10.
Martha shakes out the table cloth, sprinkling a few crumbs into the yard. It is a still day. The sun sizzles on the sheds but the air is cool. It is late winter, and Jack is plowing under the winter tillage readying the fields for corn.

She spreads it back on the table--it is almost clean, and no one else is coming until Tuesday. On the stove, the kettle is spluttering a little, clearing its throat to whistle. She puts a teaspoon of instant coffee in a John Deere mug, adds two of sugar and a slap of milk, then makes herself a cup of comfort.

The phone rings. She picks it up after the third ring. "I'll look," she says. "Blue? You think you left it by the couch?" She walks the phone into the parlor, finds the sweater that Jane has left behind. "Yeah, it was a good session today. I didn't know what the new girl would be like but she was fine. People just get it, don't they?"

When they signed up for the Terris they had figured it was a straight-forward job. They had the equipment, the franchise gave them the special gear, and set them up with a skeleton crew, personnel manuals, even some contacts where they could hire nurses and medical people whose papers weren't enough to work in hospitals. The first woman they interviewed had been a doctor in Peru and had been doing housekeeping. She almost wept with joy when they showed her the shed.

Then word got out. At first they got a lot of flack about it. But they were keeping the farm. Other ones were going up for sale. The Friday auctions just made you want to cry when you saw who was selling off their equipment. Every family had at least one job in town, And the kids couldn't get out fast enough. SO, she wasn't proud but she sure didn't see any need to apologize.

Then Pastor Venge asked if he could come to pray for them. He told her they were special souls. They were being held in a place of special purity. They were like children before they were born, and if you hurt them or let them die it would be like an abortion. He said Martha and Jack were very special for doing this. And then he asked if he could bring just a few of the faithful to pray with him.

Somehow it had turned into a regular event. Twice a week Pastor Venge and a group of brisk young men and women would come through, walking up and down the aisles of the Terri shed and calling on the Spirit of the Lord to bless these innocents and bless them too. And after a while some of the women in the church who were closer to Martha's age started to come too, and then to stay after the Pastor's group left. It was Nancy, who asked her first what she knew about one of them--a yellow-haired Terri who had probably been pretty and vibrant and now was mostly very pale, with puddling fluids making her face look vaguely swollen and bruised.

They didn't have any information about them. The whole system was set up to be anonymous. No family visits. If there were families still in the picture they didn't end up on Terri farms. But most families hit their lifetime max pretty quickly and then the Lifers took over. Nancy suggested they bring the girl up to the house and pray over her, special. Even though they wouldn't know who she was, they should pray for her, just her, and make her the focus of their intention as if they did know her.

Somehow it just seemed right. Maria prepared a dolly and brought the girl up, they set up a bed for her in the living room, they way they would have had a casket if someone had died, and then they all sat around her and looked at her. Finally Nancy started. "I think you must have been in love. You had yellow hair and he probably did too. I want to tell you that there are still butterflies flying around and they miss you." And then Nancy began to cry, very quietly.

Martha spoke too. She told the yellow-haired girl about how her own daughter had left when she was about the same age. She came back a couple of times for Christmas and now she called every month or two. One time she came with a young man who smelled bad, and she fought with Jack. She hadn't been back since, but Martha knew she'd come soon. As she talked to the girl Martha thought that the bruises in the skin moved slowly, like clouds, and she could feel the pure presence like a quiet place in her own mind.

Phyllis took her turn. Her husband Daniel was paralyzed and she did her work and some of his and let the rest drift bit by bit. Their oldest son was at the land grant college and said he was coming back and she was just trying to hold on till he did. But he wasn't there at the harvest and he wasn't there at the planting and she talked about him less and less. Now she took the still hand in her own and stroked it, the way she would have stroked Daniel's if his eyes hadn't told her that pity would kill him faster than anything else.

Finally when enough had been spoken and the women sat quietly with their hands at their sides, Nancy stood up and went to the Bible on its stand, and opened it at random and read for a while. Then they all understood that the whole last hour had been a prayer.

They had been coming once a week now for five months. They brought up different Terris, and sometimes that seemed to make a difference. Each time before they started she thought that they would have all said what they had to say and would just sit and someone would start talking about the news or the weather and then that would be that. But each time they found themselves refreshed by the hour, like butterflies sipping renewal from the drying lips of the dead.

4. Terri Farm

9. "They give me the creeps," Maria says, rubbing Palo’s feet, trying to break the knots that are cramping his toes. He grunts, trying to listen to the radio and listen to her at the same time. If tomorrow is raining the chickens will crowd towards the middle of the chicken house and there will be more dead than usual. On the other hand it will cool things down so maybe there will be fewer dead.

His job mostly involves pulling the dead ones out and throwing them in the bins. They're trucked off. He thinks maybe they get ground up and fed to dogs. They kill each other a lot of ways. On purpose and by accident and sometimes they start by accident and finish on purpose. They peck at one another all day long, nothing else to do all jammed together like that except figure out who is in charge. The ones that get pecked and pushed away from the food, which comes down the sluice in the middle, are likelier to get hurt when something scares them and they all rush to the same place, thinking it will be safe. They get pulled under foot, and stepped on and they end up with broken feet and eyes scratched out. Then after that the other ones come at them harder and after a while Palo will notice there's sort of an eddy, a hill where things should be flat. So he takes his stick with a claw, and hooks out the body.

They could just keep them in cages and that wouldn't happen. Other things happen but not that. In cages they'd be held so tight they wouldn't be able to turn around. The ones that got scared easily would scrape their necks on the mesh. They'd pluck out their own feathers--of course they do that now too, and each others' feathers. He thinks that they probably lose a few more birds this way but they get bigger and they sell them for a little more because they aren't in the cages. And it gives him a job, watching with his claw, like the bird so high up it doesn't even have to bang feathers with the next one down to prove where it belongs.

Actually that isn't true. There is a belligerent rooster that would like to take him down a notch and he always has to keep an eye out when he comes into the long shed where the birds range back and forth. The rooster is watching for him. It's almost a kind of romance, the way he comes running up to him, then leaps up, claws up to strike and spin. He might like to pick that one out, for his spirit, breed him down into one of the bright tough birds they used to fight back home, back in the camps. But that isn't going to happen, the cocks are all capons anyway. He just has something going on that remembers the way things ought to be.

Palo is maybe thinking too much about that now, thinking about how much he is turning into one of these chickens. He and Maria and the other workers have their own rooms now, sheds a little smaller than the chicken yards but built on the same lines with sheet metal sweeping down, crackling in the sun. Balloon frame walls. He was here when they put them up. Water at the tap now piped into each kitchen, but still coming from the same flat tinny tasting source, through black pipe that takes up the taste of hose in the sun.

Behind the chicken sheds are the new sheds. These have cinder-block walls, and a lot of piping and electricity, a lot of stuff going on inside. They have generators too so that even if a thunderstorm knocks out the power, lightening cracking on a transformer as happens pretty regularly, the lines will continue. Not open all the way like the chicken houses, or quartered like the laborers' units--two rooms, a stove, a sink and a toilet apiece; a shower to share between every four. The Terri sheds are two tiers high, four long rows with eight in each row, air-conditioned and full of humming and ringing machines. Maria works there now. The job is not all that different from Palo's. She takes care of them and when they die she reaches up and turns the things off and they go away. Only probably not to pet food. And so far, she hasn't actually seen one die.

The Terris--most of them are women and most of them are old but she knows they all really aren't called Terri-- come to them from all over. After a certain point there isn't much to do with an old person or a hurt person except to let them die. Nothing is left to try to fix. Things wear out, people aren't made of pieces that you can replace or upgrade. If you think of them that way, anyway, these are like manual typewriters or old electric ones. They aren't anything you'd bother repairing. Just dump and upgrade. But that isn't going to happen.

Terri Shaivo is the first Terri. She's the one they fought to keep alive. The law churned around her like the chickens stepping on one another and then she went down. But later, here and there they changed that law. So depending on where you are and who cares and what's the matter, you get to a certain point and then there's nothing to do but die, except you're not going to. There’s so many ways to keep you alive. Not exactly a 'you'. But the blood pumps around and the eyes open and close. And after a while, the beds in the hospitals and nursing homes are full, with people who aren't going to get better, and there's no room to take people who might get better if only there was room.

That's when the Terri Farms started. They bring them out and take care of them. It's a little like nursing but its more like taking care of the chickens or, actually, most like taking care of the pigs and veal calves in their pens. They don't move around. In fact, it's easier with the Terris because they mostly don't want to move. You do the same kind of thing, keeping them washed down, keeping the pens clean and putting a lot of antibiotics into the feed so they don't get sick. The air gets filtered to keep it clean inside. A lot of the equipment that the farm used when it still raised hogs just got reengineered for the Terris. It's the first one in this section of the state and it's almost full now. Taking care of the Terris is a lot more profitable than raising beef.

1. Last Rights..a Novel Way to End

1.
Jamaica morning and a smell of garbage burning as the taxi drives the twisting harbor road in from the airport. The Blue Mountains are still black in night. Rackety murmurs from windows and doorways jangle the latest song by the posterboy whose face is slap slap slapped along the length of a wall. It is too early for the dominoes players but there is an upended crate against the wall where they will station themselves soon. It all looks so different when you come to a place to die.

forever
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

Nonetheless it is a tune and not the flicker of ghost pain that has my attention. I ask the driver to crank up the bass. I like the way it changes mood, starting in a sexy snarl that laces in and out with a girl's whisper that somehow turns menace into promise. I am smiling and nodding, feeling happy. Oh happy. Here to happy out.

Into New Kingston, open green ceremonial park and kiosks with high fashion, the international hotels and agencies. I am handed out the door, feeling the buzz take hold. Happy happy.

I check in and they hand me a thick manila package. Admission is on Tuesday. Four days before I meet up with other terminal strangers and get handed onto the van. In the meantime, I will wander around. Don't have to be careful anymore. I don’t want to spend the long weekend in the resort they offer. It’s going to be last resorts, Tommy said when I showed him my ticket. No last resorts, I said, I want my last rights.

2.
The canonized Pope has begun to breathe again. From nine in the morning till nine at night the pilgrims file by. Most have never been to Red Square and would not notice how much the Polish Pope has come to resemble Lenin’s remains. Here in the blue-black crypt that has been built despite has final request to lie in the earth, his body is changing behind the glass casket lid. The crepey old-man skin is beginning to soften and fill out again. The candlelight waves his famous profiles up and down the walls behind the solemnly shuffling thanatourists. The shadows cast by each separate illumination layer papal profiles at different angles, pile on the wall like foothills , soft blue distant mountain ranges .

3.
Terri is breathing too. They have brought her into the living room and are sitting in a circle around her, hands clasped. The ashes on her husband's mantle are nothing but ashes. Here in the center of a home that looks out onto a freshly planted field she is lying in a hospital bed and she smiles her beautiful smile. They pet her hair and touch her hands. She smiles her smile and opens her eyes, black black with a pupil gone wide open. Her head turns from side to side and she breathes, and they hold hands and breathe with her. Outside a bird dips and rises tracing a spike like the one that glows and vanishes on her bedside monitor. Martha opens the Bible at random and begins to read.

4. And

ampersand
(c) 2005 R&K Now - Beautiful Dreamers

9."...vegetable love doth grow/ vaster than empires and more slow."
But Marvell

2. See Sea Saw

4.
I need to be helped to my room. This is one of the things I am not used to yet, may not have time to get used to. A nice young man...I hear my grandmother's voice saying that, I am not ready to be her...a man who is handsome as the hour before sunset, who is dressed nicely enough to make me smile moves efficiently and with dignity to move my burdens into my room. I hand him a tip big enough that his wife will be happy, not big enough to get his daughter back into school. He opens the slats, lifts my suitcase onto the luggage stand, asks me how I like my air conditioning and turns the vent to blow on the foot of the bed.

They have renovated the hotel since I was here last, before the hurricane that took off the roof. Tommy and I toasted breadfruit slices in the gas burner and ate it with brie. I'll bet the only other person on earth eating this breakfast today is Marlon Brando, I said.

Maybe I shouldn't have come alone. I sit on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

silver raft
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers
5.
I can see through the slats to the man in uniform with a holstered gun standing at the guard stand by the gate. Before the hurricane the Jennifer Court wasn't grand enough for the guard to carry a gun, and the uniform worn by the gatekeeper, who mostly kept the kids with ganja from coming in the front way, was defined by being khaki, not by starch and epaullettes. I can see the dusty street outside and raggedy kids kicking a ball in a field a block away. Well, I can't tell, maybe not raggedy. At this distance they may all be in school uniforms with new Nikes for all I can tell. I can see the retreating back of a white habit, the telltale blue stripe of a Terry enough for me to imagine the photo of the saintly Mother T around her neck. Brown, that was the guard's name. I wonder if it is still Brown.

My eyes follow the boys, the sister, Brown, and forget to tear up. It is like fixing on the horizon to beat back seasickness. The room smells like burning, I think, before I realize it is an aura and I lie back and brace for the seizure.

dapple
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers
6.
The nice young man knows Brown. Brown went back north and has a business with roots and teas. He'll tell him I am coming and Brown will visit me. No visitors I say. Don't worry, the nice young man says. Brown will come see you. He has returned while I was riding my fizzy silver magic surfboard and apparently took off my shoes and put my glasses on a table and generally loosened what was tight and tightened what was loose and placed me on a safe liferaft in the middle of the black sea. I know it is a black sea because of the waves that are less than black, they are black holes and when I look at them all the light in my eyes is trapped and spins dizzily down. They push at my fizzy dizzy busy silver patch of safety. The nice young man is holding my hand. His fingers feels warm and tough. So kind. So I come back again and we talk about Brown again.

7.
She was talking about Carmen, Alexander the niceyoungman tells Carroll the guardwiththegun. Remember Carmen, Tianna's sister who had to go home after Hurricane Farnum? She says Carmen always left mangos in her room for her. She thought it might be mango season but I told her it was too soon. Soon come I said. Soon come too gone, she said.

3. Over All

see sea saw
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

7.
Vivian cleans the outer room where they keep people who faint while waiting to visit the Pope. The dead-not-dead Pope. It is a holyplace, but they still come in with all that shit on their feet, pigeon dirt, old gum, they drop wrappers and leave newspapers. She finds things you would expect and things you wouldn't expect. Earrings. Lots of women come in and they put on the veil, take off the veil, earrings come off. Gloves in the winter, hats umbrellas, all the things you would find in a train station. Rosaries of course. Plastic throwaway ones that glow in the dark, beautiful ones bought as if jewels to tell prayers raised their honor. Old ones with beads smoothed and a little gummy from being used. Books, and not just holy ones. Sometimes she wonders if they bring them on purpose to tempt her. Romance novels, magazines with the silly skinny clothes only a young girl would try to wear. Science books. Comics that the children read and leave. People come here after they have been shopping and they set down bags and forget them. Mostly tourist things, they give them to the old Jewess on the steps who sells them again. But once she found a beautiful soft blue sweater, as light as sea foam and the same color. Father Betran said, never mind dear, and winked at her and she took it home. It was the first time she had taken anything for herself.


urns
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

8.
The Pope's chamber is cleaned by members of the Pope's own order, they work quickly and efficiently in teams of three, dusting, sweeping, then scrubbing the walls and the floor. They put lemon oil on the door and lavendar and rosemary oil on the rail around the bier. They rub a myrrh paste where the glass lid seals into a cradle of purple heartwood and ebony.

Later Bertran comes in to see him. To see Him? He talks to him when he comes in, Hello dear Father. How is Your Holiness tonight? The light by the platform reflects up from lamps underneath the glass-bricked panel behind the rail where the pilgrims kneel, and the body glows like snow in starlight. They keep light away, it would damage that skin.

The bier is very cold. Instead of air, under the glass, oxygen has been replaced with a gas that is gentler on his cells. The final Pontiff breathes once or twice an hour. If breath is the right word. There is very little metabolic activity but chemicals still exchange into the torpid fluid that runs through him, through the cleansing machines below him, in the chilling chambers.

Bertran polishes the glass. He is the only one allowed to do that this year. There would be arrangements if he couldn't, of course. It is normal that for everything there should be more than one. Except of course the Pope. But for this he is like a part of the Pope, his agent active on the outside. Like a body, tending the flesh so the spirit has a place to call home. We are all part of His body, Bertran says aloud in the inhabited chamber.


breathe
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers