by John Jodzio
I didn’t want to lose contact with the body, so I kept my right foot on its head while my left foot explored the rest. I could tell the body was wearing a blazer or something that had a shitload of buttons on it; there was a long skirt, a pair of boots with a large heel.
Bog bodies showed up every couple of years around here. We’d seen the pictures in the papers. They were from centuries ago, whores and heathens strung up by the locals because they didn’t believe in the right God. Or because they didn’t believe in God the right way. They were fully preserved by the salts in the marsh, complete with skin and clothes. Their hair was parted however they parted it during their time on earth.
I saw Kika and Chucho walking down the 12th fairway with a couple of shovels.
“Dutty went into town,” Chucho said. “At least that’s what I think Kika just told me.”
Kika was wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top and her hair was up in a ponytail. She was barefoot and I noticed that she’d painted her toenails black.
“There’s a body,” I explained, pointing at my feet. “And Chucho and I are going to dig it out.”
I was speaking slow and loud, hoping that Kika might gain some meaning from my enunciation and volume.
Kika responded in Russian. I heard her say the word “Dutty” and then she spit on the ground. She said his name again and spit. “Dutty,” she said. Then she spit three more times right in a row.
“Lady,” I told her. “We understand. Dutty sucks. We get it.”
After she was out of spit, Kika flopped down on the edge of the marsh and lit another cigarette. Chucho passed me a shovel and we started digging. After about ten minutes we’d cleared the wet earth around the body. Chucho took the legs and I grabbed onto the shoulders and we lifted it out and set it down on the shore.
It was a woman. Her skin was this strange silvery metallic color. She was wearing a long skirt and a waistcoat that buttoned all the way up to her chin. Her hair was pulled back into a bun.
When Kika realized what we’d pulled out of the marsh, she started screaming and pointing at the body. Then she started screaming and pointing at us. Who knows what she thought? Maybe that we were teenage murderers who liked to dig up our kills and show them to our next victims. Maybe she’d already had enough of this place, enough of Dutty. Her shrieking was tremendous, and it scared the nesting herons and the endangered reticulated wood owls in the marsh up into flight. Chucho moved toward her to calm her down, but when she saw him coming at her, Kika screamed again and then she ran off.
Chucho and I watched her run down the road toward town, wondering if we should stop her, try to explain this. Maybe there was some diagram we could sketch out that would help her understand that this sort of thing was normal around here. But neither of us moved a muscle. We were both tired of Dutty too, sick of having to give him more money than we thought he deserved.
“If he wants her,” Chucho said. “Let him go track her ass down.”
- - - - - - - -
When Dutty returned a little while later, we showed him the bog body. He got on the phone and called it in. In a few minutes, the town’s newspaperman was out at the golf course interviewing us.
He posed us next to the bog body and snapped pictures. We pointed and smiled.
“You seen Kika?” Dutty asked me.
“Haven’t,” I told him.
He gave me a little nod and then he turned and trudged back up the 12th fairway. That day would be the last time any of us ever saw Kika, and it seemed like Dutty already knew that she had disappeared. He was walking up that hill like he was an old man who did not trust the earth to hold his weight. He was walking like there was something strange buried beneath the soles of his feet and for the life of him he couldn’t seem to figure out what it was.
FLIGHT PATH
I hear the elevator doors open. The wheels of a hospital bed bump down the linoleum and I run over to the tiny window in my reinforced door. There is a man covered in tubes, lying on a stretcher by the nurses’ station.
“Look!” I yell to my roommate, Erica. “Look, look, look!”
Erica gets out of her bed and stands on her tiptoes next to me. We are both patients at The Terrence and Miriam Wexler Wellness Center and Spa, located on the top floor of the County Hospital. The Wellness Center is actually a women’s psych ward. They call it a “spa” to make us feel better about ourselves. Other than our psychiatrist, Dr. Molina, we have not seen another man up close in a month.
We are supposed to be focusing our energy on ourselves; we are supposed to be turning inward, owning up to the particular problems that plague us. We are supposed to be making sustainable life changes that can actually be sustained. We are not supposed to be worrying about mysterious, unconscious men who have olive skin and large biceps.
“What’s he doing here?” Erica asks.
I look at the man—his head held in a metal halo, his leg cast up to his hip. I watch as they roll him into the room across the hall from us.
“He’s here,” I tell Erica, “to fall in love.”
The man’s name is Mike Phipps. He is in a coma. I check this fact about fifty times. I plod over in my pink robe and my paper mules and peruse his chart whenever the nurses aren’t looking. Mike Phipps. I keep checking his name each time I go into his room, even though I know it hasn’t changed. Mike Phipps. I want to make sure. Mike Phipps. I can’t stop.
Mike Phipps’s eyes are closed, but he is nowhere near dead. The nurses treat him like he’s nearly gone, bandying his limbs with little interest, wetting his dark hair into a mohawk and then bringing the other nurses in to laugh.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” they tell him. “Rise and fucking shine.”
I find out from Charlotte, one of the float nurses, that all the beds in the hospital below us are full and this is where Mike will stay until something opens up.
“He’s here for now,” she tells me. “A little treat for all of us.”
Charlotte leaves and I stay with Mike. I comb his hair back down to normal. I wet a washcloth in the sink and I press it down on his forehead.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll take great care of you.”
I slip my hand into his. It’s easy. No one notices, no one sees. I slide the chair closer to him and lean in and kiss him lightly on the forehead. I peek out into the hall. No one is coming so I give him a kiss on the lips, lightly at first and then shoving my tongue through. I can feel his teeth. I whisper in his ear.
“There’s more where that came from,” I say.
- - - - - - - -
Mike Phipps has a girlfriend, Lily. Lily comes in the afternoon, this tiny Filipino thing in swishy pants, her hair shiny like videotape.
“He made this,” she says to me, pointing to Mike Phipps and then to her belly. “It’s a girl. I checked.”
I would never have guessed Lily is pregnant. Her body is hidden in bagginess—those running pants, an oversized hoodie underneath a pea coat. She offers me a handshake, her hand darting from her sleeve like a baby bird snatching a grub from a mother’s beak. I notice her tattoo then, the name “Mike” running down the side of her neck.
“You are going to regret that,” I tell her. “Boy oh boy are you going to regret that.”
At first Lily looks at me like I’m crazy, but then her face softens and her lips un-purse. I figure that one of the nurses has prepped her about what she might encounter on our floor. I can tell by the look in her eyes that whatever anger she has for me has now been trumped by pity.
“I won’t regret it,” she says.
I lift up my shirt to show Lily my regrets, the names of seven men I have loved. I did not think any of these men were going to leave me when I got their names tattooed on my body, but they did leave, one after another. I tried, with limited success, to cover up their names with a new tattoo of a rose or a butterfly. Now my body looks like an English garden, but one grown only to cover a tagged-up wall.
/> “That’s incredible,” Lily says.
I pull down my shirt and walk over to Mike’s window. I watch a plane descend from the clouds, teeter and list toward the runway lights, bump down and slow to a crawl. The hospital is located by an international airport and planes drop from the sky every fifteen minutes or so. The first couple of weeks here it terrified me, but now that my fear has subsided I’ve become annoyed with it. It’s difficult to change one’s habits with the hubbub of an airport in such close proximity. At least that is what I keep telling Dr. Molina.
“He had an accident,” Lily says to me. “In case you were wondering.”
I turn back to look at Mike Phipps. He is hooked up to tubes and colored wires and everything makes annoying beeping sounds. His head is circled in bandages. Still, I can’t stop looking at him. He has a couple days of stubble. And those arms! They look like they could surround a person, trap them inside and never ever let them go.
“He got wasted the night I told him about the baby,” Lily says. “Drove his car into a bridge.”
Lily’s eyes scan from my feet to my face, up and back down. I recently put on some weight and all the clothes I brought with me are being pushed to their limits. I haven’t showered in a day or two. I cut my own hair a couple of months ago and it has grown back in a weird bob that sits on my head like a crooked pith helmet.
“Can I ask you why you’re here?” she asks. “Is that allowed?”
I turn back to the tarmac. I watch the plane that just landed taxi toward its gate. There is a constant muttering of turbines around us, and people floating above our heads, on vacation or business, visiting loved ones, poised to start a better life in some brand new city. They are taxiing, taking off, circling, about to land. I imagine they look down on us from the sky and marvel at our size, compare us to some type of small, squash-able bug.
“I’m here because I beat somebody’s ass,” I say.
I’m lying to Lily, trying to scare her. The reason that I’m really here is because I can’t stop taking knives and cutting up my skin. It’s a young person’s thing, something I read about in a glossy magazine and then tried because I wanted to feel younger. I didn’t think much about it until I tried it, but then I was shocked at how good it felt. It felt like the old me had melted away and there was a new and better person climbing out from the gunk, a feeling that I loved and wanted to feel nearly once an hour for a period of a couple of weeks, which had subsequently ruined all my sheets and towels and left me dangerously short of blood.
I tell Lily this lie about beating someone up and I decide to make it look convincing. I take my hand and make it into a fist and start pounding it down into my other palm as hard as I can. My fist makes a flat slapping sound that echoes throughout Mike Phipps’s room. I probably should have told Lily that I had kidney disease or cervical cancer. I should have told her that I had something that would’ve made me look more sympathetic, but I just keep on pounding my fist into my hand, harder and harder until it becomes red and starts to sting, another feeling that I can’t help loving.
“I beat somebody’s ass bad,” I say.
I find out from Erica that if you bribe Charlotte with a nicotine patch, she will unlock your door for you at night. I find out that for two more, she’ll key you into Mike’s room.
“Personally I like my men with a bit more spunk,” she tells me. “But it’s your nicotine.”
Tonight, I push aside all the wires and tubing and I climb into Mike’s bed. I curl my body up against his. I run my fingers under his hospital gown. I press my ear up to his mouth.
“Liz,” I hear him tell me, “I love your hot ass.”
Mike’s voice is a low and guttural grunt, barely audible. Sometimes the words Mike whispers aren’t really words; sometimes they are just phlegm or his teeth grinding together, but I make up words for him.
“Liz,” I hear him say tonight, “you are a beautiful woman with personality to spare.”
I take Mike’s hand and stroke his fingers up and down my thigh.
“Nice,” I tell him.
I make him grab a handful of my hair and pull.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
I take his index finger and his thumb and I put them on my nipple and squeeze.
“Oh,” I moan.
This hospital is not a spa, but the staff still get pissed if you don’t use its entire name—“The Terrence and Miriam Wexler Wellness Center and Spa”—whenever you refer to it. When we are alone, Erica and I call it whatever we want.
“Spa?” Erica yells. “Who ever heard of a spa with suicide watch? Who ever heard of a spa being a stone’s throw from a fleet of airbuses bound for Baltimore? They have massages at a spa. Where’s my fucking massage? Where’s my cleansing tea? Spa, my bunghole.”
Erica says the word “bunghole” a lot. She’s the same age as me, forty-one, and of all the words she uses “bunghole” is probably her favorite. Saying the word “bunghole” a lot is not why she is here, though. Erica is here because she swallows everything she sees. She used to be a corporate accountant and she says this is the reason why she likes swallowing office supplies—pens, binder clips, rubber bands—more than anything else. Still, given the opportunity, Erica will swallow just about anything that fits into her mouth.
“I just ate an entire Vogue magazine,” she tells me when I walk back into our room.
Erica is my best friend here, but she’s a real piece of work. A week ago, one of the day nurses, Sharon, left her wedding ring out at the nurse’s station and Erica got her hands on it. For the next two days, Sharon suffered through the indignity of having to poke around in our toilet with a wooden ruler.
“If I don’t find it,” she told us, “my husband will kill me. Seriously. No joke. He hasn’t noticed yet, but for the four months of his salary he put up to buy that rock, he will definitely kill and dismember. I’ll be sitting in cold storage right next to his deer meat.”
Erica was sorry, but realistic.
“Sharon knows my motto,” she told me. “Finders, swallowers—losers, wallowers.”
Incredibly, after two days of checking in our toilet, Sharon found her wedding ring glinting up at her in the blue water. She grabbed it and jumped up and down and then gave both Erica and me hugs.
“Good as new,” she said after she rinsed it off. She held it up to the light to make sure and then slipped it back on her finger. She had the face of someone who was telling herself something that she didn’t truly believe. “Good as ever, right?”
I have seen Erica devour a box of staples like they were a stack of Pringles. I have seen her eat an entire institutional size jar of mayo with her bare hands. I have seen her break apart a digital camera with a teensy hammer and then savor it slowly, piece by tiny electronic piece, then swallow the little hammer for dessert. Every time she comes out of the bathroom, she lies down on the bed and tries to catch her breath. It is so damn hard on her insides, passing all of this stuff, but she can’t stop. She’s told me that she isn’t only addicted to the swallowing now, that she’s addicted to the attention. Her habit is her press hook. The thing that is hurting her is the thing that sets her apart from the rest of the world.
Lily is by Mike’s bedside when I go into his room after lunch today. All she does is sit, heavy lidded, stumped as to what to do. A lot of the time, she stares out the window and looks down on the parking lot. Sometimes she narrates the comings and goings of different kinds of cars to him.
“Honda Civic,” she says. “Some kind of Lexus, I think.”
Other than this, she never really talks to Mike. She never tells him about what they are going to do when he wakes up. She never sings songs to him. She sits in the chair by the window, eating M&Ms that she pulls one by one from her coat pocket and stuffs into her tiny mouth.
“He had a car that he loved,” she tells me today. “That one he crashed. He was always out on the driveway underneath the hood. I think he loved that damn car wa
y more than he loved me.”
I want to tell Lily that I know about men and their cars. I want to tell her how they hide under the hoods, how they always need just five more minutes to ratchet something down. How that five minutes turns into an hour, how one of their buddies stops by and that five minutes turns into the rest of the night and they drink beer under a garage light too dim to even attract bugs.
“I’ve been down that street,” I say.
Lily reaches into her purse now, hands me a picture. It’s her and Mike, leaning against a car that has a skull and crossbones painted on the hood. They are both laughing. Mike has his arm around her. He’s wearing a backwards baseball hat. Lily’s got braces; she’s wearing a blue tank top with a picture of a dolphin jumping up out of the waves.
“That’s the car,” she tells me. “That’s us.”
I hand the picture back to her even though I have a strong urge to rip it right down the middle, crumple her part up and put the part with Mike safely in my pocket. I know I could find some glue or some Scotch tape around here. I could get someone to take a picture of me. I could slide Mike Phipps and me together into a silver frame and I could tell everyone that this was the man who would finally stand by my side.
“Do you get off on seeing me sad or something?” Lily asks me. “Is that why you keep coming?”
I stare out at the runway. There’s a baggage handler in the distance, throwing suitcases into the cargo hold of a plane. He’s throwing them as fast as he can, really putting his back into it. It looks like he’s done, but then another luggage tram drives up and he starts all over again.
“I’m here to help,” I tell Lily.
Most nights, I massage Erica’s shoulders and we play a game we call “What We Want Most.”
“The thing I want most is a real cigarette,” she tells me. “I would trade just about anything for a real goddamn cigarette.”