The End of The Row

It’s bright in this room, almost dazzlingly so. That cold, astringent bright that throbs behind your eye balls and puckers your brow. Clinical bright. Bright enough to make the tears begin to simmer, to make you pause, close your eyes against the light, repeat the words you’ve been saying to yourself since last night, last week, last month, “it’ll be over before you know it, you won’t feel a thing”. Except it turns out it wasn’t pain you were worried about, not really, not the physical kind, not the burn or the sting or the tearing kind. It was this other kind, the kind you’re feeling now, the kind where your heart is hammering against the inside of your sternum, a rhythm so quick and a beat so fast you don’t know if you’ll make it, hammering so you can hear it fill up your skull with its din, hammering so you don’t know if your ribs might crack and your heart might burst into bloody remnants inside your chest. This kind, where you can feel the breath coming fast, in and out, in and out, cold and raw in the passages of your nose, sound like bellows huffing as your nostrils flare and push and your head begins to spin and you wonder whether a drop of air is making it to your lungs, or if you might pass out through lack of it. The kind where your vision narrows and you can see in razor sharpness the line where the linoleum meets the painted brick, wipe clean floors and wipe clean walls, and the wipe clean window onto black nothing, and then the thought, some part of your mind still curious in all the chaos, “I wonder if they thought green would be a calming colour.”

It is an anchor, this thought. “I wonder if…” is yours, it does not belong to terror. You grasp at it, “I wonder if…”, seize it, watch yourself wondering, and standing on your own two legs. “I wonder if,” you think, “green is to calm me, or to calm them. I suppose” you think, “everybody benefits from feeling calmer.” And somehow, you do. Yes, your heart is still beating nineteen to the dozen, but it has not burst. And yes, your breath is still flowing fast over dry-sore membranes inside your nose, but you have not passed out. Your knees have not buckled and your fists still clench and unclench at your command. Green walls, beige floor, a bed, lying ready. Green walls. A clock.

Green, and still cold and stark. Dank green, not the soft bright of moss or the tenderness of trees, but something you have seen before, inside, always, behind a door, and never out in the air, never somewhere where anything good grows. You don’t know what you expected. Something less clinical, perhaps, something with comfort in mind, something more of the human. But then this is clinical, you remind yourself. A medical procedure. Clinically executed. Precise, detached, unfailing. They do this kind of thing every day. Well. Not every day. But they’ve done it before. Nothing will go wrong.

Except, everything has gone wrong already and inside you feel the anger that has rooted deep in your gut blossoming into panic at the base of your throat, into despair, into the urge to raise your arms and shout again, again, again, “I am not supposed to be here, this bed is not for me!”

But you are hoarse, and so very tired, and here you are, unbelievably, impossibly, standing in your socks on this cold, wipe-clean floor, being guided to the bed that you are trying not to see, the bed that should not be for you, and there comes a point, doesn’t there, where impossible becomes inevitable, can’t happen becomes happening, and once a thing is happening, once it is inevitable, once the wheels have gained momentum and the parts are all in place, well is there any fighting left? When you have fought so hard and lost again and again and again? And what is the loss, really? When you are so tired, when so much has already been taken, when what is left is soiled and ruined?

And yet, your body still revolts against acceptance, trembles through weakened arms and quivers at the kidneys, and nobody will meet your eye. There is a phone, somewhere, you know, and you cast about the room, willing it to ring. “Wrong person, yes, terrible mistake, yes, close call, that’s right, to the holding room immediately, of course, of course, poor thing, imagine.” But the phone is not in this room, but somewhere nearby, and you cannot hear it ringing, and there is the bed, unavoidable now, wheels locked in place, a pillow for your head, at least, a sheet for your body, is something, two padded arms, crucifixal, beige straps, one for each elbow, for the chest, for the stomach, for the thighs and the knees and the ankles. Not the ankles. Your ankles. Your ankles which feel so tender and liable to fail. Your knees, flimsy as a card tower. Your thighs, hollow and numb. Your stomach, sick and roiling. Your chest, where your heart persists.

“It wasn’t me,” you tell the man beside you, but he gestures to the bed without looking your way. “You can’t… I didn’t…” and on the other side, another man is as distant as the first as he places a hand on your shoulder.

You are seated on the bed now, and suddenly you feel the abrupt obsolescence of your feet. Useless, unemployed, never to touch the floor again, and without the ground beneath you, without the earth pushing up and the heft of yourself bearing down, you are adrift, helpless as a babe in arms. “Please” you say, because all the other things were said already, and said again, and said in a hundred different ways. “I didn’t do this thing, I couldn’t do this thing, I wouldn’t do this thing.” Now, there is only “please”, and you hear the smallness of it, the way it falls dead in a room so full of hard lines.

And now, they are strapping you, tight over your flesh, and their hands brush your body and you wish it was somebody else. You, or them. Their hands on a different body, or someone else’s, on yours. Someone tender, and soft. Someone who knows your heart. Like your mother, who promised not to come, but now you need her after all, and they tell you not to pity yourself but who else is there to do it, when the world has deemed you a liar, and proved that you are, beyond reasonable doubt. There was no need for doubt. You didn’t do what you said you didn’t do. Only everyone doubted. “Please.”

One of them meets your eye and you hold it, and scream with your soul, “human, I too am human, and I am so very afraid.”

“Would you like to say any last words?” he says, and you knew that he would, but already? You have a thousand words to say, but what can be said which would matter? Which ones, of the thousands, will you leave on your lips? Or you could say nothing at all?

Afterwards, there is a prick, and another, there are lines checked and re-checked and it all seems so ordinary, so beautifully ordinary, like leaves swaying in the trees and the smell of rain and eating a burger with the TV on and a tray across your knees, like soaping your arms and hearing a train passing by and feeling your stomach rumble and knowing you are going home for dinner, and you thought perhaps there would be more, but what could be more ordinary than dying, in the end?

You think of your mother, and hope she knows how heavyy you are with the pain in your arrrm and bright unfairness to be here underwater with the leavesswayingin