communion.

a short story

They are wrong when they say it doesn't hurt. Mark had heard that somewhere, that it didn't hurt. That one was so distraught, so disassociated, that it didn't hurt. They were wrong. It hurt.

The first wound was worst, that was true. He had kneeled on the Sundown Inn's tacky floor with the knife pointed toward the arch of his rib cage, and he hadn't been able to push it in. He had looked up and focused on the picture on the far wall, a little girl, of all things, one of those big-eyed waifs holding a flower, and it had been irritation that gave him the burst of energy he needed.

Things got strange then. He suddenly felt incredibly alive and full of energy--reckless, electric energy. Pain blossomed around the edges of the wound like the time-elapsed movie of a flower opening, a red, curling explosion of pain petals. A line of blood appeared where the knife had gone in, then nothing.

"Shit," he screamed, as he stabbed himself again. "Shit, shit, shit!" That must have been what brought the manager to his room--the manager, who had noted Mark's pale, radiantly desperate visage--because he found him minutes later. Mark was playing dead. The manager turned him over. Their eyes met. It was the manager who began to shake and cry, so bad he could barely dial the phone. Mark had the absurd desire to comfort him, to pull the spindly man down onto his bloody lap, to stroke the few greasy hairs back across his bald spot.

Then he came to in the emergency room, IVs in both arms. The first thing he saw was a nurse's face in profile, faintly sheened with sweat. She was beautiful, bent over him, cutting off his shirt. Near death he suddenly inspired intimacy. The world was all over him, intent, focused.

And then he woke up in ICU. If he could have stayed there, that way, he would have been content. Perhaps that's what people in a coma felt. Because they wouldn't let him die, why not let him stay that way, in his morphine-padded womb, with his various and light umbilici. It was semidark, but everywhere red eyes lit the darkness. Small beeps and purrs filled the room. Surprisingly like a summer meadow. Near his head something flickered, the northern lights. He craned his head and rolled his eyes back. So pretty, that view of red hills. That land scape unrolling, the topography of his heart.

Nearby he could hear voices.

"How's Hari Kari?" a woman asked.

A man laughed, and several people muttered several things.

The woman's voice emerged from the jumble of voices again.

"The suicide option," she said. "Kill yourself at the suitably depressing Sundown Inn, with a rotten view of Route 9. Steak knives provided."

This cracked them all up.

Oddly Mark didn't mind. In their laughter he felt, somehow, forgiven.

The nurses treated him with respect and something bordering on deference. He had crossed some line, been there. They cared for him gently, washing his back, helping him onto the potty by the bed, carrying away his reeking waste with eyes politely averted. Men too, several were men. Big, athletic men dressed in green scrubs.

How he wished he could have been like them. So sure and solid in their belonging. Sitting down to life as if it were a large, farmy dinner. Why had they been born them and he him?

And how could you explain this to the little psychiatrist, thin and slightly furtive like Mark himself. People always lied, they never got down to the horrible details. They never said, I'm small, I'm homely, my thighs are pimply and my scalp dry. I'm 31, I live alone, I sell things, for God's sake, to people who need to buy them anyway. Office equipment. Swivel chairs upholstered in unobtrusive colors, file cabinets, pencil sharpeners. I couldn't be duller if I tried. I'm a nonentity. And I'm supposed to keep grinding away with my appointment calendar and calculator and friend the C.P.A. While the rest of the world hardly sees me because their noses are stuck in People magazine, ogling Patrick Swayze.

They said, "I've been de pressed."

They said, "Everything seems so hopeless."

They said, "I feel so apart from everything."

And he said, Herr Doktor said, "You chose a very angry way."

And Mark said, "Angry?"

And Herr Doktor nodded and gazed at him kindly.

And Mark spat up the words he hadn't said. It didn't matter anyway. He'd broken free. He was crazy now. The words flew up out of his mouth like bees. Yes, he was angry. The world had disappointed him terribly. He had come to the conclusion that there was no God, there was no plan. And if that were true, his life, his loneliness, his sense of desolation meant nothing. He was angry that everyone else seemed to be able to go on and on, eating, driving, buying, washing. He had lived a boring life, but by God he wouldn't die a boring death.

And with each word H.D.'s eyes grew brighter, but he didn't flee, swatting at the swarm around his head. A smile ambushed his lips from under the cover of his neat mustache.

"You're brave," he said.

Mark didn't know how to reply to that one. Perhaps he should try to kill himself more often. The world had suddenly gotten more interesting. He accepted the word brave and enjoyed its heft in his mind. He imagined the doctor pinning a torn, purply heart to his suture-embroidered torso. The point of the knife had penetrated the atrium. The hole was sealed now, with the surgeon's magic thread.

"I think you need to be admitted to the psychiatric unit," H.D. continued. "We need to keep you safe till we figure out what's going on."

It was nice of him, Mark thought, to pretend he was involved in the decision.

The psychiatric unit was in another building. A nurse brought Mark there, in a wheelchair, with his bag of meager belongings. They had thrown away his shirt. His coat was there, though, and his car keys and address book. The manager of the motel must have brought it over from the room.

They did not go outside--it was raining. The nurse wheeled Mark through a long underground tunnel that seemed fraught with association. Mark was still on pills, Percocet. He quite liked them.

When they arrived at the nurses' station in the psych unit, a row of expectant faces examined him from behind a redoubt of plywood and Formica. A sudden hush descended on the place. Then one nurse detached herself and came around to greet him. At least he assumed she was a nurse. She wasn't wearing white, but she had a name pin that said, "Mira R.N. Psychiatry." She knew his name, which she called out gaily. She gave her name as Mira. After parlaying briefly with the nurse who had brought him, she took over behind the wheelchair. Down the carpeted hall he went. The top of his head grew warm under her gaze.

To his right a living area opened. There was a TV, and it was going. An animal show. Some kind of creature that looked like a badger snacking on a scorpion. The only person in the room was an old woman, penned in her reclining chair by a detachable tray. It was quite clear that she was not happy. She had torn her coverlet off and thrown it to the floor, along with her glasses. She was working on her hospital johnny now and had one arm free. A surprisingly full breast hung from her wrinkled torso.

Mira made the sound of brakes screeching as she stopped the wheelchair. "Mary, Mary," she called. "Are you trying to get naked again?"

She went over and made a brief attempt to put Mary's free arm back in the johnny, but Mary shrieked and flailed. Mira pressed a button on the wall, and a disembodied voice asked if she needed help. "Yeah," she said. "Mary's disrobing again. I think she needs a chill pill." Then she came back to Mark and they went on down the hall.

In the room Mira was all business. She helped Mark into the bed. As she bent over him he noticed that she had a tart, peppery odor about her. Her hands were square and dry, the nails bitten. There was no wedding ring.

She sat down with a sigh in the chair by the bed and wheeled the overbed table toward her. She placed her forms on the table and dug a pen out of her capacious pockets. She seemed subdued, suddenly. Perhaps it was the questions. They were fairly boring. Medical history, food preferences, allergies, bowel habits, person to notify at time of discharge. Finally done, she squared the forms and stood up.

"I need to look at your wounds," she said, "to note their condition." Mark had not gotten under the covers; he was lying on the spread in his johnny and robe. He loosened his robe, making sure to keep his genitals covered. He had no underwear on. She reached over and pulled his johnny up. She bent over him, breathing softly, and gave a low whistle.

"You did a number on yourself, didn't you?" she asked. Mark assumed the question was rhetorical, and he was right, because she didn't wait for an answer but asked abruptly, "Are you still thinking about killing yourself?" He had been asked that question before, by H.D., and he had had plenty of time in which to formulate a reply.

"No," he said. "I couldn't stand my life anymore, the way it was, but it has changed. I'm still finding out how."

Mira wrote briefly on her papers, and did something that looked weirdly like a sketch. Then she emptied his bag and put the few things Mark had in drawers. He craned his neck to glance at her papers and was surprised to see the figure of a human being, a frontal view. There were no genitals; it was a generic figure. The feet were slightly apart, the arms hanging at the sides. Onto this figure she had drawn his wounds. It reminded him of those pictures of Jesus after his Resurrection, with his wounds carefully, almost lovingly, depicted. He was tempted to lean over and add those few drops of blood one often saw, that trio of tear-shaped marks.

After scratching their chins for awhile the doctors had decided he was manic depressive. They put him on Prozac and Lithium. They hadn't taken away his Percocet yet. His Percocet was what really helped him. Half an hour after a pill he felt men with pails and scrub brushes going to work on his soul.

They had what they called a family meeting with him and his parents. His parents had sat there politely for the allotted time, his father in a gray suit, his mother in her red suit with her Barbara Bush pearls. Mr. and Mrs. Mark Holley. When prompted they expressed love and support. Shock, of course, too--it was a bit of a shock. They'd had no idea, after all. Mark had always been a quiet boy. But good, certainly, no discipline problem. Isn't that so dear? (Mr. and Mrs. Hallmarky, Mira had begun to call them, after he'd talked to her one time about them. "So, how did the meeting go with Mr. and Mrs. Hallmarky?")

The social worker was not fooled. She went to work on their psyches, turning up rocks and watching what squiggled away. But try as she might, she didn't catch much. His parents had become rocklike themselves, with years of ossification. Fossilization. Sedimentation. His mother was mica and feldspar. His father granite. They could pick away at his mother, flake little delicate windows away, but their words sifted over his father like blowing sand. It would take aeons. Mark had tried, in his own way, for 31 years. True, the "team," as they liked to call themselves--that clean, cottony, compassionate set of doctors and nurses and social workers and medical students--the team had clever tools. He pictured them crawling over his parents fixed there like monoliths, crawling with little picks and brushes and metal detectors and dust busters. But it wouldn't work if dynamite hadn't. Mark had tried dynamite. His parents had been blown sky high and come down not far away, scuffed but otherwise unchanged. They could barely remember the sensation of being up there m the sky, going end over end.

And groups, there were all sorts of groups he was supposed to go to. He liked community group best. It was held in the morning and attended by the nurses and the patients on his pod, as they called it. He liked that--pod. The three old folks would be parked in their geri chairs. The rest sat on the couches. There was a 31-year-old woman named Jean, with scars all over her cheeks and arms. She favored (for personal adornment) feathers, crystals, and turquoise. She had been sexually abused. She was what they called a cutter. She cut herself when she got mad or frustrated or whatever. Did that mean he was a stabber? No, he'd only done it once so far. There was a mad housewife, Shirley. An old farmer, Fred. An addict, Suzanne, and a fat saint, Teresa. How did they feel about the doctor going on vacation? What was their goal for the day? When should the TV be turned off at night?

Invariably the meeting grew more absurd as they stalled and sputtered along. Mark would begin to laugh, with Teresa and Jean. The trio in the geri chairs would start gibbering away, like a Greek chorus, like sibyls, speaking in tongues. You could not reproduce what they said. Mark had tried. It was profound only as it came, fresh from the shadowy caverns of their brains.I think they'd better put some words on the fire. It gets cold when the mind comes down the peninsula. That carriage is wearing a blanket. It doesn't matter if we're a bit warm. Will she be here in the morning? I need to talk to you about the abyss, abyss, Abyssinian invasion of Tripoli.

One of the trio was a man. When not in his chair he tended to wander. One time he had gone into an empty room and pooped in the drawer of the bureau. In doing so he smeared feces everywhere. Mark had heard the nurses giggling about it. Code brown. Code brown. One time he came into Mark's room wearing nothing but a diaper and two pairs of glasses, one on top of the other.

"I guess you want to see clearer," Mira said to the old man after Mark rang his bell and she came to fetch him. "Quite a fashion statement," she said, sotto voce, to Mark.

Yes, there was Mira. He quite liked her. He looked forward to her bounding onto the unit every afternoon at 3 p.m., with her bag of health food and her jean jacket with the pin on it that read, "I clawed my way to the middle." He was fascinated by the way she seemed less edited than the others. The psychiatrists and nurses weren't supposed to reveal much about themselves. They weren't supposed to display shock or horror or anger. They weren't supposed to laugh at the antics of the geriatric trio. With most of the nurses (and doctors, certainly) one had the feeling that there was a miniature, prim, officious editor sitting on their shoulders, whispering "not appropriate" in their ear whenever too lively a thought formed in their mind. But Mira had no editor on her shoulder. It had been knocked clean off.

She had her down times, it was true. Sometimes she would sit on the couch in front of the TV, looking at the Enquirer or some other lurid tabloid, and taking what appeared to be brief naps. But sooner or later she popped back up, nibbled on something (she ate all the time and was not fat), and began motoring around the unit, taking a nip here, a tuck there.

She and Mark often did the crossword puzzle together. She bought the paper every day, The Valley Examiner. She gave the crossword to Mark, and, if she had time, bent over it with him, breathing out garlic and pepper and words. He felt ridiculously pleased when she left it with him and he finished it alone, when she came over to check and bellowed, "Brilliant, Dude!" upon seeing it done.

The second weekend of his stay Mark went to Mass with Mira. He hadn't been to Mass in 10 years, but that didn't seem to bother Mira. She had collected Jean and Dottie (Dottie was one of the old ladies) and was on her way out the door when she spotted Mark and bullied him into coming along. "It's a chance to get off the unit!" she said. "Come on!"

He hesitated, looking dubious. "And furthermore," she said, "I need you to help me with this wheelchair." Dottie was in the wheelchair, with a teddy bear on her lap. Mira had to keep a sharp eye on Dottie's hands, as the doctors had started an IV on her, and she was constantly trying to tear the tube out of her arm. Jean was in charge of the IV pole, with its floppy bag of clear liquid shimmering above her like some little spirit.

They took the underground tunnel again. Mark hadn't been in it since he came over, the first day. It was stranger than he remembered, with dozens of pipes running along the ceiling. One of the pipes, a large one covered in some suspicious-looking insulation, hissed loudly at a joint, where the hall turned. Mira must have read Mark's mind, for she threw up her hands and mimed terror as she passed it.

"I'm always afraid one of these flippin' pipes is going to explode," she said. "Can you see us barreling down the tunnel in front of a wave of steaming water?"

Mark and Jean laughed.

"On our way to Mass?" she added. "Like yelling `God save me'?"

They laughed again. Half a minute later Dottie gave a little chortle.

"Delayed polite social response syndrome," Mira said. "You see it all the time in these Alzheimer's types."

Mark could tell that Jean wasn't sure if Mira was joking. He didn't laugh. Sometimes he worried that Mira's mouth would get her in trouble.

They took the elevator to the eighth floor. Mark wondered if they had built the chapel up high, so as to be closer to God. As they entered the little room, Mark could see that Mass had already begun. He realized how strange their little group looked. Jean, with her scarified cheeks and flagrant jewelry, looked like she practiced some primitive, pagan religion. Mira, with her baggy tie-dyed pants and lank short hair scraped into a pseudo-ponytail, looked like she might belong to the same cult. Dottie clutched her teddy bear like a sacrificial victim. Mark looked the most normal of the four, although his skin was sallow and he'd lost weight. He was wearing some street clothes, brought by his parents. He'd looked at himself for a long time in the mirror that morning and decided he looked austere and transcendent.

The Mass was in a small amphitheater generally used for classes. There was a small stage that had been set up with a table, a white cloth, two candles, a cross, and some silver dishes. The priest stood in front of the table, at a wooden lectern. He was dressed in robes and a shawl. His voice was high and slightly bored, like a stewardess giving safety instructions. A video camera stood in the aisle, with its blinking red eye, recording the Mass for consumption by the bedridden. The priest made unwitting obeisance to it, where it stood on its tripod. The old man next to Mark was making his responses in Latin, while his IV machine scrolled red messages. Air in line, it read. Air in line. Get in line for air, not bread, not wine. Air is the sacrament. Feel it filling the chest now, with its quiet virtue.

Mark felt himself responding to the long-lost words of the liturgy. They had a power that all this silly humanness couldn't take from them. They danced in the air, like the shadow the rising heat of the candles made on the movie screen at the back of the stage, twisting and undulating over the cross. Let our cry come unto thee. O Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world. Grant us thy peace. And for the glory of thy name, deliver us; be merciful to us sinners. His eyes grew tears.

He had been right when he thought that the eighth floor was closer to God, because a slight wind had sprung up and wrapped the tower in its moaning. He could look out the window and see nothing but clouds. The air was thinner; it made his brain light. Far off he could hear a siren. In the room someone's beeper went off. The IV machine purred. And through it all the priest droned.

And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapor of smoke: The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood.

Mark was weeping now, unabashedly. And just as unabashedly Mira rose from where she sat and came around to him. She knelt in the aisle by his seat. She put her warm mouth to his ear. "Are you OK, Mark?" she whispered.

"Yes," Mark managed to choke out.

"Look at me," she commanded. He looked. She grasped both his hands and looked carefully into his eyes. Her eyes were heavy with his pain. "There's a reason for all this," she hissed. At which Mark giggled through his tears.

The walk back to the unit was polite and tentative. Mark felt that he had passed some test. He had cried! In front of other people. He had done grief work! Points galore! And here he was, walking through the tunnel again, pushing the wheelchair, although he felt somewhat weak and shaken.

Mira's stomach gave a loud growl.

"Borborygmi," she said.

"What?" asked Jean.

"Borborygmi" Mira repeated. "That loud gurgling sound in the intestine."

"You weirdo," Jean said.

"Weird and hungry," said Mira. "You guys got some crackers and wine. I got nothing."

"You should have gone up," said Mark.

"I couldn't," Mira said. "I was never even baptized. I couldn't risk being struck dead. I had to get you guys back safely."

"You better get baptized," Mark said. "Otherwise you go to limbo."

"I thought it was purgatory."

"No. Purgatory is where you wait for a while before going to heaven. Limbo is like the borderland of hell."

"Limbo could be an endless corridor, like this one."

"And purgatory is like waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles."

They looked at each other and laughed happily. Mark stopped in midlaugh, with a little intake of breath.

"What's wrong, Dude?" Mira asked.

"A ... like ... stitch in my side."

"Well, we're almost home. I'll grab you a Perc when we get there."

And she kept her word. She did what God would have wanted her to do. She settled Dottie and buffed Jean and bantered with the cleaning lady. She gobbled chickpeas and went to the narcotics drawer and took out a Percocet. She grabbed the thermometer and stethoscope. She came down to his room and took his temperature and listened to his lungs.

"Where's your pain?" she asked.

"Existential or otherwise?"

"Whatever you feel up to."

"In my left flank."

"Tell you what. Your signs are OK. Let's see if the Perc does the trick. If you get worse, I'll call the Doc."

Mira bent toward him with the pill cup in her hand. Ordinarily she would have handed the pill to him. But he was lying with the head of the bed propped up, holding a glass of ginger ale in his hands. Jean had brought it to him, trying to be nice. He opened his mouth and Mira tipped the pill in.

"Body of Christ," she said, and they laughed together.

By Sybil Smith, a nurse and writer living in Vermont