The Angel and the Locket
by Andrew L. Hodges
The young lady was garnished with unremarkable civilian clothes, over which she wore a vest of cheap and tattered thread composed of brightest sky blue. Just below her shoulder was a patch bearing the hospital’s soaring eagle insignia surrounded by the words HOSPITAL AUXILIARY. The only thing that kept her from melting into the drab beige and white all around her was the indigo vest. She was practically invisible.
The ER nurses wore green scrubs, the lab techs wore black, and the doctors were dressed predictably in white lab coats over gray, so that hierarchy could be determined at a glance. Pinned to her pocket was a plastic ID card bearing a photograph as flat as a mug shot. On the opposite shoulder was a silvery badge with grime-smeared letters that proclaimed 1000 HOURS.
The only other piece of decoration found on her was a golden chain that connected the two halves of the vest, drooping down like a rope bridge between two icy cliffsides. It branched from one pocket to the other, swinging pendulously as she walked.
Her circulations over the ER floor were almost entirely silent. Her shoes did not utter a single squeak as they shuffled over the tile floor, and her presence displaced none of the staff in the ER corridor. No one called out a greeting, nor did they even tip her a nod of acknowledgement.
The only thing to mark her movements was her faint and tuneless humming, a mere buzz which was only just audible underneath the tell-tale beep of the EKG and the electronic declarations of the intercom. It drowned in the the rah-rah-rah of conversation and the various shrieked ejaculations and proclamations from both staff and patients. Only up close could one detect the subtle frequencies that she emitted as she walked, like the psychopomp of a bedtime-story phantasm.
Her passage was stiff and unyielding, her demeanor brusquely formal. She was almost lecturing in the way she walked, arms folded behind her back, head aimed forward. In conversation, she proved to be polite enough, speaking in a practiced but friendly manner with words said quickly and precisely. She went from bay to bay, from horror show to horror show, asking if anything was needed. She smiled again and again with a mechanical twitch of her lips, all while her eyes moved furtively from person to person.
She seemed to take the greatest stock in faces, some thin and sagging, others desperate with pain, others splattered with blood. Yet despite this attention to the visages, she never made eye contact. She might as well have been a wind-up soldier, her greeting and subsequent questions little more than an audio recording. She was one more machine, one more health-promoting automaton to be considered only as a pragmatic means to an end.
It was the night shift now, and the ER was a Halloween prop house of terrors. Francis Bacon might have shirked from what the eyes of that humming, smiling face had seen, and even Goya might have let out a cry of disgust. In one bay, a man was lily-yellow with jaundice and vomiting, his voice calling between retches for a nurse.
In another, a woman had a tent stake through her hand, and was crying out in pain, blood staining pink the sheets of the hospital bed. A baby screamed, a little girl shrieked, a voice in a distant bay pleaded pathetically. Doctors rushed about impotently, their faces pale and their expressions foretelling doom. The bleeping of the EKGs kept time, ticking away the seconds like a house of discordant clocks. Chao, chaos, chaos, of the most Azathothian variety.
She wove through it all, bombinating and staring, her eyes open but unfocused, her gaze fixed on something unfathomably distant from all that was around her. She brought the guests drinks and sandwiches, brought hot blankets for the elderly, and took pains from everyone.
She moved silently but quickly, with no one taking any notice of her vague expression. She seemed to be here but also elsewhere, her manner betraying a deep and unyielding aloofness. The secrets of the mystics seemed to be hers, the dissolution of being into a kind of spiritual ecstasy in which all pain and existential anxiety fade to leave only a body whose consciousness was One with the environment.
Yet now and again, a terrible awareness would come over the eyes. They seemed to snap back into reality, the pupils narrowing, the face losing its rigid rictus. An old woman moaning about a pain in her chest. A man breathing heavily into an oxygen tank. A mother, tears streaming down her face, begging a nurse for stronger pain meds.
The eyes would suddenly become sharp and piercing, fixating for several seconds on some particularly poor specimen. Agony seemed to be the schema that connected the wandering mystic with the world around her, the thing which dragged her out of herself. She took note of crowds of people sobbing over prone figures, of grave-faced doctors and the whispers amongst nurses.
She saw them in a way they were unable to reciprocate, as if she were watching a multitude of dramas unfold through a one-sided window. She was like a ghost moving amongst the living, watching for the shadows of the Reaper. But each time the focus eventually faded, and off she would go, arms behind her back, the tuneless hum resuming.
The hours ticked by with relentless regularity. The ER was a place where moments went to die, where the running stream of minutes and hours froze solid. The digital clocks on the wall became both a necessity and redundancy to all who inhabited the pods. There was continual excitement, yet by some black magic the actual flow of consciousness seemed to grow inert.
Guests began to fidget and turn up their TVs, hoping to drown out their continual awareness of ticking time. The patients sprawled out on their beds and shifted their weight, moaning to whoever would listen. Even the staff, despite their familiarity with the shift and its mechanics, became restless with the sluggish ennui of tempus fugit.
Yet she neither stopped nor took a break from her labors. She kept on moving, humming, walking briskly, going from bay to bay to bay again and again in a cycle. Like the creation of neutrinos, she was an unnoticed yet constant phenomenon in this microcosm which kept count of the universe’s entropy.
She did return visits, going back to the same bays again and again, checking the stocks, checking the linen bins, checked the supplies at the nurse stations, check check check, pedantic and consistent. The smile remained, firm and friendly, the thin lips turned up and set into well-worn grooves. She kept time through the bars of her humming, her eyes still unfocused.
The rotation of patients began about halfway through the shift, with discharges finally being processed and fresh meat being shuttled in on gurneys. She changed a multitude of used beds, pulling off the old, smutty sheets and wiping them down with disinfectant pads before putting on fresh linen. She did her cleaning with a practiced flair, her humming picking up as she carried out this bit of housekeeping with an almost nostalgic air.
The smell of urine, vomit, and feces that often lingered over those empty rooms after a discharge held no sway over her. She was at home with it, as if it were a familiar comfort to her. Alcoholics have no sense of proportion, and she had no sense of her addiction, either.
It was in the last quarter of the shift when the change occurred.
The ambulance EMTs brought in a gurney on which lay a breathing corpse. Thin and frail to the point where gender and age all blended into gaunt uniformity, this poor soul was clearly a cancer junky. The brittle arms shook pitifully, and the bald head and skeletal face were pale to the point of being almost translucent. The eyes were dull, the light of whatever had been human within had now faded to a dull glimmer due to years of endless treatments and pharmaceutical dependence.
The end was clearly coming, but there was some limbo of hellish zombification created by modern medicine, in which the necrotic flesh was preserved. A soul sat in a rotting cocoon, caked in a coffin of decay. The nurses looked doubtful, even disgusted, and the EMTs wore similar expressions of simultaneous empathy and despair. They knew in their professional capacity where this road was leading.
She saw the skeleton rolled in and watched them wheel the newcomer into one of the major bays. When the gurney passed her by, pushed by scrambling EMTs, she stopped short. The humming died in her throat, and she was still for the first time the whole evening. Slowly and cautiously, she turned and stared at the bay where the patient was quartered. She watched the scribe enter and leave, wheeling the large, cart-mounted computer in and out. The RN assigned to the bay wandered in and out, looking nauseous and doubtful.
Now the patient was left alone, laying prone and staring up at the fluorescents with an empty expression. She watched and listened to the EKG beep like a metronome, taking the time in, letting it consume her and draw her into the ultimate reality.
Then, she came alive. She moved in swiftly and quickly, hoping she would not be noticed. The curtain to the bay was open and she slid right in, smile drawn like a pistol. When the patient’s eyes turned to her, she made her elevator pitch. Was anything needed? Anything at all? She proffered the entirety of her abilities as a volunteer, extended all that she was to the patient.
She moved much closer to the patient than she normally would, speaking into the patient’s good ear. Her smile seemed less stiff now, and the face was animated in a way that it had not been for the last few hours. She had come fully into the world, poured into this unremarkable form from whatever aether such souls inhabit.
The pale, flabby face glimmered only faintly. The voice that replied wavered and tottered, the throat dry as the Sahara. It was so low as to be less than a whisper, and she did not catch it the first time. She leaned in over the bed rail and pressed her ear close to the face to listen.
The lips moved, almost brushing against her skin, the voice shooting into her ear like a wind tunnel: water. Only the one word, spoken in grating syllables that were both sticky and parched. It came from a throat on the edge, an unrepentant murderer at the gallows, a suicide with a gun in hand and a finger on the trigger. The request was simple, yet so necessary and obvious.
She smiled her brightest smile of the night.
After leaving the bay, she blew immediately to the drab pod bathroom and locked the door behind her. She stood at the mirror over the sink and stared into it, taking in her own features. Her eyes met those of her doppelganger, two halves of her inner self meeting on a polished glass surface.
Still keeping her own gaze locked, she reached into her vest pocket and tugged on the gold chain. A tarnished locket tumbled out, dangling like a pendulum from the links between her fingers. She caressed its surface, feeling the sharp contrast between the smooth metal and the harsh corrosion.
Her skin rejoiced at the complex textures as the bumps and scars transitioned to smooth silver, which then died and rotted back into rust. It was the cycle of life, with youth turning into the indignities of disease and finally to sweet death, then circling back to youth and a fresh start. It was eternal and persistent, the forces of Fate that constantly made and unmade to remake into something new.
She flicked the locket open with her thumbnail. Inside, the grainy face of a middle-aged woman stared back at her from a black-and-white photo. The woman pictured was tawdry, bespectacled, and utterly unremarkable.
They locked eyes.
The locket snapped shut and went back into the vest pocket. She looked at herself in the mirror again, adjusted her clothes, and left.
She went to the nurse’s station and the humming resumed with a more upbeat tempo. The whirring of the stainless-steel machine that dispensed ice and water matched her own in a moment of synchronous resonance. She filled a Styrofoam cup almost to the brim with both chipped ice and water, making a sort of slurry. The nurses standing nearby paid her no heed, one on the phone and the other checking the computer records frantically. She walked past them, cup in hand, her tune almost hopeful. Her movements were quick and excitable, her step lively as she went sashaying down the hall. One would have thought she was in love.
Outside the major bay, the curtain was closed. She stopped, and her free hand went into her pants pocket. It withdrew slowly with the fingers closed delicately around something being dragged from the inner depths. The object crossed over the lip of the cup and dropped into the water without a sound. She watched it sink to the bottom, making sure that it vanished.
In a soft voice, she whispered “It’ll be over soon, Mama.”
She threw aside the curtain with an almost theatrical flair and stepped into the bay with cup in hand. The patient took the drink almost gleefully, reaching out with trembling hands. A smile twitched on the thin lips and the desperate eyes filled only for a moment with relief.
The hands grasped for the cup that was held out, closing weakly on the curving surface of the Styrofoam. Not even with both sets of fingers could the patient hold the cup adequately for a drink, and she had to help. The draft was long and drained everything almost in a single gulp. The scabrous head fell back with a sigh, and the smile on the face was all the thanks she needed. Satisfied thirst was better than morphine around here.
She left, telling the patient that she hoped things would improve.
Everything else proceeded predictably enough. She watched them unfold, making a point to walk by periodically to see what would happen next. Within the first two minutes, the RN was in the bay, worrying over the patient’s body. There were shouts followed by a rush from the nurse’s station.
Within a few more minutes, two doctors and two nurses were gathered in the bay and trying to resuscitate. They crowded together in a football huddle around the prone form that obscured her view as she walked by, but she could tell easily enough what was going on.
Machines beeped furiously and there was a chorus of frantic shouting. Within half an hour, everything was over. She watched with great satisfaction as the doctors covered the pale, stiff face with a blanket in preparation for transport. The show was over, drop the curtain.
She stood at a distance, but she saw the face clearly before the linen cover descended. An opening had formed between the crowd of medicos now that the patient had expired, and she saw quite clearly what remained. It seemed the patient had been a woman, perhaps beautiful once. The cancer had tried to eat all that away, as acid turns the luster of metals into ugliness but, in death, everything returned. Life and serenity had come back into the features and, in passing, the human element had come to the forefront, drowning out the damage done by years of suffering and disease. The eyes were closed, and the still face looked as if in a peaceful slumber, just a short period of rest before the beginning of a new journey.
She had done her work well.
The boys from downstairs came and transferred the wrapped figure into a black body bag. The bag took the corpse in, like a cocoon, the zipper drawn with a sound that she could hear with thunderous finality. The bag was then loaded onto a fresh gurney, and they started to push her down the pod hallway. It was destined for the morgue, where the shell would be disposed of like the garbage that it was. She watched them go, listening to the gurney wheels creak as it went out of sight.
She turned and walked away, her arms behind her back, still humming.
Copyright © 2019 by Andrew L. Hodges
