Orpheus on 10th Street
"Downstairs," she told us.
But a stained sign at the stairwell, sepia colored, informed us that "For security reasons" the stairway was "temporarily closed" and in small print "by order of The City Hospital of New York." We went back to the source.
"Follow the black line," the woman said this time. She spoke without ever looking up from her computer screen. Her face was faintly blue. We followed the black line and gradually the dirty rainbow of paint lines on the floor got thinner: Red--Oncology--to the right; Green--pharmacy--left. The black line brought us to a gray-doored elevator. Inside, a security guard's eyes glanced to the yellow card in my hand and his middle finger punched 5B which mean five levels below, the lowest, and it grew quiet as we sank away from the noise of the multitude on the main floor. The guard glanced surreptitiously from my wife to me. Boredom breeds guessing games.
Below, the elevator door hissed and only the black line remained, leading us to a cramped waiting room crowded by a large Spanish-speaking family, the women noisily crying, the men looking alternately bored and angry. I tried to smile at one guy, but he gave me nothing. We handed an attendant in a dirty lab coat our yellow card, and he went away with it.
"We weren't really friends," my wife whispered. "You told her 'Friends' upstairs."
I opened my mouth but didn't say anything. The room felt too small, hot. The attendant’s squeaking sneakers returned and led us to a smaller chamber with a glass wall.
He was on the other side, lying on a steel gurney, his head uncovered and mouth open. Flecks of blood rested dryly on his lips. I don't know what that was about. They usually hose the body down, I remembered, especially the ones off the street. Then they slap it onto the steel stretcher and cover it with a sheet made of the same brown paper used for drying hands in public rest rooms. They fold back a foot or so of the paper to expose the face before they put it in front of the viewing window. We stared until there was nothing more to be understood.
I thought of that blue-faced computer woman five floors above our heads who had told us to "Follow the black line.” She had also asked if we were next of kin.
"No," we said.
"Relationship to the deceased?"
That was when I had said "Friends." And I had wondered if the woman knew that his body had been found on the street, but she'd just clicked her keyboard and a printer had spit out the little yellow car, "Morgue."
They'd found him on 10th. I wondered aloud if he'd been on his way over.
"I doubt he knew where he was," my wife said. "When did you see him last?"
"Washington Square."
She nodded. "Chess. That was a while ago."
Yes, and months before that I had run into him at the Strand, and once the year or so before--walking around the Village. Long ago, before his decline, we had met at my place staying up late talking about Pound, Cocteau, Simpson--he knew about Dallas Simpson!
Then once he came over, and, I'm sorry, he smelled bad. And I think he might have known he did. I gave him some money.
He never came by any more after that. Still, we did play chess once in a while on those stone tables in the corner of Central Park or on a bench at Washington Square. His hands moved his pieces with grace, capturing my pawns with his in a single move, gently, quickly, barely pausing to think, his eyes flowing over the board, yet, weeks later able to replay the game from memory, revealing my missed possibilities, in a voice tinged with mild regret, here, there, and if I had done this, then this. "If only..."
His long fingers fluttered over the board echoing his analysis as if he were signing to me, a deaf man, but of course he wasn't; I wasn't. He and I were living out lives begun in that past of secrecy and intolerance, where deaf meant alone, where drunk meant funny not sad, or at worst pathetic. Not like today.
The woman upstairs had asked if we'd be the ones disposing of the body.
"No." She typed an "X" in the box next to "at the expense of the City of New York."
"You won't be able to claim the remains, you know."
I could only nod, grateful by now that she wasn't making eye contact. "Follow the black line."
We stood only a short time outside the glass window, his body under the paper, his mouth locked agape revealing his stained, broken teeth. He needed a shave, I thought. His hair was awry in black tufts, stiff looking. I imagined I could see through the paper to where his dead hands lay, and my jaws ached to think of them.