This is the deathwatch. The shifts begin in the morning and never end; someone is always here, curled up on the floor by your bed. This is how we know you’re going to die.
When I get home I put some leftover spaghetti in a pot and turn on the gas. Ever since I moved to his apartment I haven’t had a microwave. Radioactive heating has grown much too expensive, so I’m stuck with old-fashioned blue flames. The sauce is luke-warm and sticky and it won’t melt the cheese, but I eat it anyway. I can’t wait any longer to go to sleep.
There’s a painting by Whistler - the blue-black greyness of a cloudy river at night - and when I wake up in the morning I close my eyes and wish I had painted that scene so I could see its sadness. Then I open my eyes and the day begins.
How do you know this is the future? Things are only slightly different. Computers are a little smaller. Guns are a little deadlier. Personalities a little more untraceable. But you’re still in a hospital, dying.
We’ve come full circle. For a while, a short while, hospitals were where people went to get better. But really, it’s insignificant in the scheme of things. A hospital is where you go to die in peace. Or live like the dead. You either have visitors or you don’t. Mostly, you sleep.
I don’t have to work today, so I don’t get dressed. My shirt smells funny, like it’s been sitting for too long at the bottom of the box of toys my grandmother packed away when my father left for school. The box she took out every weekend we came to visit and that sat in the basement for years and years and waited for grandchildren. I wonder if I’ve been using the right laundry detergent and get up to turn on the TV. Thinking about your fragile skin and how I don’t really know you, I flick through the channels, looking for something slow moving and just a little distracting. A historical drama with an attractive woman wearing slightly unattractive fabrics. I stare at the accurate brickwork and try not to fall back to sleep. Complete authenticity in television is just a little suspicious. It seems as though the skies of the past ought to be a different colour than the skies of now. The air certainly was.
“What’s the story again?” You’ve opened your eyes and you’re staring at me with just a little bit of hope and confusion.
“What’s the story again?” A nurse walks by the open doorway and two doors down someone is sleeping while their relatives try not to seem impatient.
One of the oldest hospitals in France was founded by a repentant widow-queen - two rows of beds and an altar in the centre. Walls covered in stained glass windows that have long since broken and been replaced with plain glass. I tell you how we got here as another nurse hurries by, studiously avoiding my eyes. At least here it’s not Christianity they try to convert you to.
“Two weeks ago in the middle of the night you woke up and you couldn’t breathe. It was your emphysema. They brought you here in the ambulance and here you are…”
Do we tell you you’re going to get well?
Two years ago I sat in the open hallway of another hospital, listening for someone to call my father’s name. Waiting in the waiting room, leafing through out-of-date magazines, I tried not to stare at the woman across from me. She had blue-grey eyes and dark, dark hair and she was writing notes in a little green notebook. When a doctor came out through the inner door and called my father’s name she glanced up, once, quickly, and returned to her task before I could catch her eye. Now, still waiting, I think I see her out the window, wandering in the endless parking lot. She seems to drift between the rows of cars like a toy sailboat on a crowded pond, always narrowly avoiding imminent collision. I turn away from the window and back to the story I’m reading you. We’ve reached the part where all of the boys have build a sturdy house for Wendy to live in. My sister says that when your eyes are closed you can’t hear me and really I should just stop reading then and give us all a break. But I continue.
Two weeks ago in the middle of the night you woke up and you couldn’t breathe. You had been alone in the house for two years, but you still turned to the empty side of your bed, automatically, searching.
When the ambulance arrived you had managed to put on pants and a striped shirt. You’d closed all the windows, in case it rained, and you had your wallet and your keys. You were lying on your back in the middle of the living room, hoping you’d have the strength to get up and open the door. It’s your emphysema, that’s what they told us when we got to the hospital and were signing paper after paper after paper. And frankly, they can’t do much about it. They brought you here in the ambulance and they’ll give you oxygen and charity, but here you are. So we signed the last paper, took a look around the room and thought, well, it could always be worse.
After work I lie in bed and can’t sleep. I turn myself around, head to the foot of the bed, like I used to do when I was younger and couldn’t fall asleep and I think about the man whose godfather was death. When he grew old enough, the young man decided to become a doctor. Death was a conscientious godfather and he would appear to his godson standing at the foot of a stricken patient’s bed if the patient could be cured and by the head if she could not. Thus, the young man knew when to accept a patient and when to shake his head, sadly. And so the young man never lost a patient. But one day, he was called to the sickbed of a beautiful young woman. And as soon as he looked into her feverish eyes, he was lost forever. But then, then, he looked up, up above her shimmering hair, to the head of her bed and saw his godfather, death. The young man, however, believed so deeply that he could not lose her, this dying beauty, that he quickly turned her around in her bed, so that death was standing at her feet. And so she lived.
There may have been terrible consequences. But I forget them.
The reason hospitals started out so badly was a simple lack of knowledge. Hygiene was unheard of and the body was still a wondrous mystery. Only the rich could afford a reasonably informed doctor or a quantity of leeches. Now, your body has been mapped and charted and names given to all of its rivers and all of their diseases. But as the cures got better and better, they grew more and more unreachable. Only the rich can afford a reasonably informed machine. Improvements in hygiene, however, have remained.
I remember the time my dad convinced you to make a recording of some of the things you had to say. He bought a recorder, a couple of discs, batteries. You took them all away with you and a month later we had two discs of your voice, telling us about things I never heard when you were in the room. Bush planes and polar bears and small towns under quarantine and ice. Company parties, margaritas, and how my grandmother hated to tango. When I get up to leave I tell my dad we should dig out those discs and play them to you. He says he’ll take a look for them when he gets home and if I left him a message about it on his answering machine he’d be sure to remember. On my way to the elevator I avoid the nurses’ eyes and remember that I might have to take the stairs. I think I see a dark-haired woman leaving someone’s room, but she disappears around a corner in the long hallway as the elevator doors open.
At work I keep my eye on the clock.
“Hello ma’am, is there anything I can help you with?” I keep my voice light and pleasant, as if I were about to offer her soothing lemonade on a silver-serving platter. I have decided that when the store is quieter, I will build a Lego replica of the Leprosarium at Meursault, a building like a farmhouse, with a medieval arched doorway and no unnecessary flourishes. I will have to take apart the Krankenspital for pieces, but frankly I was never that happy with it. No one in the store ever notices the difference, anyway. I suppose to a customer one Lego building is much the same as any other.
“Well sir, there are quite a number of rattles and toys suitable for very young children over in aisle three, at the back of the store. Just go straight along here and turn right at the tea sets.” Rearranging beach balls haphazardly I see a middle aged woman standing in front of the plastic food, shifting her weight back and forth, but when I go over to help her, she’s disappeared. So I pretend to be organizing the flimsy boxes and wonder whether I have any pasta left at home.
“And is that everything? Well, the total comes to sixty-three fifty-four. Thank you and have a good day.”
Nights are the quietest time. At the hospital again, I curl up on the foam beside your bed and listen to my aunt telling you about the time she fell down the stairs. I look at the dust under the bed and wonder if the man in the room two doors down is still there. One night I passed by his room on the way to the washroom and I could hear him whispering to himself. But when I came back he was quiet and the woman across the hall had started screaming. I try not to fall asleep as my aunt says, “But of course that was the year I had to go back to school…”
You have a book in which you wrote all of the things you wanted to remember. Going through your things looking for some papers, my aunt found it in your bedside table, underneath your telephone bills. You read from that book at my grandmother’s funeral. “Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea…” When I return from the washroom, my aunt has brought it back with her and is reading to you from its perfect pages.
“What’s the story?”
“I like a look of Agony, because I know it’s true — men do not sham Convulsion, nor simulate, a Throe.”
I stop in the doorway and wish I could leave.
When they put you in this bed, my aunt introduced herself to all the nurses. I stood awkwardly in the hallway, wanting to lean on my sister, listening to the rise and fall of my father’s voice on the phone, telling my mother that they would be just a little while longer. Now I wander around the floor, wondering whether walking under fluorescent lights is any kind of exercise and thinking about how dark the Ospedale del Ceppo must have been, at night, and whether it helped the patients sleep. Or whether the candle-smoke filled their lungs.
When I wake up in the morning, I know it. The end is coming. Not the apocalypse. Not the great reckoning. Not even the second coming. Just a simple end. Back at work again I listen for the phone, only half hearing every customer who asks me about educational flashcards. When I get on the bus to go to my apartment the driver looks familiar, and as I show her my pass I try not to stare. She stares back and seems to be watching me as I walk to the farthest seat. But when I turn around to sit down, she is looking at the road. I look away.
I spend a lot of time in buses. I spend a lot of time trying to sleep. I spend a lot of time reading. I spend a lot of time staring at your hands. I spend a lot of time passing time. I spend a lot of time waiting.
“What’s the story again?”
Once there was an old man who lived all alone in a little house in the middle of a forest. He had three cats, two children, and seven grandchildren. He ate porridge for breakfast and steak for dinner. One day his youngest granddaughter travelled through the dark dark woods to visit her oldest grandfather and bring him some lovely fresh baked bread. She bypassed the wolf and the witch in her tempting house and headed straight for her grandfather. But when she arrived he was no longer there.
Third Place ~ Hart House Literary Contest