Crow Shine

by Alan Baxter

  He ran from the offices, sucking in the night air like a beached fish. He fumbled his cell phone from his pocket and stabbed the button for Jasper. The phone rang and rang and went to voice mail.

  Rosenbaum shook his head, muttering, “No, no, no.” He waited, listening for the fire alarm, but it didn’t come. He dialled again. Nothing.

  It took only moments to get to the front office. He ducked behind bushes as a paired security patrol strolled past, chatting quietly amid the twisting smoke of their cigarettes. When they’d passed he hurried to the open window and saw the plant in there, still quite small by comparison to the others. It was dripping, already doused. Hancock had been there.

  A jog took him around to the courtyard, a high fence with spikes leaning in at the top like shark’s teeth, where patients could get some fresh air and sun without much risk of escape. The vine there was bigger, twisting around the trunk of a small maple beside it. It too ran wet with purpled, glittering droplets. Just the day room left.

  Rosenbaum snuck past the security office, sweat soaking his clothes. He ducked below ward windows, used his pass to slip in through a side door, and hurried to the day room. His knees buckled, vomit rising in his throat, at the sight of Hancock suspended in the vines, halfway up the wall, shifting like a flag in a soft breeze. The man was thinned, reduced, the skin on his hands and neck pulled taut and sunken, like he was being emptied, sucked away. He moaned gently, in pain or ecstasy it was impossible to tell.

  Rosenbaum’s mind swam, the urge to climb up and wrap himself in with Hancock drew him forward a couple of steps. A thought drifted like mist across his consciousness. Join him? Not save him? He knew the truth already. Hancock was past saving.

  Rosenbaum uncapped his petrol can and threw it at the base of the plant, fuel glittering in the half-light as it turned over and hit the floor, scattering its contents before sliding to a stop. Petrol pulsed out to make a pool before everything was still again. The plant shivered and flexed. The vines creaked as they pushed forward, tiny green leaves reaching. Reaching for him. And he wanted so much to go to it, to accept its embrace.

  He cried out and drew a match from his pocket, struck it with shaking hands and threw it into the room. Heat in a concussive blast pushed him backwards. His eyebrows singed, the smell of burning hair stung his nostrils. He had to do it all now, the timing ruined. But the alarms were going, triggered by the sudden fire, claxons shattering the night. Screams and shouts erupted all around.

  He retraced his steps and threw matches into the courtyard and the front office, yelling at the top of his voice, “Out! Everybody out!”

  Running to the consultation rooms, he heard yelling behind him, security guards hollering at him to stop, panicked cries from inside, all overlaid with the insistent clangour of the alarms. He ran past each window in turn, his own, Sally’s, Jasper’s. Poor Jasper! Fire burst in a cloud from each office as he flicked matches in and the entire hospital was soaked in noise and smoke and flames.

  *

  Rosenbaum sat in the back seat of a police cruiser and watched the fire department douse the blackened ruins of the hospital. Parts of the old sandstone building still stood, though most of the roofs had caved in. Doctors and police tried to control the milling crowd of patients, some enthralled, some shocked. Others were no problem, curled on the grass or rocking beneath trees, stark silhouettes in the floodlights of the fire-fighters.

  Horror, confusion, despair swamped the grounds. Not everybody had made it out, headcounts were proving difficult.

  Not a chance.

  Those had been the fire chief’s words when asked about the possibility of survival of anyone still inside. The last conversation Rosenbaum had heard before the car door was closed on him, muffling the chaos he’d caused.

  The chief administrator, hair tousled from sleep, approached the car with a police officer, opened the door. His face was white as the moon and just as distant. “Why, John?” he asked, in a voice thin with incomprehension.

  Rosenbaum hung his head, tears running down his cheeks, spotting his smoke-stained trousers.

  The officer took the administrator’s arm and turned him away. The man was muttering something about an acrimonious divorce to the policeman as the car door closed, cutting the conversation off. The sounds of crying and howling were muted once more.

  Along the riverbank, massed clumps of twisting black vines stretched forward in the night, reaching for the smoking ruins.

  Shadows of the Lonely Dead

  His eyes are tight with pain as he turns away from me, buries his frustration in the pillow.

  “Something I said?” I ask nervously. “Or did?”

  He shakes his head, rustling against the duvet pulled up tight under his chin. “I’m sorry. It’s not you . . . I can’t . . . This has happened before, I . . . I don’t know why.”

  “It’s okay. We don’t have to. No pressure, you know.”

  He sniffs, turns it into a humourless laugh. “Sorry. I’m damaged goods.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, remove it quickly as he stiffens. “Oh, Jake, don’t say that, it’s okay. It happens to loads of guys, but no one ever admits it. Stay here, just sleep, you know.”

  He nods. “Maybe in the morning?”

  “Sure.”

  *

  I don’t push for anything in the morning. Something difficult is happening and I like him too much to scare him off. I make coffee and bring it to the bedroom. He’s beautiful, a wave of dark hair half obscuring his face, cheeks dusted with two day’s growth. He smiles softly as I creep up to the bed.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Hi there.”

  We stare at each other for a moment, still getting used to how the other looks, everything so new.

  “Sorry about last night,” he says. “First time I stay and I can’t . . . ”

  I hold up one hand, pass the coffee with the other. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got plenty of time, right?”

  His smile comes back. There’s an edge of melancholy that seems to live behind his eyes, but that smile pushes it away like a breeze behind clouds. “I guess so. Thanks.”

  “Take your time getting up, have a shower and stuff if you want. I need to get ready for work. I start at ten.”

  *

  The hospice is quiet as I enter. Mary offers me a subtle nod from the reception desk and I push through double doors into the smell of carpets, disinfectant and death. Claire Moyer catches my attention, coming the other way.

  “Mr Peters last night,” she says. “About three.”

  I nod. “Thought so. His family there?”

  “No. No one.”

  I shrug and walk on, drop my coat and bag in the nurse’s station. Poor old Mr Peters, his daughters stopped visiting about two weeks ago, when he started to spend more time asleep than awake. It doesn’t really matter. We all die alone.

  Even people surrounded by loved ones are utterly alone as they slip away, the sea of grief around them unnoticed. Death is the only truly personal thing there is. No one can ever understand it, even someone like me. I’ve seen death take people hundreds of times, held their skeletal hands as the darkness closes in and their breaths stretch further and further apart until they don’t breathe again. But I have no idea what it’s like.

  I check the roster, see who needs medication, bathing, feeding, simple company. I knew Peters was leaving last night. I hope he didn’t realise his daughters had stopped coming, but it’s surprising what gets through the haze of terminal illness. Even as their minds go and they forget the faces of people they’ve known their whole lives, moments of clarity spike through the deterioration like lighthouses sweeping the night and they ask, “Where’s my wife?” “Where’s my son?” And they know they’re alone whether those people are there or not and the last of their resolve crumbles as they slide into that stygian unknown.

  Edie Sutton is on my list. She needs a wash, and a feed if she’s up for it. Doubtful she’ll eat, she hasn’t m
anaged more than a couple of teaspoons of jelly a day for almost a week now.

  I’m surprised to see her awake as I enter, eyes wet and frightened in the glare of spring through thin cotton drapes. I take a sponge lollipop, dip it in the glass of water beside her bed and gently press moisture to her cracked lips. Her chin quivers as the liquid rolls over her desiccated tongue. “That taste good?” I ask quietly.

  Her eyebrows rise, the almost translucent skin stretched tight across her skull wrinkling like tissue paper. “Tired.” Her voice is barely audible, but you get used to listening for their words, every syllable a struggle.

  “Had enough, huh?”

  Tears breach her red, sagging eyelids and she nods ever so slightly.

  “You can go whenever you like, love,” I whisper.

  A moment of softening around her eyes. “Can I?”

  “Of course you can. You’ve seen everyone you were waiting to see.”

  “My Damon?”

  “He’ll be here at lunchtime.” Her son. Visits regularly as he works nearby, sits with her every evening for hours. “Another couple of hours.”

  She closes her eyes and her exhalation is slow and weak, like heat escaping a long summer day. She’ll be gone soon, I’ll have to keep a close check. I lift her hand, a collection of brittle sticks loosely attached to an arm like old bamboo wrapped in papyrus, check her radial pulse. Barely there and so slow. I let my mind pass through my touch, search out the decay and failing organs, take the shadows of her dying softly into myself. I can’t cure her, but I can collect the scourge, its malice.

  A dark stain spreads into me and I store it away.

  *

  The day goes slowly and quietly. It’s usually quiet here, except those moments when someone cries out, sudden terror giving voice to weakened lungs as they momentarily face their mortality without the softening armour of fatigue or drugs. Or the howls of grief, sometimes from friends and family, sometimes from the sick themselves. Sometimes both.

  I clean up Kathy Parsons, who’s been uncontrollably shitting viscous blood onto plastic sheets for more than a week now, check her meds. She exudes the sickly sweet, cloying odour of death. She’s terrified. Only forty eight years old, eyes always wide in child-like fear, but she’s got a little while to go yet. A little while to reach some kind of acceptance, though not all of them do. Some are gasping in disbelieving horror, even with their last breath. Almost everyone dies scared, especially the young ones. Some people are calm and accepting, content as they drift away, but they’re rare, usually very old. Everyone has time to think as they lie here, suspended in the last darkening hours of their life. It’s good that some find peace in that mortal dusk.

  I reassure Kathy as much as possible, sit with her as a sedative soaks through her struggling veins.

  Edie’s pulse is almost gone when I check her again an hour later, breaths so far apart every one seems certain to be her last. I call her son to tell him he needs to get here, but his phone goes to voicemail. I leave a message imploring him to hurry if he can.

  I pull the chair up beside her bed and take her fingers in my palms, rest my forehead against the back of her hand. Her frailty wafts into me and I soak it up, gather that insipid, creeping death into my cells. It can’t hurt me. I don’t know why, but it can’t. So I collect it. I don’t know why I do that either. Because I can. It doesn’t heal them or ease their suffering, but at some level I like to think they know I share their pain and that offers some subconscious solace.

  Edie’s pulse weakens until I can’t feel it any more. Her breaths are tiny, sharp intakes, almost imperceptible, more than ten seconds apart. Her exhalations are silent, air leaking from lungs little more than deflated sacks of inert offal.

  Fifteen seconds apart. She’s going.

  Her life leaks into the air and the shadow of her sickness, her fear and loneliness, washes through me and she’s gone. I shudder with the gift she’s given me. My hands tremble as I stand and move away to mark her chart, dimness swimming behind my eyes.

  Her son is hurrying along the hallway to her room as I emerge and his face falls when he sees me.

  “I missed her?”

  “I’m sorry. Only just. She passed moments ago. But she didn’t wake again since this morning.”

  He barks an uncontrollable sob and tears tumble over his cheeks. We’re all five years old when our mothers die. “I can see her?”

  “Of course.”

  I’ll send the counsellor down with the relevant pamphlets after he’s had some time alone with her.

  *

  Not much else happens through the day, which pleases me. It’s terrible when more than one patient dies in a day, as the first one feels somehow cheated of their time in my mind.

  Jake is parked outside when I get home, an embarrassed smile twitching his lips. “Hi.”

  I’m so pleased he’s there. “Hi.” I had wondered if I might not see him again. Our few faltering dates that led to our first night together had been cautious but full of hope. When something got in his way last night, I worried it would frighten him off.

  “Try again?” he says, holding up a bottle of red.

  “I’d really like that. I have some steaks in the fridge and wait til you try my potato rosti.”

  *

  We gently fumble at each other’s clothes, clumsy with nerves and the dull edge of the wine. Edie’s death still floats around me, within me, but that helps. I embrace it. Nothing makes me hornier than death. Something about mortality reminds us at a level beyond thought of the importance of contact, of touch, of the life within lovemaking.

  I’m not too proud to admit I usually masturbate a lot in the privacy of my home after we lose someone. It’s unavoidable, the desperation to feel alive - to feel life - especially when I’ve absorbed the death into my marrow like I do. I hope Jake can see it through this time.

  I’m as gentle as I can be, as caring as I know how. He shivers and stiffens with nerves as I run my hands across his shoulders. He looks into my eyes, a nervous smile. “It’s okay, I’m sorry. I want to.” He reaches back and unclips my bra, lets it drop beside the bed.

  “You are so lovely,” he whispers.

  There’s tension, fear, but he keeps assuring me I should continue and so I do and he eventually performs. It’s soft and urgent, but electric. Afterwards he grabs hold of me and hugs me against his chest so hard I have to gently force a breath into my constricted lungs.

  “That was wonderful,” he whispers, his hot breath tickling my ear.

  “It was,” I say. “I’m glad.”

  He holds me tight and his breathing changes. He turns his face away. I push away to look at him and tears stand in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, really. It’s hard to . . . this is difficult for me. But please, don’t feel bad. I just can’t help it.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  He smiles, leans down to kiss me. “Just keep being so nice to me.”

  “That’s easy.”

  I settle beside him and turn to let him spoon me, push myself back into the curve of his body. He’s so warm and strong and vibrant - the opposite of poor Edie’s hard, cool, frailty, all jutting bones and oxygen tubes.

  “Was someone less than nice to you?” I ask, biting my lip the moment it’s out. Probably not the thing to say.

  “Something like that.”

  I stroke his hand, not game to risk saying anything else, ask for any more of his secrets.

  “I’ll tell you one day,” he says, voice thin with pain.

  He holds me tight until we fall asleep. It’s good to have someone so alive to hold on to, a beacon against the shadow of all the death in me.

  *

  The days at work pass slowly and my hours rotate to nights. I prefer the solitude and peace of the night shift, and most deaths happen then. It’s strange how people who have been unconscious for days or weeks almost always seem
to slip away in the depths of the night, like they know somehow that leaving while the sun shines is unusual. I remember Edie dying in the middle of the morning; her shadow still drifts through me, the echo of her disease. It’s all that’s left behind, her life and body far away now.

  We haven’t lost anyone for nearly a week. The orderlies are taking bets on how much longer it’ll be. Sam’s aiming high, reckoning another few days. Marek is less confident, thinking Mr Patel will die tomorrow. They’re both wrong. Jack Oswald will die tonight, maybe in the next two hours, three at the most. I can feel it. I’ve always been drawn to death, always offended by the hopeless indignity of it. And I’ve always sought to care for the dying, take into myself something of their pain, a memory of their suffering. I was destined for this career.

  I pad into Oswald’s room, put a hand against his cheek. It’s very cool, his eyes flickering gently behind thin, pale lids. I was wrong, it’s happening already. No one to ring for old Jack, he has no one to come. “Last of a line and good riddance,” he said to me when he arrived three weeks ago.

  “You can’t be all bad,” I’d said, and he laughed.

  “Not bad, really. Just not much good either. Never had kids, wife died twelve year ago. Worked fifty years for fuck all and here I am being tucked away in a corner to die alone.”

  “We all die alone, Jack,” I said, an attempt to soften his hurt.

  “Yeah, but there’s alone and alone, ent there.”

  Darkness swells up in him. He hasn’t woken in five days. He had a drip in his arm feeding him a bare minimum of hydration, anti-nausea medication and painkillers - a poor simulation of normal life while he dies - but we took that out a few days ago. He’s a skeleton under linen stamped with the name of the hospice.

  He’d asked me the week before to speed it up for him. “Can’t you jab me wiv somefing, make it happen? What’s the fucking point in hanging on?”

  I’d told him I wished I could, and I meant it.

  We wouldn’t let our dogs and cats suffer like this but we’ll happily put our own parents away to wither and waste into ignominy and despair. They deteriorate to frightened babes again as everything they’ve ever been deserts them, and we think it’s the humane, moral thing to do, to let that happen. To watch it happen while we tell them everything will be okay. Which is the worst line of bullshit we ever try to sell in a world powered by lies and deception.