Mercy

            St. Christopher Animal Hospital has been here since the sixties and will be here until the Big Quake comes. Flat, low, and beige, a lot like a bomb shelter. Mostly it's moms coming in. The pet has started acting weird, so the travel cage is found, the kid is consoled, driven to school, and she drives back, fixes her hair, puts on the track pants, and comes here. She is blonde, loud, friendly. I tell her to leave the non-human family member with me and I will take good care, move slowly, strike painlessly.

            Sometimes they want to stay as it happens. I try to talk them out of it. They always make things complicated. The pet is whining and they are asking me if I think they should be looking in its eyes as it dies or holding it in their arms. I say I don't know but I need to be able to get 450 mg of pentobarbitone into the body. They tear up; this is where the crumpled tissues from the purse come out. Should I leave, they ask. It might be for the best, I say, and nod. I am hugged, pressed against their breasts. From 11 pm to 10 am Monday to Friday I am in charge of euthanasia. Saturday and Sunday I do toenail clipping on large dogs and exotics. Whatever you use, the key is that it be sharp. Dull, you don't know where the thing will end up. Anything's possible. 

* * *

            Monday mornings are always busy. Everyone waits out the weekend to see if it will get better. I think the first few euths go quietly. They blend together. I remember only fragments—a paw that springs out to catch my hand as I push the syringe in, the cat whose eyes blearily opened and closed a few times after I injected her, like she was falling asleep.

            And then the baby monkey, black and wrinkly with short, soft, hair all over. It climbs up my arm before I get the sedative in and perches itself on my shoulder. But this one is a biter, according to the clipboard, so I pull the creature away from my face. Routine after that, except that I leave the room and see it in front of me, on the floor in the hall, and reach down to pick it up and I can't, its body completely insubstantial yet somehow climbing onto my shoulder again. I stand there, in a patch of sun from the window, until Dr. Metcalfe turns the corner and I am frozen, groping at my shoulder, feeling warm life there.

            Good morning Clem, she says, and smiles but lets it fall quickly. She does not look at my shoulder, but then again she rarely looks at me.

            I spend the rest of my shift in the cramped supply closet, practically folded into the towel rack, watching this nimble thing swing from the thin metal bars of the supply shelves, away from me and returning, away and returning.

            I try to put it in a travel cage before I leave but it keeps bypassing the grates somehow and then Receptionist Stuart comes in so I can't try anymore because he doesn't see it either and I'm opening and closing this empty cage.

            So the ghost monkey comes home on my shoulder. When I close all the blinds against the morning sun and stumble into bed, it jumps from my shoulder to nestle between the wall and me. I haven't figured out yet if it can still bite me, but sleep comes anyway.

            The phone wakes me up early, in late afternoon. Dr. Metcalfe sounds tired, or maybe irritated. Hi Clem. This is Miranda. I need to talk with you about a patient you had this morning. The monkey, he was pretty young one I think….it wasn't supposed to go to you….

            She's talking, but I'm just staring at the monkey. It stares back. We are like those couples that communicate primarily through profound eye contact, twitches of the muscles around the eyes.

            Well….it wasn't supposed to be put down. It was only coming in for a routine checkup, think the receptionist mixed up the paperwork, there might be an investigation. Listen, I have to take action, if they sue, they live in Malibu, I mean these exotics are very expensive …Clem, I have to let you go.

            She pauses, and he doesn't fill the silence.

            Thanks for your time with us, he hears faintly as he puts the phone back on the hook.

            I am looking at the monkey and thinking that it understands. I am remembering fourth grade and throwing punches at Dan Coppersmith at recess because he talked loudly and his pants were never long enough on his body. I am remembering the look the principal gave me over his steepled hands when I told him this.

* * *

It takes me two weeks to find a new job. During this time I figure out pretty much everything about my little ghost. One, only I see him. Two, only I can hear him. Three, I cannot actually touch or pick him up. Four, he goes through walls and floors. I also spend a large chunk of time reading about schizophrenia and Parkinson's on the Internet. My ghost watches over me from the chandelier, spinning it in circles, raining dust down.

            I eventually find work as the Safe Haven Night Watch at Mercy Hospital in Santa Monica, four blocks from St. Christopher's. I call my mother and tell her only that I have a new job that pays a lot less where people give me their babies. Oh my Clementine, she says after a time, voice breaking a little. But these days I go grocery shopping with her and if her coupons for yogurt don't work, she cries. It's hard, getting old.

            I think a lot about how like my old job this new one is. With both there's the element of irreversibility—something being dropped off that will not be picked up. Both involving desperately sad people hoping to be kind.

Most of the people who leave babies aren't from around here—something about the quiet way they hand me a bundle of blankets. East L.A., maybe the Valley, somewhere in the foothills. I think they drive for hours because they think, if they find a hospital across the 405, they will have placed their child into the house of an infertile but loving celebrity. It's the American Dream.

* * *

            I come home in the morning and turn on the television and fall asleep to the first thing I find. Today—Grizzly Man. Things are looking good for him and his girlfriend. He gets closer than I could without shitting my pants, anyway. The bears look like they’re listening when he croons to them. TV Guide already told me they get horribly mauled so I lie down and drift off. In my dream I am at work at Mercy. But instead of babies people keep bringing in cancerous hamsters, violent bulldogs, the cat that scratched their child’s cornea. I declares all wards of the state, gives them names according to the days of the week they were brought in. The old system. Then someone brings in a human baby, and my dream-self knows what to do. I put on my lab coat, pull the syringe out of the pocket.

            Then my ghost swings down out of nowhere, with tiny, sharp, almost-human hands. He rips out my eyes, he slashes my face, the screaming is one or both of us and everywhere….

            I wake up, pee, get a water bottle from the fridge, and get back in bed. In the next dream I am sitting in a chair across from Oprah. The television audience cheers and claps, prompted by a sweating bald man off-camera pumping his arms. I am wearing a black veil over my face and a new suit.

            Oprah says, Clem—can I call you Clem?

            Yes yes, of course. I nod. Smile. Of course, Oprah.

            She turns to the audience, speaks: Like many of you, Clem had a loved and trusted pet who became a member of the family. Do I have pet lovers here? Dog people? Cat people?

            The prompter waves furiously and the audience cheers. They have been powdered, made up. They are ready to be panned over, smiling for the unfortunate friends back home who did not get to attend an actual taping of The Oprah Winfrey show.

            How about—and here she pauses—monkey people?

            Silence. The prompter makes throat-cutting motions at the audience.

            Well Clem is here to tell us how his beloved but exotic pet turned against him—or rather—here to show us. She turns to him now, and her eyes are glassy, brimming with sympathy, with utmost respect for his bravery. Will you, Clem?

            He removes the veil.

            Gasps from the audience. Oh my god, oh my god they chant, under their breath.

            Oprah looks at the camera and grabs my hand, squeezes. We’ll be right back, she says. 

            We cut to commercial.

* * *

            I skip sleep one day to have lunch with Janet, an old friend from high school. She was a sophomore when I was a freshman and I worshipped her. She always went behind the auditorium to smoke and I would sit ten feet away from her and read Redwall. I hated everyone except her, and she hated everyone including me. As soon as she realized this she decided we had enough in common to become friends. The happiest day of high school was when she offered me a bump of cocaine off of the school newspaper, the part with the photo of the cheerleading team winning States on it.

            She had gone to rehab a couple years out of high school and that was the last I heard until she emailed me and mentioned her kids, her second husband, would I like to eat at that new place on Fourteenth and Wilshire.

            My ghost comes with, of course, and in under five minutes I have a crushing headache from trying not to follow him with my eyes as he scampers around Janet, the table, the waiter. He’s also emitting small shrieks and so I lose entire sentences of what she’s saying, replaced with “Reeeeeeeeeee eeee scree! Eeeeee” and I’m feeling nauseated and overwhelmed when she asks me what I’ve been up to. Not much, I say, and trail off. It’s obvious she’s disappointed. Mutinous, I concentrate on my food. She checks her watch, gets the bill. Nice to see you, I offer. Good luck with the children.

            This is not something friends say, maybe.

            After Janet drives off I go and get my car and drive to the pier. My ghost has never been to the ocean or the beach, was kept in a backyard for the part of its life after it was smuggled here in a dark crate over oceans. He runs away and comes back as if reporting. His dark hair holds the sun in, feels hot when he brushes across my neck, the side of my face. I walk all the way up to the water, and keep walking, slowing as the waves hit higher and higher. The sun is out and on the water, almost blinding. When I see the ocean I always think I see seal noses in the dark spots behind the crests of waves. Once I swam out, forgetting about shore, or maybe not, maybe swimming so that I could keep looking back at the shore and seeing the umbrellas recede into bright points, and I got so tired I just floated, and if the lifeguard hadn’t seen me maybe I wouldn’t have gotten back, grown up, got a job as a vet being God, being all three Fates, cutting the strings, been fired as God, been hired as a taker of souls, the Statue of Liberty, bring me your huddled infants you yearn to set free.

            My ghost is struggling. No water instincts. I watch the little face, and out here no one can hear me talk to him, so I speak calmly, the euthanasia voice, pulling his limbs off mine when he tries to stay afloat. Eventually he stops struggling. The cold of the water has begun to seep into my bones. He sinks under, looking less vivid, more like ghosts should. I swim back. 

            Sodden, clothes heavy, I look back from the shore. The crashing of the waves seems odd, muffled.

            There is no weight on my shoulders. It feels like mercy.