Love Letters of the Angels of Death (4 page)

“Look,” the doctor says. “I wouldn't say the Lazarus Sign Reflex happens often. But when it does it's a very difficult thing for family members to witness. So most families prefer to let us carry on the testing without them.”

The glaze over your Uncle Terry's eyes hardens and clouds until he can barely see at all.

“We're going to proceed now,” the doctor says. He's not talking to Uncle Terry anymore, but to the little throng of people in green who've been collecting outside your grandfather's room. A nurse is tugging at the curtain hung from the ceiling, drawing it around the bed where a machine breathes into your grandfather's body as he, or something like him, lies tucked beneath a stiff yellow sheet.

Uncle Terry turns his head to look at the drawn curtain now standing between himself and his father. The doctor's clear, un-hushed voice is sounding on the other side of the fabric – narrating everything for the benefit of the medical students being initiated into the secret society of medically managed death. Your uncle's thick fingers are reaching out, moving toward the edge of the curtain. It's woven just barely too densely to be sheer, and it seems to drift away from his hand, pushed on some kind of invisible current in the dry, antiseptically cool air. His fingers graze the cloth, but his hand snaps back at the touch, closing into a fist. He clamps his eyes shut, gritting his teeth, desperate, hoarse as he's whispering.

“Come forth.”

You stumble into the darkest chasm of your grief for your grandfather on the same night the hospital people take their ventilator away from him – after the room fills up with doctors and residents pouring cold water inside his ears and pricking at his skin to make sure he's really gone. The round of tests is the last thing the medical people will do for him before they shut off the machines, push back the curtain, and call the adults of your family into the room to watch your grandfather finish his medically delayed dying.

But you don't see any of that. You don't even hear about it until hours after you've gone to bed in that unfinished basement, your eyes open in the darkness. There's just enough light in your room to make the joists and wires in the ceiling look like their images are made of flickering grey pixels, dimly lit over your head.

Your mother has already come down the stairs, looking through the dark house for someone awake – someone she could tell what happened to her father-in-law. She hung up the telephone after the final call from the hospital, left her bed, and came through the space in your bedroom wall where a door has never been hung. She didn't turn on a light as she stood there and told you the coma – an embarrassing word twitching with histrionic TV silliness – had ended. And now your grandfather isn't just brain dead, he's truly dead.

Even after days of hearing unfortunate phrases like “vegetative state,” you're still kind of shocked at the news. Shock isn't a complicated sensation. You know you are shocked. What you aren't sure of yet is whether you feel sad.

The truth is your grandfather never took much notice of you – the mess of blonde hair sitting there on the ottoman beside his feet while the hockey game wheeled round and round on the white screen between the beer commercials. No matter how many times you asked him to explain the rules of offside, he would always start by saying, “Well, first of all, you aren't allowed to get ahead of the play.”

And then you'd wait at least three beats before you'd say, “Granddad, what does it mean to get ahead of the play?”

You recognize another feeling. It's confusion. You don't know how to craft a proper sorrow of your own. You're not even really sure what it is you're missing – what's at the heart of this unmistakeable but unformed sense of loss. So you try to imagine what your grandmother's grief must be like instead. You try, but it's hard to see how her mood could be much different from the melancholy, recovering-Calvinist temperament the she always seems to have even at picnics and birthday parties. Still, you close your eyes and try to will your mind out across the kilometres of flat farmland between your bed and your grandmother's. Maybe you're caught up in one of those teenaged fantasies about having psychic powers that have been lying dormant, waiting for something like a death in the family to spark them into action.

It's late at night, but the idea that your grandmother is asleep doesn't seem very likely. What does she look like when she sleeps, anyway? In all your years together in the family, you've never seen her asleep. It's not very often that she breaks from her typical, interrupted-squirrel attitude and takes a seat let alone a nap. To you and the other grandkids, she is all flying potato peels and quick, hard footsteps, her arms always cocked at the elbows, held at right angles, ready to spring.

The best you can do is to imagine your grandmother lying under a well-pressed bed sheet with her eyes wide open to the dry, quiet air of her old bungalow. On the bedside table beside her is your grandfather's old-fashioned folding alarm clock – the one with hands that used to glow in the dark before you were born, before their slightly radioactive, blue-green promethium paint with the short, short half-life expired. The clock will be ticking in the dark like a small, frantic heart.

Maybe you know the timber and plaster and furniture of your grandparents' funny little house better than you know the old people themselves. All those cold white Boxing Day afternoons stuck inside the house with their angel-haired Christmas tree and the turkey soups they ruined by glutting them with boiled barley kernels – those days drove you so deeply into boredom that you learned every mote of your grandparents' house. You turned each bit of it over and over as you looked and looked for something to see.

It was especially true after the visit from the vacuum cleaner salesman with the machine made of the same material as the space shuttle. The vacuum salesman was the first person you ever heard claim that most household dust is actually dead skin sloughed off the bodies of living humans. The dust was your grandparents themselves, chafing against their upholstery while they watched television or read Louis L'Amour novels. You're still not sure you believe him. But your grandparents let the salesman turn his amazing sucking space machine on the couch cushions and on their own bedroom mattress. They watched with frigid tolerance as the stranger dumped small, yellowed hills of dust – their skin – onto black velvet circles. The salesman lined up the dust specimens on the coffee table and motioned at you and your brothers with polite, professional disgust.

“Look at that. You don't want the grandkids playing in
that
, do ya?”

The space shuttle vacuum cost more than any car your grandparents had ever bought, so they kept their complimentary knife set and sent the salesman away. But maybe if they'd let him clean the whole house – every pillow and mattress and bath mat – the coffee table would have been covered in a heap of dead skin as big as both your grandparents put together. It would have been finer than dry, prairie snow – deep, and inextricably blended, a million individual flakes combined so well it doesn't matter anymore if they aren't all exactly alike.

Maybe your grandparents' house seems so singular in your memory just because it was different from the aluminum sided, split level boxes where you and me and all our friends lived out our childhoods. All along its outside surfaces, your grandparents' house is armoured with hard grey stucco bristling with tooth-sized bits of gravel and broken glass coloured green, brown, and white.

Underneath their house, there's a basement that's more like a cellar – an uninhabited concrete box with one wall hidden behind columns of oversized, bare aluminum cans labelled with thick, black letters hand-printed onto their sides.

“Powdered Skim Milk, Elbow Macaroni, Salt.”

The cans hold your grandparents' emergency food supply. Your Dad told you they had enough food in those cans to keep themselves alive for an entire year without ever needing to go grocery shopping. If one of those Cold War doomsday bombs had ever dropped out of the sky, your grandparents could have sealed themselves in the bunker of their basement, dry-swallowing dehydrated potato pearls by the light of a hurricane lamp, perching on boxes stuffed with old newspapers and military service medals, observing that this wasn't the first time they've seen the end of the world.

In your bedroom, on the night your grandfather dies, you open your eyes and admit that there must not be any latent ESP hidden inside your brain. It's time to forget your grandmother long enough to make your own way toward grief. You turn over in your narrow girl's bed, trying to call back to your senses the pungent herbal smell that wafts out of your grandfather's bedroom door whenever you walk past it on the way to their bathroom. Your Mom told you the smell was from the tubes of ointment your grandfather massaged into the bone spurs in his knees before he went to bed every night. Its smell rubs off on his sheets, penetrates the mattress as he sleeps, and hangs over the bed like incense while he's gone all through the day.

Sometimes, you and the other grandkids would stand on the threshold of his bedroom – held at bay by the gloom cast over everything by the heavy Black Watch fabric of the drapes that stayed drawn across the window all day long. The curtains were scary, but so was the shallow water glass where you knew his teeth spent the nights. And you'd all stand there on the threshold arguing, trying to decide what familiar smell most perfectly matched the ointment on your grandfather's bed sheets. Everyone used to shout you down whenever you claimed the smell was just like homemade root beer. But you're so convinced that's what it was, you don't even remember what the other kids used to argue in return.

In the pixels on your bedroom ceiling, you are starting to see flashes of deep brown between the greys and blacks. And that's when you know for sure – the ointment did smell like root beer. You know it did. Maybe that is the seat of your kinship with the first dead person you've ever known – the secret of your grandfather's ointment.

It's a fine bond, but you grasp at it, stretching your fingertips up toward the flecks of brown flashing in the ceiling. You even close your fist, as if you're actually holding onto something with your small white hand. And you pull your fist back, toward your chest, holding it tightly enough to squeeze a single, cool tear out of one of your eyes. You stay awake, marking the tear's slow trail out of your eye, across your temple – falling and falling until it fractures into a hundred tiny rivulets, pouring into the delta of your hairline.

Four

But wait – tonight, in your grownup world where you live with me and our sons in our house in the suburbs, there's something in the newsfeed on your computer screen that makes you choke out a little cry. I can hear you all the way from the kitchen, upstairs. Down in the basement, you're reading a story about the rediscovery of the body of King Ramses the First, founder of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt – though that's not how you've always known him.

“It's them,” you call up the stairs to me. “Brigs, come see.”

“Them.”

“Yeah. It's those mummies from that daredevil museum in Niagara Falls. I told you about them. Remember?”

And then I do remember that story of yours about the childhood summer vacation when you looked into case after glass display case of desiccated, pillaged human bodies. They were on display in a tourist-trap museum. Your family ended up there after you'd finished watching all you could bear of the Niagara River falling over a cliff in the rain.

Something occurs to me as I follow your voice down the stairs: your mother was wrong. Your grandfather wasn't really the first dead person you'd ever seen. She herself had shown you other corpses, years before you saw his – the mummies, a whole cavalcade of dry brown death. For some reason, she must not have thought of the mummies as truly human – or as truly dead. Before she took you to your grandfather's funeral, your mother had pushed the admission money through a hole in the ticket-seller's glass and brought you to see the world famous mummies of the Niagara Falls Daredevil Museum.

The computer tells us your mummies came to the museum after losing their way and falling among thieves sometime in the nineteenth century. That's how they ended up lying in rows of glass sarcophagi in a carnival-style museum upstream from Lake Erie. And that's where they stayed for years and years, caught in a bad funeral that threatened to go on until the end of the world.

One of the mummies, you tell me, had his wrappings peeled back so the tourists could see his face and his reddish beard. Another one – the one you're calling your favourite – had thick hair, plaited into long braids, and heaped up like a pillow around her head. You say the body that disturbed you the very most was not really a body at all – just an unattached hand and a foot.

“I never thought of it before, but looking back,” you tell me now, “I don't know why I assumed that hand and foot belonged to the same person. It wasn't like there was anything in the display to prove that they ever did.”

Still, the appendages lay next to each other, under glass, in Canada for over a hundred years. Maybe that was the beginning and the end of their connection. And maybe it was enough.

You don't remember anything in particular about the only mummy mentioned in the news story on the computer today. He's the one found shifted into a mislabelled coffin, resting with his arms crossed high over his chest – just like Tutankhamen and the rest of the desecrated kings. He's the one the archaeologists rescued right out of the “Hall of Freaks” exhibit, years after your visit. They scanned and examined him – centrifuged flakes of his papery skin – until they became almost certain he was truly King Ramses. His fame doesn't make any difference to your memory – you still can't recall a single thing about him.

You just shrug when I question you about King Ramses. “It's because he's completely bald. I was a little girl, remember? At the time, I had been indoctrinated to value everything according to hairdos.”

Now, I've crouched down beside your chair at the computer, looking through a disgusted kind of squint at the online mummy photo gallery. Even on the small, flat screen it's pretty ghastly. Over the images of the mummies, I can see my own face reflected in the glare of the screen – dark and ghostly and pinched. “Tell me again how old you were when your parents took you to see these guys in person?”

You do some kind of math on your fingertips before you answer. “Nine.”

“And all your younger brothers were there with you?”

“Yup.”

“That means Troy would have been…”

“Three years old.”

I don't know how the parenting choices our mothers and fathers made under the influence of the I'm-OK-You're-OK ethos of our childhoods can still surprise me, but sometimes, they do.

“That reminds me.” You're turning away from me, back to the light of the screen. “They had a mummified baby exhibited there too. Let's see if we can find him.”

But I'm reaching for your hand, knocking it away from where it curves over the computer mouse. “That's enough,” I'm saying in my Dad-voice. “You're going to give yourself nightmares again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is exactly like the time we stayed up late watching that online slide show of the Holy Catholic Incorrupt Saints.”

I know you remember those pictures – all those bodies unearthed and dressed up and laid out in shrines at cathedrals and monasteries. The captions on the slide show claimed the bodies of the saints' smell like flowers or honey, and they aren't really rotting. But I can see as well as any pilgrim and – I hate to sound disrespectful but – I don't know, I guess there must be lots of different ways not to rot.

Still, I know you remember Clare of Montefalco with the image of a cross burnt into her heart muscle. And Saint Sylvan with his head thrown back and his throat still slit. And Zita who lies there in her fancy dress without any of the usual wax coverings to obscure the view of how her skin has turned black all over her face and hands. Then there's that saint lying incorrupt in Winnipeg, not quite a thousand miles from here. We could drive there and see his shrine ourselves – even though they admit some of his toes have fallen off by now.

We saw all those pictures of the Incorrupt Saints just hours before you spent the night dreaming nothing but nightmares. We watched their images flick by on this same computer screen in our basement. The slide show was five minutes long, the soundtrack was an Eastern Orthodox funeral chant, and it was almost over by the time you finally turned and asked me, “How in the flaming heck did we come to be looking at this?”

And now that we've found the Saints' heathen cousins in the digital photos of the Niagara Falls mummies, you're shoving me out of the way so you can see them better, pulling the plastic mouse right off the desk so I can't take it away from you. “No, I will not be scared. This is not scary, Brigs. This is different. This is my childhood.”

“I know you honestly don't think you'll be scared now, but in a few hours you'll be waking me up doing that thing where you moan out loud in your sleep like a frightened little girl. It freaks me out. And then I have to shake you awake and bring you back and tell you it was just a dream. I hate it. It's too – sad.”

You've never heard it yourself – that sound you only make when you're asleep. You don't know it's the worst thing I've ever heard.

So you keep struggling with me, trying to click on the links to rest of the gallery, looking for that mummified baby boy. We tangle until you're on your feet, out of your chair. It falls over, backwards, onto the floor. And you're scream-laughing and making ridiculous threats at me as I grab at you. We're down on the floor and I'm growling with my mouth pressed to the side of your face, hot-breathed and wishing the boys were already in bed.

The boys – they know a crash means a good time and they come running at the sound of the chair clattering onto the hard floor. They're capering, laughing, ready to fight for or against either of us. Scottie, our biggest boy, leads them, of course. He's the first of them to come careening into the basement, advancing with all the noise of someone spilling a bundle of yard tools down the stairs.

There's just an instant left before we know they'll tumble past the turn-around in the staircase and get to where they can see everything – you and me, breathless and flushed, and the mummies, all dry and brown. We're pulling apart now, getting to our feet, rushing against the boys' coming, the both of us standing at the desk again. I plant myself in front of the monitor, moving to block their view so all they'll see will be the back of my T-shirt. You're thrashing at the wires and keys, desperate to shut it all down, to cut the power to this ancient, worn-out kind of death, burnt in bright liquid light across the screen.