14 Stories

THE SIGNING

My wife dies. Now I’m alone. I kiss her hands and leave the hospital room. A nurse runs after me as I walk down the hall.

“Are you going to make arrangements now for the deceased?” he says.

“No.”

“Then what do you want us to do with the body?”

“Burn it.”

“That’s not our job.”

“Give it to science.”

“You’ll have to sign the proper legal papers.”

“Give me them.”

“They take a while to draw up. Why don’t you wait in the guest lounge?”

“I haven’t time.”

“And her toilet things and radio and clothes.”

“I have to go.” I ring for the elevator.

“You can’t do that.”

“I am.”

The elevator comes.

“Doctor, doctor,” he yells to a doctor going through some files at the nurse’s station. She stands up. “What is it, nurse?” she says. The elevator door closes. It opens on several floors before it reaches the lobby. I head for the outside. There’s a security guard sitting beside the revolving door. He looks like a regular city policeman other than for his hair, which hangs down past his shoulders, and he also has a beard. Most city policemen don’t; maybe all. He gets a call on his portable two-way set as I step into one of the quarters of the revolving door. “Laslo,” he says into it. I’m outside. “Hey you,” he says. I turn around. He’s nodding and pointing to me and waves for me to come back. I cross the avenue to get to the bus stop. He comes outside and slips the two-way into his back pocket and walks up to me as I wait for the bus.

“They want you back upstairs to sign some papers,” he says.

“Too late. She’s dead. I’m alone. I kissed her hands. You can have the body. I just want to be far away from here and as soon as I can.”

“They asked me to bring you back.”

“You can’t. This is a public street. You need a city policeman to take me back, and even then I don’t think he or she would be in their rights.”

“I’m going to get one.”

The bus comes. Its door opens. I have the required exact fare. I step up and put my change in the coin box.

“Don’t take this man,” the guard says to the bus driver. “They want him back at the hospital there. Something about his wife who was or is a patient, though I don’t know the actual reason they want him for.”

“I’ve done nothing,” I tell the driver and take a seat in the rear of the bus. A woman sitting in front of me says “What’s holding him up? This isn’t a red light.”

“Listen,” the driver says to the guard, “if you have no specific charge or warrant against this guy, I think I better go.”

“Will you please get this bus rolling again?” a passenger says.

“Yes,” I say, disguising my voice so they won’t think it’s me but some other passenger, “I’ve an important appointment and your slowpokey driving and intermittent dawdling has already made me ten minutes late.”

The driver shrugs at the guard. “In or out, friend, but unless you can come up with some official authority to stop this bus, I got to finish my run.”

The guard steps into the bus, pays his fare and sits beside me as the bus pulls out.

“I’ll just have to stick with you and check in if you don’t mind,” he says to me. He pushes a button in his two-way set and says “Laslo here.”

“Laslo,” a voice says. “Where the hell are you?”

“On a bus.”

“What are you doing there? You’re not through yet.”

“I’m with the man you told me to grab at the door. Well, he got past the door. I tried to stop him outside, but he said I needed a city patrolman for that because it was a public street.”

“You could’ve gotten him on the sidewalk in front.”

“This was at the bus stop across the street.”

“Then he’s right. We don’t want a suit.”

“That’s what I thought. So I tried to convince him to come back. He wouldn’t. He said he’d kissed some woman’s hands and we can have the body. I don’t know what that means but want to get it all in before I get too far away from you and lose radio contact. He got on this bus. The driver was sympathetic to my argument about the bus not leaving, but said it would be illegal his helping to restrain the man and that he also had to complete his run. So I got on the bus and am now sitting beside the man and will get off at the next stop if that’s what you want me to do. I just didn’t know what was the correct way to carry out my orders in this situation, so I thought I’d stick with him till I found out from you.”

“You did the right thing. Let me speak to him now.”

Laslo holds the two-way in front of my mouth. “Hello,” I say.

“The papers to donate your wife’s body to the hospital for research and possible transplants are ready now, sir, so could you return with Officer Laslo?”

“No.”

“If you think it’ll be too trying an emotional experience to return here, could we meet someplace else where you could sign?”

“Do what you want with her body. There’s nothing I ever want to have to do with her again. I’ll never speak her name. Never go back to our apartment. Our car I’m going to let rot in the street till it’s towed away. This wristwatch. She bought it for me and wore it a few times herself.” I throw it out the window.

“Why didn’t you just pass it on back here?” the man behind me says.

“These clothes. She bought some of them, mended them all.” I take off my jacket, tie, shirt and pants and toss them out the window.

“Lookit,” Laslo says, “I’m just a hospital security guard with a pair of handcuffs I’m not going to use on you because we’re in a public bus and all you’ve just gone through, but please calm down.”

“This underwear I bought myself yesterday,” I say to him. “I needed a new pair. She never touched or saw them, so I don’t mind still wearing them. The shoes go, though. She even put on these heels with a shoe-repair kit she bought at the five-and-dime.” I take off my shoes and drop them out the window.

The bus has stopped. All the other passengers have left except Laslo. The driver is on the street looking for what I’m sure is a patrolman or police car.

I look at my socks. “I’m not sure about the socks.”

“Leave them on,” Laslo says. “They look good, and I like brown.”

“But did she buy them?” I think they were a gift from her two birthdays ago when she gave me a cane picnic basket with a dozenand-a-half pairs of different-colored socks inside. Yes, this is one of them,” and I take them off and throw them out the window. “That’s why I tried and still have to get out of this city fast as I can.”

“You hear that?” Laslo says into the two-way radio, and the man on the other end says “I still don’t understand.”

“You see,” I say into it, “we spent too many years here together, my beloved and I — all our adult lives. These streets. That bridge. Those buildings.” I spit out the window.” Perhaps even this bus. We took so many rides up and down this line.” I try to uproot the seat in front of me but it won’t budge. Laslo claps the cuffs on my wrists. “This life,” I say and I smash my head through the window.

An ambulance comes and takes me back to the same hospital. I’m brought to Emergency and put on a cot in the same examining room she was taken to this last time before they moved her to a semiprivate room. A hospital official comes in while the doctors and nurses are tweezing the remaining glass splinters out of my head and stitching me up. “If you’re still interested in donating your wife’s body,” he says, “then we’d like to get the matter out of the way while some of her organs can still be reused by several of the patients upstairs.”

I say “No, I don’t want anyone walking around with my wife’s parts where I can bump into him and maybe recognize them any day of the year,” but he takes my writing hand and guides it till I’ve signed.