THE PROFESSIONAL MOURNERS

It’s been a long time since Leni knew who she was. Since she could look around herself and understand where she was, and what world this was. Because no-one ever knows what a finely crafted box of precision mirrors the brain is until it’s dropped. Until your hear the rattle in every thought, you will never know how many reflections there are in just that one name—Leni.

But she was born Magdalena Goode. No middle name. Which was a strange choice by her parents, wasn’t it? She felt like there was something in error about her through primary school. She had no secret name. One to be embarrassed about. Or one that had a story to it. No crack to fall between—the family name and the school name. It was just Magdalena Goode, until everyone forgot it was Magdalena Goode and it just became Leni. Leni, and her secret name became the whole thing. Somehow hidden within plain sight.

A man comes and goes. Adjusts her blankets when they don’t need adjusting. Her hair over the pillow. His palm on her forehead. She knew his name but it’s gone now. Now she knows him by his shadow. His smell and the sound of his breathing. It’s the space his body takes up in the air above her bed. When it comes and goes.

They spend hours together and neither can bridge the gap of a few millimetres. Words get lost in the fibre of flesh and the clutter of bones, or just get trapped in those pink murmurs of separation. Mouths empty of everything but noise. But he goes on sharpening his tongue and looking for a way to cut through to her buried heart … which never was a thing hidden in her head like it is in him.

Leaving the hospital room and returning, as though he was escaping and being recaptured in this cage where she is the bait. This man who lifts her hands to his whispering lips, as if he could pray with her palms but not his own.

Her forgetting is almost complete now. But forgetting isn’t the same as never happened. Because everything that has happened, keeps on happening somewhere in the grey whorls of her brain. Or is it happening somewhere else, and her brain is like the stuff within the box of a radio? A thing of mirrors, barely understood circuitry and unexamined microchips and unimagined star technology. Seeming like she is just stuff in the box because the frequency is all she can ever hear. The one radio announcer. Speaking into the room from eyes open to eyes closed. Getting hoarse now. Getting down to whispers against the microphone, and then just breath. Breathing. Letting in the voice of the world with death.

A phone is ringing outside in the nurse’s station. Tugging on the tendons between her muscles, and then settling her bones down into their sockets. Three times the tug and settle. There’s a perfection of tone in those three sounds. The delicate balance of emergency and a simple soft request for connection. The sound of two voices about to meet and merge on barely breathed puffs of air. She wishes she could hear them talk, about whatever they have to talk about, and in letting it go, finally finishes with wishes.

Forgetting everything, but all of it still there, somewhere in the stuff-filled box. Almost done even with that.

There’s an image of Egyptian professional mourners that she can see like it was cast out from the flickering projector of her fluttering eyelids against the hospital walls. Those women from the tomb of Pharaoh Ramose becoming her mourners, shedding their paid-for tears, dancing around her paid-for dying bed. For Leni now. Singing their songs ceaselessly, hours on end and singing all the way back to Egyptian sands sliding down their walls and sending them into a desert of oblivion. Singing eternal songs of life in which we have all existed together within the lies of our voices of separation.

Balthazar should be thanked for these women. He should be kissed on the forehead, or as she used to like to do, on the back of his neck, so that she could take in the smell of his body at the same time. And he should be hugged and have his name whispered warmly into his ears. So good to have thought to bring these beautiful women and array them around her as though they had come just for her. The professional mourners on the walls. The walls like pages. Their eyes as attentive as readers.

Outside it is raining, and droplets of water are running and catching and running again on the hospital window. That water collecting the light of anonymous street lights outside, but which she’s been watching her whole life. Those droplets gathering and running again. Which she’s painted so many times. She’s never understood why, really. The explanation was too basic, and it wasn’t about what it meant, but what it did within her, those running droplets of rain on cold thick glass.

Her old body is still swaddled in the white sheets that stink of her death. The pillow below her head imbued with the breath of those who have died before her. She tugs away from the fibres of her body, getting loose of the neurons that let out a few dying sparks.

Years it’s taken, moving through the round of days— Mondays to Sundays, to end up here on this afternoon that has nothing to do with any of those names, Mondays to Sundays—leaving her on the shore of a new moment never to be named anything. Or it has a secret middle name that no-one has ever heard, something that makes this sentence make sense. Life Death.

Because outside the names for them the Days had to be thought of as things in themselves. There were so many of these Days to be taken into account if they weren’t part of a set that could be blurred into packages of years, to be filed under the general title of a life. Each one of those Days a thing in itself, and for itself. A place where Leni had lived and breathed. Had been able to look up into the sky at the sun or the stars. Soon each one of those about to liquefy and run away into the endless abyss of the world’s past.

Yet here she is, at its lip, ready to go over but wanting one more thing. If she could only remember what it was. It wasn’t an object. It wasn’t a thing that could be left behind. Maybe an image. Something she’d seen a long time ago. Perhaps a vision.

Everything was forgotten as she got closer to this. Who everyone was. Even her one son. Who’d whisper while holding her hand. The paintings he brought around, asking, ‘Don’t you remember painting these?’ could have been anyone’s, and just seem like so much wasted paint and dried-up time stuck to canvas. She doesn’t remember making them but he brought them anyway, as though they were more dear to her than his face.

All forgotten. Where she had come from and where she was going, and what the trip had meant and who’d shared the seats around her, all going out the window like their voices spoken into rushing air. Leaving her with nothing but the impression of the window. Not even the view outside. Just that glass, shivering in the movement of this transit through days. Beads of water catching and releasing, as though a different system of timekeeping belonging more to angels than men.

To finally get here. A withered body, with crushed breasts, and broken hips, and shrivelled lungs, and a toothless face drained of blood. Eyes gone deep behind the elephant-skin eyelids. Gone forever now.

Her boy, her only son, outside and alone, walking the hospital halls praying against the will of his atheist heart, silent prayers even he can’t hear, for her to find more hours and days … and what then, weeks and months? But what then? What more does he wish for? That annihilation pause before it is complete, and the hopeless wish that it take with it the parts of his heart that can never let go of his mother.

But isn’t it strange? This man closer to her now than birth, gradually being erased at his edges, wearing glasses just that bit stronger every year, has learned in his time that there is nothing to any of this, that behind the constantly unfolding explosion of life lighting up this particular ball of dirt adrift in dead space, is actually nothing? Strange because in his face Leni had most clearly seen the eyes of God, sending His vision through her until her soul was cast like an X-ray of the sun across the black sky. Her only true vision, given to her in the absolute exhaustion following more than twenty-one hours of labour. The first time she’d seen his blood-spattered, blood-swollen face, when she closed her eyes, and her baby’s life moved through her and caught a hold of her heart with those desperate little fists.

She let the name go. She let him go. She let the body go. All of this that is gathered, she lets it all run across the glass. And then she watches the beads gather the light, turn the colour within their microscopic hearts, and feels them turn back into stars.