The Doors

The doors came open and I was not glad about the air.

I had been waiting for those doors for a day and a half and when they opened what I felt was that the waiting was over, and not much else, and none of it was relief about being alive.

There was a smell of outside. Dust and something green. Cold, which I had forgotten about.

Somebody was standing in it.

I did not see a face. It has been put to me more than once that I must have, and I didn’t, and the not seeing is not a gap in what I remember. There was a shape against lighter dark and then there was not even that.

Something came into the truck and took me by the hair.

From behind. I had my back to the doors because I had my brother in my lap and had not moved for hours, and whatever it was came in over the top of the people nearer the opening and got a hand into my hair and pulled.

I went out of that truck the way you drag a bag out of a truck.

I lost hold of him. That is what I remember about that part, and it is all I remember of it, and I have never once told anybody that sentence out loud.

I read him.

Of course I did. It is the only thing I do. Hand in my hair, coming off the floor, and the instrument is still running because the instrument does not have an off switch, and what I got was not what you are expecting.

No appetite. No enjoyment. No greased calculation, none of that thing men have when they have decided to do something to you and are pleased about it.

I got grace.

I got the thing you feel off somebody who has sat with a great many people while they died and got good at it. Patience. An enormous old sadness, held very neatly. The specific quality of a person who has been in a room like that a thousand times and knows exactly what to do with his hands.

I felt a healer.

Years on, that is still the word. There was a man in there, a long way down and mostly gone, who used to be somebody who helped.

And it did not save me at all.

The rest of it goes down plainly, because if I am careful here it will come out as something it was not.

I was grateful.

My brother had been dead in my lap for some hours. The only reason I had not gone out of the world already was lying against my legs not breathing, and the arithmetic that had been holding me in place for a year had just come apart in the dark, and then the doors opened and something took hold of me.

I did not fight. I could have. I had enough left in me to fight and I did not use it.

Finally, I thought. Finally somebody is going to.

I said nothing. I have gone back over that too. No words from me and none from him, not one, not then and not since, and I know now why that was and I didn’t then.

I consented to dying.

I did. Nobody made me want that, I had wanted it for months and been unable to afford it, and when it arrived I took it with both hands and I was glad.

That is not what I got.

Whatever he did to me in the dirt outside that truck, I did not agree to it, I did not know it was on offer, and if I had known I would have used what I had left on him and not on the men in the building.

He did not ask. He never spoke.

I asked for an ending.