Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl
by Vince Barrett
“Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl” first appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of The Last Line.
The early morning dance of orange-tinged light coming in from the hall windows and streaking across the bare oak floors confirmed to Brian Hurtz that Mother Nature was quite indifferent to the fact that his would be an agonizing day; it was bright and cheery in sunny South Florida. Resigned to his fate, he shrugged off the meteorological sleight and made his way along the second floor hallway towards the upstairs bathroom. Though he had been living in and navigating his way throughout this house for over thirty years now, his ginger steps were the slow and deliberate ones of a stranger. This, of course, was so as not to knock into any of Blanche’s knick-knacks which were carefully arranged on a series of small tables that lined both sides of the long corridor like processional soldiers marking the path for visiting dignitaries in a receiving line. Not that Brian knew what walking a dignitaries’ receiving line would be like, but the thought always amused him, especially as he was walking to the can.
While he once knew the stories behind the various menageries and collectable pieces, Blanche had been gone now for over fifteen years, and he himself was eighty-six; Brian figured some things were safe to let fade into the far recesses of the mind forever. Things like why in the hell was that glass giraffe perched off to one side precariously like that, right next to the rhinestone umbrella miniature? Brian didn’t get any of it anymore, but nonetheless insured that everything stayed exactly as it was the day Blanche had left all those years ago. Even the most simple of tasks like heading to the john did nothing these days but underscore the level to which his body was failing him. And fast. It was a cruel irony that inside his pain-racked body he still felt every bit like the nineteen-year-old marine recruit that had stormed that ash-laden hellhole of Iwo Jima to capture three airfields from the Japanese Imperial Army.
Brian paused next to the half-moon console table on which Blanche’s favorite assortment of lead glass horses were frozen in some kind of mid-parade prance. Normally he derived some sense of comfort from these things that had once been so cherished by the only woman he had ever loved, but today there was something about the imposed order of it all that he found disquieting. He let his mind wander back to those hellish days in February and March of 1945, and for a moment the house dissolved into a rising plume of rubber-laden smoke: the foul sensation of cordite permeated his nostrils as he watched scores of men around him pulverized by enemy fire coming from the series of fortified bunkers surrounding the air fields. By then, of course, the Americans had laid on so much bomb ordinance that the surface of the moon would have been a more ideal place to land a plane. Against the backdrop of memories from sixty-five years earlier which was more powerful than those of his day yesterday, something about the march of those horses definitely troubled him. Brian’s frail age-spotted hand reached out and delicately grasped the beveled edge of the table and lay there for a moment before he forcefully shook the table, sending the scene atop it askew; some pieces still stood, while others had fallen. There was no longer any order – just chaos.
Once back in the bedroom, Brian began to dress for the important day, selecting his dressiest sleeveless t-shirt, considered such for the lack of holes, and a pair of comfortable sweatpants – neither of which had been in the unlaundered rotation for too long. He sniffed his shirt just to make sure. Scarcely had he finished securing the Velcro straps of his cross-training shoes, when he heard the sound of his son William coming in the front door followed by his voice filtering up from downstairs. “Dad, are you ready yet? We don’t want to be late.”
Brian sighed, took a last look around his bedroom and trudged towards the stairs, “I’m coming down. Hold your horses!” He smiled to himself as he made his way down the creaking stairs, amused by a joke only he had heard relating to an event only he had witnessed. This is what life had come to in eighty-six years – a series of increasingly private jokes and smiles shared with no one, save that nineteen-year-old trapped in his decrepit prison of a body.
William helped get Brian situated in the passenger side of the Toyota sedan – the look from Brian indicated that the car’s lineage was not pleasing to him. As they pulled out of the drive, William glanced over at his father who seemed rather distant today – more so than normal. “Dad, do you want me to stop for lottery tickets? We have time.”
“No.” Brian turned his head to survey the receding scene of his neighborhood. “Not today. I don’t want to be one of those idiots standing in line to play some stupid game with sucker’s odds; I’m already doing that with my life, son. Let’s just go get this thing over with.” He again turned his attention to the blur of the world passing by outside the window in hopes of blotting out this last bit of painful reality.
Once arriving and parking the car, the two made their way into the austere-looking building. As he and William ascended to the fourth floor, Brian considered the polished cold steel enclosure of the elevator. Though certainly more expansive, he couldn’t help but think of this box as not that dissimilar from a casket – both places to put a body as it, hopefully, shuttles away to some other place. The chime announcing their arrival awakened him from his reverie, and Brian prepared himself for the familiar onslaught he knew was coming.
As the doors silently parted, the sensation was that of bitter cold air laced with the pungent sweetness of disinfectant and synthetic freshness. Brian wasn’t fooled; he knew that the artificial climate and its accompanying olfactory mélange were designed with one purpose in mind: to disguise the obvious evidence of death and human decay from the place he was about to visit. He looked over at his son and contemplated William’s vacant expression.
Brian silently shook his head and shuffled out towards the reception desk housed behind a floor to ceiling glass enclosure that had been erected to at least imply some kind of separation from those who milled about behind the barrier and those unfortunate souls who had occasion to congregate at its open windowed front. “Good morning, Sir,” said the overly friendly voice behind the opaque encampment belonging to a girl Brian suspected couldn’t be older than seventeen. “What’s the last name?”
“Hurtz.”
“Ahh, Brian Hurtz, got you right here for 9:30; looks like you’re a little early, which is fine. We’re kind of off to a slow start, so there’s plenty of room. Why don’t you pick out a free station, and one of the nurses will get you all set up. I’m sure the doctor will be in any time now too and will be right over as soon as she arrives.”
Brian turned and reluctantly took in the expansive room that was bordered on the remaining three sides by large windows that overlooked the campus grounds unfolding below. Neatly arranged in small clusters of twos and threes along the windows, some facing out while others stubbornly faced away from the sunlit windows, were large overstuffed, seemingly comfortable, recliners. Each was, in turn, surrounded by various pieces of equipment that radiated their companion chair’s utilitarian purpose. Having more in common with their sinister cousin, Florida’s electric chair, than those found in cozy living rooms, these draconian beasts were designed for one thing: to hold its occupant in a suspended state long enough for the white coats behind the glass to administer the applicable protocol of poison concocted for each lounged soul. Though, of course, they preferred to call it by another more innocuous sounding name – chemotherapy.
“Where do you want to go sit, Dad?” William asked.
With nothing to distinguish one cluster of chairs from another, especially with so few seats actually being occupied at this early hour, all Brian could do was shrug his shoulders. His choice was actually rather simple: did he prefer to play the human lottery today, hoping to be the one from many who beat the odds and was saved, while lounging his ass in blue vinyl, or was he feeling like green vinyl? This, apparently, is what it all comes down to after a lifetime of seemingly important decisions. Do I want to get married? To her? Do I want to have kids? How many? Should I get another job? Do I like my job? No, after a life’s worth of conditioning into thinking that decisions actually mean something and are attached to ramifications with some actual weight, what it all boils down to is this: blue vinyl, green vinyl. What he really wanted, he decided, was to get back into Otis’ silver box and just be done with all this nonsense. He was tired of the race to see if it was the cancer or the chemo that killed him first. “I want an orange chair,” Brian announced to a perplexed William. “Go see if they have an orange one.”
Nearly fifteen rarified miles north, behind the imposing gates of Willoughby Grande Estates, Elizabeth Kelly was tucked away in her five thousand square foot home but had her own cross to bear. She was, of course, running late again and yet couldn’t seem to muster the strength to do anything but stare up at the ceiling from under the covers. Though all the blackout curtains were tightly drawn in “the chamber” as she referred to her oversized and lushly appointed bedroom, she continued to strain at the dark recesses above as if somehow the meaning of something profound would suddenly descend and illuminate the darkness that wouldn’t let loose of her soul.
She swung her long elegant legs from under the sheets and made contact with the cold barren expanse of the Rosa Aurora marble floor below; the expenditure for the bedroom flooring had at one time given her great satisfaction. Lately it was just cold. The kind of bitter cold that characterized painful memories one couldn’t change – permanently cold.
With one final herculean effort, Elizabeth finally rose from the bed, lifting her arms upward and stepping out of her nightgown in one fluid movement. She stretched her toned naked body to its entire six foot span and let out an involuntary yawning moan. She crossed the room towards the suite’s attached spa-like master bathroom, pausing in front of the floor to ceiling mirror that leaned against the wall opposite the bed long enough to consider her lithe body. Though now forty-three, the decision not to have any children combined with her fastidious dedication to working out had saved Elizabeth the cruel injustice of watching her body completely deteriorate along with the rest of her life.
Once in the bathroom, Elizabeth pulled out the upholstered chair in front of the “hers” vanity – the “his” had been conspicuously unused for over a year now – and sat down, pulling the illuminated makeup mirror towards her face. Once a prized possession, the mirror had various settings that changed the intensity and kind of lighting allowing her to change her makeup to suit whatever the day or evening would bring. She considered the various settings: evening, home, office, and day. She selected office and was greeted with the sudden harshness of florescent lighting which was never a favorite since it, above all the others, reflected the harsh truth of what was really there over the various other dimmer, and softer, settings that tended to blur and otherwise obfuscate the reality of what was reflected. Mirrors can, in fact, lie.
As she began putting on her face, Elizabeth’s attention reflexively went to what she perceived to be her flaws and signs of aging. She was reasonably certain she could identify with particularity each meandering crevice and crack in her skin with the exact life event that had caused the fault line to emerge. The oldest lines were those on the outside of her eyes, the faint spider webbing that had begun early in life when she was barely twenty-two and had lost her only sister to a drunk driver. Those creases that were etched along her forehead were most certainly tied to those years as an ambitious medical student. No doubt she owed the adjoining vertical lines between her eyes to her two years serving as chief oncology resident at the university’s affiliate hospital. Her eyes danced past several of the other small tell-tale signs and finally came to rest on the significantly more pronounced crevices that ran down either side of her nose towards her unsmiling mouth, for these twins were linked to the most brutal and unforgivable of life’s experiences – the one that had left her a widow. As she reached to turn off the lit vanity, her attention focused on the slight white band of skin on the ring finger of her left hand. While life had seen fit to rob her of her husband and with him all the joy and happiness she had once known, the passing of time had done nothing to erase the telling tan line of where her wedding ring had been worn for twelve years. It, like the emotional scar associated with his absence, seemed destined to linger forever.
She reached over to the wall and grabbed the bathroom’s telephone and dialed her office. In the precise fashion that had once characterized every facet of Elizabeth’s life, her call was answered after the first ring. “Oncology, this is Candace,” came the sweet voice.
“Candie, it’s Dr. Kelly,” Elizabeth replied. “I’m running a bit late but will be there in less than thirty minutes. Is Mr. Hurtz there yet?”
“Yes, Doctor, he’s here waiting, and the nurse is just checking his blood count. He’ll be ready for you by the time you arrive. We’ll see you when you get in.”
Elizabeth hung up the phone and, as an afterthought, opened the medicine cabinet directly above to make sure everything was still there. On the top shelf were the various bottles of morphine and powerful pain medications that hospice had never bothered to retrieve after her husband had finally succumbed. The cancer had riddled his body with such ferocious speed that nothing could be done except attempt to manage his pain, while speeding along the inevitable with the copious amounts of morphine being injected into his collapsing veins. Elizabeth again considered the irony of how most lay persons considered doctors to somehow be possessed of some kind of superhuman ability to save lives, some even accusing them of having a god complex. It was obvious to her, as to anyone else who had ever taken the Hippocratic Oath, that physicians were often as impotent as anyone else to actually do anything other than act as a steward for whatever the universe otherwise had in store. Sighing, Elizabeth closed the medicine cabinet with the final thought of how she would soon enough put the stockpile of drugs to one last good use: the dulling of her own pain – permanently.
She quickly dressed and began the twenty-minute drive to the medical facilities on campus. As she drove, she went through her checklist; she had already cleared her entire patient calendar by feigning plans to take a much deserved and needed vacation. Her colleagues had been quick to agree to take on the additional burden of her patients while she was “out of town,” for they all privately agreed she had not been herself in quite some time. Indeed, today’s appointment with Brian Hurtz would be her very last patient visit before—it was, actually, to be her last appointment, period. And with that her thoughts went to the strange, undeniable bond between the two of them that made it absolutely essential that she at least see Brian one last time before she left this world and everything in it behind. The bond, of course, was simple: he was the last living tie that she had to her departed husband.
Dr. Timothy Kelly had been a truly talented surgeon, one whose skill had only been matched by his willingness to make tough decisions and take bold decisive actions that most doctors shirked from. It was thus that fourteen months earlier, Tim, not knowing it would be his last surgery, had made the decision to put Brian under the knife for the highly complicated six hour long Whipple procedure to treat pancreatic cancer involving the removal of the head of the pancreas, the duodenum, a portion of the stomach, and other nearby tissues. Obviously this kind of pancreaticoduodenectomy was complicated under the best of circumstances, but with an eighty-five-year-old patient like Brian, it was considered by most surgeons to be a fool’s errand and a malpractice lawsuit just waiting to happen. The surgery had gone perfectly; the cancer was removed with sufficiently clean margins, and Brian’s prognosis went from guaranteed mortality to suddenly having cheated death. Clearly, however, death had not been pleased, for it was only three days later that Tim had collapsed from abdominal pain at home and was subsequently diagnosed with his own cancer – an untreatable variety that had completely enveloped his organs; he was dead within two months. In the wake of her loss, Elizabeth had taken responsibility for Brian’s post-surgical treatment and had somehow unconsciously linked his survival with the enduring legacy of her own lost husband – the two were now inextricably intertwined.
As she pulled into the physician’s lot, Elizabeth struggled to push her husband’s memory from her mind in order that she might focus long enough to get through what would be her final visit with the man who had become her most important patient. Checking her mirror, she wiped away the running mascara lines that the tears shed during the drive. Exiting the car, she briskly made her way to the elevator and held her finger over the button marked four a few moments before taking a final deep breath and pressing it. The ride up seemed somehow shorter than normal, and Elizabeth had barely composed herself when the doors opened onto the oncology ward.
After checking in with the front desk and grabbing her patient file, Elizabeth turned and directed her attention to the far side of the room where Brian was sitting and made her way over. “How’s my favorite patient today?” Elizabeth inquired as she drew alongside him in a tone that she hoped disguised the turmoil she was feeling.
“I’m okay, Lizzy, just okay,” came Brian’s subdued reply.
Elizabeth sat on the wheeled chair in Brian’s station and rolled herself over next to his lounger, checked the tube connection leading from the machinery to the port surgically implanted under the skin in his chest; satisfied that everything looked good, she surveyed the status of the machinery and saw that Brian was nearly done receiving his weekly dose of chemo. After briefly reviewing her previous notes in his file, she again turned her attention back to Brian, taking his frail hand in her own. “Where is your son today?” she asked.
“He’s around here somewhere. I sent him to go find me an orange chair. These blue and green ones make me want to puke. The poor kid probably got himself locked in a closet somewhere. You know he’s not the sharpest steak knife in the drawer right?” Brian said with just a hint of a smile.
“Oh Brian, you are too much, what am I going to do with you? So tell me what’s going on, how have you been feeling this past week, how’s your energy level been?”
“Doc, I got to tell ya, I’m getting tired of all this,” Brian quietly replied as he averted his gaze. “I really don’t think I want to do this anymore.”
Though Elizabeth found his words extremely disquieting, she was not surprised. She had sensed the man letting go for some time. She recognized the indicators for she too had been silently letting loose of the ties that bound her to this world for quite a while. Still, she had to say something. “Brian, what you’re feeling is natural. The chemo is quite hard on the body. It has to be – it’s designed to completely eradicate any cancer cells that may have lingered and prevent their coming back. Why on earth would you want to just give up when we are so close?” she asked.
“Lizzy, I figured of all people you would know about wanting to give in and surrender the fight. We’ve been doing this on and off for eight months, every week, you think I haven’t been watching you? I notice the signs. I saw them all the time during the war, guys around you would just get shell shocked, and you could literally see the life just drain away – they’d become walking zombies. Ain’t none of them ever right afterwards either. Seen it a million times, girl, and I been watching it happen to you,” Brian said while staring into Elizabeth’s eyes with such an intensity she felt as if he were reading her very thoughts.
“It’s been a rough time losing Tim,” was all she could muster in response while casting her eyes downward.
“Oh no, sweetheart, you misunderstood. I’m not judging you, Lizzy, never would I do that, believe me – I understand the pain. I went through it all with my Blanche. Don’t you ever believe I’m thinking about you with anything but love in my heart. But, I know the signs, and you been somewhere else for quite a spell now – you been letting go all this time. What’s so bad if I do the same? I’m tired Lizzy, and I’m old…real old and real tired.”
Elizabeth could feel the sting of tears begging to well up and had to fight to keep them at bay. “Brian, I don’t want it to be like this, but I honestly don’t know what to do. Nothing has worked, not the grief counseling, not the church bereavement groups, not even the three damn grief blankets I stitched and sewed with all the butter cookie-eating elderly ladies at the hospice life transition meetings. I just can’t seem to shake the pain and, frankly, I’m not even sure what I’m doing anymore. I just want the pain to end. . . .” Elizabeth suddenly stopped, aware of actual words that couldn’t be taken back had just escaped her mouth. Brian looked back with a look of such warm understanding and compassion that Elizabeth was immediately off guard once again; they both smiled at one another in a way that communicated how each really saw the other, saw not just what was happening on the surface but the entirety of the person in front of them. It was one of those precious real moments in life, and Elizabeth wished it to last.
The warning indicator from the machine indicated that the chemo cycle had ended and that Brian’s therapy session was complete. And, just like that, the moment had passed.
After disconnecting the various pieces of equipment, Elizabeth helped Brian out of the chair, gave him a gentle hug, and began helping him walk towards the reception desk. Once arriving, she spoke to the young girl behind the glass, “Candie, give me an appointment card for Mr. Hurtz for next Friday morning at 9:30.” As she placed the note into Brian’s hand, she looked at him and inquired, “I’ll see you next week, Brian, right?”
Candace inquired from behind the glass enclosure: “Doctor Kelly, you wanted me to schedule Mr. Hurtz with Doctor Baker since you’ll be away on vacation, right?”
Not wanting to break eye contact with Brian, Elizabeth replied with her back to the counter, “No Candace, actually I am cancelling my vacation. Brian and I have agreed that the other plans we both had for next week can wait because what we are doing here together is far more important.”
At that point Brian averted his eyes, knowing that his doctor was in the midst of completely changing her schedule and reordering her life in an attempt to get him to reengage with his own. Not wanting to face her or the scene that was unfolding at the counter Brian turned around just in time to see his son laboring to push an orange-rust colored chair out of the elevator that he had obviously absconded with from some other part of the hospital.
It was at that moment that the clarity about his struggles and his life finally hit Brian squarely in the gut. He was not going to escape this life alive – no one ever does, and yet he’d been measuring the good of life as those things that were happening in between the chaos and indignities of the disease he was enduring. Yet, here and now he had to acknowledge that this cancer was not just affecting him but had been touching the lives of everyone around him.
Who was he to deny his son the sense of normalcy in stopping for a few lotto tickets when William was struggling in his own way with the oncoming inevitability of his death? So too with the young doctor who had been taking such a strong interest in his well-being and who now seemed more concerned with his giving up than she did in her own life that was still so much in front of her. Brian realized that along the way he had lost sight of the fact that it was actually his station in life now to be an example to his son and whoever else may be watching. To embody the principle that the real measure of a life is in a person’s ability to actually show up for their own battles and face them for what they are—head on and pushing through them with some sense of dignity and effort. Just like back in the days of the war, he wasn’t fighting to win some battle; he was fighting for the man and woman on either side of him. This was a fight that the soldier in him knew he could endure. Brian pocketed the note and realized it had all been worth it.
Vince Barrett is a graduate of Georgetown University and a member of the South Florida legal community. He has been writing with impact for many years, though only recently began to devote his time and effort to creating works he can openly call fiction. He is presently working on his first novel.
by Vince Barrett
“Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl” first appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of The Last Line.
The early morning dance of orange-tinged light coming in from the hall windows and streaking across the bare oak floors confirmed to Brian Hurtz that Mother Nature was quite indifferent to the fact that his would be an agonizing day; it was bright and cheery in sunny South Florida. Resigned to his fate, he shrugged off the meteorological sleight and made his way along the second floor hallway towards the upstairs bathroom. Though he had been living in and navigating his way throughout this house for over thirty years now, his ginger steps were the slow and deliberate ones of a stranger. This, of course, was so as not to knock into any of Blanche’s knick-knacks which were carefully arranged on a series of small tables that lined both sides of the long corridor like processional soldiers marking the path for visiting dignitaries in a receiving line. Not that Brian knew what walking a dignitaries’ receiving line would be like, but the thought always amused him, especially as he was walking to the can.
While he once knew the stories behind the various menageries and collectable pieces, Blanche had been gone now for over fifteen years, and he himself was eighty-six; Brian figured some things were safe to let fade into the far recesses of the mind forever. Things like why in the hell was that glass giraffe perched off to one side precariously like that, right next to the rhinestone umbrella miniature? Brian didn’t get any of it anymore, but nonetheless insured that everything stayed exactly as it was the day Blanche had left all those years ago. Even the most simple of tasks like heading to the john did nothing these days but underscore the level to which his body was failing him. And fast. It was a cruel irony that inside his pain-racked body he still felt every bit like the nineteen-year-old marine recruit that had stormed that ash-laden hellhole of Iwo Jima to capture three airfields from the Japanese Imperial Army.
Brian paused next to the half-moon console table on which Blanche’s favorite assortment of lead glass horses were frozen in some kind of mid-parade prance. Normally he derived some sense of comfort from these things that had once been so cherished by the only woman he had ever loved, but today there was something about the imposed order of it all that he found disquieting. He let his mind wander back to those hellish days in February and March of 1945, and for a moment the house dissolved into a rising plume of rubber-laden smoke: the foul sensation of cordite permeated his nostrils as he watched scores of men around him pulverized by enemy fire coming from the series of fortified bunkers surrounding the air fields. By then, of course, the Americans had laid on so much bomb ordinance that the surface of the moon would have been a more ideal place to land a plane. Against the backdrop of memories from sixty-five years earlier which was more powerful than those of his day yesterday, something about the march of those horses definitely troubled him. Brian’s frail age-spotted hand reached out and delicately grasped the beveled edge of the table and lay there for a moment before he forcefully shook the table, sending the scene atop it askew; some pieces still stood, while others had fallen. There was no longer any order – just chaos.
Once back in the bedroom, Brian began to dress for the important day, selecting his dressiest sleeveless t-shirt, considered such for the lack of holes, and a pair of comfortable sweatpants – neither of which had been in the unlaundered rotation for too long. He sniffed his shirt just to make sure. Scarcely had he finished securing the Velcro straps of his cross-training shoes, when he heard the sound of his son William coming in the front door followed by his voice filtering up from downstairs. “Dad, are you ready yet? We don’t want to be late.”
Brian sighed, took a last look around his bedroom and trudged towards the stairs, “I’m coming down. Hold your horses!” He smiled to himself as he made his way down the creaking stairs, amused by a joke only he had heard relating to an event only he had witnessed. This is what life had come to in eighty-six years – a series of increasingly private jokes and smiles shared with no one, save that nineteen-year-old trapped in his decrepit prison of a body.
William helped get Brian situated in the passenger side of the Toyota sedan – the look from Brian indicated that the car’s lineage was not pleasing to him. As they pulled out of the drive, William glanced over at his father who seemed rather distant today – more so than normal. “Dad, do you want me to stop for lottery tickets? We have time.”
“No.” Brian turned his head to survey the receding scene of his neighborhood. “Not today. I don’t want to be one of those idiots standing in line to play some stupid game with sucker’s odds; I’m already doing that with my life, son. Let’s just go get this thing over with.” He again turned his attention to the blur of the world passing by outside the window in hopes of blotting out this last bit of painful reality.
Once arriving and parking the car, the two made their way into the austere-looking building. As he and William ascended to the fourth floor, Brian considered the polished cold steel enclosure of the elevator. Though certainly more expansive, he couldn’t help but think of this box as not that dissimilar from a casket – both places to put a body as it, hopefully, shuttles away to some other place. The chime announcing their arrival awakened him from his reverie, and Brian prepared himself for the familiar onslaught he knew was coming.
As the doors silently parted, the sensation was that of bitter cold air laced with the pungent sweetness of disinfectant and synthetic freshness. Brian wasn’t fooled; he knew that the artificial climate and its accompanying olfactory mélange were designed with one purpose in mind: to disguise the obvious evidence of death and human decay from the place he was about to visit. He looked over at his son and contemplated William’s vacant expression.
Brian silently shook his head and shuffled out towards the reception desk housed behind a floor to ceiling glass enclosure that had been erected to at least imply some kind of separation from those who milled about behind the barrier and those unfortunate souls who had occasion to congregate at its open windowed front. “Good morning, Sir,” said the overly friendly voice behind the opaque encampment belonging to a girl Brian suspected couldn’t be older than seventeen. “What’s the last name?”
“Hurtz.”
“Ahh, Brian Hurtz, got you right here for 9:30; looks like you’re a little early, which is fine. We’re kind of off to a slow start, so there’s plenty of room. Why don’t you pick out a free station, and one of the nurses will get you all set up. I’m sure the doctor will be in any time now too and will be right over as soon as she arrives.”
Brian turned and reluctantly took in the expansive room that was bordered on the remaining three sides by large windows that overlooked the campus grounds unfolding below. Neatly arranged in small clusters of twos and threes along the windows, some facing out while others stubbornly faced away from the sunlit windows, were large overstuffed, seemingly comfortable, recliners. Each was, in turn, surrounded by various pieces of equipment that radiated their companion chair’s utilitarian purpose. Having more in common with their sinister cousin, Florida’s electric chair, than those found in cozy living rooms, these draconian beasts were designed for one thing: to hold its occupant in a suspended state long enough for the white coats behind the glass to administer the applicable protocol of poison concocted for each lounged soul. Though, of course, they preferred to call it by another more innocuous sounding name – chemotherapy.
“Where do you want to go sit, Dad?” William asked.
With nothing to distinguish one cluster of chairs from another, especially with so few seats actually being occupied at this early hour, all Brian could do was shrug his shoulders. His choice was actually rather simple: did he prefer to play the human lottery today, hoping to be the one from many who beat the odds and was saved, while lounging his ass in blue vinyl, or was he feeling like green vinyl? This, apparently, is what it all comes down to after a lifetime of seemingly important decisions. Do I want to get married? To her? Do I want to have kids? How many? Should I get another job? Do I like my job? No, after a life’s worth of conditioning into thinking that decisions actually mean something and are attached to ramifications with some actual weight, what it all boils down to is this: blue vinyl, green vinyl. What he really wanted, he decided, was to get back into Otis’ silver box and just be done with all this nonsense. He was tired of the race to see if it was the cancer or the chemo that killed him first. “I want an orange chair,” Brian announced to a perplexed William. “Go see if they have an orange one.”
Nearly fifteen rarified miles north, behind the imposing gates of Willoughby Grande Estates, Elizabeth Kelly was tucked away in her five thousand square foot home but had her own cross to bear. She was, of course, running late again and yet couldn’t seem to muster the strength to do anything but stare up at the ceiling from under the covers. Though all the blackout curtains were tightly drawn in “the chamber” as she referred to her oversized and lushly appointed bedroom, she continued to strain at the dark recesses above as if somehow the meaning of something profound would suddenly descend and illuminate the darkness that wouldn’t let loose of her soul.
She swung her long elegant legs from under the sheets and made contact with the cold barren expanse of the Rosa Aurora marble floor below; the expenditure for the bedroom flooring had at one time given her great satisfaction. Lately it was just cold. The kind of bitter cold that characterized painful memories one couldn’t change – permanently cold.
With one final herculean effort, Elizabeth finally rose from the bed, lifting her arms upward and stepping out of her nightgown in one fluid movement. She stretched her toned naked body to its entire six foot span and let out an involuntary yawning moan. She crossed the room towards the suite’s attached spa-like master bathroom, pausing in front of the floor to ceiling mirror that leaned against the wall opposite the bed long enough to consider her lithe body. Though now forty-three, the decision not to have any children combined with her fastidious dedication to working out had saved Elizabeth the cruel injustice of watching her body completely deteriorate along with the rest of her life.
Once in the bathroom, Elizabeth pulled out the upholstered chair in front of the “hers” vanity – the “his” had been conspicuously unused for over a year now – and sat down, pulling the illuminated makeup mirror towards her face. Once a prized possession, the mirror had various settings that changed the intensity and kind of lighting allowing her to change her makeup to suit whatever the day or evening would bring. She considered the various settings: evening, home, office, and day. She selected office and was greeted with the sudden harshness of florescent lighting which was never a favorite since it, above all the others, reflected the harsh truth of what was really there over the various other dimmer, and softer, settings that tended to blur and otherwise obfuscate the reality of what was reflected. Mirrors can, in fact, lie.
As she began putting on her face, Elizabeth’s attention reflexively went to what she perceived to be her flaws and signs of aging. She was reasonably certain she could identify with particularity each meandering crevice and crack in her skin with the exact life event that had caused the fault line to emerge. The oldest lines were those on the outside of her eyes, the faint spider webbing that had begun early in life when she was barely twenty-two and had lost her only sister to a drunk driver. Those creases that were etched along her forehead were most certainly tied to those years as an ambitious medical student. No doubt she owed the adjoining vertical lines between her eyes to her two years serving as chief oncology resident at the university’s affiliate hospital. Her eyes danced past several of the other small tell-tale signs and finally came to rest on the significantly more pronounced crevices that ran down either side of her nose towards her unsmiling mouth, for these twins were linked to the most brutal and unforgivable of life’s experiences – the one that had left her a widow. As she reached to turn off the lit vanity, her attention focused on the slight white band of skin on the ring finger of her left hand. While life had seen fit to rob her of her husband and with him all the joy and happiness she had once known, the passing of time had done nothing to erase the telling tan line of where her wedding ring had been worn for twelve years. It, like the emotional scar associated with his absence, seemed destined to linger forever.
She reached over to the wall and grabbed the bathroom’s telephone and dialed her office. In the precise fashion that had once characterized every facet of Elizabeth’s life, her call was answered after the first ring. “Oncology, this is Candace,” came the sweet voice.
“Candie, it’s Dr. Kelly,” Elizabeth replied. “I’m running a bit late but will be there in less than thirty minutes. Is Mr. Hurtz there yet?”
“Yes, Doctor, he’s here waiting, and the nurse is just checking his blood count. He’ll be ready for you by the time you arrive. We’ll see you when you get in.”
Elizabeth hung up the phone and, as an afterthought, opened the medicine cabinet directly above to make sure everything was still there. On the top shelf were the various bottles of morphine and powerful pain medications that hospice had never bothered to retrieve after her husband had finally succumbed. The cancer had riddled his body with such ferocious speed that nothing could be done except attempt to manage his pain, while speeding along the inevitable with the copious amounts of morphine being injected into his collapsing veins. Elizabeth again considered the irony of how most lay persons considered doctors to somehow be possessed of some kind of superhuman ability to save lives, some even accusing them of having a god complex. It was obvious to her, as to anyone else who had ever taken the Hippocratic Oath, that physicians were often as impotent as anyone else to actually do anything other than act as a steward for whatever the universe otherwise had in store. Sighing, Elizabeth closed the medicine cabinet with the final thought of how she would soon enough put the stockpile of drugs to one last good use: the dulling of her own pain – permanently.
She quickly dressed and began the twenty-minute drive to the medical facilities on campus. As she drove, she went through her checklist; she had already cleared her entire patient calendar by feigning plans to take a much deserved and needed vacation. Her colleagues had been quick to agree to take on the additional burden of her patients while she was “out of town,” for they all privately agreed she had not been herself in quite some time. Indeed, today’s appointment with Brian Hurtz would be her very last patient visit before—it was, actually, to be her last appointment, period. And with that her thoughts went to the strange, undeniable bond between the two of them that made it absolutely essential that she at least see Brian one last time before she left this world and everything in it behind. The bond, of course, was simple: he was the last living tie that she had to her departed husband.
Dr. Timothy Kelly had been a truly talented surgeon, one whose skill had only been matched by his willingness to make tough decisions and take bold decisive actions that most doctors shirked from. It was thus that fourteen months earlier, Tim, not knowing it would be his last surgery, had made the decision to put Brian under the knife for the highly complicated six hour long Whipple procedure to treat pancreatic cancer involving the removal of the head of the pancreas, the duodenum, a portion of the stomach, and other nearby tissues. Obviously this kind of pancreaticoduodenectomy was complicated under the best of circumstances, but with an eighty-five-year-old patient like Brian, it was considered by most surgeons to be a fool’s errand and a malpractice lawsuit just waiting to happen. The surgery had gone perfectly; the cancer was removed with sufficiently clean margins, and Brian’s prognosis went from guaranteed mortality to suddenly having cheated death. Clearly, however, death had not been pleased, for it was only three days later that Tim had collapsed from abdominal pain at home and was subsequently diagnosed with his own cancer – an untreatable variety that had completely enveloped his organs; he was dead within two months. In the wake of her loss, Elizabeth had taken responsibility for Brian’s post-surgical treatment and had somehow unconsciously linked his survival with the enduring legacy of her own lost husband – the two were now inextricably intertwined.
As she pulled into the physician’s lot, Elizabeth struggled to push her husband’s memory from her mind in order that she might focus long enough to get through what would be her final visit with the man who had become her most important patient. Checking her mirror, she wiped away the running mascara lines that the tears shed during the drive. Exiting the car, she briskly made her way to the elevator and held her finger over the button marked four a few moments before taking a final deep breath and pressing it. The ride up seemed somehow shorter than normal, and Elizabeth had barely composed herself when the doors opened onto the oncology ward.
After checking in with the front desk and grabbing her patient file, Elizabeth turned and directed her attention to the far side of the room where Brian was sitting and made her way over. “How’s my favorite patient today?” Elizabeth inquired as she drew alongside him in a tone that she hoped disguised the turmoil she was feeling.
“I’m okay, Lizzy, just okay,” came Brian’s subdued reply.
Elizabeth sat on the wheeled chair in Brian’s station and rolled herself over next to his lounger, checked the tube connection leading from the machinery to the port surgically implanted under the skin in his chest; satisfied that everything looked good, she surveyed the status of the machinery and saw that Brian was nearly done receiving his weekly dose of chemo. After briefly reviewing her previous notes in his file, she again turned her attention back to Brian, taking his frail hand in her own. “Where is your son today?” she asked.
“He’s around here somewhere. I sent him to go find me an orange chair. These blue and green ones make me want to puke. The poor kid probably got himself locked in a closet somewhere. You know he’s not the sharpest steak knife in the drawer right?” Brian said with just a hint of a smile.
“Oh Brian, you are too much, what am I going to do with you? So tell me what’s going on, how have you been feeling this past week, how’s your energy level been?”
“Doc, I got to tell ya, I’m getting tired of all this,” Brian quietly replied as he averted his gaze. “I really don’t think I want to do this anymore.”
Though Elizabeth found his words extremely disquieting, she was not surprised. She had sensed the man letting go for some time. She recognized the indicators for she too had been silently letting loose of the ties that bound her to this world for quite a while. Still, she had to say something. “Brian, what you’re feeling is natural. The chemo is quite hard on the body. It has to be – it’s designed to completely eradicate any cancer cells that may have lingered and prevent their coming back. Why on earth would you want to just give up when we are so close?” she asked.
“Lizzy, I figured of all people you would know about wanting to give in and surrender the fight. We’ve been doing this on and off for eight months, every week, you think I haven’t been watching you? I notice the signs. I saw them all the time during the war, guys around you would just get shell shocked, and you could literally see the life just drain away – they’d become walking zombies. Ain’t none of them ever right afterwards either. Seen it a million times, girl, and I been watching it happen to you,” Brian said while staring into Elizabeth’s eyes with such an intensity she felt as if he were reading her very thoughts.
“It’s been a rough time losing Tim,” was all she could muster in response while casting her eyes downward.
“Oh no, sweetheart, you misunderstood. I’m not judging you, Lizzy, never would I do that, believe me – I understand the pain. I went through it all with my Blanche. Don’t you ever believe I’m thinking about you with anything but love in my heart. But, I know the signs, and you been somewhere else for quite a spell now – you been letting go all this time. What’s so bad if I do the same? I’m tired Lizzy, and I’m old…real old and real tired.”
Elizabeth could feel the sting of tears begging to well up and had to fight to keep them at bay. “Brian, I don’t want it to be like this, but I honestly don’t know what to do. Nothing has worked, not the grief counseling, not the church bereavement groups, not even the three damn grief blankets I stitched and sewed with all the butter cookie-eating elderly ladies at the hospice life transition meetings. I just can’t seem to shake the pain and, frankly, I’m not even sure what I’m doing anymore. I just want the pain to end. . . .” Elizabeth suddenly stopped, aware of actual words that couldn’t be taken back had just escaped her mouth. Brian looked back with a look of such warm understanding and compassion that Elizabeth was immediately off guard once again; they both smiled at one another in a way that communicated how each really saw the other, saw not just what was happening on the surface but the entirety of the person in front of them. It was one of those precious real moments in life, and Elizabeth wished it to last.
The warning indicator from the machine indicated that the chemo cycle had ended and that Brian’s therapy session was complete. And, just like that, the moment had passed.
After disconnecting the various pieces of equipment, Elizabeth helped Brian out of the chair, gave him a gentle hug, and began helping him walk towards the reception desk. Once arriving, she spoke to the young girl behind the glass, “Candie, give me an appointment card for Mr. Hurtz for next Friday morning at 9:30.” As she placed the note into Brian’s hand, she looked at him and inquired, “I’ll see you next week, Brian, right?”
Candace inquired from behind the glass enclosure: “Doctor Kelly, you wanted me to schedule Mr. Hurtz with Doctor Baker since you’ll be away on vacation, right?”
Not wanting to break eye contact with Brian, Elizabeth replied with her back to the counter, “No Candace, actually I am cancelling my vacation. Brian and I have agreed that the other plans we both had for next week can wait because what we are doing here together is far more important.”
At that point Brian averted his eyes, knowing that his doctor was in the midst of completely changing her schedule and reordering her life in an attempt to get him to reengage with his own. Not wanting to face her or the scene that was unfolding at the counter Brian turned around just in time to see his son laboring to push an orange-rust colored chair out of the elevator that he had obviously absconded with from some other part of the hospital.
It was at that moment that the clarity about his struggles and his life finally hit Brian squarely in the gut. He was not going to escape this life alive – no one ever does, and yet he’d been measuring the good of life as those things that were happening in between the chaos and indignities of the disease he was enduring. Yet, here and now he had to acknowledge that this cancer was not just affecting him but had been touching the lives of everyone around him.
Who was he to deny his son the sense of normalcy in stopping for a few lotto tickets when William was struggling in his own way with the oncoming inevitability of his death? So too with the young doctor who had been taking such a strong interest in his well-being and who now seemed more concerned with his giving up than she did in her own life that was still so much in front of her. Brian realized that along the way he had lost sight of the fact that it was actually his station in life now to be an example to his son and whoever else may be watching. To embody the principle that the real measure of a life is in a person’s ability to actually show up for their own battles and face them for what they are—head on and pushing through them with some sense of dignity and effort. Just like back in the days of the war, he wasn’t fighting to win some battle; he was fighting for the man and woman on either side of him. This was a fight that the soldier in him knew he could endure. Brian pocketed the note and realized it had all been worth it.
Vince Barrett is a graduate of Georgetown University and a member of the South Florida legal community. He has been writing with impact for many years, though only recently began to devote his time and effort to creating works he can openly call fiction. He is presently working on his first novel.