Madsen kept visiting the hospital two weeks after his mother was dead. He’d get halfway in through the main doors and see the security guard’s shoulders hunch up beneath his tightly fitted gray uniform. The two tiny Asian nurses at the administrative desk would whisper and watch closely, all eyes and long black hair and immaculately pressed bleached uniforms, and Madsen would suddenly remember he wasn’t supposed to be there and turn around.
He’d wind up facing the massive five-tiered parking structure across the street, trying to remember where he’d left his Mustang. The snow continued to fall and was already nearly six inches deep, with plows and sanders coming through the area every fifteen minutes. They didn’t help much and you could hear the harsh crushing slams of metal striking metal from the highway overpass a couple of blocks over.
He watched the ambulances, police cars, and people huddling around their own dying children. Some kind of a bomb scare in the pediatric oncology ward had forced them all to congregate in the main lobby, but the dining area had closed hours ago. Kids in wheelchairs, left with only clots of burnished hair, throats and chests swathed in bandages, sat wide-eyed as the cops poured past. Madsen looked up at the windows of the north and south wings and sucked air through his teeth, wondering what he ought to do.
The bomb squad didn’t seem put out by the fact that he stood along with everybody else. German Shepherds trained to sniff out C4 sat barking at the terrified mothers trying to keep warm in the overcrowded waiting area. Nurses in sweaters frittered past carrying coffee cups around the corner of the building.
He stepped outside and let the roughly hewn moonlight slam across his back. The snow swirled around his feet and he tried hard to find something to do, at the moment and with the rest of his life. Madsen couldn’t quite remember who he’d been before his mother had become so ill, and everything ahead remained hazy, foggy. It annoyed the shit out of him. He’d once had a distinct goal that seared fiery outlines into his dreams, but in the last few days it had faded until he couldn’t remember what it had even been. A sense of relief was marred by the vague feeling of regret.
A young cop stormed past, giving him the slow once-over. Around twenty-two, new to the uniform, with blond buzz cut and an aura of self-importance. Madsen cocked his head curiously, knowing a confrontation was inevitable.
"Who are you?" the officer asked.
"Madsen," Madsen said.
"Do you have a kid here?"
"No."
"Then clear out. What are you doing?"
He still didn’t have an answer, even two weeks later. He had nothing to say for a second and then it came to him. "My mother just died."
"What room?" the cop asked.
"What the hell difference does it make?" Madsen said, feeling the warm anger flood his belly. It brought back some calm and then there he was, ready for whatever might happen next.
"You should leave, sir, there’s been some trouble."
The cop vanished around some vending machines and a dog wandered closer, nosing into Madsen’s crotch. One of the kids giggled and his mother, a broad lady with features as bland as a shopping bag, shushed the boy. Madsen winked hoping he didn’t appear to be a child molester. He held the back of his fist out to the dog and one of the bomb unit guys pulled the animal away and stomped up the hallway.
Tires scraped against spikes of jagged ice, coming off the exit ramp, and another screaming ambulance appeared at the corner, swaying as it turned too sharply and clipped the curb. Madsen took a step towards the main doors as if he might...what...protect anyone near him. Sometimes you acted without realizing the meaning behind the movement, or how stupid it might be. The ambulance slowed and coasted past, heading around to the other side of the building. The emergency room.
His stepbrother Bobby had died four weeks earlier and Bob’s ex-wife still hadn’t so much as notified a mortuary yet. They’d only hold the body for another few days, Madsen remembered, and then...what the hell would they do? He wasn’t sure whether he should bother going and claiming it himself, giving the name of Chapey’s, half a mile up the road. No matter what you thought you knew, the art of dying proved how incompetent you were.
He walked back across the lobby and the guard perked up once more. Madsen ignored him and went to the elevators. He already knew where the morgue was because he’d missed his mother’s death by forty-five minutes and had been forced to say his good-byes while she lay on a gurney shoved up to the wall. Chewing through his tongue and trying not to be distracted by her naked beneath a sheet, with her eyes a quarter of the way open, scowling.
He got in and pressed the button, held himself in the corner while the elevator lurched to a stop and the doors opened.
The lights were dim down here, one end of the corridor being remodeled. Wires hung in a colorful lump from the ceiling and a wooden ladder stood with stained cans and tools placed upon every other step. He hadn’t seen a wooden ladder in years and it reminded him of his father, the man’s thick hairy arms speckled with paint. Yellow caution tape had been strung across the width of the passage.
Madsen decided to go the opposite way and continued along the corridor past half-open doors until he reached an empty desk blocking the vestibule. Like in high school, some monitor asking you for a hall pass.
A woman appeared in the room beyond, staring through the doorway at Madsen without any expression. Not a nurse or doctor, just a middle-aged lady wearing a prim brown business suit and tan shoes that didn’t go. Jesus, maybe she really did want a pass, a doctor’s note. Please excuse Johnny from algebra; he has to go pick up his brother’s remains. Her pursed lips were covered in a heavy wax lipstick; the kind woman didn’t wear anymore. Madsen almost liked the look, mainly because it was old-fashioned and made him think of when he was a kid and his parents threw holiday parties.
"Yes," she said abruptly, as if answering a question he didn’t ask. "And why are you here?"
The offhand, curt manner of the woman drew him forward another two steps until his knees were pressed against her desk. "My brother. Robert Harrington."
"Yes?"
"His body is still here. I’d like to make arrangements."
"How so?"
"If you’ll let me use a phone I’ll call information and get the number of Chapey’s, leave a message."
"And you are...?"
So it was going to be like that.
A shudder went through Madsen as he tried to find more patient resolve, not clamber over the side. "His brother."
"I’ll need to see identification."
He pulled his driver’s license and laid it on the metal desk top that was so shiny he was startled to see his face, the reflection of his own hand coming up at him.
"Just a moment, please."
She disappeared into the room beyond, where he watched the shadows play against the open door but never saw anybody go past. He waited, realizing that he wasn’t supposed to be here and had, for reasons unknown, thrown the place out of sorts by showing up. Sometimes all you had to do was breathe to ruin somebody else’s day.
But on occasion you could take pride in being the stranger who’s willing to cross a line, even if you didn’t see it there or knew what it meant to be on the other side.
It took her fifteen minutes to return with a small box.
"Mr. Madding?"
"Madsen."
A capped teeth impatient leer, as if he spoke his name only to be difficult. "Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Mr. Madsen then. You say you’re the brother of the deceased?"
Okay, he was about to be pressed to another wall. That was fine. You almost got used to it. "Yes."
"But his name was Robert Harrington."
"His step-brother."
"You said brother."
What did these people know about blood, really? "His step-brother. He has no other family."
"I was told there was a wife and children."
Who the hell was there to tell her that? Mom on her deathbed? "An ex-wife who doesn’t care and two teenage sons who don’t know him."
"I’m sorry, but they are the immediate kin and we can’t—"
"What’s in the box?"
She drew her chin back until it almost stuck out the other side of her head. "His ashes, of course."
"But—"
Since when did a hospital cremate the dead, and without so much as a signature?...Madsen’s back teeth ground together as he looked at her again, taking further stock. She enjoyed his puzzlement, comfortable and squarely settled in that knowledge of all matters of mortality.
"I’m afraid you simply don’t have the authorization needed to—"
"Sure."
His hands flashed out in blur of motion and he had the little box. The significance of his brother’s history had been obliterated down to less than three pounds.
Without giving it much thought, Madsen walked around the desk, past the waxy lady and into the room. He expected to see shining steel drawers packed row upon row with the dead, jars filled with clear liquids and cancerous mutant organs. He thought there would be eyes watching him from the top of shelves, optic nerves still attached.
Instead, the room was empty except for well-catalogued files and envelopes and trays of bone dust, a scale and a phone on top of a sterile counter. Fluorescent lights hummed above and made the edges of Madsen’s vision burn brighter.
No windows down here, nothing to do with Bob unless he turned around and made a break for it. Madsen just wanted to get rid of the ashes and be done. The responsibility wasn’t his and perhaps he shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. Let them dispose of him however they saw fit, what difference did it make to Bobby?
But maybe it did. Too late to back off now, Madsen’s course had been set by his frustration. His scalp began to prickle and the heated rush of blood filled his cheeks. Chilly sweat stood out on his upper lip and along his hairline. He wanted to apologize but the lady wasn’t even in the room with him.
"Hello?" he called. "Listen, I—"
That just made it worse; she was probably already calling security. He had to move in some direction, do what needed to be done. He pulled open the lid and poured his brother’s ashes among the contents of all the other trays, a little at a time. Let Bob make some new friends, get taken home by other folks because his own family didn’t want him and never had, alive or dead. It was good enough, and maybe the gesture would mean something later on.
Madsen spun around and saw the woman turning the far corner of the hall beyond the caution tape. What’d she do, hop it? Her footsteps echoed down the corridor with a stern uncompromising cadence. He moved to the elevator and hit the button, wondering if a couple of guards would be ready to take him in the moment the doors opened. It perked him up, thinking of that, and the muscles in his arms and back tensed. He wanted someone to test him in some capacity, whatever it might be. A beating would be all right, so long as it took a while.
When the elevator arrived it was empty. Madsen relaxed and both his shoulders cracked loud as gunshots. He climbed in and hit the button for the lobby. The doors slid shut just as the lady down the corridor called out, "Madding?...did you...?"
"Thanks!"
In the lobby, dog fur floated past on the draft as snow piled in through the main entrance, the electric doors held open by thick rubber wedges while the police and the families spoke quietly together.
Madsen left the hospital, crossed the street and hunted around the mammoth parking garage looking for his Mustang. He spent forty minutes roaming around the place and couldn’t spot his car. It happened to him every time he had come to visit his mother, but now this was different. He had no memory of where he might’ve parked the Stang and finally rested against a railing and crossed his arms tightly against his chest, trying to hold in the confusion. Bobby would’ve been making jokes the whole time, drinking from a silver flask and eyeing every woman that passed by. The moment lengthened until Madsen wanted to cry out to his mother and brother, the way he would’ve as a boy. The urge was more powerful than he’d expected and it panicked him some.
Madsen realized he was tired and leaned against a railing for a minute, trying to decide whether he ought to just leave the Mustang and try to call a cab. He moved to the stairs and kept heading up until he was on the top tier, the fifth, and could look down at the rest of the area. The blizzard had grown much worse even while he was searching for his car, and the snow was way too high. No cabs would be coming out tonight. He could see the cars stacked up along both sides of the highway, some alone and others crushed together in mangled black masses that were already partially buried.
He wasn’t going home.
The walk back across the street to the hospital seemed a failure of some sort, as if he couldn’t let go of the past even now that his mother was buried and brother’s ashes were...liberated. They were both gone so why couldn’t he leave? The questions of his life never grew pertinent but they did become more applicable. He was down to When the fuck am I going to get out of here?
He stood in the middle of the road, staring at the upper floors of the hospital as the snow drifts heaped against his knees. If there had ever been a reason for him to keep coming back, maybe he’d find it tonight. Sometimes you only had to think you had a larger fate than going back to a shit apartment and eating mac and cheese in the glow of basic cable. If you believed enough, maybe you could force the issue.
Trouble was he could never believe in anything just that much. By the time Madsen started moving again he was nearly buried where he stood. His hair was completely covered in ice crystals and he finally realized his nostrils were being frozen over.
Inside again, and the bomb squad had finished clearing the area. The kids were allowed back to pediatric oncology wing but most of the parents and doctors still didn’t feel safe and just stood around wondering aloud who would want to play such a sick joke. The guards and nurses at the administrative desk had switched out and new faces peered at him. Somebody gave Madsen a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. He drank it without thinking and wandered off again.
He’d done this a lot while his mother lay dying, and as before no one approached him now. Like everyone here, he didn’t exude much of a physical presence and he knew it. You didn’t speak in these halls, didn’t walk as upright as you normally would. The overbearing weight of illness made everybody gape at the floor. You didn’t make much eye contact, and when you did it was fleeting and shameful. You hated the doctors for their shortcomings and mistakes, and they hated you for not dying quietly or quickly enough.
Madsen glanced down to see he was still holding the empty cup. There was no place to throw it away so he crumpled it and stuck the pieces in his pocket. He had no idea where he was and looked at the wall to see a yellow line running parallel to a red one. What’d that mean? He thought he’d walked up at least one flight of stairs. Christ, had he been this bad before his mother had gotten sick?
An explosive crush of noise burst from ahead. People walking quickly away, not running. He waited and saw a couple of the bomb squad dogs tearing down the passage, followed by more young cops. He stepped back to the wall and watched them go by. The hell? It was like in high school when you were out in the soccer field and a thunderstorm made everyone rush back into the gym. The teachers wouldn’t know what to do and you’d just hang around the place, hop on the parallel bars, girls dancing in the corner, fights breaking out on the wrestling mats, guys making out with girls under the bleachers, finding your friends on one side of the room, eyeing your enemies and waiting.
So there he was staring after them when he inched around another corner and a squat guy with powerful arms spun towards him, holding a pair of needle-nose pliers and wire cap connectors. A custodian, somebody doing electrical work. Pants riding too high, showing off old brown socks, even though they hung low on his thick hips.
"Now what’s happened?" Madsen asked.
"There’s been another bomb scare."
"Christ."
"This time in ICU. They’re trying to evacuate all the patients but most are critical and can’t be moved."
Madsen used to think of things like this while he sat with his mother, rubbing her hand. He always figured there’d have to be some kind of precautions set up to deal with troubles like these—power outages, a hurricane. But really, what could anyone do? How could they move people in the last hours of their lives, seven IV drips pumping into their comatose bloated bodies?
"Is there anything I can do to help?" Madsen asked.
It caught the custodian wrong and he started to glare, putting heat and hatred into his cloudy eyes. They could really turn the poison when they wanted to. "Who are you?"
"I’m—"
"Why are you here? You’d better go. Go on."
There was nothing to argue about so Madsen left, watching more police officers sprinting past him. None of the cops seemed to even notice him, and it made Madsen want to say something. Hold up a hand; ask if they could even see him.
His mother had been in ICU at the end, where he held onto her bruised and yellow arm with the firm and frightening resolve that if he let go, for a moment, she would leave him. The monitors kept careful scrutiny of her dwindling heart rate while the respirator forced jerking, heaving breaths into her lungs.
The IV drips—seven of them in all—filled the room with the sounds of water torture. The anticipation in waiting for each new drop drove Madsen into a silent rage. Every so often someone at the other end of the floor would burst out in a low groaning laughter until Madsen wanted to get up and strangle anybody he could find. You could easily lose your mind on the deathwatch.
It was almost a blessing—a kindness—that Bob had died first, and quickly. Cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis B had taken a strong grinning womanizer with a scotch in his hand and, within a few months, stripped him down into an angry alcoholic bleeding from the rectum. Bob wore adult diapers with pants three sizes too big, but he never let go of the bottle.
Madsen hadn’t been around much at the time and had missed most of the transition, but he’d caught the tail end of Bobby’s descent. His stepbrother on the busted couch, sallow and scrawny and scheming against his own children. His ashes, at least, hadn’t smelled of booze and sour milk.
"Hello?"
You had to find solace where you could.
"Hello?"
Madsen looked down to see a girl, maybe twelve years old, touching his wrist. Tufts of course gray hair stuck out in odd cusps and notches across her otherwise pink and scabbed head. She still had chubby cheeks though, and her hesitant smile brought out a heaviness of lines from all the corners of her face. Bandages swathed her throat and forehead.
"Yes?" he said.
"My father—he hasn’t come back." The dark angles of her ardently featured face drew together to form an exhausted shadow. She swooned and Madsen had to leap forward to catch her as she collapsed. He felt all the dense layers of gauze wrapped around her tiny frame beneath the bed shirt. He scanned the corridor for a doctor, hearing the dogs barking somewhere distantly, but saw no one.
"Hey!" he shouted towards the nurse’s station, except there wasn’t a station there. No one had ever been around for his mother either, except in the middle of the night when they huddled close, trying to explain to him, in the most indecently placid tones, why she was dying.
"I’m sorry," she told him. "Sometimes I forget I can’t walk too far anymore."
"Let me help you back to your room."
She pointed to a doorway and he hefted her into his arms. Maybe seventy pounds. She snuggled there for a second, chin pressed into his chest, while he tried to hold onto the moment knowing it was already gone. He placed her in bed where three sets of heavy sheets were carefully peeled back to reveal her own small but deep indentation on the mattress.
"He left to get our car. From before. When we were supposed to leave, but it was snowing bad, and then they said we could all go back to our rooms, so I did. But he hasn’t come back yet, and he wouldn’t have gone for long."
"No, of course not," Madsen said. "He’ll be here soon."
"My father—"
All of us, we’re always searching for a family that’s no longer there. "The blizzard has tied up traffic all over. He probably went out to..." Come up with a good one. "...get something...for you...to eat. The dining area’s closed and he didn’t know how long you’d be camped out in the lobby. I’m sure he’s trying his best." Maybe he was out there in one of the wrecks, freezing to death on the side of the expressway.
Vases of flowers lined the sill, the girl’s drawings taped over her bed. She had a good eye for detail, perspective, light and silhouette, distinctly textured realistic grimaces and grins and sneers.
"These are wonderful," he said, and he meant it.
"I’m okay so long as the pencils are sharp." Her voice had a pleasant sleepiness to it that made Madsen suddenly feel tired, in a good way. "I can’t use ink or charcoal that well, and it’s hard to keep the pencils pointy enough, even with a sharpener."
"Yeah?"
"Blunt edges turn everything ugly."
He let loose with an odd noise, and it took a second to comprehend that the sound was his own unpleasant laughter. It had been a while since he’d so much as chuckled, and perhaps he’d lost the knack for it. Here she’d said something that had some style—blunt edges turn everything ugly—that rolled off the tongue, and he’d been self-involved enough to apply her words to his own life. Madsen shook his head.
Her small fist snapped out and caught him by the wrist. He sat on the edge of the bed and petted the small knot of colorless hair just over her right ear.
"You’re cold," she said.
"Just my hands."
"What’s your name?"
"I’m Madsen. What’s yours?"
She ignored the question and kept gazing at him almost longingly, with a mixture of pity and adoration. It’s how his mother used to look at him. "Will you stay with me for a while?"
"Sure."
"Just until I fall asleep."
"As long as you want."
"My father does that most nights, when they let him."
She closed her eyes and sighed, and he kept patting her hair with the same intense, obsessive need as he had rubbed his mother’s hand at the end. There’s something about this, he thought, that warrants an unholy amount of care and attention. He glanced up at the faces on her wall, searching for her father, but saw only beautiful women and unsightly little boys.
Snow pounded at her window, like the dust...of ancestors...craving notice. Damn, it got you thinking. After more than an hour he got up and left the room. As he stepped into the hall he heard her, shifting in bed and saying softly, "Come back."
He wanted to but it was already too late. Madsen knew that now without knowing why, and yet it didn’t make the walking away any easier. There wasn’t much left to do, but still, something had been left unfinished. He understood that more clearly than anything else that had occurred in the last couple of weeks. He hadn’t accomplished the task at hand, whatever it might be.
Madsen came across an alcove filled with a few chairs, a new but worn couch, pay phone. At the end they tell you to go call any family members who might want to visit one last time. Like you ring them up while they’re watching one of their yuppie sit-coms, sitting around in sweatpants, two-year-old napping in the bassinet, and they’ll come charging into the night.
Somebody there now, crimped in the corner.
He started to walk past.
Someone on the phone, whispering in a monotone peppered with hideous titters that Madsen had never heard outside of his nightmares. It stopped him cold. Madsen swung around and watched the back of the man’s head bobbing towards the mouthpiece, his heavy overcoat covered with ice crystals. The guy trembled there, hands quivering so badly that his knuckles snapped against the metal ledge and knocked over carefully placed stacks of coins.
"You..." Madsen said.
The guy—Jesus Christ, no, the kid—wouldn’t turn all the way around, arching his pink, peach-fuzzed chin just enough so he could give Madsen a sidelong glance.
"You. You’re the one who called in the bomb threat."
The teenager coming around a bit more now but still not wanting to look into Madsen’s face. Not a teen, maybe pushing twenty-one, old enough to have already lost whatever there was to lose. Madsen moved to the other side of the pay phone and saw the kid’s face had been viciously scarred—left eye gone, the socket crushed and matted with dark tissue.
He thought that might be what it was all about. Kid is in a wreck, holds a grudge against the hospital. Who died with him? A girlfriend? His granny? We all handle our broken hearts so poorly. So he’s calling from inside the hospital and they can’t trace him? The hell’s up with that? Fifty cops and dogs running around the place, and nobody can find him, stop him? Now you’re getting down to the grit, the dirt in the corner, knowing something even worse is going on, and you’ll never know what it really is.
"You got a beef?" Madsen said, the rage coming up in him fast. First just a few drops of bile and venom, and then all the rest of it pouring out. He slapped the phone from the kid’s hand and grabbed him by the neck.
Two sticks of poorly taped together dynamite fell out of the guy’s coat pocket. They hit with a hollow thud, sounding fake, but Madsen had never been around dynamite before and had no idea whether it was real. He had to follow through.
"Okay, bastard, let’s get this over with."
The words had barely cleared his lips when a gleam of light drew his attention low, to the bomber’s right hand. He knew what was coming but couldn’t quite get himself out of the way—same old story, when you got right down to it. Hey now, here it comes.
The blade caught Madsen low in the belly but it didn’t go in deep. He tried to hold himself steady, laughing because it felt good to be doing what was right. No chance though, he fell back to the other side of the hall...and bumped a gurney shoved up against the wall...with a dirty sheet covering...
Friggin’ kid moved forward, terrified and fighting as if in self-defense. He accidentally stepped on the dynamite and those two sticks cracked loudly—plastic—spilling ball bearings. A low whining moan crashed up through his chest.
The knife brushed Madsen again, and once more, but there was no pain. He brought the back of one fist up into that ruined face. The guy’s nose went with an almost gentle snap and he started to scream. Madsen hit him in the same place again. He swept aside and struck the kid’s inner shoulder with the meaty part of his palm, driving deep into bone, wanting to break the fucker’s neck. An insane fury was on him but it only emerged second to second, with repulsive moments of clarity between them.
He kept at it for all he was worth as the blizzard continued, out there and in here. Howls echoed all around, perhaps the wind, or maybe the dogs.
At last, the bastard swooned and tumbled backwards, stepped on the ball bearings and his feet went up from under him. It appeared like a perfectly choreographed move as he hung up there in the air, chest high for an instant, before coming down flat on the back of his skull.
Madsen checked him. The bitter kid wasn’t out yet, laying there chewing his own blood, breathing shallowly. His one good eye tried to focus.
The knife was still in his hand. Madsen kicked it away.
Skittering off, splashing drops on the tiles as it spun, all four inches of the blade were wet.
"Hey now," Madsen said, a giggle lurking at the back of his throat. He reached down and felt his belly squish aside as he touched it. His hands came away completely red and he realized he’d been nearly disemboweled.
"Who are you?" the kid whimpered, asking with a real interest. "What are you doing here?"
Always a good question. Madsen waited as the guy clambered to his feet, and then punched him in the mouth once more with everything he had left. The kid went down hard and lay in a heap, unconscious.
The blow had set Madsen off-balance and he went to one knee. Blood gushed from his stomach and poured over his shoes, but it still didn’t hurt. He stood again and confronted the gurney behind him like a long-lost, resentful friend. The shape under the cloth was as familiar as any obscured face would be, his own or another.
How much less of himself was there now? When they ground him down into ashes, what would the scale read? Would he be more than a handful for somebody to take home?
This I want to see.
His fingers trembled as he reached out to touch the soiled sheet.
"I’m not dead yet," he whispered, and the conviction of his own voice gave him strength. "I am not dead yet!"
Maybe it was true. His crimson fingerprints covered the cloth and bled through to what was beneath.
"Madsen?"
He wheeled and in doing so lurched wildly and kicked the gurney. It creaked and slowly rolled away.
And the little bald girl at the other end of the hall, swathed in gauze as if she’d been flung into fire many times before, smiling and beckoning him forward, the blunt edges of his life growing more and more ugly now, even as he was running, stumbling, and then finally crawling to meet her.