Casey Agonistes by Richard McKenna (F&SF, September 1958) has a narrator who has just arrived in a Tuberculosis ward for terminal patients and, from the very beginning, he tells his story in a strange, nihilistic and anti-authoritarian voice:
You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits. Basic training to die. You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet the masks, and you get the feel of being dead. p. 182 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
I found out they called the head doc Uncle Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo, the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a kind of password.
They said Curly Waldo was sweet on Mary, but he was a poor Italian. Pink Waldo come of good family and was trying to beat him out. They were pulling for Curly Waldo. p. 184, Ibid.
We got mucho sack time, training for the long sleep. p. 185, Ibid.
On the ward the narrator meets a former shipmate called Slop Chute (a sailor who could have come out of the writer’s later mainstream novel The Sand Pebbles), and next to him is Roby who, later on, “doesn’t make it,” i.e. he recovers enough to go back into the main ward in the hospital.
The other significant character in the story is Carnahan, who tells the narrator that he can see an ape:
“He’s there,” Carnahan would say. “Sag your eyes, look out the corners. He won’t be plain at first.
“Just expect him, he’ll come. Don’t want him to do anything. You just feel. He’ll do what’s natural,” he kept telling me.
I got where I could see the ape—Casey, Carnahan called him—in flashes. Then one day Mama Death was chewing out Mary and I saw him plain. He come up behind Mama and—I busted right out laughing.
He looked like a bowlegged man in an ape suit covered with red-brown hair. He grinned and made faces with a mouth full of big yellow teeth and he was furnished like John Keeno himself. I roared.
“Put on your phones so you’ll have an excuse for laughing,” Carnahan whispered. “Only you and me can see him, you know. p. 186, Ibid.
Eventually all the men in the ward are sharing what appears to be a consensual hallucination and laughing at Casey’s antics, mostly when the medical staff appear on their rounds. Later, however, the ape seems to take on some sort of reality, something that becomes apparent when arrangements are made to move one of the men to a quiet side room to die. At this point Casey appears and apparently causes the head doctor to stagger. Then, when Slop Chute’s condition worsens and the staff try to move him, the ape’s intervention prevents this from happening.
Over the next few days Slop Chute deteriorates and has a series of haemorrhages, which the men clean up to hide from the staff. Finally (spoiler), in the climactic scene, the narrator sees “a deeper shadow high in the dark” start to descend on Slop Chute. Casey fights the darkness and initially manages to push it back up to the ceiling, but it eventually envelops both him and Slop Chute. Slop Chute passes away, and Casey disappears—but reappears on the ward a couple of days later wearing Slop Chute’s grin.
This is an interesting piece—it has a distinctive narrative voice, and the subject matter is very different from the other SF of the time—but I’m not sure that the story ultimately amounts to much. Still, a noteworthy piece for its anti-authoritarian characters and bleak, inverted view of death (which I suspect would have been quite transgressive at the time).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,200 words.