Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  He steps into the kitchen, his right leg frozen like it’s asleep, still standing sheathed in polyester trousers, stretching long and distant all the way to the rubber shoe sole that grips the floor under his foot. The leg lumbers beneath him, snagging on the surface of the yellow floor.

  Passing from the kitchen into the living room, he reaches out for the back of his armchair – the one he brought home strapped to the vinyl top of his Chevy Impala, the five-dollar garage-sale price tag still pinned to the cushion. The pads of his fingers are just as numb as his leg now, telling him nothing about the familiar, nubby texture of the low, nylon loops in the chair’s fabric. The hand doesn’t grip. It rolls against the coarse brown upholstery like a waterlogged, empty glove.

  He jerks and lets his body fall sideways, into the seat of the armchair. A chord of creaks and moans sounds out from the old springs and wood inside it. Maybe he looks up at the wooden sunburst clock hanging on the wall, clicking like a metronome. Or maybe he just sees the clock in his memory.

  The outline of a dull headache is reshaping itself, changing out of its fuzzy, formless mass, stiffening into something rigid – its edges becoming defined, tightening into sharper and sharper contrast. The ache hardens into a knife of stunning pain inside his head. The blade draws back, pauses, and stabs deeply into his brain. White light flashes, moving forward through his skull to the backs of his eyes. And then it’s dark – like he’s suddenly fallen to sleep.

  His mouth opens to call for your grandmother, but the sound he makes is nothing like her name. Her paring knife clatters onto the stovetop, as if she already knows what it all means. She’s moving in the dark spaces around his body, small and somewhere beyond him.

  “I’m callin’ the ambulance,” she says. Her feet carry her back into the kitchen with a hard, staccato sound, like a volley of darts fired into the floor. And she’s out of his reach.

  “Shoes,” he remembers. “Even in the house it was always shoes with us.”

  He sits. He knows the upholstery on the chair’s back is still sagging against his weight. He can feel it through the darkness and the numbness. And he still knows the smell on his skin is the washing machine’s white grease. There is still clarity in the sound and meaning of your grandmother’s words as she speaks into the enormous green rotary telephone hung on the kitchen wall.

  “He’s tryin’ to talk, and I can’t understand him at all. I think he’s in real trouble.”

  The heavy telephone receiver lands in its metal hook. There’s a grind and click as your grandmother twists a dial on the stove and abandons her cooking. And that’s when he knows he won’t ever eat again. What comes next is – nothing. He loses the sonic tie that links him to his wife’s voice and feet. In the quiet, he’s set adrift, dark and silent.

  Bracing himself against the horror of the language-less sound, he tries to call to her again.

  There’s another flurry of darts on the floor before they’re muffled on the shabby carpet in front of him. She’s standing over his armchair. “They say they’re coming quick as they can. I’m just in the bedroom packing a few things in case it turns out…”

  As she speaks, he sweeps his last strong arm like a scythe out into the darkness where he knows she hovers. He reaps her off her feet and into the armchair, on top of his body. She falls, tangling with him.

  “Settle down. There’s nothing we can do but wait. They’re coming...”

  She’s sitting up, getting away, but he finds her waist before she can properly rise, and gathers her, folded at her middle, into his lap. His live hand gropes for her head, combing through the wiry grey hair at the nape of her neck, closing around the narrow base of her skull. He pulls her head under his chin. She gives in, gets quiet, and he breathes in the scent of her crown – all deep and greedy – like it’s forgiveness itself.

  And then the metallic clasps and hinges are rattling like bear claws scraping at the front door. She’s gone, quick as Goldilocks. He feels other hands on him now, deftly pulling his body out of its armchair and down onto a carpeted floor. It’s clean but at close range the carpet smells grey – like dust and melted snow. There are paws and growls all around him now. And there’s a new draft wafting in like the Spirit World through the open screen door.

  The dying drags on for days and days. Again, everything is just like your Mom promised you it would be. It lasts long enough for everyone in your family to fall all the way down into the very lowest hollows of what I guess we could call the valley of the shadow of death, or whatever.

  For your mother, the fall to the lowest point in her grief happens in the grocery store in your grandmother’s small town. The store manager hasn’t heard that your grandfather is still animated by the ventilator tube in his throat. Maybe that’s why he walks right up to your mother in the dairy department and offers to start the cold cut order for the funeral lunch.

  Your Dad’s low point is that fight he has with your Uncle Terry in the waiting room of the intensive care unit in the city hospital. It happens right out in the open – by the vending machines, next to the elevators – where anybody could see and hear them. Even though your Dad swears he never said anything to get him started, your Uncle Terry points his finger right under your Dad’s collar bone and starts to whisper-yell, all heady with grief.

  “You think I did this. You think this is a chiropractic-induced stroke. You always loved a good witch hunt, didn’t you, Frank?”

  But your Dad just opens his hands and raises them both in front of himself, like an unarmed cowboy in a dusty brown movie with a soundtrack that’s nothing but whistling and reverb.

  Your other uncle – Ned – he lunges between them with the barrier of his rumpled pinstriped business suit and his special status as their baby brother. He’s on his feet for the first time since he arrived here from the Calgary office tower where he works seventy hours a week doing – no one’s completely sure what. Until now, he’s been slumped in a yellow vinyl waiting room chair, quietly tearing an empty Styrofoam cup into a long, curled ribbon, almost as if he’s peeling a Christmas orange. It’s like a game he used to play when he was a kid. When the game went well, he would come running to his mother brandishing a long, pungent strand of thin orange peel in his sticky white hands.

  He’d wave the rind right in her face. “I peeled the whole thing without breaking it!”

  “Did ya? Now throw the peel over your shoulder,” his mother would answer. “The letter it makes when it hits the ground is the first letter in the name of the girl you’re gonna marry someday.”

  “Hey guys, I’ve been thinking,” is what grownup Ned says to interrupt the tension between his brothers. “Maybe we just need to work with Dad some more.” He’s talking fast, bobbing his head to break up the dangerous line of sight strung between your Uncle Terry and your Dad. “You know what I mean: play some Mozart CDs in his room, or bring in that nice tame cat they have at home for some – what would you call it – tactile therapy, or read him some really good poetry.”

  Your Dad steps back, happy to be dropping his surrendering cowboy pose. “The old man’s having a stroke, Ned, not giving us the silent treatment. I don’t think all that ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ stuff is going to help us much anymore.”

  But Uncle Terry isn’t finished with your Dad yet. He raises his hand to Ned’s chest and presses against his sternum until Ned moves out of his view of your father’s face. “Not that it has anything to do with this, Frank,” Uncle Terry says, “but I never, ever laid a hand on the old man’s neck – never.”

  It’s late in the evening when Uncle Terry stands outside the hospital waiting area, right in front of the open door of your grandfather’s room. He’s talking with a doctor who has never introduced himself to any of them, which is just about proof positive that this doctor must be the person in charge here. The folded ribbon of paper marked with flat-lines drawn by the stylus o
f the hospital’s EEG machine is clipped to the board the doctor holds in his hand.

  In the domain of his own hospital ward, the doctor seldom whispers anything, not even when it comes to death. “It’s not that the manual tests for assessing what you’d call brain death aren’t perfectly humane,” he’s telling your Uncle Terry. “They certainly are. However, the tests tend to elicit quite a bit of – anxiety in family members who see them applied.”

  Uncle Terry hisses something in return.

  The doctor makes one clipped nod over the stiff collar of his shirt. He isn’t dressed in the same wrinkly green pyjama-scrubs as the rest of the hospital people. Instead, he’s dressed like a lawyer, only with a white lab coat over his shirt and tie – like the kind of doctor who looks right into the camera and recommends a cough medicine in a television commercial.

  “Of course,” he answers Uncle Terry. “Of course, there’s nothing the hospital can do to prevent you from being present when we run through the tests but –. In order to properly establish what you’d call brain death, we need to push the nervous system toward certain limits. And since the nervous system is really just an incredibly intricate bio-electrical machine, it is possible for it to – misfire. The body can mimic signs of life even though it’s no longer alive in a meaningful way.”

  “You’re saying he might twitch or something when you go and scrub the Q-tip over his corneas? Because I read about that and I think I’m–”

  The doctor is finally whispering as he interrupts Uncle Terry now. “There’s a neurological phenomenon called the Lazarus Sign Reflex. Have you read about that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, sometimes bodies of people in what you’d call brain death can momentarily lift their own arms and drop them onto their chests.” The doctor bends his arms at the elbows and crosses his wrists over his chest. He holds the pose for a moment, as if he’s pretending to be a cartoon Egyptian mummy folded up in its sarcophagus – a mummy buried holding a clipboard. He lets his arms fall to his sides as he begins to speak again. “Naturally, the Lazarus Sign is very striking. When it happens, it can truly appear as if the body is reanimating, and it can be – confusing for the family. But, of course, it’s just a simple reflex arc in the spine at work, nothing more.”

  The spine – all this time, it really was all about the spine.

  The doctor closes a hand around your Uncle Terry’s shoulder and shakes him gently. Terry’s arm rolls in its socket as the doctor speaks. “Listen, no matter what anyone sees hereafter, your father’s death is imminent. It’s like I told your mother just now. We see from the EEG that his brain no longer functions at all. And his heart and lungs are only continuing to work because of the hospital’s life support equipment.”

  Uncle Terry’s eyes glaze over a little bit, remembering a zoology laboratory in his first year of university where he and the other undergraduate science students skinned the legs of frogs who’d been freshly killed (“sacrificed” – in science we say “sacrificed”). The students jabbed tiny electrodes into the large nerves in the thigh muscles and then stood at their lab benches taking turns connecting the electrodes to battery packs, watching the wet, pink flexion of the muscles in the flayed legs. Maybe it’s just this memory that makes him feel like he can smell formalin fumes blowing over his face through the hospital’s ventilation ducts.

  “Look,” the doctor says. “I wouldn’t say the Lazarus Sign Reflex happens often. But when it does it’s a very difficult thing for family members to witness. So most families prefer to let us carry on the testing without them.”

  The glaze over your Uncle Terry’s eyes hardens and clouds until he can barely see at all.

  “We’re going to proceed now,” the doctor says. He’s not talking to Uncle Terry anymore, but to the little throng of people in green who’ve been collecting outside your grandfather’s room. A nurse is tugging at the curtain hung from the ceiling, drawing it around the bed where a machine breathes into your grandfather’s body as he, or something like him, lies tucked beneath a stiff yellow sheet.

  Uncle Terry turns his head to look at the drawn curtain now standing between himself and his father. The doctor’s clear, un-hushed voice is sounding on the other side of the fabric – narrating everything for the benefit of the medical students being initiated into the secret society of medically managed death. Your uncle’s thick fingers are reaching out, moving toward the edge of the curtain. It’s woven just barely too densely to be sheer, and it seems to drift away from his hand, pushed on some kind of invisible current in the dry, antiseptically cool air. His fingers graze the cloth, but his hand snaps back at the touch, closing into a fist. He clamps his eyes shut, gritting his teeth, desperate, hoarse as he’s whispering.

  “Come forth.”

  You stumble into the darkest chasm of your grief for your grandfather on the same night the hospital people take their ventilator away from him – after the room fills up with doctors and residents pouring cold water inside his ears and pricking at his skin to make sure he’s really gone. The round of tests is the last thing the medical people will do for him before they shut off the machines, push back the curtain, and call the adults of your family into the room to watch your grandfather finish his medically delayed dying.

  But you don’t see any of that. You don’t even hear about it until hours after you’ve gone to bed in that unfinished basement, your eyes open in the darkness. There’s just enough light in your room to make the joists and wires in the ceiling look like their images are made of flickering grey pixels, dimly lit over your head.

  Your mother has already come down the stairs, looking through the dark house for someone awake – someone she could tell what happened to her father-in-law. She hung up the telephone after the final call from the hospital, left her bed, and came through the space in your bedroom wall where a door has never been hung. She didn’t turn on a light as she stood there and told you the coma – an embarrassing word twitching with histrionic TV silliness – had ended. And now your grandfather isn’t just brain dead, he’s truly dead.

  Even after days of hearing unfortunate phrases like “vegetative state,” you’re still kind of shocked at the news. Shock isn’t a complicated sensation. You know you are shocked. What you aren’t sure of yet is whether you feel sad.

  The truth is your grandfather never took much notice of you – the mess of blonde hair sitting there on the ottoman beside his feet while the hockey game wheeled round and round on the white screen between the beer commercials. No matter how many times you asked him to explain the rules of offside, he would always start by saying, “Well, first of all, you aren’t allowed to get ahead of the play.”

  And then you’d wait at least three beats before you’d say, “Granddad, what does it mean to get ahead of the play?”

  You recognize another feeling. It’s confusion. You don’t know how to craft a proper sorrow of your own. You’re not even really sure what it is you’re missing – what’s at the heart of this unmistakeable but unformed sense of loss. So you try to imagine what your grandmother’s grief must be like instead. You try, but it’s hard to see how her mood could be much different from the melancholy, recovering-Calvinist temperament the she always seems to have even at picnics and birthday parties. Still, you close your eyes and try to will your mind out across the kilometres of flat farmland between your bed and your grandmother’s. Maybe you’re caught up in one of those teenaged fantasies about having psychic powers that have been lying dormant, waiting for something like a death in the family to spark them into action.

  It’s late at night, but the idea that your grandmother is asleep doesn’t seem very likely. What does she look like when she sleeps, anyway? In all your years together in the family, you’ve never seen her asleep. It’s not very often that she breaks from her typical, interrupted-squirrel attitude and takes a seat let alone a nap. To you and the other grandkids, she is all flying
potato peels and quick, hard footsteps, her arms always cocked at the elbows, held at right angles, ready to spring.

  The best you can do is to imagine your grandmother lying under a well-pressed bed sheet with her eyes wide open to the dry, quiet air of her old bungalow. On the bedside table beside her is your grandfather’s old-fashioned folding alarm clock – the one with hands that used to glow in the dark before you were born, before their slightly radioactive, blue-green promethium paint with the short, short half-life expired. The clock will be ticking in the dark like a small, frantic heart.

  Maybe you know the timber and plaster and furniture of your grandparents’ funny little house better than you know the old people themselves. All those cold white Boxing Day afternoons stuck inside the house with their angel-haired Christmas tree and the turkey soups they ruined by glutting them with boiled barley kernels – those days drove you so deeply into boredom that you learned every mote of your grandparents’ house. You turned each bit of it over and over as you looked and looked for something to see.

  It was especially true after the visit from the vacuum cleaner salesman with the machine made of the same material as the space shuttle. The vacuum salesman was the first person you ever heard claim that most household dust is actually dead skin sloughed off the bodies of living humans. The dust was your grandparents themselves, chafing against their upholstery while they watched television or read Louis L’Amour novels. You’re still not sure you believe him. But your grandparents let the salesman turn his amazing sucking space machine on the couch cushions and on their own bedroom mattress. They watched with frigid tolerance as the stranger dumped small, yellowed hills of dust – their skin – onto black velvet circles. The salesman lined up the dust specimens on the coffee table and motioned at you and your brothers with polite, professional disgust.

  “Look at that. You don’t want the grandkids playing in that, do ya?”