TOP FLOOR, SOUTH SIDE OF ST. MARY’S, D WARD
The transition was quick—that much she remembers—like slipping on dark ice hidden under a fresh sheath of snow—a flash of hang time without any landing. A comforting, delicate warmth enveloped her as the old body was discarded. Now she passes upward, up, up through gauze pads and cupboards, folded cotton smocks patterned with pale blue diamonds, through hoses and needles and layers of insulation and linoleum as if matter were mere memory. The prayers of believers (and nonbelievers willing to capitulate) assemble in every corner of the hospital, accompanying those like her, spirits not yet destined to leave.
She tries not to be alarmed. It will take some getting used to, like any change. She’s always been skeptical of an afterlife, although there had been signs: a sudden visitation from a hummingbird in a somber moment, a ragged butterfly fighting the wind to land on her finger. A message from her parents? Possibly. Faint encouragements carried on the wind, not quite a voice.
Floating with other spirits, she joins the forms clustered like shadowy soap bubbles resting on the ceiling. Some are light colored; some are a stormy gray. They gather in sticky, omniscient clouds; she is welcomed but the rules are not explained. Why here? What’s next? Maybe the guidelines are different for everyone. She dislodges from the group to wander, ever the loner, oscillating in the cool forced air.
Patients mill about below, metal contraptions calibrating their bodies to the slightest degree, a cruel game of Battleship: coordinates C-1 through C-7. She wobbles with sorrowful recognition of this uppermost floor, of its windowed view of the tops of trees and endless sky. Speeding toward the patients, she burrows in at the nape, rolling back and forth against each one like a lint brush attempting to remove hurt.
One of them fell down the stairs, another was hit by a speeding car. Two were like Thomas, engaged in evenings of bacchanalia. One girl found the hard edge of a mountain lake with her skull—she thought the jagged rocks were farther down in the water.
They encourage each other with stories of The Body as Amazing Healer, bonding in their banter, fumbling for hopeful words. Most of them count their blessings: they have movement, mobility.
Not her Thomas, eventually moved from his private room to one without windows. How could one make sense of it? Slipping off a roof at a grad pool party on the eve of his life’s new trajectory, how careless! Words only went so far—alcohol and temazepam went further. Reginald left her; each of them could only manage one broken heart. No butterfly or bird came for her, after. No speaking winds.
Flitting around the ceiling, she is dizzy with desire, consumed by it. Is Thomas here? Even without a body she feels the absence of him, the hurt. She senses her bubble sheen dulling, how a splash of acetone used to feel against skin.
All those horrific nights of sitting by his bed, jaw close to breaking with the pressure of her clenching teeth, making up details of those final moments. The probable last-minute Oh shit as his explosive laughter sent him backward, the scrambling for purchase as his lanky body slumped to earth in a shower of shingles and beer. An end to his joke telling and stargazing, his incessant ruminations on the universe. The dyed, flame-colored bangs covering one eye would never be swept back by his own hand again, the hard-earned finger calluses softening as his stickered guitar gathered dust in the corner of his bedroom.
Had he been high? She knew he’d been trying not to.
Weeks became months became conversations about long-term facilities, which basement to park him in. What was she supposed to do—the endless sounds of beeping and forced breathing? She told herself she’d dreamed what happened next. A hand reaching out, a hard grab of the nose, a shudder rippling through his body. How many minutes? Forever. The silence before thundering footsteps.
“Did he stop breathing?” the nurses had asked.
Sobbing, fingers pressed to her face like bars of a jail cell, she nodded. They talked in harried whispers before they quietly led her away, not looking at her or each other.
More of the darkness seeps into her.
Slipping into the inner ear of one girl—Mikkel—she listens, avoiding her own shivery thoughts. Mikkel is conjuring healing forces to her body, willing the nerves to stretch and reconnect, imagining lightning striking again and again at the base of her skull, recalling the smell of smoldering solder seams from her eighth-grade workshop class.
Mikkel’s before-story rises to the surface, just under the thin membrane of every thought: her friends jeering her on, the sweep of her dive from a high perch into a perfect midair roll, hitting the water feetfirst, yellow suit with the tie at the neck a striking contrast to her bronze skin, her head tilting back and finding an unseen threat. The brief shower of light—the sparks—a feeling of an infinite space opening, the moment where her body threatened to jettison the mind, a moment beyond fear.
Mikkel asks the nurse to pull the curtain shut between her and the middle-aged snowboarder, the fabric more insult than barrier but visible separation. Mikkel continues her work, evoking Camille Saint-Saëns’s Le Cygne for background music. The swan movement, thirteenth in the suite of carnival animals, a cello solo she once had almost perfected as second chair. Her pinkie twitches, just a little.
So Mikkel was a musician too, pinned down by the same unfairness, by one moment unhindered by consideration.
What if she never finds Thomas? More of her goes dark, all at once. It was inconsiderate to have intruded on Mikkel’s thoughts but she had to know. Had Thomas felt this same fear? You will play again, she whispers to Mikkel, leaving the serious melody behind. It may or may not be true, one never knows.
She will visit others, stay awhile. Search for clues.
THIRD FLOOR, RED ARROWS POINTING TO DELIVERY ROOM 310A
The maternity ward offers sparing moments of solace. Thomas isn’t here but the babies give off a hazy glow, auras ripe with newness, bathing the mothers in oxytocin.
Thirty-eight years ago she’d been wheeled in, feverish and panting with pain, never so alone, even though Reginald was right there. Late as usual, he’d stumbled into the room reeking of tavern and pool-cue dust, pretending to help with his ridiculous in-out breathing like he was taking a big shit.
They hadn’t thought parenthood through. Not to all possible ends and whether they could survive them. But her friends were doing it, so? The act itself became little more than hasty in-outs followed by Do you think it worked? At thirty-five it had, but she’d been much older than their friends.
Spooling across a soon-to-be New Mother’s forehead, she attempts to calm the huge, vibrating body. The young woman knows nothing of what’s to come, bleeding under a pilled blanket like the sheathed Hindenburg. Propping himself against a peach-colored wall trimmed with dancing zoo animals, her boyfriend zips and unzips his comfortable sweatshirt, zwipp, zwipp.
Don’t you dare look tired, boyfriend. Look at her mottled and shiny belly, soon to deflate into a crepe-paper wasteland! He has no idea—what the wreckage of afterward does to a woman.
New Mother pretends to shoot the boyfriend through the wall with plasma-beam eye lasers. While he checks his phone, she focuses on destroying him—he will land right in the street and be run over by a bus, so he can see what this feels like!
New Mother feels her body is a blister lanced with a hot iron; a scream is emitted from beneath the sweat-matted hair plastered to her face.
Rolling back and forth against peppery-scented skin, she whispers, Breathe, girl, knowing New Mother doesn’t understand how much her love might bring her to a place inside herself no one wants to visit. The possibilities of what she could do. What she might feel she has to do. To answer a question no one wants to ask themselves—how far will you go for love?
Thomas had instantly resembled an old man, with a shock of rabbit-fine white hair. It fell out and came in black and then he looked like a miniature car salesman with a windswept comb-over, always smiling, always happy. Babies don’t come with warning labels. Handle with care. Sensitive. Rebellious. Watch out for drugs. Be available to fetch this child late at night when he’s in various states of inebriation. Temper all hopes after rehab, when he suddenly has goals, aspirations, plans for after high school that will not come to fruition. More darkness creeps in, needles of sharp disappointment. How much sadness does she have to relive before she’s set free?
Helping others had not come naturally after Thomas, but she would try now, breathing with New Mother, in/out, one/two. Somewhere inside the huffing body a fissure explodes and there is blood, brows above sky-blue masks furrow. Boyfriend! Pay attention! New Mother is asked if she wants gas. She thinks gas = high and says yes, focusing on the jaunty zebra galloping on the wall, inhaling deeply like one draining a sieve. Nothing there for her, however—no quickness or light—it’s a shell game. New Mother screams into the breathing tube, wondering if the other end is a winding, Seussian trumpet curled into a basement corner filled with dusty spiders. The boyfriend reads her mind and comes to her side, grabbing ahold of one tiny-boned hand.
“There is a special room in the hospital filled with the screams of new mothers. In the basement behind the furnace. Everyone thinks the heat is just kicking on,” he whispers in a soothing hush, smiling, brushing a soaked strand of hair behind her ear. He knows her so well; she loves him again. It might just hold them together as the ship is destroyed, as her framework melts from the heat, as New Mother is handed a life. They will have to start over again with what she is holding, a form of love and joy that also feels like terror.
Leaving them to it, she doesn’t whisper anything more.
EMERGENCY-ROOM DOORS (FOREVER OPENING AND SHUTTING) WAITING-ROOM AREA
A few possible rules. She might’ve been old, but she’d never been stupid! She knew how to figure things out, having lived in the humble cabin in the woods with just her books and West Coast foraging lifestyle.
Some of her companions are grimy gray like her, dipped in emotional detritus. One makes a break for the emergency-room doors, tries to escape by slamming itself through the chest of a panicked individual. It doesn’t work—the body is apparently not a porthole—the spirit bubble shunted back into the waiting room by the pull of an unseen force. Another tries with the same result; their collective cloud is thickest by these revolving doors.
When she’d burst through those doors, frantic, reeling, heart stuttering, her fear opened all routes to panic. The shadow of all possible outcomes blackened every thought. Her whispered mantra: This can’t be happening. Reginald rubbed her back as she sat on a molded plastic chair.
More times than she could count she had waited up as Thomas fell out of cars, beer cans clattering into the street. Those tense kitchen talks, his stilted smile, pupils’ dark pools filled with distant galaxies. Always terrified to let him go to those late-night revelries, but knowing that if she didn’t, she’d lose him. Over anything, any small misstep.
One ghost bubble follows a woman rushing in, attaches onto her shoulder. The woman’s head swivels, searching. A girl in a bright red jacket greets her from the hallway and they embrace, crying together, smiling, relief coming off them in vibrating waves. The bubble lightens, turns pink, swells to twice its size before a momentary pulse of energy winks out of existence, released into whatever comes next. How? A swirl of excited activity ripples along the ceiling.
A waiting teen has seen the transition. She swims into his thoughts, wades through the pulsing music on his headphones. He thinks the curious blip of light must be a reflection off a shiny surface—a wavering sunspot—or the fluorescent lights playing tricks on his tired mind. The teen goes back to scrolling on his phone, filling his mind with shiny images so he won’t think about why he’s here.
In her old body, how many times had she thought she’d seen a blurring at the edges of her vision? Convinced there is a place beyond, she must get to it, to Thomas, somehow.
LOWER LEVEL (WHERE ARROWS BECOME RAINBOWS) ONCOLOGY ROOM LL16
The highlight of her stay has been her therapy sessions with Hope Chambers, whose name is the funniest thing, considering, but still, this ward is inappropriately rainbowed. The patients fill it with their own colors: the purple between violet and indigo, invisible to the naked eye except they see it all the time in the edges of their puncture bruises. They talk about how they weren’t supposed to be here—the statistics intended for other people, percentages cutting silent boomerang swaths through their living rooms, through their kitchens.
Through hers. She had decided not to do anything about the slow-growing melanoma. Thought it a fitting end, her pain now visibly marked. She listens to the living, finally comprehending there are other hard times, other unfairnesses.
Following the patients to this small, too-bright room, they all file in for a little bit of whatever helps. The gathering on the ceiling is thick: Hope is very popular.
A previous patient had left behind a Magic 8 Ball, stuck on one response: It Is Certain. The patients pass it around, shaking the black orb to see if they can change the future.
Sherri, her favorite, likes to hold it. She has a brain tumor and quotes books about mindfulness and Zen Buddhism, passing out headscarves made from brightly colored batik. Her body has withered to hard, cubist angles.
Today Sherri walks into the main room with a pronounced limp, eyes lit up, a pit bull looking at a bare throat. She plops into a chair, words puncturing the space in sharp, staccato bursts.
“So. I was watching Netflix. Everyone on this stupid show glimmered—like they’d been sprinkled with some life-giving pixie dust. And I’m not a jealous person.” Sherri pauses, breathing hard. “Not normally. But they were beautiful, with their perfect cheekbones and sparkling futures.” She snorts.
“I was never blessed with their smooth hair, their snug clothing fitted at the waist. I never even had a waist. And now my teeth are like ash; I am a hairless toothpick. I spat on the TV! I smashed the coffee table with the heel of my shoe!”
She hadn’t been blessed, either; all the well-wishers, the he’s in a better place-rs. Thomas was supposed to be with her. After all, hadn’t he been on the road to recovery—they all had—no more fights or slammed doors? Hadn’t there been conversations at the kitchen table over orange juice, about nothing, Thomas’s words filling the room with hopeful banter? Respectful discussions, Thursday night TV dates? She had even accepted his musical tastes, his earring bolt. Thomas had finally grown into his salesman smile.
Sherri’s chest rose quickly as she relayed her story. Smashing her heel against the table, she’d smashed it again and again though she knew she wouldn’t be able to walk afterward. But the weakness that recently defined her had been replaced with an all-maddening rage and it felt pretty good. Better than good. Ecstatic.
Had she broken things too? She had. Glasses, bric-a-brac. Marriage.
The group congratulated Sherri on listening to her feelings, even if those feelings told her to wreck things. Sherri cried.
“The coffee table was my mother’s. A blond rattan. I used to crawl underneath the webbing, pretending to be invisible. My parents played along, drinking their tea, and ignoring their weird kid, their legs hovering above me like two giants. Was the last thing of theirs I owned.”
“Then you are free of that last thing, Sherri. You’re free,” a man piped up. The room went quiet. No one had wanted to state the obvious.
Sherri knows that, you idiot.
Floating downward, she drifted onto Sherri’s skinny lap, if only to bask in the heat of her rage, admiring Sherri for facing her shit head-on.
Sherri would have stayed, or prayed, or somehow found a way forward. Sherri would have called her doctor back.
But not her, moving again and again until no one really knew where she was, somewhere over on the Sunshine Coast, letting her life slip away as she cut the constant taste of despair with juniper infused gin. Thomas’s oversized band shirts lined one dresser drawer, twenty years’ worth of moth holes marring the ridiculous names: Skin Lizards. Throbbing Kill-Twin. Spazgasm.
Losing herself on purpose, she was ever the stand-in, the odd-jobber, the necessary woodchopper, existing on almost nothing asthere was almost nothing to need. Reginald had eventually let hergo. She’d never once blamed him for making an escape.
If only she could talk to Thomas, to Reginald, and offer explanations. She is sorry. She misses them. She flits through the inside walls as fast as she can, ripping through gauzy insulation, wishing she could destroy a table too.
B FOR BASEMENT, FOLLOW THE WHITE LINE TO THE MORGUE
Spirits scatter and form a thin fog near the ceiling. She likes it here too: the quiet, the peace. No droning machines or squeaky wheelchairs, no shouting. One hears crying sometimes, but no space in the building is immune. Even the hard-boiled nurses cry when no one is looking, leaning against stacks of freshly washed scrubs, inhaling the comforting industrial-soap scent.
Rolling against the nubbly basement walls, she thinks of Thomas as a kid. Tommy, in elementary school, pretending to be a tumbleweed stuck against the brick: front to back, front to back, knapsack smashing against the rough walls, laughing at his own silliness before running off through the classroom door—never turning to wave goodbye. An unwavering lightness defined his step, accentuating the magnetic irresistibility of his persona, even later, when “good” kids had been warned to keep their distance.
Elevator doors slide open. An elderly gentleman, maybe just into his eighties, pauses, staring at the crack between elevator and waxed cement floor as if this were the horizon line from which all things were now measured. A young orderly in a pistachio smock takes his arm, helps him out. She follows them, curious. Something about this man and his dated woolen suit intrigues her. The orderly steers the gentleman down the hallway.
The gentleman shows his identification as she latches onto his shoulder. He vaguely remembers taking a taxi here but doesn’t remember paying, momentarily confused by the birds singing.
“I’ll be just outside if you need me,” says the orderly, already grabbing at his pocket for his cell phone. The man swats him away with a backward, fluttering hand. His ID checked, he’s led into a back room where there is a body.
As he suspects, it isn’t a dream; he knew it would be her. His tears come more for himself. He never stopped loving her, just abandoned her to her sadness, her self-pickling, her heart an imploding black hole he couldn’t be near.
She inspects this man mired in grief: the familiarity of his gait, his curt dismissal of the orderly, and feels a tingling dread as she detaches from his shoulder to get a good look. The whole of her bubble blackens as she recognizes his eyes, the fleck of green in one corner of the left, the scar on his chin from where he split it falling off the back of his brother’s bike. The years have not been kind. Reginald. So, this woman?
Speeding downward to his hand, the skin here is blotchy, cool, the color of mottled chewing gum. His mind is a fluttering of images that she struggles to follow as he traces the outline of her face from ear to chin.
Her as a nymph-like girl, reedy and full of dance, clicking her fingers above her head.
Her, elated when her teaching degree was finished, having come home with an asymmetrical bob, to celebrate, touching it all night, trying to suss out where it began and where it ended.
Her haste to grow it out, back to the straight brown one length favored by boxed dolls.
Her, pregnant, tiny frame suddenly massive, a boulder on pins. Her behemoth nakedness in their too-small bed a shock. The laughter they’d shared!
Reginald bends down to her ear.
A flash of violent crying on that same bed, him holding her hands so she wouldn’t tear at her skin, her clothes.
“Marta,” he says. Marta. She repeats the name. Lady, it meant. For a time, she’d tried to live up to its unattainable pretense. There is a brownish splotch at the base of the hairline, one of many indications never heeded. Concentrating on that spot, her vison skates over the body of the old broad, the lady well past her expiration date.
“I would’ve come sooner, had I known.” Been here awhile then.
Who could have known? The squirrel that came for handouts on the porch? It wouldn’t have been able to let anyone know.
Reggie. His nickname, ill-suited. Lowering his mouth over her earlobe, he whispers, in case there is a crossing for this last-ditch paper plane he throws into the nothingness.
She tries pushing into his chest—she can’t help it—spinning into the heat and warmth, hoping to bore her way in, to no avail.
“We were happy. You were a good mother, Marta. Loving.”
Words that penetrate her darkest recesses, illuminating what she knows to be true. Theirs had been a combustible love, conflicted and beautiful.
Leaving a small kiss against her cool upper lip, a heavy mark etches into the timeline of his heart, as another weight loosens. He can stop wondering, waiting.
“I never blamed you.”
Oh! This unfettered joy! A swelling, an intense inflation as pink overrides the gray.
Reginald pulls the covering over her old body and turns to leave. She is fading into an expansive warmth, like slipping into bathwater.
Pausing, he is unsure of what to do next. Then he leaves, nodding to the orderly, who briefly looks up from his screen.
Reginald pushes a button, waits for the ding of the elevator. Rides it to the main floor, where he is released into the throng. A couple pushes a giant stroller cradling a tiny baby, its contented sigh a delight to the beaming parents. A few people laugh, the sudden burst cutting the air with gleeful exuberance. A nurse rolls her eyes at a coworker, who stifles a smirk by biting the inside of her cheek. Should he get himself a coffee? Go for a walk?
He considers his options as he pushes past the heavy glass doors, closing his eyes to feel the sun on his face. A momentary flash, a burst of color beneath the eyelids—he hears a barely audible pop! He opens his eyes: no, nothing, no reason for it.
And she leaps into the wind, toward a welcoming voice, more mature than she remembers, wise, even. She’s missed it so, so much. The past is of no importance. Would she care to discuss the multidimensional aspects of time and space? He has new theories, new insights to share. Hastily accepting, she settles into her new role as student. Now she leaves it all behind, certain the earth will still rotate on its tilted axis toward a giant ball of heat and light, and the living will simply steady their gait against it.