by Cal Setar
Let’s concentrate now on the muscles in your hands and forearms, the voice says. Tense them by putting both arms straight out in front of you, fingertips to the ceiling.
I do as I’m told.
Tense and release the muscles in your forearms. Tense again. Hold it. Good.
I hold. I do not know if it is, in fact, good.
You have worth, you matter, you mean something—that’s what the therapist had said, what he’d made a point to repeat seemingly as often as possible, peppering it into our conversations in a way I found so impossibly irritating, I vowed to ignore it just to spite him.
Beside me, a sudden flash, and I turn to find Terry motioning toward the building, only partially visible through the glass behind him, motioning for me to drop my arms and put my headphones away, to get out of the cab and follow him around to the back of the van.
I do as I’m told.
Terry yanks open the vehicle’s double doors, a handle in each hand, as I stuff my own deep, deep, way down deep into the front pocket of my ill-fitting suit, along with my headphones, the voice, those soothing tones of mindfulness. The night is warm, the collar of my borrowed button-down loose against my neck, the sweat and the fabric somehow still enough to make my skin itch in the worst kind of way. I try to ignore it, to think of anything other than the sweat and the itch and the shirt, borrowed from a dusty back closet of the funeral home, the way the boards had creaked as I’d trudged after Terry through the endless musty rooms to the haunting sterility of the morgue and back out into the blissful night. The meager money I’d make from this gig. The terror I already feel over this work taking too long, potentially causing me to miss my shift at the restaurant, just enough nervous energy alive in me to think not tonight though, my shift at the restaurant wasn’t tonight at all but tomorrow night, the night of the coming morning, the day soon to follow, the terror growing by steadily increasing drips and drabs as Terry feeds the gurney to me, hand over hand, and I walk it backward from the van without turning.
Slide, hold.
Good.
I swivel my head, trying to peek behind, worried suddenly that I’d misjudged the distance between the van and the curb, and feel sudden resistance. I turn back to find Terry, eyes wide, hand-held firm to the last six or so inches of the gurney’s metal frame, speaking at me through gritted teeth.
“We’ve got to drop the wheels.”
He presses the paddle, releasing the legs as I study the outline of the building against the late summer sky, the first brush of daylight just creeping from the hills beyond the illuminated sign, the brittle brightness emanating out across a few feet of dew-wet macadam, still visible in the mostly dark, like the faintest pulse of life. Together, Terry and I roll across that macadam and through the automatic doors, the spent-looking nurse behind the desk raising her eyes from her spine-cracked book only after Terry starts in to drumming on the counter, coughing loudly and pulling a folded piece of paper from the deep, deep, way down deep pocket of his oversized camel hair coat. They share a few quiet words.
Let’s concentrate now on the muscles in your chest, I imagine I hear the voice saying. Take a deep breath, squeeze tight. Hold it.
I hold. With breath, I wait.
Terry returns the paper to his jacket and then we follow the jaundiced hallway past hanging dividers and the ugly wheeze of breathing machines, the quiet insistence of that fading pulse I’d felt in the parking lot. At the end of the hallway is an empty room.
Only no—not empty. Not really.
She is gray and small and different than I expected—head back, mouth open, thin hair curled loosely behind a puckered ear. I try not to see the dark spaces beneath her eyelids.
Squeeze tight. Hold.
“Other side,” Terry breathes.
I do as I’m told.
“Hold this.”
And again.
When the woman, what was once a woman, a person, a being with countless thoughts , feelings, and hopes…as well as a surely desperate desire not to die alone in a hospice bed surrounded by piss-colored walls and the beeps and pings of late-life replaced by the sudden silence of death, has been loaded into the black plastic bag, the bag gathered around her and then zipped up like another suit meant for the back of the funeral home closet. We line the gurney up next to her, what was once a her, and 1, 2, 3, deep, deep, way down deep, heave from one to the other, here to there, this life to the next, placing her down with what care we can manage.
Back at the front desk, Terry fills out more paperwork while I stand next to the gurney and her, the what-was-once-a-her hidden away inside the bag, and continue trying not to see, to focus on the imagined voice in my mind, to identify the areas of my body most in need of attention and placing my focus there and only there. Just then, a woman with gray-blue hair almost the exact same color of the what-was-once-a-woman’s skin, stops to say something. I motion like I can’t hear but when she doesn’t take the hint, lingering long enough that her bent body and half-frozen face become too much to ignore, asking who it is, if it’s someone she knows, I relent.
I say I don’t know. I say I’m sorry. I add that this isn’t even my real job, as if there were such a thing as if the concept mattered at all to anyone that wasn’t me. I point down the hallway from the direction we’d come and say—its room was down there.
The face below the blue-gray hair changes and I feel a twinge in my gut.
Deep breath. Hold.
“Mrs. Iannetta.” It’s a different nurse this time, not the one hidden away behind the desk, but another, just as tired as the first, I think, only gaunt and sallow too, like a real-life version of the place itself. I nod, though I don’t know what to say or do from there, have no clue whether she’d intended the words just for the woman next to me or both of us, hadn’t yet reached that depth of instruction, and soon, my hand has returned to my pocket, fingering my headphones as if there were some connection I could feel to that calming voice through the simple immediacy of physical touch. For a moment, I even think I can feel it, not just the soft rubber connecting the buds but the calm of the voice itself arcing through my fingertips, a feeling I wished to live within, to make wholly and fundamentally an aspect of myself, only then the nurse and the woman both look at me as if expecting something specific, some emotional response meant to fit perfectly into this empty space and yet all I can seem to think of are deep breaths and stress centers and the near certainty that I won’t reach the restaurant in time tonight, not with another pickup already scheduled and the other funeral to assist with, meaning Ralph will probably pitch a fit and Walt will get in trouble too since Walt got me the gig and vouched for me and so we’ll both be in for it, meaning cut hours and less money and there’s only a few more days until the end of the month anyway and what was I doing, really, taking this gig, this extra job, thinking I could pull off this and the restaurant despite Walt’s warning and Mel, she warned me too, but she needed money to complete her technical program and I needed to make the rent and so I say the first thing that comes to my mind, the only thing I can seem to think of besides continuing to tense the muscles in my stomach and back, to clench and unclench, to feel and then no longer feel the difference and what it could mean, to understand the distance between the two. “How did it happen?”
The woman, the soon-to-be-her doesn’t wait for an answer to my question, seemingly moving off as quickly as her walker will allow. The nurse watches her go, expressionless.
“Cancer. Skin cancer. Sunscreen’s a lifesaver.”
I nod again though I’m even less certain now whether that’d been what was expected of me, what I had been meant to do.
There’s no time now to tighten the muscles in my chest and stomach, to consider the feeling, to not only know the difference but what it might mean, though I do still make use of the muscles in my legs and back as Terry stuffs the paper in his pocket for a final time and we roll again out into the night, or the what-was-once-a-night, what had already become a day-in-progress.
Terry goes to the cab to radio ahead to the funeral home and I wheel the body, whatever was left of the being, the person, the woman, the her that used to be Mrs. Iannetta, around to the back. Over the building, the sun is working to drown out the light from the sign, evaporating what little coolness still clung to the air.
I do it just like how Terry showed me, pushing the gurney right up against the lip of the van’s trunk and then clasping the paddles under the frame to collapse the legs so that it can be pushed in farther. Only, I must not have pushed in far enough because, with a suddenness that clenches every muscle in my body at once, the thing collapses, accompanied by a loud bang and a metallic clattering, a shaking that seems to encompass all of me as it—and her—come to rest at my feet.
Terry, eyes wide and wild, filled with something like anger but not quite, tinted by frustration or pain or pity, shoves me aside. A couple seconds, a couple minutes, maybe decades, a century, several millennia of struggle and he turns to me, face red, mouth thin, and motions for me to move to the gurney’s other side.
I do as I’m told.
Together we lift it—her—up and into the van.
After, I climb into the passenger’s side and stare straight ahead, not willing to meet the accusing eyes of the nurse—the otherone—as she follows our progress from the front desk, around the edge of the parking lot, and back out the way we’d come. I unwind my headphones with trembling hands and slip the buds into my ears, filled with a sudden and urgent need to skip to the end, tracking forward until the languid, comforting voice of mindfulness returns, only barely drowning out Terry’s talk radio once more.
I lean my head back and close my eyes.
Now that we’re done, the voice says, scan your body again from your head to your toes. Take time to notice how you really feel. If you feel any tension, any pain, bring your awareness to that area of your body and breathe in positivity and energy. Exhale any discomfort or pain.
I do as I’m told.
Let go, the voice continues. Let go of everything. Clench, release. Feel the difference. Know the difference. Feel your body free from all tension, with a relaxed and brand new perspective.
I am desperate to do as I’m told.
We’re nearly to the highway when I open my eyes again. The trees have dropped away from the berm at the edge of the road, a yawning blank space filled suddenly with row upon row of chipped, graying headstones. I wonder how many from the nursing home have wound up here, will wind up here, how many hers, how many Mrs. Iannetta’s will find their final place in this cemetery by the side of the road, a pair of thoroughfares to everywhere and nowhere and, of course, nothing. I wonder if they’d spent their lives working and wishing and working, like me.
There is no ‘should,’ only ‘is.’ Only ‘are.’ You are—that is all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I suck in a breath, hold it, wondering now if some part of Mrs. Iannetta weren’t already floating along some astral plane, drifting toward an uncertain rest on some second or third or ten millionth layer of reality.
I wonder if she’s in the van with us right now, maybe following close after, stuck to her own body or worse, us, like some smell that just won’t go, no matter how hard you scrub your skin. I wonder if she watched me drop her, what used to be her, what was now nothing more than an empty vessel devoid of all the things that made her, her.
I think of the other woman, the blue-gray-haired haired her that was still a woman, a person, not yet a spirit or even some close approximation. I think of pointing my finger down a desiccated hallway and saying its.
My face burns.
Let go, let go, always letting go. Never forgetting. Never remembering. Just being.
I would give anything, I think, to do as I’m told.
Breathe in. Squeeze. Hold.
With my headphones in the world feels suddenly closed, closed off even, and with an instantaneous power I’ve never felt before, there rises within me an overwhelming sensation of confinement, certain that I’m somehow cut off and not seeing or hearing anything clearly, not the voice, not the world beyond us, not even the chaos in my own head. I yank the buds out, the world seemingly tilting in response as we make our way up the highway on-ramp, the day building just as our speed, carrying us on past the cemetery, the retirement home, the nurses, and Mrs. Iannetta. And the woman, who might be just where Mrs. Iannetta was before long.
And me too, I think, though I’m disappointed to find there’s little feeling behind it.
I wonder what the therapist would say about that.
As we merge, I busy myself ignoring Terry’s radio static by scrolling through my phone, news and sports and games, and more, looking at everything and seeing nothing, so desperate to be free of my preoccupations that I nearly miss the headline denoting the recent recall of various sunscreen brands. I read the summary, something about cancer and chemicals in the base formula, and laugh, drawing a curt side-eye from Terry. I click the link, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu and a deep and unexpected interest in the topic, only the app struggles to open the link and eventually, despite refreshing the page a number of times, ultimately times out.
I drop my phone in my lap, lean my head back again, eyes closed again, feeling suddenly as tired as the second nurse had looked. After a short time, the steady thrum of the wheels working its way further into my head, I feel a distant voice within me wonder whether it wasn’t maybe better this way after all, thinking I don’t really need to know more about big corporations or cancer-causing chemicals, thinking maybe I’ll just focus on my body scanning a little while longer and, if I’m lucky, maybe even catch a little nap, a half hour or so of shut-eye between here and the funeral home, the next pickup, the funeral still-to-come and my shift at the restaurant too, and that way maybe tonight won’t be so bad after all.