Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [56]
I’ll never forget his doctor’s single house call, in November, two months before he died. Wally was watching television from his bed; at some point TV had become simply what he could do. First it was a source of distraction. Undemanding electronic company, for many people of my generation, represents a certain sort of childhood comfort, a voice and energy and presence—something paying attention to us—that feels, for better or worse, like a part of home. Later I think there was just something comforting in that continual play of light and motion. Wally couldn’t tell, by then, if he’d already watched the same show that day; it didn’t matter, exactly. He was in the present, with laugh tracks and music and jumping electronic figures, energetic squiggles of light to fill his brain with something else, somewhere else. When Dr. Magnus showed up to see how Wally was doing—since by then getting him into the wheelchair and down the block to the clinic was out of the question—he didn’t stay long. He told me later, when I ran into him in the park, where he was out for a walk with his lover taking photographs of icicles, that “Wally seemed more interested in watching TV than in talking to me.”
It took me, as it sometimes does, time to get angry; a lag time has to pass in my head before I’ll give myself permission to really feel rage. All the doctor needed to do was to press a button on the remote control and switch off the set. If he had, he’d have seen Wally looking at him with the same kind of sweet openness—the self made permeable, expecting nothing, letting everything wash in and out—with which he looked at the screen, when he did bother to look at it. By then, I’m not even sure Wally could have switched off the remote control by himself.
Dr. Magnus wanted to be important; he wanted to be the center of Wally’s attention. Couldn’t he see past his own ego to read the face of a man with wildly increasing neurological damage? He wanted his questions answered, his importance as a “provider” validated—a kind of need I saw in nurses and doctors again and again, as if, as Wally became more ill, they needed to confirm their own importance. A larger man, a more generous man, might not even have needed to turn off the television at all. If he couldn’t do anything, he could pay attention to the man before him, with his gentle, tender, ruined face lit up in soft artificial colors by the light of the goddamned stupid screen. Why couldn’t he see that? His doctor’s sense of self-importance only allowed him to see, by then, a man who was indifferent to him.
Even I can tell the difference between brain damage and indifference.
He never saw Wally again.
And so this tossed-off assessment of my condition triggers a profound resentment, an anger which in itself feels like part of the pain I’m in.
Thus raising, of course, the possibility that she’s right.
Or partly so—if what’s residing in my back is held, pent-up feeling, couldn’t that hurt the muscles themselves, too? I imagine the emotional and the physical tumbling together like a pair of acrobats, two halves of a single somersault.
But what would I do about this—go home and feel? As if I hadn’t spent five months already weeping, desolate, incapacitated, able to function only in my own limited horizon? I’d just begun to be able to get out a bit more, traveling a little, doing my professional work. and then my back crippled me as my heart had earlier. And this was because I hadn’t felt enough?
So I decided to try something else, or rather it was as if something else were offered. As the most useful of Chinese proverbs says, “When you don’t know where you’re going, go by a way you don’t know.”
I’d met M. before, socially, and I’d known he did massage work because Bill had been his client since last summer, when Bill’s body had blossomed with KS lesions. Bill’s easy, bright attitude toward his illness was—shocking word, in this context