Ophelia, Alive Read online

  (Yes. Yes it has.)

  “...yeah...”

  “Ophelia? Ophelia Reed?”

  “...yeah...”

  “You’re late. You’re four minutes late.”

  “I...uh...”

  “Hey.” Snapping his fingers. Uh. Wake up, Ophelia. Say something.

  “Sorry? Sorry. I, uh—I had trouble with—”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” he’s telling me.

  “I—okay—”

  “This isn’t one of your English lit classes. You have to show up. You have to work. People expect results.”

  “That’s, um, that’s a little condescending—”

  “Sara explained that to you, right? That results matter here?” He raises a perfect eyebrow—

  “She also said you weren’t in any position to be picky.”

  “That’s not really your concern.”

  The silence that follows is long and it’s awkward. I stare at his blinding-white Keds till his eyes stop burning my scalp.

  “Anyway,” he says, “welcome to patient transport. I’m Sam.” He holds out a hand to shake and the sudden change in tone disorients me, and I quiver in my Chuck Taylors and forget to respond.

  “I—uh—” Somehow I jerk my hand up and he grabs it and it wiggles like a string in the air while the lights buzz.

  “You got an idea of how things work around here?”

  “We...transport...patients?”

  “That’s pretty much how it works,” he tells me, reaching into a box to his right. He’s got a pager—because apparently pagers are still a thing—and he’s stabbing at buttons on it with his thumbnails. “Here, take this.”

  I take it from him and it glistens sweaty in the artificial light, an overworked relic. Curves and contours that must have looked cutting-edge in 1992.

  “This is how we communicate around here. When we need to move a patient from one room to another, you’ll get the information on this screen. Other than that, it’s just a lot of grunting and straining. Say, you’re—”

  He looks me up and down.

  “—you’re not exactly a linebacker.”

  (Um, thanks for noticing?)

  “You’re gonna have to be moving 300-, 400-pound people around sometimes. Are you sure you can handle this? Most of us around here tend to be big guys. I mean—I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Are you—?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  I can see the words discrimination lawsuit flash before his eyes, and he shrugs his (beautiful) broad shoulders and the lime green fabric ripples (perfectly) over his pecs and he scratches the back of his neck, and he says, “Okay, then. Just—um—remember to, y’know, lift with your knees. I’ll—I’ll turn you over to Rachel. She’ll show you the ropes.”

  Sitting at the table with the cards is a skinny blonde chick who looks up from a half-assed game of solitaire. “Yeah,” she says to nobody, “great idea. Let’s put the only two women in the whole department together. Team Can’t-Lift-a-Single-Patient, assemble!”

  Sam says, “You’re the only one around, Rach.” And then, he adds: “I’ll try to only give you patients who don’t need to get out of bed.”

  She sighs.

  And he adds, “...and I’m sorry for interrupting your solitaire game.”

  She says, “Yes, there it is. Thank you.” She stands up and she looks like a model because of course she does, because I already feel awkward and lost standing here, so I might as well feel fat and ugly as well. She tosses an ace on the table and she stretches in a big, making-a-show-of-it sort of way, and she cracks her back and says, “Come with me, kid.” She walks past me and squeezes through the door as Sam tries (too late) to duck out of the way, and gets playfully shoved, and it’s suddenly obvious that that perfect stubble will never be mine to touch.

  She’s walking down the hallway faster than I can keep up, her perfectly white Keds flashing in the puddles of light. Why do people at hospitals always wear Keds, and how do they always keep them so white? Or maybe it’s just the artificial light. (Somehow that stuff is worse than darkness.)

  I half-start half-running.

  “You know anything about patient transport?” she’s asking.

  “I mean—y’know, sorta.”

  “So basically, you don’t have a clue.”

  “Uh—yeah.”

  “Well, it’s really simple,” she tells me. “Patients need to get moved from room to room—for CT scans, if their status changes—that sort of thing. And the nurses are too lazy to do it themselves, so they call us.” She picks up the pace and I’m breathing a little harder. “Which, again, is why most of the people in our department are big dudes. But, obviously, if they’re desperate enough, they’ll hire anyone. Which is why the two of us are here.”

  She turns a corner and I run along with her and she keeps going: “It’s usually not too bad. Patients stay in their beds, the beds have wheels on them, we push them around. It’s a pretty good workout. I mean, unless you throw out your back.”

  And that seems likely. But I can’t quit out of mortal terror now. Mom doesn’t believe I can graduate, Sara doesn’t believe I can handle this job.

  Do the job. Graduate. It’s all you have left.

  And suddenly she stops and I walk into her back and my nose scrapes against her freckles and they feel just like well-moisturized sandpaper.

  “You almost ready for us in here?” We’re standing at the door to a patient’s room and she’s talking to a nurse who’s behind a curtain.

  “Uh—yeah. I think. Almost. Maybe.”

  And then I’m on the other side of the curtain, suddenly, without thinking, because I just kept walking (apparently?). “Oh, God, no!”

  “What are you doing? What is wrong with you?” Rachel’s screaming, but it’s too late because all I can see is a faceful of old lady crotch—a forest of pubes, a wrinkly old labia—and a bloody tube being dragged out of her pee-hole.

  And the nurse is yelling, “What were you thinking, what do you think these curtains are for, give this poor woman some privacy, oh my God!” and I’m running from the room (from the tear-jerking stench), and I crumple to my knees with tears in my eyes, just searching for air that won’t smell like a buttcrack. I squeeze my eyes closed and the black turns to red turns to black, and the noise of the world turns to fuzz while the tile floor absorbs the sting. I’m here on my knees for an eternity and a half, till I feel Rachel kicking me in the butt. I’m scared to look up, but when finally I do, all I see is her face, and she’s laughing.

  “Okay,” she says, “so that was...uh, wow.”

  I look up from hugging my knees into her face, half-haloed by the purple-green fluorescent light.

  “Are you...I mean...what is this? What am I looking at here?”

  “Uh—”

  “I mean, are you sure working in a hospital is for you? You see a single catheter getting removed, and you’re—I mean, wow.”

  I’m feeling the floor with my hands, on my knees, waking up, thinking Wow, this chick’s right, I’m embarrassed, and what’s wrong with me? The tiles are cold and they’re rougher than they look from a standing position. They’re weirdly familiar (the feel of linoleum), and all I can think is it’s weird to remember the textures and feelings familiar to me as a child but forgotten as I grew. What was close became distant...

  I stand back up. My knees creak.

  “I...I’m sorry. That was... embarrassing. I’m okay. I...”

  “Yeah, are you sure? Because if you need to go sit down or—”

  “She’s ready to go.” It’s the nurse who says that, pushing past us. “And get your trainee under control.”

  I scratch at my elbow and I laugh nervously.

  She sighs, rolls her eyes, smacks her gum. “Okay, uh—let’s—there’s a...thing...we have to fill out...” And she picks up a clipboard that hangs on the wall, and checks several boxes and shows it to me. “You see how I did that?”

  I don’t, but I say yes, and
she hangs it back up.

  “Great,” she says, and she leads me over to the bed. The old woman’s awake, but Rachel ignores her, squeezing in between the bed and the wall. “There are brakes on the wheels,” she tells me. “Make sure all four are released. Then we—” she moves some sort of lever underneath the bed that I can’t see, and—“and we’re off.” She pushes on the bed and I forget to move and it runs into me and it stabs me in the gut and I gasp for air but she doesn’t notice. I scramble to stay on my feet, and we head out the door, down the hall, and onto an elevator.

  She hits a button for a floor.

  “So...” she says, and then nothing, and the elevator rises in silence while I scratch my ankle with my foot, and the air is strangely cold. One of the lights is flickering, and she coughs. And then the doors snap open and she pulls on the bed, dragging me along with it, and I see that we’re on the ICU level. Faces pass by, behind glass, under respirators and tubes and harsh, ugly lights.

  Something is beeping. The beeps swarm around, between gasps of gray air, while the skulls with their skin falling off snork and bubble, and the lights are so bright, and she’s dragging me along through the poisonous air, and this all needs to stop.

  And then the bed stops. And I open my eyes.

  “We’re done,” she says.

  “What?”

  “We’re done. We have her where she needs to be.”

  “Oh. So I can—”

  “Spend the rest of the day moving more patients around? Sure.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You’re really not cut out for this, are you?”

  “No—yes—I have to—”

  “Oh, hey,” she says, looking at her pager and stabbing at a button. “This is something you could probably do. You know where the morgue is?”

  “The—the morgue?”

  “Yeah, second basement? Just take the elevator straight down, and head to your left, and you can’t miss it.”

  “Oh.”

  She says, “Yeah, I just got a message that they need a gurney down there. Just an empty gurney. Think you can manage that?”

  “Uh—”

  “Because I have another fire I need to put out,” she says, poking at her pager some more. “Just grab the gurney against the wall over there and take it down with you. You’ll do fine.”

  “Oh.”

  “You won’t have to look at sick people. The thing will be empty, it’ll be easy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just come back to the transport center when you’re done. It’ll be great.” And she checks some things on a hanging clipboard, and she jogs out the door, and I’m alone in the room.

  Old lady opens her eyes.

  And I run.

  I’m out the door, and I’m grabbing the gurney, I jerk, and it’s heavy, but I’m dragging it behind me, under flashing lights and back toward the shaft we came up through. I punch the button and punch it again, punch it over and over, just waiting for the door to open so I can climb on and get away from the smell of this floor.

  Then they snap open and the mirror shows my face, scared and bedraggled, and I close both my eyes and step on and punch B2.

  And I’m going down.

  The elevator hits the bottom with a jolt and the doors snap open, spitting me out onto a concrete floor painted a splotchy red, and the gurney squeaks loud in the deserted hallway.

  “There you are.”

  I jump because I didn’t see her there, but there she is, just standing in the corner, her freckles lit up the same shade as the floor, and the lights above her are flickering while she half-smiles and taps on a clipboard. And this is the second time today I’ve been stabbed in the gut by hospital equipment, and I’m doubled over catching my breath till I can finally find the air to groan, “Hi, Sara.”

  “You having fun?”

  “Um—” If by fun you mean completely and repeatedly embarrassing myself, then yes. If by fun you mean injuring vital organs with hospital beds, then yes. “It’s fine. I’m—doing great. Yeah. Fun.”

  She half-laughs and the corner of her smile turns up a bit more.

  “Anyway,” I tell her, “I brought you this gurney. This is for you, right? They said the morgue wanted it.”

  “Yeah, it’s for me.”

  “So...here?” I’m pushing it toward her, just hoping she’ll take it, but she just stands there, tapping her red nails on her clipboard and smiling. And then, finally:

  “Come on,” she says. “I wanna show you something.” And she turns and heads down the hallway, leaving me here with the gurney thinking Maybe I should just leave it and get back on the elevator? Because I could, because I’m thinking that it would be so easy to turn around and go back to the transport lounge and pretend like I never even ran into her. But for some reason I don’t. Because she just left me standing here, because she knows that no matter what I’m thinking, no matter how long I stand here, I’ll just end up following.

  Because it’s always been that way.

  And so I’m dragging the gurney, running after her as she disappears into the red.

  “Hey, wait up...”

  There once was medical thesis

  That had fallen (quite frankly) to pieces.

  I don’t know the details,

  But when my sister fails,

  It’s my own sense of self-worth it eases.

  (Hey, that one’s not bad.)

  And maybe that’s why I’m following her right now. Maybe that’s why I’m filling the red and the flickers with clicks and with clacks of a rickety gurney that’s dragging behind me and slowing me down, as she disappears further and further and water-stained ceiling tiles fly by over my head.

  The oxygen in the basement here circulates poorly; patches of cold, sweaty, underground air alternate with a dry air that’s stale from a dust-coated furnace. The chills come in waves, interspersed between two-second fevers, till I’m scraping my nose against freckles for the second time today, because she stopped and we’re both standing now at a door that says Morgue. She scans her ID, turns around and looks into my eyes with a smile.

  A twisted, freckly grin stares down into my face, and I can see her breath and it smells like medicine. Her hand on the door, ready to open it, and she’s running her tongue over her perfect-white teeth. “Are you ready?” she says.

  “Am I what?”

  But she doesn’t say anything. Just bites her tongue and closes one eye like it’s somehow a trick to get the door open, and the air rushes out of the hallway and into the twilight that’s waiting behind it. She says, “After you,” because of course she does.

  I wince and I step toward the door and she pushes me in, and she steps in behind me and closes it (hard), and I blink at the cold, bluish darkness. All I can see in the dark is a half-dozen rows of cold, metal drawers that are bathed in the light of a red Exit sign, and the air doesn’t smell right, like an evil biology class.

  As my eyes adjust to the dark, I can make out the gray, fuzzy shapes, tables with people on them. Most covered in sheets, but some grimacing wide at the ceiling. Bodies. I knew this was coming, knew where we were going, and I feel like that should have made it easier, but it didn’t. We’re standing in the dark, in a room full of flesh, and there’s nobody here. No one living, I mean.

  Cold hands on my back. Her breath in my ear. She laughs at me when I jump.

  In the dark I feel her sharp nails tickling their way down my back, and she says, “Chill, okay? You’re such a spaz.” And then she walks past me, down the aisle between two rows of body coolers. “Anyway,” I hear her say, “we’re not here to gape at corpses.” Her shadowy form is swallowed by the dark, and I run to keep up, and the night is filled with pounding feet. “Just leave the gurney anywhere.”

  I bump into her one more time because she’s fumbling with her keys in the dark, one of those globulous key chains that’s more fobs and toys than actual keys. Then I hear one of them finally slide into a lock and she throws the door op
en and orange light pours out onto the cold, dead faces.

  I’m seeing something that’s halfway between an office and a closet. A pitted concrete floor, with a stained orange rug that only half-covers a drain. A rusty filing cabinet, a cheap desk, and a bathroom scale. A dusty plastic plant. A computer that’s old enough to be beige.

  She pushes me inside. (Again.)

  Then she closes the door behind us and leans against it and watches my face. She’s smiling. The cheap clock on the wall is ticking, and she says, “Yeah, we all end up in the morgue eventually. I just got here sooner than others. Wish it came with a nicer office, though.” She sniffs the air, like it’s mustier than she expected, walks toward me. Instinctively, I sink down onto her desk, and her computer monitor stabs me in the back. “But hey, at least no one ever bothers me down here.” Then she’s on her knees, rifling through a desk drawer.

  “You’re seriously okay with this? Because, wow.”

  “It’s only—ow—till I find a real job somewhere.” Grabs something, slams the drawer shut, stands back up. “Or I’ll be running this place.” She leans in over me. “Open up.”

  “What?”

  “Your mouth. Open up.”

  “Wait—”

  She jabs me with a tongue depressor, the one she pulled from her drawer, and now it’s in my mouth and it tastes like lipstick and dust and paperclips. She’s pushing my tongue down and squinting at my tonsil stones with nothing for light but the orange lightbulb that hangs by a wire from her ceiling. The splinters scrape my tongue as she pulls it away.

  “What are you—?”

  “Shh.” Now she’s got one of those things, one of those pokey-lighty things that doctors shove in your eyes and ears, and she’s stabbing around my face with it. Holding my eyes open with her cold hands, squinting hard. And then she’s sticking something in my ear, one of those ear thermometers with a loud beep that rips through my eardrum, and she pulls it out and looks at it and frowns.

  “Stop—”

  “Shh, I’m not done yet.” Then her hand’s up my shirt, pressing the cold, metal disc of a stethoscope against my chest. Fumbling around my bra, finding every possible inch of bare skin to touch with the icy metal and her sharp nails. She listens to my heart, and her eyes are far away, imagining the insides of my ventricles. Then she pulls the earpieces out, and then her hand is gone and my shirt feels cold and empty. “Get on the scale.”