I’ve never seen so many hangers. Plastic triangles of pink and blue, white and tan, grey and pink. Or maybe they’re too dark for pink, would that be fuchsia or, better, mauve. Scattered within are a few strays, braided metal from a time foregone, bronze wrapped tight like curls of blonde as they bounce. In the sideways morning light. The cold sun before the bell that harkens school. There are clips on this one, for pants or ties or things. A thin sheath of cardboard coats the base of that one, peeling paper as it shreds. Why anyone might need so many hangers is too complex a puzzle for my saturated mind. So much is changing. So much has changed.
I am charged with the task of finding a pair of work pants for tomorrow, a collared shirt, some socks and shoes. It has been 380 days since I last was a doctor. And I’m hoping the clothes make the man.
It’s a question that has occupied my thoughts since my return. Sticky and opaque, like tar it has oozed between the gears, gummed up the machine. Who is this man that is me? For 20 years, it was the overworked doctor who found his enemy in time, whose ease in saying yes and nurturing wilted hope grew a burden too heavy to bear. And then came the break point. And after that, 380 glorious days. Of something else. Of somewhere else. Magic melts the life within a cocoon’s crystal walls. That man turned to jelly, bones, stethoscope, and all.
Memories within that time are like the burnt circles on my retina… the sun, once white hot, shrunk to tiny black dots.
The six garment bags feel heavy in my arms. Black plastic skin like the sheaths that cover bodies when they stop. I lay five of them on the ground, can only tackle one unpacking at a time. I unzip the tinny metal, cheap and catching, hollow echoes in this closet that is mine. The smell of mold fills the cavities of my skull. Shirts and pants and suits spill out like the sausage wrapped guts of a slain wide-eyed deer.
The zipper screams.
A final gasp.
It was a mistake to have broken the seal, the separation between the past and this now. That world sealed from this. The sterile from the contagion. The pain from the peace. All we dare to remember from the pain of its being gone. There’s no telling what lurks on the other side until it comes to be. That’s the problem. There is only the moving forward. Time’s hand pressing hard against one’s back.
Whose shirts are these? With button-up fronts and starched collars and crispy cuffs? Solids mixed with stripes, linens wrapped in polyesters, rayon kissing cotton? My fingers trace the woven threads with more patience than the fingers of the man before. There are four shades of black, three of blue, stripes and grids and patterns that try to make each day less the same. For 380 days I had no use for shirts like these. And here are 20 of them, with 5 garment bags to go. I pull them out, handfuls of 3 or 4 or 5 at a time. Each has its own hanger. I snap them on the wooden bar like tails of monkeys on their tree. But something simply wrong gnaws at my drifting thoughts. If all of these shirts have their own hangers, where did all the empty ones come from? The ones already on the bar? And what will hang on them? Or where will they go?
The second bag is the same, with more short sleeved varieties in the lot. The third bag has some sports coats and a suit. I haven’t worn those since a wedding 15 years back, and probably won’t again until my Mom dies, or maybe Dad first. Death. Life. Time. Like molasses from a tree. Too slow to see, it drips. A race we all sprint. A race no one wants to win. I chase the thought form my head, feeling more sad than I should. Not at life’s locked hands with death so much as the each bag’s shirts and suits with their pre-hung hangers.
It is a mindless occupation, pulling clothes from their bags, adjusting shoulders and collars as they hang, hooking curved plastic on its wooden bar. I brush out some wrinkles with my hands, try to organize them as I can. Long sleeves to the left. Short sleeves to the right. Sub-groups that move from formal to playful, like colors with their friends. Four versions of black are too much. And five variations of white? No man can need this many shirts. Not the man I was, nor the man I am.
I think back to the 380 days, the man that filled them, the memories like frosted glass. I remember my daughters with their backpacks, the elevator doors as they closed. I love you, I would say, through automatic metal and mirrored lights. I love you too, Daddy, I would hear, as pulleyed cables dropped them down. The days spent writing, alone in thoughts’ sea, the world as its gorn. A coffee with my wife. A bike ride along crumbling cliffs and crashing sea. The salt panting in my breath. The cows bells as they sing. And then time again, relevant only once per day exactly 15 minutes before school’s end. Waiting on the concrete porch, leaning against brick, the fog in my breath, my wool cap and black coat, the prying eyes all around, the Spanish stares, always curious, always sweet.
And then that feeling when my son emerged first. Through the double doors. His sideways glance. Or my older daughter as she hugged her friends. Or my youngest, with her Spanish goodbyes. One by one. The order always changed. From the foreign-tongued halls to their escape. Their transition between worlds. And the look in their eyes when they first notice me. That other me. That is here. That was there. The difference of my presence and its opposite, this thing that’s racing in. Their sunlit curls as they bounce. Their pig tails as they flop. Catholic school pleats. White pressed collars. Navy sweaters with necks like V’s. And that feeling, that knowing, that love that knows no words. The rushing in like a full sail’s wind, this filling of my heart. The stretch of faces as they smile. Eyes filled with the dusty glint of stars. I can still feel their little hands in mine, our swinging shoes as they swing. The walk home is my favorite memory, through the autumn leaves that scratch on concrete, through the stories that filled three days.
The fourth bag is only pants. Light and dark grey, every version of khaki, chocolate olive beige and white. Corduroy with wales set both wide and thin. This navy pair will do, polyester, I think, pleated with frayed threads at their heels. I breathe in with face close. A little mold, but not too much. I look at the clock. It’s 8:30, in blue neon squares. Jet lag compounds the gravity of Earth’s time, like lead sewn to the lids of my eyes, bags of sand within my limbs.
8 am will come slow. I will have been awake for 3 or 4 hours by then. My saturated thoughts spinning circles like a searching wind. The stairs on the tree house have turned to rot. The potholes in the driveway were filled with mulch instead of gravel, sponges of mud for the coming rains. The kitchen sink has been leaking for a year without the tenants’ noticing, the cabinets now black with mold and too swollen to slide open. 6 light bulbs are out. Dead gnats have turned their glass coverings opaque. The doorknobs are hanging on either side by too loose screws. The house needs a power wash. So many things in this life are screaming for the nurturing never felt, the love long gone.
But what will keep me awake will not be the things, the possessions who possess me right back. It is this transition, the worlds as they swap, fleeting time as it howls, this old life rushing in.
For life makes no exception to its rule of beginnings and their ends. And I fear that man I once was, the one I’d become, will soon be dead. Zipped up in black plastic. Sealed away. Left to rot.
But the moment of truth will come tomorrow. 8 am cuts that line. After. Before. What was and what is. What once was birth turned to death.
The new man that will be, more like the old than I’d hoped.
But at least now he’s got pants.