(This reprint of an original story written in January 2008 for Carver’s Dog is in honor of the Library of America’s new release of Stephen Crane: The Complete Poems)
The young doctor entered the exam room without knocking. He had the chart in one hand and an affixed smile that sent Stephen’s heart racing at first; he knew that sometimes doctors approached bad news with a smile to mask their own horror. But Stephen quickly ascertained that the smile was genuine, one of pure amusement, and he figured the prognosis couldn’t be that bad.
“Mr. Crane.” The doctor politely nodded, still smiling, and sat down in a rickety desk chair on rollers across from the exam table. He opened Stephen’s chart on his lap, glanced at it briefly, and then looked at the name on the index tab of the folder.
“Crane. Stephen Crane. That’s your real name?”
“For seventy-two years now.”
“Any relation?”
“To … ?”
“Stephen Crane. The writer.”
“Not that I know of, no.” The smile refused to dissolve from the doctor’s thin lips. “Is there something amusing in my chart?”
“Only your name. It’s just, well, sort of funny. I wrote a dissertation on Stephen Crane; in fact, it made the dean’s list.”
“You look barely old enough to be out of high school,” Stephen said.
“Trust me, Mr. Crane, high school was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away.” The doctor tapped a pencil to his lips and gazed out the exam room window. His eyes glassed over in reverent thought. “Red.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Crane. He was fixated on the color red. ‘The Red Badge of Courage’, of course, being the most glaring example.”
The doctor stood, gently tossed Stephen’s chart on the desk chair, and thrust his hands into his hip pockets. He ambled over to the window. The smile had long since departed and Stephen thought that he looked very sad all of a sudden.
“Maggie had red hair. Maggie in ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’. She had flaming red hair. Crane called war ‘the blood-swollen god.’ Blood. Red. It’s everywhere in his work. You want to hear something, Mr. Crane?”
Stephen shrugged his bony shoulders. He really wanted to hear the results of his exam. “Sure.”
“It’s a passage from ‘Red Badge of Courage’. My favorite passage, actually.”
The doctor turned away from the window and closed his eyes as he recited.
“At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. … From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects.”
The doctor retrieved Stephen’s chart, sat down in the chair once again, and crossed his legs.
“Irony is not the word I’m looking for here … but Crane, he died from tuberculois in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. Twenty-eight years old. He died coughing up these huge globules of bright red blood, according to one of his attending physicians.”
Good Lord, Stephen thought, is he trying to tell me I have tuberculosis? Is that what’s been causing the weakness and shortage of breath?
“I guess ‘irony’ is the correct word, in this case,” the doctor continued. “Who would’ve thought that Crane’s fixation on the color red would manifest itself in his own life in such a dramatic fashion?”
Stephen’s patience suddenly evaporated like rain on a hot desert blacktop.
“Goddamnit,” he snapped. “What are the results of my tests?”
When the doctor leaned his face in close to Stephen, he could smell the distinct aroma of bourbon on the young man’s breath.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” the doctor said in a half-whisper that scared Stephen. “It’s a rhyming sequence deserving of a novel. Are you ready for this?”
Stephen’s teeth clenched. “Just … tell … me … the … results, doctor.”
“Okay. Stephen Crane, the first Stephen Crane, I mean, the writer, fixates on the color red, dies coughing up streams of the color red. Now … you, the other Stephen Crane, the other white meat, as it were, well, the results of your tests reveal that you are anemic, Mr. Crane. You’re anemic! From the Greek, meaning ‘without blood’. A deficiency of red blood cells. You know what?”
“What?”
“Most days, life doesn’t get any more amusing than that.”
