by Jon Cohen
“Dolores, go out there and keep your eyes on the other patients, will you?” Iris grunted between compressions.
Despite their efforts, Mr. Beck began to turn a mottled blue. His gh-ghhs grew faint. Respiratory arrived and slid a tube down his throat and into his lungs. The IV team stuck some lines in him, and two docs showed up and started ordering meds. They shocked the patient seven times, administered all the emergency drugs at least once, and hung up all the IV meds you could hang. Still, Mr. Beck turned an eggplant blue and stopped making sounds. His EKG slowly smoothed out from jagged V-fib to flatline. Iris pumped his chest the entire time, pumped even after one of the docs said, “Okay, it’s over. Let’s call it.” She was the last to stop working on the patient.
After the family had come and gone, Iris went in to help Dolores and Libby wrap the body. Iris didn’t mind the look of a dead body lying in bed. Wrapping the body in the plastic shroud sheet, however, gave her the creeps.
“When I die,” she said, “don’t you dare wrap me in plastic.”
“How about aluminum foil?” said Libby. “You’ll stay fresher longer.”
“You guys!” Dolores frowned. Floor nurses rarely appreciated the humor of the Unit nurses, the darkest and dirtiest in the hospital.
“I’m serious,” said Iris, holding Mr. Beck’s hands together as Libby tied them across his chest. “I’m afraid of suffocating.”
“You’d be dead,” said Libby. “Here, Dolores—put your finger there so I can tie a knot.”
“Even so,” said Iris.
“One of his eyes is open,” said Dolores.
“He’s winking at you,” said Libby.
Iris thought, Yeah, Dolores, you’re so cute even a dead man winks at you. Out loud, she said, “Why don’t you close it if it bothers you?”
“I can’t do eyeballs,” said Dolores softly.
“You know what I can’t do?” said Libby. “Toes. I don’t know. For some reason toes really get to me.” She handed Iris a card with Mr. Beck’s name and related information stamped on it. “Here, Iris. You tie the toe card on for me, pretty please?”
“You guys are such chickens. So I got to do the toe and the eyeball?” She reached up and touched her finger to his left eyelid. When she got it down, the right one went up.
Dolores jumped back as Iris and Libby tried not to laugh. “You did that on purpose,” she said.
“I didn’t do it on purpose, he did it on purpose.”
“Yeah, Dolores,” said Libby. “Sometimes these guys aren’t as dead as you think. Remember Mr. Harvard?” she said to Iris.
“The only time I thought I was going to lose it.”
“We had him all wrapped up like a mummy—”
“A plastic-wrapped mummy,” said Iris. “Ugh.”
“—and just as we were about to slide him from the bed onto the stretcher, he sits up.”
“And I mean up,” said Iris. “Right up, like he was getting out of bed in the morning. I’m telling you, I screamed.”
“Everybody in the room screamed,” said Libby.
“So he wasn’t dead?” whispered Dolores, keeping one eye on Mr. Beck.
“Oh, he was dead,” said Iris. “He was just squeezing the last bit of goody out.”
“Usually they just fart,” said Libby.
“Or jerk an arm or a leg.”
“Or groan. A lot of them groan.”
“Some of them speak outright. How about that guy last year, what was his name?” said Iris.
“Lauber? Stauber? Something like that,” said Libby.
“What’d he say?” whispered Dolores.
“He was another one we had all wrapped up,” said Iris. “But we heard him clear as day. Really creepy.”
“What’d he say?”
“‘Pepsodent.’”
“Pepsodent? That’s creepy?” said Dolores. “That doesn’t seem creepy to me.”
Iris looked at her. “The word itself wasn’t creepy, Dolores. The creepy thing was that he spoke at all. Since he was dead and everything.”
“Why’d he say Pepsodent?”
“We couldn’t figure it out. You see, the whole time he was in the Unit, he brushed his teeth with Crest,” said Libby.
“I think it was a regret thing,” said Iris. “Like probably all his life he wanted to try Pepsodent, but he never got around to it. He carried the regret to his death. Beyond his death, really. Because he was definitely dead when he spoke.”
“Definitely,” said Libby.
Iris often wondered what word she’d utter beyond her own death. What regret would rise to her dead lips, what longing? “Beauty,” perhaps? Is that what she’d say? It would have been nice to be beautiful for a day, to try it, to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe “Love”? That’s another one she’d never get close to. She embarrassed herself. She didn’t have time for foolishness. “All right, guys, let’s finish this.”
They got out the white plastic shroud sheet and slid it under Mr. Beck. They taped it around his feet and legs and chest.
Iris said, “You guys don’t do eyeballs and toes. Well, I don’t wrap heads. Dolores, he’s your patient.”
Dolores made a face. “He’s still kind of winking.”
Libby took the tape from her. “I’ll do it.” She pulled the last corner of the plastic shroud over his face and taped it.
Then they all stood there and stared at the mummy that had been Mr. Beck. A minute or so passed. Nope, thought Iris, didn’t look like he was going to sit up or speak or even fart. Looked like winking was it. “Okay. Two more hours and this night is over.”
Time to do right by the Tube Man. Iris had given him maintenance care all shift, performing the essentials while she kept the chaos in the Unit under control. She’d turned him on his left side at 7 P.M., two hours ago, and he hadn’t moved a molecule since. The ventilator hissed and puffed in the corner, delivering its twelve automatic breaths per minute. Every other minute it administered a sigh, lifting the Tube Man’s chest an inch or so higher than usual. Three IV pumps clicked and bipped on their poles beside the bed, steadily infusing the Tube Man with fluids. Iris hung two new IV bags. She spoke to him as she worked.
“Hello there. This is Iris again. I’m going to get you straightened up for the night, all right?” She always spoke to the comatose patients, told them what she was doing. If they could still hear, it was the polite thing to do, and if they couldn’t, well, what the hell.
“It’s been really busy tonight, sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. I’m going to suction your breathing tube now, then clean around it a little bit.” Suctioning terrified most patients. They coughed and turned maroon and usually fought it. Because he was so far gone, the Tube Man didn’t react at all. He turned quietly dusky as Iris suctioned the mucus out, then quietly pink again when she bagged him with 100 percent oxygen.
“I’m going to wash your back and bottom now, and change your sheet.” Iris had no problem turning him, he’d lost so much weight. His skin was pale and papery, and it sometimes tore when the nurses changed his dressing.
“You been here a long time, haven’t you?” she said as she powdered his back. “You must be getting pretty tired of all this, of us coming in here and bothering you, and jabbing you with needles and all. We don’t mean to hurt you, do you know that?”
The Tube Man gave no sign of knowing or not knowing. She turned him on his back again and saw that his eyes were open. But that didn’t mean anything. Sometimes they did that. If they were open too long, the nurse applied artificial tears. Artificial tears, and artificial breaths, and artificial food—she wondered how much of the Tube Man was real anymore. And what was behind those open eyes? Was he in a long coma dream, or was there nothing going on in his brain? She imagined a kind of wind whistling in there, like the wind that might be whistling across a distant planet. Pluto. When she was little, Arnie had told her about the planets. Mercury, the hot one. Venus, the green one. Mars had Martians. All the way to Pluto, wh
ich Arnie didn’t describe as cold or dark, but as having an undying wind that blew across its surface. It never changed, never blew harder or softer. “How did it get there?” Iris had asked. Arnie thought a minute, then he said, “Well, God had just about finished creating everything, and He was real tired. And the last thing He created was Pluto, which He let out into the sky with a big sigh. The sigh became the wind that always blows across Pluto.” Maybe that’s what it was like inside the Tube Man’s head. A wind blew there, God’s long, tired sigh.
She swabbed out the Tube Man’s mouth. There was the usual puddle of thick drool on the pillowcase, so she changed it. She washed his face, which was all hard bone and then suddenly loose over his caved-in cheeks, because he had no teeth. The Tube Man watched her actions with unmoving eyes. She took his blood pressure and temperature and wrote them on his bedside chart. Then she opened a can of nutritional supplement and poured its creamy gray contents into a bag that hung on a pole above the Tube Man’s head. The bag was connected to a long tube that entered his left nostril and ended in his stomach. The supplement flowed day and night at sixty cc’s an hour, an unending blur of breakfast-lunch-dinner.
The ventilator alarm suddenly buzzed, and the high pressure limit light flashed on. The Tube Man turned dusky. Iris popped open a suction kit, went down his airway, and sucked out a big mucus plug. His color slowly returned to normal. She half smiled: she’d just saved his life for the umpteenth time. He’d been getting a lot of plugs lately. His heart had been slowing over the last few weeks, too, and going into wacky rhythms. He didn’t have much longer; something would finally get him. Then the nurses would pull out all his tubes, tie a toe card on him, and wrap him in his shroud sheet—and that would be that.
The last thing Iris did for him was comb his hair. When he came in five months ago, he’d had a fine full head of gray hair. Hardly any remained. She combed the wispy strands anyway, and restrained herself from saying, “There, now you look nice,” which is what she usually said after fixing a patient’s hair. Nice? You couldn’t make a dying skeleton who was full of tubes look nice. No wonder no one came to visit the Tube Man anymore. Who could bear to look at him? Only the nurses, whose job it was to care for all the abandoned bodies, to touch the untouchables.
Iris straightened up the room and checked the supplies, then she emptied his urine bag and totaled his intake and output on the daily chart. His urine output had tapered to practically nothing over the last couple of days. No, it wouldn’t be long.
“Okay, sir. I’m going out of the room now.” She clicked off the overhead light and turned to walk out the door.
And then behind her, rising above the sound of blips and beeps and sighs from all the machines crowded into the room, a word, a single word:
“Is.”
Iris slowly turned and looked at the Tube Man. He had spoken again. She could see in the dim light that his eyes had closed; otherwise, everything about him was exactly the same. The same, except that he had moved from the depths of his coma and said a word. Was he starting a new sentence? A sentence beginning with “Is”? He’d never get it out—he didn’t have five more months to speak another sentence.
She went over to him, went up on tiptoes, and repeated his word in his ear. “Is? Is?” And then she waited a moment, as if there was some kind of real and actual chance he’d speak again. Despite herself she said, “Give me more, can’t you?” She felt funny in the chest, nervous, and her mouth was dry. The Tube Man lay motionless. She could almost hear the winds of Pluto whistling through his brain.
“You have to finish it, don’t you see?”
She said the word to herself, trying to imagine how he would work it. “Is this a hospital?” “Is this fair?” “Is this it?”
She had a thought then. “Is” wasn’t the start of a new sentence, but a continuation, maybe, of his first one? “The man in the window.” She’d assumed that was all of it. But no, the Tube Man was still working on it. “The man in the window is…”
Iris hugged herself as she watched the ventilator puff breaths into the dying figure beneath the white sheet. She knew that someday soon, he would speak the name of the man in the window.
CHAPTER SIX
ARNIE SAT on the front porch steps in the late summer dark. Duke wandered around in the yard, trying to eat fireflies. Arnie couldn’t see too well, but even with one deaf ear he could hear Duke snapping at them, and then there’d be a lot of spitting and chewing sounds when he caught one.
“Duke. What the hell you doing out there? What are you eating bugs for?”
Duke snapped and spit again.
“You swallow enough of those fireflies, your balls will light up. What’ll Iris say, she comes home and sees your balls blinking on and off?”
A window slammed closed next door. Guess you aren’t supposed to shout about dog balls in this neighborhood. Arnie smirked, then took another sip from his beer. His hook crunched into the can, and a few drops foamed out of a hole and dripped on his knee. Iris would be getting home pretty soon. He figured he’d wait up for her. What a shitty job, working evenings and getting home after eleven. How’d she stand shift work? He took another sip of beer and watched all the fireflies that had escaped Duke’s jaws of death. LuLu had liked the fireflies. In a summer long ago, they had sat together on a front porch holding hands and kissing, and watching fireflies. Holding hands. He lifted his arm and stared at the dull silver hook on the end of it. The hand that had touched LuLu was gone. They take your hand, they take your wife—Jesus, what a world.
The lady today in the backseat of the Lincoln, who’d they take from her? Mrs. Malone, Jim Rose called her. And the strange-looking guy in the hat and scarf beside her, her son probably. He looked young around the eyes. It had to be Mr. Malone who’d died, her husband. Welcome to the club, Mrs. Malone. Arnie raised his beer in a salute, then downed a big gulp. Poor lady. She had quite a smile. Even under those circumstances, she managed to smile and thank him for fixing the car. She was a hell of a lot more gracious than that stiff, Jim Rose.
LuLu had a smile on her, too. She didn’t smile so much the last couple of years before she died, though, because of her dentures. She was terrified they’d fall out of her mouth. She must have gone through a tube of Dentu-Grip a week—you couldn’t have pulled the damn things loose with a pair of pliers. She never let him see her without them. At night, she’d work on herself in the bathroom, then scurry across the room in the dark to bed.
“You’re going to kill yourself, running around in the dark like that,” he’d say to her.
“If I do,” she whispered, her words mushy and toothless, “don’t you dare look at me until they get my dentures in.”
“Hell, LuLu. What you so sensitive about your teeth for? I got a hook! I’m missing my entire hand! I’m the one who should be sensitive.”
“But you’re a man, Arnie. It doesn’t matter to you in the same way. I was pretty once,” she said softly.
Arnie reached out to touch her, with his hook he realized at the last moment, so he shifted around and reached again with his good hand. “Not once. Still. You’re pretty, still.”
“Sure. In the dark.”
“In the dark I got my hand again, you got your teeth. There’s nothing wrong with the dark. You’re pretty, I’m handsome. We get to do it all over again.”
“I’d like to do it all over again, Arnie.”
“All of it?”
“Most of it,” said LuLu. “The parts with you. The parts with you when my teeth were good.”
Arnie sat on the porch steps, Duke at his side, remembering LuLu as she wanted to be remembered: young, her smile bright, her teeth good.
He jumped when an apparition in white suddenly appeared before him.
“Iris girl, don’t be creeping around this late at night. You want your old man to piss himself?”
“You’d just be joining the club,” said Iris. “Most all the old men I took care of tonight pissed themselves. And worse, let
me tell you.”
Arnie raised his hand. “No, don’t tell me. You’re always wanting to tell me. How come is it you health people got to be so quick with the bad news? I never saw a group of people so eager to give all the nasty details.”
Iris stood before Arnie and looked him in the eye, which she could manage only because he was sitting on the porch steps. “All the details? You’d piss yourself for sure if I ever gave you all the details.”
“So, good. You keep your details, and I’ll keep my pants dry.”
“Well, you’re certainly in a feisty mood. What are you and that ratty dog of yours doing up so late?”
Arnie looked past her to the dark and the fireflies. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t seem like much of a night for sleeping. Thought I’d wait up for you. You know.”
Iris put her pocketbook down and sat on a step below him. A good deal of her round fat bottom hung over the edge. She looked out into the night for a while, then she said, “So, thinking about Mom, are you?”
“Sure. You know it. Thinking about LuLu.”
Iris wondered what that would be like, to love someone so much. She knew that somewhere in the dark, amidst the glow of the fireflies, LuLu was there for Arnie. A love that conjured up the dead. In the hospital when someone died, they died, that was it. Nothing you could bring back, nothing in between about it. Well, that wasn’t quite true—the Tube Man was certainly in between. Great. Arnie has LuLu, and I have the Tube Man.
Arnie was thinking along the same lines, missing LuLu and feeling sorry for himself, but feeling sorry for his unnaturally homely daughter, too, because she had no one to miss. He tried sometimes to see in her some extraordinary hidden gift, some thing of great beauty, the pearl that would make her attractive to a man. But if there was a pearl, it lay deeply and irretrievably buried. Where she was not unsightly, she was merely ordinary. Her voice didn’t dazzle, she had no great brains, she cooked but with no particular interest or talent for it, she couldn’t dance and didn’t want to (a wise choice—when Arnie imagined Iris throwing her concentrated weight around a dance floor, his stomach went acidy). Her hair didn’t shine, her feet were not small, the clothes she wore didn’t enhance her qualities, because she had few qualities to enhance. She could be funny at times, and kind at times, but not overwhelmingly, not to a degree that might cause a guy to give her a second look. The best Arnie could come up with for Iris’s main selling point was that she did what she was supposed to do. Which wasn’t so bad really, in a world where you couldn’t depend on anybody. Iris showed up for work on time, she bathed regularly with sensible soap, and she paid her bills. Arnie doubted there was anyone out there staying up nights fantasizing about a woman like that.
