His arm bucked back from the needle. I’d missed the gray vein again. They were brittle veins and it took several stabs to fit the IV. He squirmed when the cold morphine hit hot blood.
“Don’t pull this one out.”
“I was an artist—like street art—I guess,” he said, voice cancer deep, lips somehow not really moving.
Most of the done for patients are bitter. I’m sorry to admit it, but few of them meet death well. A nurse’s secret, maybe. It’s a bad job that way. About half get to anger and
pretty much stay there. It’s the pain. It’s the intrusion and the drugs and the fear. The other half get religion or get back to religion. He didn’t want a priest and he wasn’t bitter.
I tapped his piss bottle. Bongo empty. The I.V. driped drip drip into the bloodstream. His heart beeped in the monitor. Every so often the drips and beeps fell into rhythm, stretching out in syncopation until the rhythm was lost.
“But no one noticed. That’s okay. My art was conceptual. Maybe it wasn’t art. Like tracing isn’t art. But it’s something.”
“Catheter time!” I interrupted, the dope in his veins connecting his memory to mouth and disconnecting his bladder from dick. His eyes were gray like his veins—charcoal gray like two smudges on two white pages. He always looked out the window when he talked about art.
“I left traces. On beaches, in forests, fields. I never told my secret. But convictions mean less at the end. When we realize we’re doomed. I guess I knew I was doomed all along. That’s why I left them. That’s art.”
His dick reminded me of a dried umbilical cord.
“Don’t clench.”
His gray eyes bore into my girlish face. Poor guy. He could still use a bedpan.
I get confessions. You don’t see as many priests in hospitals as you’d think. Maybe people realize at the end anyone will do.
He appraised the clear tube winding out of his umbilical dick. It flowed red then yellow. His head looked like it never stopped growing, skin an inch thick over the bones. His workman hands, how could they feel? Buried under layers of callous. I touched my cold finger tips to his.
“I’d like someone to notice. I never knew if anyone got it. It won’t matter after I go, but for now it comforts. You can’t ask people to get it. Art is not oppression.”
He took my hand taking me in close. He winked a fat eyelid—the one that had a taut diagonal flap of skin above it. Did he wink it in over a lifetime?
“You shouldn’t even explain it,” he breathed. “I took it one better, I think. I never claimed it was art. And it’s not easy to find. Not like pooh-bah street artists billboarding themselves.”
“How does anyone find your art?” I checked the machine and his vitals and turned his pillow.
“They stumble.”
He smiled, the well-worn crease accepting it, gray/white mustache whiskers bending out. He fell asleep with it on. I’ll ask him what his dreams were, I thought, my shift up. I liked it when he talked, otherwise he gasped. There were holes in his neck. I feared his shift was up and I couldn’t see him again. I rinsed his bedpan and I walked home and stumbled asleep and into his art.
#
“Western art is ego. Give me sand mandalas; give me impermanence.”
I’d brought a book from the library. I got up early to get it. Big and colorful pictures, light from the window reflecting off the pages. I set it aside. I don’t think there will be time for sand mandalas.
“Mine was so faint that here I’m on my deathbed—”
“No.” I leaned in in my chair to dab his forehead. I heard sweat squeaking in his one wrinkle.
“—and I don’t know whether anyone has noticed. Ahem.”
That was his cough—ahem—like a word.
His breath was dead already. I thought: his lips don’t move because he’s ashamed of his cancer escaping.
His heart flickered. He tried to pluck off the sensor and I did it for him.
“Tell me where to go? I want to see.”
He peeked to the window, neck muscles like two suspension cables. I raised his bed.
“But if they noticed. If they traced the correct line—the one that was me—I imagine there’d be a click like in a safe cracker’s ear when she spins the right number, and it wouldn’t be my secret anymore.”
As he said this I got apprehensive because he faded. His lids fell and his words fell apart. I needed to know or it would die with him. It would die without me. I replaced the sensor and his heart was slow but I waited.
He slept. So I did other things. And things got busy.
When I break-peed I remembered him watching me place the catheter. His smudge eyes. A lot of patients die. I’d like to remember them all but I don’t. I don’t remember who died that day or that week or that month. Check the papers.
#
“What did you dream?”
“I dreamed I was me. I was in the field. Rocking Chair Field.”
His eyes were closed. I began to fear his opening them. The spent day burned off behind the town, his back wall blushing red. I didn’t believe anyone but myself could understand him and tried to loiter in this confession.
“I remembered like a stranger: He must have rocked in this chair and faced this direction and looked at that birch while whittling the spoon and left those soap flakes in the grass. He rocked until sunset when he upturned the chair and carved So long’s my chair creaks more’n my bones; that was the best thought he had—the one he chose to inscribe—of all the wonderful thoughts he must have had in this chair in this setting before he got cold and left.”
“And what did you leave on the beach?”
He murmured, “Upturned umbrellas. Filled with sand. Not sun umbrellas: rain umbrellas.” His eyes flit under his lids like he was there now in the dream or in the memory.
“And in the forest?” My lips didn’t move.
He took in air, sucked it in hard and set his mouth wide and dark. His eyes opened to the window but he was in the woods. I smelled the flowers I’d brought last week and felt the breeze ease through the barely open window. As he spoke he pointed at things in the forest.
“He sat on this rope swing and he faced this clearing and surely there were white tail in it and pumped slowly to test then faster and higher until he felt the days, and then months and years tick off. So high the rope got slack and he jumped off and was seven years young until his feet hit the ground and then he knew he was old.”
He looked at the ceiling, eyes lifting and rolling back to the whites. I think he watched a cloud float over. He reached for a walking stick. I gave him my hand. It broke as his body clenched. I held my breath and my pain. I traced the crease of his lip where his smile froze forever.
#
I can take the dog off leash this time of year on the trail. She knows this and tugs me through town. Piss steams and freezes on a blue hydrant. The forest edge is too much like a painting—like you could only reach it if you’re magic. If a swing hangs in there, I’ll trudge in snow and sight it through the bare sticks.
Aku leads the way and I walk behind, feeling a prick on my neck that runs down my back like an artist’s stroke rendering me into the scene. She paints me last and I fear the world slowing to a halt. Maybe ice melted down my parka.
Aku smells rabbit and crosses over the faint path. A skiff of new snow, sucked dry by wind, obscures old prints. We’re alone. The air smells untouched. A snow rabbit dashes silently into a thicket. Aku thrums and huffs behind, snapping the delicate interlaced sticks.
The image is still strong: the flat wooden seat, the inch thick braided rope knotted under two drilled holes, the dark branch it coils around at least five times. “The seat is green,” I tell myself. “Of course the paint is chipped.”
Aku found turkeys and howls a mile away.
“Oh, there it is.”
It arrives like a lost object. A lost object found in an obvious place. The tree is burled and the bark could shingle a roof. Roots reach out from the snow reminding me that it branches at both ends. The punked seat hangs from a single rope at eye level as if the rope clenches each time it dries after rain or winter. As I get close I see the rope is frayed out with fine curled fibers like his old neck hair.
“Did he carve something?” My heart flickers. Aku’s howls syncopate into an endless Doppler. I reach for the dangling board. Maybe it was painted green once. I hear the rope eek as I turn the board. I trace the grain and there are faded hashes against it, unreadable. Sometimes the present is so strong it erases the past.
Aku takes her time wending back from the hills on the other side of the creek. I sit on a bench and listen to water licking pebbles. The bench is dedicated to someone. It says so on a bronze plate.
C.R. Beideman lives in Bozeman, MT, where he chops firewood and casts hand-tied flies into rivers or reads in bars.
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