He ordered a cognac after the meal had been cleared, and reclined his chair fully, feeling weirdly, weightlessly happy, a lighter-than-air machine himself, floating inside this larger flying machine. He unsealed the headphones in the seat pocket, slipped them on, and tuned to Channel 4. Albinoni this time, or some such tranquilizer. He tried to listen, but the earpieces were uncomfortable, hard little Economy Class rubbers, lacking foam padding, and he soon removed them.
A small girl’s face began to appear by increments above the top of the seat in front, blonde fringe first, wide possum eyes, thimble nose. He passed her the chocolate after-dinner mint from his tray, pressing a finger to his lips, “Ssh.”
Her face ducked out of sight, only to reappear, by slow degrees, a few seconds later, her mouth wearing an uneven coat of chocolate lipstick.
“Boo!” he said.
She giggled, her head ducked down again, and again slowly reemerged. He played the game twice more before tiring of it. His own children—teenagers now—had long cured him of the joys of repetition. The fourth time the little face poked above the seat, he reached across to his dead neighbor and flipped aside the corner of blanket that veiled the face.
The child’s wide eyes widened even further; she vanished as if jerked down into her seat. This time, she failed to reappear; he could hear a mother’s whispered scolding.
He looked sideways at Mr. Brice, unmasked. With his own chair reclined, he found himself at eye level with the corpse, with just the raised middle seat between them. He reached over and reclined that seat also, affording a better view. The dead man’s face, pale and cooling, had relaxed, freed from any emotional expression. Liberated, was the word that sprang to Philip’s mind. The eyes had the dull, milky look of death. Only the beard—soft, springy, gray-flecked—still looked alive, which of course it was. And no doubt growing, slowly.
“So,” Philip said aloud, slurring the sibilants a little, “what if I need a piss?”
No answer. The pressure of the seat belt against his full bladder was growing; he hoped he could hold on. He replaced the shroud, drained his cognac, and tried to attract the young attendant’s eye. Was she avoiding him? She had clearly formed a wrong impression; he felt an urge to defend himself. I was going to answer the summons, he wanted to tell her. I was merely waiting for someone better qualified. He banged the empty glass down on the tray, making the point. My practice hasn’t been made of patients for a long time, he explained—if only to himself—but made of paper. A house of index cards. And electronic bytes. Electronic bricks: cost-benefit statistics, survival-rate data. Quality-of-life indices. Moreover, in the past I have always answered the call. I fly a lot; there have been a lot of calls. And not only in planes. The theater, the movies …
Why can’t it be someone else’s turn? he wanted to demand of her. Because even when I do report for duty, other people fuck it up. Including your colleagues, Miss Tight Lips. Let me tell you of the time I was flying Adelaide–Frankfurt, and the dread call came. Congestive heart failure, an old dear drowning in her own foaming fluids …
He closed his eyes, and was thrown back, giddily, to that day, that flight. He had pressed an oxygen mask to the woman’s face; still she had choked. The remedy had been obvious: she had needed to lose a liter or two of fluid from those lungs. In that overbooked jumbo, at least one passenger would be very likely carrying diuretics, he had reasoned. Yet the cabin crew had refused to broadcast a plea for “water tablets.” Against company policy, Doctor. We cannot risk being sued for incorrectly prescribed drugs.
He had suggested—with some venom—that the only alternative was to fly at a lower altitude. And so the huge ship, as much zeppelin as jet plane, had lumberingly descended, on medical advice, to three thousand feet, and remained there, at enormous cost in fuel consumption, for the rest of the flight, and the drowning woman had survived.
His reward? Danke schön, Herr Doktor, and a bottle of wine. Not even an upgrade out of cattle class. Wood class, in German.
He opened his eyes. A bottle of wine might at least help him get over his current assignment: babysitting the dead. He turned back to his traveling companion. The first corpse he had seen, years before, came back to him through the thickening fog of cognac and whisky. The strangeness of the Dissecting Room, its unspeakable sights all marinated in the indelible stink of formalin. He had not been the only novitiate to rush from the room that first morning and throw up. There had been cold pork for dinner at home that night, weirdly—but also brought up, warmer, later.
“Such a sensitive boy,” his mother had often defended him to his father.
“Made of sterner stuff now,” he murmured, drunkenly, to his mute traveling companion.
And felt an immediate, slight catch in his throat. It seemed a sad thing, that lost sensitivity. Where had it vanished? Or had it, in fact, vanished? If he was sensitive enough to grieve for lost sensitivity, then surely he hadn’t, in fact, lost it.
The paradox tickled him; he chuckled drunkenly, recovering already from the brief, foolish outbreak of sentimentality.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Baker again from the flight deck. I realize the trip has been, ah, difficult for many of you, and I apologize for any inconvenience. As you will understand, the circumstances were beyond our control. But we have made good progress and will shortly be commencing our descent into Canberra.”
Philip leaned forward and peered out through the Perspex window—nothing but cloud. The pressure on his bladder was becoming more urgent; in need of relief, he tried to rise from his aisle seat, but was jerked back. Something was gripping his waist; he strained against it, and was again tugged back. He glanced down. Of course. He released the seat belt clasp, and slid over into the middle seat.
“Excuse me,” he said, and stood and lifted one leg over the dead man’s leg, but failed to find solid ground on the far side, and unbalanced backward, finishing sprawled across the middle and window seats, an armrest pushing painfully into his back.
“Doctor?”
The purser was leaning in.
“Just in time,” Philip said. “Another scotch, danke schön.”
“We’ve had some complaints, Doctor. Might I suggest something soft? And if you could fasten your seat belt.”
“I’ll fasten my seat belt,” he said. “If you get me another scotch.”
“I’m sorry, sir. That’s not possible. But we’ll be landing soon. And further refreshments will be available in the terminal.”
“It’s for my throat,” Philip said. “A slight tickle. I need a scotch to soothe my throat.”
He rearranged himself into a sitting position in the window seat; the purser calmly leaned across and fastened his seat belt. “Perhaps a nap, Doctor.”
“If you read me a story, first,” he said. “And I’d like one of those cute little coloring-in kits.”
“Please, Doctor. I know it’s difficult. But it won’t be long.”
Through rising giddiness, he remembered that he had meant to work during the flight. The first draft of his paper for the Trans-Tasman conference needed fine-tuning: “The Civic Duty to Die Cheaply.” It was in his valise, wherever that was. His heavy eyelids slid shut, the giddiness worsened. Work was clearly beyond him, the title of his paper too absurd anyway, too comically unlikely.
He forced his eyes back open. Would Holly be waiting at the arrival gate? He hoped so; he suddenly felt in need of her physical presence. Her hands, her voice, her heart. Her warm heart. He reached for his mobile phone, still safely holstered on his belt, turned it on, and punched his home number. Was he in range? Apparently. The number was ringing.
“Hello?”
“Sweetheart? It’s me. We’re about to land. Where are you?”
A brief silence, then an icy voice, “Is that you, Philip? Are you drunk again?”
“Drunk with love.”
The voice moved beyond iciness, into permafrost. “I won’t be picking you up at the airport, Philip. This is Mary, not Hol
ly. We’ve been divorced for five years, remember?”
The young attendant was again at his side. “Doctor, we don’t permit the use of mobile phones while the aircraft is in flight. I must insist.”
“Just a minute, Tight Lips. I’m in the middle of a conversation …”
But Mary had hung up. He chuckled at his absentmindedness. How had he managed to dial the old number? Ingrained habit? He remembered those first months after he had left Mary and the boys, of how he would often find himself parked outside the house, driving home from the hospital on autopilot, his mind elsewhere. He had never told Holly of these innocent episodes, sensing that she would be hurt, or would read some absurd deeper significance into them.
The purser’s voice was suggesting preparations for landing. Philip obediently raised his seat, and the middle seat, but his companion’s controls were beyond his reach.
“Please return your body to the upright position, sir,” he said, and giggled.
The aircraft rocked, descending through cloud; one of Mr. Brice’s hands flopped out from beneath the covering blanket, and onto the middle seat. Anything was suddenly possible. Philip, dazed, reached out and clasped it. The fingers were cold; he remembered again the room-temperature coldness of that first assigned corpse, years before. A woman of eighty, eighty-five. He remembered lifting the linen covering aside for the first time, terrified. He remembered the immense difficulty of making an initial incision into the white-leather skin. He had willed his trembling hand to move that day, to grasp the scalpel and cut. Then tease apart the tissues with his fingers—blunt dissection, in the argot. His thin gloves had done nothing to disguise the greasiness of the exposed flesh.
He squirmed, reliving his squeamishness. Who said he was insensitive—at least when he had been drinking? The smoky magic of scotch—it always found him out, sniffed out his dormant self like a dog. He had spent a year teasing that old lady apart, a year in which horror had slowly been replaced by fascination—and, finally, by awe. Was he getting sentimental again? About a corpse? Better sentimental than squeamish. Such a marvelous structure, that frail body. Form so perfectly matched to function. And—he smiled to himself, remembering—with a spare of everything packed in. Lungs, kidneys, ovaries. Hands, feet. Ears. Eyeballs.
A spare of everything, at any rate, except a heart.
The rumble of landing gear being lowered distracted him from his drunken reverie. The itch had left his throat, but there was surely time for one last drink. He reached up his hand and pressed the call button. No response. He pressed again, and when there was again no response, apart from that tiny red light, kept his finger pushed against the button, firmly.
Finding Joshua
JACINTA HALLORAN
It is not so much a question of leaving. The question “Why leave?” demands the justification of action: the packing of a suitcase, the severing of habit. But consider the question “Why stay?” Now everything is turned on its head. You must then find a reason for waking each morning next to someone you no longer know. You must justify the silences that stretch for days at a time, the sudden tightness in your chest as you hear his car in the driveway. In matters such as these, it’s important to ask the right questions.
We live the life of ghosts now, David and I. In the evenings, after dinner—a can of soup, a frozen lasagna: the meals cooked by friends and left at the doorstep have long since petered out—I retire to the TV, David to his study. Late at night, I often hear the click of the study latch and his footsteps in the hall. He moves from room to room, his footfall hesitant, as if he is searching for something misplaced. I hear him enter Joshua’s room and I turn up the TV volume so that my eardrums ache. Some nights he doesn’t come to bed. I do not ask him where he sleeps, or if he sleeps at all. Perhaps, like the ghosts we now resemble, he wanders the house until morning, communing with bricks and mortar, waiting for the house to yield up its secrets. In Joshua’s room, there must be secrets yet to be revealed: words scratched into the desk; a coded cipher in the arrangement of books on the shelf; somewhere, somehow a last-minute message of absolution. It is not your fault.
My psychiatrist tells me it is natural to feel guilty, that guilt is part of grieving. Of course I know this—I have read the literature, counseled my share of bereaved patients—but the knowledge I possess is of a cold, uncomforting kind. It does nothing to drown out those questions that clamor, demanding answers, at 3:00 a.m. The facts and statistics—what I used to call my training—stubbornly reside in my head, unable to soothe me to sleep, powerless to release the squeezing of my heart or slow my hungry breathing. I used to be arrogant enough to think I was prepared for grief.
I have gone back to work. Where else is there to go? I work for as long as I can, but usually by lunchtime my head throbs so badly I cannot continue. It is then that I put away my stethoscope and, with a nod to Margaret or Jill at Reception, I leave the clinic, impervious to the irritation of the patients who sit there, still waiting to see me. I’m surprised I am able to leave when there is work still to be done—such uncharacteristic behavior—but then, nothing is as it was. Besides, it’s unwise to consult when the headaches are at their peak. The pain robs me of my train of thought and the nausea can bring me to my knees. As the morning progresses and the headache builds, my thoughts become loose, my short-term memory impaired, as if the pain itself were a toxic substance, seeping through the brain, leaving countless damaged neurons in its wake. I find myself gazing out the window or doodling as my patients talk. To help with concentration, I write down their complaints verbatim in their files, but when they have left the room, I stare at these dictated phrases, no longer able to extract their meaning. I suppose these are migraines, though I have also wondered if I have a brain tumor; have, at times, almost wished for a disease that carried with it the tantalizing promise of a permanent amnesia. At other times, I hate myself for such thoughts. If I forfeit memory, what else is there?
I hear all the time of children dying: burned in house fires, the parents absent; killed in car accidents; drowned in backyard pools; teenagers who climb on top of moving trains and slam into bridges at eighty kilometers an hour. I am not alone, I tell myself, as another story of loss is splashed across the newspaper or the television screen. There are many mothers like me. I have looked for comfort in such thoughts, but I have come to realize there is no comfort to be gleaned from the suffering of others. Now, in the evenings, instead of watching news or current affairs, I lie on the couch—I have it all to myself—soaking up sitcoms and soapies, quiz shows, and talent quests. I’m sustained by the banal and the bland, the soporific and the ridiculous: there is nothing like television to deaden the mind.
As a doctor, I have learned to watch and listen as my patients speak, taking note of not only their words, but also the unconscious messages they send. Subtle shifts in body language, the vagaries of affect and mood, the Freudian slip of the tongue: these are the secret tools of my trade. After twenty years of practice, such things were instinctive, or so I thought. But with Joshua, it seems my instinct deserted me. When did I stop taking note of my son? His infant milestones, his primary school years are clear in my mind; years of simple needs and simple pleasures. I can still see him, aged twelve, on the first day of secondary school: kicking at the front steps, trying to dull the shine on his new black shoes, the sleeves of his blazer hanging down to his knuckles. In the early hours of the morning, when I have given up all hope of sleep, I stand at the kitchen window and relive his thirteenth birthday party: a warm summer’s evening, the thwack of the bouncing trampoline, the husky banter of adolescent boys, the verandah table laden with food and drink. (“Not healthy stuff, Mum,” he had begged me. “We’ve got to have pizzas and loads of soft drinks.”) In the muted light of early evening, David moved around the garden in his methodical way, taking photos of Josh with each of his friends. I insisted we sing “Happy Birthday.” Was I hopelessly misguided? Now, at the kitchen window, my dressing gown drawn tight against the cold,
I close my eyes, trying to recall the expression on Josh’s face as he bent down to blow out the thirteen candles, but the edges of memory start to blur. I can no longer be sure what I remember or what, with hindsight, I’ve insinuated into the picture. Were there shadows even then? I fast-forward to this year, but his face shifts out of focus and turns away from my gaze. When was the last time I took his face in my hands and brushed the hair from his eyes? When did he become the ghost of himself, noiseless and ephemeral, slipping through my fingers?
Somewhere in this empty house, the photographs of that birthday lie neatly framed in one of David’s albums. In other albums, on shelves and in cupboards, are other photos of other times, taking their rightful place alongside school reports, homemade birthday cards, basketball trophies, swimming medallions. Drawers that I dare not open, crammed with tokens of the past. Is this the measure of sixteen years?
I have not seen Josh’s friends since the funeral. I understand their reluctance to visit us in our mausoleum, to sit in our neglected garden with the rusting trampoline. They are young: their place is with the living. Besides, they know there are questions to be answered, questions they would rather avoid. They are young but they may not be blameless. Some of them harbor secrets, kept safe too long. After the service, as they filed past me one by one—the boys red-eyed, with shoulders hunched; the girls weeping openly—I searched each face for answers. If I could have found voice I would have asked the boys, Which of you knew and did not tell? Someone must have known. And of the girls: Which of you broke his heart? But perhaps Josh was born with a broken heart: a hairline fracture, a congenital weakness that I did not detect and, consequently, failed to mend.
Writer, M.D. Page 19
