Everything You Know

Book by Heller Zoe

This afternoon, as I came awake from one of those thin, un-refreshing hospital naps, a strange woman was standing over my bed. She was unusually tall -- maybe six foot -- with a sad, too-long face and a wonky right eye.

"Mr. Muller?" she said. "I hope I didn't disturb you. My name is Vivian Champ. I'm a post-trauma counsellor."

I shifted slightly, dragging my body up towards the headboard and causing a gust of fuggy air to rise up from the sheets. Vivian's right eye veered about like a restless marble, making her left eye seem peculiarly still and glaring.

"Are you going to give me a bath?" I asked her. (Bathing is a rare and exotic privilege in the modern American hospital regime. In the entire fortnight I have been at the Beverly Memorial, I have been steadfastly refused anything more than a once-a-day wash-down with a chemically moistened cotton-nylon napkin.)

Vivian cocked her head and laughed a tinkling, girlish laugh. "No, Mr. Muller. I'm just here for a chat. How are you feeling?"

There was a short silence while I riffled through a selection of nasty responses and decided, finally, that I couldn't be bothered with any of them.

"I've brought something you might want to listen to," Vivian said when it had become clear that I was not going to reply. She produced a cassette tape from her handbag. On its cover there was a line-drawing of two hippy types sitting cross-legged, with their eyes closed. The title of the cassette was Meditation Chants and Prayers for the Sick.

"What about a cigarette?" I asked. Vivian smiled at me tolerantly. She wasn't going to be provoked. Smoking is the ultimate no-no here. They'd sooner you shot heroin -- they'd sooner you had a bath -- than that you partook of tobacco. Early on in my stay, I made a big stink about the no-smoking thing. I threatened a hunger strike. I yelled and made my eyes roll back in my head. I reduced two nurses to tears. But none of this got me a smoke. They're hard bastards, these medical people.

"I don't have anything to play it on," I told Vivian, gesturing at her tape.

"Don't worry," she said. "I can arrange a Walkman for you." She bit at her lips, allowing me a glimpse of her mottled teeth.

"Thank you," I said, "but I'm not interested."

"Why is that?" Her right eyeball seemed to become more agitated.

"What do you mean, why?" There was a nervous defiance in her tone that I meant to squash. "I'm just not interested. I want a bath."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I sense a lot of anger from you. What do you think you are angry about?"

"Look," I said with a high, fake laugh. "I appreciate what you're trying to do for me, but I don't want the tape."

She nodded again. "You know, you've been through a very difficult experience. Your main enemy now is stress."

I had had enough of this ugly person. "No," I said. "No. My main enemy now is you."

Vivian stiffened and blinked. "This is obviously not a good time," she said. She put the tape down on my bedside table. "I'll leave this here for you in case you change your mind." Then she turned and left. I watched the great, fleshy pistons of her buttocks chug lazily up and down in her nylon slacks as she loped from the room.

Depression and irritability are common symptoms among cardiac patients. My doctor told me so the other day, after I had thrown a stale bagel at one of the Asian trolls who bring me my breakfast. Naturally, I resented his banal diagnosis. Maybe this has nothing to do with my heart! I wanted to shout at him. Maybe I'm having a nervous breakdown!
* * * * * * * * *

All summer I have been feeling fretful, off-kilter -- lurching back and forth between deathly exhaustion and manic energy. Work has been a big problem. My pending task is to write the autobiography of Reginald Boon, former king of daytime television. But last year, shortly before I signed on for the Reg work, my agent managed to sell some producer the film option on my memoir, To Have and to Hold, for fifteen grand. And then, when the project got taken on by Curzon Studios, he got me hired to write the screenplay for another twenty. This was a pretty good haul for a book that's been sold five times over in the last eight years and a screenplay that, unbeknownst to the studio, has been sitting in my desk drawer for just as long. But thirty-five thousand dollars, when you come down to it, is a most unsatisfactory sum -- not nearly enough to allow me to turn down the Boon project and just sufficient to discourage me from doing any work on it. The first draft of Boon was due two months ago, at the beginning of July. Since June, cushioned by my ill-gotten and rapidly dwindling gains, I have been stuck, revving helplessly, on the tenth sentence of Chapter One. I cannot write a single word. No, that's not true. I can write endless, scabrous fantasies about Boon's family and friends. I can compose scads of pornographic limericks about his boyhood in Idaho. I just can't produce the lighthearted, anecdotal look at the life and times of one of TV-land's greats that is required. Most days, this summer, I have spent collapsed on my sofa, flicking through furniture catalogues and eating cream cheese straight from the tub.

Then there was the other thing. One morning, two weeks ago, shortly after I had returned from breakfast at the local mall, I received a parcel in the mail from my youngest daughter, Sadie. This was an odd occurrence, because Sadie had not communicated with me -- postally or otherwise -- for many years. Also, she had been dead for approximately four months.

She died this past May. She killed herself with Mogadons and paracetamols mashed up in Bailey's Irish Cream. A neighbour had been looking after her baby daughter, Pearl, for the night, and when this woman came round the next day to drop the child off, she looked through the letterbox and saw Sadie's blueish leg jutting out from the kitchen onto the hallway lino. Four days afterwards, Sadie was in the ground, buried next to her mother in Highgate Cemetery.

The family made it clear I was not welcome at the funeral, which was fine by me -- I wasn't so crazy to attend in any case. (My sister, Monika, rang later to tell me how it went, and apparently the man who did the service referred to Sadie throughout as "Sody.") Pearl, now an orphan (her father having absconded shortly after her conception), has been taken to live with her great-aunt Margaret in the north of England.

If I am sounding lachrymose or self-pitying, I apologize. The last thing I want to do is whine. Since it happened, I have been busy as a bee, calculating my blessings and registering all the small mercies that were afforded in this instance. Sadie might have done herself in in any number of vulgar or grotesque ways. She might have been a jumper. Or a slasher. She might have hanged herself from a light fixture after listening to Satanic messages in pop songs played backwards. As it was, she merely mixed herself a muddy cocktail using a plastic pestle and mortar borrowed from her daughter's Little Miss Chef set. So, lest there be any confusion, let me acknowledge right here: It Could Have Been Worse.

The address on Sadie's parcel had the wrong postcode, and the postmark was blurred. Judging from the proliferation of scribbled emendations covering the parcel's brown paper, it had been on a brutal odyssey through the California postal system. Luckily, I had never seen Sadie's adult handwriting before, so I didn't realize straight away that the parcel was from her, and I was saved from having a freak-out in front of the postman. My first thought, as I stood there at the door signing for it, was that I had been sent a bomb. I experienced a brief, Technicolor vision of exploding fertilizer, raining nails, costly facial reconstruction. And then I saw British stamps, and relaxed. Oh, I thought. Just hate mail.

I have been receiving tokens of animosity through the post for eleven years, ever since I was first accused of killing my wife, Oona. In 1970, during a marital spat, Oona broke her skull on a refrigerator door handle and died. I was subsequently convicted of manslaughter and spent a short time in prison before being found innocent on appeal. The hate mail comes, as one might expect, from people who approved of the first verdict and were disappointed by the second. Mostly, it is frothy-mouthed, green-ink rants from ladies in Hemel Hempstead. But every now and then I receive oozy, suppurating objects -- animal organs, bodily excretions, et cetera. For several months back in 1973, someone in west London express-mailed me a weekly lump of human shit -- his or her own, presumably -- each one tremulously wrapped in cling-film and silver foil. For five years or so another anonymous enemy kept up a monthly consignment of offal. And there is one tenacious individual who, for nearly a decade now, has specialized in soiled sanitary towels and crumpled paper handkerchiefs caked with snot. I have no strong evidence, but a vibration tells me that the individual in question is my wife's younger sister, Margaret -- the one who now has charge of Pearl.

Margaret has always hated me. When Oona and I were newlyweds and Margaret was still a social-work student, she used to come and stay with us in London. She would sit knitting in corners, playing the snide country mouse -- "Shop-bought flowers! How grand!" -- and moaning about the fact that she couldn't get laid. Later, she press-ganged Bill into marrying her, and the two of them went to live in righteous poverty on the outskirts of Leeds. Oona and I once went to visit them on our way to Scotland. Bill made us macaroni cheese for dinner, and afterwards we all had to do the washing-up together while Margaret and Bill sang "Green Grow the Rushes-o" ...