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Mercy
From: Columbia University
| By:
Richard Selzer |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Richard Selzer, professor emeritus of surgery at Yale University, wrote the short story "Mercy" during a six-week stay on Lake Como in northern Italy, at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was October, and on the window ledge of his room the flies were dying. "Mercy" appears in Selzer's 1999 book, The Doctor Stories. |
Selzer reads his short story "Mercy." "Three days ago the pain rollicked out of control and he entered that elect band whose suffering cannot be relieved by any means short of death."
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 he climate was full of uncertainty. Should it cool down or warm up? But the flies understood that their time had come. What a lot of energy it takes to die, the frenzy of it. Long after they've collapsed and stayed motionless the flies are capable of suddenly spinning so rapidly that they cannot be seen or seen only as a blurred glitter. |
They're like dervishes who whirl then stop and lay as quiet as before only now and then waving a leg or two feebly in a stuporous reenactment of locomotion. Until the very moment of death, the awful buzzing as though to swarm again. |
I think of a man in New Haven. He's been my patient for seven years, ever since the day I explored his abdomen in the operating room and found the surprise lurking there, a cancer of the pancreas. He was forty-two years old then. For this man these have been seven years of famine. For his wife and his mother as well. |
Until three days ago his suffering was marked by slowly increasing pain, vomiting and fatigue. Still it was endurable with morphine. But three days ago the pain rollicked out of control and he entered that elect band whose suffering cannot be relieved by any means short of death. |
In his bed at home he seemed an eighty-pound concentrate of pain from which all other pain must be made by serial dilution. He twisted under the lash of it. An ambulance arrived at the hospital. Nothing was to be done to prolong his life, only the administration of large doses of narcotics. |
"Please," he begs me. In his open mouth, upon his teeth, a brown paste of saliva. All night long he has thrashed as though to hollow out a grave in the bed. "I won't let you suffer," I tell him. In his struggle the sheet is thrust aside. |
I see the old, abandoned incision, the belly stuffed with tumor. One foot with five blue toes is exposed. In my cupped hand they are cold. I think of the twenty bones of that foot laced together with tendon, each ray accompanied by its own nerve and artery. |
Now, this foot seems a beautiful, dead animal that had once been trained to transmit the command of a man's brain to the earth. "I'll get rid of the pain," I tell his wife. But there is no way to kill the pain without killing the man who owns it. |
Morphine to the lethal dose and still he meows and bays and makes other sounds like a boat breaking up in a heavy sea. I think his pain will live on long after he dies. "Please," begs his wife. We cannot go on like this. "Do it," says the old woman, his mother. "Do it now." |
"To give him any more would kill him," I tell her. "Then do it," she says. The face of the old woman is hoof beaten with intersecting curves of loose skin. Her hair is donkey brown, donkey gray. They wait with him while I go to the nurses station to prepare the syringes. It's the thing that I cannot ask anyone to do for me. |
When I return to the room there are three loaded syringes in my hand, a rubber tourniquet and an alcohol sponge. Alcohol sponge? To prevent infection? The old woman is standing on a small stool and leaning over the side rail of the bed. Her bosom is just above his upturned face as though she were weaning him with sorrow and gentleness from her still full breasts. |
All at once she says severely, the way she must have said it to him years ago, "Go home, son. Go home now." I wait just outside the doorway. The only sound is a flapping, a rustling as in a room to which a small animal, a bat perhaps, has retreated to die. |
The women turn to leave. There is neither gratitude nor reproach in their gaze. At last we are alone. I stand at the bedside. I should be hooded. "Listen," I say. "I can get rid of the pain." The man's eyes regain their focus. His gaze is like a wound that radiates its pain outward so that all upon whom it fell would know the need for relief. |
"With these." I hold up the syringes. "Yes," he gasps. "Yes." While the rest of his body stirs in answer to the pain he holds his left, his acquiescent arm, still for the tourniquet. An even dew of sweat covers his body. I wipe the skin with the alcohol sponge and tap the arm smartly to bring out the veins. |
There's one that is still patent. The others have long since clotted and broken down. I go to insert the needle but the tourniquet has come unknotted. The vein has collapsed. Dammit! Again I tie the tourniquet. Slowly the vein fills with blood. This time it stays distended. |
He reacts not at all to the puncture. In a wild sea what is one tiny wave? I press the barrel and deposit the load, detach the syringe from the needle and replace it with the second syringe. I send this home and go on to the third. When they are all given I pull out the needle. A drop of blood blooms on his forearm. |
I blot it with the alcohol sponge. It is done. In less then a minute it is done. "Go home," I say, repeating the words of the old woman. I turn off the light. In the darkness the contents of the bed are theoretical. No. I must watch. I turn the light back on. |
How reduced he is, a folded parcel, something chipped away until only its shape and a little breath are left. His impatient bones gleam as though to burst through the papery skin. I'm impatient too. I want to get it over with and step out into the corridor where the women are waiting. His death is like a jewel to them. |
My fingers at his pulse, the same rhythm as mine! As though there were one pulse that beat throughout all of nature and every creature's heart throbbed precisely. "You can go home now," I say. The familiar emaciated body untenses. The respirations slow down. Eight per minute, six. It won't be long. |
The pulse wavers in and out of touch. It won't be long. "Is that better?" I ask him. His gaze is distant, opaque, preoccupied. Minutes go by. Outside in the corridor the murmuring of women's voices. But this man will not die. The skeleton rouses from its stupor. The snout twitches as if to fend off a fly. What is it that shakes him like a gourd full of beans? |
The pulse returns, melts away, comes back again and stays. The respirations are twelve, then fourteen. I have not done it. I did not murder him! I'm innocent! I shall walk out of the room into the corridor. They'll look at me holding their breath, expectant. I lift the sheet to cover him. |
All at once there's a sharp sting in my thumb. The same needle with which I meant to kill him has pricked me. A drop of blood appears. I press it with the alcohol sponge. My fresh blood deepens the stain of his on the gauze. Oh never mind. The man in the bed swallows. |
His Adam's apple bobs slowly. It would be so easy to do it. Three minutes of pressure on the larynx. He's still not conscious, wouldn't feel it, wouldn't know. My thumb and fingertips hover, land on his windpipe, my pulse beating in his neck, his in mine. I look back over my shoulder. No one. |
Two bare IV poles in a corner their looped metal eyes witnessing. Do it! My fingers press. Again he swallows. I look back again. How closed the door is. My hand wilts. I cannot. It is not in me to do it. Not that way. The man's head swivels like an upturned fish. The squadron of ribs battles on. |
I back away from the bed, turn and flee toward the doorway. In the mirror a glimpse of my face. It is the face of someone who has been resuscitated after a long period of cardiac arrest. There is no spot of color in the cheeks, as though this person were in shock at what he had just seen on the yonder side of the grave. |
In the corridor the women lean against the wall, against each other. They're like a band of angels dispatched here to take possession of his body. It is the only thing that will satisfy them. "He didn't die," I say. "He won't, can't." They're silenced. |
"He isn't ready yet," I say. "He is ready," the old woman said. "You aren't." |
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