I was friends for awhile with a guy I knew from high school who happened to end up at the same graduate school program I was in. He was an odd guy in high school and he was an odd guy in graduate school too. A loner but not a burnout. The opposite of that. Intense and focused in a strange and quiet way. In high school he wanted to be a mortician and of course in high school that earned him a lot of shit and a lot of crap too.
We were in the same biostatistics class. Jeff was a medical student, and I was a candidate for a Master's in Public Health degree. It was a very hard class and he was better at it than me, and he was generous with helping me out with little side explanations. So I took to always sitting with him and we would get lattes at the cart before class and he and the help and the lattes made it not such a bad experience. It was a cavernous lecture hall with bad lighting and peeling little wooden paddle desks, the kind that flip and fold up and down, and it was sort of a cozy thing we had going.
What happened to the mortician thing, I asked him one morning, you know the med student thing seems to be quite the other way to go. He laughed and said, I still want to do that, that's still my thing. I'm just doing this first. And I said, really. And then his pager went off, and he gave me a longish look, that same quiet/strange thing I remembered about him from high school. And he asked, do you want to see what I mean? I thought oh, he's going to go show me his cadaver, and that's fine, I get it, and he's been nice to me and helpful and all so I'll go see it even though I've seen cadavers a bunch of times before. So I said, sure.
The lecture hall emptied into a corridor that if you followed it the whole way would take you through more than a mile of university buildings all the way to the University Hospital ER, I think it was maybe the longest corridor in the US or something at the time. And we walked it, not saying much, all the way to the ER. Jeff took me to a curtained area right in front of the nurses' station, which is where they put all the really dicey cases that need the most attention. And before I could say, aren't we going to your cadaver, he slipped a purple lanyard with a blank white plastic tag over my neck and took me by the hand and pulled me behind the curtain, just as about three or four doctors and nurses were walking out, and snapping off their gloves. They looked at him and briefly nodded; they did not even seem to register me. Game over. Dead guy. Dead bluish guy on a gurney, still hooked up to monitors, one monitor the classic flatline, and one monitor doing a little something still.
Sternal rub, Jeff said, from behind, softly into my ear, his breath like a real touch on my skin, and in my hair. What, I said, not processing efficiently at this point, and he said it again, in just the same lover-like way, Sternal rub. And he put his hand on my hand, and guided it onto the dead guy's chest, and curled his fingers around my hand to make a fist, and my heart was pounding and I to be honest felt a little undone by his touch and the situation in general and the not knowing what the hell was happening, or happening next. And with that he pushed down on my hand, hard, and rubbed my knuckles deep back and forth and back and forth on the guy's naked dead chest, right on his breastbone, my knuckles catching and then slipping over these little ridges and divots in the bone. And then there it was: the dead guy arched his back just a little, moved the tiniest fraction to the left, a little shift, but away from my hand, and his hand over my hand.
That's how you know it, Jeff said, and his eyes were no longer on me, but on the guy, who I could see now was dead, but not actually dead, just dead for most purposes. Jeff's eyes shone, and he looked pale, and alive, and electric. He shifted his eyes onto me, and then away, and I knew I wasn't there, that this was a love, an odd love, a love of a thing inbetween, and that you can't explain, and that costs you shit and crap in high school, and that you have to find your way to through conventional routes, like biostatistics, and schools, and programs, and conventional people, to get close to, sidle up close to, to see it, and touch it, and adore it, and feel it, and whisper in its ear, like a lover.
That's how you know its still there.
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