As We Go Up, We Go Down

“I never liked this man.”

“I know mom. You’ve said so many times.”

“But look at his face. He’s the mouth of a fish on dry land.”

My mother was complaining about Tucker Carson on the blinking TV in her hospital room. As she’d relayed, she didn’t like his “tactic” of hanging his mouth open when his guests were talking. The “fish on dry land mouth” was used to cut in on guests immediately after, or partway through, their dialog. She elaborated, “There’s no talking between people nowadays. It’s bla bla bla no shut up bla bla bla!”

Born in 1949, she’d been raised on Walter Cronkite and lamented the end of civil discourse as she knew it always to be and imagined it always was.

I didn’t care much for Tucker Carson but she insisted we watch him whenever I had the time to visit her in her room. She liked to hear me laugh at her distaste for him.

Many times my boss would schedule me till after seven and I’d miss the show. I told her about my mother’s bad liver and if I could get overnight hours so I could see her during the day. She half looked up from her papers on her desk and spoke in a pleasant tone which clashed with the heavy bags under her dead eyes. “Amazon accommodates its employees’ work/life balance…”

My schedule changed to nights for a weekend then back to days.

It was a good weekend with my mom, even if there was no Tucker Carlson.

I didn’t prefer visiting at night because I’d fall asleep in a ripped apart chair next to her bed as we watched food shows. I walked through the Iraqi desert with an M16 and full kit but twenty miles a day in an un-air-conditioned warehouse in the middle of summer is worse murder. Maybe that’s just the extra years on my knees.

There was always a moment when I’d wake up at around five in the morning, which I needed to for work, and fear the silence in the room. I expected the worst. I didn’t want to turn my head to know.

Then the heart monitor would beep its normal rhythm and I’d recount my thanks.

Not wanting to wake her I whispered my goodbyes and went home for a shower and change before work.

I walked into my mother’s room at the hospital as one of the nurses stepped out with a hand reaching in her pocket for her phone. When I leaned over her bed to kiss her I noticed the new IV which had already begun to bruise her yellowy skin.

“These new nurses today… There’s no getting around it, they’re awful,” winced my mother.

She’d been a nurse in her working life up to the day she was admitted to the very hospital she worked in for twenty-eight years. It was a treat to hear her talk about all the ways the latest crop of nurses and doctors screwup almost everything they got their hands on.

Short rounds with patients to gain extra time to waste on their phones, impersonal bedside manner, meeting any comfort request with animosity; it gave me an opening look from behind the magician’s stage.

My mother had loved everyone she met in her youth though that had changed somewhat after her illness took away much of that natural interest in strange faces. “I thought love of life lived in the heart. Turns out, it’s the liver.”

Despite the yellow skin, the bruises, the weight loss, all the tubes inside her, me not being a match for a transplant; she still had the smile of her youth. One of her and my Christmases where she had presents for me. One of welcoming me home from Iraq. I needed that smile.

A time later a nurse came in and coldly announced the requirement of a sponge bath as informed by the charted schedule. She then realized she didn’t have the sponge, or anything for the bath, and left. It was about time for me to leave as my mother always pressed to go home and spend a night’s sleep in an actual bed. My knees and back needed it to march through the warehouse all day but it was always just as tough to leave her in that place.

When I did stamper through the halls I found my mother’s doctor exiting the lounge with specks of soy sauce on his white coat. I stopped him by side-stepping in his path and forcing an exchange of gazes. It was rude but the doctors and nurses and orderlies would otherwise turn a corner and speed-walk away from any contact.

The doctor greeted me kindly and asked how my mother was doing.

I asked the same of him.

He sighed. “What more?”

I pressed him on the issue and he gave a heavy shrug.

“Look dude,” he said. “At such an age, with such an advanced condition, and her expenses; the insurance isn’t there for a transplant. With what that private room costs she’s lucky to have that. Be thankful she upgraded her insurance when she did.”

I stared through his placid face for a minute.

Once while driving in a group of four tanks across an Iraqi highway, we had to fire upon a couple civilian vehicles that weren’t slowing down as they approached on the opposite side of the road. We opened fire from every gun, me on the coaxial M2. The first car exploded in a mighty woosh with much more blast pressure than fire. The second car went out with much less flair. My commander gave the clear to investigate the scene. The first car had the remnants of artillery shells, the second was a man a woman and four children packaged in the back seats. Despite their breathing, my CO decided it was too dangerous to remain on the highway. I never had a want to squeeze the trigger on my machine gun. Standing in the hospital hallway I could’ve squeezed on the doctor’s neck till he went forward with the transplant or his eyes popped out.

But when I came back around the doctor was gone and I was standing in the hall alone, crazy.

On the day before Veterans’ Day I drove to the hospital after a grueling shift in the warehouse. I’d just cashed a third of my day’s pay in my fuel tank and bought a bag of Fritos, my mother’s favorite at the station, but put aside thoughts of what to give up for rent at sight of the concrete block of a hospital. I had to park in a space far at the back and slide out of the passenger side for how boxed in I was.

When I got to my mother’s floor I saw her doctor exit her room. He was bright and eyeing one of the nurses at the desk who eyed him back just as jovially. My anger from the other day didn’t rise back up. I was thankful.

But then I stepped into my mother’s room and when I leaned over to kiss her I noticed her fragile frown. She repeated to me what her doctor had told her which was a softer version of the cutting news he gave me when I caught him in the hallway.

All the joy in her smile had melted into several more deep lines on her yellow skin, terror in her green eyes.

I didn’t have anything to say. All the night I sat there next to her — hand in her hand and we watched TV without a stir.

I woke to the stillness of the room and shed a tear in that moment before the new, weaker rhythm of her heart monitor. Drained, I whispered my thanks, said my goodbyes, kissed her sleeping head, and left to get ready for work.

After an even more rushed workday than usual – they’d cut the time to retrieve products for packaging by fifteen percent for Veterans’ Day weekend – I went straight to the hospital in a half dreaming malaise.

When I got to the front desk I repeated who I was and who I was visiting and I got my ID out and showed it to the nurse at the front desk for the thousandth time it felt.

She looked me in the face for a long while recalling memories of previous encounters. “Oh yes it is you. Your mother’s passed… Sorry for your loss.”

When she passed my ID back it slipped from my limp hand onto the visitors’ log.

The nurse was surprised. “Didn’t you get our call? The sheet says you are the primary contact; aren’t you?”

I was the only contact. In truth, after checking there in front of the reception desk I did receive the call while at work but they’d instituted a rule where all phones had to be shut off in front of a supervisor before staring a shift.

“We also called your employer. Were you not at work?”

“I was.” Once more the want to kill pulled at my muscles demanding some outlet. But my boss wasn’t around and there was no one in the hospital reception room I wanted to see die. The want subsided but my heart still thudded and my breath was heavy.

The doctors permitted me to have a look at my mother’s body. It was cold and bared that deep frown I’d last seen her with. Her eyes were shut and I was thankful for that for I don’t think I could bear that terrorized look one more time. The doctors told me she passed peacefully but I suspected lies in their voices full of routine assurances.

That experience wiped me down to a new level of malaise I’d never before felt. I drove without putting on my seatbelt or reaching for my blinker and my sleepy head frequently popped up from under the steering wheel. Almost rear-ending a semi did nothing to stir my heartbeat.

Famished, I went to the nearest restaurant which was an IHOP. The street side sign read, “Happy Veterans’ Day! Veterans Eat Free!” so I showed my ID to the girl at the front and she smiled and showed me to a booth.

Everything on the menu blurred together, I could only read the items as carbs, protein, sugars, etc. Basic training had kicked in for some reason. Perhaps preservation, but of what?

I got the breakfast sampler with a side of fires and a Pepsi. When my food came the girl, bright in her expressions, said, “Thank you for your service.” I didn’t answer, nor did I look her in the eye. She set the food down and asked, “You alright Sir?” Still no answer from me. I picked up my fork so she’d leave.

I poured as much of the fake maple syrup as I could onto the pancakes, threw ten shots of hot sauce on the hash browns, and swam my fries in ketchup. The entire meal would wreck my digestive system and interrupt me at work where bathroom breaks had been reduced to six minutes per day unofficially as to not break state codes. It was a perfect mix of everything bad for me and what I needed.

Ready to lift the first forkful of ham to my face, a man in a camouflage trucker hat with a Tennessee accent approached my booth. The heat off his protruding gut sweated my arm. “Excuse me. I just wanna say thank you for your service. We’re all thankful to have you protect our country.”

I whispered, “Leave my fucking live alone.”

“Huh,” said the trucker man not able to hear me.

“I don’t have anything left to be thankful for.”