Burial of the Dead

CY PRES - The Brother

THE BROTHER

Brian Wyman, stout, pearly white, made jolly with the intermittent blush of rosacea, closes the door to the narrow passage with the steam pipes, the concrete and the wires - a kind of closet aside the morgue, one of the hospital’s internecine corridors leading nowhere, unused except for the storage of glass slides with tissues and cells from dead people. Two years before one of the administrators upstairs had asked: Who wants to make an office out of a crawl space? and Brian Wyman had said he did, and since he’d already made ten thousand requests, entreaties and mild admonitions for some kind of space he could call his own, the hospital, on the say-so of Coop Johnson, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, gave it to him, this space, which was more an absence of space, an unknown, overlooked area squeezed between the formal squares and rectangles drawn on blueprints designating function and use. It was the best the big-boys were going to do for Brian Wyman, a professional good guy and diener for the morgue, and they said he could make an office out of it as long as he didn’t disturb the scaffold with the cardboard boxes of slides enumerated in some code for deadly diseases like a twelve tone scale of mortality.

So Brian installed a surplus desk from a vacated Board Room, a phone from laundry, two lamps from Goodwill, supplies from Staples, a picture of his second wife, Carol, and a small picture of his mother. This would be his first and only office in a career spanning decades, the place from which he’d monitor the comings and goings of pathologists, interns, maintenance men, mortuary-people and the young residents from Yale and UCONN who rotated through the place three times a year, the same ones he didn’t trust or like, the privileged students with the eager faces, upturned and plugged nostrils, white knuckles, ambition and dreams (which, of course, were his dreams) of bright lawns and white houses in wealthy suburbs outside Hartford.

And his office was also the place where he counseled newly sober drunks before the meetings on Wednesday nights. Most of the pigeons from the Program who made their way through the morgue were nervous as hell when they knocked on his door, not so much about picking up a drink, as about what they might see in a hospital morgue as they imagined the big guy, Brian Wyman, dressed in a blood stained smock and one of those cylindrical paper hats, standing like a careless butcher over the eviscerated body of some poor soul who’d passed from natural causes or the autopsy itself. But Brian was careful about that. He never made an appointment the same time Pathology scheduled an autopsy, and when he couldn’t avoid the conflict, he’d meet the new guy or girl in the cafeteria on the second floor where he held court most afternoons and where everyone knew his name.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Brian tosses his wallet on the desk and starts to rearrange his credit cards, the necessary designations of identity and purchasing power in a society that demands so much of both. The phone rings; he checks the LED. It’s the same number that rings every night, and he thinks how his mother won’t let this go. He thinks: Did I screw up Matthew’s life? Am I supposed to make everything right for him, the privileged one, the spoiled one, the brother who’d always be a boy? Hadn’t he been spoiled his whole life? Hadn’t he gotten everything he wanted: sleep-away camp, private schools, college, ski trips, island hopping, the fucking guitars he never learned how to play, the art lessons, all that useless, fem-bullshit the old man paid for, holding his purse strings like a dying man in a desert holding water bags for himself, untying them only for the Prince who’d tested well because he wasn’t dyslexic and letters didn’t dance around the page when he read, but fell in place so he could pencil scratch the innards of pale brackets on stupid tests from New Jersey.

“Fuck him,” Brian thinks, remembering the time he found Matt, disheveled and homeless, off his meds, living in a cemetery near their hometown. Off his meds, Brian thinks, well you mess with the bull, you get the horns. At the very least his fuck-ups weren’t my fault and they shouldn’t be my responsibility either.