Breathing Apparatus

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, watching the geezer reflected back at me. His hair is white and wispy around his ears but the rest is bald and bumpy. Wrinkles have long since made a home in his skin, the crevices deep around his once lively brown eyes. He stands hunched over, knobby knuckles gripping the sink. The geezer blinks once, twice, breathing shallowly. The tube pumps oxygen into his lungs at a steady pace. In and out. In and out. In and out.

I step back from the mirror and sit on the toilet lid, the porcelain’s cold seeping through my pants and into my legs. My hand finds the tube dropping down from the corner of my mouth, holding it carefully as if a single movement would rip it out. I know that it had been snagged and grabbed and it never once inched, but I’m still cautious. I was scared when it was installed. Installed, that’s what the doctors called it like I was getting a new part in my car. Installed is the wrong word, they need a better one. Maybe attached or equipped. I like equipped, that makes it sound important. Maybe if they had used a different word, more people would have cared about the atmosphere.

Everyone knows that the atmosphere has been failing for decades, too much pollution. People were scared, I was scared. I was young then, early thirties. I was still worried about the future, about what would be left for my children. In the end, all my worrying did was put more black smoke into the air.

Scientists said everyone needed the Breathing Apparatus, that’s what they call the tube. It's a thin tube, maybe as thick as a pencil, though I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. It snakes down my throat and into my lungs, constantly pushing and pulling fresh oxygen into them. It's been there so long that I forget it’s there most of the time. The other end is attached to a water bottle sized compressor at my hip, gently humming. It doesn’t sound like humming as much as soft breathing, gently inhaling and exhaling the condemned air, filtering it for use. I run my fingertips over the metal hanging from my hip and find the recognizable plate. With a gentle push, it comes off. At the yearly exams the doctors always tell us not to touch the panel, it was for them to make sure everything was still working properly. They say we’ll hit something and the Breathing Apparatus will stop working. Then we’ll die.

The compressor keeps pumping oxygen into my lungs. In and out. In and out. In and out. In and- I push the button that stops the compressor. It makes a loud whine then grows quiet. I watch the clock hanging on the wall, counting the seconds until my chest realizes the machine was off and it needed to do something that it no longer remembered. My chest starts to burn as my head ticks off the seconds. 17… 18… 19… 

Slowly, very slowly, I push the oxygen out of my chest then even slower, I pull in more. My chest still burns and the process is much too slow but I keep breathing. In… and out. In… and out. In… and out. By the time a full minute has passed, the pain has started to subside and breathing becomes easier. I can feel my throat protesting to the unusual exercise but I keep breathing, tasting the air on my tongue. From what I remember, the air used to taste like nothing. The only air I ever recall tasting is standing by the stove as I waited for Mother’s home-cooked dinners, I remember the air tasting as good as the meal. I remember the air of a little coffee shop at my college campus, bitter and earthy. Now, I taste metal. There once was a similar taste, when I had tasted my own blood in my mouth. It's been a long time since then. But this metallic taste doesn’t come from blood, though I do prod my tongue around just to make sure.

No, the air tastes of metal, a metal so brash that I can feel it on the back of my throat. It tastes like I had been chewing on a piece of copper. So this is what the world tastes like now, not Mother’s fresh-baked pies straight out of the oven, not the earthy coffee shop, not even nothing. Metal.

I wonder how long the world has tasted of metal and I had never noticed. Maybe it was the tube that kept me from tasting it, maybe I just didn’t care. Maybe I should have done something. My chest begins to burn again and I remember that I have to keep up the process. Slowly, in and out. In and out. In and out.

I push myself to my feet and immediately reach for my cane, leaning on it more heavily than usual. I hobble into the living room and over to the window, brushing back the curtain to look out at the moggy afternoon light. When I was a child, there were days when the sun was so bright that we had to wear sunglasses. Sunglasses! There’s another thing I haven’t seen in years. My eyes skim over the people on the sidewalks, only a handful or so. A young mother is walking a stroller down the sidewalk. When I squint, I can see the small pink tube poking out from under the blanket. I’d had a choice to get a colored tube but I had refused. To this day, I still don’t know why I had chosen the clear tube. I could have it changed every year at the doctor’s appointment but I always refuse. I watch as the mother pauses to tuck the tube into the blanket, smiling warmly at the little darling.

I watch as they turn a corner and pass out of sight, the taste of metal on my tongue, my throat protesting. In and out. In and out. In and out.