Half the Kingdom (17 page)

Joe blinks a two-count “Yes.”

“If I remove the tube from your throat there is a probability—not a certainty, but a high probability—that
you will not be able to breathe on your own. You understand that. Yes?”

Joe takes a moment. He blinks. He understands that.

“Okay, let me state this as a fact: If I remove the tube I would not—I can
not
—reinsert it. Do you understand?”

Why would Joe not take a long moment to think about this? He blinks. He understands this also.

The doctor holds Joe’s hand in his hand. “Do you wish me to remove the breathing tube? Take your time.”

Joe takes his time. He takes such a very long time that the doctor says, “I’m going to put it to you the other way around, so we can be very very clear that we know what you want me to do, and so we don’t have to put you through this conversation again: Do you wish me to leave the tube in?”

Joe is still taking his time, thinking. His eyes do not lower their lids, neither with the rapid natural blink that moistens the eyeball, nor with the two-count blink that means yes and chooses life over death, or chooses death over life.

The doctor sits on the edge of the bed with Joe’s hand in his hand. He regards his patient. Joe regards the doctor.

Lucy sits in the solarium. If you find, reader, that you are tired of Lucy looking for her glasses, think how tiresome it is for
her
to find them and have to hold a finger in the page of the address book while she takes the cell phone out of its niche. There aren’t enough hands to remove the glasses from their case and, having identified the talk button on the cell,
put them on her nose so that she can check the number that she has never been able to hold in her head long enough to dial.

“Kathy? I don’t believe this! I never expect you to pick up! I call, and there you are at the other end of the line! I want to read you my funny short-short about being dead.”

Katherine says she is burning to hear Lucy’s story. Lucy reads Katherine “Sadie in Heaven.” Katherine’s detailed, specific, accurate, high praise is what Lucy has been waiting her life long to hear, does not believe, and experiences as an act of hostility.

Because Lucy is wearing her readers, her reflection in the night-black glass of the solarium wall is blurred. A blurred nurse wheels in a recliner on which the blurry old Luba lies naked; they’ve given up trying to get her to keep covered. And here they come, all the sixty-two-pluses who have gone around the bend, naked every last one. Here comes that sweet old Rhinelander, his elongated limbs have the wavy articulation of an El Greco saint seen from the worm’s-eye view. The naked nonagenarian, Anstiss, has elegant bones, a noble skull. Here’s Samson, the drowned fat man from Glenshore’s night beach. His belly is the familiar kind that starts under his breasts. The crying old Jack looks peculiarly naked because his large, dark, hairy head looks dressed. Naked Hope with her gray locks open about her shoulders pushes his chair. One nurse leads old, lost Ilka by the arm, and another wheels in the huge black Lilly who overflows her chair. The
Gorewitz sisters walk with their heads turned to each other like the talking profiles in old
New Yorker
cocktail party cartoons. This is the party of the unaccommodated, the men one penis apiece, the women each with her two dugs. Lucy observes herself reaching behind herself to undo the tie at the back of her neck, and the one behind her waist.

Dr. Miriam Haddad, who knows she is late for the meeting in the Senior Center, passes the open door of Cedars of Lebanon’s Interdenominational Chapel. Correction: The chapel
has
no door. The chapel stands open at all times to all. Miriam looks in and calls Salman on her cell.

Salman is walking out of the door of his office when his secretary calls him back. “Your wife wants you down in the chapel, right away.”

“What for? Hand me the phone?”

“She’s hung up. She said, right away.”

“Where
is
this chapel?”

“Next to Cedars of Lebanon’s Chase Bank branch office.”

“What’s up?” Salman asks Miriam. “We’re late for the meeting.”

“Look!”

Standing in the doorless opening, Salman Haddad looks at the potted palm, the standing lamp, the neutral
space dedicated to welcoming anybody’s faith and offending nobody’s taste. Salman sees the pink soles of the kneeling man whose forehead touches the ground. A kneeling child with ecstatically upraised arms is not, on closer look, a child but a small little woman in a little dress wearing Mary Janes with lace-trimmed white socks. An old man under a prayer shawl is davening.

“Miriam,
what
? What did I hurry down here for?”

“Look on the wall, across from the standing lamp. You took your time, and it’s already fading!”

When questioned, the three worshippers agree that they saw a moving finger doing graffiti on the wall. What do they think it wrote? “The Lord Is One,” or “Kyrie Eleison”? It means that it is now theoretically possible to live forever. Dr. Miriam Haddad thinks that what the finger has written is “Sorry!” with an exclamation point. Salman Haddad walks over and makes out that the fast fading letters spell “Oops!” Miriam is right about the exclamation point.

In the room on the third floor, Dr. Stimson sits and waits on the edge of the bed in which Joe Bernstine lies supported by pillows and probably cannot breathe without the tube in his throat. The doctor is waiting for Joe to blink. And if they haven’t died, as the story says, they are living to this hour.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank friends who have read, thought about, and told me what they thought about
Half the Kingdom
, through its several changes: Allen Bergson, Deirdre Bergson, Alan Friedman, Vivian Gornick, Joyce Johnson, Gene Lichtenstein, James Marcus, Norma Rosen, Barry Schechter, Matthew Sharpe. I thank David Segal for the research I never feel like doing myself, and Angelo Pastormerlo for suggesting certain books for Joe Bernstine’s library. Thank you, Kathy Earnest, for lending me the character of Mrs. West, the piano teacher. I want to thank Dr. Eric Cassel and Dr. Flavia Golden for conversations about the procedures in emergency rooms. They are not responsible for the outcomes.

I thank the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars for the good year in which I wrote portions of the book.

Parts of this book were published, in somewhat different form, in
Harper’s Magazine
(May 2011) and in
The New Yorker
(December 24, 2007).