Joseph Caldwell: Lazarus Rising

“Who’d you think it was?”

Johnny stretched himself out next to her and put an arm across her side. She placed her hand over his. For a moment neither of them moved, then Johnny said, “You want to move onto the bed? The floor’s kind of hard.”

“No, I’m okay. Besides, even the bed’s hard. Even if you floated me in the tub, it’d seem hard. So I’m okay right here. You okay here?”

“I’m okay.” Johnny leaned his head closer, his nose touching a quarter nesting in her hair. He reached in and picked it out.

“Leave it,” Dempsey mumbled. “You never know when I might want to make a phone call.”

He left it there. They lay quietly. With his nose, Johnny brushed aside a strand of hair just below her ear and pressed his lips against her neck. Slowly he moved his nose up above her ear and ran his tongue along the rim, then gently touched it inside and flicked his tongue, but gently. After he’d brushed her neck again with the tip of his nose, he lay still, his face in her hair, the nested quarter cool against his forehead.

“I thought I was dying,” Dempsey said. “Just before you got home. It felt so funny.”

“Should I call the doctor?”

“No, no. Please. I’m better now. But it was like my hair started to grow and I could hear it growing. And something inside me, it sounded like Rice Krispies. Snap crackle pop. All the way through me, like I was made out of Rice Krispies and someone had just poured a bucket of milk on top of me. I thought, I’m exploding into little bits and pieces. And it tickled too. I’m dying, I said, and this is how it feels. Like Rice Krispies.”

“Let me help you go lie down for a while.”

“I am lying down.”

“In bed I mean.”

“I’ve got to get up and do some work. The Rice Krispies caught me right in the middle. If I’m not going to paint, I should at least clean the brushes.”

“I’ll clean the brushes.”

She stroked his face. “No. You’re not a painter. I told you. You’re not allowed to clean brushes.”

With Johnny’s help, mostly at the elbow, she stood up. “There,” she said. “See? I’m standing on my own two feet. How’s that for starters?”

“I think you should lie down some more.”

“I think I should go work some more. I promised Jamey.”

“I think Jamey has more time than we do,” Johnny said.

She turned and looked at the painting. It showed two huge men stripped to the waist, their bodies, their hands, and their faces black with coal dust, their eyes made all the more fierce and glaring by the grime surrounding them. One was heaving a great shovelful of coal into the circular maw of a furnace. The other was bending down, his back a huge hump of muscle, his shovel pushed into a mound of coal just to the side of the furnace door. The light from the fire made the coal glisten, flickering against it, anticipating the true fire soon to come. The fire itself was orange and gold, not so much pointed flames as one mass of contending colors devouring each other, replenishing each other, making sure that their struggle would never end. Caught in the furnace’s flare, the men’s bodies shone like polished wood: the forehead, the upper arm, the chest of the man closest to the furnace door, the humped back, the left cheek and ear, the entire left arm of the man shoveling into the mound of coal. The men seemed to work with a malevolence equal to the malevolence of the fire itself. They seemed calmly maddened by the task, determined to excite the flames to an even greater devastation. This was her painting The Burial of Lazarus . Lazarus’s body, Dempsey claimed, was already inside, and it seemed that the two men were making sure that it would never be raised, would never be called forth and given life again.

Johnny had at first complained about the inaccuracy of the painting. Lazarus had been buried in a tomb inside a cave with a stone blocking the entrance. He had not been cremated. Dempsey explained that this was her painting and she could bury him any way she wanted to bury him. Johnny’s real objection, of course, had more to do with her own burial than with the burial of Lazarus. In her will she had directed that her friend Winnie, the executor, cremate her and toss her ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge. Johnny told her this was a rejection of her body. She was punishing it, getting even for what it was doing to her. He, she said, was exactly right. And went right on painting, stoking the fire.

It was the paintings, of course, that had brought Dempsey and Johnny together again after their separation. The idea for a series of Lazarus paintings, as she had already explained, had come to Dempsey from her friend Jamey, who was dying at the time. When he had been diagnosed with AIDS, he had planned a series he would have painted: Lazarus Afflicted , Lazarus Being Cared for by His Sisters , The Burial of Lazarus , and finally, The Raising of Lazarus . (The death itself he wanted to omit; he wasn’t ready for so immediate a confrontation.)

When Jamey had gotten too sick to do the work himself, Dempsey said she would do the paintings and Jamey could pose. Jamey agreed and moved into Dempsey’s loft, but then he became too sick even to pose. He died before she’d even begun.

The project then became Jamey’s memorial. His dying, she had to admit, had not been an easy time for either of them. He had developed the habit of complaining, as if it were one more syndrome of the virus. This had not been Jamey’s style, but for the final weeks of his life he had become what Dempsey preferred to call “testy.” The truth was that he had become a chronic complainer. Nothing was right. Nothing she did for him was acceptable. Not her care, not her cooking, not her cleaning. Most of all her cleaning. If she cleaned, she was deliberately disturbing him; if she didn’t clean, she was endangering his health by allowing dust to gather and the virus to proliferate.

When, at the very end, she’d had to feed him—even spoon in water, which he could no longer draw up through a straw—he was infuriated by her ineptitude. Even though she had learned from Winnie, who’d done similar duty for her friend Caitlin, to feed from the tip of the spoon, not from the side, some dribble would invariably fall onto his chin, neck, chest, or bathrobe. It was, Dempsey told him, because he bit the spoon. He should just let her do the work. Then there’d be a quarrel, with Jamey falling out of bed—actually Dempsey’s bed, which she’d surrendered to him for the duration.

It was while she was struggling to get him up off the floor, back into the bed and straightening out the pillows under his head that they would reconcile. This had become the pattern: they would fight, yell—even, on Jamey’s better days, throw things—until Jamey either collapsed or had a coughing fit or, once, a convulsion. Then, during the frantic efforts to help him, to undo the damage, they would both apologize, both beg forgiveness and sometimes weep. There would be a brief respite from Jamey’s whining until Dempsey’s next ministration, which per usual, would be insufficient, inept or attempted murder.

This had not been Jamey’s way. Before the illness, he’d been cheerful, agreeable, accommodating, and affectionate. Which was why Dempsey had offered to take him in. She’d liked his company. He liked hers. He would die in a state of mutual regard. It hadn’t happened that way.

Jamey’s last words to his friend—aspirated and barely audible, but still a snarl—were: “Never mind. Forget it.”

She’d been trying to lift his hips so she could slide a fresh diaper into place before he soiled the sheets. He hadn’t seemed that heavy but by now had become dead weight, a gathered center of gravity already responding to some primal pull back to the earth. When she’d rolled him toward her to begin to place the diaper, a spill of yellow fluid came from his mouth, onto his pillow, smelling like rotted vanilla pudding. She’d quickly righted him again, then realized he might choke on whatever it was he’d been trying to disgorge. She rolled him toward her again. No more fluid came. Jamey jerked his head away from her as if she’d been trying to rub his nose in the mess he’d made. And so he died, his bowels emptying themselves in a swift leakage escaping onto the flowered sheet—huge daisies—that Jamey had brought with him when he’d first moved in.