When You Are Engulfed in Flames (8 page)
I put the gifts back into the bag, ashamed at how deeply my feelings were hurt. “Most people, most humans, receive a present and say thank you,” I told her.
“Not when they get garbage like that, they don’t,” she said.
In fact these things were perfect for her, but Helen wouldn’t accept them for the same reason she wouldn’t accept anything: the other person had to owe and be beholden. Forever.
I picked up the bag and headed for the door. “You know what you have?” I said. “You have a gift disorder.”
“A what?”
“It’s like an eating disorder, only with presents.”
“Take that back,” she said.
“My point exactly.” And then I left, slamming the door behind me.
Helen knocked on January 1, just as I was leaving for a cleaning job. “Work on New Year’s Day, and you’ll work every day of the year,” she told me. “It’s the truth. You can ask anybody.”
I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won’t get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on. She also claimed you could prevent crib death by making the sign of the cross three times with a steak knife.
“If you’re camping, could you use a Swiss Army knife instead?” I asked.
She looked at me and shook her head. “Who the fuck goes camping with a baby?”
Helen was shaking out her pills: the ones for her heart and her high blood pressure, the pain in her side and the new one in her right leg. Trips to the doctor were her only ticket out of the apartment, and after each visit she’d spend hours on the phone, haranguing the people at Medicare. When that got old, she’d phone McKay’s drugstore and have a go at the pharmacist. “I’d like to cut his balls off and stuff them down his throat,” she told me.
Now there were new pills she needed to take. I offered to pick them up for her, and along with the prescription she handed me a receipt. It seemed her enemy at McKay’s had overcharged her for her last order, so after getting this new one I was to tell the hook-nosed Jew bastard that he owed my neighbor four cents. I was then to suggest that he shove his delivery charge up his fat ass.
“Got that?” Helen asked.
I was happy to pick up the medicine, but when it came to the disputed bill — and toward the end there was always a dispute — I’d make it up out of my own pocket and lie when she prodded me for details. “The pharmacist said he was very sorry and that it won’t happen again,” I’d tell her.
“Did you tell him what he can do with his delivery charge?”
“I sure did.”
“And what did he say?”
“Pardon?”
“When you told him to shove it up his ass, what did he say?”
“He said, um, ‘I bet that’s going to hurt.’”
“You’re damn right it will,” she’d say.
Back when she could still get up and down the stairs, Helen had all the run-ins she could handle: on the bus, at the post office, wherever peace reigned, she shattered it. Now she had to import her prey, deliverymen, most of them. The ones from the Grand Union, the supermarket we favored, tended to be African, recent immigrants from Chad and Ghana. “You black bastards,” I’d hear her yell. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”
She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli. “How could you?” Hugh scolded.
“What do you expect me to do when somebody’s stealing my things?” she asked. “What, am I just supposed to stand there and do nothing?” It eventually came out that by “stealing” she meant that he had borrowed her pen. After using it to tally the bill, he stuck it in his shirt pocket, absentmindedly, most likely. Helen reacted by pulling his hair and digging her nails into his neck. “But not hard,” she said. “There was barely any blood at all.”
When asked why the boy would steal a thirty-cent pen, a pen he could surely get for free at his father’s store, Helen sighed, exhausted at having to explain the obvious. “He’s
Portuguese,
” she said. “You know what those bastards are like. You’ve seen them.” But there was a hint of desperation in her voice, the fear that maybe this time she had gone too far.
The following morning she called our apartment and asked, almost sheepishly, if I’d rub in some Tiger Balm for her. I crossed the hall and, after letting me in, she took a seat and pointed out her sore shoulder. “I think I sprained it smacking that little freak,” she said.
It was February 14, Valentine’s Day, and after a few more words about the delivery boy, Helen’s thoughts turned to love, or, more specifically, to my father. He’d visited me the previous autumn, and she’d been talking about him ever since. “That Lou is a very good-looking man. Too bad you didn’t get any of his genes.”
“Well, I’m sure I got some of them,” I told her.
“No, you didn’t. You must take after your mother. And she’s dead, right?”
“Yes, she’s dead.”
“You know we’re the same age, me and Lou. Is he dating anybody?”
The thought of my father and Helen together made the bottoms of my feet sweat. “No, he’s not dating anyone, and he’s not going to, either.”
“No need to get so sensitive,” she said. “Jesus, I was only asking.” And then she lowered her shirt a little and asked me to do her back.
I’d just returned from another trip to the pharmacy when Helen asked me to dab some white shoe polish on her kitchen ceiling. A slight stain had formed, and she insisted that it was dog urine, leaking down from the apartment above her. “The sons of bitches, they think that if they ruin my ceiling, it’ll drive me into a nursing home.”
I don’t remember why I didn’t do it. Maybe I had someone waiting for me, or perhaps I’d just had enough for one day. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” I told her, and as I shut the door, I heard her say, “Right. You and your ‘tomorrows.’”
It was Joe who found her. Helen kept a sawed-off two-by-four in her kitchen, a weapon against possible intruders, and he awoke to hear her banging it against the inside of her door. He had a key in case of emergency and entered the apartment to find her on the floor. Beside her was the overturned step stool, and beneath the kitchen table, lying just out of reach, was the bottle of white shoe polish.
On
One Life to Live,
and all soap operas, really, the characters are forever blaming themselves. The male lead is nearly killed in a car accident, and as the surgeons do what they can to save him, the family gathers in the waiting room to accept responsibility. “It was my fault,” the ex-wife says. “I never should have upset him with the news about the baby.” She starts to bang her head against the wall and is stopped by the lead’s father. “Don’t be stupid. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.” Then the girlfriend horns in and decides that it was all
her
fault. In the end, the only one who won’t feel guilty is the driver of the other car.
“Why the heck would she stand on a chair to polish her shoes?” Joe asked as the ambulance headed off toward St. Vincent’s. “That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“Me neither,” I said.
During the next few months Hugh and I visited Helen in the hospital. The problem wasn’t her broken hip, but the series of strokes that followed her operation. It was as if she had been struck by lightning, that’s how fried and out of it she was. Unable to put a sentence together, she’d also been literally defanged. No teeth, no glasses, and when the last of the henna had faded, her hair, like her face, was the color of old cement.
The hospital room was small and hot. Near the door was a second bed, and in it lay a Dominican woman who had recently lost a leg. Each time I was there, she pointed to Helen’s food tray and begged. “Is she going to eat that applesauce? Do you think she wants those crackers? If not, I’ll take them.”
Had Helen been her old self, this woman would have been missing a lot more than a leg. As it was, the roommate left no more of an impression than the wall-mounted TV, which was permanently tuned to the Bullshit station, and was on all the time.
At the funeral home were people I had heard about but never met. Helen once told me that as a young woman her nickname had been Rocky, as in Graziano, the fighter, but according to her sister, she was called any number of things. “To me she was always Baby Hippo, on account of her great big behind,” she told me. “I’d call her that and, oh, she used to get so mad.”
Most everyone I met had a good anger story: Helen cursing, Helen smacking, Helen slamming down the phone. In the months after she died, these were the moments I’d recall as well. Gradually, though, the focus shifted, and instead of Helen attacking a deaf-mute, I’d picture her the following morning, sitting in her kitchen as I applied the Tiger Balm. It was such a strange thing for her to have, let alone say. “It’s Oriental,” she told me. “I think the Chinese invented it.”
I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn’t either. We’d never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I thought, like stroking some sort of a sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, “Please,” her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.
The thing about dead people is that they look really dead, fake almost, like models made of wax. This I learned at the medical examiner’s office I visited in the fall of 1997. While the bodies seemed unreal, the tools used to pick them apart were disturbingly familiar. It might be different in places with better funding, but here the pathologists used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages. Chest cavities were emptied of blood with cheap metal soup ladles, the kind you’d see in cafeterias, and the autopsy tables were lubricated with whatever dish detergent happened to be on sale. Also familiar were the songs, oldies mainly, that issued from the blood-spattered radio and formed a kind of sound track. When I was young, I associated Three Dog Night with my seventh-grade shop teacher, who proudly identified himself as the group’s biggest fan. Now, though, whenever I hear “Joy to the World,” I think of a fibroid tumor positioned upon a Styrofoam plate. Funny how that happens.
While at the medical examiner’s office, I dressed in a protective suit, complete with a bonnet and a pair of Tyvek booties. Citizens were disemboweled, one right after another, and on the surface I’m sure I seemed fine with it. Then at night I’d return to my hotel, double-lock the door, and stand under the shower until all the soap and shampoo were used up. The people in the next room must have wondered what was going on. An hour of running water, and then this blubbery voice: “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.”
It’s not as if I’d walked into this completely unprepared. Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework. Most kids grow out of it, but the passing of time only heightened my curiosity.
As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of
Medicolegal Investigations of Death,
a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being “Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse.” I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:
Behold the recluse looking pensive!
Mildew, though, is quite extensive
On his head, both aft and fore.
He maybe shoulda got out more.
I know nothing about biology either. The pathologists tried to educate me, but I was too distracted by the grotesque: my discovery, for instance, that if you jump from a tall building and land on your back, your eyes will pop out of your head and hang by bloody cables. “Like those joke glasses!” I said to the chief medical examiner. The man was nothing if not professional, and his response to my observations was always the same: “Well.” He’d sigh. “Not really.”
After a week in the autopsy suite, I still couldn’t open a Denny’s menu without wanting to throw up. At night I’d close my eyes and see the buckets of withered hands stored in the office’s secondary cooler. The cooler contained brains too, a whole wall of them shelved like preserves in a general store. Then there were the bits and pieces: a forsaken torso, a pretty blond scalp, a pair of eyes floating in a baby food jar. Put them all together, and you had an incredibly bright secretary who could type like the wind but never answer the telephone. I’d lie awake thinking of things like this, but then my mind would return to the freshly dead, who were most often whole, or at least whole-
ish.
Most of the them were delivered naked, zipped up in identical body bags. Family members were not allowed inside the building, and so the corpses had no context. Unconnected to the living, they were like these strange creatures, related only to one another. A police report would explain that Mrs. Daniels had been killed when a truck lost control and drove through the front window of a hamburger stand, where she had been waiting in line for her order. But that was it in terms of a narrative. Did the victim have children? Was there a Mr. Daniels? How was it that she found herself at this particular hamburger stand on this particular afternoon? In cases like hers, I needed more than a standard report. There had to be a reason this woman was run down, as, without one, the same thing might happen to me. Three men are shot to death while attending a child’s christening, and you tell yourself,
Sure. They were hanging out with the wrong crowd.
But buying a hamburger?
I
buy hamburgers. Or I used to, anyway.
This medical examiner’s office was in the western United States, in a city where guns are readily available and drivers are known to shoot each other over parking spaces. The building was low-slung and mean-looking, set on the far edge of the downtown area, between the railroad tracks and a rubber stamp manufacturer. In the lobby was a potted plant and a receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. “For decomps,” she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted awhile before being found. We had such a case on Halloween, an eighty-year-old man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a lightbulb. Four and a half days on the floor of his un-air-conditioned home, and as the bag was unzipped the room filled with what the attending pathologist termed “the smell of job security.” The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy system I had ever seen.
Never live alone,
I told myself.
Before you change a lightbulb, call someone from the other room and have him watch until you are finished.
By this point in my stay, my list of don’ts covered three pages and included such reminders as: never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating. This last one is a nationwide epidemic, and it’s surprising the number of men who do it while dressed in their wife’s clothing, most often while she is out of town. To anyone with similar inclinations, a word of warning: after you’re discovered, the police will take snapshots of your dead, costumed body, which will then be slid into photo albums and pored over by people like me, who can’t take the stench of an incoming decomp, so hole themselves up in the records room, moaning, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” not sure if they’re referring to your plum-colored face or to the squash blossom necklace you’ve chosen to go with that blouse.
I hadn’t timed my visit to coincide with Halloween, but that’s the way it worked out. You’d think that most of the casualties would involve children, trick-or-treaters hit by cars or done in by tainted candy, but actually the day was just like any other. In the morning we had our decomposed senior, and after lunch I accompanied a female pathologist to a murder trial. She had performed the victim’s autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. There were plenty of things that should have concerned me — the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets — but all I could concentrate on was the defendant’s mother, who’d come to court wearing cutoff jeans and a
Ghostbusters
T-shirt. It couldn’t have been easy for her, but still you had to wonder: what
would
she consider a dress-up occasion?
After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. “Fire up the kettle,” I told him. “Ol’-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.”
It was, of course, the fear talking, that and a pathetic desire to appear casual, one of the gang. That evening, instead of returning to my hotel, I sat around with the transporters, one of whom had recently been ticketed for using the car pool lane and had argued, unsuccessfully, that the dead body he was carrying in the back constituted a second passenger. I’d thought these guys would be morose and scary-looking, the type who live in basements and have no social skills, but they were actually just the opposite. Several of them had worked for undertakers, and told me that gypsy funerals were the worst. “They set up in the parking lot, tap into the electricity, and grill chicken until, like, forever.” They recalled finding the eye of a suicide victim stuck to the bottom of a bedroom door, and then they turned on the TV and started watching a horror movie, which I can’t believe had any real effect on them.
It was just the four of us until around midnight, when a tipsy man in a Daytona Beach sweatshirt came to the front gate and asked for a tour. When the transporters refused him, he gestured toward an idling car and got his girlfriend to ask. The young woman was lovely and flirtatious, and as she pressed herself against the gate I imagined her lying upon an autopsy table, her organs piled in a glistening heap beside her. I now looked at everyone this way, and it worried me that I’d never be able to stop. This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable. The trick-or-treater may not be struck down on Halloween, but sooner or later he is going to get it, as am I, and everyone I have ever cared about.
It goes without saying that for the next few weeks I was not much fun to live with. In early November, I returned home and repelled every single person I came into contact with. Gradually, though, my gloominess wore off. By Thanksgiving I was imagining people naked rather than dead and naked, which was an improvement. A week later, I was back to smoking in bed, and, just as I thought that I’d put it all behind me, I went to my neighborhood grocery store and saw an elderly woman slip on a grape. She fell hard, and after running to her side I took her by the arm. “You really have to watch yourself in this produce aisle.”
“I know it,” she said. “I could have broken my leg.”
“Actually,” I told her, “you could have been killed.”
The woman attempted to stand, but I wouldn’t let her. “I’m serious. People die this way. I’ve seen it.”
Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.
