Ophelia, Alive Read online

  She says, “But it is. Pain is pain, y’know? It’s not a competition. It’s not like, Oh, he was hurting more than you, so it’s okay for me to make light of your pain. That’s not how it works. You’re feeling what you’re feeling, and I have no business dismissing that, and I did, and I shouldn’t have. I just—God—I see patterns like this in my behavior all the time, and it’s not okay, and I’m sorry.”

  The tick-tick-tick of the fingernail in the carpet. The mist of the night in the streetlights. The side mirror rattling outside my window. I say, “It’s all right, I get it.” I pick at a thread in my seat and add, “I mean, it probably is kind of funny. When I hear kids cursing at each other on the street, I crack up, because they don’t know how to do it. It’s just kind of embarrassing for them. But when you’re trapped in a room with 30 other people, and they’re all abusing you, it really doesn’t matter how old or intimidating they are, y’know? It hurts.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well—y’know. I was doing my student teaching, right? Seventh grade? So I thought I’d teach these kids to write poetry. I show them some different forms, but all they want to do is write limericks. Honestly, I was probably lucky to get them to move beyond haikus. But anyway, I’m begging them to try something else, something a little more challenging, and the teacher’s not in the room, and they all just go nuts. Out of their seats, destroying things, cursing at me, calling me stuff I can’t even repeat. So, anyway, I never went back. Changed my major the next day.”

  “Geez.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s lame.”

  “Well, I mean—that is really awful. But that doesn’t seem like typical seventh-grader behavior to me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Shrugs. “I dunno, just that it’s weird. And that, I dunno, maybe you shouldn’t have given up on teaching after a single bad experience? Like I said, I doubt that was typical.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s like with your rape metaphor. If the first boy I ever met had raped me, I probably would have been turned off to dating for the rest of my life.”

  “Gotcha.” We’re getting closer to the hospital now, and the fingernail scraping through the carpet is getting louder.

  “Anyway, it’s just as well,” I tell her. “I never really wanted to be a teacher. Got a lot happier once I embraced my identity as a writer.”

  “Except you don’t write.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” I bite at a hangnail. “I guess it’s just easier to do nothing.”

  “It sure is.” She turns into the hospital parking lot and gears down. This is it, we’re actually doing this thing. “Anyway,” she says, “you might be right about the gym thing.”

  “The gym thing?”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right that it only exists to wring student fees out of us. God knows I never make it over there.” I laugh, and she says, “Where am I going, exactly?”

  “We need to park around back. In the shadows, if you can.”

  She parks the van and crosses herself as she jerks the gearshift back and kills the engine. Then we sit in the dark. The lot is deserted, and a streetlight behind us flickers off. The air in the van’s getting cold, but we just sit, breathing stale, congealed smoke, each of us waiting for the other to open her door. Waiting for a click to assure us that this is really happening.

  I open mine.

  She follows my lead and then our doors clunk shut and the yellow dome light blinks out. The sky is mostly overcast, but the black clouds glow around their edges with the weak light of the stars.

  “Wait here a second,” I whisper.

  “Hold on,” she says, grabbing my arm before I can run off. “Are there security cameras?”

  “In the lot? Or inside the hospital?”

  “Uh, either?”

  “I haven’t seen any. And if there are, they probably don’t work.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Call it a hunch? This place is decrepit. And Sara was saying—”

  “Who?”

  “Uh—never mind. Just—just wait here for a sec.”

  Unless someone found it and moved it, the gurney should be right where I left it Friday morning; in the dark of the night, though, the hedge where I hid it is just a mass of jagged shadows. Thorns and branches and broken bottles sticking in a thousand different directions, stabbing the night air with a sickening enthusiasm. I duck down below them and reach blindly into the dark, feeling for the cold metal or the soft foam. Thorns scrape against my arm and blood leaks out, but I keep stumbling forward till my forehead bumps against something icy. I curse, but I grab the thing and start pulling.

  Now that I know where it was, I feel like an idiot for not seeing it right away. It was only stuck halfway into the bush, its back end hanging out like a pedo’s ass in a public park. The metal frame digs into my hand, and the wind whistles through it, but I grit my teeth and drag it around to the back of the van, where Kate is waiting. She says, “You ready?”

  “I guess.”

  She opens the hatch and again we’re drowning in yellow light and looking into the half-closed eyes of a dead coed. We each grab a random limb and pull as hard as we can because the sooner we get her out the sooner we can close the hatch and douse the light and take her inside and hide her away and be done with this mess. Kate’s got an arm and I’ve got a leg and we pull till she lands slantwise on the slab, with an arm hanging off one way and a leg hanging off another, and she slams the van shut, and we close our eyes and wait for someone to see us and yell Hey what are you doing, but no one does. All we hear is the wind picking up again, and Cyndi’s hair blows around and catches the streetlights in its blond streaks.

  We head for the door, and for a few horrible seconds, we’re out in the open, under the streetlamps, where anybody could see us. But then finally, we’re standing at the back entry, the one I stood at for the first time less than a week ago, shaking and nervous about my new job. Now I’m shaking again, and so is Kate, but I grit my teeth because this has to happen.

  I reach for the ID scanner, which is hanging even more floppily than the last time I saw it, and I jerk my temporary card back and forth in it until I hear the door click. Then I pull on the cold handle, revealing a hallway full of whitish tiles dripping with fluorescent light. But—

  “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “Just get her inside,” I say. “Hurry up.” I pull hard on the gurney, dragging Kate with me, until we stumble in the door and catch our breath.

  “What’s going on?” she whispers, and silently, I point ten feet down the hall, where a security camera’s light is glowing red. “I told you,” she says.

  “It probably doesn’t work.”

  “But what if it does?”

  “Uh—” I look down, at the wastebasket that tripped me on my first day here. As before, it’s full-to-bursting with hairnets and facemasks. The smell isn’t great, but it’s something? I guess?

  I reach down gingerly, trying to touch the used safety gear with as little of my hand as possible, which is ridiculous considering I’m about to put it over my face, but I guess you do what you can to make the awful things you’re doing seem slightly less awful in your own mind.

  I snag two facemasks and two hairnets from on top of an empty Lunchables box, and I toss one of each at Kate. “Put these on.”

  “Are you—?”

  “Just do it.”

  I tie my own facemask over my nose and mouth, noticing that it smells of ham and cheese, and then I tuck my hair into the bouffant. Kate does the same. Then we look each other over, and we look like extras from a movie about a zombie outbreak, and it occurs to me that that might be exactly what we are. “We need to cover her up,” she says.

  “Huh?”

  “We need to cover up the body. We can’t have anybody seeing what we’re carting around here.”

  “Well—” I’m thinking—“it’s a hospital, so there’s gotta be sheets everywhere.”


  “I thought you said you worked here. Don’t you know where anything is?”

  “I’ve only worked, like, two shifts.”

  “Okay, well, just—”

  I open the nearest door, hoping for a linen closet, but I’m met with a patient’s room, dark and filled with snores while a monitor beeps. I panic for a second before I realize there’s a linen closet just inside the door, and in one motion I open it, grab a sheet, and toss it over Cyndi. For just a second it catches in the air and hangs like a dirty plastic bag in a breeze, and then it flops onto her face and her knees, leaving a single cold foot sticking out in the ham-and-cheese-scented air. Kate grabs the corner and jerks it hard over her foot like she’s hiding a monster under a bed. Then I say, “Let’s go,” and we start down the hall, wheels clacking loud.

  One wheel on the gurney squeaks, and the squeak seems loud, but I tell myself that squeaky things must coast down these halls all the time, and no one will notice us. Just two patient transporters moving a body, is all. A nurse walks past us but she stares at the floor, and I wonder how long it’ll be till I’m like her—someone who’s seen death squeaking by on a cart so many times that she won’t even look into the eyes of the living. Out of my eye’s corner, I see Kate watching her, craning her neck to make sure she keeps walking, and I want to say Stop that, you’ll just draw attention, but I can’t bring myself to say anything. She’s watching so closely she trips on the gurney and it skips and it squeaks, and I swear I hear Cyndi moan under the sheet, but that makes no sense, and I tell myself Chill, just keep moving. You’re almost home-free, just keep moving, it’s this way, down this hall, you’re almost to the elevator, just don’t slow down.

  And then there it is. A recess of gray-painted steel in the beige-painted wall, with a cobweb-filled corner, because nobody cleans down here, ever, I guess. One floor and we’re there. Just an elevator ride away from freedom.

  “Ophelia.”

  “What?”

  “Are you going to push the button?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  But then, three hallways back, there’s a voice and some footsteps. “Yeah, I found someone. So far it’s been interesting.” It’s Sara’s voice, coming this way. My hand bursts forward and hammers the button, again and again, trying to drown out her footsteps. Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick. “Nah, I’m not really worried about double-blind. I just need to prove that it works. And it does, and we can work out the bugs later. I just need to show that—”

  The door judders open and I yell-whisper “Move!” and I jerk the gurney forward as I leap on, dragging Kate behind me, and pound the Door close button over and over again. I duck behind the wall and close my eyes and pray.

  The door closes.

  And then for a breathless moment I’m shut in a tiny room with Kate and a corpse, and the air hangs sticky while the fake wood paneling on the walls sweats, and the dust and the cobwebs fill me with sneezes that never come. The floor sinks beneath us.

  “What was that about?” she says.

  I try to say something, but what is there to say?

  “Who was that?”

  “The—the mortician—”

  And there’s more, and we both know there’s more, but both of us stand here too scared to make noise, while our guts both drop lower and then finally the door groans back open. I jerk on the cold steel again and drag Kate down the dark reddish hallway behind me, saying, “We have to hurry,” but I’m not sure if she even hears. We fly down the hall till we get to the door of the morgue, and I scan my ID and it opens.

  Darkness.

  As always, the lights are off in here, which is just as well, I guess. Cold, wet, dark, with row after row of sterile steel tables covered in sheets with hands jutting haphazardly out from beneath them. Behind us the red glow of an Exit sign, and somewhere from in front of us the cold draft of AC, cranked up by some bureaucrat who doesn’t know it’s January. As my eyes adjust to the dark, Kate’s masked face comes back into view and our gazes catch in the icy air. Then we both look away.

  The door shuts behind us and we slide the gurney in between the rows of coolers, and I pick one at random, blindly in the dark. A cold, shriveled face, a naked old man. I slam it shut, hard. And the next one has more human flesh. It’s a woman’s, a shriveled old bag, belching gas in my face. They’re all naked, all of them, covered in droplets of water or I-don’t-know-what, and my stomach is turning while the room spins around me (the black, and the red, and the cold, clammy flesh).

  Then, a voice in the dark: “I know, I know, but I’m making progress with it, I’ll just keep tweaking things, and—” Kate grabs me, pulls me down, behind the coolers, as Sara steps in the door, tromping through the dark, still talking on her phone. “And what if it does? No great loss to the world.” Then the door to her office closes and it’s quiet again.

  Kate whispers, “I think I found an empty one,” and she pulls a drawer open. I brace myself for cold, wrinkly skin, but it’s empty, just like she promised.

  “How’d you know it was—?”

  “There’s no name card on it.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Now help me out,” she says, and I pull the sheet off and I reach to pick Cyndi up and Kate does too, but then she stops and says, “Wait a second.”

  “What?” It’s cold in here and we’re whispering loud, and I just want to be done, to go to bed, but of course she’s overthinking it.

  “We’re going to have to undress her.”

  “What?” Then I realize I said What so loud that Sara had to have heard, and I duck low again, and I shiver.

  “Look at all the bodies in here,” she says. “They’re all naked. We’re going to have to undress her too, or she’ll stick out like a sore thumb. There’s no choice here.”

  “What do we do with her clothes?”

  “Throw them away? Burn them? I don’t know. But we need to get them off of her right now.”

  Ugh. “You’re right.”

  She’s already pulling a boot off.

  I swallow hard and start pulling on her earrings, dangly things that catch on her flesh and tear it like meat. There’s a necklace too, but I’m done being careful; I grab it and pull and the clasp breaks apart like it’s made of foil.

  I shove it all in my pockets.

  Now Kate’s got her boots and her socks off and she’s working at undoing her belt, and I need to catch up, so I start working on the enormous buttons on her jacket. Then I grab the cuffs of the sleeves and yank toward myself, and I punch myself in the jaw when it finally comes off. The draft from the vent is right behind me, and shivers are running up and down my spine, but I force my stiff hands to grab onto the hem of her sweater, and her arms flop over her head when they come free.

  Her bra gives me a bit more trouble since she’s lying on her back, but I manage to slide my hand under her icy skin and twist the fabric till it comes unhooked and she pops out, and then it’s just a flick of my wrist and she’s totally undressed. Kate doesn’t even blink, just says, “Okay,” and then we lift her and drop her lopsidedly into the drawer, and she pushes it in and it shuts with a click.

  And she’s gone.

  And we never have to see her again.

  We stand there together, in a pile of clothes, the gurney between us, and I look at Kate, and she looks at me, and we finally both smile a little. We smile, I think, because neither of us really thought that this moment would come. We’ve had Cyndi now less than twenty-four hours, but somehow it feels like it’s been weeks or months, like death has been dragging behind us for years. Now the weight of that death is all gone, and we smile at each other with big, ugly smiles, and then I’m in her arms and then she’s in my arms, and it feels like forever since I’ve hugged anyone. She’s sweaty and so am I.

  Then I break away, and we pick up the clothes, and we pile them back on the gurney, with the sheet on top. And we start for the exit.

  “Get down!” Kate’s pulled me back onto m
y knees behind the coolers, and we sweat and we hold in our breath while Sara stomps back through the room, whispering on her phone again.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got a backup plan. Look, this is my only chance to leave my mark on the world, so—”

  The door clicks shut and she’s gone.

  Our breath hangs in our lungs, but we’re alone, finally, and Sara’s gone, and Cyndi’s gone, and we might actually make it out of this. We wait till we don’t hear her footsteps anymore, and then we wheel the squeaky gurney out the door and down the hall to the elevator. I push the button and we wait and the doors jerk open. And the gurney squeaks on, and we follow, and the doors slam shut and we rise, but my eyelids are heavy and sinking. The ragged red carpet is pushing us up toward the sky, which is still a full hour from sunrise, and relief in my gut is swelling to modest ambition. To be fully honest, it’s kind of a strange feeling to suddenly have motivation. I see now that all that it took was a single accomplishment under my belt, even if said accomplishment only consisted of hiding a body. First thing on Monday, I’ll see my advisor again and we’ll figure out how I can graduate in a semester or two (I’m sure that it’s possible); then I’ll get started on writing that novel that’s bouncing around in my head and has been there forever, and then I’ll check Craigslist and find a new job that’s far from the corpses and bedpans as soon as I can. The glow lights the threads in my scrubs in a green-yellow sheen, and the air’s feeling fresher. We rise and we rise until Kate melts away and it dumps me out into a gray cell that’s strangely familiar. A cell that I’ve seen from the outside, but once, long ago, it was mine. The eyes of the children that looked through the windows and pleaded with me while I ran for a gurney—but those eyes are mine now. They’re mine, and I’m inside and standing behind them with them in my head, surrounded by walls made of concrete, the frame of a cold, metal bed, and an icy steel mirror. My eyes behind glass, looking out through the diamond-crossed wires at a brightly lit room ringed with eyes just like mine and a thumb pressing hard on the pages of Hamlet. And Sara stands outside the cell, looking in at me, mouthing sharp words like I win and You know that they’ll never believe you again from now on. My mother has hands on her shoulders and leads her away, and says something to her, but I can’t hear anything inside my cell. A memory that I had forgotten—this cold, concrete cell with the ugly steel fixtures and one tiny window that spills in gray sunlight and casts long, black shadows of bars. I seethe and I choke on my tears, and I plan for the day when I’ll make her cry back all the tears that she gave me. All day and all night everything that I see is through one tiny window that bleeds bright fluorescence and rows of the staring eyes into my tiny, square box. Eight tiny corners of ugly concrete that twist in forever and press on my eyes, and one-thousand nights ago, I still remember when she got the curtains she hung on our bunk beds—the dark, heavy curtains that blocked out the light of my nightlight and let her do to me whatever she wanted. The long midnight sessions of her playing doctor, till I begged her to stop and she mouthed the word No, every night, for six weeks or six years. Till I grew up and finally got her alone, and I reached out to hurt her as much as she’d deep-wounded me, and that’s when we were found. My mother screamed (loud), and she carted me off in the back of her car, and I finally woke up in these four hard, gray walls, with the light pressing in from the hole in the door, and the huge man outside with the sneer and the twitch, and he’d bang on the door and he’d force his way in. And I run from him over a sea of gray eyes and dark curtains and hot, sweaty palms, and grinding concrete turning thumbnails to stumps, and the midnight, the endless, dark clarity bleeding from walls, tearing me from the inside and screaming its screams in my ears till I beg it to stop, and I’m falling. I fall into memories lost long ago till I tear through the wall and I’m back in my bed with the sun again.