Erico tried to shake his head, but the sandbags stopped the gesture. His neck muscles seemed to scream. “I don’t care how. I just don’t want to be afraid anymore. I just don’t want to be afraid.”
Still gripping Erico’s fingers with his left hand, Rene reached back with his right hand, pulled up a chair, and sat down. “We have a deal?”
“Yes.”
Rene Boniface nodded, closed his eyes, and held Erico’s hand with both of his.
Erico felt his headache fall way, the aches and tension in his limbs, in his chest, his abdomen, his head and neck, it all fell away. He could see no lights, no colors, but he could see hope, joy, a peculiar tension that was an anticipation of something splendorous about to happen.
“This was Rachael’s death,” said Rene, his voice speaking to Erico as from within Erico’s own mind.
There was a glow, a hazy blue light high above her. Rachael could feel her arm reach up toward the light, although she could not see her own hand. She couldn’t see it, yet it was not strange to her, for she understood everything.
All that had been anxiety, all that had been worry, all that had been fear. Nothing. Foolish, silly. It would have been laughable, save the reality that Rachael now understood all. Hence she understood herself, her fear, and the fears of the entire universe. The answers to all of the questions ever asked reposed within her memory. Not just her questions; everyone’s questions. All that was unimportant fell away. All that was important became understood. Every cell of her body became aware and understood its place and worth to the organ, the body, the universe, the soul of Rachael Raddenburg.
Beyond the light, the warmth, perhaps its source, was the end, the beginning, the source, the center, an event/power/entity/state of such towering consequence, attaching any name to it diminished it. Next to it any conception of god that had ever existed became as nothing.
It was something of love.
The love was for Rachael, and because she understood everything in the universe, Rachael knew that she was worthy of the love. It was hers for eternity.
Glittering billows of down soft diamonds parted and folded her within as every particle of her joined with every particle of the universe and forever became both the mother and the child of existence.
The blinding light dimmed, the warmth diminished, and Erico opened his eyes to see Rene looking back at him. Rene’s face looked drawn, empty. Erico still felt the understanding, the meaning, of the experience. He had been gone for years; perhaps decades. “Rene?”
The morgue orderly nodded, his eyes still closed.
“Was that God?”
Even as he asked it, Erico could feel his understanding collapsing, his life of answerless questions returning, the love dissolving in a bath of petty doubt and self-recrimination. The clock on the wall showed the time to be seventeen after nine. “I shouldn’t’ve asked,” said Erico. “I shouldn’t’ve said anything.”
Rene sighed as his face grew a patient smile and he squeezed Erico’s hand. “You’re not dead. The things you see, the things you hear, the things you feel and think begin cluttering up what you experienced. How do you feel?”
“Feel?”
“Yes. Your fear. How do you feel?”
Erico looked within himself. There was something he felt. It was the residue of a great peace slowly being eroded by a desperate sense of loss. The fear of death, though, was gone. There were still some things that remained from his experience. He felt relaxed, confident, worthy of love.
Of course it had been Rachael Raddenburg’s feelings he had experienced.She had been the one who had been worthy of love; not Erico. The more he teased at it, the faster the feelings left him. “I can’t stay like this, Rene. I’m not scared of death. It’s something worse. The way I felt. I want to feel that way again.” Erico squeezed Rene’s hand. “It’s leaving me, man. I don’t want to lose it.”
“It’ll come soon enough, Erico.”
He closed his eyes as he mentally nodded. Soon enough. Death would come soon enough. A shard of the understanding he had experienced remained in his memory. It was the knowledge of what an incredibly improbable gift life is. Any life; his life. There was no way to cast it aside now that he knew the truth.
Peace. A feeling of serenity— that everything was exactly where it was supposed to be — washed over him just as he relaxed and drifted off to sleep, the morgue orderly still holding his hand.
The next morning when Erico Ramos awakened, he was hungry. When his doctor, Janice Landry, came by on her rounds, Erico was proclaimed “guardedly stable.” There were setbacks, periods of progress, and a series of operations. In three weeks, however, Erico was allowed to sit up. In another four days he was, with the aid of a walker, allowed to go to his room’s bathroom on his own. Six days after that he was allowed to take a shower. In another week he was discharged and continued physical therapy on an outpatient basis.
Although he was grateful to have pulled through, each moment he lived was touched by the sense he was living on borrowed time, that he had touched something wondrous that was now gone, and that he owed Rene Boniface a death. After Erico got his old job in ICU back, he would, at times, see Rene visit a patient. The patient would always say that he or she had requested the morgue orderly, usually the patient died within a few days, and the remains took that last ride down to the cold room, big smile and all. Perversely, Erico envied them their smiles.
Then came a period of almost three weeks during which no one at Northvale General died. It was nothing special; just a statistical lull in deaths by alcohol and other drugs, fatal traffic accidents, various diseases and old age. Just as there are statistical peaks, there are valleys. For whatever reason, at that point in time, there were no death experiences for the morgue orderly to collect.
There was something about it all that disturbed Erico. Perhaps it was the old debt he owed Rene; perhaps it was the fact of what Rene Boniface was: a spiritual ghoul who fed upon death. A very hungry ghoul.
It was the night shift in early summer, the warm breezes carrying the scent of honeysuckle past the sealed windows, Erico sat in the almost deserted cafeteria sipping at a cup of decaf until Rene Boniface came for his usual mid-shift donut. As he went through the line, paid for his donut, and headed for the door, the morgue orderly avoided any eye contact with Erico.
“Rene,” called out Erico.
The morgue orderly stopped and turned toward him. His face was drawn, his eyes wide and frightened. “What is it?”
Erico held out a hand toward the opposite side of the cafeteria table. “Have a seat.”
“You don’t like me, man. You never did. You needed me, once. But you don’t like me.”
“I want to talk.”
The tip of Rene’s tongue nervously moistened his lips. He glanced down at the napkin and donut in his hand, then dropped into the seat facing Erico and draped an arm over the back of the chair. “Okay, what?”
Erico glanced down at his coffee cup. “Look, maybe I wanted to thank you for what you did for me.”
“You’re welcome. Can I go now?”
Erico slowly shook his head as he stared at his coffee cup. One thing he had learned from his time on the rehab unit was that the only way to say it was to say it. He lifted his gaze until he was looking directly into the morgue orderly’s eyes. “You need it, don’t you? I don’t pretend to understand much about this, but you need it.”