Ophelia, Alive Read online

  “I’ll need your ID...”

  “Nah, just use yours. The temporary badges open pretty much every door in the hospital.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s a huge security flaw. IT says they’re on it, but from what I hear they’ve been on it for like five years now, and since IT is really just one old guy named Larry, not much ever actually gets done. If I were you, I’d hang onto the temp ID as long as I could. Never know when you’ll need extra medical supplies.”

  She’s joking, at least I think, and I don’t want to know if she isn’t. “Okay, then.” I swipe my badge and I hear a click and I follow Sara through the door. She leads me down the gauntlet of toe tags, and it’s dark like before. I ask her, “Don’t you ever turn the lights on down here?”

  She says, “Occasionally. When I’m working in the morgue. But I’m cloistered in my office a lot, so I figure, save some energy, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “But anyway, things move pretty slow around here. Bodies come in and there’s a butt-ton of paperwork before I can even start on them, and then once I have them ready, there’s another butt-ton of paperwork before I can ship them out.”

  “I’d think they would want to get rid of a bunch of festering dead bodies as quickly as possible.”

  “Um, excuse you. My bodies do not fester. And yeah, you’d think so, but no. Think of it as a metaphor. You English majors like those, right? Metaphors?”

  “A metaphor for what?”

  “I dunno. Death, purgatory, whatever. You live for a little while, and you get dropped into the dark forever, and you’re just stuck there, and you can’t do anything about it, and nobody cares.”

  “Deep.”

  “Whatever,” she says, dropping her books on an empty body table and jamming a key into her office door. “Not all of us spend every waking minute studying metaphors, all right? Get off your high horse, Oaf.”

  I really wanted to say Speaking of death... but now I can’t. I don’t normally tell her things, but I have to tell someone (anyone) about the body (those eyes, in my memory, I have to let them out). But now I can’t. It’s something about that word Oaf. She’s always called me that, ever since we were little. And I used to assume it was short for Ophelia, till I learned to use a dictionary and looked it up, and found out it meant a clumsy, stupid person, a lout, a blockhead—or in the archaic sense, a mentally deficient child, or even, weirdly, a changeling. Then I rehearsed for days, and I worked up the nerve, and I asked her to stop, and when I did, she leaned in close, eyes narrowed, and put her sharp nails on my arm and said Stop what? And I sat there, studying her face, watching her breathe, and searching my insides for strength I never found, and that’s when I realized that somehow she had gotten inside me.

  But these are just images. Jumbles of nonsense disguised as memories. None of it is real, it’s just electrons swirling in my brain. Nothing is real right now except her hand on the key twisting 90 degrees clockwise and the clanking sound that it makes, like the elevator door, but smaller and louder. Nothing except the orange glow of the exit sign falling onto the tile floor and twisting up the table legs and over the dead people stuck here in purgatory. And she pushes me into her office and makes me step on the scale, and she nods with a smile and tells me she’s happy to know that it’s working. Then she bites her lip and says, “Have a seat.”

  I sit on her desk, and my stubby legs swing above the orange rug, and the single dangling light bulb is right behind my head, casting dark shadows on the closed door. She stands in the shadow, blocking the exit, depressing my tongue, sticking a stethoscope up my shirt. My heart shudders when I feel her cold steel.

  She picks up the clipboard, one of those ugly brown particleboard ones that would go perfect with an orange hardhat, and she picks up a yellow wooden pencil and licks it with a tongue that darts out of her mouth and says, “Let’s talk.”

  “Um—okay.”

  She stands there, eyeing me for a second, and finally says, “Well, how do you feel?”

  “Uh—” I’m freaking out, I saw a body, and it disappeared, and I can still feel its cold, sweaty beard on my face, and—“fine, I guess.”

  “No hunger?”

  “Not really. I’ll tell you about my adventure with a Snickers bar sometime.”

  “What happened?”

  “Um—nothing. Nothing, really. I tried to eat a Snickers on the way here, and it was disgusting. I can’t get the awful taste out of my mouth.”

  “What’s it taste like?”

  “Um—seriously? I dunno, it’s salty, and chemical-y, and cottony, and just really dry and gross. Why?”

  “Just curious. Okay, what else? You feel okay physically? Still alert? Still energetic?”

  “I guess. Do I seem alert and energetic?”

  “As much as ever.” Checks some stuff off on her clipboard. “Any feelings of anger or paranoia?”

  “Why would I have feelings of anger or paranoia?” I’m thumbing the folded-up flier in my pocket. It’s smooth and it’s thick and chartreuse like my scrubs.

  “It’s just a question.”

  “I—well—maybe?” I’m folding it, unfolding it, looking over the printing. Black toner with a mottled sheen from a laser printer. A jumble of letters and shapes. Names and tomorrow’s date and a bit of ironic clip art that probably looked like something before a dozen Xeroxings.

  “What’s that?”

  My hand jerks to shove it back in my pants, but she’s grabbing it away and holding it in the light, reading the words that I can see projected backwards. FOLK NIGHT. The name of a coffeehouse. Kate’s name, followed by three others in a smaller font. Tomorrow’s date and 8PM. “It’s nothing. Just something my roommate gave me.”

  She’s picking at it with her perfectly manicured nails. Its giant green shadow shakes on the wall and her face flickers in the orange twilight. And she finally hands it back and says, “Lame.”

  “What? How is it lame?”

  “A wannabe singer-songwriter going around, handing out fliers? What is this, the ‘60s?” She folds it up and slides it back into my pocket. “I can’t stand people who are walking advertisements for themselves.”

  “It really wasn’t like that.”

  “No?” She leans on the wall, crosses her arms, raises an eyebrow.

  “Well—no.” (But now I wonder if it was.) “She gave this to me as friend. Said that it was about writing. And how she learned to. And that it would help me—or—or something.” This isn’t coming out right, but then, why do I feel the need to defend either one of us?

  “God, right? So she’s Walt-fucking-Whitman? There’s never any shortage of artists forcing their mediocrities on the world, is there?”

  “Sara, why are you being like this?”

  “I don’t know. Rough day, I guess. You’re not going, are you?”

  “I mean, I was on the fence.”

  “Good. Stay on the fence. Good plan.”

  “Nah, y’know what?” I say, suddenly filled with inexplicable determination. “I think I will.” And I get up and walk right past her and reach for the doorknob, but it sticks and I can’t make it work, and I’m fumbling.

  She pushes on the door above my head and it pops wide open and I stumble out into her morgue. Then the door closes and I’m alone.

  thurs. jan. 13.

  7:03 pm.

  and then suddenly

  There’s shit everywhere.

  I’m retracing my steps, the last seven seconds, the last three minutes, that led to this moment where I’m staring at a shit stain the size of a room, a starburst on the floor made of ass-juice and farts, and a nurse in the center who’s drenched head-to-toe in the brown, with contempt in her eyes and a hand that’s suddenly empty.

  Stay out of their way. That’s all you had to do.

  And now, here we are. The bedpan I bumped sitting inverted on the floor, and everything streaked with the brown and the green and the yellow it used to co
ntain. The TV is filling the room with bleeps from Gordon Ramsay’s swears, and their eyes are on the brown and their eyes are on me, while the patient moans softly in her bed. We’re supposed be moving her now, and she’s laying there while we all just stand here and stare at each other and wish that I’d stayed the hell out of the room or my elbow had stayed at my side or my foot hadn’t slipped or I’d just called in sick and I’d stayed in my bed for the evening and nothing involving my elbow, my foot, or my unbridled knack for just clumsily fucking things up had ever happened tonight.

  And it’s too late now. Too late for any of that.

  Rachel’s mouth’s hanging open (she can’t be all that surprised, right?), and my eyes trace her curves from her chin to her hips, where she changes from green into brown, and from there it’s a blur where the line between her and the swamp of the floor is. All three of us look like we’re mushrooms that grew in a mud puddle, legs splayed and standing in terror of what we’ve become, with flecks in our hair and our noses and eyes.

  “I—” That little noise from my throat would have been some real words, except now there’s no air in my lungs and my heart has stopped beating, I think. My run-and-hide instinct has kicked in, and all I can think is Get out of this room.

  A dumb thing to do. Such a dumb thing to do. It’d be one thing if I were the one with the bedpan, or I’d had a reason to be in the room, or I were the nurse or the patient or anything else, but I’m no one at all. Just a charity case with no skills who has no right to be here, and I tripped through the door and then elbowed a bedpan, and shit’s everywhere, and the smell is like nothing that’s ever existed outside of a prison latrine.

  “Well—” Rachel finally says, forcing the words through her throat—“Why don’t you get a—”

  I run.

  I can’t help it. I slip in the muck, and I push past the doorframe (I’m banging my elbow, again), and I half-slide-half-stumble through over-bright lights, just trying to outrun the stench of my failure, and gasping and choking on fumes made of vomit. I’m sure they’re all staring and probably laughing, but I don’t know what else to do, so I run. Brown globs spread out like a thick trail of breadcrumbs behind me, and I’m reaching out with my eyes both shut tight, pushing everyone out of my way, till my hands feel a door that somebody left open. I’m diving inside, and I slam it shut (tight), and I’m left all alone in the dark with my smell.

  I’m in a closet.

  It’s one of those janitor closets filled with smelly mops and buckets and one of those cold, dirty concrete floors with a rusty drain in it. And I can feel the bile coming up in my throat, so I lean over the gigantic sink and let it pour out of my mouth. In the dark it slaps against the cheap fiberglass and flecks splash into my hair and it burns my nostrils. And I cough and I sputter and collapse on the floor. And I let the rusty concrete pull the heat from my pounding heart away. And I breathe.

  I feel around.

  I’m groping for a light switch, but there isn’t one. Then I’m hugging my knees, hugging them tight, rocking back and forth on the floor, like a crazy person.

  I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop thinking about the classroom, the one with the bulletin boards covered in colored paper and the parts of speech, what a noun was, and what a verb was. How I sat observing for hours and hours while Mrs. Swift went over a grammar lesson and they talked about The Outsiders and I thought to myself This looks easy. Then I finally got up in front of the classroom, and I don’t even remember what I said the first nine or ten times, but she buried me under a list of complaints that made no sense. But I kept standing up at the front of the room, telling them what a verb is, a noun is, an adjective is. Until one day she left me alone in the room, teaching all by myself in a roomful of sociopaths. We’re going to talk about poems, I said, and I showed them a dozen, all in different formats, and said, Now you try one, but all of them wanted to only write limericks. I said to the girl in the front row, Let’s try something else, but she told me no. And I said to her Wouldn’t you like to learn something that’s new? and she said, No, just leave me alone. I said Just read this poem, I think you could do something like it, and she told me Why don’t YOU read it if you really like it so much? and all of kids in the room started laughing at me. And I said Read it now, or I’ll go get the principal, and everyone laughed at me harder and harder. And then one of them, the boy in the back row, got out of his seat. I said Why are you up? and he said I don’t know, and he pulled all the nouns off the walls. And I said What is wrong with you, why are you all such idiots? and the girl in the front row said What’s wrong with you, you’re the idiot, you can’t even teach us anything, and you wear the same stupid outfit every day, and you’re fat and you’re ugly, and they all laughed at me again. And I said Why are you so mean? and she looked me right in the eye and said Fuck you, and I cried.

  So many mistakes.

  There once was this failed student teacher

  Whose resolve just got weaker and weaker,

  And she lay there and cried

  While her third career died,

  And considered becoming a...

  I dunno, a streaker?

  A motivational speaker?

  God, limericks are so hard.

  Tears mingle with shit and it all flows down the rusty drain next to my head. And then I hear him say, Hey, get up. (What?) Get up. I feel the ghost of a shoe, an untied boot, nudging me so gently that I almost wouldn’t notice, but I look up and through the tears and the dark I see a face like a hipster lumberjack that’s somehow familiar. Long greasy hair and a beard and a red flannel shirt and he’s saying Get up. And I say to him, But I don’t think that I can, I can’t go on, and there’s nothing out there I can possibly do. And he looks in my eyes and he says You belong here, and I tell him What? No I don’t, I’m a writer. But then he reminds me that You’ve never written a word. So maybe just think about doing the job that’s in front of you now. I say I could do so much better, and he says But now it’s not time for that, Ophie. Then he takes my muddy hand and he turns on the faucet for me and he says It’s time to work. I say, I don’t want to, I can’t, and he says, I know, but it doesn’t matter. There’s work to be done. I tell him that’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard and he says Maybe it is, but we’re here now, and we have to clean up the shit, because if we don’t, things will keep being shitty. Everyone will get sick and it will be all your fault. And so as he finishes rinsing my hair, I say, I understand and I’m ready to go out and fix things, but then the doors open and my eyes are burning from the fluorescent light.

  “Ophelia?”

  “Um—what?” I squint, trying to recognize faces and shapes in the flood of bluish yellow.

  “Are you all right?” It’s Rachel again, standing there and smacking her gum like she’s trying to kill it.

  “Something—about—what? Why?”

  “You’re sitting in a utility closet talking to a mop.”

  “Um—no—I was talking to—” but that doesn’t make even a little bit of sense. There was someone in here, but he’s a mop now. Leaning against the wall, greasy, and covered in a beard of dustbunnies. My head is throbbing.

  “To be honest, I thought you were just kind of dumb, but now I’m wondering if you’re schizo as well.” Looking at me sideways, half-concerned. “Anyway, I came here to get the mop, since I had no idea where you wandered off to.” She reaches past me and strangles the mop I was talking to, then drags it down the hall.

  I chase her.

  “Hey, wait, I was going to—I mean, I was about to—I was in there because—” I can’t keep up, she’s too fast. “Wait—I can—” I hate myself for stammering. And being so damn slow.

  “What?” She’s stopped now, turned around, looking me in the eye. Her pupils are black, and she’s stopped chewing her gum, her jaw frozen halfway between open and closed. Breathing through her mouth. Flipping her hair.

  “I was about to—”

  “About to? About to.” She’s
got her hands up now, somewhere in between shrugging, rubbing her temples, and strangling me. “Uggh—listen—” She stops, rolls her eyes, and bites her lip with her gum hanging out.

  “What?”

  “Ugh...” Crosses her arms. “Do you know where the child psychology wing is?”

  “Um—no.”

  She gestures with her head toward a staircase down the hall. “Two floors up at the end of the building. Take the stairs, turn left.”

  And for a second she just stands there, like I’m supposed to know exactly what to do with that information. She breathes through her gum, and then remembers to add: “Listen, they took one of our gurneys earlier today, and we need it back. You wanna go grab it? And take it back to the dispatch room? Please?”

  “I—okay. You’re doing this just to get rid of me for a few minutes, aren’t you?”

  “Good call. Get moving.” She walks off.

  “Wait—who do I talk to when—” but she’s gone, a million miles down the hall, practicing her swears.

  I turn around and start walking.

  And I’m glad.

  Glad that I don’t have to face that room again, glad that I can get a few minutes to myself, even if it’s just to walk upstairs and get a stretcher.

  Or a gurney. She said a gurney.

  What’s the difference?

  Damn it. Not only am I unable to do my job without splattering shit everywhere, I don’t even know the difference between a gurney and a stretcher. That’s, like, lesson one of patient transport. I’m the worst patient transporter ever.

  (You’re fired, Oaf.)

  I can’t let that happen. I need to stay here, in a job, getting paid, need to finish my degree and write books and get published, need to show them all they were wrong.

  I can do that. I can. Focus.

  Sara told me she’d keep me employed if I took her dumb drug, and I’m taking it daily, the way that she told me to. So I guess I’m okay, except—

  Actually, she said she would get me fired if I didn’t take it. She didn’t actually make any promises to keep me around if I did. Those are two different things, I guess.