Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“‘But murderous Achilles — you gods, you choose to help Achilles. That man without a shred of decency in his heart… his temper can never bend and change — like some lion going his own barbaric way.’” There Irene lost the words for what felt like just a moment in the river of morphine. “At last when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more, the people massed around illustrious Hector’s pyre… they collected the white bones of Hector… shrouding them round and round in soft purple cloths. They quickly lowered the chest in a deep, hollow grave and over it piled a cope of huge stones closely set.” And then George was closing the book, and Irene knew sleepily that he had reached the end. With a great sigh he sipped from his cup and said, “‘And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.’”

Irene tried to say thank you, but it came out as just a slurred sob. George seemed to get the idea, though, and he gave her a warm kiss on her forehead. Then he set the book on her nightstand and went to use the restroom.

She dozed off and woke up, it was dark outside, and Sara was there too, flipping through a magazine article about festive votive centerpieces made out of branches of yellow and orange bittersweet.

“Am I going to get buried?” Irene asked.

Sara looked up at her quickly, then looked out the window.

“Let’s not worry about that right now,” George said to her.

“When am I supposed to worry about it?”

Tears in her eyes, Sara said, “After Thanksgiving. Let’s talk about it then.”

Irene left it alone. She coughed up some more mucus and drifted off. She woke up again at eleven-thirty as Sara and George were leaving.

“We’ll be back again at eight. And the nurses said that if your numbers are good in the morning, they’ll arrange for you to come back with us for dinner.”

Irene nodded, even though she felt sure that her numbers would not be good in the morning. She couldn’t say why exactly — nothing hurt more than it had the day before, but it was slightly harder to take a breath, even with the oxygen mask. Slightly harder to lift herself up off the pillow to receive George’s hug goodbye. She felt her heart pumping just a quarter-beat slower.

She closed her eyes for a minute, knowing that Jacob would be there soon. He had been telling everyone that he had to work double shifts at the asylum, but Irene knew he was just angry with George for moving to Boston. He arrived at Irene’s bedside just minutes after the others left.

“Do you just hang around on the street until you see them leave?” she asked.

Jacob rolled his eyes and said nothing.

“Just go to Boston with them then. Nothing’s keeping you here.”

Jacob flinched. “Don’t be absurd.”

It occurred to Irene that she’d never get to see the end of it.

“He finished the book today,” she said. “The Hector part.”

“‘So now I meet my doom.’” Jacob closed his eyes, speaking softly so as not to bring the nurses over. “‘Well let me die — but not without struggle, not without glory, no, in some great clash of arms that even men to come will hear of down the years!’”

“Do they still bury people?” Irene asked.

Jacob thought about it. “I think you have to have bought a plot somewhere. I don’t know if you can just do it last minute. There must not be a lot of space left in the city. It’d be all the way out in Queens somewhere. Cemeteries are always in terrible neighborhoods.”

“So I’ll be cremated?” she sighed.

Jacob spoke softly. “That’s how I’d want to do it. Cleansed by fire and all that. Plus I hear it’s very eco-friendly.”

“And then what?” she asked. “Sara keeps me on her mantel in an urn? In Boston?”

Jacob lightly pounded the arm of the chair. “Not on my watch! I’ll make sure you’re scattered.”

Irene purred. “I never did get to France.”

So many things she never got to do or see. It seemed impossible, even now that she knew.

Jacob patted her hand. “Then to France you shall go.”

“I’m trusting you then.”

“Well, that was always your first mistake. Now get some rest, or those nurses will never let you out tomorrow, and Sara will have a meltdown.”

Jacob leaned down, and Irene kissed him goodbye. She watched his frame fill the hospital doorway and recede down the hall. It had always been his first mistake too. For Irene had no designs on making it to Thanksgiving, for a crown roast she couldn’t chew and an icebox cake that she couldn’t taste. No, she had only one wish left — and that was not to die in a hospital room with pink walls and teal plastic trim. If she was going to go, then she was going to go . All week she’d been working on the plan.

Around two a.m. Nurse Moira began her rounds, beginning with the rooms down the hall, and Nurse Darren entered prescriptions into the computer at the main desk. Nurse Bethany would still be changing into her scrubs. Irene had been watching, carefully, as they adjusted the IV pumps and monitors all day, to learn how they could be switched off without sounding any alarms. It took about thirty seconds to get free, including plugging up the PEG tube and locking it down flat with some medical tape. Then she put on her red coat and some booties that Sara had knit for her. They had been in the closet covering a large pile of medical supplies that Irene had been gathering that week, in preparation for a final art project. She wouldn’t get the chance to finish it, but there was a detailed sketch on top of the pile so Juliette and Abeba could assemble it after she’d gone.

Irene smoothed her hair in the reflection of the elevator door. When the elevator came, it was empty. The doors shut, and she began to descend through the hospital. What gives out first? she wondered. Heart, lungs, or legs? She didn’t particularly care so long as it happened before they dragged her back to that plastic room. She wouldn’t die on 11 East. She simply would not.

“’Night,” she said pleasantly as she breezed by the guard at the front. He looked up at her for a moment, and then she was past him.

Cold, fresh air blasted her face like a frozen kiss. She crossed the slippery street, and from there it was just a few steps to Central Park. Soon she was in a dark, open meadow, the individual icicles of grass pushing up through the loose weave of the booties and crunching under her heels. On the far side of the meadow was an oval patch of dirt, still reddish beneath the gray frost. She went a little farther and then paused under a tree, taking time to watch the shadows dancing there in the dark, unlit heart of the city.

Trudging into the chilly valley between two baseball diamonds, she thought back on the years she’d lived with her grandmother Fiona — the only time she’d ever really felt at home as a girl. An inveterate smoker, Gramma Fee had developed emphysema (to no one’s surprise) just after Irene turned fifteen.

For a year Irene had watched her grandmother dying, bird thin and wisp haired, an oxygen tube hooked beneath her nose. Each time she saw the doctor she’d swear to them she’d never smoke another cigarette, so help her God… but by the next day she’d be puffing away, tugging the little wheeled oxygen tank behind her like an impolite puppy. Irene remembered the big diamond-shaped warning sticker on the side of the tank: WARNING: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. DO NOT OPERATE THIS TANK NEAR ANY OPEN FLAME. Every day she’d watch the cigarette burn slowly down until it was barely an inch from the little nozzles that stuck up into her Grandmother’s nostrils. It was like living next to a bomb that might go off any second.

It had been good practice, Irene thought, as she came up the other side of the valley and toward a grove of dark trees, feeling all the while as if Gramma Fee were just beside her. She could almost hear the creak of the little wheels on her tank. Smell the sweet, forbidden smoke. See the outline of white hair and white nightgown at the edge of the dark.