Still Here, Still There by Richard Bausch

Author:Richard Bausch [Bausch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

VI

Marson’s morning had begun with an old affliction—a recurring condition the doctors called corneal erosion. He had suffered with it intermittently for at least thirty years, and sometimes several years would go by without an attack. But it always returned. Perhaps this time it was the dehydrating ride in the jet from Memphis to Washington. But the truth was that neither he nor the doctors had ever really been able to discern a pattern or a cause. One doctor, not an ophthalmologist but a good general practitioner, attributed it to dryness, to having a fan blowing on you in the nights. But Marson never put a fan on, had always slept under blankets, even in the summer.

At any rate, in the predawn he woke from a busy dream of an airline cabin, two rows of seats crowded with weary passengers going off into the vanishing point, and immediately he felt the pain in his left eye. The condition did not endanger his sight or damage the tissue, but it was as if there were a small shard of glass under the lid. It hurt to move the eye, opening or closing it. Any slight motion of it, to either side, up or down, was excruciating. The only thing he could do was put some ointment in it and lie flat with eyes closed until the pain went away. Sometimes this took hours. His son snored in the next bed and made sudden gasping noises. Marson got up quietly and moved into the bathroom. The ointment was in his shaving kit.

Later, in bed again, he felt a pressure at the middle of his chest, a familiar and old sensation, having to do with the skein of muscle tissue on either side of his breastbone. He had strained it lifting his suitcase into the back of the car, in Memphis.

And still, of course, he thought of his heart. What else do you think about at this age in the nights, with your seventy-one-year-old son snoring in the bed next to you? The eye stung and watered; his chest hurt. He thought of Schmidt. Eugene Schmidt. He remembered the cold and the misery, the loneliness, even as you moved with others, even as you heard their voices, voices that you clung to though they drove you toward breaking down. Sounds grated on your nerves. Something singing amid the sprigs of pine where you walked, some small helplessly cheerful-sounding creature, and you wondered what could possibly live in this dead place, while you hoped to be able to kill it to stop its noise, and you went on, breathing gas and smoke and powder, and the memory-obliterating, sick-sweet, weighing-you-down stench of death.

“Bad,” he murmured, lying there in the hotel bed. “God. Help.” There was always the fear of breaking to pieces. He thought of the others, the dead, saw their faces colorless as cold water. This was what he had been afraid of, going into this situation where all of it could come rushing through the opening you made in memory.

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