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A Novel
by Garth Greenwell
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They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale. It was like someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked, trying to turn me inside out and failing and trying again. Like that, while somebody else kneed me in the groin. For eight hours on Saturday, I said—On Saturday, someone interrupted, I was surrounded by people at this point, some busy with IVs or electrodes but most, it seemed, just looking at me, asking me to answer questions I had already answered, wanting to hear everything afresh. In my own words, they said, not the words they had heard from others, the words that had summoned them here, from all corners of the huge hospital I was lucky to have almost in my backyard, just a mile from my house—on Saturday and you waited until today to come in, the voice said, you must be the stoic type. Stoic or stupid, I thought. For eight hours I had lain on the sofa in the room where I write, where I spend most of my time, reading or writing, though really I hadn't lain, I had crouched on all fours, I had curled into myself, clutching my stomach, I had held my balls as if to shield them in my hand. It didn't occur to me to go to the hospital, in part because for months I had thought of hospitals and doctors, of medical offices of all kinds, as the last places one would go for help, as dangerous places, in the pandemic the likeliest places to get infected, everyone I knew felt the same. Only if you were dying would you go to the hospital and it didn't occur to me that I could be dying. I wonder if anyone ever imagines they're dying, even as it happens, or if anyone imagines it without being sick for a long time, people like me, I mean, who have always been more or less healthy and more or less strong, hale, as my grandparents said, as my mother sometimes says, or said until now, counting her blessings, all of her children hearty and hale. I didn't imagine anything as I lay there, as I crouched or curled, nothing occurred to me, when I try to remember my thoughts they come broken and scrambled. I be- came a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul. I spoke only once, when L came down from his office upstairs—we both work during the day, we're used to hours of silence, our life together depends on measuring out solitude and company—and tapped on my door and receiving no reply opened it slowly, gingerly, until he saw me where I lay and spoke in alarm. What happened, he said, what's wrong, he was speaking Spanish though it was an English day, we alternate days, each of us likes living in the other's language. I must have grunted or moaned, made some sound, because he said But tell me, please, what is it, and I told him I was sick, it was the most I could manage, I said I was sick through gritted teeth, taking shallow breaths; if I breathed too deeply the pain was worse, the fist in my gut twisted at the wrist. Vamos al médico, L said, his tone resolute, stern, he knelt by the sofa and put his hand on my back, right now, vamos. When I shook my head no he began to argue, an argument we've had often, anytime I feel even slightly unwell he insists we go to the doctor; in his country the health system works as it should, he has a European sense of what it means to be ill. Always, nearly always, I refused, even before the pandemic; I've always hated doctors, a sense I got as a child, I suppose, that things usually pass, that doctors waste your money and your time, you wait for hours and they send you home the same or sicker. An American attitude or a Kentucky attitude maybe, most of my siblings share it. But I couldn't argue with him now, I said Please, guapo, I can't, and when he started to speak again I said please, I love you, I can't talk, I need to be alone. I knew it would hurt him but it was true, I couldn't be considerate, pain had sealed me off from sociability. Okay, he said, standing up, okay bello, these were our names for each other, guapo and bello, silly lovers' names, and then he left without saying anything more, closing the door quietly behind him.
Excerpted from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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