The Mirrors Read online

  Maybe we all are.

  —Indiana

  December 2013

  BROKEN MIRRORS

  The Truth, as Told by a Bottle of Liquid Morphine

  In the beginning, there weren’t all those shady characters around: it was just me, the rest of the medicine, the woman, the man in the bed, and his cancer.

  Lots and lots of cancer—metastasized from the lung to the bone, to the liver, to the brain, until the doctors shrugged and, frankly, just gave up looking for all the new places it had spread. That’s what the hospice nurses alleged, at least, in whispers when the woman went skulking off to her bedroom. When they thought the patient was asleep and nobody else could hear them.

  They might have been furtive, but an objective third party (like myself) didn’t need to be an R.N. to see that the patient (identified, per my label, as Jacob J. Amberg, Trailer Lot #52, Pleasant Summer Drive, Wurzburg, Indiana) suffered the burden of multiple malignancies. After all, I wouldn’t have even been there if straits weren’t dire. Moreover, I could see (through the brown tint of my bottle) the tumor in the patient’s jaw that made it look as if he was always working on a gobstopper or wad of chewing tobacco. I could see the way he’d wasted, too, when compared to better-nourished people—the way his belly was a pit, rather than a mound. The way his soft, almost-feminine skin wobbled over bone when he got the tremors (“terminal restlessness,” one of the nurses dubbed it).

  I perked up a little at the mention of the word “terminal,” because I thought that perhaps this meant I might soon find myself useful. Truth be told, I felt lazy. The oxygen machine had been pumping away dutifully—day in, day out—for days now. I envied it, because it was doing its part to keep Jacob J. Amberg alive. I envied the Ativan and Haldol that had already gotten their shot at calming him. I envied all the pills warding off constipation, all the swabs that had their life’s purpose fulfilled in the cleaning of his mouth. I envied, if you can believe it, even the adult diapers. At least they were doing their part. I, on the other hand, had to wait (rather like the gentleman, Aroldis Chapman, brought in to pitch the final inning of those Cincinnati Reds games the woman put on the television each night). After seeing enough of those games, I realized I was like the “closer” in a ball game. Not to be called on unless absolutely necessary, after the other pitchers couldn’t go on any further.

  The nurse told the woman just to use Vicodin at first, and I admit that I felt a swell of pride in knowing that I was considered superior to my peers. So powerful was I, as a pain reliever, that I might have the unfortunate side effect of depressing the work of Jacob J. Amberg’s lungs. Better, they said, to avoid using me until the Vicodin stopped working. If I’d had a mouth, like the nurses, I would have smiled (or maybe even gloated) at the implied compliment. As it was, I only managed to force a little bit of extra shine onto my glass when a stray glint of sunlight made it through the dusty mini-blinds.

  Such praise was, for a time, the only thing that kept me from going mad from all the waiting. I wasn’t being lazy, I reminded myself; I was simply being reserved for a more opportune time. To kill the hours (and, as it turned out, days), I tried making telepathic conversation with the other medicines, but they all seemed either too busy or too glum to reciprocate. Jacob J. Amberg himself wasn’t talkative either. During long stretches of the day he would sleep. If he did awaken, he might say a word or two. “Chicken,” he’d say. “Cloud. Dirt.” One might have imagined that he was reciting whatever vocabulary he had left, in alphabetical order. I suspected that those fleshy balls in his brain were gaining weight at the expense of his sanity.

  After a day or two, the woman couldn’t bear it. She’d spend hours off in her room while Jacob J. Amberg alternated between states of sleep, raspy breathing, and joint-jiggling bouts of terminal restlessness. She turned on the television to keep him company, then paced away to her room. But neither The Price is Right nor any of the indistinguishable talk shows that followed or preceded it offered the man much in the way of solace. Nothing did. I suppose that’s why she walked away. It can be hard just to sit there and see it, unable to do much. I suppose she and I had that in common. She could take her eyes away from it, though—at least for short respites. Not me. I kept the vigil going. I had no other choice.

  There came a time when Jacob J. Amberg stopped speaking entirely. I perked up and thought this meant I would finally have my chance to be of service. While his breath had long been raspy, it now sounded gurgly. The nurses tried to explain to the woman that this was simply a function of the weakness of his esophageal muscles. No longer could they be counted on to swallow his saliva. But the woman shook her head and whimpered. “The death rattle,” she whispered, “the death rattle.”

  The woman was, by now, almost as fatigued-looking as Jacob J. Amberg. I began to feel concerned about her. I never saw her eat much. Sometimes she went off to a cubbyhole furnished with a tiny rust-pocked stove, took a brick of noodles out of a cellophane package, and heated them in a pot of hot water. There weren’t many of those bricks in the trailer. On days she didn’t eat those, she ate a few hard-boiled eggs. Jacob J. Amberg wasn’t eating anything anymore (although he might drink from a bottle of Ensure, once a day). I looked back and forth between the two of them to see who was wasting away the quickest. Jacob J. Amberg seemed to be in the lead, but he’d had a head start.

  One day, the woman asked a hospice lady if Jacob J. Amberg might be better off in a nursing home. The nurse told the woman that this wasn’t the best choice, as it was likely just a matter of days (if not hours) until the man “passed away.” Did she really want to move him? Could she afford a nursing home? No? Then there would be red tape to consider. Was he already signed up for Medicaid? No? That would take months …

  The nurse did all the talking that day. The woman didn’t say anything. She looked beaten. The man’s cancer didn’t beat her. Terminal restlessness didn’t beat her. It took a nurse to do that.

  After the nurse left, the woman got a book with thin, pulpy, yellow pages and looked at listings starting with “F.” She started to make a call on her cell phone, but it wouldn’t work. “I can’t be out of minutes,” she said to no one (not knowing that I and the other medicines were listening—though in truth I was the only one paying attention). She started sobbing. “I gave them money last week.”

  I didn’t know what she could have meant. If I expected anyone to run out of minutes, it would have been Jacob J. Amberg.

  When the nurse visited again the next day, the woman left the trailer altogether, taking a jar of coins with her. She said she was going to buy more minutes, and she could only do this if someone else could stay there. At the time I didn’t understand. I thought she was referring to some way of extending Jacob J. Amberg’s life by putting her treasure into a machine, perhaps, or offering it unto a god.

  The woman was gone for a long time.

  The nurse looked frustrated. She glanced at her watch. She took her cell phone out of her purse and began gabbing. I heard her make snide remarks about how “Mrs. Amberg” was so coldhearted that she left the man to go into town. She confided in her colleague that “these types were always the worst.” She said she hoped the hospice would speed up its plans to phase out its sliding scale program. She got off the phone when she heard the growl of an engine and crackle of gravel in the driveway.

  When the woman came back, the nurse frowned. “You may want to consider starting him on the liquid morphine,” she said. “We can’t say these things for certain, but he’s very close. What I mean is, tonight may be his last night.”

  “All right,” the woman said, eyeing me with some collision of respect and contempt. “I have minutes on my phone now. Is it okay to call you if things get bad?”

  The nurse assured her that she could call twenty-four hours a day and someone—not her, of course, but someone on-call—would come out if it was an emergency. The woman feigned thanking the nurse. The nurse feigned sincerity when she told the woman she w
as welcome, then left to go visit her next patient. I’m a relative newcomer to watching humans interact, but between the man, the woman, the nurses, and television, I’d had a crash course on the subject. The only person who wasn’t feigning a thing was Jacob J. Amberg.

  Through his gurgling, he seemed to be groaning. Perhaps, I thought, this was my chance to shine.

  The woman retrieved the book with the flimsy yellow pages again. She turned to “F” once more. She pushed buttons on her phone, then spoke to someone. She did this many times, tearful throughout the whole ordeal. The conversations must not have been good ones. “I still owe from Daddy? … So you won’t? …”

  Finally she had a conversation that proved more promising. “He’s dying,” she said. “Jake,” she explained. “How much will it cost? … What’s cheapest? … I don’t want him burnt, Billy, you know that’s not what he’d want. He told me he wanted to be buried near his momma. Made me promise not to cremate him. You got to help me.”

  Then something said to her over the phone unfroze her face from its perpetual grimace. She no longer begged. Now she planned. “You think so? … I got some good stuff left … uh-huh … morphine.” She’d said my name. She’d said my name, and hung up almost right afterward.

  She made some gestures toward Jacob J. Amberg. She embraced him, stroking his hollowed-out cheeks with the back of her hand. She told him she’d only leave him alone that way for a little while, and that she was only leaving him alone because she absolutely had to. Then she grabbed me by the neck and hauled me away.

  She hadn’t lit up a cigarette in the trailer, because of the oxygen. But in her ancient pickup truck, riddled with rust, she was unencumbered by such restrictions. She rested me in one of two cup-holders down by the gear shift. A hot, half-empty beer can sat to my left. I thought (foolishly, I later learned) that this prosaic neighbor of mine proved how fortunate I’d been to come into this world as a medication of no low status.

  We arrived at a place called “Tuckwell Home For Funerals.” That’s what the sign said. Paint chipped away from the building’s façade. Grass erupted from cracks in the sidewalk. It didn’t look like a pleasant place. She tucked me into her purse (a filthy environ, full of dust and grime and even a pair of whiskey shot-bottles) and only took me out when she sat down in an office.

  There was a man sitting across the table from us. He was stocky, short-haired, and smiling. He seemed to have been acquainted with her previously. He made small talk with her about how, since the housing market tanked, he didn’t mind leaving real estate for this job. He enjoyed the business of helping people in their time of need, he said.

  Then he picked me up, appraising me like the jewelers on the Jared Diamonds TV commercials. “Not bad,” he said, “for a down payment.”

  “Half now,” the woman replied, “the other half after he’s buried.”

  He leaned all his girth away from the table, frowning. “Ella Jo,” he said, “come on, now, be reasonable. I’m the one taking the risk of getting caught selling it. You know what the sentence for distribution is these days?”

  She gritted her teeth and grabbed onto me, squeezing tight. For a tense second I thought she might knock me right across his head. Tears fled from her eyes like survivors from a sinking ship.

  “Okay,” the man—Billy Tuckwell—said. “Half now, half after he’s buried, plus two thousand dollars you’ll owe on a payment plan.”

  The woman—Ella Jo—looked down. “That’s the best you can do? After years huntin’ and campin’ together with Jake? I know he wasn’t the most sociable person in the world. He was too shy to make it out to the Elks Club or the Masons or the Kiwanis or whatever it was you had your hands into, but you at least treated him decent. You were the closest thing he had to a friend. And after all that, all those years, this is the best you can do?”

  “Now, Ella Jo, don’t you get up on your high horse. I offered you the cheapest—and you declined, remember? Said he wouldn’t want to be burned.”

  Ella Jo nodded. Sighed. “Okay, then.”

  The man fetched a mason jar. “Pour it in now, if this is what you’re sure you want to do.”

  With a trembling hand, she managed to pour just a little less than half of me into the jar. Billy Tuckwell grabbed me out of her hands and shook me, attempting to measure the remaining quantity to ensure Ella Jo had kept her word. He shook his head. “That’s less than half you just poured. But I’ll let it slide for now.”

  Then they talked about matters more mundane (to me, at least). What songs should they play over the public address system during the visitation? Would there be a pastor officiating the funeral? Did she have any pictures she wanted posted near the casket? Had she thought through which clothes she’d like him in? How should they trim Jake’s beard?

  I supposed I could have listened to all that, but I found myself too stunned by the sudden, unexpected absence of just less than half of me. I knew Jake and Ella Jo were each—in their own manner, either from cancer or poverty—wasting away. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I would, too.

  “Jake.” Jacob J. Amberg was sometimes called “Jake.” Just as the woman was sometimes called “Ella Jo.” Just like William Tuckwell was sometimes just plain “Billy.” It was a lot to learn, but I was getting the hang of it.

  When we got back to the driveway outside of Trailer Lot #52, Pleasant Summer Drive, Wurzburg, Indiana, we could hear Jake’s moans through the thin walls. When Ella Jo opened the door and rushed over, she plopped me back where I’d been and caressed Jake’s hand. “It’ll be over soon,” she said.

  I saw a grimace on Jake’s face. I’ll never forget it. I felt so impotent. For all my strength, I could only help him if Ella Jo poured me into his mouth. But she wouldn’t. I knew that now. She tried to calm him by fetching the two shot bottles of whiskey out of her purse and pouring them down his throat. He coughed. Gurgled. All that did was make him more restless.

  The night went on like that. Ella Jo would stay with him until she could no longer stand it, then turn out the lights and leave for a long time. When he quieted down, she’d peek out of her room and walk out, maybe hoping it was over. But it wasn’t to be finished for a long, long time. When she realized this, she retreated back down the dark hallway.

  As always, she didn’t leave Jake completely unattended. There was me, of course, plus the television. First David Letterman. Then Craig Ferguson. Then old movies. The first featured a man with fangs who drank other people’s blood. The second showed images of dead people rising en masse from their graves. I wondered just how that could work. I decided that none of the zombies could have died of cancer. The disease had rendered Jake bed-bound. If, after Billy Tuckwell buried him, he were to come alive again, he would, in all likelihood, just lie there in his coffin, groaning. At the most, the soil at his grave might seem to rumble from his writhing in terminal restlessness. But he wouldn’t be able to so much as knock Morse code on his casket, let alone dig his way out.

  Jake’s life ended shortly after the last movie and just before dawn. I’m no expert on the afterlife, but based on his grisly expression I suspect the only light he saw in the end was the flicker of his television casting a feeble glow into the trailer’s gaping darkness.

  I was there at Jake’s burial, officially for business reasons (though in my heart—for lack of a better phrase—I really was grieving). Ella Jo and I were the only mourners. She waited by the grave until the bulldozer plopped the last dirt on. Then she drove to visit Mr. William Tuckwell and delivered me into his waiting hands, just as she’d promised.

  Billy has seen fit to sell me a little at a time, as that’s how he makes the most money from me. It’s a slow death, and utterly devoid of the glory I imagined for myself. Instead of saving the day by rescuing seasoned adults from the agony of cancer eating away at them from the inside out, I’m poured down the throats of people barely older than children so they can numb themselves to the dread of all the decades left to live.

&
nbsp; In the end, is that enough purpose to expect out of life? Should I content myself with the notion that I’m still at least in some way helpful? No. I don’t think so. The only way I think my existence will have been in the least bit worthwhile is if I’m returned to the custody of a certain desperate widow, so that she might consume me in sufficient quantity to finish herself off. If you care to feign interest in my interests, that is my final request—to leave this world slaking the death-thirst of a kindred spirit who has learned the truth about this world, just as I have.

  The Cat in the Cage

  The cat batted the thick, orange extension cord with his soft white paws; catching it in his teeth, gnawing, oblivious to the fact that Sheila planned to use it to hang herself.

  “Stop it!” Her voice cracked, her face grew hot. Her mind reeled, still catching up with the new reality. Dan did it this time, after years of threats. He really left. Said he couldn’t stand the stench of booze on her breath anymore. Since giving up drinking never worked for long, she decided to quit breathing instead.

  Suicide (as a daydream, a temptation) first latched onto her in middle school and, like a lapdog, never left for long. The urges came and went over the years, but, unlike the men in her life, didn’t wander far. Sometimes accompanied by well-thought-out plans, but often not. Once or twice she’d even started writing the note, but discarded it. This time she decided not to bother. Writing a note slowed her down and invited doubt. She didn’t want doubt. Not anymore.

  For decades, she’d just wanted to shut off the hurt in her head. She’d just wanted peace. The move from the city was supposed to help, but didn’t (“geographical cures never do,” her A.A. sponsor had lectured). A suicide cure just might, though.