Freebird

by John Raymond

  “I’m not thinking about the police right now,” he said. “The police are not my concern. Or yours. Your concern is only your brother and what’s best for him and your family. Okay? So put the police out of your mind. Don’t think about that here. That’s for another day.”

  Anne loved this doctor.

  Anne sat with her father and her son in a corner of the waiting room, pondering what to do. For many minutes they sat there silently, staring at the floor. Anne’s dad was ultimately the one who had to make the call, and Anne had no idea what he was thinking. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, either. Among her tests, this was a new one, utterly unpredicted. All her worries about her dad had obscured her own clarity of judgment. Was she ready to do this already? After only four days, was she prepared to say good-bye? The hours had been going so slowly, but there hadn’t been that many of them yet. She sensed Aaron was ready. He understood the gravity of the situation, but he was also the most objective, having logged so little time with Ben. He was able to see Ben as a mere patient.

  “It isn’t looking so good, is it?” she said to no one in particular.

  “Nope,” Aaron said, in a way that let her understand he wasn’t being flip.

  “I think Dr. Salt is right,” she said. “We have to think about Ben’s comfort here. I know he isn’t feeling anything right now, but the way he is, it just isn’t right. It isn’t how he’d . . . Oh God . . .” Her chin and mouth crumpled, and she couldn’t go on.

  “This isn’t how he’d want to be,” Aaron said, gently continuing her thought.

  “And even if something happened, and he somehow comes through,” she said, “then what . . . a life in bed? No brain activity? Eating through a tube? He’s never going to think and feel again. And even if a miracle happened, what after that? The death penalty? My God. I mean . . . What do you do with that?”

  “That’s not what we’re thinking about now,” Aaron said.

  Still her dad wasn’t talking. He was rocking in his seat, massaging his thighs. He’d conferred with a rabbi earlier in the day, but it hadn’t seemed to change anything for him. Anne still wasn’t even sure how fully he comprehended the situation.

  “What do you think, Daddy?” she managed to ask him.

  Her dad’s eyes remained on the floor. The footsteps of a faraway nurse made a screech on the linoleum. The wheel of the food cart clicked on its axle. Aaron sighed, tracking on some sad tangent of thought.

  “Daddy?”

  Still he didn’t move, but eventually his rusty voice emerged from his mouth: “There is always hope,” he said.

  Anne looked over at Aaron, who raised his eyebrows a degree to confirm he’d heard the communication. The words had registered. There’s always hope. That’s what her dad, the legal custodian, had said. But what did this mean, practically speaking? Aaron didn’t offer any response, because what did a person say? There’s always hope. They weren’t crazy words, not uncomprehending of the circumstances, but they weren’t helpful, either. There would have to be some interpretation ahead.

  And so they waited.

  The morning was unendurably long, a slow trickle of seconds, a hot, gritty ooze of minutes, and at last the afternoon came on. Anne killed fifteen minutes staring at some kid playing a video game on his stupid plastic console. Over his shoulder she could see the screen, where hunchback orcs were losing limbs to the slashing blade of a ranger’s scimitar. It was another cruel joke, obviously, but eventually it went beyond a joke. She stared openly as the slack-jawed kid wallowed in that awful, ugly, pastiched world, bathed in that awful, gray, computerized light, giving himself over to the stiff-moving avatar. He poured himself into this crude, digital puppet, unaware of anything in his physical vicinity, lost in the meaningless but obligatory killing of subhumans.

  What does Ben want? She asked herself Dr. Salt’s question. He wants to go, she thought. He wants to be released from his cage. He wants to release us, too, and send us back to our productive lives. That was her best guess, anyway. That was what she’d want in his situation. Or so she thought. There was always what people said they wanted, and then what they really wanted, confronted by the pyre of death.

  In Ben’s healthy life, what would he have imagined for himself? He’d have wanted to die in battle, she thought. And in that, he’d gotten his wish. He’d made the whole world his battlefield, and he’d taken many of his foes with him. And how did she herself want to go? Fast. Hit by a bus. An anvil on her head. A piano falling out a fifth-story window. She vowed to start walking in more construction zones as she got older and more brittle. Postmenopause, she’d start living very much more dangerously. She’d never sin again.

  Do you believe in anything after? Dr. Salt never asked this question, but it was where the other questions led. On this question, she hated to hazard a guess. Her deepest intuitions went something in the vein of mulch—the beatific dissolve of carbon-based life into organic dirt. Maybe, possibly, it felt good. The dissolve was maybe even a form of ecstasy. Maybe even sexually pleasurable, in a way. Slowly, slowly, the flesh melted into rich earth, gradually growing back into the forms of life, as flowers, spreading as pollen in the wind, carried away by honeybees. A tree is water becoming light. The prospect made her want to choose her burial ground very carefully.

  In the evening, the nurse came again. Anne still loved her, but she’d come to dread the sight of her. This angel of mercy and death. So wonderful and so unwanted. She told Anne that Dr. Salt had arranged a meeting with some other intensivists and specialists in the hospital for a second opinion. Ten o’clock was the agreed-upon time. They would meet in the conference room, if that sounded all right.

  “That soon?” Anne said.

  “He thought you wanted more feedback. Isn’t that right?”

  “Okay.”

  The nurse went away, and Anne told her dad and Aaron about the coming meeting. They didn’t question the need. They remained in their seats, killing their time however they could.

  At the appointed hour they proceeded to the conference room and waited as the doctors trickled in one by one. There were five of them in all, one young, one gray haired, three with glasses—what were the chances? Dr. Salt presided over the meeting, explaining some of the more recent charts and the vital statistics, and afterward Anne and her dad went down the line, receiving all the experts’ ultimate opinions. Is there any chance of a change? Is there any reason to prolong this process? No, no, no, no, no. They were all in complete agreement, straight down the line.

  The doctors filed out, returning to their rounds. Dr. Salt stayed. The family sat around the conference table, basting in the windowless room, testing the new ground they’d come to.

  “Grandpa?” Aaron said. The silence of the room was thick enough, it almost swallowed his voice. Anne was mildly astonished that he was the one taking the lead in the conversation, but it made a certain sense, too. He and her dad had come to some new understanding. He was the one who should preside over this monumental family conversation. He was old enough. “What do you think?” he said.

  Grandpa Sam sat at the end of the table, the weight of the universe pressing on his back. He understood what all the doctors had said and what their group diagnosis meant. He hadn’t missed a trick. He hadn’t been prepared to make the decision previous to this meeting, but now, at last, there was truly no hope at all. Over four days, the hope had never truly existed, but only now was the final, fading echo of hope gone, too. Faced with the row of doctors, he bowed to their collective authority. Here was the threshold he’d been waiting to cross. The days of agony had gone on long enough.

  He looked at Aaron with resignation.

  Aaron waited an appropriately long time to answer the gaze, allowing the weights to settle on the scales.

  “I think we need to let him go.”

  Grandpa Sam looked at Anne. She nodded her assent.

  He stared at the wall, weighing the scales one last time in his own mind, and he nodded. “Okay.�
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  So the words had been spoken. The judgment had been handed down. Anne’s mouth was suddenly dry. Her fingers and toes were numb. She stared at the poster about sanitary hand washing, trying and failing to understand the graphic. Had they really just made the decision? This was the very hour? This was what she was looking at when she pulled the plug on her brother? It seemed so. This was the chair she would be sitting in. This was the clock. This was the chair and this was the clock that had been waiting for her since the beginning of time. This was the room that God had created long ago and dressed for her. This was the sound of an air-conditioning vent He’d decided on to accompany this act. These were the clothes and this was the taste in her mouth. All the details seemed wrong. They were so random, so absurd. She was so unprepared.

  “Now?” she said, almost choking, as Dr. Salt stood. He nodded once and exited the room and waited in the hallway for the family to follow.

  Here I am walking down the corridor to kill my brother, she thought, passing the doors of the offices and restrooms. And here are the faces of the nurses who see us walking. She followed Dr. Salt’s footsteps through the ICU doors and down the inner hallway, past the other cells holding their broken bodies. They entered Ben’s room, Dr. Salt first, then Anne, then her dad, then Aaron, and, last, the white nurse. The military cop stood to the side, trained at last.

  “Take those off,” the nurse said with gratifying disgust, pointing to the handcuffs. Anne could tell their vigil had worked some power on the nurse, bringing her over to the terms of their struggle, and that was something. The cop unlocked the handcuffs and placed them in his belt.

  “What do we do?” Anne said.

  “You just wait,” said the nurse.

  The nurse started by removing the endotracheal tube. When the tube was withdrawn, she shut down the ventilator, and the rasping sound ended with a chuckling rattle. Next the nurse removed the brain-monitoring wires. She took out the nasogastric tube and the two IVs, gradually returning Ben to his natural self. He lay there in the bed like a rude piece of clay. He already appeared to be losing his shape. His skin was softening, waxy, with red bumps and welts on his forearms. His breathing was getting slower and more shallow, but it didn’t stop. They all watched him, his chest still rising and falling, waiting.

  “How long will it take now?” Anne whispered.

  “It might be an hour,” Dr. Salt said. She could smell the Tic Tac in his mouth, an almost overpowering fume of artificial mint. This is the smell, she thought. “It could be six hours,” he said. “We can’t say exactly. His body is healthy. We’ll see.”

  Anne looked at the nurse, not even knowing what to ask.

  “What do we do?” she said again.

  “You can say good-bye,” the nurse said.

  Anne tightened her jaw. She stepped forward and sat down in the seat at the side of the bed. She laid her hand on top of Ben’s hand. His hand was warm, positively clammy, and his knuckles were thick and strong. The life in the body was almost vigorous. She kept her hand on his warrior’s hand, utterly unsure they were doing the right thing.

  “We’re with you right now,” she said quietly. “We are always with you, Benny. We’re right here. Dad?”

  “B— B—” Trying to utter his son’s name, her dad broke, sobbing. For a second Anne worried that he’d gone insane, that the sobbing might never end. He crouched over and shook his head, as if he’d ruptured from reality, and she could feel panic gathering in the base of her mind, but thankfully the feeling didn’t go any farther. She could see her dad hadn’t dropped over the edge after all. He knew what was happening and how to behave. His tears were exactly appropriate to the situation. Soon he’d recovered himself and taken a place beside the bed. He held his son’s hand as the muted thrum of the hospital surrounded them, and Aaron, her son, took a place at the foot of the bed.

  Together, they watched, focusing all their attention on this still-living being before them. Anne was very grateful her son and father were there, adding their thoughts to the pool of concentration. She was focused so hard, she could almost feel the life force receding. And as her awareness of his receding life grew, she began to feel the life in herself as well. There was a living energy that bound them, a single, living energy of which they both, they all, partook. The life of her brother was the life of everyone, and as his life energy ebbed, it ebbed back into the life energy of everything. Her own life energy was part of it, as was the life energy of those pitiful schmucks in the waiting room, trapped in their shapes, with their weird faces, all of them, one. In the presence of her brother’s dying form, she felt every human hierarchy dissolve. The fact of this existence, its myriad eyes and minds, dwarfed every human ambition and pretense. Names, money, status, all of it was nothing. There was no fucking way she was giving the people’s water to Mark Harris.

  She kept watching, examining her brother’s every pore and stray hair for a final time. Ben’s chest rose and fell, each breath a struggle. To live without him sounded so miserable and wrong. She couldn’t imagine being in that world. She sobbed suddenly, comprehending the finality of the experience. They were standing at the door to the center of creation here, and it was a one-way door. Ben’s voice would never speak to her again. She would never feel the burl of muscles in his back, the brawny hardness of his elbows. She would never feel his gaze on the side of her face. She saw the coming absence with such clarity, in the way she should have seen it all the time, the fog of distraction peeled away. God, she hoped Ben knew how much she loved him. He knew, didn’t he?

  She stared at the metal bar of the bed, too blighted to think or feel. It was two more hours before Ben’s breathing finally ended. The doctor drifted in and out, checking, but when the last moment came, he wasn’t there. Anne had heard a body lost 0.02 ounces at the moment of death, the weight of the soul, but she didn’t know if that was truly the case. She felt the moment of passing, though, the final shudder and giving up, as if some immense chasm had been crossed. The cup poured back into the ocean. She and her father and son sat there with the body, in a state of shared bewilderment, not talking, not understanding a thing, not even trying.

  At some point the nurse came into the room and asked them something, but Anne didn’t hear exactly what she’d said. “What?” she said. To turn around was beyond her strength.

  “Would you like to shave him?” the nurse said.

  Still Anne didn’t understand what she was proposing. “Now?” she said.

  “Now is a good time,” the nurse said. “Some people do. Some people don’t. It’s up to you.”

  Anne was quiet. No one had told her anything about shaving her brother’s corpse. No one had prepared her for that intimacy. She wasn’t sure what the proper response should be. It occurred to her that she could plausibly say no, beg off, and no one would think any less of her. But truly, she had no choice, did she?

  She looked down at Ben, at his empty, lifeless face. It was the face she’d known from the beginning of time. It was the face that had greeted her every morning of her youth. It was the face she’d summoned in her mind every time she read the newspaper. She looked at her son, tears streaming over his cheeks. She looked at her dad, head bowed. Fuck you, God, she thought. Of course I’ll shave him.

  26

  In Ben’s dream, he was in heaven. He assumed it was heaven, anyway. No one had told him as much, but the world resembled the pictures of heaven that everyone knew as heaven. Stretching below him was a landscape of pink cumulus clouds, big, round bulbs coursing slowly with the atmospheric wind. Above him arched a deep, blue-black sky marbled with stars, and in its highest zone flocks of shimmering beings flew across the dome, leaving multicolored contrails in their wakes. He knew without being told that they were higher forms of some kind, probably angels. And he knew they were the source of the booming, glorious music that filled the air and filled his body to the core. The music was a chant coming down from above, raining through him, a profound, enveloping bombardment of
harmony.

  He knew it was a dream, and yet, on some level, he knew it wasn’t that, too. It was a dream and not a dream, not that it mattered either way. For even if it was a pure dream, even if this was a vision manufactured entirely in the chemical factory of his own mind, it was still a clear testament to the miraculous foundations of reality itself and didn’t diminish one bit the glory of the experience of God.

  A brilliant rainbow flared across the curve of space, the sheer cliché of which convinced him it had to be a dream. He was still experiencing the activity of his mind, and that meant he was still alive. But what a mind he’d been given to imagine this!

  His body, such as it was, floated over the cloudscape. He wasn’t going very fast, just cruising at a gentle clip, and he enjoyed the soft air, the sweet scent, the overwhelming sense of oneness and connection to everything that existed. Sometimes voices came to him as if seeping into his dream from behind many walls. He caught the sounds of his sister, his nephew, and possibly his dad, murmuring to each other very far away. He wanted to say something to Anne, to reassure her that everything was all right, even better than all right, glorious, but the desire to speak didn’t connect to any bodily machinery. The synapses didn’t extend into any hands or tongue. The electrical charge fizzled somewhere and stopped before making the connection. He couldn’t find any arms to move, or a mouth to open. He couldn’t find the breath to push out of his throat over his nonexistent lips.

  The voices faded, and he continued flying. The stars and moons and gleaming asteroids of the universe drifted above. He could see the churning of a thick nebula, the speckled rings of a jeweled planet. He laughed at the cosmic splendor of it all, and the laughter seemed to vibrate through him, breaking him into happy shards, shaking him into happy pieces. The laughter carried him into a whole different realm of being. His laughter was like a disintegration into God Himself.