Lullaby
It was the middle of summer, but the room was cold, cold as death.
“One hundred years old,” he said.
“What did she die of?” I asked.
“Of being one hundred years old.”
As I looked around the ceramic-tiled room, I thought of some nameless horror movie I had seen before, or a hundred horror movies I had seen before, where something happens…where something has to happen in a place so still and quiet. A breath. A sigh. Something. I watched the clock on the wall. I half expected it to stop and for something or someone to moan. Or something to come crashing through the door. For some ghost to appear. But then I forgot about all those sensational scenes from the horror films. They’re really not that scary, not compared to the smell of death, which never finds translation on the screen. At this moment, I was experiencing the most horrifying thing I had ever experienced in my life. It wasn’t the sudden shock, the sudden jolt, the sudden appearance of the unexpected, or the sudden crescendo. No, it was the steady, predictable clicking of the hands of the clock, the only sound greater than the breathing of two living bodies in the morgue.
“Life is short, you know,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
My head was swimming with questions. Who was she? Did she have family? Did she die alone? Did she leave her final impression on the living, or did she have one final breath? Or sigh? Or fart? You always hear stories about that last ounce of delayed life making its way through the crude architecture of the human body before the soul departs for heaven or hell. Where was she going? Heaven or hell? Did she really live?
“That’s where we’re all headed,” he said.
I wondered what this old woman looked like under this black plastic bag. I imagined the work of time’s sadistic cruelty on the body: the blotchy, sagging skin, the frail bones, the liver spots, the bad teeth, the sunken eyes.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, looking at this. I was supposed to be flying to Paris, Lisbon, Prague, or Milan, selling modems, making seven times as much money. It’s only part-time, I told myself when I took a job working security at St. Matthews hospital. Something to pay the bills while I keep looking. Although this job was beneath me, I thought it would be an easy job. After all, during summer break in college I’d worked a security job, which consisted mostly of chatting with young, beautiful, sharp-dressed women working overtime for Morgan Stanley, or providing directions to French tourists while at the same time practicing my college French, or reading Stephen King. Here I was fourteen years later…my first day on a job that didn’t require a college degree (much less an MBA) dressed in nothing but a bad polyester uniform and a dream I gave up sometime between marriage and the birth of my first child. But it was hard to revive that dream in this room. Something about the cold, implacable truth of this room made me feel like I was being confronted with something much deeper than death -- a kind of death in myself.
“Let’s go up to six,” he said.
When the doors opened on the sixth floor, I stepped onto polished hardwood floors, walls lined with portraits of grim countenances under the spotlights of tiny gold plated lamps.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“People who pay big bucks to die in style. They get the VIP treatment. Any meal they want from wherever they want it. But no one leaves here alive.”
“Sounds like death row,” I said.
I glanced left and right into the rooms as we walked down the hall. In passing a certain room, I caught a glimpse of silhouette on a bed in a dark corner of the room. I imagined it had seen us, for a low, pitiful moan escaped at the moment of our passing. We walked past a few more rooms, turned a corner and suddenly stopped in front of a nurse’s check-in station. This is where my guide and supervisor, John, exchanged greetings with the nurses.
“When you come up here, make sure you sign this,” John said, showing me the check-in list located behind the desk. “Just hang out here for a minute. I’ve got to use the bathroom.”
I looked down the hall at the shiny hardwood floors. I looked again at the portraits on the wall. The faces were stern, stoic, unhappy, alone. Then I looked into a room across from the nurse’s station. An old man was asleep on the bed. If it weren’t for the way his chest was moving rhythmically with his breath, I might have guessed he was dead. He certainly looked the part. Although he was six feet tall, he probably weighed a hundred pounds. His cheeks were so sunken I thought I might be able to see through his face if I got close enough. His legs and arms were like branches of a Ficus tree.
“He’s dying of Aids.” John was suddenly at my side. “He’s only forty years old. We’ll probably be wheeling him out of here tomorrow.”
“Drugs?”
“No. A very different kind of injection, I’m afraid.”
I grimaced and shook my head.
“Do you know what a dead body feels like?” he asked me. “Chicken. Just like the kind you pick up in a grocery market. Well, you’ll probably see tomorrow. At least two people need to take a body to the morgue.”
This emaciated half-human looking figure on the bed was only six years older than me! What would I do if I knew I only had six more years to live? I wouldn’t have to worry about retirement, getting old, exorbitant health insurance premiums or medical bills, or being a burden to anyone. I could go to Hollywood and chase that dream of being an actor and not worry about where I’ll be in ten years. But somewhere between Ohio and California I picked up a wife, a child, a responsible job, a life of quiet desperation. Would six years be enough time to do something big, something that people will remember me for, something significant? What have I done?
Just then, I heard the most beautiful music fill the halls. It was a Brahms lullaby.
I looked at John. “Come with me,” he said.
We got on the elevator and went to the fourth floor, the baby ward.
“Every time a baby is born, that music is played throughout the hospital,” he said.
We watched the nurse from behind the glass nursing one of the new born infants. She looked up at us and smiled, then went back to her work.
“You know, with all the shit I see here…heart attack victims rolled in to the ER, doctors and nurses pounding on three hundred pound bodies, cracking open ribs, trying to get a heart started again, black kids turned blue, psychopaths trying to spit on you as they’re being tied down…prostitutes, crack addicts, and drunks on the corner calling you a five-dollar-an-hour rent-a-cop…that Brahms lullaby reminds me that life’s still a beautiful thing.”
Just then, static broke from our radios, followed by the voice of another security officer. “Code purple, GSW.” Although it was only my first day, even I knew what that meant. We rushed to the elevator. Moments later we were on the first floor. Several ambulances were lined outside the entrance of the ER. Stretchers hauling bodies of teenagers with gunshot wounds were being rushed into surgery, followed by hysterical mothers, brothers, and cousins. John and I met up with several officers to manage the pandemonium. “Wait here….no, you can’t go back there…we have the best doctors working on your son. I’ve seen them perform miracles…if anybody can save them, they can…” we told them, in addition to more mundane directions on where to sit, where to wait, or where to go to the bathroom.
Suddenly, some seventeen-year-old kid came up to me and put a gun to my head. “I’m going back there! I don’t care what you say.” No doubt he wanted to make sure he finished the job he started on the rival gang member he shot earlier.
I grabbed his balls. We don’t carry guns, so grabbing his balls seemed like the next best option. Don’t ask me why. It was just a reflex, a distraction. I didn’t think this kid was stupid enough to murder an innocent stranger in front of twenty or thirty witnesses. His mother rushed to his side, pleading with him to put the gun down while two police officers pointed guns at his head. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, though it felt like an hour. He was immediately arrested.
Everything was happening so fast. I didn’t have time to get scared, or realize I was scared, or take a deep breath. I was already on my way back to assist with the transport of dead bodies to the morgue, so I was caught completely off guard by the crossfire that ensued. But it was only the first gunshot I heard. There’s something about death that seems to slow down time to a virtual halt. And when your whole life flashes before your eyes it’s not the good things you see, it’s the bad things: the time I got lost in a department store when I was four years old, getting bitten by a dog when I was seven years old, the time I fell from a roof and broke my leg, the night I was beaten within an inch of my life by a bunch of thugs, the first time I felt heartbreak, the last time I saw my ex-wife and the man she was with, the car accident that killed my best friend in high school, every panic attack and fear that plagued me like demons mocking and celebrating every hesitation in the direction of my dreams, as if each one brought them closer to ensnaring my soul.
Although I said only the bad parts of your life flash before your eyes, there is one exception. The last thing you see is good. And it made me realize I was wrong, for I had done something significant in my life. For me, it was the last thing I saw -- a picture I keep in my wallet, a picture of my little girl, Dana. And the last thing I heard…the Brahms lullaby.
It was the middle of summer, but the room was cold, cold as death.
“One hundred years old,” he said.
“What did she die of?” I asked.
“Of being one hundred years old.”
As I looked around the ceramic-tiled room, I thought of some nameless horror movie I had seen before, or a hundred horror movies I had seen before, where something happens…where something has to happen in a place so still and quiet. A breath. A sigh. Something. I watched the clock on the wall. I half expected it to stop and for something or someone to moan. Or something to come crashing through the door. For some ghost to appear. But then I forgot about all those sensational scenes from the horror films. They’re really not that scary, not compared to the smell of death, which never finds translation on the screen. At this moment, I was experiencing the most horrifying thing I had ever experienced in my life. It wasn’t the sudden shock, the sudden jolt, the sudden appearance of the unexpected, or the sudden crescendo. No, it was the steady, predictable clicking of the hands of the clock, the only sound greater than the breathing of two living bodies in the morgue.
“Life is short, you know,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
My head was swimming with questions. Who was she? Did she have family? Did she die alone? Did she leave her final impression on the living, or did she have one final breath? Or sigh? Or fart? You always hear stories about that last ounce of delayed life making its way through the crude architecture of the human body before the soul departs for heaven or hell. Where was she going? Heaven or hell? Did she really live?
“That’s where we’re all headed,” he said.
I wondered what this old woman looked like under this black plastic bag. I imagined the work of time’s sadistic cruelty on the body: the blotchy, sagging skin, the frail bones, the liver spots, the bad teeth, the sunken eyes.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, looking at this. I was supposed to be flying to Paris, Lisbon, Prague, or Milan, selling modems, making seven times as much money. It’s only part-time, I told myself when I took a job working security at St. Matthews hospital. Something to pay the bills while I keep looking. Although this job was beneath me, I thought it would be an easy job. After all, during summer break in college I’d worked a security job, which consisted mostly of chatting with young, beautiful, sharp-dressed women working overtime for Morgan Stanley, or providing directions to French tourists while at the same time practicing my college French, or reading Stephen King. Here I was fourteen years later…my first day on a job that didn’t require a college degree (much less an MBA) dressed in nothing but a bad polyester uniform and a dream I gave up sometime between marriage and the birth of my first child. But it was hard to revive that dream in this room. Something about the cold, implacable truth of this room made me feel like I was being confronted with something much deeper than death -- a kind of death in myself.
“Let’s go up to six,” he said.
When the doors opened on the sixth floor, I stepped onto polished hardwood floors, walls lined with portraits of grim countenances under the spotlights of tiny gold plated lamps.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“People who pay big bucks to die in style. They get the VIP treatment. Any meal they want from wherever they want it. But no one leaves here alive.”
“Sounds like death row,” I said.
I glanced left and right into the rooms as we walked down the hall. In passing a certain room, I caught a glimpse of silhouette on a bed in a dark corner of the room. I imagined it had seen us, for a low, pitiful moan escaped at the moment of our passing. We walked past a few more rooms, turned a corner and suddenly stopped in front of a nurse’s check-in station. This is where my guide and supervisor, John, exchanged greetings with the nurses.
“When you come up here, make sure you sign this,” John said, showing me the check-in list located behind the desk. “Just hang out here for a minute. I’ve got to use the bathroom.”
I looked down the hall at the shiny hardwood floors. I looked again at the portraits on the wall. The faces were stern, stoic, unhappy, alone. Then I looked into a room across from the nurse’s station. An old man was asleep on the bed. If it weren’t for the way his chest was moving rhythmically with his breath, I might have guessed he was dead. He certainly looked the part. Although he was six feet tall, he probably weighed a hundred pounds. His cheeks were so sunken I thought I might be able to see through his face if I got close enough. His legs and arms were like branches of a Ficus tree.
“He’s dying of Aids.” John was suddenly at my side. “He’s only forty years old. We’ll probably be wheeling him out of here tomorrow.”
“Drugs?”
“No. A very different kind of injection, I’m afraid.”
I grimaced and shook my head.
“Do you know what a dead body feels like?” he asked me. “Chicken. Just like the kind you pick up in a grocery market. Well, you’ll probably see tomorrow. At least two people need to take a body to the morgue.”
This emaciated half-human looking figure on the bed was only six years older than me! What would I do if I knew I only had six more years to live? I wouldn’t have to worry about retirement, getting old, exorbitant health insurance premiums or medical bills, or being a burden to anyone. I could go to Hollywood and chase that dream of being an actor and not worry about where I’ll be in ten years. But somewhere between Ohio and California I picked up a wife, a child, a responsible job, a life of quiet desperation. Would six years be enough time to do something big, something that people will remember me for, something significant? What have I done?
Just then, I heard the most beautiful music fill the halls. It was a Brahms lullaby.
I looked at John. “Come with me,” he said.
We got on the elevator and went to the fourth floor, the baby ward.
“Every time a baby is born, that music is played throughout the hospital,” he said.
We watched the nurse from behind the glass nursing one of the new born infants. She looked up at us and smiled, then went back to her work.
“You know, with all the shit I see here…heart attack victims rolled in to the ER, doctors and nurses pounding on three hundred pound bodies, cracking open ribs, trying to get a heart started again, black kids turned blue, psychopaths trying to spit on you as they’re being tied down…prostitutes, crack addicts, and drunks on the corner calling you a five-dollar-an-hour rent-a-cop…that Brahms lullaby reminds me that life’s still a beautiful thing.”
Just then, static broke from our radios, followed by the voice of another security officer. “Code purple, GSW.” Although it was only my first day, even I knew what that meant. We rushed to the elevator. Moments later we were on the first floor. Several ambulances were lined outside the entrance of the ER. Stretchers hauling bodies of teenagers with gunshot wounds were being rushed into surgery, followed by hysterical mothers, brothers, and cousins. John and I met up with several officers to manage the pandemonium. “Wait here….no, you can’t go back there…we have the best doctors working on your son. I’ve seen them perform miracles…if anybody can save them, they can…” we told them, in addition to more mundane directions on where to sit, where to wait, or where to go to the bathroom.
Suddenly, some seventeen-year-old kid came up to me and put a gun to my head. “I’m going back there! I don’t care what you say.” No doubt he wanted to make sure he finished the job he started on the rival gang member he shot earlier.
I grabbed his balls. We don’t carry guns, so grabbing his balls seemed like the next best option. Don’t ask me why. It was just a reflex, a distraction. I didn’t think this kid was stupid enough to murder an innocent stranger in front of twenty or thirty witnesses. His mother rushed to his side, pleading with him to put the gun down while two police officers pointed guns at his head. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, though it felt like an hour. He was immediately arrested.
Everything was happening so fast. I didn’t have time to get scared, or realize I was scared, or take a deep breath. I was already on my way back to assist with the transport of dead bodies to the morgue, so I was caught completely off guard by the crossfire that ensued. But it was only the first gunshot I heard. There’s something about death that seems to slow down time to a virtual halt. And when your whole life flashes before your eyes it’s not the good things you see, it’s the bad things: the time I got lost in a department store when I was four years old, getting bitten by a dog when I was seven years old, the time I fell from a roof and broke my leg, the night I was beaten within an inch of my life by a bunch of thugs, the first time I felt heartbreak, the last time I saw my ex-wife and the man she was with, the car accident that killed my best friend in high school, every panic attack and fear that plagued me like demons mocking and celebrating every hesitation in the direction of my dreams, as if each one brought them closer to ensnaring my soul.
Although I said only the bad parts of your life flash before your eyes, there is one exception. The last thing you see is good. And it made me realize I was wrong, for I had done something significant in my life. For me, it was the last thing I saw -- a picture I keep in my wallet, a picture of my little girl, Dana. And the last thing I heard…the Brahms lullaby.