development
Jessica Walker My apartment is on the fifth floor of what once was a hospital. The realtor told me nervously of the building’s former life during my video tour. I don’t love that, I said. I didn’t say—My father died of cancer nine months ago. I didn’t want to increase her discomfort. I took the apartment. I had come to the rental market late with a large dog. It was my best option. The developer tried to retain elements of the hospital’s “hospitalness,” misguidedly thinking of this as a selling point. The hallways are painted an institutional pea green. The glossy gray floors shine under lighting that manages to be simultaneously bright and soul-dulling. The elevators are deep and wide. You can imagine stretchers squeaking down the corridors, patients— immobile logs beneath crisp white sheets. You can imagine this even if your father didn’t just die after four hospitalizations in a year’s time. You are on the highest floor, my sister tells me. The really sick people are on the lower floors. In the ER. I know, I say. But I don’t say why we think what we think. And I try, I really do try to appreciate the place—a luxury apartment I could never afford if its macabre history had not significantly decreased its value. I have high ceilings, picture windows, mountain views, vintage hardwood floors and bafflingly low utility bills. The place is brick and square and solid. A fortress. I never lose electricity, even in an ice storm. My building—unlike the human body—is built to endure. But when I take my trash out
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to the dumpster I am met with a view of Maplewood Cemetery, the oldest graveyard in town. People die in houses, too, a friend says when I mention the deathtinge that has come to haunt my days and infuse my dreams since moving into the hospital. You’ve probably lived many places where someone passed away. And I don’t say that I know this because my father died at home, on hospice, convulsing in pain that only a hospital could have handled. There is so much I don’t say about death now that I’ve seen it happen and happen so horribly. Because life, or at least my life, is almost assuredly a cosmic joke, the hospital next to a graveyard is on Locust Avenue—a street sharing the name of a Biblical plague. On this point, I suppose, my living situation twists absurdly enough to evoke laughter. But I do not laugh. The death I saw was horror. And what is horror but absurdity without humor? Now I am forty-two, living in a hospital, recent witness to my father leaving his body a few feet from where I opened Christmas presents in childhood. There was a death in our living room, I am living where people die. An Uber driver—a former hospital employee—pulled up to my building, shocked to see his old workspace transformed into apartments. I asked where the death was, and he pointed to a lower floor by the dumpsters, the wing of the building closest to the graveyard. Dumpsters, graveyard, morgue. It all makes logical, linear sense. I want to laugh. But I cannot. It is not safe to laugh at death when you live in a hospital next to a graveyard on a street named after a plague the year after a hearse pulled into the rain-sogged yard where you once played Mother May I. They zipped him in a black bag that seemed more suited for a garment than a corpse, and neatly lifted him from hospital bed to gurney, then out the door. Nothing left behind but deep tire marks in the mud.
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DE V E L OPM E N T
Until laughter comes, I try to conjure optimism, improbable, defiant optimism. The developer of my building comes to mind as inspiration. Who thought it possible to create apartments in a hospital next to a graveyard on Locust Avenue? Who thought it normal to have humans playing Twister, clipping toenails and humping where others suffered, were intubated, sliced and sewn? Why can’t I have the developer’s ridiculous faith in the transformative power of change? Why must we go from life to death, from comfort to pain? Why not the reverse? Maybe your floor was labor and delivery, my sister says. That is a nice thought—chubby infants slick from birth wailing and grasping, not yet comprehending what goes on in the lower floors, in the plots across the street. The first thing I did upon birth was grab my father’s index finger. He was into old films. Black and white. Noir. Gravel voiced heroes, stubbled jawbones, sunken eyes. They played more and more in the final year when he couldn’t leave the house, when home became hospital and body became prison. In Key Largo, Humphrey Bogart comforts the widow of his war buddy, telling her a fairy tale about the philtrum, the cupid’s bow, the indent on the upper lip. Before he was born . . . he knew all the secrets of life and death. And then at his birth, an angel came and put his finger right here. And sealed his lips.
The actor died of cancer at the prime of his career. My father’s dog bears Bogart’s name. The residents of my neighborhood have transformed the sloping graveyard into a de facto dog park. City-issued poop-bag
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dispensers are stationed at the entrance. At five o’clock residents of the surrounding neighborhood unleash their pets, who tussle and shit amongst gravestones, some so weathered the inscriptions are flat and unreadable. A doctor brings a large silver bowl full of water. A medical procedural basin, he tells me, for surgeries. And I do not question what other lives the bowl has led. Before I lived in a hospital, before my father died, I used to smoke and drink with my friends on the cold granite slabs of the cemetery’s mausoleum. My future residence hulked in the background. It did not seem strange to me then. I’d unleash my dog, watch him chase my thin-boned friend as they romped—their dark outlines elvish and lupine, somewhere between fighting and playing—jumping over plots, low walls and headstones. I laughed from the mausoleum steps, brought a bottle to my mouth. Backlit by the hospital, they leapt. At times they seemed to be hanging, suspended in night air. Father, put a finger to my lip. Seal what I know of this world.