The person who served you your coffee assumed that
you were a doctor. He, a small, dark brown man with an accent you wouldn’t
presume to place, said, “Will that be all, Doctor?”
Your brain had to make sense of the mistake before
you could say, “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Thanks.”
You sat down at your regular table. Two actual
doctors, a pair of old white guys, were sitting a few tables away. One of them
was hunched over a Tupperware container filled with sliced fruit, the other was
staring off towards the elevators and twisting his wedding ring like he was
trying to unscrew it but the threads were stripped. A few children raced past
and a man with a deep voice said something sharp and foreign and one child
stopped running and turned towards the man, then back towards his sibling or
cousin who was still zigzagging and laughing. A different man with a sharper
voice, a voice that made the ring-twisting doctor flinch, said the same foreign
thing and the second child stopped, sat down and cried. One man, you didn’t
know if it was the sharp voiced or deep voiced man, walked over to the crying
child and picked them up then led both children back to where their family—at
least three generations of it—was crowded around two tables as far to the side
of the dining area as they could get.
The coffee was too hot. It wasn’t bad coffee, had
never been bad coffee, but it wasn’t good either. It was an excuse for you to
sit here, that’s all.
A man and a woman got off the elevator. You pulled
a newspaper out of your black bag and set it on the table. While the man
stepped back to look at the signs above each vendor’s counter, the woman looked
around at the people sitting at the cafeteria tables. She made eye contact with
you and smiled sadly. You nodded and looked down at your newspaper. Your arms
bracketed the folded broadsheet and you rubbed your thumbs against the pads of
your index and middle fingers, but your eyes watched the woman walk up to the
man and the two exchange hushed words. The woman put her hand on the man’s far
shoulder and the man raised his shoulder nearest the woman so that he could
gently extract then bring his elbow over her head and hang his hand off her far
shoulder. You saw then, maybe in the gesture or in the shape of their hands or
their postures, that they were brother and sister. They walked to the new Hero
Burger—it opened early last month—and started reading the menu. The man asked
the server if they sold veggie burgers then the woman explained to the server
that she has a severe nut allergy.
The doctors at the nearby table stood at the same
time. They weren’t even looking at each other and if they had exchanged some
signal you missed it. One of them, the one who was twisting his ring, said,
“Well,” to which the other one replied, “Well.”
You agreed with them, but you didn’t stand right
away because, well, leaving with them would be strange and obviously—you don’t
know—collegial? Like they might have started talking to you about some doctory
thing and you wouldn’t know what to say and your cover would have been blown
which would have been devastating because what would you have done, what would
you do without the hospital?
It was a year earlier you started coming here.
Okay, not quite.
Not really.
You started coming here, like, let’s see, uh
fourteen months earlier. The regular visits anyway. At first you were coming
with your partner whose cancer had come back and come back in more than one
place, not just their beautiful brain. The surgeon who’d seen it said it was
beautiful. You knew it was beautiful in its operation, in its functioning, in
its living state. Something about the surgeon’s comment—meant as a
lighthearted, even laudatory Nice work!—conjured a brain in a jar, your
partner’s brain in formaldehyde on some surgeon’s shelf, admired for its shape,
admired as a specimen or a teaching tool. “This is where we dream. This is
where your balance comes from. This is where your memories live. This part here
helps you form attachments.”
Thirteen months ago you were visiting your partner
here because keeping pain from hammering that beautiful, dying brain required
intravenous opiates. You asked your boss to fire you so you could collect E.I.
while you and your partner’s mother sat in the hospital room watching her child
drift further and further away. Other family came too, of course. You would
leave the room and go for walks. The ubiquitous nurses and doctors were like
the staff on or even the engine of the impressive ship the hospital was. The
patients were the ship’s passengers, suffering on their way to the shores of
either the continent of life or the continent of death, their families, their
loved ones, their people anxiously traveling with them.
When you were younger you loved, even still you
love, taking the bus and observing the person across the aisle, reading over
the shoulder of the man or woman in front of you, closing your eyes and
listening to the music escaping the headphones of the person next to you,
closing your eyes and imagining what that music might be calling up or washing
away for them. Thinking about this communion calls to your mind a jug being
filled with water from two sources simultaneously. Or hundreds, thousands of
people walking the banks of rivers, to the shores of lakes and oceans and
pouring out jugs and water bottles and glasses like it is some religious
festival. With this image you experience overwhelming warmth somewhere near the
center of you.
Just under twelve months earlier you stopped
having a reason to come here. And right away you missed it. The day of your
partner’s funeral in the suburb where they grew up, you were also surrounded by
many people, but it was different because you had all gathered for the same
reason, the same grief, the same difficulty and it was a pain that you were
perceived to be one of the main bearers of. As a consequence, so many of the
people grieving, carrying their own hurt, came to you with the sweet hope of
sharing and easing your hurt, but with the side-effect of adding their
suffering to it.
Your partner’s favourite drag queen had been
invited to perform and she was weeping her way through a second rendition of
“When Doves Cry” when you got up, whispered to your partner’s mother that you
were going to the washroom and walked out. Your heels were bleeding into your dress
shoes by the time you reached the train station. Your train had just left and
the next one wasn’t due for nearly an hour. You bought a coffee and sat on the
platform waiting and enjoying the emptiness. A train traveling in the opposite
direction stopped and a stream of people with their own lives and worries and
griefs walked the same direction for the length of the platform, took the same
stairs and one of two tunnels before going to their own cars or to get into the
cars of friends, lovers, mothers, fathers or to get on the bus that would drop
them where they needed to be.
Sometime between then and when the train carrying
you home was splashed in a burst of setting sunlight coming through a gap
between two mountainous skyscrapers, you had decided—or come to know,
really—that you were heading to the hospital.
You bought another coffee from the man who had
mistaken you for a doctor and again he called you doctor.
When the elevator came and opened its doors, you
walked on, but you were so occupied trying to find a way to hold your coffee
without a creeping burn finding its way through your skin that you forgot to
press a button to tell the elevator which floor to go to. You heard a muted
conversation before a set of doors at the back opened up and a caretaker with
his head down wheeled a cart across a tiny gap.
“Excuse me,” you said.
“Oh. Excuse me. No, God, pardon me.”
“It’s no trouble.”
Behind him was a vast area with canvas bins and
silver-barred shelves with bottles and linens, its cinder-blocked walls marked
black from contact with rubber stoppers that protected the corners of things. A
short man with greased hair, probably Filipino, watched you slide out of the
way of the cart, then bent back to his task, his arms and part of his head
disappearing into a sack of canvas hanging from a stainless steel frame on
large, grey, rubber wheels.
“Nice weather lately,” you said. “Looks like we
might have a summer.”
“Fly season,” he said. He pressed the button for
the fourth floor.
You reached over and pressed the button for the
fifth floor to see where the conversation would go. “What’s that?”
“Seen ’em fucking everywhere. Flies. I mean having
sex everywhere. I’m not a vulgar talker. Don’t use the F-word for emphasis.”
“Okay.”
“Anyone you talk to’s all delighted the weather’s
getting warmer again, but when you work with garbage . . . ”
“I can see how warm weather might be a mixed
blessing.”
“Mixed nothing. What’s the blessing?”
“When you aren’t at work?”
“You think I’ve got A/C? There’s a nice time in
the evening where if I happen to be by the lake or— Nah, you’re right.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No need to be sorry. I’m just in a bad mood’s the
truth. The weather is nice. The flies agree.” The elevator stopped, the doors
dinged open and the caretaker pushed his cart out. “You have a good day, you
hear?”
“You too.”
On the fifth floor you got out and did a circuit,
careful not to spill your coffee. Most of the doors were closed, but you passed
one that was open. A hunched nurse was sticking electrodes to the chest of a topless,
bearded man.
You took the elevator back to the first floor.
Whoever had designed the hospital’s lobby had,
either by carelessness or design, used ramps and gardens to obscure sightlines.
If you were eight or maybe ten feet tall you would have been able to see the
whole vast multileveled open space supported by regular columns and partitioned
for various purposes. There was value, you thought, or beauty maybe in the way
that the walls and the green life here seemed to direct you down safe, quiet, known
paths—to lead you this way to the front doors, this way to the pharmacy or that
way to the small, private sitting area where just over a year earlier you and
your partner’s mother had discussed the details of your deathwatch rotation.
You heard singing and you followed the sound up a
long ramp to a small courtyard outside of the gift shop. The plants lining the
sides of the ramp obscured your view of the performer, but you could see a
woman crying in a dirty bathrobe with clear tubes up her nose, could distinguish
a decent version of “Purple Rain,” could sense an inexplicable heaviness in
your body as if your feet and your arm—reaching for the banister and holding
tight—knew something that you too smugly ignored. When you cleared the last
plant, a rubber tree reaching its waxy leaves out into the walkway, you saw,
smiling welcome, then smiling recognition, your partner’s favourite drag queen,
the one who’d sang “When Doves Cry” twice at the funeral.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. All of your
partner’s people had developed relationships here, especially in the last
months of your partner’s life. You’d never seen the drag queen here before, but
there was no reason to think that they didn’t perform regularly to lift the
spirits of who? Well, the lady with emphysema all folded up like she was
smoking outside on a cold day. There was a man with a new baby, or a bundle of
fabrics in varying shades of white that had taken the basic shape of a new
baby; a bald person—a hairless person actually—of no clear sex and no obvious
age; a woman whose body seemed tired, who had bags under her eyes, but who
otherwise seemed well. Two boys too young to be alone sat up on the edge of one
of the concrete planters. The larger boy, was hammering his heels against the
wall he was sitting on. The smaller boy was pulling pieces of fern off the
plant and dropping the pieces to the floor.
You didn’t feel like you could leave, but you were
desperate to. How would the conversation with the drag queen go? “What are you
doing here?” would certainly be a question, most likely the first one. “Oh, you
know, this is what I do now. I come here.”
A man wearing Madras shorts and a sweatshirt with
the hood up came out of the gift shop and handed the boys on the wall’s edge a
package of wine gums each then lifted them both down simultaneously.
“Hey, you don’t pay,” came a voice from the gift
shop.
The hooded man turned back even as he began
walking down a ramp, his hand on the boys’ backs pushing them, guiding them.
“He no pay,” said the voice. The small woman who
ran the gift shop with her husband came out the doors, looked at the crowd and
pointed in the direction the man and his sons had disappeared in.
No one in the crowd moved.
You smiled. You stood. You walked past the drag
queen, held your palms up and shrugged while mouthing the word “Sorry.”
“Hey,” the woman said. As you rounded the corner,
you saw that she had spotted a security guard who turned towards her. “That man
with two boy, again he no pay.” The security guard nodded, turned and ran in
the direction the hooded man was walking.
You slowed down and took a relieved breath. Your
heart was racing; you put your hand over your chest as if to calm it.
By the time you passed the security guard, he had
caught up to the man and his sons and he was saying, “Well, why’d you bring
them if you were going to steal?”
The hooded man mumbled something in reply.
“Well, this is not the first time you’ve stolen
something here. You shouldn’t have brought them if you knew you were going to
steal.”
You could see the glass doors to the street,
students passing with their backpacks and side bags and white headphones, a
businessman on his cell phone.
It was time to go home, for the day anyway.
Toronto, April 2016
Story: Lee Sheppard
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