To Feel Stuff (13 page)

 

Vivian was supposed to be working on Thanksgiving, but the fire at her house changed things. Her boyfriend called in the afternoon, saying she couldn't make her shift because of “a personal crisis,” so Health Services called in a rent-a-nurse. Her name was Bethany. I wish you could have seen her.

Bethany had this habit of looking at me sideways from under her hair. This sometimes reminded me of a horse, sometimes of this prematurely mustached guy that I went to high school with, who was a big, big Metallica fan.

The infirmary desk phone kept ringing all night, which was weird for a holiday.

“I don't want to answer the phone,” Bethany said to me, sounding nervous.

“No problem,” I said. “I'm not expecting any calls.”

“They didn't mention anything about phones.”

“Don't answer it.”

We were eating fried chicken that we got from Food Services. There had been surplus legs left over from everybody else's Tuesday-night dinner.

“Do you want to give thanks?” Bethany asked.

I looked around to figure out if I wanted to, and then I looked back at her. “Not really,” I said.

Bethany didn't put up a fight. “Cool.”

The two of us went back to eating, but our mouths weren't making chewing noises. We sucked on that chicken. Every once in a while some lumps of snow fell off the windowsill, and it would surprise us because we'd forgotten that the world made significant sounds.

After a long while, I decided to bridge our gap. “So Bethany,” I said, “Let's try some dinner conversation. It's so quiet in here, it's making me feel more dead than usual.” Bethany glanced up at me from beneath a chunk of her hair. “Do you want to, like, know something about me?”

“Sure.” And I knew automatically what I wanted to hear. “Tell me about why you became a nurse.”

Bethany didn't even think about it. “Because I wanted a job where I could stay inside a house.”

“This place isn't very houselike,” I said. I had to keep spitting small pieces of bone back onto my plate because they were hidden in the meat.

When she was bent over her chicken leg, Bethany looked feral, like she was eating a vulture's leftovers. She didn't look up from her food when she talked. “What I set out to do was in-home care. And I had a job for a while, for this lady with cancer, who used to call me a whore, but I got past that.”

“Why'd she call you a whore?” I asked. “Are you a whore?”

“Do you think I'm like a whore?”

“No, but all I have is a first impression.”

“Well, I'm not a whore. She was angry, that was part of it, and she said I smelled like sex, which, I don't know, I don't think I do. Maybe I just have strong pheromones. But she died.”

Feeling nauseous from the chicken (not from the cancerpatient story), I threw the leg I'd been holding into the trash can. I made the basket. I thought about going pro. “I just swallowed another piece of cartilage. I'm finished. Sorry to hear about her death, because of your job.”

“I thought I would find another cancer patient to take care of,” she told me. “But I didn't realize that I'd been lucky. It's harder and harder to find that kind of job, partly because of the economy. People are mostly going into places like hospices and senior condos now. They're cheaper and they offer movement classes.”

“What's the other part of it?”

“If you're not going to have more chicken, can I have that leg?” Bethany asked, pointing to the last piece that was sitting on my plate.

“It's all yours.”

“Thanks.” Bethany took the leg like she had to beat the spring of a trap. “Well, the other part is that people used to want to die alone in their homes. They didn't want prying eyes on them. And I didn't want prying eyes on me. It was the perfect situation.”

“And now?”

“People want to pretend they're not dying when they're really dying. Like I said, they want to be in movement classes until the last second. My profession is becoming obsolete.”

“When I die,” I said, “I want to be alone. No nurse. Nothing.” This is good for you to know, just in case.

“Me too.”

“Do you hate your job now?”

“They send me to a lot of functions, not houses. I had to go be a nurse at the Providence Girl Scout Olympics this past summer. It was maybe the worst day of my life.” Bethany paused, but she didn't make eye contact with me. “I don't know if I should be telling you about all of this. Why do you want to know why I became a nurse?”

“I ask all the nurses that,” I told her. “Doctors will always tell you that they went into practice because they wanted to help people, which is generally an oversimplification or a lie. Nurses will usually tell you why they're really there, though, because they don't have so much to lose from the truth.”

“I guess you're right. If I get fired, I'm thinking of going into house cleaning.”

We were quiet again while Bethany finished her chicken behind her hair, but the silence was friendlier this time. When Bethany finally lifted her head and I saw the bone, it was all pillaged. That's why it made me think of you and your legs.

“Bethany?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know how to do girl talk?”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“Here. I'll try to start it,” I said. I paused to get over my uneasiness, and then I started. I don't really do this kind of thing ever. I don't really confess it ever, either. This is for you. “If I was thinking about someone when he wasn't in the room, if the idea of him kept returning to my mind, do you think that would mean that I had a crush on him?”

Bethany nodded. This wasn't to show that her answer was an instant yes, but that the question was one she could live with. She stared down at her sweats. “When you're thinking of him, is it good or bad things that you're thinking?”

I looked up to the ceiling and tried to picture you floating there. “When I think about him, I think about how different he is from me. That difference speaks to me. Do I have a crush?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“I thought so.” I shut my eyes and leaned back against my pillow. I felt like I was in trouble, like I'd been stealing. Stealing from what or whom, I don't know. But you seemed off-limits, and me liking you seemed like a transgression.

“Wait. Before you go to sleep, you need to take your antibiotics.” Bethany picked up my cup of pills and cup of water from where she'd put them underneath the bed. She passed them to me.

“Do you feel like you have fever?”

I checked my forehead with my hand. My temperature seemed okay for once. I told Bethany, “No, I'm still cool.” I took my medicine.

“Do you want the lights out?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But listen, it's Thanksgiving. If you want to go to sleep, nothing's going to happen to me overnight. I'm sure of it.”

“If anyone found out, somehow—” Bethany interjected.

“Who's telling?” I asked. “The cups?” Since they were both empty, I chucked them over to the side of the room, and they hit the window before they fell to the floor. They rolled around in drunken, half-completed circles. The two of us watched them, entranced.

“Worse comes to worst,” I added, “you'll go into dusting.”

“Okay,” Bethany said. She got up from the bed, took off her shoes, then flicked off the overhead lights. I reached over and turned off my private lamp. After the room was dark, I heard Bethany peeling back the covers of the bed next to mine.

“Good night,” I said.

“'Night.”

In the hallway, the phone started ringing again.

“Just ignore it,” I ordered her because I was feeling good thinking about you, my new crush, and I didn't want any bad news coming my way. Maybe you think that's me being paranoid, but doctors have weird lives, driven by weird passions. They work weird hours. They decide to check on lab results at weird times. And I wouldn't put it past one who felt like he had a familiar relationship with one of his frequent patients to put in a phone call on Thanksgiving. There was always that danger.

The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004

 

Thanksgiving 2002 arrived just a month after my first meeting with E. I asked if her family was coming to Providence for the holiday, she was not well enough to leave the infirmary. E said, “I told them that it wasn't worth coming, since I wouldn't be much fun.”

Unable to believe that her parents wouldn't insist on visiting, I pressed E. “Are you not close with them?” This was a year before she confided in me the family's supernatural leanings and the resulting tension.

E answered, “We're as close as we can manage.”

I dropped the subject that day, but returned to it when Christmas rounded the corner. From what I could gather, E's parents always offered to make the trip, but E declined. E showed me a coffee-table book her mother had sent her for Christmas, comprised of graphic pictures of psychic surgery, practiced mostly in the Philippines and Brazil. While psychic surgery involves no scalpels or traditional incisions—supposedly, the healer gains access to the innards through the use of his or her fingers—the pictures in the book were undeniably gory. There was also a chapter on psychic dentistry. When I expressed surprise at her mother having sent this as a gift, E said she thought it was an indirect way for her mother to express concern about E's health.

“But doesn't she want to see you in person?” I asked.

“There's probably a lot of reasons why she doesn't,” E said, failing to elaborate.

Throughout conversations held over the course of our association, I deduced that these reasons included (1) that E's parents chose to err on the side of too much space when it came to E. Ideological differences had strained their relationship, and S and A were fearful of losing more ground with their daughter; (2) that because A and, to a lesser extent, S do not perceive a thick barrier between life and death, they regard illness more casually than most of us; (3) that because A connected E's string of illnesses to her familial legacy, she was not as frightened by E's health problems as a mother with a different background might have been; and (4) that A and S's parenting philosophy included the somewhat antiquated notions that (a) young persons must find their own paths in life without artificial (i.e., undesired) intervention, and (b) separation of child (or, in this case, young adult) and parent is necessary for the child's coming of age. Moreover, the child should control the duration and nature of that separation.

The family spoke on the phone every week or two.

Only six months after I began working with E did I learn that she had a younger sister, J, “who my parents named half after my dead cousin on my dad's side who was hit by a drunk driver, and half after my mom.” J was born fifteen years after E. The only thing that E has ever volunteered on the subject of her sister is “We have a good relationship. She's five. You know?”

I thought that E would be alone on Thanksgiving 2003—I didn't consider the required nurse practitioner to be company—and saw the holiday as a perfect opportunity to strengthen our slightly tenuous relationship. We had not spoken since our talk at my home, and I was anxious about E's commitment to our work. I planned to surprise her with McDonald's, keep her company, and reestablish the goodwill that had existed previously between us. On a more personal level, I thought E might like to know that someone was thinking of her. Unfortunately, although I tried calling the infirmary three times that night, there was never an answer. I drove to Health Services to see if the light was on in her room, but the window was dark.

From The Desk of Chester Hunter III

 

When my plane landed at TF Green, I couldn't wait to get off it and back to you. But what was excruciating was that even walking off the plane was out of the question, so I had to sit and watch while the other Brown kids strolled down the aisle, using their legs. As they were passing me I stared at their knees with what I guess was envy, and I started to feel like one of those old, fat ladies at the beach who stare at the tight nineteen-year-olds in their small bikinis.

After everyone else had deplaned, a steward came back for me with my wheelchair.

“Okay, sir, I'm going to pull your chair to the side here, and hopefully you can use those big guns to lift yourself and slide over into it,” he said. He gave me an uneasy smile, and I must not have smiled back, or must not have smiled back convincingly, because he started to look very guilty.

“Oh man, I'm sorry. Guns are arms, you know? You didn't get shot, did you? I'm sorry, sir.”

“No, I didn't get shot,” I told him.

“Ah, relief, relief. That makes me feel better,” he said.

Down near the baggage carousel, a driver wearing a suit and tie was holding up a sign with “CHESS HUNTER” written on it. I didn't want to wait with him at the carousel because I knew I'd be useless, so I hung back near the escalators while he got my suitcase. This made me feel so stupid and outside the normal world that I started humming a few bars from “The Phantom of the Opera,” and then I had to laugh at myself because I felt so wrecked.

When we got to the parking lot, I saw that my dad had actually hired a limo. It was black, complete with tinted windows, and it was really embarrassing, El.

“I think a town car would probably have been sufficient,” I told the driver.

“Aww, come on,” he said, opening his arms like he was demonstrating the sheer mass of my vehicular luck. “We can take an extra spin around campus if you want, show off the car to your buddies. Make them all jealous.”

“But I don't have any buddies that I want to show off for.”