The World of the End (4 page)

Ann was desperately invested in her patients’ rehabilitation, sending them back to their lives with a sly smile. Deep down, she knew that their praise, which bordered on adulation, was nothing more than the natural and temporary condition of a dependent person. Every time one of her patients checked out of the ward, she felt like an inconsequential servant. So long as they were in good health, they were the same people who cut her in line, walked all over her, ignored her.

For her existence to be palpable, theirs had to be in jeopardy. In her eyes, that was the root of inferiority—to be seen, not as a human being but as a service provider. A hefty middle-aged patient dealt her the worst blow when, after two months of constant care, he passed her on the street without so much as a nod. She laughed at the sound of hundreds of patients’ voices reverberating in her ears, pledging to stay in touch, to come by and visit from time to time. Not one had kept their word. They had all managed to forget. She no longer held a grudge. She just learned to ignore them to nearly the same extent that they ignored her, pretending to be human.

She wakes at five, showers, has coffee, leaves the house at five forty-five, gets on the bus at five fifty, arrives at the hospital at six twenty, puts on her white uniform, reads the night’s charts till seven, then attends to her patients till one, at which point she has lunch—the same two triangles of egg-and-potato salad sandwich with a glass of mineral water—and at one thirty, returns to the ward till six, tending to her patients, new and old, galloping like a possessed woman from room to room, solving all problems, calling the right doctor when necessary, and filling out the daily chart ten minutes before leaving the hospital. At six twenty in the evening she boards the bus. At six fifty she gets off, basking in the time she allows herself to roam the streets. At eight, she returns home, eats dinner, showers, watches TV, and crawls into bed. At eleven she shuts off the light and falls asleep in three minutes flat.

Ann’s robotic life afforded her no pleasure, stimulation, or satisfaction, but she refused to allow the dreariness to deflate her. Lacking an alternative, she simply continued living. It was so decreed, and she complied with dull obedience. The same dull obedience she showed when told by the director of the hospital that she had been promoted to head nurse. She didn’t bat an eyelash at the news of her promotion or the small pay raise. A simple calculation revealed that she would, barring a miracle, pay off the monstrous mortgage on her small house by the age of sixty.

When Ann turned forty, the miracle arrived. A complication during surgery left an elderly woman, who had been in her care for six months, in a vegetative state. The woman, Hanna, had taken the possibility of complications into account, and had told Ann that if she were to emerge from the surgery, held in this world by the thread of life support, she should wait no more than a month. If, after that, she saw no changes, she should disconnect her from the tubes and turn off the machines. A moment before entering the Operating Room, she smiled and patted Ann’s hand as though she knew that her life would end with the touch of the scalpel as it carved the tumor from her brain. Ann spent every spare minute of the next thirty days by her side, coaxing her back to life. On the thirty-first day, she gathered herself and went to see the hospital director, laying out the story of the old woman who had no next of kin. The director weighed the matter and said he trusted her instincts. At 12:45 that afternoon, Ann, in the presence of two doctors and three nurses, disconnected her from life support, kissed her on the forehead, and left to go eat her egg-and-potato salad sandwich. Two days later, for the first time, she attended a patient’s funeral, alongside a rabbi, and a lawyer who came over to her afterwards and informed her that the deceased had left her a palatial house in Kfar Shmaryahu. Ann stared at the lawyer till he smiled and said that Hanna had lost her family in the Holocaust and had not borne children. Ann knew the details. Hanna had told her everything, aside from the will and the fortune.

After checking her options, Ann sold Hanna’s house and covered her own mortgage, surprised to see that there was a hefty sum still left over in the account. Then she started to save. Each month she deposited the excess from her salary in a savings account along with the inheritance money. Her future plans did not involve traveling around the world or laying the foundations of her dream house; her sole desire was to ensure financial independence through the prairies of old age. Dependence disgusted her. (Over the years she also cultivated a cautious distaste for love and its legions, convinced that the matter was nothing more than an ensnarement meant to deny people their independence.) To her dismay, she learned with time that her new job responsibilities called for counseling and other skills she had never considered acquiring. She read several books about bereavement, fished out a few hollow clichés, and kneaded them into a single truth. Over time, she learned to polish her words, lending them a professional gleam. Listening to her, the widowers-to-be were under the impression they were being counseled by a woman deeply familiar with the workings of the unconscious mind. They were unaware that her arguments had been drafted in the distant realms of her imagination, and that, more importantly, she had been profoundly changed.

Hanna’s death heralded the start of a new chapter in Ann’s life. She embraced the burden of disconnecting people from life support and, along with that, slowly relinquished her grip on revenge—she had nursed enough of the infirm back to life; now was the time to send her patients to the kingdom of eternal rest. Hanna taught her something about human kindness and, had she stayed alive, she would surely have said “hi” as she passed her on the street. Ann felt she owed her a favor in return, and asked the hospital director to be charged with caring for the patients on life support.

Ten years passed as Ann eased the comatose into even deeper sleep. During that time, her reputation grew until, at age forty-six, after her forty-ninth departed patient, she decided that she would retire after one hundred. The director of the hospital, perhaps assuming that round numbers hint at rationality, agreed to her terms: the hundredth deceased patient would ring the freedom bells for the “Angel of Death.” He even promised her an enhanced pension package and took an interest in her post-career plans.

She shrugged and said, “All my life I’ve cared for others; when I retire I’ll care for myself.” Beyond a vague feeling in her gut, she had no idea what that meant. But then, two years later, she came across the health club and felt her stomach twist into knots. The Spot. During that year, Ann feverishly surveyed several candidates. Each lingering glance she allowed herself made the rest of her walk home an uncomfortably wet affair. The following year, she chose her Romeo, the man whose name she didn’t know, who wreaked havoc inside her. The harder she tried to banish him from her mind, the more entrenched he became. Those five intoxicating minutes in front of the health club window so dominated her mind that only as she stared at the wall at night, a moment before disconnecting herself from the animated world, was she able to recognize her menacing addiction.

With each new morning came fresh denial. She sailed past the window without so much as a glance in the direction of the orphaned machines, emerging empowered and inoculated against the club’s clawing gravity. But one December day, when her guard was down, just as she was contemplating how to convince the relatives of a comatose patient to authorize his inevitable transformation, the Spot emerged in her mind, sprouting into reality, spreading the dark gravitational force of physical attraction, a corrupting power that yearned to drag her headlong into the thick of a wild frenzy, pulling her face-to-face with a beautiful, sculpted body, which scrubbed her senses clean of all thoughts beyond the small drops of sweat that slid down an athletic chest, over the hard boxes of his stomach, pausing for an interlude at his belly button and thieving their way directly down the wet slopes of her desire, slipping under the elastic band of her panties, making it difficult to walk. He turned around, steel and flesh melding as his bottom rhythmically rose and fell, and Ann’s pupils were riveted to the image, refusing to believe that winter could bring such throbbing heat, as she hid under an increasingly concave umbrella, letting, at last, the cascading water wash the scum from her feverish mind. Ann ran for her life. The umbrella flew out of her slippery hand and bounded gracefully over a stretch of film-coated puddles. When the nurse’s feet came to a stop in front of her door, she knew she was sick. Out of work for four days on account of the flu, a collaboration of the pouring rain and the Spot, she vowed, on the fifth day, to shake the addiction.

For a full grueling week, she came home from the hospital and didn’t dare raise her eyes as she passed the health club, pushing her feet past the Spot, repressing the familiar sensations of pleasure. On the eighth day, she allowed herself a glance. Once again, six months passed during which Ann succumbed to the Spot and returned to her sordid ways. Luckily, her frozen features masked her private turmoil. One time, in the eye of a sexual storm, she met a colleague from the oncology ward and was able to hold an agreeable conversation, as though her athlete’s tongue wasn’t lapping at her insides, shocking her to the core. Although Ann enjoyed every moment, she never grew accustomed to the notion of the stranger inside of her, and deduced that her sudden licentiousness was a result of the deep change within her—from an inferior, invisible woman to a woman who controlled the fate of others, a woman treated with reverence by those around her, a woman who, despite her continued adherence to her most exceptional characteristic, spread fear among the young nurses that joined the staff. These days they looked at her admiringly, most assuredly noticing her existence. Now that her humanity had been confirmed, her body started to seek out her femininity and found it in the world of make-believe—Ann’s favorite fantasy entailed a slightly different take on
Sleeping Beauty:
The handsome man from the health club, who has fallen into a vegetative state after an accident, is cared for by the devoted nurse. She tries to bring him back to life in every way, but when there is no other choice, she puts her hands on the plug and brings her lips to his in farewell. The patient opens his blue eyes, draws her close, and thanks her in the most appropriate manner. Ann fed off the fantasy for months, enriching it with speculation regarding her dreamy partner’s life. One time, he’s an accomplished scientist conducting complex experiments in his lab; another time he’s an impulsive artist overflowing with fresh ideas; but at all times, he’s a shy lover who has eyes for her and her alone. The first time she saw him from the Spot, she swore her allegiance. A year later, her mate was still the one. Soon she would unplug her hundredth patient and get a life, which would, one way or another, involve her athlete. Maybe she’d even summon the courage to walk straight through the door of the terrifying place and ask to sign up for a membership. She laughed and dismissed her frivolity as nothing more than a ridiculous fantasy. Ann loved no one, certainly not a nameless sweaty someone. And the Spot? The Spot sat on the rift between true and false. When she was overexcited she told herself that her athlete played but a minor role in the creation of her fantasy, and that if he didn’t exist, she’d find a substitute.

Yet for all her self-assurances, she was proven wrong on the third evening since his disappearance. Ann looked up, discovered his absence once again and didn’t know whether to be happy or sad: the Spot had lost its power. She felt nothing, her body sent no objectionable signals; the engine was dead. The debate had been resolved; the man, in his absence, had stolen the pleasure that had been reserved solely for him. Ann was finally willing to admit that his sudden disappearance saddened her. There was a bland taste in her mouth. She bought her favorite chocolate bar, and the bland taste remained. A soft sorrow rose within her. Shoot, she thought and bought another candy, he’s turned invisible. Just like me. She tried to relax, to explain his absence as a vacation or a work-related trip, encouraging herself that he would be back. Then she dismissed the thought. Deep within, beneath the calming voices, she heard a voice say, “He won’t be back. He’s gone. Left you for good.” She moaned, looked at her reflection in the display window, and hissed “inferior.”

She didn’t sleep all night, bemoaning the bitter end of her fabricated love story. Throughout the next day’s bus commute, she strained to find a plausible excuse for her tardiness. She couldn’t say that she was three hours late because she spent the first five hours of the night crying and only went to sleep at four in the morning. She decided to say that the bus was in an accident. She arrived at the hospital, her story tightly stitched and perfectly packaged. The director swerved past her in the hall and the nurses were dashing about, attending to their chores like industrious ants. Ann bowed her head and smiled sadly. She had no need for an excuse. No one noticed she was late.

4

Robert’s Birthmark

The immaculate lawn stretching from the white room to the station was all but empty. A lone figure sat in a wheelchair at the edge of the grass, hidden behind an enormous sign adorned with the words C
ATHERINE
D
UMAS
. At first, the newly dead thought the man was aflame, but as they drew close they saw that the acrid smoke swirling out from behind the sign emanated from the stout cigar jammed between his lips.

Before the 9,568 inductees had the chance to voice their disappointment at the well-manicured lawn, which, despite the assurances offered at the orientation, was barren—no friends, no relatives, no acquaintances, no lovers—they heard a deep male voice call to them from the far end of the path. “Welcome to one and all. We’d appreciate it if you could board the multi-wheels so that we can take you to your new homes on Circle 21 in the city of June 2001. The multi-wheels will depart in ten minutes. We request that you not push; twenty multi-wheels await you. As your guide, I’d like to wish you a bon voyage and a pleasant death.” A second or two later, a stampede began, the herd of people charging toward the blue vehicles at the far end of the lawn. The guide, standing in front of the vehicles, brought the megaphone to his lips and announced through a spreading smile that there was “No need to run. And, please don’t step on any bodies.”