What Paulie Picked Up

Paulie sweated inside his black overcoat and wished he could strip off the nitrile gloves and wipe his hands on his trousers. Stovepipe trousers, they were. He was proud of his slim-hipped lean look in the stovepipes – totally aware of the neat crisp lines and arcs created by his long, long legs and the swing of the efficiently-cut and tailored overcoat, the untucked but tidy blazing white shirt and black bolo tie. He stepped into the building entry and stomped to shed the snow from his shiny black wellingtons. All this sartorial splendor was wasted on his partner James, waiting outside with the gurney. James was a pedestrian sort of dresser at the best of times. Today he looked like shit. Paulie was embarrassed.

Paulie punched in the apartment access code from instructions on the body removal authorization form and waited, sweating heavily in the hot flow of air from baseboard heaters. No one replied, but the door buzzed so Paulie grabbed it and pulled it open. He signaled to James to bring in the gurney. A helpful old soul on the inside, noticing the gurney, held the door open so Paulie could go back out to help James maneuver it. It was quite a large one. Quite clumsy. Somewhat heavy.

Paulie hoped their intended cargo wasn’t large or heavy – he was speck-seeing and woozy from an evening spent dancing and drinking and vomiting til the wee hours. He felt he’d had only one good lift in him this morning and he’d already used it up. He and James wrestled the gurney into the elevator, stared up at nothing until the door closed.

“You gonna make it?” James turned to give Paulie the once-over, finding nothing whatsoever to approve of.

“I’m good.” Paulie replied. He swiped his hair away from a damp brow, leaned against the back wall of the elevator.

“Don’t fuckin’ drop the body.” James snarled as the elevator came to a stop.

“Bite me.” Paulie hissed and shoved the gurney forward, running over James’s left foot. In Paulie’s defence, James had rather large feet in what might be considered unnecessarily cumbersome boots. They were hard to miss.

James grimaced and silently blessed his steel-toed boots. He tugged the gurney forward to unit 405, left side of the corridor, a long corridor that ended in a tall window and emergency doors to the left and the right, emergency lighting overhead, pull stations, fire extinguishers and all the emergency signage you could ever want. Exactly like hundreds of corridors all over the city. James hardly paid attention at all anymore. He’d been doing removals for fourteen years.

The door to unit 405 was open, and a slight, gnomish elderly man stood just within it.

“Come in,” he said, his voice but a whisper, a whiff of whiskey or mouthwash behind it. “She’s in the bedroom.”

“Come right in,” the elder-care head nurse called. “We’re ready in here.”

Paulie and James placed the gurney in position and waited while the nurse signed off on the removal. She stroked the deceased’s small soft cheek once, gently, and went into the living room to offer solace to the elderly man. He sat silently crying on the edge of the loveseat where he and his wife had sat, hip to hip, night after night, for the last ten years of their life together. Their bums had worn side-by-side depressions in the cushions. He would sit there until their daughters arrived from Barrie later that afternoon.

Back in the bedroom, Paulie and James prepared the gurney to receive the small body. They choreographed a proper lift then settled the remains into the bag. During the lift, however, something substantial fell from somewhere, bounced off the bed and onto the floor.

Both men ignored it until they had the remains properly secured, then Paulie squatted to see what had escaped from somewhere. It was a book that had slid on landing to rest just at the edge of the bed and underneath. But it was not just any book. It looked like a diary, of the sort that girls (who grew up to eventually be reviled as Baby Boomers) used to confide in and entrust their secret thoughts to. It was of soft pink leather, embossed with fairies. It looked like what it was: juvenile. Paulie wondered if the little lady had suffered dementia and had expressed her revisited youth within the book’s pages.

Before he straightened up, he slipped it into his overcoat pocket.

James had not missed a trick, of course. He was accustomed to Paulie’s sticky-fingeredness. And tolerated it, for the most part. He had a few loose rules-of-thumb: for instance, no jewelry, however valueless – any insignificant bauble might have inexplicable value to a survivor and cause an uproar if discovered missing. A book he could overlook. These sorts of finds kept Paulie coming in to work of a morning and James found it easier to overlook his foibles than to replace him.

By the time the elevator door closed behind them, Paulie was humming tunelessly to himself. He had a hand in his pocket, compulsively stroking the spine of the diary. Suddenly James couldn’t stand the sight of him.

“After we drop this one off, you can clock out.” James said. “I get paid for the whole day?” Paulie wanted to know. James would gladly have paid him for two just to be rid of him.

Later, Paulie caught a bus heading downtown. From the central terminal he caught the crosstown to the house he shared with friends out in Port Dalhousie. All the way home he thought about entertaining his roommates that evening with some of his homegrown pot and snippets from the diary. Pot first, of course. It would be hilarious!

In fact, he lit up as soon as he climbed down from the bus. Hilarity was always welcome and could not come soon enough. Janis, ‘The Ravishing Redhead’ as he referred to her, met him halfway up the block to his house and shared what was left of the doobie. She was his current favourite woman. Like him, she was tall and long-legged and spare. She worked at a call centre and fed feral cats with the proceeds.

At home, Paulie turned on the oven light and sat with Janis on kitchen chairs in front of the oven to watch deep crust pizza rise and bubble. They were too hungry to wait, of course. They swooned with pleasure over raw dough, tomato sauce and zero percent beer. When sated, they lit up another doobie and gathered the other denizens of the house for a reading.

“I’ll start”, Janis said and reached out for the diary. Janis didn’t know Paulie well enough yet to understand that he would be loathe to part with it, so soon after acquiring it. On the other hand, they hadn’t had sex and Paulie badly wanted to, so he handed it over.

“Should I start at the beginning? Or just pick a random spot?” Janis asked the room. The room, it seemed, couldn’t formulate a response, or at least, not a coherent one. “Well, hell!” she muttered. “It’s locked. Can anybody here pick a lock?”

After the diary had made two turns around the room and returned to Janis unopened, she pulled a folding knife out of her cargo pants pocket and sliced through the strap. Paulie cringed.

“I’m sorry, Paulie, but there was no other way to open it,” she said. She was prepared to launch a defensive verbal assault if he made a big deal out of it, but he just said, “You carry a knife?” “Yes,” she replied, “and a screwdriver in my other pocket.” She cocked an eyebrow and stared at him. “Are we good? Can I start now?”

“By all means,” Paulie blustered, as if he hadn’t experienced a moment of secret terror and regret just now. Janis smiled. She’d had that effect on men before. She kind of liked it.

She opened the diary in the approximate middle. On the left was a sketch, in coloured pencil and ink, of a young man. He was of middling height and slim, subtly muscular. His hair was honey-coloured and hung to his shoulders in waves. He was nude and his visible genitalia were rendered in exacting detail.

“Oho!” she chortled. “This ought to be good.” Her gaze went to the facing page and she began to read, but silently. She didn’t really want to read pornographic prose out loud to a roomful of people she barely knew. She read on and smiled softly. Her audience got restless. “Spit it out!” “Let Paulie read – it’s his book.” “C’mon, share!”

She looked up. “It begins, with” she said, “My Love” – that’s how it starts, ok? Listen.”

The room went silent.

“My love,” she began, “We were young together, and strong together and beautiful. We were one, entwined, and we groaned and cried and strove, our branches one tree. Oh, my love, weren’t our children a blessing and a gift to the world? Oh, my love.”

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s all for that page.” She turned the page. There was a sketch of an infant, as detailed as that of the nude. The beautifully rendered infant was in a tiny coffin.

“I can’t read this,” she said, and handed the diary to Paulie. “I don’t think this is the place, or the time. It’s too real, Paulie. Put it away.”

Paulie put the diary in his overcoat pocket, put the coat on and went out to sit on the front step and consume another doobie. Janis followed him out, pulling her anorak over her shoulders and sat down beside him. He offered her the weed but she declined.

“I’ll head home now. There’s probably a dozen cats at my back door howling for dinner. See you tomorrow at Cat’s Caboose? I think there’s a jazz band booked.” She stood, rested her hand on his shoulder.

“Ah, yeah. Sound’s good.” Paulie replied and gave her hand a small squeeze. He felt oddly grateful to her for reading what she had read and stopping when she did. She clattered down the steps and was off, loping fast with her head down. He loved watching her while she moved away from him. Nobody did that quite like her.

Later, when the only sounds in the house were soft snoring and nocturnal farting, Paulie padded to the front closet to retrieve the diary from his overcoat pocket. He propped himself up in his bed with pillows then turned on his bedside lamp and began at the beginning.

It was true that he couldn’t really remember the small person in the bed and then on his gurney. He hadn’t really paid attention, he never did. Even as he had lifted her his mind was elsewhere. Mostly he was thinking of himself - was his squat in proper form as he lifted? Was his overcoat dragging on the floor? And stealing random articles from the deathbed environment, well, he thought that made him special, a badass. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a badass, right? That had been his thinking, and it had served him well.

Now here he was, alone in his room, holding the work of a woman’s soul in his hand. What Janis had shared had skewered him and he was caught between wanting and dread.

It took a very long time to finish the diary because although it was beautiful and suffused with love it was also intense, it was intimate and it was searingly and brutally honest. It was hard to go forward sometimes. He just had to stop. In those pauses he thought or wondered and sometimes cried but always hated himself because he could not remember her face. He could not remember her face.

By the time the sun came up, he felt as tender and raw as a new-born babe. He had brushed past another human soul in the night and that soul had turned to his and revealed itself in all its flawed humanity.

In the end, he came to accept that when all was said and done, she was simply a woman who had lived fully. What set her apart, and set Paulie’s soul on its knowledge journey, was that she had left a description behind – her life in her words - for Paulie to steal.