36. "And There the Antic Sits" - Cameron Gunn's Nightmare




William Blake Etching

                   ' - for within the hollow crown
                 That rounds the mortal temples of a king
                 Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

     Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

     Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

     To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;

     Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

     As if this flesh which walls about our life

     Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,

     Comes at the last, and with a little pin

     Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!'     [Richard II, Act 3, scene 2]

Cameron Gunn’s a fighter, determined this is just a minor skirmish to be won. He hasn’t spent a small fortune at Les Mills keeping his body in shape to dissolve in a pathetic puff of smoke at the sign of a little stress. Bad enough having to surrender from work for a spell but hospital is an enemy to be avoided like the plague and it shakes him up to find himself a patient for the first time.

Nights are the worst. In the day he’s busy, in control, the decorations for his prowess in the battle of life visible around him – the best private room, bouquets of flowers on the coffee table, a view over the gulf from his bed, a stream of important people to entertain, staff fussing over him, washing him, feeding him, his secretary visiting with papers to be signed and despatched, constant calls on his cell phone. And there are other daytime distractions: nurses to chat up with a bluff heartiness, titillated by invitations to the pleasures of mounting his Harley Davidson for a ride - at midnight - in the nude; robust globe trotting agency mercenaries, unbowed in the face of sickness and death, who, belying the prim starchiness of their nunlike uniforms, joke with him lewdly about his post operative libido.

“Don’t you fear, Mr Gunn, we’ll get you up,” jests the buxom Katie Koala. “Get you cocked and firing again.”

But in the night he’s alone and sleepless with only his fears to bring to heel. His brain goes into overdrive fighting furiously to combat memories of the past months and defeatist omens of what the next might bring. He curses that strutting faithless Rosalie and vows there’ll be no more leggy air hostesses conquered in exotic places, transmuted into trophy wives to parade their youth in his face and demand, flashing their dark assassins’ eyes, multiple orgasms and bottomless credit. He’s better off alone. Can look after himself. That’s what it all comes down to in the end anyway. Looking after number one, that’s his philosophy. Served him well in the army and served him well in business and he’s buggered if he can see why it won’t serve this campaign too.

Cameron lies on his back thinking of Trevor’s warnings. As doctors go Trevor is fine, even if he is Chinese. Calls a spade a spade and doesn’t lie. But he’s making too big an issue of it all. Growling at his ignoring the symptoms for so long. Worrying about cholesterol and blood pressure and heart rates and stress and PSA counts and telling him he will have to slow down, take things easy, cut back on his work and his drinking and, if the worst scenario plays out, forgo a sex life.

“I’d rather be dead,” Cameron joked.

“That’s an option too,” Trevor laughed.

Not that Cameron is afraid of death. As a tank commander in Vietnam he saw colleagues killed and maimed. Killed and maimed plenty of gooks too in his turn. He witnessed atrocities and slept well at night. In his officer’s uniform, he felt invincible, a master of the universe proudly upholding a family tradition stretching back to the mists of 1854 when one of his ancestors led the dragoons’ suicidal charge on the Russian guns at Balaclava and survived to tell the tale. He loved the rigour of military training and discipline and the sense of physical well-being it gave him. After the army he declared war on his body, joined a regiment of body builders, learned to call his biceps ‘guns’, his shoulders ‘cannonballs’, and vigorously attacked the exercises needed to bomb, blitz, shred, rip, burn, blast, destroy, chisel and torture recalcitrant and undisciplined muscles into shape, his body a battlefield, he the victor. When his business commitments no longer allowed time for body-building he became a gym junkie, a 6am regular rapidly progressing through the ranks of  programmes, from BodyJump’s barbells and weights, squats, presses, lifts and curls, to BodyCombat’s empowering kick-boxing, karate and Tae Kwondo, until he graduated to the explosive energy charged music and moves of BodyAttack’s high intensity aerobics. Then he cycled to work to shower and change in time for the breakfast briefing of his executive troops.

Nor is he afraid of pain, not physical pain at least, though he certainly flinched when blonde svelte Cape Town Kate shoved her little silver cutting tool up his ass and clipped off pieces of his prostate gland for the biopsy. Six times she cut. Six times he flinched.

But mental anguish is as alien to him as the idea that his body fortress is not impregnable and that he might weaken, age and die like lesser mortals. He’s filled with shock and awe that a subversive terrorist the size of a walnut, lurking like some suicide bomber out of sight in the fetid back alleys of his flesh, could secretly and furtively blast him to oblivion. In the dark of the night, scantily clothed in the degrading anonymity of his white hospital smock, the bitter joke of such a defeat seems a cruelly lit obscenity. Cameron feels a tear form in each eye. He brushes the right one away angrily but is too slow to stop the other running down into his ear. His chest heaves with his rapid intake of breath. God, how humiliating, he thinks. What is he? Some self-pitying namby pamby New Age liberal about to cry? For Chrissake, you old bastard, show some backbone, get a grip.

The night nurse, the old blowsy one, shines a torch in his face.

“Are you OK, Mr Gunn?” she whispers.

“Yes. I’m fine,” he snaps.

“Having trouble sleeping? Would you like another pill?"

“Leave it there. I’ll take it later.”

Three months earlier, after Rosalie decamped from their seaside mansion, Trevor, in a pre-emptive strike, prescribed sleeping pills. Cameron didn’t take any but brought them to the hospital in case of just such a catastrophic night time surrender as this. Depressed and war weary, he is systematically adding to his armoury of pills. If it comes to a final blitzkreig, he decides, at least, goddammit, he’ll take back control. Crash and burn to his own command.

And now, in the pitch of night, he stands in terror peering from the edge of the abyss as God’s spirit flees the earth and an evil moonlight floods the sky. He sees great black clouds billowing up over the Western oceans, tanks and guns and steel apocalyptic horses with flaming nostrils rumbling and tossing on their rolling swell, ghostly crows bearing pestilence eclipse the moon and the wolverine sons of blood thunder across the desolate land seeking their nightly flesh as women and children cry for bread. He sees famine, death and all the armies of disease loose in the land, the earth smoking in a cataract of fire and blood, the world in free fall gyrating recklessly helplessly through the cosmos chasing the fading light the dying light the dead light into black holes and sulphurous pits. He sees Lucifer cast down from paradise and the monstrous scaly head of the Great Satan rising over the horizon above the mouldering sea, a swirling red demon spewing thunderbolts from a cavernous mouth. He sees graves and sepulchres give up their gory dead, blazing comets cross the sky scattering ashes through the feverous night, a god of war drunk with blood, a groaning sick heaven vomiting with the stench of death, skeletons in the throat of hell howling for vengeance, and wild men locked in chains crouching naked in fetid swamps shrieking at fiery eagles and screaming lions scavenging on their leprous limbs. He sees the cockroaches inherit the earth as he crawls among the warring oceans the smoking trees the fires of doom and hears the whole of humanity shrilly crying a shrill penetrating cry lacerating in the darkness of his mind ringing ringing in his ears as he claws out in his nakedness and grabs the mindless throatless headless beast and the beast speaks and the words of the beast, drawn torturously from its bowels, reverberate in his head and Cameron hears the voice of the beast and he hears the shrill metallic message of the beast and the beast’s message is for him, his message, the echoing message he wished had come sooner to cut through his consciousness and sever him from the tyranny of the dark, from the terror of the visions of the night, and the beast’s voice, the voice of deliverance, is his voice and the voice says.

“This is your wake up call you old bastard. Have a nice day.”

William Blake etching