Invidia

 
As Pauline fed the rusty wire through her needle, she examined her patient, a man wearing black loafers and a navy blue suit, and sighed. She’d only be able to fix one of his trespasses during her procedure, though she supposed it was the more important of the two. She’d leave someone “up there” to deal with this man’s inability to match the right shoe with the right suit. Pauline smiled dryly at her joke and gave the wire a quick tug to make sure it was attached securely to the needle before placing it in the oversized pocket of her yellow apron.
        Pauline cocked her head to the side, narrowed her eyes, and took a step closer to her patient. Her footstep echoed heavily through the space and Pauline rolled her eyes. The echo wasn’t scientifically possible. She knew this because she knew that literally nothing existed beyond the eight-foot circumference of the harsh medical lighting.
        Once, between procedures, Pauline had stepped outside of the circle of light and simply dissolved. She’d felt it, felt her molecules begin to dissipate until she imagined herself the foam on top of a freshly-poured glass of root beer. When she floated back into the light, she reassembled and vowed never to leave it again. There was no point. There was nothing beyond the ring of light but the promise of an unsettling shift in being. Besides, she was dead, she had a debt to pay, and if she ever wanted to ascend, she needed to concentrate on her work.
        Pauline took two small steps toward the man on the table, which were accompanied by booming echoes.
        “Honestly,” she said, her voice also reverberating off of nothing, “I don’t need the ambience. It doesn’t make me comfortable; it makes me twitchy. And when I’m working on eyelids, I’m pretty sure you want my hands to be steady.”
        Pauline waited a moment, staring out into the darkness about her, and then took another step. Silence greeted her like an old friend. She smiled and gave a single nod out to the darkness, a thank you.
        Pauline approached the man on her table and licked her cracked lips.
        “Let’s see what we’ve got today,” she said, placing a hand over the man’s beating heart and closing her eyes.
        She saw the woman’s hips first, clothed in a skirt with a houndstooth pattern. The hips curved swiftly into two long legs, toned and resolute, the product of taking the stairs instead of the elevator at work. The woman’s hair was the color of birch and framed her face like a helmet. When she laughed, it sounded like coins falling into a pond. On her left hand, a modest but beautiful diamond sat on a band of platinum. The ring’s inscription read, Single soul, two bodies.
        “Aristotle,” Pauline whispered.
        Next, Pauline saw the man on her table smiling and talking. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she knew he was talking to her, to the woman in the houndstooth skirt. He was inviting her to a movie or that new restaurant in Brooklyn or a hike with friends. Pauline knew the invitation sounded innocent but that it was hedged with a dark desire, a desire that involved skin and excuses. The man on her table would pursue the woman, despite the ring on her finger and around her heart, until he had her. What happened next would be messy. They’d brought this man to Pauline just in time.
        Pauline sighed and removed her hand from her patient’s chest.
        “I get it,” she told him. “I do. But women are trouble, especially those that are not yours. I should know.”
        Pauline pulled a small stool out from beneath the table and took a seat. She pressed a button on the side of the table and it lowered with a metallic hiss. She pulled a weathered thumb across each of the man’s eyelids, assessing their thickness and also how easily the skin glided over the eyeballs. Pauline was grateful for his age. The man was somewhere in his 40s, which was good because his skin was starting to slack, starting to wrinkle, starting to separate from tissue and bone. Pauline had learned that taut skin made this procedure more difficult, more time consuming, more tiring. Luckily, that wouldn’t be the case. Pauline would have this man stitched up in half an hour, maybe less, and then he could return to his life with a clear conscience.
        Pauline reached into her apron pocket and retrieved her needle threaded with wire. She examined the length of the wire and determined it was long enough to tend to the man’s right eye, the one closest to her.
        Pauline paused and stared at her hands in the severe lighting. They were so different than they had been in life – worn and compact, as if Pauline’s surgical work had replaced her fingers with cutlery, miniature spoons and forks and dull butter knives. Perhaps cartilage and joints didn’t exist in the afterlife. That had to be it.
        But most of all, Pauline missed her skin. It had been youthful and supple, full of blood and oxygen and life. When others asked the secret to her skin, Pauline claimed it was her diet rich in avocados and salmon, but deep inside, she knew she’d simply gotten lucky with her genes. People both envied and detested Pauline when she was alive because she’d been exquisite. Gentlemen always wanted to kiss her hand. Men without manners wanted to kiss her in other places. There were too many of those types – men without conscience, men with wives, men with deviant ways, men who wanted to conquer something or someone, especially a movie star. And Pauline had let them. She’d allowed her body to be a totem for anyone who wanted to worship it.
        But one day, she’d tripped over her overpriced Louboutins and into a New York manhole. The tabloids reported she’d fallen nearly 20 feet and landed at a grotesque angle, breaking her neck and dying instantly. What the public didn’t know is that Pauline had, in fact, fallen past the bottom of the manhole, past the creaky, old sewer lines, past the ancient earth packed beneath mankind, and into this hospital room for two.
        It had taken Pauline nearly a week to accept that she was dead. She kept telling herself it was an elaborate hoax; someone had locked her in a gruesome movie studio. And yet she was terrified to leave the circle of light from that single bulb that never flickered, never went out. She no longer required sleep and simply stared into the darkness. When no one came to retrieve her, Pauline began to grow numb. And worst yet, restless. When a voice like the ocean offered her work in exchange for redemption, she accepted it readily, eager to busy her idle hands and redeem her wicked ways.
        She’d learned needlework technique from a voice in the shadows that sounded like her mother. She’d practiced on herself, opening her own skin and sewing it closed again. At least there was no blood, only a clear jelly-like substance that oozed out and then hardened. You could peel it off when it dried the way small children peeled paste off their hands when their teacher wasn’t looking. Beneath Pauline’s chaste, white shift and yellow apron, her body was a patchwork of her past, nearly every inch opened and then closed again, held together by rusted wire. She missed her skin.
        Pauline heard a creak in the darkness, like a door opening on old hinges.
        “Yes, yes, I know,” she whispered into the darkness. “I have other patients waiting.”
        With her left hand, Pauline pinched the skin of the man’s right eyelid between her thumb and pointer finger. Her right hand floated over the man’s face and then the needle dipped to pierce the skin. Pauline’s hands moved with the rhythm of an old blues song, smooth and steady, as she stitched the man’s eye closed. His broken skin oozed the way that Pauline’s did during her training, but it didn’t faze her. She continued her work. Five minutes later, the right eye was finished and Pauline smiled at her craftsmanship.
        She stood, flexing her hands and circling her wrists. She pulled the stool around the surgical table and took a seat on the man’s left side to tend to his other eye. She rethreaded her needle with another length of wire. Again, she pinched, and again, she sewed, her deft hands working independently from the rest of her body.
        When Pauline cut the last length of wire with a cutter, the man’s eyes looked like they’d been stapled shut, the metal of the wire glinting dully beneath the single fluorescent bulb. Pauline placed her needle back in the front pocket of her apron, rubbed her palms together, and sighed. She waited until the ooze had hardened and then peeled if off the man’s face like a mask.
        “Almost done,” Pauline whispered to the man.
        She again approached the body and placed her palms over the man’s newly-sewn shut eyes. She closed her own and said in a clear voice, “Neither shall you desire anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
        Pauline’s visions began again. She saw the man in his navy blue suit and black loafers pass by the woman in the houndstooth skirt with nothing more than a half-hearted wave. She saw the woman in the houndstooth skirt with her husband, smiling happily and rubbing her stomach, a child on the way. She saw the man meet a new woman in the grocery store, one without a ring on her finger and a love for mystery novels.
        Pauline opened her eyes, removed her hands from her patient, and said, “Trust me. It will be better this way.”