On a Pale Horse (45 page)

One was a series of excellent three-mile runs. I have adult-onset diabetes, a mild case, and I treat this by staying away from free sugar and by exercising vigorously, including my thrice-weekly cross-country runs. When I do well, I break twenty-two minutes for the distance, then jog and walk another half mile, warming down, so as not to stress my system unduly by abrupt changes. Well, in September I was finishing a decent but not great run when the weekly garbage truck came up behind me in the last half mile. That truck cuts through the forest to reach another section of our wilderness, and our paths happened to coincide here. So I speeded up to get out of its way, without stopping my run. It’s amazing what a stimulus it is to have a truckful of garbage pursue you up a hill! Suddenly I was running a record finish, and because of this, it became one of those rare sub-twenty-two-minute runs, by just two seconds. Well, good enough; and next time I kept a slightly faster pace and broke twenty-two again. And a third time I did it a little faster yet. Unexpectedly, I had a string going. I had never put together more than three of these in a row before; could I do it on this Garbage series? Yes! I did the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and finally, with great effort on a drizzly day, the tenth. What a series! Now I could relax. But the series continued, until it carried me through the entire month of October, despite problems of scheduling the runs. I was amazed and gratified.

The other thing was negative. My wife’s father had
been suffering some low-grade malady during the summer, but now it got serious.

[Interruption at this point to go pick up a horse’s balky foot for my daughter. We check and clean out the feet before riding, to be sure there is no stone or stick wedged that could cause lameness, but the horse doesn’t always cooperate. I have more power than my daughter has; that foot came up for me. Had this interruption occurred earlier, I would have thought to have my protagonist check the feet of his gallant Deathsteed. Now, in the Author’s Note, it is too late. Well, I’ll catch it in another novel. This has been a sample bracket note, a live performance.]

My wife’s father had to be hospitalized, put on dialysis for kidney failure, and have abdominal surgery. He was still bleeding internally, so they set him up for corrective surgery—but were not sure he could survive another operation so soon. The chances seemed to be fifty-fifty; if the bleeding didn’t kill him, the surgery might. His wife, my wife’s mother, was distraught. Naturally my wife went down to Tampa to help out, so she was away from our home about half the month of October. That was why I had a scheduling problem for my runs, because I don’t like to do them when there is no one to backstop me at home. There are hunters out there in the forest who don’t necessarily see straight enough to tell man from deer, and there are rattlesnakes and such, and rampaging garbage trucks; and, of course, I’m laboring so hard that I could trip over an unseen root and take a fall and pull a muscle and be in trouble, and I want someone to call the ambulance if necessary. (I believe I mentioned my morbid streak.) But we managed; my two daughters, then aged fourteen and eleven, helped run the household and feed the animals when they (the girls) weren’t in school. Penny, the elder [whom we just met in a bracket], cooked supper, while I washed the dishes. And my father-in-law tided through.

Things eased up in November and December, as I worked full-time on the first draft of this novel—and my series of twenty-two minute runs continued. My father-in-law made it home for Thanksgiving, though ravaged by what had turned out to be Wegener’s Syndrome, a rare
and normally fatal malady before modern medicine changed the odds. We live, in some respects, in fortunate times.

I finished my first draft of
Pale
and shifted to the first volume of
Bio
for a couple of months. My good runs continued—forty, fifty, sixty in the series. In fact, they speeded up to a subseries of 21:30-minute efforts, and then to a sub-subseries of sub-twenty-one-minute runs. I was breaking the seven-minute mile! To my amazement, I managed to put together ten of these superfast-for-me runs in a row, before the rising heat of a Florida spring put an end to that in March. But I was still on my twenty-two minute series: seventy runs, eighty … when would it end?

My mother-in-law, perhaps worn out by the terrible siege of her husband’s illness, got sick herself and went to the hospital. But it was more than that. She had cancer of the pancreas. We didn’t know much about this disease and thought she would have six months or a year to live. But after only six weeks, as I was typing the second draft of
Pale
in late March, she died.

This is a novel of death, as I have said. The serious illness and sudden death, occurring while I was immersed in fictional death—this disturbed me deeply. I had a brutal refresher course in what death feels like to the survivors.

There was nothing to do but go on—with novel, with running, with life. But there was now a deeper quality of gloom about it. Death is not funny. It may be the normal end of life, but I still don’t like it. No, not at all!

My run series hung on, despite my depressed spirits and outdoor temperatures in the mid-80s. I made runs number eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three … maybe I could actually make it all the way to one hundred! I reject all superstition vehemently, yet I found myself counting those runs as if they were years of my life. It seemed I had now been promised at least eighty-three years; how many more? Nonsense, of course; still …

As April 1982 came, I was near the end of my second-draft typing and saw that the novel was going to be short: about eighty thousand words instead of the ninety thousand or so expected. There is normally a ten or fifteen
percent expansion in the submission draft, because of polishing, blank space at the end of chapters, and the addition of notes that have been crammed into the margins of second-draft material. I needed enough second-draft wordage so that that expansion would put the final draft comfortably in the hundred-thousand word range I had contracted for. Normally I run overlength and have to tighten up a bit, but this time my bracket notes had taken up more space, throwing off my estimate.

Writers pay a lot of attention to wordage, because some publishers seem to care more about length than about quality and will automatically reject novels that don’t fit their narrow standards of length—or will chop out extra wordage to make a novel fit. Not so long before, I had had to chop out twenty thousand words from my novel
Mute
, damaging it; I share the average writer’s aversion to such mutilation, especially since it makes the finished product seem choppy or disorganized when it wasn’t that way originally, and can damage his reputation for intelligibility and thus perhaps harm his career. Editor Lester del Rey has never done that to me, and so my fantasy has prospered—but I don’t push my luck.

In this case, there was material I had wanted to include, but had bypassed because of the difficulty of organizing a novel with a high emotional commitment. Fortunately, the notes were right there in my brackets. Some key cases of death—I could break
Chapter 6
into two parts and fit these scenes in the first part, and this would bring the number of chapters to thirteen—exactly right for a novel about death. So while I typed the second draft, I resumed work on the first draft, doing those scenes. Oh, yes, writers do work this way; the smooth, finished product you readers see is likely to be the result of considerable and scrambled effort.

Good news came in on the early sales of my science/fantasy novel
Blue Adept
, lightening my mood; the paperback edition had jumped to number three on the B. Dalton Bookseller list, and to number five on the Waldenbooks list. This is rarefied territory for light fantasy, and the best performance of any of my novels so far. It meant
Blue
was a mainstream bestseller, though it didn’t
quite make
The New York Times
list. A writer lives for such news!

The phone company sent a man out for no reason we could see, and he switched the lines, so all our calls came to our neighbor and vice versa. My New York agent tried to phone me three times about ongoing negotiations on the sale of
Bio of a Space Tyrant
, my biggest contract so far, and each time wound up talking to the neighbor’s boy. Par for the course. Satan only knows what kind of contract I might have wound up with, had I not caught on and hastily phoned my agent back. Maybe Satan sent the phone man out! Of such minor elements is a writer’s life fashioned.

I did my eighty-fourth sub-twenty-two-minute run on Monday. Ha—I would live to age eighty-four! On Tuesday, April 6, at 1
P.M
., I did my alternate-day exercise, the Japanese push-ups. I can’t describe them; they are done in martial arts classes for warm-up, and they are more complicated than regular push-ups. They have put new sheaths of muscle on my arms and chest, so that I no longer look quite as thin as I am. Over the years I had built up to seventy-five push-ups within a five-minute span; I time them on my Deathwatch. Without the time limit, I have done one hundred—but those final ones become hellishly uncomfortable, so I eased back. Why do I do push-ups? Well, running is good for every part of the body except the arms, so I do pull-ups and push-ups to shore up that weakness.

When I was less than half my present age, as a draftee in the U.S. Army in 1957, I was poor at regular push-ups. When I was unable to do ten in one session, the corporal told me to go back to the barracks and find a
man
to replace me. Only in the Army is manhood defined by push-ups, which is part of what’s wrong with that institution; nevertheless, that corporal would not so address me today.

I hate push-ups, but I like the body they give me, so I grind my teeth and do them. On this day I felt indifferent, physically; to my surprise, the push-ups were exceedingly strong. In fact, I broke my speed record, doing my seventy-five in four minutes and seven seconds on the
stopwatch. Terrific! I unkinked my digits—these push-ups are done on the tips of ten fingers, which is part of why they get uncomfortable—and settled down for lunch. Then the mail came, and I was reading it at 2
P.M
. when I felt a pain in my left side. Indigestion? Well, that would pass.

It didn’t pass. It got worse. I struggled with it for an hour, finding no relief vertically or horizontally, and retched into the sink a couple of times before I asked my wife to call for help. Soon she drove me in to see the doctor. Yes, it was the same doctor who had wrestled with my Cat-Scratch Disease two years before, as noted in my prior Author’s Note. By this time I had the cold sweats and my limbs were jerking, sometimes violently. The ride was interminable; every half hour or so I rechecked my watch and discovered it had only moved along five minutes. “You know,” I gasped, “I fear death, but if I knew the rest of my life would be like this, I would welcome death!” I meant it. Pain provides a special perspective, and that perspective is reflected in the novel.

People tried not to stare at me in the doctor’s waiting room as I sat there, hunched over to my left, panting violently; that was the only way I could keep the pain bearable. My hair was wild, and I was in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, with dirty feet, the way I normally am when writing at home. I didn’t have a regular appointment, of course, but the doctor arranged to see me soon, and I don’t think any other patients objected. I was wheeled into an office. I was beginning to feel faint, and motion only made things worse.
Everything
made things worse! But in due course we had an opinion. There was a trace of blood in my urine, and the symptoms indicated a colic of the kidney, probably caused by a kidney stone.

I wound up in the hospital with a shot of Demerol, which I understand is synthetic morphine: a powerful painkiller. It didn’t kill
this
pain, but it zonked out much of my brain, and that helped. My wife tells me I was saying strange things, such as something about a fly on the window and steps on a cabinet; I remember none of it. If I had been able to write, I probably would have made bracket notes, and today would know exactly what was
on my mind then. A fly? Do you suppose the Lord of Flies could have—? I do remember waking up long enough to inquire, “Am I making sense?” And my wife, in the manner of good wives with difficult husbands like me, assured me that I was. I faded in and out; the pain did not depart, but at least I was unconscious some of the time. Six hours after it began, the agony began to ease, and in another hour it was gone. I can’t honestly say it was the worst pain I have suffered, though our book of medical symptoms says that kidney stones can indeed be among the worst agonies to afflict man. I think it hurts more when I stub a toe hard. But the toe hurts only a minute; this was six hours. The remorseless continuation of pain is, candidly, something else. I suspect even a mild pain could become unbearable if continued long enough; I think that’s part of the secret of the Chinese water torture.

Next day they gave me a complex X-ray series, a pyelogram, with dye in my blood to show the course of the various conduits. Yes, my left ureter—that’s the tube between the kidney and the bladder—was distended, as if blocked by a kidney stone. Probably my exceptionally vigorous push-ups had dislodged the stone and sent it on its painful way. It had taken an hour to encounter a constriction, and then—wow! Nothing much; it was really only a grain, like a piece of sand, and with luck it would clear on its own. Meanwhile, the urine was getting by, so I was okay. All I had to do was strain my urine through a meshed funnel, to catch the stone when it came out so they could analyze it.

I was glad to cooperate. If this was a little stone, I didn’t want to encounter a big one! But they had hooked me up to an IV bottle—I suspect this is standard hospital policy to make sure the patient doesn’t walk out without paying the bill—and the needle was taped to my left arm. To go to the bathroom, I had to trundle the bottle-stand along with me. To forget would be a bloody mess as the needle ripped out of my vein. I understand it happens to absent-minded patients. And they had me in one of those hospital gowns—you know, the type that falls open at any pretext to bare your posterior. Everybody in the hospital
wants to get at your posterior! Have you ever tried to, as they phrase it, void through a funnel into a plastic container, with a tube connected to your arm that tends to drape itself between you and what you’re doing? And the hospital nightie falling off your front? Naturally they are worn backward, and no one had tied the apron strings on mine. If I lifted my arm too high, trying to get things out of my way, the blood backed into the IV tubing, making another mess. I discovered that by the time I got everything ready to go—Nature had changed her mind. I think it is called “bashful kidney.”