Clean

The cleanliness is what gets you. More so than the silence, or the stillness, or the emptiness. It’s the cleanliness that jars. There’s an unnerving dissonance in this place of white floor, red and yellow walls, squeaky clean chairs that don’t squeak anymore when they twist like reeds by a river. So calm and clean.

And the smell! It’s gone! Bigger somehow in its absence. Like how the small noises are bigger in the silence. Like when an airplane rumbles overhead and everyone, all three of you jumps, looks up out the windows and stares, as if airplanes are unexpected at places like this: the airport. Such a big sound, drowning out the single burger grilling, the one small chips in the fryer.

Out of instinct you check your watch. Of course it’s not your flight. There are only ten of them today. Yours isn’t even next.

You came early for this airport tradition, to go through the motions to try and pretend that everything was normal and all right. That this was just another trip home, or a vacation, or a work thing. That it was anything other than a descent into hell.

This place is perdition today, even more than usual. Usually it’s a certain type of chaos - one of coming and going and waiting to come or go. Usually suitcases pack the space, their tiny chipped wheels dragging on the greasy floor, like beached whales in a sea of paper wrappers and squashed fries. Those damn squashed fries. The way they get caught in the ridges of your shoes and make you slip, that sudden loud stomp of falling and catching yourself. Muttering obscenities because you’re already running late and stressed and hungry and you knew this fucking place wouldn’t soothe any one of those needs, but it’s tradition now. And in times like these, traditions are the things that endure.

It’s an instinct, more than an obligation, checking your watch as the minutes tick by. Eyes blinded by the sheen of clean tables as the bored busboy sprays and wipes again and again and again. A burger and small fries feels even more pathetic than usual. Should you have supersized? Something obscenely large to fill up the obscenely large space, the clean, sparkling emptiness? We’ve all got to die sometime. Might as well finish on a high.

But you can’t joke about that. Nobody jokes about death anymore.

You wave your hand and do that tense smile that everyone hates as you leave. The girl at the register looks up and gives you a nod. The man who checks your suitcase in does the same, as does the one at security. Lots of waves and nods these days. Belatedly, you realise it’s because you’re all wearing masks. No one can even see you smile. But it’s in the eyes, isn’t it? The windows to the soul.

Another plane takes off and everyone watches through the glass, mesmerised.

The burger at the other end of the flight isn’t tradition, but you order it anyway, and sit yourself down again on a clean chair that doesn’t squeak and circle silently in it because you can. You’re delaying. It’s not a secret. Your time in perdition is ending and you know what comes next. You haven’t passed the test to go to the good place, you’re going to the other place instead. Or is that a different mythology? Weighing your soul against a feather, paying a coin to the boatman. You’re all out of coins and your eyes look in on a soul that is ten tonnes of jagged metal. None of the mythologies quite cut it when reality feels so unreal.

In your pocket, your phone buzzes. You can’t touch it, but it doesn’t matter. You already know what it’s about. You already know the address, the floor, the room number. You don't want to know if you'll be allowed in to say goodbye.

You linger over the burger and fries, enjoying the precipice you stand on. It’s strange to know your plans for the next two weeks. It’s strange to have a compulsory mourning period, a government-mandated isolation chamber to live in with the echoes of your goodbye. Beginning with an end seems wrong. Death is meant to be so random, so mysterious. This meticulous planning, the scheduling of it feels wrong. An insult to nature.

But really death is the most natural thing in the world. Keeping her alive all this time is what goes against nature. Death is only returning her to it.

In the cab, the world around you shines. Back seat, as far away as you can get from the driver. Masks on, hands sticky with sanitiser, the leather seats sweltering under plastic sheets. It’s so bright outside. You want to be thinking the sun is shining extra bright today for her, that this is a good thing, a last hurrah. But it just feels sore. It’s too bright. Bright like the flashing lights on the machines, like the needles, like the tube that snakes down her throat as if it’s choking her.

You close your eyes to block the brightness it out. You don’t even know if she looks like that anymore. It was this morning that you saw that on your tiny phone screen. Maybe in person it doesn’t look so bad. Except really it is so much worse than it looks. Really all the bad stuff, all the broken stuff, is inside, and that tube in her throat is keeping her alive. It’s a monumental job these days, staying alive.

They are up to challenge though, the ones who help. They give you a new mask and new gloves, can’t shake your hand or hug you, but they smile so hard with their eyes. You attempt a joke, one that’s been with you all this time – isn’t it funny that you have to isolate after being here, not before? It seems counter-intuitive, but of course all the people here are already sick, nothing you bring here can make it worse! But those eyes don’t laugh – of course not, why would you joke here, you idiot? – not because it’s not funny but because they still fear it will get worse. It can’t get worse feels like a way to tease a vengeful God. It’s your family who is dying, not theirs. It can still get worse for them.

When they sit you down in the room on the floor at the address you’ll never forget, she doesn’t look so bright anymore. She looks calm, which is good, but dull, which is bad. She’s not a babbling brook or a sunlit hill. She’s a cracky-grassed park in a bad neighbourhood, with cigarette butts in the dirt. She isn’t nature or machine. She’s just sad, and sick, and ready to die.

And she holds your hand through the gloves. And she looks at you through the mask. And her eyes are so clear you can see everything, light as air, and you’re mesmerised all anew.

The cleanliness is what finally gets you. Even once the machines fall silent, the rise and fall of her chest falls still, her eyes turn empty. It’s the cleanliness that jars. There’s an unnerving dissonance in this place of white floor, white walls, curtains swaying like reeds by a river. So calm and so, so clean.