“I can’t believe that. What are we supposed to do with him?”
With him, you think. She didn’t say for him. You feel a light whip turn over inside your arm. We all love each other, that is obvious now.
The emergency ward has wide windows that slide open at the prompting of ocean air, warm air that moves in across the sunlit desk. There is a white grit of beach sand on the floor emptied out from the sneakers of hundreds of children who pass the same foot wound back and forth around a giant log in English Bay. You are standing halfway to the sliding door, with a white cast and dark smelling clothes. She is upset, standing behind the desk. She looks to him, we can’t just let him go.
He looks back. We have to. We can’t kill him. He looks to you. I wish we could, but we can’t.
Then they smile. We have to learn how to say goodbye now. You smile back, not so confused by the pitch of emotion as they are. You are, after all, the one who is going to die, the one they’ll think about.
As you leave through the doors you look over your shoulder and see them hook arms; the wave they share to you says: No one has mattered until you, thank you. They have an enthusiasm about where you’re going that you know will take you there.
You decide that you have enjoyed saying goodbye so much that you will spend the rest of the day looking for people to say goodbye to. You make your way to the social services office.
You tell them that you are leaving the province. There are two women behind desks who are visibly relieved.
“Oh, I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
The other, more serious, looks up above her glasses.
“You would die here soon, you know. That’s what happens, I’ve seen it. Good for you. You should go.”
“Yes, yes, congratulations. I think you’ve finally come to something.”
It’s all they can do to remain at their desks and not come around and kiss you. You lift your cast and wiggle your fingers. They return the wave, nodding to your cast. It hangs now from a rear-view mirror. You include everything in the enthusiasm that you feel.
You have trouble finding more people to say goodbye to, and as the afternoon tips toward the end of office hours your Valium stay is starting to come loose. Buildings close in, much like you’d imagine, and you start to react fearfully to the people around you.
Soon you’re in a small parking lot between two cars fighting with two guys. They seem to think the key to the struggle is to pin your elbows together. You remember clearly piping in a voice to throw them off: A calmer head prevails, and, sirs, it is the same head that bites you.
You say in a universally appealing voice: “I can see a straitjacket working rather well in this type of situation.”
It is the first clear sentence that you’ve spoken aloud in weeks. One of the men raises his hand and grunts. He hates you. You grunt back. You’re not saying goodbye to these fuckers. As far as these things go, you’ll just stick to formula and soon you’ll be unconscious. Put there either by the blows they deliver or by violently ducking from hands that reach down to help you.
The next day you are a psychiatric patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital. They start you almost immediately on a diet of Lithium, Amitriptiline and Ativan, with a methadone taper. Fine, you think. You know exactly how long it will be before these drugs change your circuitry. Fine. A long way off. You spend the day sitting on the brand new couch in a tiny smoking room. Floating across the carpet at your feet, like an immense cat, is H/ellen.
H/ellen is about sixty, with long grey hair, and she is pulling at the hem of a light linen smock that is too short. She lies on her side, and you think she must weigh about three hundred pounds. She has the expression of an eight year old in trouble. Around her swollen hand on the carpet lie cigarette spokes. Twelve of them, browned at the tips, but unsmoked, they fan out from her splayed fingers.
“Gotta smoke?”
You flip H/ellen a cigarette. In ten minutes you flip her another, this time watching what she does with it. She puts it in her mouth and reaches down to a pack of matches folded into her sleeve. The heads of the matches are bent up like a fleeing mob and she twists off a stick to strike it. She manages this, rolling onto her back, and she takes the flare before it becomes orange and extinguishes it in the tip of the cigarette. She rolls back onto her side and smiles at you brattishly and asks for another cigarette. You give it to her. You think she confuses lighting cigarettes with putting them out. You think that’s it. You lay your pack open on the floor beside her, and she leaves it alone. Instead, she asks you for a cigarette every five minutes, without taking one. Soon she lies on her belly, drawing her hem midway up her back, rocking the giant white cheeks of her ass in the sun. She looks up at you, flirting and smiling. You return her looks and nudge the pack with your toe, closer to her. She laughs. You’ve surprised her somehow.
And then she says: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”
“What is that?”
H/ellen knocks a cigarette out of the pack.
“Walt Whitman, part-time carpenter.”
You sit up on the edge of the couch, looking down at her face. You don’t know what else to ask. She looks up and licks the air between you.
“Ahhh. There you are. I’ve been looking for you, young man.”
A doctor is standing at H/ellen’s feet.
“Pull down your dress H/ellen. Do you think we all want to see you?”
The doctor pats you on the shoulder and stretches an arm leading to his office down the hall. You follow. As you approach his office you can tell that something is making him uncomfortable. Something is bothering him. You sit in his office and he flips open a file. You can tell he’s not reading it.
“So, so, so.” How twitchy this man is. You see a lot of doctors and you’ve begun to wonder: What on earth do they have in common?
“So, so, so.” He’s trying to say something, but he doesn’t know how. “You’re a painter, huh?”
You milk the painter angle whenever you can, it seems to satisfy something about you.
“Yes.”
“OK, you’re gonna think this is a little odd, but I want your professional opinion on something.”
You squint to picture yourself at an easel, in a paintsmeared smock, with one of those wood things hanging from your thumb. Art history: Cézanne, Polenc, and … and … Walt Whitman. You imagine lifting the back of your smock, flashing your ass at H/ellen, who is your model.
“Sure doc, anything. Shoot.”
“Yeah, so I bought this painting, that one over there.”
You recognize the building in the painting. It’s the Queen St. Mental Health Centre. And it’s painted by Mendelson Joe.
“Yeah, that’s Mendelson Joe, isn’t it?”
The doctor becomes tense again. Your observation is almost too astute.
“Well, I wanted to know if it’s … if you thought, whether you thought it was any good.”
You stand up and square off in front of the painting. You try to raise your hand to your mouth, but the cast clunks against the desk.
“Oh dear!”
You gesture for him to stay seated.
“I’m fine. I’m OK.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Yeah, it’s good.”
The doctor sits up.
“Really? You think so? I thought so. Sort of … uh … primitive, wouldn’t you say?”
You cough and hold your mouth in a plaster palm.
“Yeah, I like this kind of thing. Sure. I was there.”
The doctor nods seriously. You were there. Oh yes, oh, I see. You were there.
You’re lying. You were in the Clarke Institute.
“Well, good. Everything else is OK? We have you on the medication now, do we?”
You cough again.
“Yes, but I think that the Lorazipam dose is too low and I think I need some Percodan.”
You hold out your hands and they jump involuntarily at the air.
You wince and pull your cast to your chest.
“Ah, yes, it’s going to be a rough couple of days for you. I’ll tell the med-girl to double up on that for a while.”
30
No More Zombies
It’s Friday night, so the staff allows the patients to rent a movie and stay up to watch it. The titles patients request are all meant to upset and disturb the nurses. Science Crazed, Phantasm, 2,000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead, Carnival of Souls. The nurse on duty looks at the selection and says: “You don’t think this is funny, do you?”
No one answers; instead, you all look down at her hand, flipping your list against her thigh. Her fingers are yellowed with slick nicotine tips and you look at each other. There is only one smoking room. Where does she smoke? The tiny world of the nurse hiding in the half moons on her fingernails scratches to the surface. This suggests to you, emotionally, negligently, that her people can get away with anything. They would like you to watch Terms of Endearment. You don’t even know how to begin to explain how hateful this movie is.
At the appointed hour she turns off the college basketball game you’re watching and brings a heel down an inch from H/ellen’s face. March Madness. She adjusts the blue of a blue screen with a remote. H/ellen turns her head on the floor and looks at you. She gives the universal sign for being in close proximity to a hated person’s smelly foot. The nurse leaves before the movie begins and it proves unwatchable right from the beginning. Not a fault of the film exactly; the nurse has adjusted the colour up into a spectrum where everyone appears to be wearing huge, flaming life preservers. Jeff Daniels is in more trouble than most of the actors. His character frequently drops his head toward his chest, exposing his face to the charring effects of flame. You each decide silently that the nurse has unwittingly given you the kind of movie you wanted after all. You turn the sound up so loud that the Terms of Endearment are transformed into the Agonizing Screams of Endearment. H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one. You just recycle the ones she doesn’t smoke. She has a beautiful smile. Crazy. All trouble. Never learning.
Just as Jack Nicholson attempts to extinguish the fire covering Shirley MacLaine by driving an ultra-violet car into a white ocean, the nurse comes running across the room. She’s pissed. She turns the television off, looking at no one. She kicks the air over H/ellen and flees the room. The VCR is still running, so it takes a few minutes for people to pull themselves away. When they do, H/ellen and you are left alone to smoke and listen to the movie purring along in its machine.
H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one.
She sits up to grab the cigarette, and instead of lying back down slides over to the coffee table. She looks you straight in the eye as she lifts her little dress up over her hips. She pulls the leg of the table between her legs. You look down quickly and then look up again. She looks down herself, encouraging you to do the same. The foot of the leg is surrounded by her large vagina and she draws it against her flesh by flexing her thighs. She looks back up to you and, while you are looking directly into each other’s eyes, you unbutton the top of your pants and slip down your hand.
You feel for a brief second, Tommy’s laboured breathing. He lays on his back, sleeping, with medication applied to the scrapes on his face and a white sheet pulled tight across his tall chest. He will wake up soon and come to find you. You concentrate on this.
This was exactly twelve years ago. Four days later you will discover a surprising alternative to suicide.
31
Autopsy
In the waiting room of Dr. John Mendez the corpses of a woman and her teenage son are being unwoven from the stiff limbs that have held them through the week. Dr. Mendez lays the bodies out on the floor of an examining room. There are already three other bodies there, stacked on the cushioned table. There is such an abundance of diving board stiffness in the people that surround him that Mendez finds himself performing loose little dances to distinguish himself. He is conscious of not being dead. He is less conscious of the people around him not being alive, and so along with his dancing he’s carrying on conversations with the cadavers.
He jigs down to a squat and pulls blond hair off the youth’s forehead.
“Hello young man.”
Mendez steps around, still in a squat, so that he’s looking across the teenager’s chest.
“Now we have no choice. We’re starting to really get to know one another, aren’t we?”
Mendez places a hand on the boy’s chest.
“You’re a beautiful lad, Doomsday Boy. You’ve backed off a bit from all this, though, haven’t you?”
He lifts the youth’s forearm and his entire upper body comes off the floor.
“I can’t believe that you’re like wood now, Doomsday Boy! Five days ago I said to your mother that little bags of marijuana never killed anyone. And now where is she? There, beside you. What a pair. Like planks of wood! Jesus has left a few carvings for me.”
Mendez pushes the tip of his finger into the hard skin between the boy’s eyebrows.
“I think you were just starting to go crazy with the world — right in here, Doomsday Boy, where your eyebrows are preparing to reach across and join hands. The long Ontario boy, now just a little carving of the rest of the world.”
A telephone rings in the reception area across the hall. Mendez lets it ring three times before tapping the boy’s shoulder with a closed hand and rising to his feet. He counts the other corpses with his eyes. “All you exhausted and serious people. I think I will take a walk to the telephone.”
One week ago the plague of cannibals in Ontario stopped moving. The population that had been crouched in a corner, under the shadow of hands dripping offthe walls, with their own arms held protectively over their heads, had been holding their breaths. One week ago the zombies sat down quietly, the spirit of revenge, of murder, slipping from them. As the population exhaled it felt the silly relief of survival. We began to clean our parks and fields of the dead and the near dead. Slowly the province became less self-absorbed.
We discovered that while we were fleeing from vampires a giant in Texas began tossing babies like footballs from a bridge, breaking their little bodies open against the pebbles of a dried riverbed.
The receding hairline of the land continued its steady progress while we were gone and the little black glasses perched on the world’s nose lost some of their effectiveness. If we can accept our recent history, then we can now take a place among the slow cells that muddy the thought of the world.
Dr. John Mendez has been called to the Campbellcroft Secondary School. A makeshift morgue has been set up in the gymnasium, and the doctor is part of a team sent in to organize the dead. Over four thousand bodies have been hastily piled in this refrigerator. Steam climbs out of the limbs and wiggles, like white worms, across cliffs of dead people. The mist becomes dew on the upper lips of faces that are turned toward the steel rafters.
A plywood table sits in a narrow valley, and on it a body is being opened by Dr. Mendez.
“Well, my sleepy little man, this is a famous nap you’re having now, isn’t it?”
Mendez glides four fingers under the flat upper lobe of the lung he’s laid against Les Reardon’s side. He depresses his thumb through the tiled pink of the tissue, squeezing out a black bubble from within.
“Oh dear, these last few breaths didn’t help matters much, did they?”
Mendez lifts the edge of the body, accidentally pushing the lung from the table. He squeezes his hips against the edge, but the organ slips through and swings under the plywood, suspended like a pendulum. The weight of the lung tugs where it’s attached inside the chest cavity and the heart springs up onto the corpse.
“Little monkeys! Come on, get back up here!”
Mendez rests the chain of organs between the arm and the chest.
“Well, you rascal, before I let you go about exploding all over the place I have something to tell you.”
Mendez drags a thumbnail
through a burnt crust that covers the shoulders.
“Now listen carefully: I think you must have had an awful fire at your back. And as you were opening your mouth to warn me, the air crawled in and blistered you on the inside.”
Mendez piles the organs back into the torn pocket of the man’s abdomen and lays a clipboard against him. He writes the name and age of the man. Death by smoke inhalation. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something’s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Something gentle, Mendez thinks, something in this place.
“Well, I have to put you back in the fire, but why don’t you carry that little space with you, eh? You tell the flames to burn carefully around it.”
Mendez rolls the table on its wheels down through the valley, bouncing it across the wrists and knuckles that cripple out along the banks. The bodies that have been processed are deposited in the girls’ change room, where a team binds them into groups of six. From there they are transported to an incinerating facility in Pickering. Three teenage girls, in blue gym shorts and slack training bras, pull the body of Les Reardon loose from the slivers that hold him to the gurney. They lower him, face down, onto a plastic sheet. Les shares the sheet with the leather tents of two dead cows. Mendez attempts to back the empty table through the door. One of the girls steps off the sheet, wipes red gruel from her hands onto her gym shorts, and holds the door for the doctor.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are a terrible team. Thank you.”
As he turns a corner around the southern mountain, Mendez notices a dark ledge of scorched heads and shoulders. He parks the gurney beneath the discoloured bodies and steps up onto a back that supports his weight. With a pinching grip that breaks through the blackened skin around the back of a woman’s neck, Mendez attempts to pull the body down. The head tumbles out of its spot, surprising Mendez as it bounces to the ground.
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