Flat Line
By Kelly R. Samuels
You wonder why you dislike people who laugh at their own jokes. You always have, something you realized as a girl when you accompanied your parents on visits to various family members on Sunday afternoons and there was that one great-uncle who thought he was so funny. He sometimes slapped people on their backs after he told a joke, his mouth wide open, head thrown back. Is it because of him?
Or because you don’t tell jokes? You’re considered a serious young person. This after being thought of as a serious child. Teachers were always informing your parents at parent-teacher conferences of your solemnity. Jokes rarely made/make you laugh and you certainly can’t remember any to tell. They seem silly, like roller coasters, which you’ve never understood either. Why intentionally scare yourself? At least laughing is good for a person, but, still, you don’t laugh. And so people who tell jokes and then chuckle at them are people you don’t want to be around.
You were reminded of this on a recent flight. You were traveling back from a medical conference and there was a guy seated behind you who kept guffawing at his own comments. You caught a glimpse of him once the plane landed, once people were anxiously disembarking, yanking their bags down from the overhead bins, and he looked just like you thought he would: short with a paunch, curly gray hair, flushed skin. He was your father’s age, but nothing like your father. You briefly pondered if you would have loved your father as you do if he had been like that man. Who knows? Maybe you would have enjoyed a good joke. Alternate versions of yourself are difficult to comprehend. You as you are is what you know.
Perhaps you dislike these people because they appear to appreciate themselves a little too much. That great-uncle never checked to see if anyone else thought his joke was funny. In tossing back his head, he closed his eyes. Assumptions were made. Like those girls who never check themselves in shop windows. They stride past, certain they look good. Or those people who just call someone up and don’t consider for a moment what they’ll say, as if the words they choose will be the right ones. They never bother to rehearse, even in their heads. It’ll be fine, they think. I’ll be fine, they assume.
Maybe it’s a combination of things, but you’re pretty certain after thinking it over that it’s because of your outlook on life, which is serious. You’ve been to one or two comedy clubs, always with friends who wanted to go. You’ve watched a few famous standup comedians, shows people you knew or roomed with back in college would rent or stream online. You’ve seen how the best comics don’t laugh at their punch lines. They stand there, waiting to continue, as if they haven’t said anything funny at all. The best comics, in fact, may realize that what they do isn’t that important or honest, in the end. Maybe that’s why they commit suicide. They see what you have always seen: Life just isn’t that funny.
One would think, then, that you are prone to crying, that the sadness of life and art, which imitates life, would provoke tears from you. But that isn’t the case either. You haven’t lost anyone you really cared about yet, so the jury’s still out on that one, but books ending in death don’t make you cry. Even Where the Red Fern Grows, a classic your grandmother gave you when you were a girl, or The Fault in Our Stars, which you read for a class in high school— something having to do with loss—these didn’t do it. And you like dogs—not as much as cats— but you like them, and you can certainly appreciate a good-looking, good guy. But, nope. Not a tear. Nor movies. You’ve been the one walking out of the theater dry-eyed while everyone else was blowing their nose. Someone told you once to watch Love Story, some film from forever ago, but it did nothing but irritate you because of its heavy-handed music.
Death, after all, is expected. You saw this in your clinical rotations. Kids with cancer. Old people with their organs shutting down, one by one, like light switches being turned off. Your time working in a nursing home confirmed that death begins in the lower extremities, the mottling making its slow way up. You’ve been the one to insert the IV without your hands shaking, the one to feel the tumor—palpable upon examination—and not flinch. Wiping people’s asses gets you more down than their demise. This attitude, this coolness, as one of your instructors called it, has not always helped you in your chosen career path. You might have made a better surgeon.
Your mother wept at your family dog’s graveside, actually just a hole dug near the river you once lived by, where Candy, a black Cockapoo, was buried. Your mother had owned Candy forever. Had actually—you think—loved that dog more than she loved you. Nights you came asking to sit next to your mother were met with denial; Candy was already there. And what of those car trips when Candy whined to sit in your car seat and your mother acquiesced? Could that be child abuse of some sort? Headline reads: “Head-On Collision Kills Toddler. Mother and Dog Fine.” She wept, your mother did, her nose red, her voice hoarse. And you stood, fifteen years old, taciturn, reading her chosen verse from Matthew, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted…” And you thought that quite probably, based on Jesus’s words, there wasn’t going to be any comfort for you. Now you wonder how anyone could name their dog Candy, which calls to mind strippers.
You were friends in college with a Trekkie who knew of more fitting advice, in your opinion. Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order. You liked that guy more than he ever knew. He’d call and ask to walk along the lake or get a burger and you’d go, thinking he’d get the hint. But he didn’t. You see yourself in the bright lights of the fast food restaurant, listening to him talk of the latest paper he’s writing, assuring him he’ll get an A, there’s no need to worry, and then a year later, at a house party, watching him with another girl, his hand in the small of her back. It’d be nice if people could read minds.
What would they learn from reading yours?
There’s a picture of you, not more than two, crying in the barber’s chair, daisy in hand. You cannot recall how the flower got there, or why. Your father, of course. Something to distract you, stop the sobbing. He had taken you to the barber instead of a salon because he didn’t know any better. What difference did it make, really? Hair was hair. Where your mother was, no one knows.
There you are, crying, ocular proof of the only time you showed emotion other than mild irritation or occasional anger. But you can’t tap the memory. You can’t recall what it felt like. You can only assume you were scared or understood on some level that a barber shop was not the place to be getting your first haircut. Maybe the cape was too tight around your neck. Maybe the barber had nicked your neck with the scissors tip. Certainly, the haircut itself warrants some sentiment. It is the blunt cut of a young boy. It is nothing to laugh it.
You are a flat line. A blank screen. A hum.
You wonder how you could have cried then, worked up the courage to howl over a haircut. Such a little thing. Such big pain.
THE END
Author Bio: Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the poetry collection “All the Time in the World” (Kelsay Books) and three chapbooks: “To Marie Antoinette, From,” “Words Some of Us Rarely Use,” and “Zeena/Zenobia Speaks.” She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with poetry appearing in The Massachusetts Review, Sugar House Review and RHINO, and prose appearing at Midway Journal, Blood Tree Literature and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She lives in the Upper Midwest.