Everyman

At one point, the man to his side, having handed him that day's sports section, quietly began talking to him. He was probably only in his late forties or early fifties, but his skin was pasty and his voice was not strong or assured. "First my mother died," he said, "six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died, a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And that's when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, 'Now we're going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?' And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around and they say, 'Now we're going to cut off your left arm.' Then, when that's done, they come back one day and they say, 'Do you want to quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?' And all the time I was thinking, When, when do I quit? When do I turn on the gas and put my head in the oven? When is enough enough? That was how I lived with my grief for ten years. It took ten years. And now the grief is finally over and this shit starts up." When his turn came, the fellow beside him reached over to take the sports section back, and he was shepherded to the operating room by a nurse. Inside, half a dozen people were moving about in the glare of the lights making preparations for his surgery. He could not locate the surgeon among diem. It would have reassured him to see the surgeon's friendly face, but either the doctor hadn't entered the operating room yet or he was off in some corner where he couldn't quite be seen. Several of the younger doctors were already wearing surgical masks, and the look of them made him think of terrorists. One of them asked whether he wanted a general or a local anesthetic, the way a waiter might have asked if he preferred red or white wine. He was confused – why should the decision about anesthesia be made this late? "I don't know. Which is better?" he said. "For us, the local. We can monitor the brain function better if the patient is conscious." "You're telling me that's safer? Is that what you're saying? Then I'll do it."

It was a mistake, a barely endurable mistake, because the operation lasted two hours and his head was claustrophobically draped with a cloth and the cutting and scraping took place so close to his ear, he could hear every move their instruments made as though he were inside an echo chamber. But there was nothing to be done. No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it for as long as it lasts.

He slept well that night, by the next day felt fine, and at noon, after he lied and said a friend was waiting downstairs to pick him up, he was released and went out to the parking lot and cautiously drove himself home. When he got to the condo and sat down in his studio to look at the canvas he could soon resume painting, he burst into tears, just as his father had after he'd got home from his near-fatal bout of peritonitis.

But now, instead of ending, it continued; now not a year went by when he wasn't hospitalized. The son of long-lived parents, the brother of a man six years his senior who was seemingly as fit as he'd been when he'd carried the ball for Thomas Jefferson High, he was still only in his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.

The year after he had carotid artery surgery he had an angiogram in which the doctor discovered that he'd had a silent heart attack on the posterior wall because of an obstructed graft. The news stu

As always, to keep his mind elsewhere he summoned up his father's store and the names of the nine brands of watches and seven brands of clocks for which his father was an authorized distributor; his father didn't make much money selling watches and clocks, but he loaded up on them because they were a steady item and brought window-shoppers in from the street. What he did with these seed memories during each of his angioplasties was this: he would tune out the badinage the doctors and nurses invariably exchanged while setting up, tune out the rock music pumped into the chilly, sterile room where he lay strapped to the operating table amid all the intimidating machinery designed to keep cardiac patients alive, and from the moment they got to work anesthetizing his groin and puncturing the skin for the insertion of the arterial catheter, he would distract himself by reciting under his breath the lists he'd first alphabetized as a small boy helping at the store after school – "Benrus, Bulova, Croton, Elgin, Hamilton, Helbros, Ovistone, Waltham, Wittnauer" – focusing all the while on the distinctive look of the numerals on the dial of the watch as he intoned its brand name, sweeping from one through twelve and back again. Then he'd start on the clocks – "General Electric, Ingersoll, McClintock, New Haven, Seth Thomas, Telechron, Westclox" – remembering how the wind clocks ticked and the electric clocks hummed until finally he heard the doctor a

The year after the three stents he was briefly knocked out on an operating table while a defibrillator was permanently inserted as a safeguard against the new development that endangered his life and that along with the scarring at the posterior wall of his heart and his borderline ejection fraction made him a candidate for a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The defibrillator was a thin metal box about the size of a cigarette lighter; it was lodged beneath the skin of his upper chest, a few inches from his left shoulder, with its wire leads attached to his vulnerable heart, ready to administer a shock to correct his heartbeat – and confuse death – if it became perilously irregular.