The Four Fingers of Death Read Online Free PDF

disgust me.”
She flung one of the volumes at me. Something French.
“Are you sure you’re not just feeling bad because of the withdrawal?”
“You don’t know anything about it! You think you know what this feels like? You think I’m stupid? Get out of here, get out of this room right now, and don’t come back.”
“I’m trying to be supportive, in this your—”
“I’ll tell you what your kind of life is; do you want to know what your kind of life is? The boring kind. Your idea is that maybe you’ll sit around for a little while and listen to some jazz on the web, on some web site that’s about to go out of business because not one person has ever listened to any of the shit that they play on there—”
“Tara—”
Because when she got started…
“Boring, boring, everything you do is boring, with your goddamned baseball statistics—”
“I thought you liked baseball—”
“—and your old books; who’s going to read all these books, and they just sit around here and no one reads them, and you expect me to have to look at all this shit, when all I want to do is be where the action is, you know, where there’s a little energy and enthusiasm left in the—”
The third day was the same, except that she asked for a copy of Seven Ways to Accept the Wisdom of Your Illness , by some Tibetan Rinpoche or other. She got through exactly one of the seven ways before she got up from bed to throw that one out the window. I found it among the prickly pears a few weeks later.
I spent the next two days in the living room doing part-time telemarketing. We needed the few extra dollars to cover some of what I hoped would be Tara’s final wagers.
When she rose on the fifth day, her hair was wound into the whorls that kids favor when they are sucking their thumbs, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she was wearing only a diaphanous nightgown. With her swollen fingers and toes, she looked like she’d come from deepest space, from the great interstellar beyond, but one look at the smile on her face and I knew that the cure had finally taken. At least for now. She was rolling her oxygen tank behind her, like it was a child’s pull toy or a Pomeranian.
“Are you back?” I asked.
“I am back.”
“And how do you feel?”
“Like I licked the inside of my crematorium.”
“Which means?”
“Keep me in the dark about current events until further notice. Even a local news site is going to set something off. I mean, maybe I could read some coupons or a cereal box or something, but not much more.”
“Are you going to take back any of those things you—”
“Monty, you know that I’m not responsible. It’s like delirium tremens.”
She lay down on the sofa and put her head in my lap, and that was a moment I often thought about two or three years later when I found myself in the waiting room of the hospital, eating from the vending machines. The day on which the helicopter carrying the world-renowned Sino-Indian surgeon landed on the roof. (And this was only one of the many, many add-ons that your health insurance provider doesn’t deem reasonable and customary.) In the OR, they were taking the lungs out of the six-pack holder in the refrigerator, in order to test this first donor lung, to make sure it was still in good working order. Then they began talking about my wife’s condition, which, they remarked, was going to slay George’s squeaky-clean lungs, just as it had slain her own, and which made the whole transplant a complex undertaking for anyone, because, they said, my wife, Tara, was going to perish . I would never see Tara with gray hair, and I would never see her worrying about how fat she had gotten in old age; I would never see her liver spots and think how beautiful are these spots , I would never see Tara dandling a malevolent toddler on her knee, she would never bust out her identification card for seniors’ night at the movies. And I would never see her on the deck of a cruise ship in the Caribbean,