Albiorix, says the dirty chaplain. I could taste it from the doorway. Could have tasted it if there’d been just one. But hear me out now. On the night table stood a hundred vials. A thousand vials. Ten thousand. I was so flustered I lost all sense of the sequence. What came next, what I was supposed to say next to the

Hang on, says Randolph from Van Nuys. Let’s not get carried away with wild exaggeration. Albiorix? I had a legit prescription and even the pharmacy across the street from the hospital couldn’t fill it. The manufacturers shut off the tap. Even the pharmacy in the subbasement of the hospital couldn’t fill it.

Supplier in Malaysia, says the dirty chaplain. The hospice operator was Malaysian and had a connection. And anyway, you’ve been there, you know what it’s like. The vial, the scent of methane escaping from the vial. Cracks in the concrete, flames shooting up through the cracks. I was flustered. It was my first time solo. My mentor had signed me off. My first call. In the van I shut my eyes and slowed my pulse and walked through the sequence. I find it helpful to visualize an imaginary deathbed in a penthouse with one solemn and composed next of kin at the bedside. Spacious penthouse, curtains not drawn, sunshine, the next of kin awaiting me and music playing, “spiritual” music, something exquisitely pure, “a cleansing of all the static that surrounds us.” I visualized the composer’s spiritual advisor, a biography of the composer written by the composer’s spiritual advisor and how the spiritual advisor had become a selfless advocate for the composer while also fulfilling the duties of a high-ranking secretary in the World

Please let’s be mindful of the time, says Benjamin from Lake Balboa.

I’d been trained well, says the dirty chaplain. Flames, methane. I counted down from ten and then I looked away. As I counted, I tried to remember the sequence and what came next. I’d been trained so well that I succeeded in holding my gaze on the tongues of flame and the panicked letters scrambling across the labels of the vials and at the same time I managed to remember. Mortuary. The brochures. Yes, in the sequence, that came next. Have you chosen a mortuary? would be the next words out of my mouth once I reached ten. I formed the words. Have. You. Chosen. Seven, six, five. The plastic of the vials buckled and the plastic crackled, flames shot out in all directions, in all

Excuse me, says Stu from Panorama City, but I’m a bit confused, it’s not as if the deceased just keeled over, what about the days or weeks of waiting, nothing else to do but wait and prepare. It would put me off, if I were the next of kin. Asking about a choice. Of course I’ve made a choice.

Yes, you want the family to say Yes, says the dirty chaplain. Doesn’t put them off at all, just the opposite: it reassures them. They’re fragile and you’ve relieved them of their anxiety that they’ve forgotten some critical end-of-life must-do. You’ve thrown them a softball. They’re way ahead of you now, they chose a mortuary the day you

When my partner gave up the ghost, interjects Dean from North Hills, our spiritual counselor asked whether we’d phoned the mortuary, not whether we’d chosen a mortuary.

Your memory is blurred, says the dirty chaplain, you were dipping into your partner’s bedside vials and your memory is scrambled. Let me speak my piece. I reached the end of the count and tore my eyes away. The words were in my mouth. Have you chosen. I spoke the words. Lord. O Lord. Lord guide me through this ordeal. Lead me through the sequence. Ask the question, land on “mortuary.” Move forward in the sequence. Shift gaze from the family to the body. Now that

Wait, breaks in Dean from North Hills again, it’s only now that

The first authentic visual encounter with the body, says the dirty chaplain. An imperative in surviving day after day of counseling the newly bereaved: meet the body gently. Let moments pass. Because otherwise it damages you. Door after door opening onto body after body, harshly, with traumatizing immediacy. I visualize a stainless steel obelisk laid on its side. Only after I’ve put the family at ease do I

Exactly my strategy when I fill a prescription, says Ted from Sun Valley. Not a stainless steel obelisk, but the same idea. So that when I approach a counter week after week and there on the shelves are the traumatizing names of

Exactly the same, says the dirty chaplain. And there it is, the dominating object in the room, formerly a steel obelisk. And now the sequence proceeds as it should. A soft pause. Let each side, family, spiritual counselor, reflect for a moment, all take a deep breath, settle into a workflow. Now the counselor may confront the body. And I do, and there is no gentleness. All in disarray. The family hasn’t tidied up the bed, the linen, the pillows, the incontinence pads, the body itself. A cardigan. The deceased left this life wearing a light cotton cardigan and nothing else. The cardigan, disheveled, unbuttoned. Didn’t button up the cardigan, didn’t cover up the foot. The penis. The foot. Didn’t shut the eyes of the deceased and there it is, the dead man’s penis, exposed. Foot. Didn’t fix the pillows which are all askew and stained, didn’t think to grant the poor father or brother the

Chaplain, stop, says Nathan, from Sepulveda Basin originally, now in Beverly Crest. Speaking only for myself, I’m wondering if we really need to know every little detail? What is and isn’t exposed? We’ve all discussed the dangers of getting off track, the risk of losing sight of why we’re here. Can we skip past the private parts of the deceased?

I second that, says Mitchell from Valley Glen. If someone is owning up to backsliding, then fair enough, let’s be explicit, was it Paaliaq, was it Kiviuq.

Hear me out, says the dirty chaplain. Just hear me out. I was confused and distressed. At first I didn’t trust the evidence of my eyes. Penis. Foot. Foot. Penis. Albiorix. The flames, the buckling plastic. So much Albiorix escaping from the vials on the bedside table. So much Albiorix all at once, after I’d gone without for so long. It walloped me. I counted down again, keeping my eyes just below the decedent’s waist. The waist hem of the cardigan. Penis. Foot. I reached the end of the count. Nothing had changed. Nothing was changing. Protruding from the groin of the dead man in his deathbed was a foot. A penis. A foot. A body part in the shape of a foot in the part of the body where a penis belongs. A foot, a penis. A true foot, an organ that appeared to be a foot and nothing but a foot but was not at the end of a limb, not an extremity, but in the middle of the groin; at the center of the groin nothing that resembled a penis was to be seen, only a protruding foot. A foot in place of a penis, or a penis shaped like a foot. Exactly like a

Yes, but, when the Albiorix was flowing, Randolph from Van Nuys says, I had plenty of experience with Albiorix, flames through cracks, stench of methane, but distortion of perception, never. Sometimes I have Albiorix flashbacks. They throw me for a loop but doubting the evidence of my senses, never. Seeing things that aren’t there, never.

Exactly, the dirty chaplain says. Flashbacks. Not being walloped by the vapors of a new corpse while at the same time Albiorix molecules flood through your pores, gush into your lungs. My eyes traveled back up the leg of the dead man hoping that they would alight upon an ordinary penis. Nothing had changed. The dead man had normal bushy pubic hair. A foot protruded. Where a penis should have been, a foot stuck out, in and of itself a foot, anatomically a foot with all the usual foot parts, so it seemed. The foot joined the body just above the ball of the ankle. Yes, the ankle had a ball, plainly visible. Five toes, just what you’d expect. A nail on each toe. The nails trimmed in the proper manner of trimming the nails of the terminally ill, which is to say, with no curve, but rather straight across, in neat edges. The skin the skin of a normal penis. Not mottled like the extremities at the ends of the dead man’s legs. Not mottled and livid like the

Excuse me, says Phil from Northridge, but aren’t nails always supposed to be trimmed straight across? When I took my sixteen year old son for his first nail trimming, I remember distinctly the lecture he received on this very subject.

This monstrous appendage in the shape of a foot still glowed with life, the dirty chaplain says. Living tissue, the skin tone of the dead man’s skin when blood still circulated in the dead man’s veins. The entire groin region still maintained the vibrancy of life, of pulsing blood, warmth, human presence. My eyes were shut. Everything I’ve described is true but inaccurate. For this inaccuracy I blame the

Mandatory interruption, says Desmond from Valley Village. Can’t go there. Can’t say the word, can’t dance around the word, can’t be anywhere in the vicinity of the word. There are rules and where would we be if we relaxed the rules? Please go back and be mindful of the rules. Blame, blaming, I blame, he blames, you blame.

You’re absolutely right, says the dirty chaplain. Rewind. The entire groin region still maintained the vibrancy of life, human presence. But I wasn’t yet seeing the entire groin region. Everything I’ve described I took in with a sweeping glimpse, a fraction of a second of bafflement and shock, disbelief, appalled revulsion. But that was just a glimpse. A penis, no, a foot, no, a penis. Time went by before I oriented to the strangeness. The anomalousness. Eyes getting their bearings before genuinely seeing. Hear me out now. Something was off about the foot. The foot, considered as a foot, putting aside any consideration of its function or lack of function as a penis, what this strange foot did or didn’t do, was in itself odd, or to be more accurate, in an odd state. The detail that grabbed me first was the spacing of the toes. Five ordinary toes, a big toe, a little toes, the three others. Yes. A normal set of toes. Attached to the foot like any ordinary set of toes. These toes were

Correct me if I’m wrong, says Seth from Encino, but a detail already had grabbed you. The nails, how they were trimmed.

I was flummoxed, says the dirty chaplain. Rattled. I still am. Events fall out of order. I must have noticed the nails after I was unsettled by the spacing of the toes. There, I still am rattled. The word I’m looking for is splaying. Judging the foot with reference to an ordinary human foot, a non-penile foot, basic pedal extremity, the splaying of the toes, their unnatural and chilling angular deformation, went far beyond anything I’d seen in my experience as an observer of the gravely ill, of the newly passed away: a strangeness added to a strangeness, a bizarreness in the five small appendages at the end of the beyond-bizarre pubic appendage. I attempted to maintain a semblance of poise, to remember the sequence. The big toe angled sharply away from me, in the direction of the bedside table. The adjacent toe was misaligned in the same direction, plus, it hooked upward strikingly, a kind of vertical splaying restricted to that one toe. Next to it was a large gap, a division between it and the three smallest toes, an interval of nothingness in the shape of a slightly tilted V, the base of the V where the toes met the foot, the widening of empty space created by the extreme bending of the first of the next three toes in the direction opposite to the largest two. All three smaller toes angled together gruesomely in my direction. This group of three seemed to be straining to the utmost to pull themselves away, to depart the foot. And this straining exhibited itself in the foot itself, in the tendons of each of the three toes, the upward pressure of each tendon against the skin of the foot, starkly elevating each tendon along the whole length of the foot. The tendon of the little toe looked like it was about to burst through the skin. Like it had already begun to burst through and—Stop, said an interior voice. Stop this nonsense. You are a credentialed hospice spiritual counselor. You need to get back on track right now. The family is depending on you, this voice said. You can’t just stand there dumbfounded. Use your training. Put yourself in an appropriate space. A man has died and his bereft

At such times of crisis, says Thomas from Reseda, crisis not involving death needless to say, I go my mailbox with my mailbox key and I grasp the key and reflect upon how easily the lock opened, once I made the right decision. Not literally go to the mailbox, needless to say.

A question came next, a question in the sequence, says the dirty chaplain. You can’t just stand there forever not remembering the question, said the voice of my mentor. Yes, I get it, I answered, let’s all just act as if there isn’t a foot staring us in the face where a penis should be. I had to act. I stopped thinking. Bless my mentor and his commitment to not pulling punches. I let my training do the thinking, and there it was, the question, the next question in the sequence, an obvious next question, flowing logically from the question I’d asked about the choice of mortuary: a close logical connection, so obvious and close that my drawing a blank tells you how thrown off I was. I got the question out. The words formed. I raised my eyes to the family. Have you phoned the mortuary, I asked. Um, no. No, chaplain, said one of the next of kin, in a normal bereaved tone of voice, as if there were no foot, as if they were over there, the family, on the opposite side of the hospital bed, and between us lay an ordinary new corpse, father, patriarch, progenitor, with an ordinary exposed crotch. Well, um, no, said the next of kin politely. No, um, because, you see, we figured you would need to do the pronouncing before we took that step. My neck snapped back and I could hear the sharp inrush of my own surprise. Astonishment, really. Shameful embarrassment. A whole new level of vexed disbelief. Utter dismal sense of absurd dereliction of duty. Scandal and humiliation. I’d completely forgotten about the pronouncing. In the order of things, the pronouncing belongs before the questions about the mortuary. Of course it does. No point in bringing any mortuary into the picture until officially there is a dead body in the picture. What misery. Utter despair. What a black eye for the respectable hospice provider and their reputation in the community. Didn’t matter that I was on my first solo call. How do you forget to pronounce, Albiorix smashing you in the face or no Albiorix, a foot with ghastly splayed toes jutting out of a hairy crotch or no such foot? In all my training, my mentor hadn’t prepared me for—and why would he?—the shock of being corrected by a layperson. A fiasco of

Wait wait wait, says Jay, born and raised in Canoga Park. What you’re saying can’t be right. You, pronounce? That makes no sense at all. You’re the spiritual counselor. Your training isn’t in medicine. Where are the medical personnel? Isn’t there an on-call nurse? An EMT? If it were my relative, I wouldn’t want a spiritual counselor feeling around for a pulse. Not with all those supposedly dead bodies you read about where someone slipped up and missed a sign of life.

My elderly mother who died spent her last months at home in hospice care, chimes in Mitch, not Mitchell, Mitch who lives in the blurry boundary between Winnetka and Canoga Park. It took the on-call nurse three hours to arrive. You know, traffic.

My elderly father-in-law, says Geoff from Arieta, was a staunch atheist and went through hospice without once meeting with a spiritual counselor. At the end, the spiritual counselor happened to be in the neighborhood. He explained to us that any member of the hospice team legally and officially could handle all the legal and official business, including the pronouncing.

Pulling myself together, says the dirty chaplain, I addressed the next of kin. Keep it simple, I told myself. Be humble. Well, yes, you’re right, I said to the next of kin across the hospital bed, the pronouncing must take place first, then the call to the mortuary. But as I spoke these words I realized, with a sinking feeling, a shiver of dread, that I would have to say more. Before I placed my hands on the body of the dead man, I would need to reestablish my credibility. An explanation was due the next of kin. More than an explanation, an apology. In the middle of a fiasco I would need to find the poise to craft a convincing and competence-affirming

Chaplain, you’re about to run over, says Ethan from Chatsworth.

I took a good look at the dead man’s peaceful face, says the dirty chaplain, his neck upon which I would

If you didn’t miss every other week, says Jake from Mission Hills, you would know that the chaplain always runs over.

Is known for running over, says Maxwell from Sherman Oaks.

The family hadn’t shut his eyes, says the dirty chaplain. The dead man gazed off into the distance blankly and peacefully. An easy death, by all appearances. His brow was smooth, his untidy cardigan bespoke only the attentive distress of a family concerned with ministering to their dying loved one while not making a fuss about buttoning or unbuttoning. My eyes traveled down the open cardigan to the hideous protruding body part. I was thinking. Strategizing. Salvaging. I would glance just once more at the foot that jutted out where a penis belongs. Then I would raise my eyes again to the family and deliver my apology. In this way I would tacitly be referencing the presence of the anatomical enigma and its nightmarishly splayed toes, or quasi-toes, acknowledging discreetly that I had seen and was aware, had blundered, it was true, as regards the sequence, the pronouncing, but at the very least could be counted on for tact. If only my gaze hadn’t just taken in the tranquility above the neck. The expression of calm wonder and surrender on the dead man’s face, its features already at rest, minutes after death…after that glimpse of quietude, the foot, in contrast, smashed up at me turbulently, everything about it signaling the opposite of rest and a peaceful slipping away. It was as if the body had undergone the most violent of death throes and in the minutes after death the visible record of the throes had settled in the foot. Penis. A struggle, pooling after death at the juncture of the lower abdomen and inner thighs. The remainder of the body peaceful, the aberrant genitalia contorted, agonizingly not at rest. Those tendons straining as far as it was possible to strain without actually exploding through the skin. Those toes, splaying with such

Just for the record, says Ethan from Chatsworth, you’ve now officially run over.

It was as if, says the dirty chaplain, the rest of the body had let go and all of the muscles had gone slack, while in the anomalous penile body part, or pedal body part, the turmoil of the passage into death had gathered in the tendons and muscles in contorted disarray and the moment of death had locked the havoc into place so that it now was plainly visible, captured mid-turmoil. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned that the toes were reddish-brown rather than the pale flesh color of the exposed skin elsewhere. Perhaps not so long ago the dead man had taken daily walks around the block in a favorite pair of open toe sandals. Perhaps in the violence of the terminal struggle the last forceful pulse of blood had been diverted into the dire effort of the toes to splay, to separate. The toes drew the last of the dead man’s living blood into them. Whatever it was, the flushed skin added to the impression of a chaotic clenching and bunching of the musculature, down the foot, into the toes, the toes seeming to be vying to detach themselves each as far as possible in its own direction, each to go its own way, to flee the other toes and escape the writhing within the foot itself, the gruesomely arrested twisting and contracting and knotting from which it was so difficult to remove my eyes. The little toe strove with such extreme forcefulness that I swear to you my eyes saw it as a blur. It wanted off the foot and yanked at its long tendon in its own little death throe. At its base, its joining with the foot, the skin crinkled in lines of sharp relief from the unnatural angle of the toe as it pulled hard. Similar lines continued up the side of the foot. Penis. And on the other side of the foot, or penis, as much as I could see of the side farthest from me, a similar crinkling told of the big toe and its futile effort to flee in the opposite direction. The thick tendon of the big toe made a hump like a bicep. A flexed bicep with one narrow end running down into the big toe and the other disappearing into the dead man’s pubic hair, the tensed middle bulging prominently, casting a shadow across the center of the foot, not as deep or dramatic a shadow as that cast by the little toe’s starkly elevated tendon, but broader. My eyes traced these tendons—little toe, big toe—from the pubic hair along the length of the foot into the first joints of the wildly splayed toes. In this lengthwise continuity there was a semblance of order and logic or at least alignment, paths the eyes could grasp and follow to make sense of the disorder, a lengthwise set of guides. But the general impression was of forces crisscrossing and colliding in a tumult of confusion. The foot as a whole seemed to have been halted in the act of tearing itself apart. Even the long hump of the big toe’s tendon that so prominently crushed the skin outward from the inside, the taut white skin, could be seen, as my eyes examined it more closely, to be less a single continuous channeling of force down into the fleeing big toe than a confused crosshatching of forces shaping the bulge asymmetrically and in segments of contrary directions of contraction and torque. My eyes shuttled back and forth between the crest of the hump where it caught the light from the bedside table, forming a long lightened highlight, and the strip of even lighter skin where the reddened toes joined with the foot and the skin was stretched tight as the toes went all out not to be joined to the foot any longer. Possibly the color contrast at the boundary of the toes enhanced this effect of lightness. It occurred to me that in the mortuary the bodies were identified by tags and that some mortuary attendant would soon be in my place, their eyes held, as mine were, by the swaths of skin running this way and that, the unnerving surface expression of the internal pandemonium, contained just barely, so it seemed, within the skin. The foot gripped me and kept gripping until a different kind of swath swept across my field of vision, a kind of smeared blurring which again caused me to doubt the evidence of my senses and worry that the Albiorix fumes were distorting what I saw. Fumes, flames. Doubt or no doubt, I recognized that I must move onward through the sequence to avoid serious ugliness. Bless my mentor and his sarcastic chiding, all those bracing debriefings in the back of the van. Again my training took over and I managed with great effort to offset the foot’s pull by easing into instinct, muscle memory. The muscles of my eyes lifted me away from the foot. Now I felt my training impelling me forward. There on the other side of the hospital bed the family stood in their earliest bereavement, deprived of a body officially ready to be hauled off to the mortuary. First I needed to plead for forgiveness. Then move onward to the formality of laying my fingers on the dead man’s unremarkable neck. Then the family could tidy up the bed, the linen, the cardigan. But first apologize sincerely while maintaining eye contact with the family. In apologies we give of ourselves so as to renew the holy imperative of harmony and joy, says Saint Thomas Aquinas. Even in bereavement and the shock of loss we etc. All my rigorous training had prepared me for this moment, folding the family within my gaze, forming the words, improvising, maintaining eye contact. Yet as mightily as I tried, I could not keep my eyes off the the hundred thousand

 

 

 

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Fortunato Salazar, who lives in West Hollywood, did the translation of the Book of Job that’s the basis for the screenplay of the forthcoming HBO Max series, Book of Job. He also has stuff at The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, PEN America, VICE, Guernica, and elsewhere.