerations are wildly mixed.

Dr. Bakst's cigua-toxin diagnosis had been challenged by other doctors. So he had an additional interest in proving himself right. He sent me to every corner of the hospital for CAT SCANs, MRIs and dozens of other esoteric examinations, in which the forces of the entire planet are upon you. I was able, but only up to a point, to separate his professional concerns from his other motives. The fact was that he knew I needed his "personal" visits, his daily presence-that I depended upon him.

It occurred to me during one fragmented and hopeless day that I might be one of those cunning patients whose master plan is to drink up the doctor's attention. The sick man sees that the physician must portion it out, and he also recognizes a special need to get ahead of his sick and dying rivals. The doctor naturally has to protect himself against these monopolizing impulses-perhaps should say instincts-of people who are blindly recovery-bent, who have the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die.

Dr. Bakst was solidly built but with an odd tendency about the head, which he carried like a boxer. It was of course out of the question to guess what he was thinking. He came and went as he saw fit. His glasses might turn toward you when his eyes did not. This led me to realize that it would be a mistake to try to communicate the many odd things I was experiencing. The problems he was setting me in arithmetic were much like the challenges thrown at David Copperfield by his wicked, tyrannical stepfather-"Nine dozen cheeses at two pounds, eight shillings, four pence. This reckoning should take you no more than three minutes." I had been good at sums in my schooldays, and it carried me back to childhood to work at them. For my fingers, too, they were good therapy, and I was soon able to sign checks and pay my bills.

The doctor now adopted a rougher style with me.

"What day of the week is it?"

"Tuesday."

"It's not Tuesday. Every adult knows what day it is."

"It must be Wednesday, then."

"Yes. And what's the date?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, you're preparing to make a stab at it-a gamble. But from now on you're going to know the date like any normal person. You'll check it out every morning, and you'll be ready from now on to tell the day of the week and the exact calendar date." Then he pinned a calendar on the wall for me. The doctor had seen that my days were a morass of self-neglect and that I was demoralized, drifting and losing heart through slackness and disorder.

It is possible that Dr. Bakst saved me. I believe I owe my life to him and of course to Rosamund. Bakst didn't think that it had been a mistake to put me "on the floor' or that I was bound for a chronic care facility. He believed that I could-and therefore should-make the grade. Somehow he sized me up as capable of coming back. I wonder what medical practice would be if doctors were to dismiss such intuitions. Dr. Bakst, like a skillful Indian scout of the last century, pressed his ear to the rail and heard the locomotive coming. Life would soon be back, and I would occupy my seat in the life-train. Death would shrink into its former place at the margin of the landscape. The patients desire is to crawl or limp or maneuver himself back to the life that preceded the illness, and to entrench and fortify himself in the old position.

If I had died I would naturally have been released from the promise I had made years ago to write a short description of Ravel-stein and to give an account of his life. Having come near death myself, I don't need to fear the guilt the living often feel about those others-parents, wives, husbands, brothers, and friends-in their graves.

Just out of college in the late thirties I was a research assistant helping to compile a geographical guide, and I learned that there was an Athens in almost every state of the union. It was also a fact that A. N. Whitehead had prophesied during a sojourn in Chicago that it was destined to lead the modern world. Intelligence was here for everybody's free use, and so it was highly possible that this city might serve to be a new Athens.

When I told this to Ravelstein I remember that he laughed exorbitantly and said, "If this happens here it won't be because of Whitehead. There wasn't enough philosophy in him to fill a birth day balloon. Not that Russell was much better."

I was interested in such opinions not because I had philosophical ambitions but because without much knowledge of political philosophy, I was preparing to write, had agreed to write, a memoir of Ravelstein, a political philosopher. And I couldn't say whether Whitehead and Russell had or had not developed ideas worth examining. Ravelstein sharply told me not to bother my mind with their studies, essays, and opinions. But I had already read five or six of their books. We should be grateful for good advice in these matters since life is too short to risk a waste of time-an entire month, say, on Russell's _History of Philosophy__, an obviously deformed and even cranky book, very modern in that it tries to spare you the study of several German and French philosophers.

In his own way Ravelstein tried to protect me from poring over the works of the thinkers he most admired. He ordered me to write this memoir, yes, but he didn't think it was necessary for me to grind away at the classics of Western thought. But for the purposes of a short biography I understood him well enough, and I agreed that it should be done by someone like me. Furthermore, I am a great believer in the power of unfinished work to keep you alive. But your survival can't be explained by this simple one-to-one abstract equivalence. Rosamund kept me from dying. I can't represent this without taking it on frontally and I can't take it on frontally while my interests remain centered on Ravelstein. Rosamund had studied love-Rousseauan romantic love and the Platonic Eros as well, with Ravelstein-but she knew far more about it than either her teacher or her husband.

But I would rather see Ravelstein again than to explain matters it doesn't help to explain.

Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me, and I go back and forth with him while trying to hear what he is saying. The music is pouring from his hi-fi-the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass-no wall mirrors here-and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street Kisser Asser striped shirt-American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravel-stein likes a big tie-knot-after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. His left foot is several sizes smaller than the right but there is no limp. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the _Italian Maiden in Algiers__. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and _Carmen__ than Wagner and the _Ring__. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine. He puts on his $5,000 suit, an Italian wool mixed with silk. He pulls down the coat cuff with his fingertips and polishes the top of his head. And perhaps he relishes having so many instruments serenading him, so many musicians in attendance. He corresponds with compact disc companies behind the Iron Curtain. He has helpers going to the post office to pay customs duties for him.

"What do you think of this recording, Chick?" he says. "They're playing the original ancient seventeenth-century instruments." He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There's an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots-the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can't be heard in all this bird-noise.

You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.

The End