by Chris Lynch
“What are you doing here?” asks the face that is just about visible in the doorway.
“I have a request.”
“There are request boxes for that. Nobody comes here for that.”
He’s thin and middle-aged, looks slightly nervous, slightly irritated, like he would prefer to be alone with his music and quiet talk.
“You do interviews, though, right?”
“Technically, yes. We don’t tend to get celebrities or news makers through here often. Or ever, really.”
“Would you like to interview me, then?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I’m something like a news maker, you could say.”
“What news did you make?”
“I didn’t make any myself, actually. Yet, anyway; I suppose I might someday. It was my dad who made the news.”
He sighs. I wouldn’t say he was excited, quite, at the prospect before, but he is deflated now.
“Maybe you should send your dad down, then.”
“Can’t. He’s dead.”
That has a lot of power, when you say that to people. You can change tones and gears and temperature when you bring that into a conversation.
“I’m sorry. Jeez, I am sorry. Can I ask, is that how he made the news?”
I am anxious to tell this man that I am my father’s son.
“Yes. But he made even more news after he died. You know about the fire? The one that took the two firefighters? And then the—”
“Holy smokes,” he says, opening the door wider and pawing my shoulder, “get in here.”
He calls himself Middleman Mike. Midday, midweek, man in the middle putting you together with great music.
There is a bank of long sliding knobs on a mixer, on a table. Middleman Mike slides one down and another one up and a red light goes on above his head as the music settles down.
“Folks, that was Shifty with a song that never fails to brighten things up, ‘Starry-Eyed Surprise,’ dedicated to Roy from Lesley. She says, ‘Happy anniversary, love. We are going to get better and have many more starry-eyed surprises together.’ Well, people, how lovely is that? Get better really soon, Lesley, from all of us here at County Hospital Radio.”
He has a soft and understanding voice that seems to come from a body older and heavier than his own. He is good at this, I think, and I am glad I’m here.
“We have a special and unusual guest here, now folks. This is Russell, who has a dedication he wants to make, and a message to send. Russell is the son of one of the two firefighters we lost in the tragic fire awhile back. And there is a certain Mrs. K. currently staying with us to whom he’d like to pass on his thoughts. Mrs. K., if you’re listening, here is Russell.”
A second red light goes on as Middleman Mike slides another knob, and the microphone in front of me comes live.
“Um,” I say, surprised even though this is exactly what I asked for. “Hello. Well … I hope you are feeling well....” I have never been as nervous as I suddenly feel right now. “… And all I wanted to say was … and I remember when you came to my school, still, and your cat … and I am sorry, Mrs. Kotsopolis, about your cat. He was a great cat.... My dad was a good man, Mrs. Kotsopolis, and a great firefighter. Things went wrong, but not before things went really, really, really right for a lot of people over a lot of years. He spent a great deal of time being truly heroic, before he wasn’t. I am sorry, for what happened to you and your cat when he wasn’t heroic. I’m sorry, and I know my dad is sorry. Very, very, very sorry … Mrs. Kotsopolis …”
When I stop talking—anyway I don’t stop talking so much as stuff just stops coming out—the silence I hear is so huge here in the little studio and in the waves of the air of the rest of the world. Middleman Mike just stares at me for several seconds with I-don’t-know-what on his face. Could be sympathy, could be pity, could be irritation, but I am without a clue.
“Dedication?” he eventually asks me, live on air.
“Right,” I say, like waking up, “my dad had such a huge dedication, every day of his life, to helping—”
“Sorry, Russell, but I meant the song. You said you wanted to make a dedication to Mrs. K.?”
“Oh,” I say, absolutely flushed with embarrassment and empty of ideas. “I, ah, I’m sorry, Mike. I don’t … really know music. Don’t … know what she likes …”
“Sinatra,” Middleman Mike jumps in, “I am sure she likes Sinatra. So here you go, Mrs. K., from Russell to you, Frank Sinatra singing ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ and after that we’ll come back with the man himself to talk about how he’s surviving the tragedy.”
Mike does his soundboard thing and Sinatra starts his moonlight thing, and I begin a new case of nerves.
“I don’t think I can do that, Mike,” I say.
“What?”
“I don’t think I can talk about that, I’m sorry.”
“You say sorry quite a bit, huh?”
“Sorry.”
“Listen, this is why you are in here. This is why I let you in. People don’t just knock on the door and stroll in here just because they feel like it. People will want to hear your story.”
Even that, just his mentioning of people who will be listening and judging what I say, makes me sweat. “How many people?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Couple hundred, including staff?”
“That sounds like a lot of people.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, at any given time probably a third of them are asleep.”
“Well, that doesn’t really—”
The phone on the wall at Middleman Mike’s shoulder rings. It’s muffled, like a regular phone being suffocated under a pillow but he jumps anyway. He stares at it for a second. “That only happens about once every two months,” he says.
“Hello? Yes. Oh, hello. Oh, yes, yes, absolutely …”
He aims the phone at me. I take it, my head swimming now.
“Hello?”
“What happened to my cat?” Mrs. Kotsopolis asks. Her voice is not even a voice, it is so soft. It is more like just shaping words out of breath. “You know something about what happened to Omar?”
What have I done? Already, what have I done here? Nobody told her what happened, to blue Omar? For good reason, Russ, nobody told her what happened to blue Omar.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I tell her. “I just meant that I was sorry about him getting lost. I haven’t heard anything. I’m sorry.”
There is what may be a long pause now. It could be other things. She could be catching her breath, or even still talking very weakly.
“Thank you for the gifts,” she says. “I smiled.”
I smile when she says she smiled. I smile broad and mad like an idiot, this is such uplifting news to me.
“I’m glad you liked them,” I say.
Middleman Mike makes himself work busy, playing more music without talking at all, without acknowledging that I am even in his room anymore. It helps.
“I forgive him,” she says, somehow even more softly.
I choke up at the words. I choke so much breathing is hard, never mind speaking. I pause even longer than she did. When I get it together, I say, “Can I come up and see you?”
She does not pause. “No.”
“Oh … right. Of course. I understand. Well, I hope you are feeling better.”
“Thank you, son.”
One more pause. One more deep breath and a run. “He was a good man,” I say. “My dad. And he tried. I know he tried.”
I hear her struggle with the breath, pull in as deep as she can, then release it in shapes of words. “I know. I saw.”
I open my mouth to tell her thanks, thanks, thanks, and how much better that …
But I get dial tone.
How can I say? How can I say just how much that means to me, what Mrs. Helen Kotsopolis said, all that she said. Forgiveness. Redemption.
She liked her presents.
I got more than I ev
er could have hoped for, coming here, more than I ever could have prayed for in making this journey to this hospital, and the gifts I brought were less than nothing compared to the infinity of gift I got in return from the wonderful Mrs. Kotsopolis.
She knows my dad was a good man. She knows he tried. Because she saw.
“You sure you won’t talk?” Middleman Mike asks me.
Won’t? We are well past won’t. I can’t even speak to tell him I can’t speak. I smile and shake my head and I think he understands but there’s no way of knowing for sure. He hands me back the blank dedication sheet I brought in, points to the phone number at the bottom, and tells me, “If you change your mind. At any time, if you change your mind. I know people would be anxious to hear everything. You do owe me, after all.”
I take it and nod and feel like I do, in fact, owe him.
“Good luck, Russell,” Middleman Mike says earnestly as I head out the door. Just outside, I find the nurse, the same nurse who was defending Helen Kotsopolis from me. I smile at her.
“How dare you,” she says in a low and controlled and terrifying tone.
“What?” I ask, shaken. “What?”
“This explains why you were ashamed to say who you were.”
“I was never—”
“He is not forgiven, and he never will be. And you are not forgiven, coming in here and manipulating a poor, fragile old woman who has been through far more than enough for anyone to ever … She may forgive you, but I can assure you that God does not and neither do most of the people of this town.”
I don’t do it on purpose, but I fall back, on what seems to be the only thing holding me upright. “I’m sorry—”
She slaps me right across the face, hard enough for the sound to carry clearly down the length of the corridor. She looks quickly off, since this is presumably not what nurses are allowed to do, but the radio station is tucked away. She is free, though, to address me as she sees fit.
She sees fit to slap me once more, though this time it is lighter, weaker, less sure but more sad.
“That is for you and your father. It is from all the people here who have to change dressings three times a day. Who have to pull away skin when they pull away bandages. Who have to look into eyes blinded white. Who have to listen to breathing so compromised it sounds like we’ve got snakes loose in the ward. Who have to teach people how to bend arms and legs all over again because they don’t have the flexible skin that God gave them as infants. Who have to sit by the bed while patients weep for hours at their own reflection in a hand mirror after their hair and lashes have gone for good. So thanks for coming by, and making yourself feel better, but do us all a favor now and go home because it’s not changing anything for anybody else.”
She spins and pulls herself away with such force I am sure it is to stop herself from beating me senseless.
And at this moment, I wish she would.
I stand with my back to the door of the radio station, my face blistered in the heat of the rage I found just outside. The height of that fall is so great I’m still falling, and sick with it all.
HARD SKY
Monday night is Young Firefighters. Has been for a long time, which is why I am so well trained already, why I am ready to go already but I will keep training until I am beyond training and when they are ready for me I will be beyond ready for the job. Monday night is Young Firefighters, because it is.
If I was nervous that first time back after the long layoff, after the events of the summer, then what to call this? The nerves slashing around my stomach are so wild and violent they are nearly audible. Maybe they are audible, but I cannot hear them and they will only be heard when I cross through this door and my comrades are there to make the sound real.
I make a low intense growl as I force myself to push open the door, the kind of noise warriors in movies make to buck themselves into battle.
But there is no sound. There is no sound, because there are no comrades.
I walk in, move farther in, to the middle of the very empty room. It’s not quite gym size, but it is maybe ballroom size, and the emptiness is making it huge. There are piles of equipment, helmets and coats and breathing apparatus lined up on long tables along one wall. That’s a drill, getting the gear on as quickly as possible. There are various climbing structures and obstacle-course items arranged all through the place. On the far wall, about twenty feet up, is a window frame. There’s nothing but wall behind it, but it’s a convincing-enough frame, stuck there to the wall. You have to ignore the ceiling that is only another four feet above the window. Hard Sky, is what we always call it in Young Firefighters.
There is a ladder at the base of the wall, and I go to the ladder. It’s a tall two-piece reinforced aluminum job with a rope pulley to raise the second bit. It’s heavier than the kind you’d have at home.
There is an exercise. To practice getting to that window to save upstairs lives. It’s a two-person exercise.
But nobody’s here. There’s never been nobody here.
“Whatcha say, Monsignor?” I say to the slumping figure of the victim. He’s half curled over like a drunk in the gutter. I nudge him with my foot. “You want to help? Your chance to be a hero.”
I am not surprised at Monsignor O’Saveme’s failure to respond. I don’t think I would have been surprised if he did respond either. I’m surprised lately at my ability to be surprised by things that shouldn’t surprise me, and to be unsurprised by things that should.
I kick him really hard. His humanlike head feels like a semideflated soccer ball as it leaves my foot, smacks off the wall behind him, and smacks again, facedown to the floor.
“I’ll do it myself, then,” I say. I take the ladder from the floor. I hoist it, drop one end so the feet plant somewhat stably, and I quickly begin to wrestle the bulk of it toward Hard Sky before gravity and momentum catch on and it fights me back down.
It’s a two-person job. It really is, but there are no two people here. I’m fighting it from the go.
It’s not a long fight. As if there is a team of little gnomish but fat firemen climbing the ladder as I raise it, the whole thing leans against me, twists and fights and goes all awkward and right off my shoulder to the floor.
Crash almighty. The sound of heavy aluminum alloy, clattering to the floor in a big empty ballroom of a hard sound-bouncing place is something beyond what ears and nerves should have to take. It’s a smash-up that lasts maybe three seconds but appears to happen over and over in some kind of replay, or bounce, or echo or all of them, but it is hellish is what it is.
You know how sound can make you angry? How really bad cymbal sound in really bad conditions can penetrate your skull and drive you right out of it?
I begin kicking Monsignor O’Saveme. I kick him and I kick him. I kick him in the ribs and I kick him in the stomach and I kick him in the balls, and again, and I kick his head so hard and so many times and I chase him and do it more until the force of it and the swing-and-miss and weakness make me spin awkwardly, lose my footing and bang to the floor in a lump right alongside him.
I am face-to-face with where the monsignor’s face would be if he had one.
“I’m sorry,” I say, through really breathy, really halting, hiccuppy panting.
“Have you got something to confess, my son?” The Girl’s voice asks from across the room.
“No,” I say, staying right where I am.
“Did you just beat up the monsignor?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel better?”
“I don’t feel anything.”
Like a sprite she appears in front of me, just beyond the monsignor. She crosses her legs at the ankles and smoothly allows herself to sink, to sit, cross-legged on the floor.
“Where is everybody?” she says in an incurious way.
Now I sit up. I cross my legs too. It doesn’t work. I pull up my knees and rest my chin on them instead.
“Where is everybody?” I repeat back at her.
>
“I asked you that,” she says.
“And I asked you that, Melanie. Just the truth, is all you have to give me. Just as long as you keep it true, we’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”
We have a stare-down. But it’s not that, is it? It’s not that, it’s a stare-up because she is here to help me, to lift me up if lifting is possible or to catch me if it’s not. She is, obviously. Look at her face.
“Melanie?”
“It’s not on this week, Russell. That’s all. They decided to give it a week. Two, maybe.”
“Give it a week, for what?”
She shrugs. It is a shrug that does not mean I don’t know.
“For me to go away? For me to come to my senses. Melanie, is that it? For me to realize it’s not worth it and then just quietly melt away … hey, like my dad did. Did you get that? Melt away, just like my father did. That’s pretty funny.”
I’ve done it now, of course. I’ve brought the details back now, haven’t I? I am seeing it, I am seeing my dad’s big beautiful face, his majestic mustache, and I am seeing the flames coming up, teasing, teasing, licking, lapping, peeling it all back, from the lip on up and right back up over....
“I’m here,” Melanie says, leaning forward and insisting her face into my face. “I’m here, Russ. I hope that’s something. Lots of people will be here, in time, if you just hold on. They’ll be back.”
“I won’t be here,” I say, and shock myself with the words, true as they feel.
“What?” she says, as if I had just declared my intention to commit hari-kari.
“I don’t think I can do this now, Melanie. I don’t know if I belong with these people anymore … or maybe if they don’t belong with me. Everybody is so wrong. They’re all wrong, I’m all wrong....” I shake my head all around, like a wet dog, to get her face out of my face, to get the visions out of my head, to just shake, for godsake.
I grab the monsignor in a choke hold, and I begin pounding his head off the floor. I see my hands turning white with the effort, and for a moment I feel like I am accomplishing something right and important.
Melanie says nothing, does not intervene. Until I am exhausted, and Monsignor O’Saveme is seven times dead.
