waiting on Thursday

"Mr. Meckett.  Mr. Meckett?"  The emergency room nurse is finally calling your name. 

"Right here."   You raised your hand and spoke quietly.  "That's me.  I'm not ready yet, though.  Can you move me down the list and take care of somebody else?  Maybe that person with an ear in their pocket?" 

It's too early.  There is no reason for the medical professionals to know you'd been awake all night thinking about it.    The receptionist doesn't need to know your alarm went off at midnight and you sat up studying shadows of hooded robes and curved scythes.  

Your wife is asleep in the uncomfortable chair beside you.   You want to let her sleep as long as possible.   It could be a bad day for her and she will need her rest.  She went to sleep last night later than usual, unable to decipher your subtle suggestion for a little lovemaking.  Twenty minutes into the back rub she was breathing like an untuned violin.    Men your age do die during sex.  It was probably best you didn't risk it.   She was not happy, though, driving you to the emergency room at midnight.  Now she looks so peaceful and other worldly but when she wakes up and witnesses you repeatedly giving up your turn to see a doctor, she won't be so angelic.   So it's good she's still asleep even though it can be good for her neck to be slouched like that.  

You wonder why they put little shiny pillows in coffins.   When you woke at midnight you could hear the barn owl. It sounded even closer last night, almost right at the window, and with clearer enunciation.     When she wakes up you will have a preemptive "i love you" ready.   You tell yourself to make sure it sounds matter of fact or even flippant.     

She will remember how sweet and courageous you were facing the abyss.  You may have to remind her throughout the day, especially if this thing drags out.  For now she is somehow sleeping in the waiting room of the city's busiest emergency room.   No sense in both of you pretending it's just another eclipsed day.   You wish you had a better handle on this thing.  You are going to die today, but you don't know when or the cause of death.  

Anyway if it's gonna happen at least try to be brave.   Don't start smoking again, that is too obvious.  Anyway you just quit yesterday.   And don't go around whistling.   You are right where you need to be.  If anyone is gonna cheat death, you have positioned yourself in the best possible position.   Just be normal.   

The clock above the nurses station stops,  you panic.  You start sweating and start to motion to the nurse but you can't move.   The inevitability of life, on the second  hand;  magnets and the wet pull of the moon have taken over the large white institution clock.   "Wake up.  Honey, wake up.  It's happening.  It's Thursday."   So much for playing it cool-- there it is.   

"Uh, what?" 

"It's Thursday.  Today is Thursday."  The words sound like a truck backing up over the row of brown vinyl chairs.   "It's happening.  I'm dying."

"Oh yeah,  Ernie the oracle, right?"  she said calmly like waking from a pleasant dream. 

"It's Thursday the 12th.   Maybe I should have stayed in bed today.  I could catch something here.  There are a lot of sick people here.  Do we have a secret stash of cigarettes?"

"Mr Meckett, we will see you know."

"No.  Go ahead, take care of the women and children first, I need a cigarette."  You feel around and find a crumbled up pack in your tweed jacket.  

"Sir, you can't smoke in the waiting room."

You ask your wife if she has a light.  

"Sure,"  she said.  "And do you want a blindfold?"    You walk toward the large glass automatic door.   You sit in an abandoned wheelchair.   

"I'm glad you are able to take this all so well,honey.   I was afraid you'd fall apart without me."

"A widow with an insurance settlement,  breast enhancements and a convertible will  do alright for herself."    You think she's kidding as she lights her cigarette, then yours. 

"Just wheel me back in if I start to lose consciousness,"  you mutter.  "Stupid office pools," 

Years of nicotine jet through you and focus your thoughts.  It all started during the global pandemic.  You can not remember whose idea it was, but Ernie in accounting bought the calendar square of today, Thursday the 12th, as the day you would die.    Accounting is innately always blurring some ethical boxes, moving around any sense of morality with dubious legality.   You think there are more than a few  bookies working beneath the corporate shroud.   At first, you were slightly amused until the big money started getting tossed in the hat.  The launching and undercurrents of odds, point spreads on the time of day and parlays on cause of death.   You suspect even the American Gaming Association has its black leather glove in the till.    Someone told you there was plenty of side action and some second-chance pools, too, in case you survive in a coma into Friday.   The probability of one's own mortality shouldn't be the playground of some bored bean counters.    

"Honey, I'll bring you some coffee," she said, stopping by the wheelchair to kiss your cold sweaty forehead.   She is still beautiful and you wonder if Ernie will hit on her at the burial.  

"You take yourself too seriously," you tell yourself.  This could just be a silly joke.   Maybe you are just an easy mark.   You are old, overweight and smoke is always coming out of you like something in you is burning.  You have been told you dress like a mortician laid out your clothes twenty years ago and you get out of breath on the escalator.   And how does everyone know about the gout?  You only told one person. 

What you find most troublesome is Ernie.  He is really good at office pools.   You have heard he has an offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands to hide his winnings from the IRS.    He predicted the last two Nobel Prize winners in statistics.   He has won three out of the last four in his  fantasy bowling league and he makes a fortune at Santa Anita predicting the horse that will break a leg and get put down.   He has studied the chinese zodiac and understands the geometric consequences of a parallel universe.    You heard in the break room that as a child, the family played fish with tarot cards until his sister drowned at the kitchen table. 

The bastard even got you a birthday card last week.    That just isn't even nice.    Since the office pool came out, they asked you to start working from home.  They care more about the consecutive days without a work related accident calendar than they do about you.    

There is a loud fly bouncing against the window behind you trying to get into the hospital.  Your wife comes back with coffee.  "Just say It," you remind yourself but try not to sound too pitiful.  "I love you."   You say it and feel air coming out of you.  Your clothes are compressing into the wheelchair.   Of course she tells you she loves you too.  It is just like formaldehyde-- part of the process.   The coffee seems hotter than usual and you think about the afterlife but only for a second because your wife found half a soft pack of cigarettes in her purse.  You feel like an old piece of furniture or something discarded behind the garage of a backwoods taxidermist.  It's Thursday.  You are a dying balloon.  This is all metaphor, you know.    Maybe metaphorically you are already dead.  That would explain the trail of sand from your dissolving spine falling out  the back of your pants, like sawdust off the apron of a cabinet maker.  

Perhaps metaphorically you have already died.  Maybe you died when your first wife left you for the guy at the record store that played guitar.  Or the time when you were fired from the English department at the University for suggesting the department chairs' writing talents lent itself better to professional wrestling scripts.   Your soul certainly could have left your body while you begged for the marketing job at the auto parts store.   You think about burying your dog or the time you drunkenly pissed on a firefly and imagined all the electrolytes leaving your body.    This could just be your life replaying; your life passing before your eyes,  You are dying now.  You feel it.   

"While I was getting coffee, the nurses were talking about all the weirdo this week," your wife said.  "I think you got them on the subject.   And they were talking about a guy dying during a seance."    Your wife is behind you reading to push your back in but puts her hand on your shoulder.   "Honey, what did you say that Ernie guy does?"

"Accounting", you tell her.  "He's the night auditor." 

"Was that the man at work that just died?  I think that is who they were talking about.""

"What?"  Your blood starts to seem a little less like dying paint.

"Yeah, I read it to you.  Don't you remember?  We even sent a check for the memorial fund.   Weird name… 'Scamp' or something."  

"Ernest Scamp in accounting."

"Yeah.  That sounds right.  I sent a check for fifteen dollars since you work together."   

Through the smoke of your second cigarette you smell coffee, sit up straight and take a sip but a big smile dont make for a good, clean pour.    "How did he die?" 

" It was pretty gruesome. I thought I told you.   Sounds like his comb-over got caught in one of the casters of a ouija board and then repeatedly smashed his head through the glass coffee table.  Right there in front of his wife and kids.  Horrifying."   

"Umm…  that's terrible.   Honey, would you roll me to the car?  I'm ready to go home."

All the way home, driving into the rising sun, you notice the moon fading away and the lightweight, aluminum bodies of traffic lights.   The original version of your favorite elevator anthem is on the radio, your wife puts her hand gently on your large leg and the rain of the night blows from the windshield.    You walk into your house like a child's first steps mostly because the weight of your belly cuts off the circulation in your legs  when you sit.  

As you crawl back in bed you said, "I'm going back to sleep. If work calls just tell them I've died."  You fall right to sleep, easily, with a cigarette ashing on your pillow.