Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Death and the Ring

On my way to the gym, the transit police and ambulance service people were covering the body of a dead guy on a stretcher. I couldn't see who it was or if it was any of the homeless men who are typically around Back Bay Station.

In the locker room, when I pulled my shirt over my head, it snagged the stone on my ring and tore it out. I found the stone on the floor, placed it carefully in the locker thinking the jewelry store could easily pop the stone back into the setting.

Before leaving the gym, I put the ring back on my hand but had no safe place for the stone, so I decided to hold it between my fingers until I got back to my desk.

This was successful until I got to the Vanguard Medical building by Back Bay Station. My faced itched. I scratched it with the hand holding the stone. And pop! It snapped out from my fingers and I didn't see it drop.

I put down my gym bag, pulled back my hair and got down on my knees to start scouring the brick. It must have bounced into a crack.

The more I looked, the more it wasn't there. People walked by staring at me like I was a crazy person. Tears started to form. Now I'm crazy and crying, I told myself.
After 15 minutes of crawling on the brick mere feet from where someone died a half hour earlier, the tears were getting too heavy and I couldn't see through them. I gave up.

Back at my desk, feeling sorry for myself, I took the clothes out of my gym bag. The little blue stone plopped onto my desk. It hadn't fallen in the street, it had fallen into my bag.

3 comments:

Ben Monopoli said...

Was the dead guy the hobo who's always laying on the ground right there as if dead? You know the one I mean? Once when I was walking by I saw a passerby trying to rouse him -- "Buddy, buddy," he was saying, shaking the guy -- and I wanted to tell the good samaritan that the guy just always looked dead. Apparently today he fit the part!

Maggie said...

It was a guy about ten feet from the As-if-Dead Guy.

Since the transit police were all milling around, someone did try to wake As-if Dead Guy. He wasn't stirring.

Ben Monopoli said...

Haha! It's unbelievably ironic that a person would die in that spot and it wouldn't be the as-if-dead guy.

Like, if you told me you saw a dead guy somewhere in Boston without giving any more details than that, I would instantly think of the as-if-dead guy. And you would say, "No, actually it was someone three feet from that guy."

Amazing.