Trust Me by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

longer in a tweed jacket but in a lime-green hospital garment, and now jubilant, bending close. He held up the crooked little finger of one hand before Carson’s eyes, which could not focus. “Fat as that,” he called through a kind of wind.
    “What size should it have been?” Carson asked, knowing they were discussing his appendix.
    “No thicker than a pencil,” came the answer, tugged by the bright tides of contagious relief.
    “But when did you sleep?” Carson asked, and was not answered, having overstepped.
    Earlier, he had found himself in an underground room that had many stalactites. His name was being shouted by a big gruff youth. “Hey Bob come on Bob wake up give us a little smile that’s the boy Bob.” There were others besides him stretched out in this catacomb, whose ceiling was festooned with drooping transparent tubes; these were the stalactites.Within an arm’s length of him, another man was lying as motionless as a limestone knight carved on a tomb. Carson realized that he had been squeezed through a tunnel—the arm straps, the swollen rubber—and had come out the other side. “Hey, Bob, come on, give us a smile.
Thaaat’s
it.” He had a tremendous need to urinate; liquid was being dripped into his arm.
    Later, after the windy, glittering exchange with the surgeon, Carson awoke in an ordinary hospital room. In a bed next to him, a man with a short man’s sour, pinched profile was lying and smoking and staring up at a television set. Though the picture twitched, no noise seemed to be coming from the box. “Hi,” Carson said, feeling shy and wary, as if in his sleep he had been married to this man.
    “Hi,” the other said, without taking his eyes from the television set and exhaling smoke with a loudness, simultaneously complacent and fed up, that had been one of Carson’s former wife’s most irritating mannerisms.
    When Carson awoke again, it was twilight, and he was in yet another room, a private room, alone, with a sore abdomen and a clearer head. A quarter-moon leaned small and cold in the sky above the glowing square windows of another wing of the hospital, and his position in the world and the universe seemed clear enough. His convalescence had begun.
    In the five days that followed, he often wondered why he was so happy. Ever since childhood, after several of his classmates had been whisked away to hospitals and returned to school with proud scars on their lower abdomens, Carson had been afraid of appendicitis. At last, in his sixth decade, the long-dreaded had occurred, and he had comported himself, he felt, with passable courage and calm.
    His scar was not the little lateral slit his classmates hadshown him but a rather gory central incision from navel down; he had been opened up wide, it was explained to him, on the premise that at his age his malady might have been anything from ulcers to cancer. The depth of the gulf that he had, unconscious, floated above thrilled him. There had been, too, a certain unthinkable intimacy. His bowels had been “handled,” the surgeon gently reminded him, in explaining a phase of his recuperation. Carson tried to picture the handling: clamps and white rubber gloves and something glistening and heavy and purplish that was his. His appendix had indeed been retrocecal—one of a mere ten percent so located. It had even begun, microscopic investigation revealed, to rupture. All of this retrospective clarification, reducing to cool facts the burning, undiscourageable demon he had carried, vindicated Carson. For the sick feel as shamed as the sinful, as fallen.
    The surgeon, with his Ivy League bearing, receded from that moment of extreme closeness when he had bent above Carson’s agony and decided to handle his bowels. He dropped by in the course of his rounds only for brief tutorial sessions about eating and walking and going to the bathroom—all things that needed to be learned again. Others came forward. The slightly amused dark Slavic woman