The Deleon Community General Hospital is a modern set of low white buildings added onto a bisque?colored core, dating from the Thirties, with a Spanish?tile roof and curved grillework at the windows. The complex fills two blocks on the southern side of Tamarind Avenue, which runs parallel to Pindo Palm Boulevard about a mile to the north. Janice spent most of yester-day here, so she knows the way into the parking garage, and which arrows painted on the floor to follow out of the parking garage, across a glass?enclosed second?story pedestrian bridge, which takes them above the parking?garage ticket booths and a breadth ofbusy asphalt and a hexagonal?tiled patio with arcs of oleander hedge and of convalescents in glinting steel wheelchairs, and down a half-flight of stairs into a lobby where street?people, multiracial but the whites among them dyed on hands and face a deep outdoorsy brown, doze beside the neatly tied bundles and plastic garbage bags containing all their possessions. The lobby smells of oleander, urine, and air freshener.

 

Janice, wearing a soft salmon?colored running suit with pow-der?blue sleeves and pants stripes, leads, and Nelson, Roy, Pru, and Judy, all in their airplane clothes, follow, hurrying to keep up. In just one day Janice has acquired a widow's briskness, the speed afoot of a woman with no man to set the pace for her. Also some remnant of old love ? of old animal magnetism revived in this thronged institutional setting not so different from the high?school corridors where she first became aware of Rabbit Angstrom, he a famous senior, tall and blond, and she a lowly ninth?grader, dark and plain ? pulls her toward her man, now that his animal fragility has reawakened her awareness of his body. His, and her own. Since his collapse she is proudly, continuously conscious of her body's elastic health, its defiant uprightness, the stubborn miracle of its functioning.

 

The children are frightened. Roy and Judy don't know what they will see in this visit. Perhaps their grandfather has been mon-strously transformed, as by a wicked witch in a fairy story, into a toad or a steaming puddle. Or perhaps a monster is what he has been all along, underneath the friendly kindly pose and high coax-ing voice he put on for them like the wolf in grandmother's clothes who wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood. The sugary antiseptic smells, the multiplicity of elevators and closed doors and directional signs and people in white smocks and white stockings and shoes and plastic badges, the hollow purposeful sound their own crowd of feet makes on the linoleum floors, scrubbed and waxed so shiny they hold moving ripples like water, widens the ominous feeling in their childish stomachs, their suspicion of a maze there is no escaping from, of a polished expensive trap whose doors and valves only open one way. The world that grownups construct for themselves seems such an extravagant creation that malice might well be its motive. Within a hospital you feel there is no other world. The palm trees and jet trails and drooping wires and blue sky you can see through the windows seem part of the panes, part of the trap.

 

The vaulted lobby holds two murals ? at one end, happy people of many colors work in orange groves above which the sun seems one more round orange and, at the other, bearded Spaniards in armor woodenly exchange obscure gifts with nearly naked Indians, one of whom crouches with a bow and arrow behind a spiky jungle bush. This Indian scowls with evil intent. The ex-plorer will be killed.

 

A skinny strict woman at the main desk consults a computer printout and gives them a floor number and directions to the cor-rect elevator. This family of five crowds onto it among a man who holds a bouquet and keeps clearing his throat, a Hispanic boy carrying a clinking tray of vials, and a big jawed bushy?haired middle?aged woman pushing an ancient version of herself, only the hair not so thick or so brightly dyed, in a wheelchair. She drags her mother out to let other people off and on and then forces the wheelchair's way back in. Judy rolls her clear green eyes heavenward in protest of how obnoxious and clumsy grownups are.

 

Their floor is the fourth, the topmost. Janice is struck by how much less elaborate the nurses' station is here than in the intensive cardiac?care unit. There, the uniformed women sat barricaded behind a bank of heart monitors each giving in a twitching orange line the imperfect beats from the rows of individual rooms, on three sides, with glass front walls, some doors open so you could see a dazed patient sitting up under his spaghetti of tubes, some of them closed but the curtains not drawn so you can see the two dark nostrils and triangular dying mouth of an unconscious head, and yet others with the curtains ominously drawn, to hide some desperate medical procedure in progress. She has home two babies and escorted both of her parents into the grave so she is not a total stranger to hospitals. Here, on Floor Four, there is just a single high counter, and a few desks, and a waiting area with a hard wood settee and a coffee table holding magazines titled Modern Health and Woman's Day and The Watchtower and The Monthly Redeemer. A big black woman, with waxy tight?woven corn rows looped beneath her white cap, stops the anxious herd of Angstroms with a smile. "Only two visitors in the room at a time, please. Mr. Angstrom came out of the ICCU this morning and he's still not ready for too much fuhnn."

 

Something in her wide gleaming face and elaborately braided hair transfixes little Roy; suddenly he begins under the stress of accumulating strangeness to cry. His inky eyes widen and then squeeze shut; his rubbery lips are pulled down as if by a terrible taste. His first cry turns a number of heads in the corridor, where attendants and doctors are busy with the routines of early afternoon.

 

Pru takes him from Nelson's arms and presses his face into her neck. She tells her husband, "Why don't you take Judy in?"

 

Nelson's face, too, undergoes a displeased, alarmed stretching. "1 don't want to be the first. Suppose he's delirious or something. Mom, you ought to go in first."

 

"For heaven's sake," she says, as if Harry's burden of exasperation with their only living child has passed to her. "I talked to him two hours ago over the phone and he was perfectly normal." But she takes the little girl by the hand and they go down the shiny rippled corridor looking for the room number, 326. The number rings a faint bell with Janice. Where before? In what life?

 

Pru sits on the hard settee ? uncushioned perhaps to discourage loiterers ? and tries to murmur and joggle Roy into calm again. In five minutes, with a sob like a hiccup, he falls asleep, heavy and hot against her, rumpling and making feel even more oppressive the checked suit which she put on for disembarking into the Northern winter. The air?conditioning in here feels turned off; the local temperature has again climbed into the eighties, ten degrees warmer than normal this time of year. They have brought this morning's News?Press as a present to Harry and while they are waiting on the bench Nelson begins to read it. Reagan, Bush get subpoenas, Pru reads over his shoulder. Regional killings decrease in 1988. Team owner to pay for Amber's funeral. Unlike the Brewer Standard this one always has color on the page and today features a green map of Great Britain with Lockerbie pinpointed and insets of a suitcase and an exploding airplane. Report describes sophisticated bomb. "Nelson," Pru says softly, so as not to wake Roy or have the nurses hear what she wants to say. "There's been something bothering me."

 

"Yeah? Join the crowd."

 

"I don't mean you and me, for a change. Do you possibly think ?? I can't make myself say it."

 

"Say what?"

 

"Shh. Not so loud."

 

"Goddamn it, I'm trying to read the paper. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb blew up that Pan Am flight."

 

"It occurred to me immediately but I kept trying to put it out of my mind and then you fell asleep last night before we could talk."

 

"I was beat. That's the first good night's sleep I've had in weeks."

 

"You know why, don't you? Yesterday was the first day in weeks you've gone without cocaine."

 

"That had nothing to do with it. My body and blow get along fine. I crashed because my father suddenly near?died and it's damn depressing. I mean, if he goes, who's next in line? I'm too young not to have a father."

 

"You crashed because that chemical was out of your system for a change. You're under terrible neurological tension all the time and it's that drug that's doing it."

 

"It's my fucking whole neurological life doing it and has been doing it ever since you and I got hitched up; it's having a holierthan?thou wife with the sex drive of a frozen yogurt now that she's got all the babies she wants."

 

Pru's mouth when she gets angry tenses up so the upper lip stiffens in vertical wrinkles almost like a mustache. You see that she does have a faint gauzy mustache; she is getting whiskery. Her face when she's sore becomes a kind of shield pressing at him, the crépey skin under her eyes as dead white as the parting in her hair, her whisper furious and practiced in its well?worn groove. He has heard this before: "Why should I risk my life sleeping with you, you addict, you think I want to get AIDS from your dirty needles when you're speedballing or from some cheap coke whore you screw when you're gone until two in the morning?"

 

Roy whimpers against her neck, and two younger nurses behind the counter in the desk area ostentatiously rustle papers as if to avoid overhearing.

 

"You shitty dumb bitch," Nelson says in a soft voice, lightly smiling as if what he's saying is pleasant, "I don't do needles and I don't fuck coke whores. I don't know what a coke whore is and you don't either."

 

"Call them what you want, just don't give me their diseases."

 

His voice stays low, almost caressing. "Where did you get so goddamn high and mighty, that's what I'd love to know. What makes you so fucking pure, you weren't too pure to get yourself knocked up when it suited you. And then to send Melanie back home to Brewer with me to keep putting out ass so I wouldn't run away somehow. That was really the cold?blooded thing, pimping for your own girlfriend."

 

Nelson finds a certain chronic comfort in his wife's fairskinned, time?widened face, with its mustache of rage crinkles and its anger?creased triangular brow, pressing upon him, limiting his vision. It shuts out all the threatening things at the rim. She says, faltering as if she knows she is being put through a hoop, "We've been through this a million times, Nelson Angstrom, and I had no idea you'd hop into bed with Melanie, I was foolish enough to think you were in love with me and trying to work things out with your parents." This cycle of complaint is stale and hateful yet something familiar he can snuggle into. At night, when both are asleep, it is she who loops her arm, downy and long, around his sweating chest and he who curls closer to the fetal position, pressing his backside into her furry lap.

 

"I was," he says, plainly teasing now, "I did work them out. So what were you starting to say?"

 

"About what?"

 

"What you were going to tell me but couldn't because I fell asleep because according to you I wasn't as wired as usual." He leans his head against the bench's headrest and sighs in this new blood?clean weariness of his. Coming down makes you realize how high up you usually are. "God," he says, "it'll be good to get back to the real world. You're sort of right about yesterday, I was stuck, with Mom grabbing the car as soon as you got back. All you can deal for around Valhalla Village is Geritol."

 

Her voice in marital sympathy softens. "I like you like this," she confides. "Just yourself. No additives." He looks, with his tidy taut profile sealed upon his tired thoughts, his thinning temples balanced by his jutting little mustache, almost handsome. The scattered gray hairs in his rat's?tail haircut touch her, as if they are her fault.

 

Wearily in Pru's forgiving tone of voice he hears that she is not yet ready to let this marriage go. He has plenty of margin still. "I'm always the same," he disagrees. "I can take or leave the stuff. Yesterday, maybe you're right, out of respect for the old guy, or something. I just decided to do without. What nobody seems to understand is, it's not addictive."

 

"Wonderful," Pru says, the softness in her voice ebbing. "My husband the exception that proves the rule."

 

"Don't we have any other topic?"

 

"This story," she decides to begin, "of Judy's being trapped under the sail. Aren't the sails awfully small? You know what a good swimmer she is. Do you possibly think ??"

 

"Think what?"

 

"That she was just pretending, hiding from your father as a sort of game, and then it got out of hand?"

 

"So it just about killed him? What a thought. Poor Dad." Nelson's profile smiles; his mustache lifts closer to the underside of his small straight irritated nose. "I don't think so," he says. "She wouldn't be that cool. Think of how far out there it must have seemed to her, surrounded by sharks in her mind. She wouldn't be playing games."

 

"We don't know really how it was out there, or how many seconds it all took. Children's minds don't work exactly like ours, and your father's way with her is to be teasing, the way he talks to her. It's something she could have done not to be cruel but a child's idea, you know, of teasing back."

 

His smile now shows his small inturned teeth, which always look a little gray no matter how hard he brushes them, and flosses, and uses those handles with rubber tips once he gets into his pajamas. "I knew it was a bad idea, him taking her out there when he doesn't know shit about boats," he says. "You say he acted proud of saving her life?"

 

"On the beach, before the paramedics came ? it seemed to take forever but they said it was only seven minutes ? he seemed happy, relieved somehow even with the terrible pain and struggling for breath. He kept trying to make jokes and get us to laugh. He told me I should put new polish on my toenails."

 

Nelson's eyes open and he stares, not at the opposite wall where a dead benefactor's oil portrait preens, but unseeing into the past. "I had that baby sister, you know," he says, "who drowned."

 

"I know. How could any of us ever forget it?"

 

He stares some more, and says, "Maybe he was happy to have saved this one."

 

And indeed to Harry, as he lies on his back drugged and tied down by tubes and wires in what seems a horizonless field of white, the sight of little Judy alive and perfect in each reddishbrown hair and freckle, her long eyelashes spaced as if by a Linotype machine with two?point spaces, is a pure joy. She had tangled with the curse and survived. She is getting out of Florida, death's favorite state, alive.

 

His collapse twenty?six hours ago did have its blissful aspect: his sense, beginning as he lay helpless and jellyfishlike under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at some depth was a coming back home, after a life of ill?advised journeying. Sinking, he perceived the world around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like a cloud of holiday balloons. His many burdens have been lifted away in this light?drenched hospital, this businesslike emporium where miracles are common if not cheap. They have relieved him of his catheter, and his only problem is a recurrent need to urinate ? all this fluid they keep dripping into him ? sideways into a bed pan, without pulling loose the IV tube and the wires to the heart monitor and the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.

 

Another small problem is fog: a football game he has been looking forward to seeing, the NFC playoff game between the Eagles and the Bears at Soldier Field in Chicago, is on the television set that comes out on a tan enamelled metal arm not two feet from his face, but the game, which began at twelve?thirty, as it goes on has become dimmer and dimmer, swallowed by an unprecedented fog blowing in off Lake Michigan. Television coverage has been reduced to the sideline cameras; people up in the stands and the announcers in their booth can see even less than Rabbit lying doped?up here in bed. "Heck of a catch by somebody," said one color commentator, Terry Bradshaw as a matter of fact, Bradshaw who in the Super Bowl at the beginning of the decade was bailed out by a circus catch by that lucky stiff Stallworth. The crowd, up high in the fog, rumbles and groans in poor sync with the television action, trying to read the game off the electronic scoreboard. The announcers ? a black guy with froggy pop eyes, maybe that same guy who married Bill Cosby's television wife, and a white guy with a lumpy face ? seem indignant that God could do this, mess with CBS and blot out a TV show the sponsors are paying a million dollars a minute for and millions are watching. They keep wondering aloud why the officials don't call off the game. Harry finds the fog merciful, since before it rolled in the Eagles looked poor, two perfectly thrown TD passes by Cunningham called back because of bonehead penalty plays by Anthony Toney, and then this rookie Jackson dropping a pass when he was a mile open in the end zone. The game flickering in the fog, the padded men hulking out of nothingness and then fading back again, has a peculiar beauty bearing upon Rabbit's new position at the still center of a new world, personally. The announcers keep saying they've never seen anything like it.

 

He has trouble at first realizing he must perform for his visitors, that it's not enough to lie here and accept the apparition of them like another channel of television. During the commercial, the one for Miller that shows the big black guy lifting the pool table so all the balls roll into the pocket supposedly, he lowers his eyes to Judy's eager face, bright and precise as watchworks free of dust and rust, and says to her, "We learned, didn't we, Judy? We learned how to come about."

 

"It's like a scissors," the girl says, showing with her hands. "You push toward the sail."

 

"Right," he says. Or is it away from? His thinking is foggy. His voice, nasal and husky, doesn't sound like his; his throat feels raw from something they did to him when he was brought into the hospital, something with oxygen, he was half out of it and then all the way out thanks to something they slipped into him in the confusion.

 

"Harry, what do the doctors say about you?" Janice asks. "What's going to happen?" She sits in a chair near his bed, a new kind of vinyl?cushioned wheelchair, like a revved?up version of Fred Springer's pet Barcalounger. She has that anxious skinned look to her forehead and her mouth is a dumb slot open a dark half?inch. She looks in that two?tone running suit and those bulky Adidas like a senior?league bowling champion, her face hard from too much sun, with two little knobs like welts developing over her cheekbones. The delicate skin beneath her eyebrows is getting puckery. With age we grow more ins and outs.

 

He tells her, "One doc told me I have an athlete's heart. Too big. Too big on the outside, that is, and too small on the inside. The muscle is too thick. Apparently the heart isn't a nice valentine like you'd think, it's a muscle. It pumps with a kind of twisting motion, like this." He shows his little audience with a twitching fist: beat, pause, beat, pause. Judy's face is transfixed by the screen of the heart monitor, which he can't see; but he supposes the effort of his small demonstration is showing up in his running cardiogram. Janice watches it too, their four eyes shiningly reflecting the electronic jiggle and their two mouths both open to make identical slots of darkness. He has never before seen any sign of heredity between them. He goes on, "They want to put some dye into my heart, by putting a long tube into some artery down at the top of my leg, so they can see exactly what's going on, but offhand they think at least one of the coronary arteries is plugged. Too many pork chops on top of all that hustle on the court when I was a kid. No problem, though. They can bypass anything, they do it every day now, as simple as plumbing with plastic pipe. They tell me it's amazing, what they've learned to do in the last ten years."

 

"You're going to have open?heart surgery?" Janice asks in alarm.

 

The fist that impersonated a heart feels cloudy and heavy; he lowers it carefully to his side on the sheet, and momentarily closes his eyes, to spare himself the sight of his worried wife. "Nothing for now. Maybe eventually. It's an option. Another option is, this catheter has a balloon in it somehow that they inflate when it's inside the plugged?up artery. It cracks the plaque. That's what they call it, plaque. I thought a plaque was what you got for winning the championship." Rabbit has to keep suppressing the impulse to laugh, at his inability to share with Janice the druginduced peace inside his rib cage, the sense of being at last at the still center. Painkiller, blood?thinner, tranquillizer, vasodilator, and diuretic all drip into his system from above, painting the hospital world with rosy tints of benevolence and amusement. He loves the constant action, the visits to extract blood and measure blood pressure and check instruments and drips, and the parade of firm?bodied odorless young females in starchy cotton and colors of skin from every continent who tend to his helpless flesh with a sexy mix of reverence and brutal condescension, with that trained look on their pretty faces like actresses or geisha girls. His little white?walled room seems in his entrancement to be a stage set, crowded with unpredictable exits and entrances. Semi?private, it even has a curtain, which conceals his roommate, who was burbling and vomiting and groaning this morning but has fallen since into a silence that might be death. But for Harry, the play goes on, and on cue another actor enters. "Here's a doc now," he announces to Janice. "You ask him whatever you want. I'll watch the game and Judy'll watch my heart monitor. Tell me if it stops, Judy."

 

"Grandpa, don't joke," the dear child scolds.

 

The cardiologist is a big red?skinned immigrant Australian named Dr. Olman. He has a pink hooked nose, brilliant white teeth, and bleached lank hair. Years of the good life in Florida have overlaid his clipped native accent with a Southern drawl. He takes Janice's little narrow brown hand into his meaty red one and they become, in Rabbit's eyes, his cardiac parents ? worried little nutbrown mother and outwardly calm and factual father. "He's been a pretty sick lad," Dr. Olman tells her, "and we've got to teach him how to take better care of himself."

 

"What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

 

"The usual thing, ma'am. It's tired and stiff and full of crud. It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status et cetera."

 

That strangely intense and slightly embarrassing Gallo?wine commercial, about the guy who has a blind date with a girl who turns out to be the very liquor saleswoman who advised him what bottle to take the date as a present, comes on.

 

"As best we can tell without cardiac catheterization," Dr. Olman is saying, "the principal narrowing is the standard one, the left anterior descending, the workhorse of the system. Luckily, he appears to have fairly well?developed collaterals, which have kept him going. You see, ma'am, whenever the heart's been starving for oxygen, it tries to develop alternative routes to get blood to the muscle. Also, from the murmur we think we hear there may be a fair bit of stenosis around the aortic valve. Not a pretty picture, but by no means the worst we've ever seen."

 

Janice looks at her husband almost with pride. "Oh, Harry! You would mention the little aches and breathing problems, and I never took you seriously. You didn't complain hard enough."

 

"It was perfect," the girl in the commercial sighingly says, at the end of their date, starry?eyed and in soft focus; you can see they will fuck, if not this date the next, and marry and live happily ever after, all by the grace of Gallo.

 

Dr. Olman has sized Janice up as educable and moves into a heavier sell. "Now, if his luck holds and the lesion isn't located at a bifurcation and there's not too much calcification a lot of doctors would advise you to begin modestly, with an angioplasty, and wait and see. To my own way of thinking, though, you have to offset the relative lack of trauma and expense ? we can't forget expense, now can we, what with Medicare's pulling in its horns and this new chappie's promising no new taxes? ? we have to offset those psychological pluses against the minus kicker, the likelihood of recurrent stenosis and having to do it all over again, the odds of which, to be honest about it, are on the shady side of fifty per cent. For my money, not to keep beating about the bush, the artery bypass is the sucker that does the job. What do you say in the States, never send a boy when you can send a man? Now, ma'am, how much do you want to know about the heart?"

 

"Everything," Janice says, adoring of this man willing to explain things to her, her tongue peeking through as she prepares to concentrate.

 

"Way to go," Dr. Olman gamely says, and makes a big fist with one hand and with the fingers ofthe other begins to show her how the coronary arteries he on the heart's surface, their branches burrowing into the hardworking muscle. Harry has seen this demonstration earlier in the day and signals Judy to come closer to his bed. She is wearing the pink party dress she came down on the airplane in, and the stiff white ribbon around her braided pigtail. Yesterday's experience at sea has given her a sunburn on her nostril wings and beneath her clear green eyes, where her freckles are thinnest. She keeps staring at his heart monitor.

 

"What do you see?" he asks her huskily.

 

"It's like a little twitchy worm, that just goes and goes."

 

"That's life," he tells her. "That's your granddad."

 

Judy yields to an impulse: leaning against the bed, she tries to embrace the old man, disarraying and tugging at the tubes and wires attached to his upper body. "Oh Grandpa," she confesses, "it's all my fault!"

 

Her breath feels hot on his neck. He hugs her, as best he can, with the arm not pierced by the IV. "Don't be silly. What's your fault?"

 

"Yesterday. I scared you out there."

 

"You didn't scare me, sweetie. The Gulf of Mexico scared me. You weren't scared?"

 

Tearily she shakes her head No.

 

This seems another wonder to him. "Why not?" he asks.

 

Her smooth little face gets that tiptoe look which in a mature woman signals that she is about to lie. She says, a bit mincingly, "Yon were out there with me, Grandpa. And there were lots of other boats around."

 

He renews his trammelled hug and her slender little body is unresisting, something has gone out of it; he feels a roughness in his throat, perhaps from yesterday's gulps of saltwater. His eyes film over with the hot relief of tears. On television, men with wide shoulders and narrow hips move like gods on Olympus among the clouds. You can't even see any more who is white and who is black. Blinded though they are, the announcers keep yelling in those straining excited voices they have. A commercial shows a Subaru bumpily climbing a mountain of dead car chassis.

 

"Want to change the channel?" he asks Judy, and moves her hand from his bandaged wrist, where it is hurting him, to the hand control for the television set on its beige metal arm. He lies back feeling the white walls stretch all around him just like the ocean yesterday, his bed a raft. Judy flickers the TV through a wrestling match, a parade, a scare commercial with Karl Malden barking that with American Express Traveller's Checks you can't be robbed, a man and a woman in black skating in a sparkle of ice, a tonguein?cheek horror movie about being a teenage werewolf in London, and another movie called, they learn from the station break, The Fists of Bruce Lee. The kung?fu violence is arresting enough to hold Judy's attention for a few minutes. Fragments of what Dr. Ohnan is confidentially yet, in that peppy Australian way, quite audibly telling Janice weave into the action ? murderous kicks turned into slow motion by the director, graceful blurs of Oriental color. ". .. preliminary test . .. pulmonary congestion common after a myocardial infarction . . . backup of blood, leakage into the lung tissue ... hydralazine ... inflammation of the pericardium . . . Dilantin . . . skin rashes, diarrhea, loss of hair . . . hate to go to a pacemaker for a man this age . . ."

 

Bruce Lee kicks out, once, twice, thrice, and three handsomely costumed thugs slowly fly toward the corners of the room, furniture shattering like fortune cookies, and suddenly Judy has switched channels again, coming upon a commercial Harry loves, for some skin moisturizer whose name he can never remember, but he could never forget the look on the model's face, the way she smiles over her naked shoulder as she slinks behind the bathroom door, and then when she comes out the satisfied wicked purr in her expression, her wet hair turbanned in a bulky soft towel, her breasts showing cleavage but the nipples just off the screen, if only the screen were a little wider, if he could only slow the action down like in a kung?fu movie, for a thirtieth of a second there might have been a nipple, and the way she relaxes into a blue velvet sofa as if ever so profoundly satisfied, lovely eyes closed with their greasy lids, her eyebrows slightly thick like Cindy Murkett's, and then the part coming up where she is dressed to go out for the evening, all moisturized still beneath her gold lam& .... "No, wait, honey": he senses that Judy is about to change channels and reaches out to stop her but fails, it's back to the werewolf, the boy's face is growing fur as he crouches in a telephone booth, and then the ice skaters, the woman sliding backward at you with her little skirt flipped up; and then the back of Harry's wrist stings from the tug he gave the IV, and a flirtatious ghost of yesterday's pain plays across his chest. The Demerol must be wearing off. They gave him a little brown bottle of nitroglycerin on his bedside table next to the telephone and a glass of stale water and he shakes one out shakily and puts it beneath his tongue as they have taught him. It burns under his tongue and then, the funny thing, a minute or two later, his asshole tingles.

 

"How much junk food does he eat?" Dr. Olman is asking.

 

"Oh," Janice says, with enthusiasm, "he's a real addict." His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too?high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station. She looks up into the doctor's big red blond face as if at an instructively beautiful sunset. The two of them make a duo, dividing him up. One takes the inside, the other the outside.

 

Now a turquoise Subaru is spinning along one of those steep spiky Western landscapes that the makers of automobile commercials love. A shimmery model, skinny as a rail, dimpled and squarejawed like a taller Audrey Hepburn from the Breakfast at Tiffany's days, steps out of the car, smiling slyly and wearing a racing driver's egg?helmet with her gown made up it seems of ropes of shimmering light. Maybe Nelson is right, Toyota is a dull company. Its commercials show people jumping into the air because they're saving a nickel. The channel jumps back to the Fiesta Bowl Parade. Youth, flowers, a giant Garfield the cat jiggling majestically along. Harry's internal climate of drugs and their afterwash seems to be undergoing a distant storm, like sunspots or those faint far hurricanes on Jupiter. Along with history, Harry has a superstitious interest in astronomy. Our Father, Who art in Heaven . . .

 

". . . tons of fat through his system," Dr. Olman is saying, "rivers of it, some of it has to stick. Marbled meats, pork sausage, liverwurst, baloney, hot dogs, peanut butter, salted nuts ..."

 

"He loves all that stuff, he's a terrible nibbler," Janice chimes in, anxious to please, courting, betraying her husband. "He loves nuts."

 

"Worst thing for him, absolutely the worst," Dr. Olman responds, his voice speeding up, losing its drawl, `full of fat, not to mention sodium, and cashews, macadamia nuts, they're the worst, macadamia nuts, but it's all bad, bad." In his intensity he has begun to crouch above her, as if over a slippery putt. "Anything made with hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, coconut oil, palm oil, butter, lard, egg yolk, whole milk, ice cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, any organ meats, all these frozen TV dinners, commercial baked goods, almost anything you buy in a package, in a waxpaper bag, any of it, ma'am, is poison, bloody poison. I'll give you a list you can take home."

 

"You can, but my daughter?in?law is studying nutrition. She has a lot of lists already." On cue, Pru appears, hesitantly filling the doorway with her womanly?wide frame in its nappy travelling suit of three?dimensional checks. Unawares, Janice goes on buttering up Dr. Olman. "She's been saying everything you've been saying for years to Harry, but he just won't listen. He think's he's above it all, he thinks he's still a teenager."

 

The doctor snorts. "Even the teenagers with their supercharged metabolism aren't burning up the fats and sugars this country's food industry is pumping into them. We're having adolescent heart attacks all over" ? his voice softens to Southerliness again ? "God's green creation."

 

Pru steps forward, in her three dimensions. ` Janice, I'm sorry," she says, still shy of using her mother?in?law's name, "I know he shouldn't have so many visitors at once but Nelson is getting frantic, he's afraid we're going to miss the plane."

 

Janice stands, so briskly the wheelchair recoils under her. She staggers but keeps her feet. "I'll leave. You say hello and bring Judy when you come. Harry, I'll drop by on my way back when I've put them on the plane. But there's an origami demonstration tonight at the Village I don't want to miss. The man has come all the way from Japan." She exits, and Judy switches off the television in the middle of an especially amusing slapstick commercial for Midas mufflers, and exits with her.

 

Dr. Olman shakes Pru's hand fiercely and tells her, baring his shark?white teeth, "Ma'am, teach this stubborn bastard to eat." He turns and punches Harry with a loosened fist on the shoulder. "For half a century, my friend," he says, "you've been pouring sludge through your gut." Then he, too, is gone.

 

He and Pru, suddenly alone together, feel shy. "That guy," Harry says, "keeps attacking America. If he doesn't like the food here, why doesn't he go back where he came from and eat kangaroos?"

 

His tall daughter?in?law fiddles with her long red hands, twisting at her wedding ring, yet moves forward, to the foot of the bed. "Harry," she says. "Listen. We're stricken at what's happened to you."

 

"You and who else?" he asks, determined to be debonair Bogie at the airport in Casablanca, Flynn at Little Big Horn, George Sanders in the collapsing temple to Dagon, Victor Mature having pushed apart the pillars.

 

"Nelson, obviously. I don't think he slept a wink last night, you were so much on his mind. He can't say it, but he loves you."

 

Harry laughs, gently, since there is this valentine inside him that might rip. "The kid and I have something going between us. Not sure love is what you'd call it." Since she hesitates in replying, looking at him with those staring mud?flecked greenish eyes that Judy's clearer paler eyes were distilled from, he goes on, "I love him all right, but maybe it's a him that's long gone. A little tiny kid, looking right up to you while you're letting him down ? you never forget it."

 

"It's still there, under it all," Pru assures him, without saying what '`it all" is. Her Sphinx?do hair is slightly wild, Harry sees in the brilliant hospital light ?colorless stray filaments stand out all around her head. He feels there is a lot she wants to say but doesn't dare. He remembers how she appeared hovering above him as he lay breathless on the beach, in her white suit with its spandex crotch, anxious and womanly, her face in shadow, unlookable at, and right beside it like a thunder?head the face of Ed Silberstein's son, his salt?stiffened black curls, his butternut skin, his prick making its bump in his tight black trunks, beside the five?sided Omni logo ? a smoothie, on the make, on the rise. Hi?ho, Silvers.

 

"Tell me about you, Pru," Rabbit says, the words gliding out of his hoarse throat as if his being in bed and chemically relaxed has moved them to a new level of intimacy. "How's it going for you, with the kid? With Nelson."

 

People do respond, surprisingly, to the direct approach, as if we're all just waiting in our burrows to be ferreted out. She says without hesitation, "He's a wonderful father to the children. That I can say sincerely. Protective and concerned and involved. When he can focus."

 

"Why can't he always focus?"

 

Now she hesitates, unthinkingly revolving the ring on her finger.

 

As if all of Florida is made up of interchangeable parts, a Norfolk pine stands outside his hospital window and holds an invisible bird that makes the sound of wet wood squeaking. He heard it this morning and he hears it now. His chest seems to echo with a twinge. Just to be on the safe side he takes another nitroglycerin.

 

Pru blurts out, "The lot worries him, I think. Sales have been off these last years with the weaker dollar and all, and what he says are boring models, and I think he's afraid Toyota might lift the dealership."

 

"It would take a bomb to make them do that. We've done O.K. by Toyota over the years. When Fred Springer got that franchise Japanese products were still considered a joke."

 

"That was a long time ago, though. Things don't stand still," Pru says. "Nelson has trouble being patient, and to tell the truth I think it scares him to have none of the old?timers around any more, Charlie and then Manny and now Mildred, even though he fired her, and you down here half the year, and f Jake gone over to Volvo?Olds over near that new mall in Oriole, and Rudy opening his own Toyota?Mazda over on 422. He feels alone, and all he has for company are these flaky types from north Brewer."

 

At the thought of "these flaky types" more of her hairs, glowing like electric filaments here in Florida's fluorescent light, stand out from her head in agitation. She is trying to tell him something, something is slipping, but how can a man tied up helpless in bed track it down? Rabbit has his heart to nurse. This is life and death. His drugs must be wearing off. The deadly awfulness of his situation is beginning to rise in his throat, burning like an acid regurgitation. His asshole tingles, right on schedule. He has something evil and weak inside him that might betray him at any minute into that icy blackness Bernie talked about.

 

Pru shrugs her wide shoulders in delayed answer to his question about how it was going. "What's a life supposed to be? They don't give you another for comparison. I love the big house, and Pennsylvania. In Akron we only ever had apartments, and the rent was always behind, and it seemed like the toilet bowl always leaked."

 

Rabbit tries to lift himself onto her level, out of his private apprehension of darkness, its regurgitated taste. "You're right," he says. "We ought to be grateful. But it's hard, being grateful. It seems like from the start you're put here in a kind of fix, hungry and scared, and the only way out is no good either. Hey, listen. Listen to me. You're still young. You're great?looking. Smile. Smile for me, Teresa."

 

Pru smiles and comes around the end of the bed and bends down to give him a kiss, not on the mouth this time like in the airport, but on the cheek, avoiding the tubes feeding oxygen into his nose. Her close presence feels huge, checked, clothy, a cloud come over him like the shadow of that hull on its side out there on the Gulf, where it was cold and hot both at once. He feels sick; the facts of his case keep wanting to rise in his throat, burning, on the verge of making him gag. "You're a sweet man, Harry."

 

"Yeah, sure. See you in the spring up there."

 

"It seems terrible, us leaving like this, but there's this party in Brewer Nelson's determined to go to tonight and changing plane reservations is impossible anyway, everything's jammed this time of year, even into Newark."

 

"What can you do?" he asks her. "I'll be fine. This is probably a blessing in disguise. Put some sense into my old head. Get me to lose some weight. Go for walks, eat less crap. The doc says I gotta become a new man."

 

"And I'll paint my toenails." Pru, standing tall again, says in a level low voice he has not exactly heard before, aimed flat at him as a man, "Don't change too much, Harry." She adds, "I'll send Nelson in."

 

"If the kid's wild to go, tell him to just go. I'll catch him later, up there."

 

Her mouth pinches down at one corner, her face goes slightly stiff with the impropriety of his suggestion. "He has to see his father," she says.

 

Pru exits; the white clean world around Harry widens. When everybody leaves, he will give himself the luxury of ringing for the nurse and asking for more Demerol. And see how the Eagles are doing in the fog. And close his eyes for a blessed minute.

 

Nelson comes in carrying little Roy in his arms, though visitors under six years old aren't supposed to be allowed. The kid wears the child like defensive armor: as long as he's carrying a kid of his own, how much can you say against him? Roy stares at Harry indignantly, as if his grandfather being in bed connected with a lot of machinery is a threatening trick. When Harry tries to beam him a smile and a wink, Roy with a snap of his head hides his face in his father's neck. Nelson too seems shocked; his eyes keep going up to the monitor, with its orange twitch of onrunning life, and then gingerly back to his father's face. Cumbersomely keeping his grip on the leaden, staring child, Nelson steps toward the bed and sets a folded copy of the NewsPress on the chrome?edged table already holding the water glass and the telephone and the little brown bottle of nitroglycerin. "Here's the paper when you feel like reading. There's a lot in it about that Pan Am crash you're so interested in. They think they know now exactly what kind of bomb it was ? there's a kind with a barometric device that activates a timer when a certain altitude is reached."

 

Up, up; the air thins, the barometer registers, the timer begins to tick as the plane snugly bores through darkness and the pilot chats on the radio while the cockpit lights burn and wink around him and the passengers nod over their drinks in their slots of pastel plastic. The image, like a seed at last breaking its shell in moist soil, awakens in Harry the realization that even now as he lies here in this antiseptic white fog tangled in tubes and ties of blood and marriage he is just like the people he felt so sorry for, falling from the burst?open airplane: he too is falling, helplessly falling, toward death. The fate awaiting him behind this veil of medical attention is as absolute as that which greeted those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like garbage bags full of water. Smack, splat, bodies bursting across the golf courses and heathery lanes of Lockerbie drenched in night. What met them was no more than what awaits him. Reality broke upon those passengers as they sat carving their airline chicken with the unwrapped silver or dozing with tubes piping Barry Manilow into their ears and that same icy black reality has broken upon him; death is not a domesticated pet of life but a beast that swallowed baby Amber and baby Becky and all those Syracuse students and returning soldiers and will swallow him, it is truly there under him, vast as a planet at night, gigantic and totally his. His death. His purely own. The burning intensifies in his sore throat and he feels all but suffocated by terror.

 

"Thanks," he hoarsely tells his son. "I'll read it when you go. Those damn Arabs. I'm nervous about your missing your plane."

 

"Don't be. We got tons of time still. Even Mom can't get lost on the way, can she?"

 

"Drive east from here to 75 and then south to Exit 21. The road feels like it's going nowhere but after three miles the airport shows up." Harry remembers his own drive along that weird highway, the lack of billboards, the palm trees skinny as paint drips, the cocoa?colored chick in the red Camaro convertible and stewardess cap who tailgated him and then didn't give him a sideways glance, her tipped?up nose and pushed?out lips, and it seems unreal, coated in a fake sunshine like enamel, like that yellow sunlight they make on TV shows from studio lights. He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it. He feels his body sweating from fear, he smells his own sweat,? clammy like something at the bottom of a well, and sees Nelson standing there bathed in the artificial light of the world that hasn't broken through into death yet, neat and taut in the puttycolored suit he is wearing instead of the denim jacket he wore on the flight down, but with his shirt collar still open, so he looks like an all?night gambler who took off his tie in a poker game, down here nearly a week and hardly ever saw the sun. The little smudge of his mustache annoys Harry and the kid keeps calling attention to it, sniffing and touching the underside of his nose as if he smells his father's clammy fear.

 

He says, "Also, Dad, I noticed the Deion Sanders case is being pushed back into the sports pages and somewhere in Section B there's an article about fighting flab that'll give you a laugh."

 

"Yeah, flab. I'm flabby on the inside even."

 

This is the cue for his son to look sincere and ask, "How're you doing anyway?" The kid's face goes a little white around the gills, as if he fears his father will really tell him. His haircut is annoying, too ? short on top and too long in the back, that pathetic rat?tail. And the tiny earring.

 

"Pretty good, considering."

 

"Great. This big beefy doctor with the funny accent came out and talked to us and said that the first one is the one a lot of people don't survive and in your case now, for a while at least, it's just a matter of changing your lifestyle a little."

 

"That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

 

Nelson's eyes get dark and swarmy, the way they do whenever his father mentions God. The conversation keeps sticking, it doesn't flow, Harry keeps thinking how he is falling, the kid is like a weight on his chest. Come on, he says to himself, try. You only live once.

 

"Pru told me you were up all night with worry."

 

"Yeah, well, she exaggerates, but sort of. I don't know why I can't sleep down here. It all feels phony to me, and there's all this stuff back in Brewer I should be tending to."

 

"Like at the lot? Between holidays is a slow week usually. Everybody's feeling broke after Christmas."

 

"Well, yeah, and other stuff. I keep feeling hassled."

 

"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."

 

"I suppose."

 

Harry says, "I been thinking about our conversation, about Toyotas being so dull. Give 'em credit, they're trying to sex the line up. They're coming out with this Lexus luxury sedan next fall. V?8 engine even."

 

"Yeah, but they won't let us regular dealerships handle it. They're establishing a whole new retail network. Let 'em, it's going to flop anyway. The Japanese aren't Italians. Luxury isn't their bag."

 

"I forgot about that separate Lexus network. I tell ya, Nelson, I'm not quite with it. I'm in a fog."

 

"Join the crowd," Nelson says.

 

"And oh yeah ? the stat sheets. I've been thinking about that. Are you having trouble moving the used? Don't get greedy. Ten per cent markup is all you should expect, it's worth shaving the profit just to keep the inventory flowing."

 

"O.K., Dad. If you say so. I'll check it out."

 

The conversation sticks again. Roy squirms in his father's grip. Harry is falling, the light is just a skin of the dark, thinner than an airplane's skin, thinner than an aluminum beer can. Grab something, anything. "She's turned out to be quite a fine woman, Pru," he volunteers to his son.

 

The boy looks surprised. "Yeah, she's not bad." And he volunteers, "I should try to be nicer to her."

 

"How?"

 

"Oh ? you know. Clean up my act. Try to be more mature."

 

"You always seemed pretty mature to me. Maybe too, early on. Maybe I didn't set such a good example of maturity."

 

"All the more reason, then. For me, I mean."

 

Does Harry imagine it, or is there a stirring, a tiny dry coughing, behind the curtain next to him, in the bed he cannot see? His phantom roommate lives. He says, "I'm really getting anxious about you making your plane."

 

"Sorry about that, by the way. I feel crummy leaving. Pru and I were talking last night, if we ought to stay a few more days, but, I don't know, you make plans, you get socked in."

 

"Don't I know it. What could you do, staying? Your old man's fine. He's in great hands. I just have to learn to live with a not so great heart. A bum ticker. Charlie's done it for twenty years, I can do it." But then Rabbit adds, threatening to pass into the maudlin, the clingy, the elegiac, "But, then, he's a wiry little Greek and I'm a big fat Swede."

 

Nelson has become quite tense. He radiates a nervous desire to be elsewhere. "O.K., Dad. You're right, we'd better get moving. Give Grandpa a kiss," he tells Roy.

 

He leans the boy in, like shovelling off a wriggling football, to kiss his grandfather's cheek. But Roy, instead of delivering a kiss, grabs the double?barrelled baby?blue oxygen tube feeding into Harry's nose and yanks it out.

 

`Jesus!" Nelson says, showing emotion at last. "You all right? Did that hurt?" He whacks his son on the bottom, and sets him down on the floor.

 

It did hurt slightly, the sudden smarting violence of it, but Harry has to laugh. "No problem," he says. "It just sits in there, like upside?down glasses. Oxygen, I don't really need it, it's just one more perk."

 

Roy has gone rubber?legged with rage and collapses on the shiny floor beside the bed. He writhes and makes a scrawking breathless noise and Nelson bends down and hits him again.

 

"Don't hit the kid," Harry tells him, not emphatically. "He just wanted to do me a favor." As best he can with his free hand, he resettles the two pale?blue tubes one over each ear as they come from the oxygen box hung on the wall behind him and resettles the clip, with its gentle enriching whisper, on his septum. "He maybe thought it was like blowing my nose for me."

 

"You little shit, you could have killed your own grandfather," Nelson explains down at the writhing child, who has to be hauled, kicking, out from under the bed.

 

"Now who's exaggerating," Harry says, "I'm tougher to kill than that," and begins to believe it. Roy, white in the gills just like his dad, finds his voice and lets loose a yell and tries to throw himself out of Nelson's grasp. The rubber heels of nurses are hurrying toward them down the hall. The unseen roommate suddenly groans behind his white curtain, with a burbly, deep?pulmonary?trouble kind of groan. Roy is kicking like a landed fish and must be catching Nelson in the stomach; Harry has to chuckle, to think of the child doing that. On one grab: deft. Maybe in his four?yearold mind he thought the tubes were snakes eating at his grandfather's face; maybe he just thought they were too ugly to look at.

 

Full though his arms are, Nelson manages to lean in past the tangle of life?supporting connections and give Harry's cheek the quick kiss he meant Roy to bestow. A warm touch of mustache. A sea?urchin's sting. The watery monster stirring behind the bed curtain releases another burbling, wracking groan from the deeps. Alarmed nurses enter the room; their cheeks are flushed. The head nurse looms, with her waxy woven tresses, like oodles of black noodles or packets of small firecrackers.

 

"Oh yeah," Harry thinks to add as Nelson hurries his yelling, writhing burden away, down the hall, toward Pennsylvania. "Happy 1989!"