The Death Bed
With that thought Hannah got up and walked across the room to the bookshelf. Peter turned his head lethargically to see what she was doing, but soon turned his attention back to the soft glow of the monitor. Hannah surveyed the mass of books that they had accumulated over the years and realized that the majority of them had gone unread. She knew it was because quiet evenings spent reading on the sofa had been replaced by driving the kids to a myriad of extracurricular activities. The desire to be well read had never been genuine, and the books had been bought only because reading them would help them conform to some image they’d formed of what a good upstanding citizen should be.
“I’m going to start reading again,” she told herself as she perused the selection that had collected dust for so many years. “It’ll make the time go faster and I can get out of the house to do it.”
Hannah Manchell took Walden Pond off the shelf, tucked it into her purse, and left the house. The wind was especially chilly and she buttoned the top button on her overcoat. She walked up a block and then down the unkempt alleyway that led to the well-kempt park where, she had been able to assume with some certainty, she would be completely alone. And, as she sat down on the bench that overlooked empty swings swaying ever so slightly in the cold breeze, she was.
* * *
Thomas, sipped his coffee, leaned back in his chair, and propped his shoulders against the wall, content with himself or, more accurately, content with his explanation of such a complex idea. He waited for either John or Mark to respond as he sat with his two friends and a stack of books at what had become their usual seat on the terrace just outside the Small Talk Coffee House. It was a popular place to study, or to frequent with the intention of studying, and the terrace was alive with the buzz of students carrying on lively conversations.
“Why don’t you go ahead and kill yourself then?” Mark suggested.
“What?” Thomas asked. He was a little surprised at his friend’s forwardness.
“If all that junk’s true, then you might as well end it all now,” Mark continued.
“I just hadn’t ever thought about it like that,” Thomas confessed.
“Hey, we’ve all got a lot of work to do,” John said and their attention turned back to the textbooks and notes they had brought with them.
* * *
The dying sun shone out beautifully as Julia drove down the interstate on her way back from the nursing home. Those last beams of light danced in the atmosphere and painted the clouds and the sky all shades of oranges and reds. The display matched the colors of the dying leaves that fell from the trees and got caught in the chain link fences that kept them from cluttering the four lanes of asphalt.
Julia, for a change, took a moment to admire the sight. Everything around her seemed bright and beautiful, even the man at an exit ramp who was bundled up in a ratty brown corduroy jacket along the side of the road with his thumb sticking up in the air. She’d passed people like that a thousand times without giving it any thought but this time she pulled over to the side of the road and rolled down her window, something she never thought she would do, not alone on the interstate, not at night. But something inside her told her that it would be okay just this once.
“I’m only going another couple miles up the road but you’re welcome to ride that far,” Julia said as the man with dark curly hair and crooked teeth approached the car. It was hard for her not to be afraid, not to judge him by the stereotype. The man folded his arms, put his elbows inside the open window, and leaned into the car. Julia could smell the foul odor that could only have come from weeks without washing away the muck and grime and the stench of the city.
“I really need to go further than that miss,” he said.
Julia didn’t know how to respond. In her shock she let her foot slip off of the brake pedal and the automatic transmission caused the car to lurch forward.
“Sorry,” Julia said as the man staggered back a step from the jolt.
“Don’t worry ‘bout it,” he said sticking his head back in the window. “I don’t mind because you’re a sweet gal, and you’re going to take me where I need to go.”
As he spoke he produced a knife from the ratty jacket. It was at least four inches long and serrated on the bottom. Julia barely caught a glimpse of the sharpened metal, but that was all it took to burn its image into her mind. Without thinking her foot found the accelerator. She heard a thud in her left ear that she assumed was the man’s head hitting the door. When she looked in her rearview mirror she saw him lying on the shoulder of the road, dead, unconscious, faking, she didn’t know or care. Her heart was going faster than her Mustang for the next few miles until she passed a police officer writing someone a ticket on the eastbound lane.
“Should I report what happened?” Julia wondered. It was the first rational thought to cross her mind since that sharpened metal had shown itself inside her car. And if it hadn’t been for the median separating her from the patrol car she might have stopped. “No. I’m fine and it would just bring him back into my life.” She reminded herself of the cases of burglars breaking into houses and suing when they got hurt. And there was always the possibility that the man was alive; then everything would come down to her word against his. “There’s no guarantee of justice. And besides, nothing really happened. I just decided not to give him a ride. Just keep driving,” she told herself.
The mustang and her mind had slowed down enough for Julia to realize that there was blood on her left arm. She didn’t want to pull over to try and stop the bleeding, so she ignored the problem until she was safely in her driveway. Once she had turned off the engine, she reached into the backseat and with her right hand felt around until she found the Handy Wipes that she always kept in the car. She cleaned the cut, which was really no more than a scratch that had bled profusely because of the intense pounding of her heart.
She looked around the car and noticed more blood on her door where the man’s head must have hit. She sat in the car for several minutes taking deep breaths. The thought of AIDS crossed her mind even though there was only a small smear of blood on the door. She knew that even if he was infected that there was no way his blood could have gotten inside her cut, but logic wasn’t enough for her to shake the fear. She grabbed the dead boy’s Bible and took a deep breath.
When Julia opened the door to step out onto the concrete driveway she heard the dull clanking of metal and saw the four inch blade lying on the ground next to her foot, reflecting the artificial light coming from her car. “He must have dropped it when he hit his head,” she thought. She picked up the knife, using only her index finger and thumb, and set it down just inside the driver’s door. She watched it slide under her seat and out of sight with every intention of disposing of it later. She didn’t want that thing in her car, but the thought of holding it in her hand, touching it again, or deciding what to do with it, repulsed her even more. She added the man’s knife to the list of things that she wanted to forget forever, if only it would disappear and she would never have to look at it again or ever recall it. She closed the car door and went straight to her room, responding to her mother’s cheery welcome in an exasperated tone that indicated that she wanted to be alone.
As Julia sat at her desk she stared at the leather bound book next to her, unable to justify such a horrible world to the possibility of there being a good God. Neither could she justify the boy who had died for her grandfather in Korea.
“It’s all wrong. What’s the matter with this ---- place?” she wrote in her diary. It was the first entry she had made since the night she purchased it. Her first impulse was to write everything as she thought it without sanitizing her language. She’d sanitized every word that had ever come out of her mouth, and she knew that nobody else would ever read it to know what words she really thought. She wanted to remember everything in the ugly passionate detail that she was feeling in the moment, without a veneer of politeness. Despite all of this, she still couldn’t bring herself to write out the
word but felt that, despite her use of dashes, the slightly sanitized entry would still capture most of her emotion.
“Nothing makes sense about this place,” she continued. The black ink flowed out of her ornate pen and onto the dingy pages. “It doesn’t make any sense to try and fix anything, because it’s always going to be the same. It doesn’t make any sense to love it or hate it, because in the end we’re all going to end up rotting away in a grave—or worse, well preserved for centuries in a concrete vault under a headstone. I could be on my way to the cemetery now if things had gone just a little differently tonight, and I was only trying to help. If I hadn’t gotten scared and hit the gas I would be spending the rest of time lying in a coffin, not feeling anything. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad though, not with the way I’ve felt lately. I can’t make sense out of anything and I’m to the point that I don’t even want to try anymore.”
Julia couldn’t find the words to really describe the empty, confused, angry, feeling that had been welling up inside of her since the incident. She resisted the urge to scribble over the page in her frustration. Closing the diary, she got up from her desk and threw herself on the bed. She gripped the pillow and held on tight. She couldn’t resist the desire to have something to hold onto and wished that the pillow were her mother, or Sara, or even Jason.
She lay awake that night and wished oblivion would come and take her, but even sleep eluded her, and when it finally came, she had a horrible dream about a man with a knife stabbing her stomach through her open car window. She woke up in a cold sweat. The alarm read 5:34, and instead of trying to go back to sleep she got out of bed and took a long shower.
When she got out of the shower she opened her diary and wrote:
Wednesday, November 27th
“If I hadn’t ever given up on Jason to go to homecoming with Scott, we wouldn’t have ever done anything, and I wouldn’t have ever had the operation, which means I wouldn’t have gone to see Grandpa in the nursing home, which means we wouldn’t have gone to the storage shed, and I wouldn’t have been driving back home that night, and I wouldn’t have had my head filled up with stuff about helping people, and I would have had the sense to never even considered stopping for that man, and none of yesterday would have happened. The funny thing is I don’t even know if I regret it. But I do wish it could have been different. I’m only eighteen and, more than anything else in the world, I wish my life had turned out differently.
Chapter 10
At other times my soul suffers from what I should call attacks of foolishness, and I seem to be doing neither good nor evil, but to be going with the crowd, as they say. I experience neither torment nor bliss. I do not care if I live or die, suffer pleasure or pain; I do not seem to feel anything. The soul seems to me like a little ass that feeds and keeps alive on the food that is given to it, but eats it without reflection.
-Teresa of Avila
Later in the evening Thomas found himself sitting in the Small Talk Coffee Shop. He didn’t know the man who sat across from him, though he seemed strangely familiar. Thomas had sat down by himself at his usual seat on the terrace and the stranger had approached him, and asked if he could sit down. Thomas agreed and soon found himself engaged in a heated philosophical debate. He folded his arms across his chest, feeling content with having explained the same idea that Mark had challenged earlier. He waited for the stranger.
“Why don’t you go ahead and kill yourself then?” the stranger suggested. The stranger revealed his strong accent, maybe European, which Thomas had not noticed before in his glee at having found a willing listener—or had the stranger found him; Thomas couldn’t remember anymore. Now the stranger sat up straight in his chair, and the edges of his lips curled into an expression that Thomas would hardly have considered a smile. This expression startled Thomas and made him take note of his new companion. The stranger was dressed in fine black slacks and a white button up shirt smattered with a few faint stains, which had been bleached so many times that they were now only visible to someone who looked closely. He was well groomed and sat up straight. But above all Thomas noted the prideful arrogance that he seemed to exude.
After a considerable amount of thinking Thomas finally responded to the stranger’s suggestion: “Of course it’s logical in the end, and who’s to say I won’t—maybe I will; why not?”
“You won’t,” the stranger said, with a hint of disappointment in his voice.
“How do you know I won’t?”
“You have to really believe something to act on it, and you’re hardly convinced up here,” he added, pointing to his head. “You won’t ever put any of your ideas into action until you believe them down here.” At this he thumped his chest with gusto. “This is where men find the will to act. And it really is a pity; I’d love to see everyone put your ideas into action—how to really convince them, down here and not up there, that’s the problem.” The stranger sighed and shook his head in lament.
“But you won’t win the people with rational arguments; that’s for certain,” he continued. “However, if you appeal to their emotions then you can convince them of anything. I’ve convinced many people of many ridiculous things, things that no logical person could believe but people aren’t logical you know.”
“That’s the entire point of my idea,” Thomas objected. “There is no appeal to emotion or social constructs. It’s all cold calculated logic.”
“And that’s the problem with your type. As long as you can’t go beyond logic you’ll never be truly convinced; that’s why you’re all hypocrites. You preach one thing because of logic but you really believe another. You want to believe what you preach; I can tell that you really want to believe. You just need to have a little faith.”
Thomas, visibly frustrated with the stranger’s apparent lack of understanding, stood up from the table. The stranger remained seated, sipping his coffee.
“I’m afraid you’re still missing the point,” Thomas said. “But I don’t have time to explain it to you. It was good to meet you but I really have to get going. You understand of course.”
As Thomas started to get up from the table the stranger’s hand shot out and seized his arm. His grip was fierce and his fingers dug into Thomas’s arm. Thomas became frantic and yelled for help but everybody in the coffee shop went about their business as if they didn’t hear his cries. Thomas knew that everyone heard him and anger at their apathy overtook his initial fear. He yelled louder, as loud as he could, and then his voice was gone. The stranger was still holding his arm, but nobody cared enough to look up from their coffee. Then he was awake in his bed covered with sweat. Rick was sleeping soundly in the bed across the room and a wave of relief swept over Thomas as he wiped his forehead and closed his eyes again.
* * *
Wednesday morning drug on for Julia. Because she had gotten up so early, she found herself dressed and ready for school with an hour to spare, despite dragging out every step in her morning routine as much as she could. She spent the hour, reading the dead man’s holy book. Julia didn’t know exactly where to start so she opened it to the beginning, thumbed through the contents and the notes on the translation and began reading: “In the beginning.” She read about the creation of the world, Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, and Cain killing his brother Able, before she finally closed the book in disgust and decided to write in her diary instead:
Wednesday, November 27th
My second entry for the day and I haven’t even left for school yet. I started reading the dead man’s Bible. I was right before. There is no justice in the world, not even in the Bible. Able does good, and because of it his evil brother ends up killing him. It is comforting to know that this world’s been unjust since the very beginning, that I’m not the only one. If I were God I wouldn’t let people live forever either. I’m writing this as if I really believe these stories. But if they were true then who on earth would actually want to eat from that tree and live forever?
Julia went i
nto the living room and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She had already eaten her standard morning Pop Tart but needed to kill more time. When she finished her cereal she went back to her room and opened her diary again and wrote:
Why do I need a journal? I used to just say everything and I never had to write it down. It’s like talking to myself, like an imaginary friend. I guess it’s because I don’t have as many real friends as I used to. Sara and I still talk some but not like we did before. Jason still says hello to me when we pass each other in the halls but neither of them calls me—I don’t call them either—not since I started seeing Scott. It’s like I make one bad decision and my whole life goes downhill. That doesn’t seem fair. It was just one bad decision.
Julia closed the journal again and set it on her desk and gathered her books for school. She sandwiched the black leather-bound Bible in her backpack between her Calculus book and the worn out copy of Hamlet that she had to read for senior English. She knew that she would have time to read during lunch or in her current events class.
* * *
Hannah woke up that morning and got ready in a hurry before rushing away to the office. She worked at her desk like any other day until 11:00 when she left for her doctor’s appointment. She drove to the office building and took the elevator up to the third floor. When she walked into the waiting room a smiling receptionist greeted her from behind a counter and handed her a form to fill out while she waited. When Hannah turned around she was greeted by fifteen morbid faces that looked up from their newspapers, magazines, and coloring books long enough to notice their new companion, and then returned to their waiting.
Hannah found a seat next to a young mother. She was an attractive woman who appeared to be in her early twenties. Her son, who had to be at least three or four years old, still hadn’t learned to cover his mouth when he coughed. The mother didn’t say anything or seem to care that her son was coughing in Hannah’s direction.