The New Job

To breathe, you hum, almost sing. Ahh ahh ahh umm umm, oh god ahh ahh ahh, the song goes; your legs shuffle in time.

You slide your legs, left and right, over the sheets to dissipate the buzzing under the skin. You’re starting to feel it again, in the legs, in the sides, even under the skin of the arms now.

After decades of accumulating knowledge, plying this daily, trading information, making lives better, including your own, you are reduced to this as your human job, day job and night shift: gingerly running your feet over white sheets.

The buzzing of nerves is masked pain coming unmasked, but you are afraid to summon the nurse. If she fails to report right away, you’ll have pain compounded by the fear of even greater pain. Each new stirring of pricked nerves within, radiating outward till others can hear it in your breaths, becomes a worse torment once you push that button.  And still last night, no nurse, no shadow, no movement at the door. You will not make it.

To lie still and quiet is to feel your frayed nerves fully. To move the legs is to believe that you are the source of that pain – that, in essence, is your job. Surely this sharpness, this intensity, cannot come from deep within your own body, your traitorous body. 

Another stabbing inside. The legs jerk up to the abdomen, which swollen now as if you’ve eaten a meal of pebbles, a thousand pebbles dashed down with gallons of sour, warm buttermilk, sloshing hard inside. Your skin stretches thinner, keeping the pressure contained, barely. Your abdomen is unrecognizable. You feel like the guy in the movies, on the ground, being kicked by a bully, but the bully does not stop; he kicks even harder.

You cannot say any of this.

Your room is full of people, but no nurse. Your daughter wipes her eyes but they still water. She won’t look fully at you today. She wipes them again, goes into the bathroom.

In the bathroom, your daughter washes her face. She puts on make-up, perfume, a scent that is a false evergreen smell, a manufacturer’s take on a forest. She combs her hair, pulls it back, comes out.

At your side, your son taps your shoulder, afraid to clap it hard, the way a man would, as you used to. Tap, tap. His eyes rest on the TV screen. You watch his Adam’s apple rise, he holds it there. Then it falls. Something he wants to say, that he cannot say. You remember this, the sense of a lump dissolving there, words dissolving at the top of the throat, that a young man never could say, never. You stood over your own father, in his travail, unable to sort out what you wanted to say, what you might need to say.

Your wife opens an insulated lunch sac. She’s avoiding the cafeteria. She pulls out three sandwiches, three small cans of juice and lines them up on your food tray. She will never feed you again.

Oh god ahh ahh ahh. The pebbles press against your heaving lungs, as if you’ve gone for a long run, leaving the house on a cold morning and running full out, the tissue frozen, heavy, aching, stabbed. It’s another job, positioning yourself so the lungs remain under the least pressure possible. Ahh ahh ahh umm umm.

Your son stands beside you and glances along your gown. He sees the catheter, sees more. Your wife points up at the TV, tells everyone to look. Look, they’re up, by two points. She yanks your gown as low as it will go. Still your legs slide up and back, up and back. You are doing your job well. By four, your son reports. The teams on the TV move back and forth, back and forth, along a painted court. Is it a championship? Maybe, but no one tells you.

Your extremities, dotted with fingersticks and prodded with other needles really are beside the point. Your fingers ache, but the catheter in your urethra rubs the skin raw. Every point of your self that can still move is on fire. You no longer have anything to hide, just parts that once moved, without incident. Things that worked.

Your daughter presses her eyes, then puts her hand over them again. She sucks in her own breath when she holds your clean hand, looks at all of the needle traces, shakes the hand gently.

Your wife tells them to eat, but the food sits there on your tray. 

Your son sees the hand is finished. He narrows his eyes at you, taps his own mouth with his young, unweary, unveined hand. He is learning to accept what his brain will not compute, what your daughter’s eyes water for, what your wife’s legs grow cold and heavy over as she stands each night beside your bed before she leaves to go to the motel nearby. A motel you will never lay eyes on.

She pops open the small cans of juice, but only she drinks. It’s good, she says.

Your son runs his hand through his hair. He wants to be anywhere but here. He  smiles an anemic smile. They’re up by eight, he says directly to you. He waits a beat, then his eyes return to the screen.

Sometimes you hold your breath, but the mass of pebbles won’t let you rest for long. You have to press the button, and do. Cold, cold, freezing cold with panic as the last trace of morphine disappears, and you are left with all of it.

You understand and know, finally, a kinship with all of the men who died beside you in the war, with all of the men you killed in the war, healthy and functioning one moment, plunging in terror in their planes to the Pacific the next. You no longer feel so sorry for them. You feel a kinship, in fact, with everyone who has ever died, affliction, accident, execution, the world around. Every day, the death by time, death over time, your animal’s death. You all are one at this intersection, at the junction of time left and all gone. 

You know you are something called “alive” because of the nerves screeching like a banshee knotted to a flaming stake. The heart keeps the show running, steady, against your will, oh god.

Relief comes, in the form of the nurse wearing something pink and green – you cannot think of the word – outfit or costume? You will spend time trying to think of the word as she adjusts the bag hanging above your bed, like the sword of who?

Uniform, you think. You’re not sure if you’ve said it out loud.

A moment of relief, such that at first you cannot clearly think. All you sense is a rush of relaxation, such that your heart mounts, the buzz of the drug lifts it out of your chest, its unearthly power fillips your blood.

After some time -- a minute? several minutes? – your wife asks, as usual, can I get you anything?

“Bring me up,” you say, clearly.

They all stare at you.

“Pull me up,” you say. And your well-meaning daughter and son take places on either side of you, moving quickly, glad for the command. They grab your thin insect arms and force you the wrong way, dragging you back into your pillow, but not up, not above your sensations, not high enough. They cannot comprehend the fiery lungs, the angles you need to get the air in gently, the importance of your careful work.

“No, stop, no.” They try something else.

“No.”

Your children look at you, glum. They ache with their failed attempt to buy you more relief. Your daughter bites her lip, hard. Your son really looks into your eyes. Your alma mater, he tells you. He tears at his fingernails with his teeth. You can see one finger is bleeding at the base of the nail. Your wife hums a Stevie Wonder song, takes out some knitting.

Your stomach is swelling with fluids. Another task arrives: quelling nausea. The  organs float on this new sea, on a coming tide you cannot manage, your body engorged, to your gorge.

Just in time, you wave a hand, a signal for your wife to place the yellow-brown plastic bowl, shaped like a kidney, under your chin. A few more ounces.

Your son leans on his hands on the windowsill and puts his forehead against it, as your wife stands, takes the bowl to the bathroom. It’s her new job now.

Your daughter calls out the name of a player you don’t know. A friend of her friend. Your son glances back at you and nods, wipes his lips with the back of his hand, nods, and you do the same, wipe yourself so he won’t have to see it there at your lips anymore.  Your son calls his sister a name dropper, turns back to the screen.

You watch the players, basketball players, run back and forth, back and forth.

In a short while, your wife comes out of the bathroom, her eyes red, the backs of her hands glistening from tears.

You see this as she pats a cold washcloth at your lips, offers to brush your teeth. You let her move the brush over your teeth and gums, tender as the skin of an infant. Your tired mouth no longer handles food nor toothbrush. Still, as you gaze at her puffed eyelids, you slosh water in your mouth as forcefully as you can, and spit it out in a vigorous stream into the same ugly bowl.

She offers to shave your chin and trim your nails.

So you can do what?