I stand in the doorway for a moment to assess the situation. There she is, a wrinkled little prune of a woman with her hands folded below her pulled-taffy breasts, half lost in the shadow of the machines that stand between her and the window that faces the sunrise. The whisk-hush of the ventilator as it provides her with oxygen. The steady drip of the IV’s that pump her with liquefied food and nutrient minerals. The whir of the electricity of the machine that monitors her vitals and its accompanying metronome beep. There is hardly a shape between the stiff thermal sheet and the mattress as her hollow bones continue to shrink in on themselves. I swear, witch doctors have worn necklaces thicker with bone than this woman, a scarecrow gone and lost its hay.
I go in and stand at the foot of the bed and then I pick up her chart, flip through the pages. Nothing has changed since yesterday. It is as though despite the world, Mrs. Reya Engel refuses to change herself. The sharp contact between the chart and the steel bed frame as I place it back is as loud as the tolling of the village hall bell tower. I suck in my breath but she seems not to have heard it. It is only when I turn to leave that I hear the familiar rustle of human movement. I remember the first time I notice such a sound, that of human movement—only three years earlier when I come home early, sick with what will become pneumonia contracted from a little girl in the clinic, and hear it like a background frequency underlying all of the unique clicks and moans of Frank and his mistress as they tousle in our bed; I stand there for a moment thinking to myself, how can anyone ever get sleep with that horrible sound like a wind tunnel formed around them? And then I go sit in the park until the school buses are on their way home again so that he doesn’t know that I know.
“Good morning, Nurse Fasch,” pipes a mouse. I turn and smile at the sad old woman who is smiling like a waning cuticle moon back up at me.
“Good morning, Mrs. Engel. How was your night?”
She shrugs. Her shoulders are two bony little knobs like the fish skulls they keep insulated behind glass at the museum where Emery used to obsess over them until we pull him by the shirt cuff along. I am almost certain that, should I pull that blanket back, Reya Engel’s body will be nothing but a fish spine lying curled with a scaled tail flapping slowly where her feet should be.
“Couldn’t say,” she answers. “Slept right through it.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. I see they’ve jacked up your dosage again. Has the pain been worse?”
“Nothing to worry about.” She closes her eyes and turns them up toward the ceiling. I can’t tell whether she has fallen back asleep, but before I can turn to leave again, she withdraws a shriveled stick of an arm out from beneath the blanket, with obviously great difficulty, and beckons me over with a claw. “Did I ever tell you about the time I met my husband?”
“No, Mrs. Engel, you never did.” Her husband dies several years earlier, a quiet and humble owner of a hardware store who spends his entire life in town except for three weeks spent abroad overseas where he meets Reya and from whence he brings her back to live with him for the sixty-seven years that will precede his dignified painless death in the middle of the night.
“Do you have time?”
I check my watch, something I seem to do more and more these days despite the fact that I have less and less things to do and places to go. I am due in the clinic, but I can’t quite bring myself to deny her. “For you, Mrs. Engel, I would make all the time in history if necessary.” I pull one of the steel frame chairs screeching across the linoleum to the side of her bed, take her cold hand in mine. I have to check to make sure it is actually cupped in there, it is so light it makes no impact on my relatively meaty palms.
“I was engaged at the time, but as far as I was concerned, it was already over. I was twenty-three, I thought I was too young to settle down but it turned out I was just settling down with the wrong man. His name was Julian. My fiancé. There was nothing wrong with him, but, when I kissed him, there was no fire. There was nothing that made me want to spend the rest of my life just trying to die so that I could be with him for eternity. Do you know the feeling? The fire?”
I say that I do, and I mean it. And I think of Benjamin.
“So I just up and left one night. I took everything I needed, or thought that I needed, to survive, and I took all the money I’d saved up from my part time job at the library, and I boarded a plane to Tokyo, and from there I chartered a small fishing boat to take me to Ie, an unknown fishing village all alone to itself on a small sheet of land floating alone among the Ryukyu Islands, the Japanese Archipelago. You can’t imagine a more solitary place than that island. The entire piece of land barely had a population of a hundred. It was a green place with little trees and high rolling hills, the lower coasts, especially the coast around the town, were built up with high stone walls to protect from the tall ocean waves that would sweep upon us in the night like the specters of titans. There were about three dozen huts built from mud and from brick they forged themselves from the red clay of the sheer northern cliff. The rest of the island was rolling hills dotted with wild sheep and low wire fences that kept the sheep from wandering onto the half of the island jagged with rocks and cliffs. The fishing boat dropped me off at the edge of twilight, and I fell in love with the world all over again as I watched the bruise-purple sky swallow the setting sun, as wide as I’d ever seen it. You could see the strings of fire it spit up off of its surface and sucked back in again.
“I lived with an old woman whose husband had died recently of exhaustion from a lifetime of herding and shearing sheep. I had wanted to leave the world, and there on Ie, it seemed the only place left where someone could still do so. I spent my days helping the women make minor repairs to the huts, tend to the gardens, and pull the bone, gristle, and veins from the sheep carcasses the men brought back at the end of the previous day. Mrs. Han-Yoon, her name was, had spent her entire life on that island. After her husband died, the neighbors took pity on her and took turns preparing meals of fish and mutton to bring to her every night. I could not speak their language, and some of the villagers seemed never to have heard of America. But they welcomed me and began to feed me as well. I stayed for three months, occasionally distraught over the way I had simply walked away from my family, from Julian. I would cry late at night wondering if any of them were still looking for me. If they thought I was dead. If anyone had known how truly unhappy I had been with him. I felt I couldn’t let anyone know where I’d gone, or that I had even gone. My parents were as smitten with Julian as he was with me. And in fact, they had always wanted a son. It had been about as close to an arranged marriage as you can get in Western civilization. Because they’d wanted a son, they had passively neglected me for years, and then I finally brought home a man who came from good stock, a handsome man with money and success and a personality brimming with charisma and good cheer. I couldn’t go back to them. They would have sent me right back into his arms.
“It was in November, as the harshest winds were blowing in from the sea. The sheep slept in temporary shacks erected specifically for the winters. Food was scarce for all of us. As tragic as it was whenever another sheep fell dead from frostbite or starvation, we all secretly cheered that we might have a bite of its tough meat that night. I went hiking through the hills to keep my blood circulating, it was the only thing you could do there to keep warm. Mrs. Han-Yoon’s fire pit was barely a crackle, and I was in no way accustomed to the thinness of the single lambs-wool blanket I’d been granted upon moving in. I found myself navigating the rocky end of the island, as nervous about snapping my ankle on a slick of ice as I was set on getting to the high point of the cliff where I could watch the waves slide the ice sheets around like spilt dominoes being tossed in the air by a flock of Baptist soothsayers.
“It was there that I saw him, scuffling along the icy shore with a small video camera clutched in one hand. I could tell right away that he was an American, from the flat lifeless haircut and the flannel jacket that he wore o
ver denim slacks. He had a small kayak tied to a rock among the frozen reeds that looked like saber-teeth. He was there documenting poverty conditions in the Japanese farmlands for an independent film he had been commissioned for. I climbed down to talk to him. It had been months since I’d been able to have a real conversation with someone who could understand me. Maybe it was the loneliness, maybe it was the fact that when I’d left home, I’d been all too ready to settle down, only unwilling to do so with the wrong person. But three hours later when he boarded his kayak to head for the larger Ryukyu Islands to the east of us, I boarded with him.
“Two weeks later, we were walking hand in hand in Tokyo when a mugger accosted us in an alley, knocked him to the wet ground and pushed me up against the wall. He shook a knife in my face screaming something in hurried Japanese as I clutched my purse to my chest. Arnold simply stood calmly, dusted the muck off of his clothes, and stepped between the mugger and me. ‘Do you ever think this through?’ he asked in as casual a manner as you’ve ever heard. The mugger was just in shock from Arnold’s gall, he held the knife out at his side, and just stared at him with the widest eyes an Asian could muster. ‘You have no idea what this woman means to me. You have no idea whether I would be willing to fight to the death to protect her. What would you do? Would you kill for whatever might be in that purse?’ The mugger cursed. I knew it was a curse because I’d heard Mrs. Han-Yoon say the same thing every time she pricked her finger with her darning needles. I knew then that I was going to marry him. And when we came back here, to America, that was the first thing we did.”
“That’s a beautiful story, Mrs. Engel,” I say. “What happened with the mugger?”
She laughed, a wheat-dry laugh that should have shaken her apart by the fibers. “Well I had nothing of worth in there in the first place. Remember I’d just come from Ie, where the economy was based on geniality and returned favors. Arnold took out his wallet and tossed a few slips of paper yen to the ground, turned his back on the man, and ushered me with all the propriety of a President back to the main road… When Arnold died, he told me to fight for as long as I can to hold onto life, because whatever comes after certainly can’t be as beautiful as this. But, Nurse Fasch, I’m tired of fighting. Do you know that my mother was in the hospital for seven years before she died? And every evening after the first that she’d been admitted, the doctors went home expecting her to be gone the next day. We have strength in my family. And I’m tired of it. Sometimes, I just want to be weak. Sometimes, I just want to do what’s easiest, even though I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do. I miss my Arnold. Do you believe that there is only one person in this world anyone ever really belongs with?”
I nod my head without realizing that it’s something I actually believe.
“So do I, Nurse Fasch. And I feel like the longer I hold on here, the less likely it is that I’ll find him after I go. When he kissed me that night of the mugger, I felt that fire that I’d never felt with Julian. The fire that made me want to spend the rest of my life dying, just so that I could spend eternity with that man. I would do anything in this world to leave it, so that I could be with him again.”
She rolls onto her side and reaches her bony hand out to grab my forearm. I look at it.
“I’m strong, but I’m not strong enough to do it myself.”
I leap up from the chair, almost throwing her back into her place, and hurry out into the hall. I think of Benjamin again as I leave.
* * *
I remember when sunsets were beautiful things. Now the sun is the color of the dirt. This entire town is the color of dirt. And when it sets, it is simply a merging of two identical things. Only the night looks different, when the land becomes cold and blue. I want to hurry home where Frank will be ordering takeout for Emery’s last night. But I can’t.
The church, a tall building with a ruddy steeple, the only building in town other than village hall that really stands apart from the others, is only a block from my normal route between the hospital and home. A great imbalance lingers in my mind. I have only hours left to spend with Emery before the moon rises fully and he leaves. And yet this great unsettling pain is a thick pool of sinus pressure in my head, it is a weight on my lungs, my joints hurt, my muscles are tired. And so I find myself standing at the great church doors with my hands on the demon-horned handles, ready to sacrifice what little time I have to relinquish myself of this burden. I need absolution.
I pull the doors open outward with what can only be called gusto, and I march in. There is a wide wood-paneled crescent hall separated from the sanctuary by a barrier reef of tall glass doors. The pews are empty, the body of Christ hangs dolefully above the altar, his ribs casting diagonal zebroid shadows upon his stomach along with the dancing flicker of the candle-lit chandeliers that hang modestly and randomly above the aisles. The pneumatic spring of the doors sucks them closed behind me and makes me jump. I step up to the glass doors. I can hear my footsteps as you can only hear them in an empty church. In the silence I can hear the muffled thoughts of the stain-glassed saints as they discuss amongst themselves my presence.
A short old man slides open the door of the confessional booth and steps out. I look over my shoulder and when we make eye contact, he pulls his hat tight over his bald head and scurries out as though I can see his sins written upon his face. I watch him go, behind me, out the heavy doors. Beyond them, the world is just turning blue. Emery will be home by now, having picked Ingot up from her school just down the street. Frank will be there, sitting on the sofa with his shirt off, sweat built up in the shallow folds of his fat even though he hasn’t done a thing since coming home from work, watching the TV and fondling his mistress in the folds of his brain. Completely ignorant to the fact that only hours earlier, I sat right there naked with my Benjamin and bade him farewell. The dampness of our own sweat probably still lingers in the thick foam cushion beneath the veneer, rolling along the wide steel springs like gumballs seeking their rest.
I make my way to the confessional and stand there for a moment with my hand on the thin folding door. Through the adjacent door I can hear the rustling scratch of human movement, the phlegmy rattle of an old man’s throat. I pull open the door and step in. I have to sit before I can see again, and I have to winch my knees in tight against the wall. As my eyes adjust, I see the violet walls, I see the silhouette of a tired bearded face behind a screen. There is a small bulb above his head, I can see its twisted filament grinning. His face is hidden in long shadows, but I know who he is.
His head bobs, and only then do I know he is still alive. “How can I help you?” he asks.
I don’t say anything. He turns and looks at me through the screen. When he moves, he looks to have scales, and the motion makes him appear to be swimming.
He squints and peers forward until his nose is almost touching the screen. “Do you seek penance?” he asks.
“Do you, Father?”
“I’m sorry?”
I think for a long moment. “I’m a nurse, Father. Today an old woman asked me to end her life because she didn’t want to struggle anymore.”
He takes in a deep breath and leans back away from the screen. “I see. And…did you?” His voice is reviling. I have never truly understood what it means for someone to be speaking through his teeth until Reverend Wiley had deposed Preacher Johns from the pulpit, because that is how he speaks. Through his teeth, like a hissing snake.
“She asked me first thing in the morning, as soon as I got there. There are not many people who might know how that feels, Father, to walk around all day knowing a life rests in your hands. You do, Father.” I direct that at him in a hardened voice before softening it again. “I saw her old, pitiful face in every patient I saw. I heard her voice when I knew there were no voices there to be heard. Every vial of morphine my fingers grazed froze them there for just a second longer than they should have been. But, no. I couldn’t do it. When my shift was over, after I signed out, I
went back to her room with something in my pocket I’d stolen from the drug storeroom, something that would have killed her without pain. But as I stood in the doorway, as I stood there looking at her sleeping body hidden in the darkness of the curtained windows and the setting sun, I could not bring myself to contribute to ending someone’s life. Even if it meant she might suffer awhile longer. I believe, as I’ve always believed, that life is a gift from God that shouldn’t be squandered.”
“Then you’ve done nothing wrong. What is it that you’re seeking penance for?”
I take another long moment to think. Then finally I say, “I’m not here seeking penance, Father. I’m here to offer it to you.” He doesn’t say anything, though I sense a shifting of his soul beneath those robes. “You, Father Wiley, you’re scarred with your misdeeds, and everybody ignores it because they say you’re sent here by God. But I know who it is that’s sent you.”
“And who is that?”
“You know who it is. General Anselmo. We all know why you’re sitting in there right now instead of Father Johns. And the lives you’re stealing here, Father, the boys you’re shipping off for him to steal, those lives will not be forgotten. And when enough of them are lost, Father, they’ll remember who sent them away.”
“I think you’re confused, Daughter.”
“I’ll remember who sent them away!” I cry it with quieted tears, tears quieted to respect what little solemnity remains in these, the hollowed halls of what was once my church.
I rattle the screen and propel myself from my seat and out of the booth. Those heavy, demon horn doors are closing behind me by the time the old man manages to slide his side of the confession booth open. He sees my back as I dissolve into the blue night. Half a block down, I turn back and I see his silhouette standing in the orange candlelight of the church as he holds the doors open trying to find me.
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