It had been hanging up near the back of one of those novelty shops, the kind with phony mustaches and candy cigarettes and giant inflatable cans of soup. I had just stood there and stared at it for a while, thinking words like sanitation and antiseptic and neuroscience. It seemed at once the most unexceptional and fascinating item in the store. I plucked it off the rack and went straight to the counter. Paid the girl with the lip ring and mohawk and slipped on my prize as I walked out into the cool night air.
I arrived home wearing the white lab coat. This was not because I was an aspiring doctor or scientist or lab coat model. It was not because of how comfortable it was; the material was thin and callous and unfriendly. It was the sterility of the garment; the clean, blinding white, the needles and cotton balls and charts of anatomy associated with it. It made me feel translucent, like a ghost who could choose when to be seen. Instead of Morgan Hughes, people would look my way and see stethoscopes, thermometers, scary orange bottles of pills.
Standing before my childhood home, I found myself unable to knock on the front door. The inevitable disappointment of my parents already stung in a way that slowed my every movement, and the idea of home seemed alien and impossible. I sat on the front lawn and tried to feel for a sense of familiar in the grass, still crunchy and brown with the remains of summer. It felt like a long time before my mother came out to water the plants and ignore the grass. She approached me and sighed and gestured with the can as if to water me.
You need to grow, she said.
The next week I went apartment hunting and selected one without bothering to see the inside because it was located on the other side of town and that was good enough for me. The deal was that my parents would pay the rent for the first month, and if I wasn’t able to find a job within that time, it was back to school. This new apartment of mine was in a faded green building that the landlord stressed was very, very quiet, repeating this point several times over the phone. His tone was the opposite of cautionary; I must have sounded like someone who really enjoyed silence.
I stopped playing team sports when I was 12, at the first sign of competition eroding the lightness of childhood. Suddenly striking out or missing a shot brought with it the sensation of letting people down, being the cause of disappointment. I started playing tennis and when I lost I didn’t care, walked home with a smile on my face, happily alone in my failure. While team sports seemed to be a lie, a false representation of togetherness, the solitary struggle of tennis was honest and clear. During the matches I felt a brief but intense solidarity with my opponents, most of whom I didn’t know and would never speak to. Both of us alone in our quests, but fully aware of each other’s plight. Even on the shallow level of a recreational sports game, it seemed profound. For a small section of time there were two people with a complete understanding of the other’s present hopes and fears, ones they carried by themselves and could never share the weight of.
The previous tenant had marked the wall all over with sentimental quotes that I couldn’t get rid of no matter how hard I scrubbed. Things like Keep your heart open and Two is better than one and Struggling together isn’t struggling at all, becoming more unique and elaborate from there. I asked the landlord about it in hopes of a rent reduction and he called the writing standard decoration.
Go look at any apartment in the building, he said. They’ll be there.
And so I did. The woman next door smiled at me and said,
Of course. Right this way doctor.
She asked me about a mole on the back of her neck as I examined her plain white walls, void of sentence décor.
You need a skin doctor, I said. I know a good one.
Who?
I forget.
She became suspicious and I left. Called the landlord back.
Well not that one, he said. That one hasn’t been updated. Check any of the others.
I hung up.
The world is filled with flowers of every color. When you see yours, all the others will look grey.
The apartment came with a fire extinguisher, bright and ready for action against the wall. I slept with it that first night, because I didn’t think its placement would be very convenient in an actual fire. I felt like there was a chance I had forgotten some important safety rule somehow, missed the part in school where they tell you about the secret switches under the utensil drawer that need to be flicked each night to prevent fires. Those posters in health class, the ones with white outlines of hands turning the dials in back of the closet with DON’T WAKE UP COOKED written on them; maybe I never looked in their direction. That day when every teacher was required to talk about that one little button, blue and smooth, that absolutely had to be pushed before you even thought about closing your eyes; maybe I had been out sick. But when I woke up the apartment was grey and empty and still, and the metal was cold in my arms.
I rose and showered and went to the kitchen, half-expecting there to be cereal in the cabinets, a welcoming present from the world of adults. But the shelves were bare, and I left the apartment without breakfast. I didn’t have any clear direction, but once outside felt myself drawn to the cemetery next door. The grounds were hilly and overgrown, moss obscuring the letters on every other tombstone. I wandered about, ducking underneath the low-hanging branches of weeping willows and kneeling down to meet various members of the graveyard community. Everything at rest, the air static and hushed. I thought for a moment that if I lay down I could become a part of it all, sinking into the grass, my heart stopping in a moment of complete peace, brain content to shut itself down; it’s okay friend, we gave it a shot. I sat first, feeling my hands around the soil to see if it was soft enough to remain on for all eternity. Once this was determined, I lay my head back and spread out my limbs, then brought them in tight so as not to hog the ground, leaving room for potential neighbors.
Tennis was how I met my first and only girlfriend, trading swings with her my senior year of high school before speaking a word. The feeling of instant intimacy during our game was overwhelming. I wanted to step over the net, walk right onto her side of the court, ask if she wanted to be my partner in a doubles match. Instead I put all of myself into the stroke of my racket. Swat. This is me, this is my skin. Swat. Peel back a layer. These are my nerves. Swat. Peel another layer. This is my DNA. Swat. Now you’re at my bones, my skinny, gangly skeleton. Swat. This is my heart. It’s beating faster than normal. In the coming weeks it became evident that we would never recapture the same bond we had shared on the court, words failing where a fuzzy green ball had succeeded. Our break up was more implied than spoken. I haven’t played tennis since.
I lay on the ground for what felt like an hour, but could still feel my heart beating along in rhythm as my eyes opened to the sudden sound of a violin, distant but distinct in the silence of the cemetery. I rose to my feet and looked back at my chosen gravesite. My body hadn’t even made an impression; it was clear I wasn’t welcome here, not yet. I followed my ears up a short hill that led to a mound overlooking the rest of the grounds. It was in the valley below that I saw the musician, sitting on a wooden chair amidst the tombstones, playing a bright and cheery melody that clashed with the atmosphere, as if inviting the dead to rise and dance. She wore a red cloche hat that matched her dress, her brown hair falling unevenly over her ears. She didn’t see me, and I just sat for a while and listened. When it was over I debated whether or not to clap; it was a great performance and the venue didn’t entail a lot of audience response. Finally I moved my hands together hesitantly, the sound weak and delayed. She looked up and found me and my cheeks burned red. Suddenly I feared that I had just intruded on something very private, a secret ritual shared with no one who still had breath in their lungs. Perhaps I had made her feel exposed, known in a way she hadn’t authorized, each stroke of her violin cutting deeper. Slide. This is me. This is my skin. Slide Slide Slide. This is my heart in the form of sound waves, reverberating across the stone garden and putting life into the air. She looked terribly embarrassed, and I called out an apology as she packed away her violin and fled the scene, leaving the chair behind.
There’s nothing like holding something that is alive. Most people don’t know this but life is transferable through the touch of live entities. This is why petting zoos exist. It is why people run their fingers over tree bark. It is why people hold hands and why people have sex. When you do these things you are more alive than usual.
I left the cemetery and walked two streets over to the diner, where I had a Belgian waffle and referred the waitress to a podiatrist whose name had slipped my mind. After this I roamed through main street, looking for HELP WANTED signs. The only one I found was in the window of a building so narrow its title had to be split into three rows:
ONE to TWO
HOUR
PHOTO
Inside I was met by white tables and white walls and squeaky clean white flooring. Everything long and narrow. At the end of the room there was a door standing ajar, typing sounds coming from behind it. Not catching sight of any bells sitting on the smooth bare tables, I went to the back and knocked. The typing ceased immediately. I heard feet move swiftly to the door and it pulled back to reveal a man wearing a lab coat identical to my own. Middle-aged with white hair and aggressive eyes.
I’m here about the sign, I said. I’m here to help.
He hesitated, then reached a hand out to my shoulder and looked me in the eye with intent.
Do you know how to process photos? He asked.
Not really.
He removed his hand and nodded, then brought his fingers to his chin and began to scratch an invisible beard.
A man who comes dressed for work before he even has the job, he said.
I didn’t respond. He kneeled down suddenly and began untying his shoes. I moved to the side, as if granting him the necessary privacy. Once finished, he scooted past me in his socks and went to the window, taking down the help wanted sign and pausing to rub out a small splotch on the glass with a tissue from his pocket. He then came sliding back, stopping in front of me and sticking out his hand. I extended the sleeve of my coat so that it covered my fingers, then raised my arm and shook. The next thing he said came out a bit mumbled, but I thought it sounded something like,
Slooncamp.
I could only assume this to be his name, so I said,
Morgan Hughes.
It’s a good thing you have experience in lab work.
I thought of my high school chemistry class, with the bunsen burners and test tubes and safety goggles, and nodded. Mr. Slooncamp put his shoes back on and showed me around the back room, windowless and cluttered, the counters filled with coffee-stained papers and precariously stacked photos. It was a surprisingly wide space. The walls were cracked in several places and looked as if they had undergone a series of paint jobs, all of which were left unfinished. Mr. Slooncamp led me forward, both of us stepping over the debris on the floor as we went. At the back of the back room there was a back-back room that was called the darkroom. I smiled as we circled around its small perimeter; it was beautiful. A dim blue light buzzed overhead, shining down faintly on the glowing pools of chemical liquid, resting below in sunken containers on a large table in the middle of the room. Mr. Slooncamp began talking about negatives and dipping intervals and drying times. I did not ask questions because I did not know if someone with lab experience would ask my questions. Questions like, what does that do? What are those over there? What is this and can it burn me? At the end of his explanation Mr. Slooncamp turned to me and snapped his fingers.
Presto, he said. That’s how you develop.
I drank alcohol for the first and only time a few weeks after my unspoken breakup with my first and only girlfriend. I had one friend at the time, Jason, who had another friend named Chris. Chris wasn’t my friend and I wasn’t his friend. This decision of non-friendship seemed to be mutual. When the three of us got together Jason would walk in the middle and sit in the middle and when he went to get something there were empty gaps of air that existed in the middle. Chris and I would sit there, silent and still, alone until Jason returned. When we looked over we could see each other and this was unsettling so we did not look over. Instead we kept our eyes ahead, watching whatever it was on TV that Jason had selected. Such decisions were always made by Jason; it was one of the perks of having friends who weren’t friends. We were at my house one night when Jason had to leave early for some reason that I didn’t hear because I stopped listening after this initial information, the information that meant Chris would have to make up a similar excuse so that we could go on pretending to be friends and not people who had no reason to be in each other’s houses. Jason got up and moved towards the door and my ears were pointed and expectant, waiting for Chris to get the next part over with so we could both breathe relief and move on with our nights. I would have accepted anything, really. He could have told me he was supposed to fly a spaceship that was leaving tonight to plant ferns on Jupiter. I would have nodded and smiled and wished him a safe trip. After a few minutes though, Chris was still there, sitting on the other side of my parent’s couch, watching Jason’s favorite football team play. I turned off the TV because I thought the act might provide a segue for Chris to make his exit, and also because I had been watching a sport I hated for the past half hour. Seconds passed and no exit was made. My fleeting glances at the other side of the couch revealed Chris to look quite comfortable, sunk low with his head deep into the back cushion. When he suddenly suggested we drink the beer he had brought over because his brother turned twenty-one and my parents were on vacation, I said okay because I was already home and my excuses to leave were limited. I thought that maybe this was the right way to have my first drink, around someone I wasn’t friends with, someone that I thought of with a reciprocated indifference. I became drunk quickly, and Chris laughed, saying he had never seen anyone get slammed so fast. I suspected that neither of us had seen many people get slammed at all, but instead of saying this I started talking about my first and only ex. I went on and on about our tennis game, and then all of a sudden my face was wet. I rubbed my eye and my finger was wet. Chris looked at me with an expression that wanted to sympathize but felt more like laughing.
Please leave, I said. You have a spaceship to fly.
I stopped hanging out with Jason, which meant that Chris and I were free to continue with our non-friendship, and now we could even do so without seeing each other. Bathroom stalls became my new lunch venues, and I would often imagine that my first and only girlfriend was in another one, crouching and rummaging through her tin lunchbox, the one with a tennis ball on the lid. My dreams of shared stall hiding were crushed when I spotted her in the cafeteria one day, eating at a table with friends, an open seat on her left. Instead of an empty gap of air in the middle there was an empty gap of air on the side. The difference about these sorts of gaps is that nobody notices their existence at all.
My work began immediately, Mr. Slooncamp indicating with a vague waving of his hand the stacks of photos to be developed.
I prefer drawings myself, he said. But photos work for some people.
He gave me a nod and closed the darkroom door. I stood unmoving for a while, disappearing into the silence, becoming one with the chemicals. Suddenly I imagined her, the cemetery musician, perched on the counter with her hat still on, dress lying in a shadow on the floor. Violin no longer necessary. She rose and walked towards me and I gripped the white of my coat. The problem was that color barely existed in here, and my coat had no meaning; I was completely and unmistakably Morgan Hughes, someone who could not help you with your reoccurring nosebleeds; someone you were not naked around for impersonal reasons. Her hand closed around mine and she said,
Hey. It’s only fair.
My hands grew sweaty and I slipped away.
Sorry, I muttered. There are a lot of chemicals in here and I can’t afford any stains.
There was once a woman who created a magical telephone. Every person she called with it found everything she said fascinating and poignant. I bought new slippers this afternoon, she would say. It’s amazing how accurately you describe your shopping, they would respond. Next door there was a woman with a normal telephone. She too called everyone in the phonebook, wanting her voice to exist all across the city. Most people hung up on her, but some listened and a few talked back. One of these women felt better after their phonebook experience. The other was trampled to death by journalists.
The next day I woke up early and went back to the cemetery to find her just arriving, violin case in hand, wearing the same red outfit as the day before.
I’m sorry about yesterday, I said. I wasn’t supposed to hear that.
It’s okay, she said.
Her voice was soft, issued with care, as if wary of disturbing any air particles. I breathed deeply. The strength of another live presence was staggering. She stood still and rubbed her arm, a giant violin, every movement like a symphony in this theatre of death.
You’re really good, I said.
Thanks.
Do you play for live people?
They make me nervous.
They ask me about migraines.
It was silent for a moment before she said,
I make hats for live people.
I still felt bad about my intrusion, but here she was, letting me intrude further. I felt better about my clapping now, but I still owed her something; what I’d been given could not be returned.
I dropped out of college, I said. And I recently slept holding a fire extinguisher.
She smiled, the awkward and tightly stretched grin of a person who wasn’t used to the sensation.
Why? She asked.
I was afraid, I said.
Of what?
Burning my skin.
I mean about college.
My chest tightened up and my arms felt prickly. Suddenly it was as if I had been the one surprised by an onlooker, caught wacking tennis balls on an empty court. Swat Swat Swat.
What kind of hats do you make? I asked.
I could show you, she said.
What about this morning’s concert?
She shrugged.
My audience is patient.
As we walked to her apartment she told me about finding the chair sitting there on her first visit, a rickety brown invitation.
Maybe it was important to someone, she said. And they wanted to be buried with it next to them.
I’m sure they’d be happy to see it still in use, I added.
Were you visiting someone? She asked.
No, I said. I was applying for residency.
How’d it go?
It’s going to take a while to process.
A week before my high school graduation I saw my first and only girlfriend playing tennis with someone else, a male someone else. They were just finishing up and I watched them walk off the court together, leaving behind the game ball. I went home and grabbed my racket, holding it for the first time in several months, and returned to the court. I picked up the abandoned tennis ball and went to the nearby field. It was open and empty, the air quiet and still. I tossed up the ball and wacked it as hard as I could with my racket, launching it into the horizon. Once it landed I walked forward and picked it up and repeated the action. Toss, swing, find, repeat. Toss, swing, find, repeat. I soon came to the end of the field, the woods standing tall and dark before me. This would be the one, I thought. This would be the swing that made it disappear. I twirled my arm around and threw the ball up higher than ever before, channeling all my strength into the racket as my swing made contact. I hesitated several minutes afterwards, trying to leave but somehow unable. It wasn’t good enough; I had to know for sure. I dropped the racket and entered the woods, peeking around every tree trunk and searching my hands through every piece of shrubbery. I didn’t know when to expect satisfaction. Possibly it would come after I didn’t see the ball hiding under a particular fern. Possibly when I confirmed it to be absent from inside the next decaying log. Hours passed and it became dark. I tried to use the light from my cell phone to continue the search but this was far less efficient than daylight and the process slowed. I had to recheck areas several times because my phone light was weak and it would have been easy to miss a tennis ball. It got really late and eventually my phone ran out of power and all went to black. I sat shivering on the forest floor until the first traces of sunlight descended through the trees. At some point in the night I had realized that I would need to burn the forest down to have any chance at knowing for sure. Since I am no tree-burner, I left the woods and didn’t return.
We stood in her apartment like strangers in a department store. Hooks were scattered around the border of the living room, the hats on them big and small, feathered and flowered, their colors subdued against the soft and intimate glow of white lights strung around the ceiling. All of them were women’s, but I tried one on anyway, a big yellow sunhat. She looked at me and laughed, crossing a hand over and clutching her wrist. I had always been unsure about the existence of right moments, but this felt as close as possible, so I hung the hat up and moved forward across the room, stopping before her as I felt my coat brush against my forearm. She looked at me with eyes big and timid, her accelerated breathing audible in the hush of the room.
I’m sorry Miss, I said. It appears you have a case of the 1920’s.
The 1920’s? She said quietly.
Victims suffer from delusions of living in the past, I said. And are often seen playing the violin in cemeteries.
What are my options?
It took me a very long time to speak again. Finally I said,
We’ll have to make another appointment.
The door to the back room was shut when I arrived for my second day of work, and I made apologetic knocks against it with my late and guilty fist. Minutes passed before Mr. Slooncamp opened the door slowly, his eyes peeking out at me with suspicion.
Sorry, I said.
He nodded distantly and looked away, then went back to his desk and began drumming his fingers softly on the keys of his typewriter, filling the room with a click clack click clack. Curiosity overcame me at the threshold of the darkroom and I made my way back towards Mr. Slooncamp, his white hair illuminated underneath the anesthetic shine of the faint blue light overhead. I stopped behind him and leaned forward to examine the page, which so far read:
Hello. We are at a college graduation. This is my daughter in the cap and gown. I have my arm around her and am smiling big at the camera. Both of these things express my pride. My daughter has not wanted to be around me this much for a long time but at this moment she seems okay with it and this can be seen in her facial features, which are relaxed and happy. If I could somehow extend this moment,
Mr. Slooncamp’s hands froze above the keys and he turned his head around, looking up at me with a confused expression. I quickly realized that I had done it again; another intrusion. Before I could apologize, Mr. Slooncamp brought his finger up to the undeveloped photo hanging on the shelf above his desk, tapping the air centimeters away from its glaring white surface.
I’m going to guess right one day, he said. Wouldn’t that be something?
A few hours later I hung the photo up to dry in the darkroom. It was a picture of a cat standing on a skateboard, calm and unafraid.
Our appointment was scheduled for 10:00 and I showed up right on time because doctors are always late and I was determined not to be one. We sat down on her couch, surrounded by headwear. Her own hat firm above her eyes.
How long do I have? She asked.
I don’t know, I said.
The words felt good coming out of my mouth, as if they’d been waiting my whole life for release.
Actually I’ve discovered a cure, I said. I just need to examine the top of your head.
Okay.
Wait.
I slid the sides of my coat back, pulling my arms out and draping it over the unoccupied cushion to my right. My chest shook with every breath. She looked at me and I felt her knowing; I felt her not thinking about stethoscopes. I smiled. She took a deep breath and I could see it happening; her hands reached up over her ears and gripped the sides of her hat and I could see it. Hello hello hello. This is me, launched out of the 1920s and sitting right here next to you, hatless. I watched the hat graze past the corners of her head and come loose. She placed it atop the backrest above my coat, the shell of a doctor with a case of the 1920’s. I scooted closer to her and we both just paused for a moment. The next thing was that our foreheads came together and our cheeks rubbed back and forth. Our faces trod over each other, getting the lay of the land, sensing the wonderful strangeness and warm similarity. Her nose, her jaw, her eyelash, her lips. We rubbed each other’s arms. This is us. This is our skin. Our hands shook as we removed clothing from one another. Peel back a layer. These are our nerves. More of this as our lips came together and our bodies extended over the couch. Now we’re at our bones, our skinny, gangly skeletons. Our eyes stayed on each other; they felt no desire to look away.
When it was over she showed me the blue fedora she kept beside her pillow in the bedroom, which had the power to induce dreams solely about hats. We slept close together with the fedora halfway over both of us, and in the morning reported dreams of people walking around with bill-less baseball caps and topless circles of fabric floating around their heads like the rings of Saturn.
Most of what was written on the walls of my new apartment made me want to cover every inch of the bumpy white surface with disinfectant. There were a few notes I liked though. I even had a favorite, which I discovered hiding below the window on the second day.
Hello. This is my heart. I wrote it on the walls because I want it to be seen.
Timothy Day is an absent-minded and awkward person living in Seattle. He hopes to one day become a filmmaker as well as a writer. His fiction has appeared or is upcoming in journals such as Menacing Hedge, The Apple Valley Review, Burrow Press Review, Bird’s Thumb, Petrichor Machine, and others. You can visit him online at frogsmirkles.wordpress.com
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