The Man in Black

Virginia — the pollen belt of the world. Claritin and Albuterol inhalers eat your heart out, because this is where you’re making your killer profits. I’ve lived in this state since I was knee high to a duck, and I’ve been struggling to catch my breath for my entire twenty-two years on this planet. I’ve been hospitalized for my asthma many times. It’s always in the late spring, when the flowers are fully bloomed and you can see the thick yellow dust coating everything. Last spring was the absolute worst. There was just enough rain to make everything grow and bloom, but not enough to tamp down the dust, so every breath was torturous for my lungs. The hacking cough and wheezing restricted my airways until I was on the verge of passing out. Before I keeled over, I drove my miserable butt to the hospital.

After signing in at the ER, they tell me to take a seat. My face is beet red at this point from lack of oxygen, as I can only draw small sips of air. After checking in at the reception desk, I ask with a throaty whisper how long it will be before I’m seen.

She shrugs, and without the slightest hint of empathy in her voice says, “They’ll call you when they’re ready for you.”

I stare at her with dead-eyes for a second before taking my seat, swearing that if I die here, I will come back as a ghost and haunt that lady for the rest of her days.

The waiting room’s packed full of moaners and groaners. I scour the room for an empty seat, preferably one sitting next to a person who isn’t hacking up a hairball or bleeding profusely. I settle on an end seat where I only have to sit next to one person, a quiet man wearing a black suit, pink shirt, and a black tie, with a fedora covering his face.

I take a seat and concentrate on breathing. In, out. In goes the oxygen, out goes the carbon-dioxide. In, out, in, out. Just hang in there… 

As I’m struggling to stay alive, the man beside me lifts tips his hat onto his head and takes a long look at me. He’s clean-shaven, with beady black eyes resembling a ferret’s.

“I’ve seen quite a few people come and go from here,” he says. “And I have to say, if you don’t classify as an emergency, I don’t know who does.”

“Can… you… tell… them… that?” I say between bated breaths.

“Won’t do any good. They encourage people to die in this hospital. Fewer patients to treat. This place is a never ending line. They don’t have enough staff to care for them, and the ones they have are overworked.”

“Sounds like… you know a lot about… about this place.”

“I travel around a bit, but I’ve spent more time here in the last few years than any other hospital, so I’ve noticed a thing or two. I’ve seen quite a few people come in and leave in a bag. Quite a few. It’s a testament to the greedy vultures who own this place. It’s their legacy.”

I don’t answer, because I need to concentrate on sucking these small sips of air. But I nod to let him know I hear him. He keeps on talking as if my life isn’t on the verge of slipping into the abyss.

“It’s the investors. They cut corners everywhere they can. This is the busiest ER on the east coast per capita, and it’s in the bottom ten percent of average pay for their employees? Doctors, nurses, and receptionists make a pittance compared to what they can make anywhere else around here, while having twice the patient load.”

“Travesty,” I wheeze as the doctor calls in one of the waiting patients who’s been blowing their nose every fifteen seconds.

“Yeah, for people like you. That lady came to the emergency room for a head cold for Christ’s sake, and here you are holding on to your life by a single thread.”

I pull my inhaler from my pocket and decide to take my sixth puff of the hour. The first five did little to help, but I figure I have at least twenty people who have priority over me to be seen. It couldn’t hurt.

“Good idea,” the man says. “Wait a minute and take another puff.”

I do exactly that, and while my wheezing continues, I feel my airways open, allowing oxygen to flow more freely than before. A smile crosses the pale man’s lips, giving a warm temperament to his otherwise icy demeanor. When I meet his eyes, I have to struggle not to pull away my gaze, because those black bulbs contain a waking nightmare. I force a polite smile and thank him for his advice. Then I ask him if he’s waiting for someone. It’s a question I immediately regret because of its personal nature, but he answers without hesitation.  

“I’m waiting to collect the dead.”

I figure he’s the mortician. Although, I can’t for the life of me figure out why he’s sitting in the emergency room. “Don’t they deliver the dead bodies to the morgue?” I ask.

He smiles again, only this time with a sliver of the warmth from before. “I prefer to be on site. Besides, I’m nocturnal, and I’m not a drinker, so this is the most interesting place to be. Do you have any idea how many crazy stories I hear nightly? I could write a bestseller.”

I manage to eek out a laugh, which I immediately regret because it leads me into a coughing fit, which is followed by more intense wheezing.

The man looks annoyed. At first I think he’s grossed out by my coughing fits, but then he clarifies his disgust by pointing at the next patient who’s called through the double doors. “Another hypochondriac gets their turn before the real emergency victims. You see that guy over there with his arm in the sling?”

I nod.

“He was at work when one of those industrial bulbs fell onto him, shattering and leaving his forearm and shoulder riddled with tiny pieces of glass. That woman sitting next to him, she’s practically blind from the intensity of her migraines. She’d been better off sitting at home in her dark bedroom and praying them away than to come here for help. Meanwhile, that heifer that just waddled back has a bunion the size of a marble on her big toe. She’s so terrified that it’s infected that she comes into the ER on a Saturday night instead of simply waiting until Monday and waddling into the Emergicare clinic. These are the decisions that cost lives.”

“You’re so passionate about this,” I say. “If you know these people, why don’t you voice your grievances. You might force things to change.”

“Greed has already made up their minds. And as far as the hypochondriacs, there are too many of them to count. I’d never be able to get it through some of these people’s thick skulls that their emergency is not an emergency at all.”

I nod again, happy that out of all the people in here, I sat next to this man, who has given me a brand new perspective on the mentality of morticians. My eyes wander around the room trying to decipher who the hypochondriacs are, and who are the actual victims of circumstance, when I see the receptionist pointing at me. Then I see the security guard walking towards me with a nurse by his side. I look over and see the mortician lean back in his chair and place his hat back over his face. 

The return of the intense pressure takes hold of my airways and by the time the nurse is next to me, asking my name, I’m underwater without even a so much as a needle for a snorkel. The world around me turns fuzzy, then dark. Panicked voices seem so far away, seeming to fade farther with each passing second.

Strong hands lift my lanky frame. And the last thing I hear is a sweet, comforting voice that reminds me of an angel say, “Hang in there Eric. We’re going to get you some air.”

Part 2

After finishing another hairpulling six to six shift at the hospital, I go home to my boyfriend, hoping I can get a glimpse of him before he goes to church. To my surprise, he’s awake, and he’s made me my favorite breakfast: blueberry pancakes and maple sausage links. I’m so happy to see him because I feel the need to unload this morning. Every night is stressful working in the emergency room, but Saturdays are the worst. We see everything from drug overdoses, gunshot victims, firecracker accidents — really anything you can think of. Occasionally we get the patient with suicidal tendencies, or obvious psychological disorders, and we must take certain extra precautionary measures once they’re in our care. We’ll do our best to treat any physical ailments, then turn them over to the mental health professionals. I’ve noticed we’ve been having more than a few of these patients lately. None of them suicidal, but all of them exhibiting the same symptoms, all without prior medical history of psychosis or schizophrenia.

As I saturate the first pancake with maple syrup I say, “They talk to an empty chair.”

Jared flips the pancake and scrunches his brow so that it looks like a caterpillar zig-zagging across his face.

“It’s always the same chair, the one in the far corner. It’s weird. No one ever sits there. No matter how crowded the waiting room is, no one sits there. But a lot of the patients that sit next to it talk to it, like there’s somebody sitting there.”

He shakes his head. “Weird.”

“That’s not all. Every patient we’ve noticed talking to the chair gets priority to be seen over the folks that came in for scrapes and sniffles. When we get them in, they are all literally on the verge of death. We saved this man tonight who was breathing through a pinhole sized opening. I don’t know how he was talking, much less breathing.”

Jared tosses another pancake onto the platter and pours the last of the batter into the skillet.

“You aren’t understanding the gravity of the situation. I’ll wait until you’re…”

“No, no… I’m letting it soak in,” he says. “I’m trying to think of a logical explanation.”

“Well, your logical explanation may differ from mine. Seeing how you believe in invisible deities in the sky.”

“It could be an angel. Lord knows your hospital needs a miracle to sort things out around there.”

“We need an overhaul of management and owners, not an angel.”

“You need that too,” he says. “Now, I want to hear your logical explanation.”

I’m about to answer when I feel a tickle in my throat which quickly turns into an itch I can’t scratch. I ignore it and take a smaller bite, figuring that I’ve been eating too fast, but the next bite is almost impossible to swallow, feeling like I’m trying to fit a large marble down a straw. Jared notices me struggling and asks me if I’m okay. I ask him what he put in the pancakes.

“Blueberries, a little sugar, butter, almond flour, milk…”

“Almond flour,” I wave him over, “take me to the Emergency Room.”

It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know the severity of my allergy. The last time I ate almonds, they upset my stomach, giving it a hollow feeling that lasted a few hours and then faded away. I purposely avoided raw almonds after that, but I never thought it would have this effect — swelling my insides until I was sipping for air.

We get to the ER, and per-usual, they are backed-up with patients. So I take a seat in the far corner, next to a-man in a black suit, wearing black wingtips, with a black fedora covering his face. Meanwhile, my boyfriend pesters the receptionist, pointing at me and describing my struggles. I watch him with my faded vision and even amidst my struggles to survive; I smile. It’s obvious he loves me by the way he allows his normal laid-back demeanor to fall by the wayside, doing everything but cursing the staff for not recognizing a life-threatening emergency.

“You should hang on to that one,” a deep voice says.

I look over to see my reflection in the beady black eyes of the man in the fedora.

As I massage my esophagus I say, “If I live long enough, I’d like to marry him.”

“I recognize you. You work here. You worked last night. You’re a nurse.”

I concentrate on breathing. It’s happening, but it’s extremely painful.

“How long… have you been waiting?” I ask, not sure why I feel the need to engage this stranger on my deathbed.

“I’m always waiting,” he replies. “Waiting for someone like you. Someone on the verge.”

His words bounce around in my cloudy mind. The verge? The verge of what? Death?

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he says. “If you can keep a secret. Can you keep a secret, Beth?”

Curious about what he has to say and how he knows my name, I nod.

“I hang out at places like this to collect souls. The thing is, I really dislike my job. I mean, I don’t have any qualms with taking a ninety-year-old grandma who dies in her sleep, but a thirty-something like you… it’s too early. You have a lot of life left to live.” He points to Jared, who is still arguing his case with the receptionist. “And you have people that care about you enough to risk getting arrested.” The security guard confronts and incensed Jared, while the man continues. “So I come here, and I cheat a little by trying to prolong lives instead of what some of my brethren do, what we’re supposed to do, which is take every available soul. I’m not supposed to interfere with the human realm, but I’ve gotten to where I don’t care about their rules. I figure, what is the worst that could happen? Are the powers that be going to demote me to shoveling coal into the furnace of hell?”

I’m entranced by his words, and positive I’m hallucinating and on the verge of death. I crumple onto the floor and hear screaming all around me. Jared and others in the waiting room all crying out for someone to help me. As I await death, or a doctor to save me, I look up at the man. He puts a bony finger up to his pale blue lips and then places his hat back over his eyes.

The next few hours are a blur, but after getting an allergy shot, I survive the anaphylactic attack. I’ll never forget about the man in black and what he told me. But I will always keep his secret. If I told people, they would tell me I was hallucinating. If I were them, I’d think the same thing. But after that experience, and thinking of all the close calls sitting in the same chair, I’m a believer. There is a nether realm, something after this life. I can’t be sure of the details, but I believe. I still work in the ER at the same hospital. And even though I can’t see him, I always nod at the empty chair in the corner when I come into work, as a thank you to the man in black. The collector. The not so Grim Reaper. My guardian angel.