Taps

 
Eight floors up the elevator shaft in the Marvin and Ethel Katzenberg Atrium of University Hospital, and one floor away from the apheresis unit where his stem cells are to be collected for the transplant, the glass elevator comes to a stop.
       It doesn’t stop at the eighth floor, exactly. The eighth floor hits Arnie Jablonsky at about his knees. He can see this through one rectangular panel on the door side. If it were possible to break the heavy glass, he could heave himself up onto the floor, twist sideways, and squirm his way out onto eight. One floor away from nine, where he needs to be, but close enough. He’s not so old and sick he can’t handle one flight of stairs.
       He gives the glass a tentative tap. The sound is deep and dull. Sensing that he has drawn the attention of the other elevator occupants, he shoves his hands in his pockets and laughs a small, embarrassed laugh, then mumbles something about Facilities fixing it soon, for sure. But looking through the glass walls out into the atrium, he sees that the other five elevators have stopped, too. He thinks, six pistons on a broken crankshaft, and they’ll need a mechanic the size of God to fix it.
       Knowing Marge, she’s oblivious that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Somehow, it’s a comfort thinking that she is in the food court hallway eight floors below, yakking at a Great Cookie cashier about how hard it is to drive through rush hour traffic from Finksburg into downtown Baltimore, and then have to figure out how the parking thingie works at the patient parking entrance. How is anybody supposed to know whether you swipe your card or stick it in the slot—and why don’t they have an attendant there to help people, anyway? Don’t they know that patients are sick and have too much on their plates to deal with as it is? Arnie closes his eyes and sees her plain as day, down to her smooth hand with white stuff gunked up in the prongs of her diamond ring, and the smudgy black dots of makeup under her eyes. Funny what comforts.
       So he thinks of his Marge. Marge Jablonski, with a name like a beautiful, drunken slur, waving a white Great Cookie bag full of chocolate chip and raisin oatmeal, and probably some cookie with nuts because she thinks he needs the protein. He pictures her squinting at the name tags on people around her trying to figure out who can answer her questions. She has so many questions. This is probably a good thing most of the time, Arnie thinks, because when he is on the phone or in the exam room with the nurses or coordinators or whatever they are, he can never remember all the questions he needs answers to. Marge does, and she always has that little spiral notebook and pen to jot things down. She takes the tiny notebook out of her purse, props it on her knee, and scribbles away, squinting through her brown hair with three silver hairs boinging away from her head. Arnie knows how many; he counts them. Considering everything, the number of silver hairs on Marge’s head may not be important, but to Arnie it is.
       Somehow, things like this have become more important to him than knowing how many cc’s of this or that or what the chemo letters stand for. That’s Marge’s job, and she’s good at it. So Arnie counts on his Marge to remember, while he thinks of things like how bluish his legs look sticking out of a paper gown in fluorescent light, or if it really matters anymore if he eats sausages with nitrates. Anything but will it hurt, or how many times, or will it work.
       Marge will buy more cookies than either of them can eat. He doesn’t crave sweet stuff as much as he used to, and Marge will say she needs cookies like a hole in the head, but he knows that she needs to do this, to write things down, to buy things. Arnie smiles. When other people smile without any apparent reason—no one talking to them, nothing on a TV or radio—Arnie thinks they may have a few screws loose. He knows that whatever he does in the elevator space is especially noticeable. What else do people have to look at? Nowadays, he’ll take his smiles where he can get them.
       Elevators stop all the time. Arnie can’t think of anyone who doesn’t have a story about getting stuck in one. Eventually, some elevator mechanic gets the message and gets it going again. Hard to miss six stuck elevators, especially when they’re made out of glass. But something about this particular time feels different, deader. If there can be degrees of dead. Dead is dead, right? He doesn’t want to look at the other people on the elevator. He wants to think about Marge and the Great Cookie cookies. He has enough on his shoulders without adding anyone else’s fear. Someone else’s missed appointment, the endless falling dominoes of medical procedures. So he looks past them, through the negative space, to what’s outside.
       Beyond the glass prisms packed with people, everything in the world seems to have run out of fuel. The office lights of the rooms on all nine floors of the atrium have gone out. The techs, the nurses, the receptionists making copies of Blue Cross Blue Shield cards—they’re gone, disappeared in the dark or gone deeper into the hospital halls, though Arnie thinks he sees the ghosts of them in the gray windows, like puffs of smoke. The hanging plants that hung from the atrium walls with splotches of red, probably geraniums since they’re hard to kill, are gray now, too.
       He hears a mechanical squeal, but they remain suspended. No other sounds come from outside. The crash carts and laundry carts and stretchers carting inpatients to Radiology have come to a halt, wheeled to the hallway walls and abandoned. The inpatients, the outpatients—they’re somewhere in-between now. Wherever they are, they are quiet and unseen. Arnie thinks it’s more than just the loss of fluorescent light and mechanical hum. It’s like someone has him by the scruff of his neck and is telling him, “Pay attention.” But the message can’t get through, and anyway, he doesn’t want to hear it. Instead, he looks down at his plaid shirt, belt buckle, and tennis shoes. There is something reassuring in the green and gray patterns, the belt tucked snugly through the belt loops, the tightly tied laces. But false, too. He thinks of what’s inside them all, what would happen if everything came unbuttoned, untied.
       Where is Marge? Arnie doesn’t think she would be afraid. She is never afraid, only pissed off or anxious, and she stays that way until she gets answers. Arnie isn’t afraid for Marge. He smiles again. Marge could get answers from God himself, and she’d write them down, word for word, in her little notebook. Like Moses.
       But she is frustrated with him, and he knows it. She says, “I love you, but you have to pay attention,” and “Two heads are better than one.” Things like that. But when they get off the phone with the doctors, after the jumble of numbers and procedures and flow charts of possibilities through the receivers held to each of their ears, all he can do is lay his cheek against her powdery soft one as if there is only one head between them. He wants her to pay attention for both of them. He has none left to spare.
       His gut hurts. After stabbing a Neupogen needle through his pinched belly flab for a couple of weeks, he’s sore, and even though he’s not looking forward to getting the blood hosed out of him for five or six hours, he wants it over with. He wants the techs to get enough stem cells so that he doesn’t have to stick himself anymore. This is no time to break down; timing is everything here. Inside him, those little red cells are already heading toward the exit. He knows it.
       Above him, a big hand grabs the elevator cable, yanks, then lets go. Then yanks and let go another five or six times, fast. At least, that’s what it feels like. Like he’s being jerked around.
       Then the world rolls below him. A marble, flicked by a thumb.
       Everyone twists around, staring at the others, white faced. No one has fallen. They sag back in on themselves, jingle keys, shift weight from one leg to the other, briefcases and bags from one fist to the other. Arnie notices the other passengers for the first time now, parts of them anyway, nothing that makes sense or is whole yet. The guy in a wheelchair with a knotted trash bag sitting on his wasted legs is humming a hymn. A soldier in a uniform with an empty sleeve stiffens, like maybe he should salute or cross himself. There’s a priest, too, with pink cheeks and that look they all get from too much time in the pulpit. Pink and white like lab mice. He tries making up a joke in his head about a guy standing in an elevator when in walks a priest, a rabbi, and a one-armed man, but somehow a bar joke isn’t the same without the bar.
       High above them, in the atrium dome, something cracks. Plates seem to shift, not only in the metal framework of the dome. Below Arnie, the earth rolls and bumps, a ball bounced by a large, uncareful hand.
       A glass pyramid detaches from the sky and descends floor by floor, past the unseen nurses and carts and gray geraniums, onto the first floor, where it shatters.
       In the elevator, a woman with slits in her dress whispers “shit” and makes soft, high-pitched sounds that she can’t seem to stop in her throat. Arnie wants to pat her, somewhere, but there’s more skin sticking out of the slits than he knows what to do with. A guy with a yarmulke bobby-pinned to his head like Dr. Rapoport looks down his nose at her, then starts tapping away at the number nine on the elevator panel. Tap tap tap, as if his secretary’s voice is suddenly going to come through the panel and tell him that his next patient is now ready in exam room 6. Tap tap tap. Like Dr. Rapoport when he finally makes it to the exam room, when he pokes him and thumps him, after Arnie has waited for two hours in a paper gown with an April 2009 Motor Trend, this guy acts like he has someplace better to be. They all have better places to be.
       Why doesn’t anyone talk? Do they all have a Marge, who talks for them, who asks all their questions?
       Arnie waits until Bobby Pin has stopped tapping the number nine button, then reaches past him to open the metal door on the panel with the phone symbol. He pulls the phone as close to him as he can through all the bunched shoulders, and the empty shoulder sleeve, and stretches his head to meet it. The quiet is even quieter now, he thinks. He listens with his ear pressed to the receiver, and everyone in all six glass elevators of the Marvin and Ethel Katzenberg Atrium of University Hospital seems to listen with him. He wonders how there can be degrees of quiet. Quiet is quiet, right? But there are degrees, he thinks—quiets that aren’t so bad, some that are kind of nice really, like the quiet before everyone yells “surprise,” or the quiet when one cheek rests against another cheek. But there’s a whole long line of quiets after that kind—the quiet when you don’t know the answer, when the ignition cuts out, when you ask what your odds are. He tries to pay attention. He listens now. There’s no sound except the rub of his ear against the receiver. He reaches through the sleeves and puts the phone back in the cradle. “Dead.”
       A voice behind him says, “Not yet,” as if he’s about to apply defibrillator paddles to a bare chest.
       Arnie twists his head toward the voice. It’s Bobby Pin, who pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, something else for him to jab a finger at. And everyone else is doing the same now, Arnie sees. Jabbing, or thumbing the things as if all this is a kid’s video game and some will win and some will lose. This is not how they will win.
       Pink Cheeks, Empty Sleeve, Trash Bag. Slits. Only Arnie’s arms hang at his sides. Marge is the one with the phone.
       There is a low hum, like a faraway train, and then the elevator taps the side of the shaft. Nothing breaks. It’s more like a warning, like when his mother flicked her finger against his arm in church when he squirmed during the sermon. Only a much bigger finger, a much bigger warning.
       Arnie can’t stand this tapping, but he can’t come right out and tell the guy to stop. Something about people who are different religions or colors, or missing parts of themselves, intimidates him. Not that he has a problem with them; he’s just intimidated. So he avoids looking people in the eye who are different.
       He clears his throat and asks the man with the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder, “So how did you lose your arm, anyway?” and the pink-cheeked priest’s smile goes flat. Arnie can tell he’s squeezing the guy’s shoulder, telling him, son, you don’t have to answer that.
       There are enough unanswered questions already now—the electricity gone, the atrium dome shattered on the floor below, the building bucking and buckling—so why not get answers where there are answers.
       Empty Sleeve shrugs off the hand on his shoulder. “Tumor.”
       “Bone?”
       “Yeah. Bone.”
       “So they got it all?” Arnie thinks that if a guy has to lose that much, he’s owed something in return.
       “I don’t know. I’ll never know.”
       Arnie pays attention. The soldier is young enough to be his son, or even grandson, if he’d had one. His scalp shines through his military haircut like a baby’s, and there is sweat where his sideburns should be.  His eyes are blue and the whites are very white, not the tired yellow or red-veined whites of a grown man. His face is hairless. Close shave or chemo?
       He has so many questions. Why is the boy still at attention? Does he think God is a five-star general? Does he think the hospital people will respect him more if wears his uniform? Does he keep it on in the exam room or wear a paper gown like the rest of them? The soldier’s uniform is immaculate, seams exactly where they should be, no crease where it shouldn’t be. The bars and stars shine, not a scratch on them. Arnie thinks that, miraculously, they will stay that way. When all the parts of all of them lie in a heap, those bars and stars will still shine. Why is that?
       “I think they got it all.”
       Empty Sleeve—Arnie erases this name from his thoughts—the young man nods at him and stands straighter.
       The man in the wheelchair still holds his trash bag tightly in his fist. It’s green. Standard Glad tall kitchen bag sort of bag. Arnie needs to know what’s in it. He nods toward the bag. “Valuables?”
       The man’s fist loosens, and the skin in his hand pinks up. Arnie sees all the colors now. The trash bag slides from the man’s lap onto the elevator floor. Whatever was valuable on the first floor or the ninth floor, isn’t now. The priest sinks down beside the man, takes his hand, and lays his cheek against the top of his head. Arnie doesn’t think of lab mice this time.
       Slits hasn’t breathed right for a while now. She seems to be working up to a full-throated scream, but she’s choking on it. She reaches up to where her right breast should be and grasps a handful of pink material. “My breast. They cut off my breast.”
       She screams against the inside of her elbow, but Arnie pulls the arm away, and her scream fills the elevator. The scream is big enough for all of them, so they let it go on and on until it winds down.
       Arnie wraps his arms around Slits, feeling the exposed flesh, and says. “It’s all right.” She is all right. Screamed out now. He lays his cheek against her cheek. He thinks of Slits and her breast somewhere, and all of them with some vital part missing, somewhere else, his Marge and all the answers she has scribbled down in her little notebook. He thinks that now he is paying attention, arranging all the parts into a whole, making as much sense of it as he can. She would like that.
       Again, there is that low hum outside, a train coming for them. A squeal of metal cable grating against metal cable, and a snapping, wire by wire. The intake of all their breaths. The letting go.