Cold Snap

by Thom Jones

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

A collection of short works brings readers to the disease-infested areas of Rwanda and follows the stories of hard-struggling victims, devoted doctors, and a strung-out advertising writer who does the work of God. Tour.

Release date: June 1, 1995

Publisher: Little Brown & Co

Print pages: 240

Sample

SON OF A BITCH, there’s a cold snap and I do this number where I leave all the faucets running because my house, and most houses out here on the West Coast, aren’t “real”—they don’t have windows that go up and down, or basements (which protect the pipes in a way that a crawl space can’t), or sidewalks out in the front with a nice pair of towering oak trees or a couple of elms, which a real house will have, one of those good old Midwest houses. Out here the windows go side to side. You get no basement. No sidewalk and no real trees, just evergreens, and when it gets cold and snows, nobody knows what to do. An inch of snow and they cancel school and the community is paralyzed. “Help me, I’m helpless!” Well, it’s cold for a change and I guess that’s not so bad, because all the fleas and mosquitoes will freeze, and also because any change is something, and maybe it will help snap me out of this bleak post-Africa depression—oh, baby, I’m so depressed—but I wake up at three in the morning and think, Oh, no, a pipe is gonna bust, so I run the water and let the faucets drip and I go outside and turn on the outdoor faucets, which are the most vulnerable. Sure enough, they were caking up, and I got to them just in the nick of time, which was good, since in my condition there was no way I could possibly cope with a broken water pipe. I just got back from Africa, where I was playing doctor to the natives, got hammered with a nasty case of malaria, and lost thirty pounds, but it was a manic episode I had that caused Global Aid to send me home. It was my worst attack to date, and on lithium I get such a bad case of psoriasis that I look like alligator man. You can take Tegretol for mania but it once wiped out my white count and almost killed me, so what I like to do when I get all revved up is skin-pop some morphine, which I had with me by the gallon over there and which will keep you calm—and, unlike booze, it’s something I can keep under control. Although I must confess I lost my medical license in the States for substance abuse and ended up with Global Aid when the dust settled over that one. God’s will, really. Fate. Karma. Whatever. Anyhow, hypomania is a good thing in Africa, a real motivator, and you can do anything you want over there as long as you keep your feet on the ground and don’t parade naked on the president’s lawn in Nairobi and get expelled (which I did and which will get you expelled; okay, I lied, you can’t do anything—so sue me). On lithium, while you don’t crash so bad, you never get high, either, and all you can do is sit around sucking on Primus beer bottles, bitching about how hot it is when there’s so much work to do.

While I’m outside checking my faucets, I look my Olds-mobile over and wonder was it last year I changed the antifreeze? Back in bed, it strikes me that it’s been three years, so I go out and run the engine and sit in the car with my teeth chattering—it’s thirteen below, geez! And pretty soon the warm air is defrosting the car and I drive over to the hardware section at Safeway and get one of those antifreeze testers with the little balls in it. At four in the morning I’m sitting in my kitchen trying to get it out of the plastic jacket, and it comes out in two parts, with the bulb upside down. No doubt some know-nothing Central American put it in upside down for twenty cents an hour in some slave factory. I know he’s got problems—fact is, I’ve been there and could elucidate his problems—but how about me and my damn antifreeze? I mean, too bad about you, buddy, how about me? And I’m trying to jury-rig it when I realize there is a high potential for breaking the glass and cutting my thumb, and just as that voice that is me, that is always talking to me, my ego, I guess, tells me, “Be careful, Richard, so you don’t cut your thumb”—at that instant, I slice my thumb down to the bone. So the next thing you know I’m driving to the hospital with a towel on my thumb thinking, A minute ago everything was just fine, and now I’m driving myself to the emergency room!

Some other guy comes in with this awful burn because a pressure cooker exploded in his face, and he’s got this receding hairline, and you can see the way the skin is peeled back—poached-looking. The guy’s going to need a hairpiece for sure. A doctor comes out eating a sandwich, and I hear him tell the nurse to set up an I.V. line and start running some Dilaudid for the guy, which he deserves, considering. I would like some for my thumb, but all I get is Novocain, and my doctor says, “You aren’t going to get woozy on me, are you?” I tell him no, I’m not like that, but I have another problem, and he says, “What’s that?” and I tell him I can’t jack off left-handed. Everybody laughs, because it’s the graveyard shift, when that kind of joke is appropriate—even in mixed company. Plus, it’s true.

After he stitches me up, I’m in no pain, although I say, “I’ll bet this is going to hurt tomorrow,” and he says no, he’ll give me some pain medication, and I’m thinking, What a great doctor. He’s giving me pain medication. And while he’s in a giving mood I hit him up for some prostate antibiotics because my left testicle feels very heavy.

“Your left testicle feels heavy?” he says skeptically.

Yeah, every guy gets it, shit; I tell him my left nut feels like an anvil. I mean, I want to cradle it in my hand when I’m out and about, or rest it on a little silk pillow when I’m stationary. It doesn’t really hurt, but I’m very much conscious of having a left testicle, whereas I have teeth and a belly button and a right testicle and I don’t even know. I tell him I don’t want a finger wave, because I’ve been through this a thousand times. My prostate is backing up into the seminal vesicles, and if you don’t jerk off it builds up and gets worse, and the doctor agrees—that does happen, and he doesn’t really want to give me a finger wave, especially when I tell him that a urologist checked it out a couple of months back. He puts on a plastic glove and feels my testicle, pronounces it swollen, and writes a script for antibiotics, after which he tells me to quit drinking coffee. I was going to tell him that I don’t jerk off because I’m a sex fiend; I have low sex drive, and it’s actually not that much fun. I just do it to keep the prostate empty. Or should I tell him I’m a doctor myself, albeit defrocked, that I just got back from Africa and my nut could be infected with elephantiasis? Highly unlikely, but you never know. But he won’t know diddle about tropical medicine—that’s my department, and I decide I will just shut my mouth, which is a first for me.

The duty nurse is pretty good-looking, and she contradicts the doctor’s orders—gives me a cup of coffee anyhow, plus a roll, and we’re sitting there quietly, listening to the other doctor and a nurse fixing the guy with the burned forehead. A little human interaction is taking place and my depression is gone as I begin to feel sorry for the guy with the burn, who is explaining that he was up late with insomnia cooking sweet potatoes when the pressure cooker blew. He was going to candy them with brown sugar and eat them at six in the morning and he’s laughing, too, because of the Dilaudid drip. After Linda Ronstadt sings “Just One Look” on the radio, the announcer comes on and says that we’ve set a record for cold—it’s thirteen and a half below at the airport—and I notice that the announcer is happy, too; there’s a kind of solidarity that occurs when suffering is inflicted on the community by nature.

My own thing is the Vincent van Gogh effect. I read where he “felt like a million” after he cut off his ear. It only lasted for a couple of days. They always show you the series of four self-portraits that he painted at different times in his life as his mental condition went progressively downhill. Van Gogh One is a realistic-looking pic, but as life goes on and his madness gets worse he paints Van Gogh Four and it looks as though he’s been doing some kind of bad LSD, which is how the world had been looking to me until I cut my thumb. It gave me a three-day respite from the blues, and clarity came into my life, and I have to remind myself by writing this down that all the bad stuff does pass if you can wait it out. You forget when you’re in the middle of it, so during that three-day break I slapped this note on the refrigerator door: “Richard, you are a good and loving person, and all the bad stuff does pass, so remember that the next time you get down and think that you’ve always been down and always will be down, since that’s paranoia and it gets you nowhere. You’re just in one of your Fyodor Dostoyevski moods—do yourself a favor and forget it!”

I FELT so good I actually had the nerve to go out and buy a new set of clothes and see a movie, and then, on the last day before the depression came back, I drove out to Western State and checked my baby sister, Susan, out for a day trip. Susan was always a lot worse than me; she heard voices and pulled I don’t know how many suicide attempts until she took my squirrel pistol and put a .22 long-rifle slug through the temple—not really the temple, because at the last minute you always flinch, but forward of the temple, and it was the most perfect lobotomy. I remember hearing the gun pop and how she came into my room (I was home from college for the summer) and said, “Richard, I just shot myself, how come I’m not dead?” Her voice was calm instead of the usual fingernails-on-the-chalkboard voice, the when-she-was-crazy (which was almost always) voice, and I realized later that she was instantly cured, the very moment the bullet zipped through her brain. Everyone said it was such a shame because she was so beautiful, but what good are looks if you are in hell? And she let her looks go at the hospital because she really didn’t have a care in the world, but she was still probably the most beautiful patient at Western State. I had a fresh occasion to worry about her on this trip when I saw an attendant rough-handling an old man to stop him from whining, which it did. She’d go along with anything, and she had no advocate except me. And then I almost regretted going out there, in spite of my do-good mood, because Susan wanted to go to the Point Defiance Zoo to see Cindy, the elephant that was on the news after they transferred the attendant who took care of her, for defying orders and actually going into the elephant pen on the sly to be her friend.

There are seven hundred elephants in North American zoos, and although Cindy is an Asian elephant and a female and small, she is still considered the most dangerous elephant in America. Last year alone, three people were killed by elephants in the United States, and this is what Susan had seen and heard on the color television in the ward dayroom, and she’s like a child—she wants to go out and see an elephant when it’s ten below zero. They originally had Cindy clamped up in a pen tighter than the one they’ve got John Gotti in down in Marion, Illinois, and I don’t remember that the catalogue of Cindy’s crimes included human murder. She was just a general troublemaker, and they were beating her with a two-by-four when some animal activist reported it and there was a big scandal that ended with Cindy getting shipped down to the San Diego Zoo; I think there was some kind of escape (don’t quote me on that) where Cindy was running around on a golf course in between moves, and then a capture involving tranquilizer darts, and when they couldn’t control Cindy in San Diego they shipped her back up here to Tacoma and put her in maximum-security confinement. It was pretty awful. I told Susan that over in India Cindy would have a job hauling logs or something, and there would be an elephant boy to scrub her down at night with a big brush while she lay in the river, and the elephant boy would be with her at all times, her constant companion. Actually, the elephant would be more important than the boy, I told her, and that’s how you should handle an elephant in America—import an experienced elephant boy for each one, give the kids a green card, pay them a lot of overtime, and have them stay with the elephants around the clock. You know, quality time. How could you blame Cindy for all the shit she pulled? And in the middle of this, Susan has a tear floating off her cheek and I don’t know if it’s a tear caused by the cold or if she was touched by Cindy’s plight. The reason they sent my sister to the nuthouse was that you could light a fire on the floor in front of her and she would just sit there and watch it burn. When our parents died, I took her to my place in Washington state and hired helpers to look after her, but they would always quit—quit while I was over in the Third World, where it’s impossible to do anything. It was like, Meanwhile, back in the jungle/Meanwhile, back in the States… Apart from her lack of affect, Susan was always logical and made perfect sense. She was kind of like a Mr. Spock who just didn’t give a shit anymore except when it came to childish fun and games. All bundled up, with a scarf over her ears, in her innocence she looked like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront.

We drove over to Nordstrom’s in the University District and I bought Suz some new threads and then took her to a hair salon where she got this chic haircut, and she was looking so good that I almost regretted it, ’cause if those wacked-out freaks at the hospital weren’t hitting on her before they would be now. It was starting to get dark and time to head back when Susan spots the Space Needle from I-5—she’s never been there, so I took her to the top and she wandered outside to the observation deck, where the wind was a walking razor blade at five hundred and eighteen feet, but Susan is grooving on the lights of Seattle and with her homemade lobotomy doesn’t experience pain in quite the way a normal person does, and I want her to have a little fun, but I’m freezing out there, especially my thumb, which ached. I didn’t want to pop back inside in the sheltered part and leave her out there, though, because she might want to pitch herself over the side. I mean, they’ve got safety nets, but what if she’s still got some vestige of a death wish? We had dinner in the revolving dining room, and people were looking at us funny because of Susan’s eating habits, which deteriorate when you live in a nuthouse, but we got through that and went back to my place to watch TV, and after that I was glad to go to sleep—but I couldn’t sleep because of my thumb. I was thinking I still hadn’t cashed in the script for the pain pills when Susan comes into my bedroom naked and sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Ever since I’ve been shot, I feel like those animals in the zoo. I want to set them free,” she says, in a remarkable display of insight, since that scar in her frontal lobes has got more steel bars than all the prisons of the world, and, as a rule, folks with frontal-lobe damage don’t have much insight. I get her to put on her pajamas, and I remember what it used to be like when she stayed at home—you always had to have someone watching her—and I wished I had gotten her back to the hospital that very night, because she was up prowling, and suddenly all my good feelings of the past few days were gone. I felt crappy, but I had to stay vigilant while my baby sister was tripping around the house with this bullet-induced, jocular euphoria.

At one point she went outside barefoot. Later I found her eating a cube of butter. Then she took out all the canned foods in my larder and stacked them up—Progresso black beans (beaucoup), beef-barley soup, and canned carrot juice—playing supermarket. I tell her, “Mrs. Ma’am, I’ll take one of those, and one of those, and have you got any peachy pie?”

She says, “I’m sorry, Richard, we haven’t got any peachy pie.”

“But, baby, I would sure like a nice big piece of peachy pie, heated up, and some vanilla ice cream with some rum sauce and maybe something along the lines of a maraschino cherry to put on the top for a little garnish. Nutmeg would do. Or are you telling me this is just a soup, beans, and carrot-juice joint? Is that all you got here?”

“Yes, Richard. Just soup and beans. They’re very filling, though.”

“Ahhm gonna have to call Betty Crocker, ’cause I’m in the mood for some pie, darlin’.”

Suzie looks at me sort of worried and says that she thinks Betty Crocker is dead. Fuck. I realized I just had to sit on the couch and watch her, and this goes on and on, and of course I think I hear someone crashing around in the yard, so I get my .357 out from under my pillow and walk around the perimeter of the house, my feet crunching on the frozen snow. There was nobody out there. Back inside I checked on Susan, who was asleep in my bed. When I finally saw the rising of the sun and heard birds chirping to greet the new day, I went to the refrigerator, where I saw my recent affirmation: “Richard, you are a good and loving person,” etc. I ripped it off the refrigerator and tore it into a thousand tiny pieces. Only an idiot would write something like that. It was like, I can’t hack it in Africa, can’t hack it at home—all I can hack is dead. So I took all the bullets out of the .357 except one, spun the chamber, placed the barrel against my right temple, and squeezed the trigger. When I heard the click of the hammer—voilà! I instantly felt better. My thumb quit throbbing. My stomach did not burn. The dread of morning and of sunlight had vanished, and I saw the dawn as something good, the birdsong wonderful. Even the obscure, take-it-for-granted objects in my house—the little knickknacks covered in an inch of dust, a simple wooden chair, my morning coffee cup drying upside down on the drainboard—seemed so relevant, so alive and necessary. I was glad for life and glad to be alive, especially when I looked down at the gun and saw that my bullet had rotated to the firing chamber. The Van Gogh effect again. I was back from Van Gogh Four to Van Gogh One.

THEY’RE calling from the hospital, because I kept Susan overnight: “Where is Susan?” “She’s watching Days of Our Lives,” I say as I shove the .357 into a top drawer next to the phone book. “Is she taking her Stelazine?” “Yes,” I say. “Absolutely. Thanks for your concern. Now, goodbye!”

Just then the doorbell rings, and what I’ve got is a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve seen enough of them on the Dark Continent to overcome an instinctive dread, since they seem to be genuinely content, proportionately—like, if you measured a bunch of them against the general population they are very happy people, and so pretty soon we’re drinking Sanka and Susan comes out and they are talking about Christ’s Kingdom on Earth where the lion lies down with the lamb, and Susan buys every word of it, ’cause it’s like that line “Unless they come to me as little children…” Susan is totally guileless and the two Witnesses are without much guile, and I, the king of agnostics, listen and think, How’s a lion going to eat straw? It’s got a G.I. system designed to consume flesh, bones, and viscera—it’s got sharp teeth, claws, and predatory instincts, not twenty-seven stomachs, like some bovine Bossie the Cow or whatever. And while I’m paging through a copy of Awake!, I see a little article from the correspondent in Nigeria entitled “The Guinea Worm—Its Final Days.” As a doctor of tropical medicine, I probably know more about Dracunculus medinensis, the “fiery serpent,” or Guinea worm, than any. . .