WENT TO BED FINE, WOKE UP DEAD
SHE’D GONE TO bed in the Johnson City Stopover. That much was certain. Cold cream, a peek out of the window at her rented Datsun, eyemask on and lights out. She remembered, too, thumping an ancient wall-heater to dispel the mountain air, and a peculiar mouldy smell blooming out of the curtains. But now it felt like the motel sheets were pulled up over her face. Deirdre McGonagall never slept that way. She sat up, irritated. In addition to her duties as a registrar, she took genealogy very seriously, and would need a good night’s sleep before she began to trace the branch of her family that had uprooted from Scotland and replanted itself in the soil of Tennessee two hundred years before.
The sheet remained where it was, seemingly now below her. She turned to regard two bumps of nose and chin under the fabric, then reached out hesitantly, her nails taking on a brief, sparkly quality as they moved. What on earth?
Deirdre swung round and stood. Her toes groped for the travel-slippers she’d shrugged off under the bed. Instead they struck something hard and cold, kicking off another lightshow. Feeling oddly limber, she bent neatly at the waist and peered through the gap where her feet had been: hmm. Trolley wheels – dull steel, grey rubber – came into view. At a strange angle beyond them was a pair of large, scuffed brogues.
‘Oh!’
She straightened up, everything snapping back into place as it had when she was eighteen and heedlessly chasing a hockey ball across the fields.
‘H – hello?’
Even to her own ears, the voice that emerged from her throat was peculiar: ringing, piercing even, yet sweet as the tinkling of the country burn out behind her grandmother’s house. What was a man doing in here? Who was he, and where was her room, exactly?
‘Sir. Sir!’ Finding her usual voice, she started for him. ‘Why are you here?’
Deirdre tiptoed round the shape under the sheet and made for a pool of light over by the bathroom. But instead came a wedge of desk, and travelling upwards, long portions of sand-coloured trousers, a shirt-cuff peppered with cinder burns. The edge of one hairy hand overhung it. Beyond the dull green wall was a new, shadowy corner. She’d had enough, and laid her fingers over his hand.
‘What, sir, is going on?’
The man flinched and started from his seat. He touched his own hand with panicky fingers, as though he’d rashly gripped a knife-blade, or an unwatched cigarette had burnt down to the knuckles. Now Deirdre saw there was a cigarette – resting on a pressed-tin ashtray, the dratted thing smouldering away contentedly. She’d laughed at the clerk’s check-in question: ‘Regular, or non-smoking?’ It no longer seemed funny.
She felt she had better take hold of this situation, and quickly. Summoning all her professional resolve (though noting as she did so that she had never once taken a registration in her nightgown), she stepped into the stark rectangle of light cast by a boxy overhead fluorescent.
‘Sir, I demand to know what you’re doing here! It won’t do. Is this the famous American hospitality we’ve heard about? I’ve come to see how my family fared in these mountains, not entertain strange gentlemen, at night, in my room!’
She stood tall, waiting for the proper resolution of things to drop into place, as it inevitably did.
But the man picked up his cigarette and blew out a lungful of smoke. She heard a pen, scratching; the skin of his palms mussing at wiry hair. She took a step backward, then another, till she felt the bed-rail hit her thighs. She put out a hand and it struck a scooped ceramic-block; tried to steady herself, and discovered a long chiselled groove. She looked up at the ceiling, but it was no longer boxy. The ceiling was no longer there.
From a searing hole, fringed with fingers of light, poured all the effulgence of the heavens. Beyond the light a tunnel stretched up into the wide beyond, and Deirdre knew all at once what this was, and that she had no choice but to surrender.
Yet the block-and-groove remained stubbornly present beneath her fingers, and the man wrote on. As the light-fronds waved, and the hole burned brightly, she noticed a portion of his unshaved cheek, the dangling cigarette, a sudden beacon of all that was homely and real. Though her eyes were pulled upwards, she felt an overmastering urge to see what he was writing. In one fluid step she was beside him. Sparkles of light cascaded over the desk, illuminating his face and frayed collar, the greasy lapels of his jacket. Beside him, propped on an undertaker’s catalogue, was a bakelite nameplate: Ward Shiflet, Medical Examiner. He stopped scraping and squinted for a moment, then took another pull on the cigarette and reapplied himself.
This was abominable.
Stranded on a slab, three thousand miles from home!
Beyond all the professional ministrations of her colleagues!
Deirdre fought the pull of the light, forcing her attention back to the form. It was upside down, but she read it quite easily all the same. Here erewas state, county and a complicated-looking seal, then a series of boxes requiring this official’s attention. These seemed to fox Mr Shiflet. He’d scratched out several attempts at his title, which would not fit into the allotted space, but done better with his office address and a string of numbers she assumed was a number from a licence. The middle of the form appeared to be mostly folderol, but at the bottom was the heart of things.
Cause of death, in blunt type. There was a main space, and smaller spaces nestling like piglets round a sow. Deirdre could feel the pressing radiance, hot as the stingers of a jellyfish she’d swum through as a child. She clung to the desk. If she must go to glory, she would at least ensure the paperwork was properly completed.
If only she could see his face. Was it nice, the whiskers scratchy like her father’s, the eyes baggy with kindness? Or was it stern and business-like? She burned for the knowledge as for nothing in life. Here he was, at last – the recording angel! Fingers trembling, nib bobbing around like the nose of a broken horse. She smelled creosote, violets, burning toast. He scratched out her fate, letter by agonisingly shaky letter.
Patient went to bed fine …
First published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (April 2020)
Next: Wabi-Sabi