Memento Mori

Timothy Reilly

“I’m looking through you, where did you go?”
–Lennon and McCartney

‘Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost:
we are cut off for our parts‘
–Ezekiel 37:11

for Jo-Anne

Peter Driscoll was left in the waiting room with the x-rays of his right arm.  The negatives, illuminated from behind, looked, from where he sat, like the milky exposures of deep-space objects—nebulae or radio galaxies or quasars or some other cosmic phenomenon.  Upon closer examination, however, the x-rays revealed their actual target: the bones of a human arm.  And it seemed to be a perfectly normal arm—for a skeleton.  So how could a doctor look at these same ghostly images and read the ominous signs of disease and doom?
…..Arthritis, thought Peter.  What would arthritis look like?  Or cancer?
…..He stared closely at the x-rays and noticed the faintest nimbus where the flesh should be.  The scrutiny produced in him a disturbing and curiously familiar sensation of being outside of time: as if he were examining his own fossil remains.  The sensation reminded him of when he was a small boy; how he would go into the hall closet with a hand mirror and flashlight, push his way through a forest of heavy jackets, and hang the mirror on a bent nail at the back of the closet.  Looking into the mirror, he would put the flashlight on a pivot to his chin, and, pointing the light upward, vary his features with shadows.  After awhile, the mirrored image would become a separate entity, and Peter would run from the closet: before the reflection could speak . . . or grab him.
…..In childhood, Peter felt the tug of large opposing forces in the universe.  He knew he was being watched.  He perceived with terror a conspiracy under his nighttime bed.  During the day, he would often catch sight of sneering faces, imprisoned in gnarled tree trunks. A pending threat of complete erasure came with the hydrogen bomb: cocked with a hair trigger, between God and the Devil.  By gentle contrast, the changing face of the moon and the songs of birds and insects comforted him—as did the clop of shoes in church and the mechanical sounds from old clocks.
…..The doctor entered the room with the stagy glee of a game show host. He was a lanky man, somewhere in his forties, and looked as if he had played basketball before entering med school.  His bushy hair was completely and prematurely white, and had the windswept look one gets from riding in an expensive red convertible.
…..“Sorry for the wait,” he crooned.  He almost jogged to the x-rays and consumed their meaning in about ten seconds.   He then turned to Peter.  “I’m Doctor Fouts,” he said, shaking his patient’s troubled limb.  In a lower tone he added:  “I’m the Bone Doctor.”  He glanced at Peter’s chart.  “So.  Tell me about your sore arm, young man.”
…..Peter was halfway through his fifty-eighth year, and did not consider himself old enough to be condescendingly referred to as “young man”—but he had noticed it happening more and more.  He began to explain his problem to the doctor, but before he could finish two sentences, the doctor grabbed back his right hand and turned it like a doorknob.
…..“That hurt?” the doctor asked.
……Peter opened his mouth to answer . . .
…..The doctor made a sharp twist in the opposite direction.  “How ‘bout this way?”  he said.  He then gouged his thumb—hard—into the flesh below Peter’s elbow.  “I’ll bet that reallyhurts,”
…..Had Peter been given the opportunity to respond, he would have answered in the affirmative: three times, with ascending terraced dynamics.
…..“Well, here’s the news, young man,” said Doctor Fouts.  “Are you ready?  It’s like when you take a car in because it’s making a noise (?).  You think it could be something serious, but it turns out to be only something rattling around in your glove box.”  He lowered his face to look Peter directly in the eyes.  “What you have is tennis . . . elbow.  No big deal.”
…..“I don’t play tennis,” said Peter.
…..“Don’t need to—it’s just the origin of the term.  Have you recently done any kind of exercise with your right arm?”
…..“I use a baton to conduct my band and orchestra classes.”
…..“Bingo: repetitive motion.  It really doesn’t take that much.  As we get older, you know, the parts start to wear out.  It’s easier to get injured.  That’s life, young man.”
…..On his way home from the doctor’s, Peter’s eleven year old car overheated in front of a Big Lots store. Parts start to wear out.  He called the Automobile Club, and in exactly twenty minutes, as promised, a man arrived in a white tow truck.  The tow truck driver climbed out from his cab carrying a metal clipboard and paperwork.  He was a young man, mid-twenties, with a fly-like appearance: wrap-around sunglasses and spiky lacquered hair, revealing the pale contour of his scalp.  He stared at Peter for moment, a cigarette dangling from his lips like a movie gangster.
…..“I know you,” he said, nodding gravely, as if he recognized Peter from a Wanted Poster.
…..Peter waited, not knowing how to respond.
…..“You’re Mr. Driscoll.”
…..“That’s right,” said Peter.  “I’m the one who called.”
…..“No.  I mean, you’re Mr. Driscoll: my old junior high band teacher.”
…..Peter squinted at the young man’s face, trying to transpose it backwards.
…..“I’m Jason.  Jason Bliss.  I used to play tenor sax.”
…..“Of course,” said Peter, without the slightest recollection.  “Tenor sax.”
…..“Wow,” said Jason.  “You changed.  I almost didn’t recognize you . . .  no offense.”  He flashed a snide grin.  “So: you retired or what?”
…..Peter’s first instinct was to reprimand his former student—teach him something about manners—but time had stripped him of that authority. “Well, Jackson—”
…..“Jason.”
…..“Jason.  No, I’m not retired. But one thing you can count on is the fact that we all get older.”
…..“Yeah,” said Jason, dragging on his cigarette, taunting his old teacher by smoking in front of him with impunity.  “You’re born, you live, you die.”  He cocked back his head and blew skyward a defiant plume of smoke.
…..Jason’s graveyard flippancy exhumed the memory of one Willy Jackson: a vision of Jason as he will be.  Willy was a neighborhood character from Peter’s late teens and early twenties.  He was an American archetype—a so-called “Grease Monkey” or “Garage Troll”—from which the more heroic and savory Fonzie Myth would arise.  He was a chain-smoking, leathery faced man, with a nose the size of an acorn, who had the odd habit of greeting people with a grunted release of smoke and a simian-like face blink.  He was a WWII vet, had never married, and, although gorged with middle-aged bitterness, had something disturbingly juvenile about him.  Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and onward to the end of his life, he sported the coif of an Eisenhower-era teenage thug (greasy fenders and a duck’s ass), and decorated his garage walls with pictures of nude women and automobiles.  Whenever mortality entered a conversation, Willy would automatically observe, in gravelly Lucky Strike timbre, “Ain’t nobody gets outta here alive.”
…..He died horribly from lung cancer: in unbearable pain and with a look on his face expressing sadness and a heart-wrenching fear of what he could or could not see lying ahead.
…..Jason opened the engine hood and told Peter to start-er up. While the engine was running, Jason squeezed the radiator hose and instantly concluded: “Thermostat.  Nothing serious.”
…..Peter rode with Jason as his car was towed to his regular repair shop.  His trustworthy mechanic, a soft spoken Southerner named Larry, agreed with the thermostat diagnosis.  “No big deal,” he drawled. “She’ll be ready to roll in about an hour.”
…..When Jason opened the door to re-enter his tow truck, Peter, noticing a skateboard behind the driver’s seat, was compelled to voice a warning about the undisputed perils of smoking cigarettes.
…..“I ain’t worried,” Jason said.  “I’ll quit when I’m forty.  And besides: by the time I’d get cancer, there’ll be a cure for it.”
…..Peter thanked Jason for his assistance and wished him luck in his life’s pursuits.
…..Peter had been teaching instrumental music for over thirty years.  His wife, Mae, had been teaching college literature courses for nearly as long.  Retirement—a foreign word, formerly reserved for “others”—was now something they both were in line to confront.  But the R-Word bothered Peter far more than it bothered Mae.  And it wasn’t the usual apprehension of what to do after the day-to-day routine of regular employment ended (for years both Mae and Peter had been cultivating lives outside their respective careers), but rather the fact that Peter considered retirement to be the next-to-last stamp on the Right of Passage dance card.  And, as in his childhood, he was again seeing foreboding signs everywhere: baggers at supermarkets offering to help him out to the car with his groceries; retail stores, theaters, and restaurants applying senior discounts without his asking.  People calling him “young man.”
…..“The doctor wants to shoot my arm with cortisone,” Peter told Mae.  “He says my parts are wearing out.  I’m getting older.”
…..“Did you tell him where he could stick his cortisone needle?” said Mae.
…..“I should’ve.  Instead I told him I’d have to think about it.”  Peter shook his head.  “Doctors have become dope-pushers.  They want to keep us stoned and dependent and technically alive, so they can legally milk our wallets.  They’re all agents of the pharmaceutical companies.  They’re in cahoots.”

* * *

The following day, Peter guided his band class through their usual warm-up routine: a familiar trek up and down a B-flat major scale, in the mathematical progression of whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and ragged staccato eight notes (quarter note equals 60; mezzo forte).  He next attempted to tune them on the even tone of his most stable clarinetist.  Though still a little jolting, the band’s overall intonation was a vast improvement from its primal honks and squeals.  Now, enough of the members sustained a semblance of good intonation, occasionally finding their niche in the vertical glimmer of a triad’s natural harmonics.
…..Peter told the band to take out the arrangement of Bach’s Komm Süsser Todd. The trombone section recycled their well-worn joke title, “Come Scissor Toad,” but few others laughed.  While Peter waited for the band to take out their music, a boy unknown to him walked up to the podium and produced a handgun and pointed it directly at Peter’s stomach.  The boy’s face was frozen between grimace and grin—his glassy eyes staring through his victim—as he held the pistol in that sideways gang-banger fashion, popular in movies and video games.
…..“Die, old man,” the boy blurted, in the angry yelp of a pubescent male.  He pulled the trigger to a dull click.  Nothing.  He looked at the weapon as if reading the ingredients on a can of soup, then walked calmly out the door, fidgeting with what appeared to be a jammed semi-automatic mechanism.
…..For a moment, the band-room’s inhabitants were like fossilized insects in amber. Then Peter realized that he was the one in charge, and activated his cloudy recollection of the Lockdown Procedure—securing exits, phoning the office . . . what next? what next? Soon a piercing bell rang out in regular bursts of three.  After around forty-five minutes of being huddled in the band room, an unbroken tone signaling “All Clear,” and the students filed out, leaving their unpacked instruments on their disordered chairs.
…..The parking lot was filled with anxious parents and obnoxious media.  Peter somehow slipped past all of them, but was cornered by a policeman gathering information.  After Peter conveyed his part of the drama, the police officer informed him that the gun-toting boy had been wrestled to the ground by security.  No one was seriously injured.
…..When Peter returned home, Mae went to his arms in tears.  “Thank God you’re safe,” she said.  He assured her that he was indeed safe.  After they both calmed down, he described his ordeal.
…..“Remember those old Universal Monster movies?” he said.  “They scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.  But even so, I couldn’t believe how stupid the victims in those movies were.  Why didn’t they just run?  Frankenstein was really slow.”  Peter stared at the floor as if he could see the reanimated corpse slugging through the carpet threads.  “But now I understand,” he continued.  “Because I froze.  I could have poked his eye out with my baton.  Or kicked him in the nuts.  But I didn’t do anything; I just stood there like an idiot.”
…..“Who was he?” asked Mae.
…..“That’s just it.  I don’t know.  He was a student—but not one of mine.  Looked like a typical kid: like one of those Japanese comic book characters.”
…..For dinner that evening, Peter and Mae had Stouffer’s lasagna.  Peter felt bloated afterwards and chewed some Tums and turned on the television to watch the news headlines.
…..FEMALE NEWSCASTER: “Some scary moments at a local middle school, when a student, armed with a gun, threatens teachers and students.”
…..MALE NEWSCASTER: “It’s all in the mind. Neurologists claim to have located a region in the brain that triggers the belief in God.”
…..FEMALE NEWSCASTER: “Could drinking red wine be the secret of long life?”
…..MALE NEWSCASTER: “Hmmm, sounds good to me.  Also, sports and the latest in weather, with our very own award-winning meteorologist: Skip Dominquez.”

Obnoxious music, split-screen collage of recent disasters, pharmaceutical commercial. . . .

…..Peter awoke at midnight with a bullet-sized pain radiating in the exact region the boy had pointed the gun.  He suspected food poisoning—or something psychosomatic.  But as the pain increased in area and intensity, his unspoken suspicions turned to heart attack.  By 12:45 he was writhing on the floor like a hooked worm, and Mae decided to drive him to the hospital emergency.
…..The pain lasted about three hours, as Peter lay on a table waiting to be examined.  Just when he thought he could stand it no longer, the pain started to retreat in a shape that was a mirrored opposite of its attack.   About this time a doctor came in to examine Peter.   He pressed Peter’s stomach, thumped it like a watermelon, and listened to his heart.  He then removed his stethoscope and said, “Maybe gall stone.”  His accent appeared to be Russian or Transylvanian.   “Is okay now.  Jus no eat pizza.”
…..Peter avoided pizza completely, but the pain returned in three days: precisely at midnight.  He told Mae he would be alright, but that she should not follow him into the living room, where he would “ride it out” alone.  He dreaded what awaited him.  A full moon shone through the window, casting a skeletal shadow from the bare branches of a peach tree, evoking yet another Universal movie monster: The Wolfman.  Peter could now empathize with the torment suffered by Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.); the fear of having to go through this horrible transformation, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
…..He had two more attacks before going to see one of his HMO doctors. After an ultrasound confirmed the presence of “multiple gall stones,” he was scheduled for laparoscopic surgery.  His advising doctor told him he’d be in and out the same day.  No big deal.
…..“But do they have to take out my gall bladder?” said Peter.  “Couldn’t they just remove the stones?”
…..“Sure,” said the doctor.  “But the stones would only come back. And if you don’t act on this pretty soon, it can get dangerous.  It can affect your pancreas and liver—you could even die from it.”
…..“But how can I live without a gall bladder?”
…..“It’s just a drip system.  Honestly, I don’t know why we even have one.  And think of this, young man: afterwards, you’ll be able to eat whatever you want.”  The doctor’s wide grin revealed a gap from a missing tooth.

On the morning of his operation, Peter stood in the hospital foyer staring intently at his wife’s face.  The two of them pledged each other love then shifted abruptly to dry humor, in an attempt to cushion the gravity of the situation.
…..“I’ll be waiting for you right there,” said Mae, pointing to a blue vinyl couch.  “I’ll grade a few papers and then you’ll be ready to go home.  We’ll have pizza.”
…..Peter turned and walked stoically down a long corridor, feeling like one of the early astronauts: about to be strapped into a tiny capsule above a massive and volatile rocket, with even odds for a successful liftoff.  He went to the check-in area where a hospital worker asked him to sign a stack of forms.  As he read through the forms, he noticed the recurring themes of death, disfigurement, and a few other surgical mishaps.  The hospital worker began drumming her acrylic nails on the countertop.  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Driscoll?” she asked.
…..“I’m reading the forms before I sign them.”
…..“Most people just sign them.”  She breathed loudly through her nose.  “Look: there’s nothing to worry about; you’re going in for a routine procedure.”
…..“It says right on the forms that I should read them before I sign them.”
…..The hospital worker clucked her tongue and sighed. “Most people just sign them.”
…..Peter noticed boxes indicating religious preference.  Although he hadn’t set foot in a church in years, he checked the box for Catholic.  He remembered how in his thirties, he had jokingly referred to himself as a “devout deathbed Catholic.”  The joke didn’t seem so funny any more.  People die from face-lifts and tooth extraction.  There was no such thing as a “routine procedure”—laparoscopic or otherwise.
…..He was next taken to a room to prepare for the operation.  A nurse came in to give him a hypodermic.  “This is to help you to relax,” she said.
…..“I’m okay,” Peter said.  “I’m relaxed.  I don’t need a tranquilizer.”
…..The nurse continued undeterred.  “It’s just to relax you,” she reiterated.
…..After Peter was “relaxed,” he was wheeled on a gurney to a limbo-like corridor crowded with other tabled patients waiting for surgery.  A deep voice from a nearby radio reported, with displaced urgency, that Venus may collide with the Earth in 3.5 billion years.  What the hell are we supposed to do with that information? thought Peter.  It reminded him of his father’s scoffing at the idea of digging Fallout Shelters, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
……“What’s the point?” his father had said.  “Do they think a little hole in the ground is going to protect them from an H-bomb?  I’d rather go up like a Roman candle than crawl in a pit and wait to die of radiation.”
…..Peter’s mother took a different approach.  She told him not to worry:  God would never allow any old Khrushchev the power to end the world.
……“But Khrushchev doesn’t believe in God,” Peter said, with a sense of despair beyond his 12 years.
…..Soon, the corridor thinned-out to Peter’s lone presence, and an anesthesiologist approached his gurney.  He was a middle-aged Asian man, with a kind face and the gentle manners of a priest administering Extreme Unction.  He spoke English haltingly but with precision—listing first the chemicals he would use to put Peter under.  He then instructed him on what to expect as he went under, and what to expect when he awoke in another room.
…..When Peter was wheeled into surgery, he felt at peace.  But he wondered whether his serenity came from whatever it was the nurse had injected into his bottom, or if it was at least in part a product of his own doing. He recited in his head a jumbled Act of Contrition, an Our Father, and what he could remember of the Apostle’s Creed.  He was relaxed.  He was unafraid when masked people scurried about him as if he were a racecar in a pit stop—shaving him, painting him, poking him with needles, taping electrodes to his body.  He looked up at their hovering featureless faces.  He wondered what they were thinking between their murmurings. Do they believe that God is a mere flicker in the temporal lobe?  Do they believe that Venus will collide with the Earth in 3.5 billion years?  Does anyone really believe—deep down—that Human Existence ever meets a full stop?
…..COUNT BACKWARDS FROM ONE HUNDRED
…..Peter heard his own voice coming from a distance.  He felt as if he were pushing through a closet of thick jackets: toward some music or reflection or whatever comes next.

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→EMPRISE 16