Nathan rubs his eyes. "Busy night."
"Busy week, month, whatever," the attendant replies. "They're dying of everything."
When the steel slab slides out on its silent bearings, Nathan is sure there has been some mistake.
"This is her?"
"There's been some swelling, just so you're prepared," the attendant says, and, without delaying-Nathan wishes he'd wait just a minute-lifts the sheet, making a loose tent down which Nathan can see all. He reaches toward her as a blind person might. Darkened leather face senseless as a handbag. Eyes, halfclosed, squint dully into the middle distance. She looks to Nathan punched out, bruised. Even the bridge of her nose has spread.
Below she is as shapeless and bunched as a baby. The sheet flutters down.
"Sign here."
When all the words are written, the attendant feeds Maria back in with a little shove, the throbbing hum of the hospital boiler just the other side of the wall some suggestion of where she's going. Nathan steps back against the massive cabinet. "You all right?" the attendant lamely asks. Nathan turns to rest the side of his face against the refrigerated metal, choking on a sorrow he has never known, but which, like his death itself, has hunted him these months and years.
"She wanted you to do it, no one else."
Nathan raises his head to find the attendant gone. In his place is a short man in a black pants suit with his throat clutched in a white cleric's collar. His head outsized and closely trimmed, perched on his neck like a golf ball on a tee.
"Cleary," he says, holding out a hand.
The priest seems about Nathan's age, and oddly it's the near-baldness that makes him look that young. Coming down from the rarefied air of fight and recovery into the basement of the damned and defeated, Cleary, robust, energetic, seems to thrive where he can admire his work, the fermenting corpses stretched out like loaves in their individual ovens, rising, getting ready to go. Cleary gives Nathan's hand a special squeeze, and for a second Nathan is sure the priest will never let go. Maybe he's sizing him up, taking Nathan's spiritual pulse while he adds together all Maria has confessed with what he now sees before him. So, here, finally, Nathan Stein.
"Maria," Cleary says, finally dropping his hand and nodding toward Maria's drawer, "spoke of you all the time. Especially toward the end. I heard you were down here. I've been wanting to meet you."
"I bet you have."
Cleary seems almost glad for the opportunity, glad even for the circumstance. Strange how the professionally faithful seem to run right over social nuance, as if their faith has shielded, or freed, them from the necessity.
"She knew just when she was going to die," Cleary plows on.
Nathan pictures their own non-goodbye, Maria preoccupied with her tranquilized neighbor, and he slipping out from under her blank stare. He'd assumed she was staring at him, but now he knows it wasn't him she was seeing at all. How long after he'd left had she actually stopped breathing? He should have gone up last night. He would at least have liked to say something to her, anything at all. Though what it would have been he has no idea. "She knew yesterday afternoon?"
Cleary's nod turns into a continuous, mechanized bob, smug with amazed discovery. "Down to the day. The hour. Yes, she knew." Inclining his head, the priest leans against the enormous cabinet, the fluorescent light glancing off both his shiny forehead and the wall of stainless steel behind him, ankles and arms crossed, as if waiting for the bus in the cold sun. "Yes, Maria spoke about you quite a bit."
But Nathan just stares, bracing himself, unwilling to rise to this bait. He is starting to resent the way Cleary isn't letting him have it, giving him a stern talking-to, like Maria would have. Either he doesn't know his job or it's part of that grand strategy they all seem to have of letting you probe yourself, reprimand yourself, levy your own fine. Nathan can feel the growing annoyance in his gut. When was the last time he ate? He slaps his coat pockets for his pills.
"Looking for a smoke?" Cleary asks hopefully, and brings out a heavy silver lighter.
But Nathan shakes his head. "Not for years."
"All, self-improvement. You're a more honorable man than I." Cleary squints and pauses, then raises at Nathan a pair of startled eyebrows. He clears his throat, smiles. "Should I take that back?"
Nathan shrugs. "Go ahead." He searches for signs of wear on Cleary's face-every day here a Sunday, every day requiring hurried, last-minute conversions-but finds nothing. He envies for a moment the priest's ability to fend off all the chaotic lives that end, muddled and humiliated, in his hands. All the weeping families, all the bodily fluids. Until it all lies here, all his little experiments, sent away every one of them. And he'll never know where to-or even if-until he follows them himself.
"So why me?" Nathan asks. "Why not her mother, or any of her brothers? To ID her."
"I guess she wanted you to see," Cleary suggests.
Nathan's reply is automatic: See what? But he holds it in, knowing the confessional game to follow: see what he saw, and what did he see? As though this exchange will bring him to say, "himself," then cry and weep and beg forgiveness.
"She looks terrible," he says instead.
"Yes," Cleary agrees." She does."
"Was anyone else with her?"
"She said goodbye to everyone else, then made them go. She was waiting for you. She was filled with remorse. She wanted to apologize."
An unlit cigarette has appeared in Cleary's fingers. He rolls it in his fingers, then finally puts it to his lips. Nathan is surprised at his own indignation. The cloud of felonies around him pulling apart to reveal this single misdemeanor. "Are you allowed to do that in here?"
Cleary's lighter pops. He inhales, squints, and raises his eyes to the cabinet. "I doubt anyone here would mind." He waves his hand, trailing flags of smoke. "Anyway, you didn't come back."
Nathan lifts a hand in protest, "But I did," then drops it, "in a way."
The priest nods, a disapproving twinkle in his eye. "She thought you might actually be with her.She thought you'd know to do that. She gave you a lot of credit that way. She believed you were highly intelligent."
Nathan wrinkles his nose at the gauze of smoke. The priest looks pleasantly surprised, as if to say, Does this offend you?
"So you were with her when she-"
"Stopped breathing, yes," Cleary says.
"She wanted you to be?"
Cleary's smile turns apologetic. "People do. She requested her own last rites. That's never happened to me before."
“You don't know her," Nathan begins, marveling at the urge to tell him this: "When I met her, guys left and right, drugs."
Cleary frowns. "That wasn't her. There's always someone who wants to be found." He nods toward the steel wall. "Who she was just before she died, that's who she always wanted to be."
"Well, at least she wasn't alone," Nathan says.
"She was looking for answers. When she came in to the hospital this time she was paralyzed with fear. She knew she was going to die, and she didn't know what to believe, or if she should bother trying. She had a lot of questions. She really was a religious woman, she just didn't know it. For instance, one question she had was, What did she do to make you leave? Beside the obvious, of course."
"Me? I didn't leave. I don't know what you mean. I've stuck it out these last three years while she was sick."
"Maybe I'm asking the wrong question."
Nathan eyes hi in warily. "I have court soon."
“Just tell me this, Nathan," Cleary says in a tone eerily familiar, as if he's known Nathan all his life, or men like Nathan, legions of Nathans marching lockstep into the chapel since the beginning of time. "Why are you here?"
"Maria wanted me to identify her body."
"And why you?"
"I don't know what you're driving at."
Did you always do what Maria wanted, or only this one last favor?" Cleary lifts his chin, observing Nathan down the length of his nose.