Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
In time, it will be established whether the Humanzee can mate with any female specimen, human or chimpanzee, or whether the Humanzee, like the donkey, hybrid offspring of horse and mule, is sterile.
How lonely the Humanzee will be, isolated in its (his) clinical quarters on the eighth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences! Though possibly, sooner rather than later, another Humanzee specimen will be created by the Professor’s lab team, a sibling that might (if it is female) be a mate for the Humanzee …
In his state of trance N____ sits at the computer, thinking. Or rather, thoughts move through his brain as through a convoluted and contorted maze.
… we will be a family and he will come to love me.
Hurriedly N____ clears out his office in Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall taking computer files on memory sticks, documents, papers, a selection of books that are essential to him.
Returns to the apartment on Edgar Street. Tells the astonished Mary Frances that they must leave at once: the State Department has learned of N____’s engagement with her and that she is bearing his son and so a warrant has been issued for N____’s arrest and without being allowed a legal hearing N____ will be deported to a “hellish” part of the world he has not seen in more than thirty years and their baby, when it is born, will be taken into detention by the US government under the Illegal Alien Act of 1971 …
Hurriedly they must pack. Must pack!
No time to waste, no time for explanations other than the bare stark terrifying fact that Mary Frances will lose not only her fiancé but her baby as well if she does not flee with N____ that very day. If she stays behind it is highly probable that she will be arrested and charged with “aiding and abetting” an individual arrested under the Illegal Alien Act and in any case, the baby will be taken from her and she will never see it again.
Wide-eyed Mary Frances never doubts these fantastical words of N____’s uttered in a voice of heightened calm. Mary Frances has not ever doubted N_____, and will not doubt him. When she stammers asking where can they go N____ tells her that eventually they can cross into Canada—“There are relatives of mine in Vancouver, they will take us in and protect us”—but in the meantime they can hide in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where no one would ever think to look for them.
It is true, N____ has saved a good deal of money over the years. Few expenses, a frugal bachelor life. As if for such an occasion: a sudden disappearance, fleeing federal authorities, exile. Fleeing the Professor. Perhaps N____ has been on the run, an illegal alien, for most of his life.
As they pack suitcases and cardboard boxes N____ tells Mary Frances about the beautiful scarcely populated mountains west of Red Bluff. They can rent a cabin easily, he recalls a trailer village beside a lake, yes and the small town Red Bluff, no one would know where they’d gone, no one would have the slightest idea, cleverly he’d consulted several websites about hotels in Costa Rica and if/when his office computer is examined in an effort to track him these sites will be discovered and it will be believed he’d gone to Costa Rica … With tearful but trusting eyes Mary Frances listens to her fiancé, she has never seen N____ so fiercely animated, so certain of what must be done, the two of them together, a couple. N____ pauses to take her warm moist hand tenderly and squeeze it in the way that one might squeeze the hand of a frightened child to comfort her, a gesture he has never made before.
“Oh but, Nath’iel—what about the baby? How will he be born—safe?”
“We can do it. I can help you. Our ancestors knew how. We don’t need the Clinic. ‘Natural childbirth.’ The hell with them.”
“The hell with them! Good.” Mary Frances laughs wildly, her eyes are shining with tears of wonder, devotion. “God will protect us.”
“God will protect us. I know it.”
Elated N____ runs to his apartment to load the van (armloads of books, it is his books N____ most values, which he will bring with him into exile) and to bring it around to Edgar Street. By this time N____ has convinced himself that they must leave at once, he must not be detained, they are both in grave danger, their baby is in grave danger, at any moment government gestapo will be knocking at their door, they are equal to the challenge of natural childbirth in the mountains, there will be no need for a medical doctor, a hospital or a clinic. For how can N____ explain to Mary Frances that if she gives birth successfully, her baby will be taken from her and her life will be snuffed out? How can N____ explain to Mary Frances that it is he, her fiancé “Nath’iel,” who has herded her, like a heifer into a chute leading to the slaughterhouse, to this fate? Telling himself the crucial thing is the prevention of infection of the mother’s birth canal. N____ will boil water, sterilize surfaces. N____ will wear latex gloves. (Must remember to purchase gloves and other items needed for the home birth, en route to Red Bluff.) Something in the refugee N_____, primitive, defiant, gives a little lurch, this will be the challenge of his life.
Mary Frances is not likely to panic when contractions begin, as another woman might in such circumstances. Mary Frances is solidly built to give birth, wide-hipped, a wide pelvis, heavy breasts bursting with milk. Mary Frances will pray for courage, and her God will give her courage. Mary Frances will deliver her baby by instinct, grunting and heaving as her female ancestors delivered their babies, managing to survive against the odds.
And whatever is issued from between Mary Frances’s great straining thighs streaked with blood and sweat, she will honor as a gift of God.
By four-twenty P.M. they are prepared to leave. Breathless, exhilarated! It is strange, N____ has not wanted Mary Frances in his van before, had not even told her that he owns a vehicle; he has not (he’d thought) wanted the female presence to linger in it, her scent, the impression of her body, the dampness of her perspiring thighs, yet now he has not the slightest concern but is deeply grateful that he owns a vehicle, that they can flee together. Indeed N____ adjusts the sun visor so that the afternoon sun won’t glare into Mary Frances’s eyes.
Boxes of books, hundreds of books gathered from both apartments, fill the van. In his fever of anticipation N____ imagines long idyllic evenings of reading aloud to Mary Frances from such texts as the great works of Charles Darwin beside a birch-wood fire, Nathaniel, Jr. in a cradle, or in a crib, in a shadowy alcove, features blurred in the innocence of sleep.
On the interstate they should get to the Sierras by sunset and in the morning to Red Bluff. That night they can rent a motel room or, maybe, sleep in the van in sleeping bags within earshot of the white-water rapids cascading down the mountainside.
Walking Wounded
1.
Late morning but there’s a heaviness to it like dusk. Bruised sky like an eye swollen shut. Smell of sulfur in the warm wind from the lake shallow at this end, rotted with cattails, tall reeds and rushes and something floating just beneath the surface.
He has returned to our small town on Lake Cattaraugus. He has returned eviscerated.
He is forty-one years old. His youth has been lost to him.
Torn away like clothes cut off a stricken man by EMTs wielding shears in an emergency.
He has learned respect for the astonishing swiftness of (young, vigorous) emergency workers. As soon as you lose control of your body in a faint, in a public place, your body is theirs.
Why think of this?—he isn’t. Hell no. Not.
At the southernmost edge of the lake he sees her.
A luminous figure in the mist that lifts from the lake on this mild, overcast June morning.
She is standing at a railing of the esplanade, very still.
He is very still, a little distance away.
Her back is to him yet he is certain that she is a stranger.
Her hair is loose, curly and tangled partway down her back. Her shoulders are narrow, she is delicate-boned, a young woman, a girl who is (he is sure) a stranger to him. She leans forward against the wrought-iron railing, gazing out at the lake in utter stillness.
Light glimmering on the rippled slate
Is it—her?
Like a clapper inside a bell his heart clamors.
Am I terminal? he’d asked.
Should I have hope? Or—is that ridiculous? Selfish?
Early that morning he’d been awakened by a sharp cramp in the calf muscles of his left leg. Jolted from the comfort of sleep that is his only solace.
When this happens he is stricken with pain in his leg. Furious at being wakened so early.
He has learned to get quickly out of bed, stamp his bare foot on the floor to soothe the cramp. Whimpering to himself like a child; the pain is excruciating.
Lightning-swift pain in his leg that clamps tight. Toes in his foot rigid as claws.
“Jesus!”—rendered helpless, staggering about trying to overcome the cramp.
Within a minute or two the worst of the pain usually fades. Like a rueful afterthought the muscle ache will remain for hours.
Since his evisceration L____ has longed for sleep—it is his only refuge. Insomniac nights he’d resisted drugs, alcohol. He knows how easy that would be: stepping into the dark water that rises to his knees, his mutilated lower body, over his mouth, nose, eyes. No.
Sleep is L____’s happiest time even when it’s riddled with turbulent and senseless dreams.
As a boy he’d been a runner. He’d been on the track team of the (local) high school. His leg muscles had cramped then, sometimes. But that was different. A different kind of pain. A shared pain—the other boys on the team had had cramps in their calves too.
Only vaguely he can recall, as you’d recall a dream told to you by another.
If amid the detritus in this house he encounters photographs of that boy—skinny, yearning face; dark, hopeful eyes—he turns quickly away.
“That was my life then. When I had a life.” But there is no woman. But he is lucky.
No one sharing his bed to be a witness to the way such stabbing pain unmans him, renders him helpless as a child.
What’s a man without pride? Unmanned.
Fact is, he could not bear another knowing of his condition. He’d told no one. He’d avoided the telling.
Bluntly he’d said to her, No. I don’t love you. It was a misunderstanding.
Doesn’t recall the look on her face; he’d turned away.
And now he has returned to the house of his childhood at Lake Cattaraugus, New York. Even if she knew she would not have dared follow.
Just go away. Leave me. And don’t touch me!—your touch makes me sick.
He has confided in no one—of course. For there is no one. “Just tell me, Doctor: Am I ‘terminal’?”
He’d been blunt, brave. It had seemed a kind of braveness—bravado. Or possibly he’d been rude.
In fact he had not asked about hope. He had not even thought of hope at that time.
Seething with anger, even as he was shivering in the chilled examination room. He could not bear the indignity, it was the indignity that maddened him, more than the other.
The doctor’s answer was an unhesitating No. You are not “terminal”—not inevitably.
What the doctor meant was that with the proper medical treatment, of course, life is prolonged. Some sort of life is prolonged. After five years (he was told) there is a 65 percent survival rate for individuals in his age group afflicted with this particular cancer.
If the cancer has not metastasized to lymph nodes, other organs, bone. If surgery removes the malignancies. If treatment can be tolerated, which sometimes, even in seemingly healthy and “fit” individuals in his age group, it is not.
Nine months of chemotherapy following the radical surgery—the evisceration.
He does not recall the surgery clearly. Days, weeks immediately following. The relief of being alone, not having to speak of the considerable physical trauma, see its reflection in another’s (concerned, pitying) (repelled?) face.
Grateful then that he hadn’t been married. To be wed to another is to be welded to another and when you are mad to be alone, you do not wish to be either.
So, L____ is alone with his body. If he is wed, welded to anything it is to this body.
If he examines the ravaged body, still he does not clearly recall. The partially healed shiny-white scar tissue like the configurations of frost on a windowpane, the disfigurement of his lower belly and groin that suggests a playful distortion. A mist has settled over his brain. Very easy to forget, or to misremember. There is mercy in such drifting patches of amnesia.
By day he has become brisk, matter-of fact. In his dealings with others he is hearty-seeming, quick to laugh, and quick to cease laughing, inclined to impatience if cashiers, service workers, waiters don’t move fast enough for him.
On the phone he is assertive, his laughter is a kind of barking punctuation. Though he does not—ever—lift the receiver of a ringing phone unless he sees that it is a professional contact who is calling, an editor perhaps. Not the personal but the impersonal is his solace.
By day, when his clothes conceal the mutilation. Very quickly you learn to adjust to the new contours of the body, disguised by ordinary (loose-fitting) clothing. As a person afflicted by joint pain learns to walk with his weight distributed just so—no limp is detected. (Except by the unnaturally sharp-eyed or the suspicious. Whom L____ avoids.)
He is somewhat proud of such adjustments. By day. Deals with himself briskly and matter-of-factly as another might deal with him.
The body he has become.
Shields the colostomy pouch close against his (flat, flaccid) belly beneath his clothes. It is hidden there, it is protected. It has become the most intimate connection of his life like an umbilical cord and this attached to the tiny hole in his stomach, the stoma. An external (plastic) gut, a practical measure, in fact an ingenious solution to having no rectum and only a few meager inches of some five feet of large bowel remaining.
The pouch has to be changed at regular intervals depending upon the uses to which he puts it. (How much he ingests, digests.) If leaking, more often. Carefully remove the old pouch, empty contents into toilet, attach the new. Dispose of the old pouch in an opaque white plastic bag placed carefully inside the dark green trash container to be wheeled out to Road’s End Lane under cover of darkness Thursday nights, for Friday morning pickup by Cattaraugus County sanitation.
His task. He is his own nurse’s aide. He is indentured to himself. His fingers should have grown deft by now but remain clumsy, shaky, as if shy.
He would laugh, it is funny.
And what is most funny, how L____’s teenaged self would have recoiled in disbelief and loathing foreseeing such a fate. How once with a ninth-grade friend watching a TV documentary of wounded and disabled Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs L____ had said with the vehemence of youth if anything like that ever happened to him he would “blow out my brains with a shotgun.”
You don’t, though.
Abashed watchword of the walking wounded—You don’t.
And so it has been a shock to L____ this morning. Having seen the young woman at the lake.
Having felt for her—something …
She is a stranger, he is certain. No one who has known L____ or L____’s family.
The luminous figure. So still!
Elsewhere in the park were teenagers, adults with young children, even a boy with a model airplane droning overhead like a maddened wasp. Their noises did not seem to penetrate the silence that enveloped the young woman; she stood apart from them as if invisible. Curly, tangled hair partway down her back—very fine, very pale, silvery pale, with a mineral sheen. And wearing what appeared to be a sweater or a wrap of some pale-gray cobwebby material. And her white (linen?) skirt long, nearly to her slender ankles, and her bare feet in open-toed sandals, white-skinned.
From a little—safe—distance he regarded her.
He was almost waiting to be disillusioned—to see that, ye
But he did not know her, he was certain. She is new to this place also.
Feeling so strange! Light-headed, dry-mouthed …
That stab of excitement, recognition. It can leave you shaken, faint. An electric current running through the torso to the groin—the vagus nerve.
If the shock is severe, the vagus nerve shuts off blood to the brain; you fall at once in a faint.
Hello—he might (plausibly) have called to her.
Excuse me—he might (plausibly) have approached her. His heart beats strangely, just to think so!
A shock to him, at his age and in his condition, who has expected to see nothing at Lake Cattaraugus, and to feel nothing.
Hello. Don’t think I have seen you here before …
I used to live in Cattaraugus. Now I’ve returned …
Ridiculous! Such words, faltering, stale, hopeless, and contemptible as deflated party balloons, or stray condoms in the mud at the lakeshore caught amid broken cattails.
Flung after him the cruel female taunt Go away. You are not even a man. Why would I want to speak to you?
Chloroform is the most pragmatic. Swift, clean, leaves no trace and he knows where to purchase it without being questioned.
Other methods are cruder, clumsier. Within the past several years he has perfected his method.
The primary element is surprise. And, of course, no witnesses.
He has grown deceitful. It is a rare pleasure.
Returning to the family home at Lake Cattaraugus and telling no one who knows him, not relatives in the area, not family friends, old friends from school, long-ago acquaintances.
Returning wounded, and wise in deception. Armed with a “project”—a manuscript of more than one thousand pages that requires his deepest concentration.
The great effort of L____’s life. L____’s remaining life.
In the cobblestone house on Road’s End Lane amid a tangle of tall old oak trees he plans (he thinks) to be happy.