“Hey Molly, look. It’s the guy in the green trench coat again.”
“Anybody figure out why he’s here all the time yet?”
“No, as far as I know nobody has ever gotten the chance to talk to him. Oh!! Shhh!! He looked this way…”
The whispered conversations are always the same, especially at the hospitals. Everybody remembers the jacket and my gender but never anything else about me. I guess that’s how this job works…how my life, if you can call it that, works. Nobody really sees me once I get past a certain point. Sure I catch a quick glance here and there, they see me out of the corners of their eyes, but those are usually the people I’ll be seeing soon anyway.
The elevator on the way to the sixth floor is packed but I have a comfortable bubble of space. I know that nobody even suspects that I’m there, but for some reason they can’t seem to force themselves into the spot I occupy. This is fine for me I don’t like being too close to anybody for too long…the indifference and my near invisibility get to me after awhile.
I know how this will work. I’ll walk down the hallway, electronically locked doors will open for me, nurses will move gurneys right before I walk into them, grieving families will weep harder and doctors will lose hope. My movement through the hallways will flutter papers, drapes and clothing the same as anybody else, but nobody sees me for more than a split second, well, nobody besides the person I’m there to see.
I look at the slip of paper in my hand. It’s a simple post it note with the name ‘Ivy Marlutta’ written with a refined hand. There’s no room number written on the paper and yet I know exactly what floor she’s on and what room she’s in. The door opens when I face it.
The room has two beds. One is empty. One is occupied by an elderly lady with hair that looks as if it’s been white for a very long time. She is resting peacefully in her bed when I come in, her fragile chest rising and falling with each breath she takes. There’s a chair in the corner that’s occupied by a younger man; he’s 42, the woman’s son and he just lost his own two kids to a car accident. His wife is interred in the psychiatric ward of the hospital on the eighth floor. He’s wide awake. His face has too many lines for someone of his age, it’s hardened and grooved in a way that tells me more of the man’s story than I wish to know. I already know a few things about his tragedies, I always know a few things about the tragedies. The man has lived hard and has no more tears to cry. He knows his mother isn’t far from a natural death. She’s older. One hundred and three years old to be exact. Her birthday is in two days. She’ll never reach it.
The man never sees me enter the room. He didn’t notice the door opening or the rustling of the privacy curtains as I walked to the foot of Ivy’s bed. I look down at him for a few minutes. He’s determined to wait out the inevitable. I can see the heavy bags hanging under his eyes from loss of sleep but I also see the grim and almost manic sense of apprehension. Even though I stare at him for a few long minutes the man never notices me, never takes his eyes of his mother’s sleeping face. This is how it always is.
I turn on my heel and the moment my eyes meet the face of Ivy Marlutta her eyes snap open. Her son doesn’t seem to register that she has woken up, I glance back at him and he’s still staring at her as if she were asleep and he could fight off her impending death with his glare. Ivy takes me in with icy blue eyes that still have a defiant glint to them. Finally, after a few minutes of staring straight into my face, she smiles warmly and seems to relax.
“I see,” she says in a loud, clear voice that rings around the room like a command. Her son doesn’t seem to hear her. They never do. “It’s time to go then. Too bad, I was hoping to make it to 104 but you’re the boss…just this one time.”
I’ve never been the boss, I tell her this.
“Oh really? If you’re not the boss then who is? If you don’t mind the last few questions of a dying old woman.”
I assure her I have all the time in the world and then I show her the post it note with her name written on it. She laughs for a long time. I’m not surprised.
“So this is it huh? This is how we’re chosen? Ah the lord must be a woman, no man has handwriting that fine.”
I tell her I have no idea, I’ve never seen the ‘boss’ but that yes, this is how I know where to go every morning.
She studies me for what seems an eternity before saying “You’re more handsome then I thought you would be. I was always sure you’d be some apparition of incredible horror.” I smile at this. “Oh and you can smile too, that means that it’s not all business with you is it?” I stare at this old woman thoughtfully. She’s right, it’s not all business. I only get one note a day and then I spend the rest of the day wandering wherever my will takes me. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve been shocked and disgusted to the point of retching. I eat and drink as a compulsion and I awake every morning in a bed.
“You’re more human than I thought you would be.” The dying woman says as she reaches her hand toward me. Suddenly I don’t want to take it; I don’t want to deliver this woman into the arms of the afterlife when she’s so close to making it to one hundred and four years. I don’t want to take her away from the son sitting behind me who has been through too much tragedy already. She must have seen the sudden aversion spread across my face; a mask of doubt and agony. If anything, her insistence that I take her hand grew stronger.
“It’s okay, I’m ready. One hundred and three years is long enough for anybody and I’m just sitting here wasting away in this bed when I could be exploring the vastness of whatever comes next.”
I swallow hard; something about this woman has been different from others. Sure most of them had questioned me and went easily. But it was almost as if she understood more than she should have about death, about life…about me. I slowly take her outstretched hand in mine. I see her mouth the words ‘thank you’ before I hear the heart monitor flat line. I lay her hand at her side and slowly straighten up. Turning around I see her son. Strangely enough, relief has spread across his face with a slight hint of sorrow. The woman must have been in pain for him to be relieved at her death. I look into his eyes and the briefest of reflections of myself gives me a shock. There are tears streaming down my face.
The trip out of the hospital was the opposite of the trip up to the room. The farther I got from the old woman’s room, the more people started noticing me until I was finally on the street and people were apologizing for bumping into me. I felt like sleeping. Laying my head down and waking thousands of years later when I wasn’t quite so confused. I still don’t understand what the old lady had done to me. Ever since the day I started doing this, the day I received the first note under the door and knew exactly where to go, I had always thought of myself as different from everybody else. Not exactly human. But the old lady had said I was more human than I thought. It was those words I can’t get out of my head.
The moment she had said it, something had swirled through my head, a blurry image of a man in a cap and gown surrounded by a hundred or so other people who were likewise clad. The man was smiling. The thought had faded from my mind but burst forth unhindered once I was outside of the hospital. I had all day to think about it before I would wake up the next day.
I still remember that first morning I woke up. The room was dark save for the single ray of light that slithered lazily across an old wooden floor and highlighted a slip of paper that rested partially underneath a battered metal door. I woke up in blue jeans and a maroon t-shirt. Across the room I could see a single coat hanging on a battered old coat hanger. It was an old green trench coat and the sight of it sent something buzzing in the back of my head, something I could just barely remember and then the feeling was gone and it was just another coat.
There was a paltry meal of slightly warm eggs, bacon and coffee sitting on the table in the middle of the room. The table was in an equally bad state of repair as the rest of the room. The paint was peeling off of the walls and where there was wallpaper I could see water stains that were dark brown with age. Instinctively I got out of the cold, damp bed and ate the meal set out before me. I can’t remember if I was hungry, I’m not sure if I really do get hungry. I eat when there is food in front of me, I suspect it’s more of a compulsion than an actual need. I finished the coffee and went into the bathroom.
The lid to the tank of the toilet was broken in half and one half of it was lying on the floor. The cold water knob on the sink was missing but I didn’t care, I used the hot water and scrubbed my face. The man who stared back from the spider web cracked mirror looked haggard with long brown hair that hung down to his shoulders in stringy clumps. My eyes were a grayish haze as if I had woken up from a very long sleep. The shower was disgusting but I got into it anyway and washed what felt like years of grime off of my body. Finally, showered and clothed, I walked back out into the main room. I looked at the note on the floor. There was some writing on it written with a very steady hand.
As soon as I picked up that little slip of paper I felt a buzzing in the back of my head and suddenly I knew exactly what I was and what I was here to do. I knew my job, I knew what it entailed, I knew my limitations and how people would treat me when I was close to achieving the goal for the day. I never found out if I had a name. Maybe I had one at some point, but it was lost to me then and still is.
The name on the paper was Erin Colier. She was eighteen and had just recovered from a broken leg two weeks ago. She was just then starting to get her running legs back and had decided to take a short jog in the morning to loosen her stiff muscles. I was to meet her in half an hour. I don’t know what made me think I had to do this, but there was never any question as to whether or not I would go. I put on the trench coat, opened my front door, stepped out into an equally run down hallway and followed the hallway until it came to a door that opened up into a large city.
It was early morning and the only activity on the main drag was delivery trucks preparing businesses for daytime operation. There was a haze in the air, a thick fog that prevented me from seeing all the way up or down the four lane road but I knew where I was going. I walked for ten minutes, took a right onto Aberdeen Street and waited at the corner. A man walked by me and said hello with enthusiasm that I knew would be killed by a hard day of moving crates of fish all day. A young woman of 25 passed me and did a double take as if she had just seen me, nodded curtly and quickly walked away. Another man walked by soon after that and though he looked right where I was standing, it was as if I was invisible to him, he was looking straight through me and never acknowledged that I was there. After he passed out of visibility I heard footsteps that were too quick to be walking and I knew that it was time.
Out of the fog appeared a girl who looked no more than eighteen. She wore tight black running pants and a tie-dyed tank top. She was attractive by the standards of the day but I paid that no mind, I’ve no feeling for human attraction. As she jogged closer I could see the pain on her face, but also the stead fast determination to get her body back to where it was before she broke her leg. She broke it during a track meet. She was a star at her school, with a full ride to an ivy league school that her parents would never have been able to afford. She had worked hard and had avoided most of the things that make growing up fun, focusing instead on working towards a better life in the future.
She was looking straight through me but I knew all I had to do was stand there. She got closer and I could see the limp as she ran, the pain it was causing her to struggle forward. The only thing I could think was that she was only another minute away from resting peacefully wherever it was that she was heading. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was nearly in front of me, jogging at a steady, yet labored pace, when she caught sight of me, turned her head towards me just as she stepped into the street. She knew in that very instant what was to come and a pain worse that death swept across her face in that split second before the delivery truck hit her.
Every morning I’ve awoken in the same type of room. I’m not always in the same city or even the same country, but the lodgings and the breakfast are always the same. This morning I awoke and stared at the ceiling for an hour before getting up. My mind was tossing back and forth the image of yesterday that had been brought on by the words of that old woman. The thought of the image reawakened that peculiar buzzing in the back of my head until I got up and ate the breakfast set in front of me. There was work to be done and the buzzing stopped as I stooped down to scoop up the yellow post it note that was slipped underneath the dented metal door of my room.
‘Morte Wallace’ was written in the decadent hand writing. As I stared at the name I realized that something odd was happening. I didn’t know Morte Wallace. I knew he was going to die, I knew how, but I knew nothing other than that. I continued to look at the words on the note to no avail, the man’s personality, age, past events; everything was hidden from me as if my mind was suddenly filled with a dense fog.
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