The View from Castle Rock

He says, “Beg your pardon?” in a formal way, to gain time, then is able to tell me, seventy-two. He is trembling slightly all over, but his chin is trembling conspicuously, just the way my mother’s did. In the short time since he has entered the hospital some abdication has taken place. He knew it would, of course-that is why he held off coming. The nurse comes to take his blood pressure and he tries to roll up his shirtsleeve but is not able-she has to do it for him.
    “You can go and sit in the room outside,” the nurse says to me. “It’s more comfortable there.”
    The second strange thing: It happens that Dr. Parakulam, my father’s own doctor-known locally as the Hin-doo doctor-is the doctor on call in the Emergency Ward. He arrives after a while and I hear my father making an effort to greet him in an affable way. I hear the curtains being pulled shut around the bed. After the examination Dr. Parakulam comes out and speaks to the nurse, who is now busy at the desk in the room where I am waiting.
    “All right. Admit him. Upstairs.”
    He sits down opposite me while the nurse gets on the phone.

    “No?” she says on the phone. “Well he wants him up there. No. Okay, I’ll tell him.”
    “They say he’ll have to go in Three-C. No beds.”
    “I don’t want him in Chronic,” the doctor says-perhaps he speaks to her in a more authoritarian way, or in a more aggrieved tone, than a doctor who had been brought up in this country would use. “I want him in Intensive. I want him upstairs.”
    “Well maybe you should talk to them then,” she says. “Do you want to talk to them?”
    She is a tall lean nurse, with some air of a middle-aged tomboy, cheerful and slangy. Her tone with him is less discreet, less correct and deferential, than the tone I would expect a nurse to take with a doctor. Maybe he is not a doctor who wins respect. Or maybe it is just that country and small-town women, who are generally so conservative in opinion, can often be bossy and unintimidated in manner.
    Dr. Parakulam picks up the phone.
    “I do not want him in Chronic. I want him upstairs. Well can’t you-Yes I know. But can’t you?-This is a case-I know. But I am saying-Yes. Yes all right. All right. I see.”
    He puts down the phone and says to the nurse, “Get him down to Three.” She takes the phone to arrange it.
    “But you want him in Intensive Care,” I say, thinking that there must be some way in which my father’s needs can prevail.
    “Yes. I want him there but there is not anything I can do about it.” For the first time the doctor looks directly at me and now it is I who am perhaps his enemy, and not the person on the phone. A short, brown, elegant man he is, with large glossy eyes.
    “I did my best,” he says. “What more do you think I can do? What is a doctor? A doctor is not anything anymore.”
    I do not know who he thinks is to blame-the nurses, the hospital, the government-but I am not used to seeing doctors flare up like this and the last thing I want from him is a confession of helplessness. It seems a bad omen for my father.
    “I am not blaming you-,” I say.
    “Well then. Do not blame me.”
    The nurse has finished talking on the phone. She tells me I will have to go to Admitting and fill out some forms. “You’ve got his card?” she says. And to the doctor, “They’re bringing in somebody that banged up on the Lucknow highway. Far as I can make out it’s not too bad.”
    “All right. All right.”
    “Just your lucky day.”

    My father has been put in a four-bed ward. One bed is empty. In the bed beside him, next to the window, there is an old man who has to lie flat on his back and receive oxygen but is able to make conversation. During the past two years, he says, he has had nine operations. He spent most of the past year in the Veterans Hospital in the city.
    “They took out everything they could take out and then they pumped me full of pills and sent me home to die.” He says this as if it is a witticism he has delivered successfully many times.
    He has a radio, which he has tuned to a rock station. Perhaps it is all he can get. Perhaps he likes it.
    Across from my father is the bed of another old man, who has been removed from it and placed in a wheelchair. He has cropped white hair, still thick, and the big head and frail body of a sickly child. He wears a short hospital gown and sits in the wheelchair with his legs apart, revealing a nest of dry brown nuts. There is