my workplace, a picturesque hospital from the era of Roland Flint and Irene Glascock, has a curious basement cafeteria. it is moderately populated during breakfast, intensely busy during lunch, surprisingly jittery during dinner and frighteningly vacant over the weekend. the workers are mostly Hispanic; strong, olive and supple. there are a quarter Haitians, a speck of White and a granule of African-American men and women, all lobbying for low blood pressure diets. obesity is not uncommon, unfortunately, among the staff, especially in the section of French Fries and Cheese. And the staple is fried plantain, Cheesecake yogurt, spinach pizza and soda.
the families of patients who visit this earthy, low-hum cafeteria always have an array of peculiar expressions. tied to sorrow and worry, a lot of the times, they forget to smile, forget to breathe and forget to eat -as dust and globular microbes settle on the crusts of soup, pie and meat loaves. the Jews sit in the North corner, the Arabs in the left and every one else is in between -flat, unsound and peculiarly dazed. perhaps they worry about a loved one dying, a non-fatal accident, a cousin's childbirth or colon cancer. or maybe they think about stealing food, homelessness or the irony of prayers. i smile at a few of them as i carry my tray across the unsettled, peach-colored lobby area, ringing with the sounds of climatic catastrophes, CNN fables or who wants to be a millionaire? but they never smile back, or open their lips or make any sign of eye contact.
i walk out through the set of double doors in the south side of the cafeteria, balancing my lunch box on my right calloused palm and holding a bottle of Fiji water on my left by the white, corrugated cap and take a sharp right to the docking site. the walls of the hallway are a pale shade of yellow -somewhere between Aureolin and straw-colored if i had to take a guess -and covered with palm smears, coffee stains and wet outlines of muddy shoes. they look like butterfly wing prints, or pineapple skin or a congealment of miniature moons that no one has bothered to clean in seven years. the hallway itself is about 500 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide and at the edge of 400 feet there is a sign jutting out that says medical physics.
on the left hand side, before the docking entrance, are two rectangular, spacious rooms. the doors to these rooms are sometimes latched, sometimes pad-locked and sometimes left open for transport. i noticed a pair of sky blue stretchers by one of the doors last Tuesday but did not bother to wait around and investigate what was going on. i was already running late for a Strategic Planning meeting for the College and being even a minute later would result in Rosemary Silverstein, our associate consultant, going up in arms about punctuality, unprofessionalism and faulty HR hiring policies. Diana Rosenthal and Heather McRae, the Dean's assistants, would riffle through a long line of courtesies, incredulity of the GOPs tax policies and giggle, cheekily, until another ten minutes had passed. everyone would collect themselves from a maverick of emotional hangings and then proceed with the agenda for the meeting.
today, however, there is a small body bag lying on a stretcher in front of the first door, completely unattended to despite something being inside of it. i spot it from a distance and begin to slow down as i approach it from a hundred feet away. a mild musty smell darts through my nose,wafts through the entirety of my facial cage and tingles my brain with a violent swoosh. i tiptoe forward, and move closer to the body bag. my adrenaline alarm pulsates the outer coats of my circulatory system, making me hyperventilate and roughens my skin with goosebumps. five feet away, and i finally spot an ID card lying on the floor.
name: w lieberman
age: 3 years
cause: neuroblastoma
time of death: 12:34 pm
my mind goes spinning across the table of a hundred questions, doubts, remorse and shock. is that a boy or is it a girl? what is the pattern of its current disintegration -the effects of rigor mortis, the banquet of flies, maggots and burrowing spirochetes? what is the father doing? is the mother alive? did it have a pastor or Rabbi at the time of shocks? did the nurse cry?
i fall into a daze of alien existentialism. as if shuttling on a plunger between a wide parallel macrocosm and a white, fenestrated micro-cosmos. as if living through the eyepiece of a wide-eyed telescope; burrowing and slithering at 100X magnification on the brim of a crystal jar. as if hauling, in exhaustion, in a game of tug of war between the past and present, distance and proximity, impact and dismissal, knocking on the bell jar of slipping time. i am transfixed within the mesh of a silk cocoon, writhing and playing with chaotic pendulums, snapping my wrists and drumming the beads of molten seeds. i am paralyzed in place, pinched with forks of brazen stones, cold and vacant in the slant of daylight. i am gripped with fear, gnarled with hate and spun with words of reckless grievances. what am i to say, to the empty souls of flesh cubicles? what am i to say to an orphaned jewelry box, motionless and staunch behind the moonwalk of zippers? what am i to do in the world agape, running away from a dead history - frivolous and lunatic in the situation of times?
i give it a moment, and walk away. through the docking site, till the end and take the elevator to the third floor. back into my own reality, in the queerness of my office space. my mind separated from my body.
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