A Quiet Death

He does not like artificial light.  Prefers natural darkness.  Sunlight seeps in like an apology for a shy illumination of his room.  She likes it this way because a brighter light will expose her and she wants to sustain the imagination that she is beautiful.  Gorgeous in shadows, yes, and average in exposure, at best.  Everything about her is average.  Height, weight, number of lovers.  Only her salary is above the average.  He pays her handsomely.  And in the shadows he is handsome.  

    In Belgium he is the hermit American.  Never leaves his room, one of four in a house whose rooms are rented out by a widowed  mevrouw.  She, let’s call her Johanna -  not the mevrouw - cares for him.  She’s a caregiver.  Makes his meals, cleans his room and his laundry, organizes his medication and kindly harasses him into taking it.  Are they flirting?  Sometimes she imagines that he is invalid and she must wash him.  Remove his clothes.  Expose him in the shyly lightly pierced naturalness of darkness and smooth warmth over him, warmth in the form of a wet cloth, soapy and foamy and warmly and shyly and ardently though gentleness often objects and is rarely overruled.  

    Physically he is intact.  There are his scars.  Burned there.  Smooth trenches of past burns.  The topography of his body is traditionally male where it can be, where the burns haven’t destroyed hair.  The hair on his chest, mostly preserved.  Not a coat.  More like a subtle yet undeniable proof:  yes, he is male.  And she likes how it’s exposed when he’s lazy with the top buttons of his shirt.  He is intact.  All parts functioning.  Everything works.  Especially his tongue.  Licentious at times.  Most times principled.  He pays her handsomely so she deals with both times.

    He came almost three years ago.  Hired her nearly on the spot and she didn’t understand the need of her.  Intact, all parts working.  Sometimes an internal mechanism snaps and he snaps and she takes it in and rebels internally where it doesn’t matter like the time she asked if he wanted her to come to him come to him come to him and clear the table and he snapped Bide Where You Are Bitch.  Johanna, she told herself, you are a bitch.  In that immediate responsive moment she believed it.  I am a bitch.  It’s happened many times.  He sways her immediately.  Swoons her with his out-of-nowhere aggression and she thinks Only A Bitch Would Be Swooned.  

    One morning she swoons into his room extra early and he is reading by the window through which comes a sorry shaft of shy apologetic sunlight.  Johann is curious and shy like the sunlight and sorry like the same when she asks what he’s reading.  A woman, no, a young girl, shyly a woman, comes to Christ in an olive garden and with the wetness of audacity exclusive to women asks to be his wife, she asks with the wet audacity, and He consoles her with firm male denial and wetly she asks that if He refuses her marriage will He at least accept idolatry?  Of The Body.  If she cannot be His wife, his wet wife, can’t she at least be his harlot?  Johanna is wetly stunned.  Shocked and wet.  It is a novel he tells her.  It is blasphemy to novelize Christ.  He is Truth.  

    The truth is that this continues for three years.  She knows his name only through his medical files.  He never introduced himself.  His first name has the Latin word for god or deity.  She began worshipping him.  Throughout this worship officials visitors guests came and went with papers and documents and all the doldrums of governmental legal on-the-dotted-line things and now he has told her that she must leave.  She is no longer needed.  Not required.  She has officially become a needless accessory to his existence because he has been approved.  His incurable disease, though mental, has been approved for termination.  Its germination started in a desert.  His life must be stagnant and without production or terminate.  

    He has come to get a quiet death.  No more disfiguring beyond the scars.  An injection directly into the heart.  Johanna wants to dissuade him.  Convince him otherwise.  Perplex the issue.  Dissuade and perplex him.  Fuck him or masturbate him.  She wants to mount him like that harlot on Christ.  But this never happens.  He could take her weight and return her thrusts.  But he firmly dries her wetness.  It is not what he has come for.  He has come for assistance in a death of quiet repose and when he reposes in quiet death she stares at his body that was able and that functioned and was firm and now is firm in death and in quiet she stares at his firm death.  

    Before it -

    Johanna.

    Yes?

    I had to come to your country to die quietly.  That’s fucked up, don’t you think?

    Why could you not do it in your own country?  You have God and deity in your name.  Can you not do anything?

    Not quietly . . . hey, Yo!  Hanna, not quietly.  I could blow out my brains.  But nothing blows quietly.  And I’m tired of the noise.  

    I think you make your own noise.

    You’re such a woman.

    And you are such a man.  Complaining about noise instead of fighting for quiet.

    You don’t know what I’ve fought for.

    Fight for me

    I know only that you are here and you pay me to care for you.

    I care for you pricelessly

    In a firm shyness - she will firmly refuse encouragement to be open - she leaves his room.  Leaves him in his naturally dark state of firm death.  The doctor told her it would happen in the blink of an eye and so she forced herself firmly not to blink, to keep her bright round eyes open and wet and watering with the firm effort.  He died anyway.  Firmly and quietly.  

    What happens to a head that goes through so much effort to want the body so firmly and quietly dead?

    She once called him by his god-imbedded name and asked if he believed in God.  

    The God that made his firm body.  He able-bodied body.  His masculine body.  Yet the effeminate eyes, the persuasive mouth.  All the subtle features that managed to rage testosterone.  

    Yes.  

    Then only He can choose your death.

    He chose it by granting my application.

    You do not apply for death.

    Sure you do.  Just join the army.

    You are playing with words.

    The words of my favorite plays are tragedies.

    Quiet.  Shy.  This is the night as she goes home.  She will have another patient.  Maybe one who is handsome in the bright light.  Maybe one who is sexy in the dark.  Maybe one who did not have to come to Belgium for its granting of death in quiet firmness.  Death assisted firmly in the quiet.  

    Still average, she feels beautiful.