“What’s in the cabinet?” I ask. I’m supposed to be helping with arts and crafts, but I don’t think Willa cares about beads right now. She’s watching me. Or will be.
“Honey, are you okay?” Willa asks me in return, instead of answering my question. Then she mumbles something else I don’t understand.
I swear the air is buzzing so much it’s got a smell, like electricity. It’s got that “oh shit” scary flavor, the one that sits in that place between the back of the tongue and the underside of where your nose smells things when there’s a big storm moving in. The kind that makes so much lightning the dark sheets of rain shimmer like you’re inside a glow tube.
That flavor that says you’re inside of something dangerous.
Willa drapes her old lady dancer hand over mine. I feel her touches, or will. Or maybe this is another repeated pushpin in my life—Willa comforting me. Making me feel special.
“Would you like something to drink? Water or orange juice?” She’s fiddling with the polymer clay, forming exquisite little round balls so fast I wonder if she’s that talented or if I’m not following because my brain’s screaming that I need to crawl into a bathtub and pull a mattress over my head.
“Willa, I gotta go.” The electrical taste is so strong now I’m gagging and I know I’m gagging right now, sitting on Willa’s folding chair in front of her card table, in her magically huge and bright room.
It hadn’t really dawned on me just how big it is. Lots of rooms overlap for me—where I am, where I was, where I might go all make a “room” so I stopped paying attention a long time ago. Can’t tell them apart unless I lick the walls, which I’ve tried. But paint is paint is paint.
Distance, spread, even steps to a goal, all wash out unless I make an effort to anchor, but mostly I don’t bother. It’s not worth the time.
I knock the card table when I stand up and it jerks away from me, its legs scratching along the room’s old people warehouse carpeting. Loud, halting ping-bongs resonate up through its hollow legs and into the fiberboard top. It’s like the table’s a speaker or something, and its tightly stapled vinyl cover only makes vibrations moving through it louder.
I can’t tell if I see this change. The table did change—I heard it. I smell the faint dusty plastic smell of disturbed industrial carpeting and I swish the air around on my tongue desperate to lock onto some sense of time, hoping I’ll taste something.
But no. The table stays the same—timelessly positioned just so in Willa’s remarkable room.
“Will you come back?” Willa asks. Not when will you come back, but if.
I stare at her. I can’t help myself. She’s old yet she’s a dancer. She’s rich yet she’s here. She asks questions and she’s Willa and I know, without a doubt, that she’s got a marble somewhere inside her body. Because she swallowed it.
Something tasteless and timeless like glass is sitting somewhere inside her. Me, I must be shattering. My disability finally got the best of me. My brain’s had enough of floating through my life devoid of context and decided to snap which is why I’m smelling the electrical stench. It has nothing to do with the open cabinet and everything to do with me. My head’s making enough ozone to choke everyone in the nursing home.
My gaze moves from Willa to the indistinct buzzing behind the metal door. It’s black like it’s always been black, and always will be. Like it was black before someone rolled it out between two massive drums and flattened it into sheet metal. Like when the Earth is done and the sun’s most of the sky, it’ll be right where it is, just as black and just as scary.
The space behind the cabinet door is too big, just like the room is too cavernous. Not that I see anything other than darkness and shadow, but somehow I know. Black means void and void means big.
I suddenly wonder what big tastes like. Maybe it would taste better than the ozone my overheating, shattering psyche is making.
I don’t answer Willa. Coming back, not coming back, I feel as if leaving the question alone, as it hangs like a thing of its own in the air between us, is the best course of action. It’s not really a question of right now, anyway. It’s a fulcrum between past and future.
I move my legs and shuffle my feet across the carpet toward the door. It’s a well-worn path, one made by more people than I can count, and I only add a little to it. Here, the carpet doesn’t have that faint, dusty plastic smell.
The way out of Willa’s giant room, the many steps passing through strips of light from the overheads and lines of shadow from corners and doors, kicks up decade upon decade upon decade. If I dropped to my knees and felt the tattered ends of the fibers under my fingertips, I’d know what all those decades were. I’d lick my fingers and I’d taste it all: Willa’s fresh oranges. The carpet installer’s level, salty boredom. Dry bits of wars fought in far off lands and then tracked onto this very floor like hot spices. Small hints of alcohol, the cheap kind, the stuff that tastes like paint thinner.
This is why I don’t look at people. I can’t handle the ghosts.
I’m out of the room before Willa can ask me another question.
***
Outside Willa’s room, in the glaring rainbow harshness of the nursing home’s pulsing fluorescents, I move too fast down the concourse-wide corridor. I keep thinking about kindergarten and large rooms full of people and always being told “No running in the halls!” and feeling like a child again.
Because I know being a child was in my past. Otherwise I’d be so confused I’d lap myself, looking over my shoulder as I ran by the “normal,” confused me.
Even with my disability, my life has a certain stability to it. Expectations are met: my car starts. I come to work. Rhonda sends me on the same curving path through the home and I end up making beads with Willa. I go home. When it happens, I don’t know. But it does. And I rely on my expectations to fake like I know what time it is.
I don’t taste juice boxes or the astringent grossness of non-toxic glue like I would if I really was in kindergarten, so I know I’m in the nursing home. “No running in the halls!” is just a general expectation of the world and one I’d better adhere to, no matter where I am, here, in the parking lot under the flat not-gray grayness of the sky, in the hallway of my apartment complex. It seems like a smart expectation, one that could save a person from a nasty tumble.
The thing is, old people are fragile. They know it. I know it. We all understand not to body-slam an old person because when they hit the wall, a hip’s going to crack. So when I knocked into one of the residents, I knew what I did. I heard him bounce off the wall, making a huff sound as if I’d stuck a tube down his throat and vacuumed out his air. Things clanged—his walker, or maybe a cane. He uses, or will use, both. I can’t tell what he has now.
He’d been strong, too, most of his life. Not a big guy, but quick and agile and athletic. He’d surprised more than one big burly opponent with a right hook capable of real damage. He’s got decades of engine oil and sweat carved out of what for everyone else was burning plastic and the toxic dust from copy machines.
There are other ghosts around him, too. Lovers, several, none regretted and all missed. Angry grandchildren with smartphones who ignore him when they visit. Hints of Europe. I suspect I’d taste sunshine and the Mediterranean if I licked him.
But all that’s gone. It’s vanished away into time and I don’t know how or why.
I’m not sure if I should help him off the floor. The air tastes acidic, like panic, and I don’t know if it’s him or an aftertaste of the electrical fire in my head.
He’s swearing and I don’t know if it’s at me or at his hip. All I can do is run away down the corridor, praying someone who can see what’s happening will help him.
***
Rhonda’s asking about Willa but all I can think about is the electrical fire in my head. She wants to know what was so terrifying I felt I needed to run down the hallway and smash into poor Mr. Samuelson. Who’s alright, or might be alright in a couple of days.
Or was alright before I knocked him into the wall. I don’t know. If I’d tasted his sweat before I ran off, I probably would know. Or at least have some context.
Rhonda’s desk is as round as her, round like a snow globe full of the haze generated by a permanently shaken state. Now there’s a fun metaphor for my life: Shit changes, but I don’t, stuck as I am inside my little disability unable to see out. Or get out.
I must have snorted because Rhonda’s even less happy than she was earlier. I hear it in her voice even if I can’t read it on her face. I’m half tempted to crawl over her semi-circle desk and lick her nose.
We haven’t really done this before, the stern disappointment. It’s new. Maybe I should lick her nose.
I hear tapping—she’s banging the tip of her pen against the arm of her office chair, a distinctly sharp sound, clear and precise as if it’s resonating the perfect amount inside the tubes and joints of her seat’s metal frame. Not round at all.
And different.
I smell electrical fire again, a stink as sharp as Rhonda’s tapping. I almost think she smells it too, but it’s bad enough I think any sane person would speak up, which she doesn’t. I pinch the bridge of my nose and clamp my eyes shut, hoping it’ll go away.
“We’re worried about you.” Rhonda’s voice still sounds pissed.
I’m just a random volunteer. It’s not like the nursing home has to pay my medical bills or anything. I’d think she’d have more of a heart and not sound like she’s going to fire me.
Which she is. This moment’s a full-on iron spike into the bulletin board of my life.
I stand up before she can say it. I’m nodding and looking at the floor, more so I don’t have to taste her 80s stale potato chip in plastic life than because I’m acquiescing or anything pathetic like that. I’m a volunteer, damn it. I’m here because I want to be, not because I have to.
But I can tell by the way she’s sitting, and the smell of disappointment in the air, and her tapping and tapping, that I’ll never be welcomed back. My stint here in the nursing home’s done. No more volunteering, and I’d better not apply for any jobs.
I don’t hear anything else she says. Outside her office, the nursing home’s got the slow scurrying feel it always has—people move through the halls all the time, constantly, but they do it in slow motion. Their ghosts, too. The flavor of all the different decades gets to be too much and it flattens out everything else.
I drop my volunteer vest onto the visitor’s bench outside her door. It’s this reclaimed park bench some rich person dedicated so long ago I only get hints of its decade when I run my fingers over it before licking them clean. Rhonda had it brought inside sometime in the 00s. I think the nursing home was remodeled around then—there’s always been this ghost of a different décor hovering over everything. Plastic plants, brown paneled walls, orange vinyl chairs. I never paid much attention.
I’d always assumed it had happened and wasn’t a will happen. Who, in the present, would put orange vinyl on a chair?
The buttons on my vest clink when they hit the slats and the fabric slides off, making an odd ripping noise, as it slips through the gap between the back and the seat.
I just leave it. It’s vanished into the blackness behind the bench and I’m not sticking my arm in there. Too many ghosts around to take a nip at my fingers.
Willa’s going to be mad if I up and leave without saying good-bye. She’s at the card table when I walk into the room. It’s still skewed in its particular way, with its particular corner pointed at the door. She’s got her back to me, as usual, and she’s working.
Because she’s always working on those goddamned beads. Little round things, perfect spheres, which she shouldn’t be able to make with her fingers. But she does.
The day’s the same flat not-grayness it always is. It flows in through the glass wall that is her floor-to-ceiling window. Her monitor’s off, like always. The machinery in the cabinet is humming and ticking away behind the closed door.
I taste those oranges again, that refreshing and sweet wonder of a perfect and clean life. I see her sitting tall in her chair, her legs stretched to the side just so, because she’s a dancer, and that’s how star ballerinas sit. Or tutored movie stars.
Or maybe just Willa. Maybe her rich family found a way to get her this too big, too deep room with the window stretching too high into the sky. But I don’t think so. I think she carved this space out of this nursing home all by herself.
She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t look at me. I’m standing behind her, wondering what to say, and I smell the electrical fire again.
I’d better hurry it up. I don’t want to knock her to the floor, like I did poor Mr. Samuelson.
“Which color, darling?” she asks, still with her back to me. She must be pointing to globs of clay on the table in front of her. Globs I can’t see now, and never could.
The cabinet door had always been more solid, more real than her beads, all black and blank and buzzing, in its unchanging way.
Willa taps the table.
“What?” I ask. She wants an answer about the clay, probably the same answer she always wanted.
Her old lady hands look more dancer-like today. She moves with a grace I’d never seen from her when she turns her shoulders to look at me. The enormous room could hold a stage with Willa on it, twirling and twirling until the entire world gets dizzy. There’d be filigree and shimmering gold and silver and that middle pinkish champagne color. Maybe peacock feathers. Candles, too.
“We need to choose a base color. Which one, darling?” Her finger pokes into one glob on the table, then then other. We’re making beads again, the same way we always make beads. Little balls, always. And they always start with me choosing the color.
Our bead-making ritual dictates I do my best to give her a precise answer by getting the polymer in my mouth long enough to tell her what’s what, but today, I don’t care enough to try. It’ll wash out, I’m sure, and become as indistinct as everything else.
“You choose today, Willa.” All my attention’s on the cabinet. I walk to it, stopping equidistant between Willa and the buzzing machinery, like I’m standing on the center of a seesaw. One foot’s going up and the other down, but at least both sides weigh the same. I’m not being tossed one way or the other.
She’s twisted her head like a puppy listening, ears all cocked. On the other side of me, the cabinet pings, as if it, too, is listening.
It didn’t seem deep enough to be that black inside. The giant monitor hanging on the wall over it only stood out from the wall about six inches and the cabinet didn’t stick out into the room all that much more.
I am beginning to think servers wouldn’t fit inside, either.
“What’s in the cabinet, Willa?” I don’t move.
“My beading supplies, sweetheart. You know that.” She’s holding up a little sphere. The clay’s got a cast to it today, some little pinkish undertones. I don’t think it’s actually clay. I think it’s something different. Something new.
It looks transparent, in the flat non-gray of the afternoon light, like it’s reflecting something inside itself. Something swirling and rich and hidden.
I stare at Willa’s old lady dancer’s hands. She’s holding the damned sphere with her pinkie extended, as if she’s drinking tea.
“Sit down.” She waves the little ball and motions to my chair.
The cabinet’s humming now, louder than it should be. Louder and bigger, just like Willa’s window. Just like her cave of a room.
She’s watching me as I plop into a chair. I can’t tell if she’s peering at me, concerned, or if she’s squinting because there’s sun outside and I’m backlight. But her gaze follows me down and stops when I stop. “Do you know how many beads I make each day?” she asks, rolling out another.
I’d never thought about it. I assumed she did other things with her life when I wasn’t here. “A hundred?” Throwing out a guess seemed to be the polite thing to do.<
br />
She’s grinning. Even with her ghosts, I can see the big old smirk on her face. “A nice, round number.” A little chuckle mixes in with the machinery behind that black, dark, distracting door. “Round numbers are nice. They make people happy.”
There’s a pile of beads in the center of the table. A nicely ordered pile, in a beautiful swirling pattern much like the center of some vintage glass marble.
I know what the marbles taste like. They had only one purpose: toy. If I licked one, I’d get hints of a journey. There’d be the salt of tears and the sweet crystalline sugar of laughter. There’d be spinning for enjoyment.
Always movement. Willa’s pile of beads looks like spinning solidified. She’d arranged sphere after sphere of pinkish-yet-colorless material into only God knows what.
“I used to make the marbles from glass.” She looks forlorn, like she’d lost something dear to her. “Before that, resin I made from trees.” Holding up a bead again, she peered at it. “Each change of material and I’ve needed to work faster.” Then she dropped it onto the pile. “But each change made the material more…” She dropped another one. “…and more…” Another fell from her fingers. “…impersonal.”
Impersonal, like this damned nursing home. Impersonal, like Rhonda. “I got fired today, Willa.” I thought it best I tell her the truth about why I’d come to visit.
“I know.” She cocked her head like a puppy again as she peered at the pile of beads. “It happens.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I hadn’t been thinking about it. I’d tried not to think about it at all. This place was the board onto which my life played out in little notes about craft sessions in the sun room, or movie nights, or the next week’s menu. What I did was up on display, and the only reason I knew what I was doing was because I had Willa and this place to refer back to.
“It’s not going to be the same for me, either.” Her finger wagged between two globs of clay. “Your presence added a… texture. You transferred life to the marbles, darling, when you came to help. It’s a special skill. One only a few people hold.” She taps the table top. “Which color, darling?”
Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds Page 7