“Where’s the doctor?” an old woman in a wheelchair asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“This is terrible,” Jack Fine said to Addy.
“At least they have a place to go,” the Ghanian said.
Behind the Plexiglas window on the other side of suffering sat an ocher-skinned, almond-eyed woman. I thought she might be Cambodian or Vietnamese.
“Put the form in the slot in front of you,” she said without looking up.
I placed the blue form where she asked, and she picked it up. When she noticed what it was, she frowned, then sighed.
“We’re very busy,” she complained.
“It’s my clothes,” I replied, realizing that my breath was coming short again.
“You came in DP-twenty-seven,” the woman replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asked.
The hospital sentry hesitated. She said, “DP. Deceased Person. The first doctor who saw you declared you dead.”
Ana, the young nurse/receptionist, led us to a door behind her kiosk. It was small and green and opened into a dark room. A light came on automatically when we entered. We realized with awe that we had entered a vast chamber lined with deep bins that were filled with hundreds of bundles of clothes bound in brown paper and secured with tan masking tape.
I could hear the breath singing in my windpipe.
“You OK, Cecil?” Addy asked.
I didn’t answer. While Ana searched through certain piles of bundles I looked around. Most of the brown-paper packages had the name and date of death scrawled on the tape. One read: reynard, milton 10/11/07; deceased. Some of the slips had fallen from their bundles. There was Julia Slatkin, Harris Montoya, and Po Li. The dust and lint gathered in my throat and lungs, and I felt the beginnings of another respiratory attack. I should have run out of there, but running for me was a thing of the past.
That one room led to another, where there were no bins and even more bundles of clothes, piled all the way to the eighteen-foot ceiling. I thought about the concentration-camp films that came out when I was a young man just out of the air force, right after the war. The Nazis took everything that their victims owned: hair and teeth, shoes and clothes. I felt that I was in the presence of some great crime that I would never be able to prove.
“Here it is, Cecil,” Addy said. “Here’s that robe I brought you from Accra.”
In the taxi I opened the window and let my head loll out, the wind forcing its way into my lungs. All I had to do was open my mouth.
Adegoke’s wife is spending the summer with her family in Nice. His daughter has gone to Singapore, and his son is on a film shoot in southern Mexico. My old student gave me a room with a window on the twenty-seventh floor of university housing. Here I’ve been sitting for the past three weeks waiting for breath to return, so that I might escape to a Caribbean island; there I hope to forget what I learned among the bundles of death.
Reply to a Dead Man
When the doorbell rang, I had no inkling of who was there or what his or her business might have been. I was sitting at the dining table in a room that had never been used for entertaining. Books and notepads, two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and a few stacks of dirty dishes were piled here and there around the dark-stained hickory plank. I had been perched there writing a letter to my sister about the death of our brother in the fall.
It was now spring, and this was the first time I’d reached out to Angeline. I had missed the funeral. Our brother had been buried in Cincinnati by Dearby, his fourth wife. She, Dearby, told me that if she was going to pay for the burial, then he’d be interred in the same cemetery as her and the rest of her family.
I was having a hard time, financially, when Seth passed. I’d just lost my job as a regional manager for Lampley Car Insurance, and my unemployment checks hadn’t been enough to pay the rent. I couldn’t take time off from my temp position at Lenny’s Auto Parts, and the funeral was on a Wednesday, a workday. My boss, Alan René Bertrand, didn’t particularly like me, and so I couldn’t even take the chance of asking him for the time off. Lenny’s paid $22.50 an hour, the best temp rate in town, and so I sent a dozen white lilies and a note thanking Dearby for honoring my brother.
You see, I knew that Dearby and Seth were on the outs when he died. My sister told me that Seth had been seeing his second ex-wife, Althea, again, and Dearby was threatening to kick him out of the house.
She, Dearby, called to tell me about Seth.
“He had a heart attack,” she said. “I warned him about the high blood pressure and his weight. He wouldn’t listen. He never listened.”
I was thinking that Dearby was pretty big herself.
As if she could read my thoughts across the two thousand — plus miles that separated us, she said, “I know that I’m big, but my heft is fruit fat, weight from fresh fruit with fiber and natural sugars. My doctors tell me that I’m OK the way I am.”
“I know you are,” I said, to fill the empty space in our conversation, an emptiness that loomed like the blank line at the bottom of a boilerplate contract.
“What do you want me to do with him?” she asked.
“Um...”
“The body, Roger. What do you want me to do with the body?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“I know that,” Dearby said. “He’s gone, and somebody has to bury him.”
“Oh... Oh, yeah. Right. Um...”
I got up from the table, remembering that awkward moment, half a year ago, when I had to tell Dearby that I didn’t have the money to help pay for a funeral.
The walk from my worktable to the front door wasn’t long. No distance in my 634-square-foot half-home in the Wilshire district was that great. The other side of the subdivided house was inhabited by a woman named Rose Henley. I had seen Rose only once, a few days after I’d moved in seven years and ten months earlier. She’d rung my bell and introduced herself as my neighbor.
Rose Henley was old, maybe sixty, and she had one gold tooth. She was fairly short, even for a woman, and her black hair was sliding into white. She was a white woman, broad-faced and stout.
“Mr. Vaness?” she had said, all those years ago.
“Yes?”
“I’m Rose Henley, your neighbor.”
“Oh. Hello.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt, just wanted you to see my face. And I wanted to see yours.”
“Would you like to come in?” I asked, not putting much heart into it.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I just wanted to greet you. I don’t get out very much.”
This was no exaggeration. I had not seen nor had I heard from my neighbor since.
But that day, when I was writing to my sister, Angeline, about our brother Seth’s death, I was sure that Rose was at my door. I didn’t get much company since losing my job. The friends I had liked to party, and I couldn’t afford the gas money, much less my part of the bill at our favorite bars and restaurants.
After I was fired, I had asked my girlfriend, Terri, if she would move in so we could share the rent.
Terri broke it off with me three days later.
No one ever knocked at my door, and Rose was the only person I was acquainted with in the neighborhood. It had to be her, I thought; that was just cold, hard logic.
So I opened the door looking down, expecting to see my diminutive neighbor’s wide face under a thatch of black hair turning white.