The Genius of Little Things

by Larry Buhl

  Just then I experienced something like an emotional swarm, several feelings at once, buzzing around, like bees. I pushed them all down. That’s what I always did.

  I concentrated on what I would do next. I would punch in and do paperwork for Mrs. Platt. I would roll patients and clean their urine. I would make the place spotless for the state inspectors. Tasks. It always helped to think of tasks. Little duties and lists helped me put unidentifiable emotions back in the box where they could do no harm.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I hadn’t seen Rachel since my paranoid rant at school, just before the Pasadena trip. I hadn’t called, either. But I had sent a text message. It said, simply, I’m a dummkopf, sorry. She didn’t write back.

  I didn’t expect her to agree to date me, but at least I could put my jerkiness in context. She may not have known what dummkopf meant. That’s possibly why she didn’t respond. Or, more likely, she didn’t recognize the number, because I sent the message from a new, disposable phone after I gave my good one to Levi. She was probably trying to call me at the old number, and Levi was intercepting. Maybe he was talking with her. Maybe they were dating. Most likely, she was still ticked at me.

  During a break in my evening nursing class, I called Rachel. “Did you get my message?”

  “What?”

  “I’m a dummkopf. It means idiot. I didn’t mean to say what I did and I’m sorry.”

  “(static)”

  “If you are not still mad, I’d like to meet for coffee later. Or tea. Tea is better because I don’t drink coffee, except in the morning. But it’s up to you.”

  “(unintelligible) breaking up.”

  “How can we break up if we’re not officially dating?”

  “What?”

  “At least meet me for five minutes.”

  “I can’t (unintelligible) work until nine.”

  “You start work then or end work?”

  “(static) call me back!”

  “Do call you back, or don’t call you back?”

  There were three beeps, then nothing.

  My nursing class ended at 9:00. I called Rachel back at 9:01. “It’s Tyler. Sorry about the bad connection. It’s my new phone.”

  All I heard from her was, “(static) Starbucks (static) thirty.” The signal died before I could ask her which Starbucks. I called information and found the one closest to where she worked.

  Rachel was sitting in an oversized leather chair with her legs twisted into some kind of yoga posture. She was sucking on something with a straw. I was happy to see her, but my mood was dampened by the fact that the farking “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/It’s a Wonderful World” medley was playing, just like the every time I had ever been to Starbucks.

  “This must be the only song they play here.” I was off to a snippy start, and that was not my intent.

  “It’s by Israel something,” Rachel said. “I can’t pronounce his last name. He’s Hawaiian. He died a few years ago because he was really fat. Well I’m not sure that’s the reason. But he was large. Isn’t it great?”

  “Yeah, great,” I said, as chipper as I could pretend to be.

  I began to explain why I had been such a jerk. I told her that Caltech meant so much to me, and I had been worrying myself sick about it. I was about to mention the yellow jacket usage when she told me not to stress out.

  “Caltech would be stupid not to accept you. If they don’t, it’s their own loss.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. I liked her attitude.

  “About the photo,” she said. “You were partly right. Principal Nicks knew about the beer at the party before he saw the photo, but he confirmed it by looking at my picture. The editor, who will be forever named assface, turned over the beer photo without telling me. When I found this out I quit.”

  “You quit because of me?”

  “I quit because of the unprofessional cabal between the brownnose boys in the newsroom and the administration. But also because of you. So we’re fine?”

  “I am. Are you?”

  “Very.” She sat up and announced she had good news. She knew someone who knew someone at a popular blog that was interested in my sex and drugs speech. This sounded like bad news, but I let her go on. They also wanted to know why Principal Nicks considered me a troublemaker, which also sounded bad.

  “But listen, this part is good. They want me to write about the stall door issue as part of a larger piece about student activism. I’m not going to get paid, but it’s great exposure, and the Web is where all the innovative journalism is happening. But we can’t have any more massages until I finish the story.” On the word massages, she used finger quotes. I didn’t ask her why writing the story would preclude physical contact.

  She pulled out a manila envelope from her backpack and told me to open it. Inside were dozens of photos. The first twenty or so were from the party. In most cases, the subjects made faces at Rachel. One photo featured a guy with his hand in the air. He was smiling, almost vibrant. It took about ten seconds to realize I was the guy. “You can keep all of them. I have copies for my portfolio.”

  For the next few minutes we listened to some lugubrious and unidentifiable soft rock. Rachel closed her eyes. My body was in the sweet spot between wired and catatonic. We stayed there, half asleep, then fully asleep, until the barista kicked us out.

  Outside we stood between two SUVs in the strip mall parking lot, shielding our faces every few seconds from oncoming headlights. Rachel asked if I knew anyone who wanted to buy her camera. I told her not to sell it. She insisted she needed the money. “You probably don’t know what that’s like. My job at Luxor is keeping food on the table. Seriously.” She hadn’t shared much about her home situation up to that point. She used this time, under the unflattering greenish neon lights, to fill me in. Her mother used to work as a radiologist, but she had to go on disability when her fibromyalgia became too bad. Her parents divorced when she was two. Rachel wanted to study journalism at Columbia or Northwestern, but she didn’t see how she could move that far away when her mother needed so much help.

  “You know fibromyalgia is…” I was about to tell her it was possibly a psychosomatic disease. I was going to share the research I’d done. But she didn’t want to hear that. People don’t usually want to hear facts and statistics. Usually they just want you to empathize.

  “What?” she said.

  I finished my sentence. “Pretty painful, I’ve heard.”

  “Yeah. She’s had rotten luck.”

  “If you look after her, who looks after you?”

  She was stumped for a moment. As an explanation of where I was going with this, I told her I had looked after my BiMo because she was crazy, at least half of the time. I was beginning to understand that a mother shouldn’t need that much help from a kid.

  “We look after each other, my mom and me,” Rachel said. She declared that we were both lucky. “You and I don’t have everything handed to us, so we strive harder.” I recalled writing something like that on one version of an admissions essay. It sounded better the way she said it. I didn’t think I could ever be as positive as Rachel. It would have been much easier if I had looked after someone with a simple case of fibromyalgia, whether the disease was real or not. But I wasn’t envious, not really.

  Kel had no more yellow jackets. He recommended a combination of pharmaceuticals that would meet my need for optimal brain function and alertness, while maintaining a schedule of less than four hours of sleep a day—one Ritalin and two Sudafed tablets, three times a day, and one Sudafed at night with no Ritalin. I bought fifty Ritalin tablets from him at what I thought was a highly inflated price.

  It worked, for a few days. I experienced no twitching, no teeth grinding, no runs. I was focused and awake, not too stressed out, and able to think clearly most of the time.

  One night, I reconciled with Rachel just before my shift, I mistakenly took three Sudafed tablets with a tablet from an “herbal alertness formula” that I’d bought a
t an Asian health food store. It contained ginseng, which was supposed to produce more yang in the body. What it produced was a full-body freak-out.

  At work I was a fidgety mess. My arm was twitching so vigorously that it caused a glass of water to slip out of my hand. Even Courtney noticed my lack of coordination, and she rarely noticed anything.

  I looked for Kel in the courtyard. He was leaning against a Doric column with a pot pipe stuck in his face. I ran over to him and said something vague about needing to smooth out my rough edges.

  “If you want a hit, just say so.” He held the pipe in front of my face. I did not need to get high, but didn’t feel like explaining what I really meant. It took too much effort to put words in the right order and I had absolutely no patience. I snatched the pipe and inhaled deeply. He offered his thoughts on the matter of illegal substances, while I rolled on the ground in a coughing fit. “Easier to get pot nowadays than it is to get cold medication. Big pharma wants to hook you on that crap for life. But this stuff is… Hey. You okay, bro?”

  By the second break I was ravenous from the pot, still jumpy from the speed and frustrated at the lack of decent food in the staff refrigerator. Did nobody have leftovers from Thanksgiving to share?

  I was not in the best state in which to handle residents.

  Milagro Sanchez should have been easy to turn. She weighed eighty-two pounds and she was near catatonic from the Estazolam she was now being forced to take. When I turned her from her back to her left side, she continued rolling onto her stomach, as if her face and the pillow were magnetized. I didn’t want to hurt her—she bruised easily, and her skin was like crepe paper—so I stood back and analyzed how I could move her into proper position.

  Courtney, who was observing from the doorway—this was her idea of teamwork—snapped at me. “Sometime, tonight?”

  I asked Milagro whether she could breathe, forgetting that she was incapable of speech.

  “Let her go!” Courtney shouted.

  Milagro’s roommate, Edna, agreed and shouted a few swear words at me.

  I left Milagro half on her side, with her face in the pillow, in the pose of a giant S. I promised to come back and check on her. But I didn’t check on her. Mrs. Platt gave me new forms to fill out and there were new surfaces to bleach. When my Sudafed-ginseng speed bomb wore off, I crashed hard. I spent my last break asleep in the lounge with the TV on.

  Courtney’s demand to “get up” merged with the LIFT-AND-WORK command of the aerobics woman on TV. “Milagro Sanchez is dead, and now we have to fill out forms. There’s an inquiry and the inspectors are coming. Why do you always create more work for everyone?”

  For the next few minutes I tried to will myself awake and make sense of what Courtney said. I sat and watched the unitard-clad TV exercise woman kicking like a maniac as I focused on the key words. Milagro Sanchez is dead.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Because Colonial Gardens was in the middle of a state inspection, an investigation was opened in the suffocation death of Milagro Sanchez. The day after Milagro was found dead, Colonial Gardens went into safety overdrive. Effective immediately, all aides were required to do hourly checks on residents to ensure they had not rolled onto their stomachs, and that they were able to breathe without obstruction. One might have assumed this was already standard practice, but it wasn’t.

  Darla and Ruth engaged in frantic speculation. Darla thought someone from Milagro’s family snuck in and smothered her in the night. Ruth insisted that Milagro didn’t have family, which I suspected was true, and that there was no way anyone could break in the building, which was totally false.

  Courtney tried to dampen speculation with her unique brand of sourness. “People die here all the time, if you haven’t noticed.”

  All of this finger-pointing did nothing to help my all-over body ache and a feeling that my sinuses were trying to eject my eyeballs from my skull. I hadn’t taken any Sudafed tablets that day because I was out of them and didn’t have time to stop at a store. On my second break, I judged the situation to be serious.

  I found Kel in the B wing. I needed to ask him, again, for a new supply of yellow jackets, or perhaps something milder that would make me alert without the anger and anxiety. And it would need to work well with the Ritalin and be longer-lasting than the Sudafed. I didn’t ask him this with specificity. What came out of my mouth, as I held my hand to my forehead, was a Frankenstein-like groan.

  “My man, I need to keep it cool for a while. Can’t share anything with ya. They got investigators with flashlights up my ass.” He probably didn’t mean that in the literal sense.

  “Finals are coming up,” I said plaintively.

  “Cry me a river, dude.”

  He must have thought I truly would cry him a river, because he found me in the courtyard during my third break. He said he would work something out if I met him at his car at the end of our shift, in two days. Two days?

  Just before shower time, Mrs. Platt called me to her office. She told me she had read my incident report and she wanted to verify some things. She asked me to clarify whether I had turned Milagro alone.

  “I turned Milagro Sanchez. I was the last one to move her.”

  “You turned her on her side?”

  “Yes. I asked if she was all right, but she didn’t say anything.”

  “She never says anything.”

  “Right. When I received no verbal or non-verbal cue, Courtney assured me that Milagro would be fine.”

  “How did Courtney know this?”

  “I assumed… because she worked here longer… she had her ways… of knowing.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Platt said. “Seems to me you did everything you could. I’ve told Courtney she has to work with you as a team.” She adjusted her glasses and analyzed my face. I must have been grimacing from the headache, induced by the speed withdrawal. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. No. I’m sad. About Milagro.”

  “We’re all sad. But let’s hope this incident doesn’t shut us down.” She informed me that we would have to wait a week, at least, until inspectors completed their report.

  **

  December 8. A preliminary list of new rules Colonial Gardens should institute for better patient care and safety.

  1. Double the number of glucose checks.

  2. Nurses’ aides should make one round per hour instead of four rounds per shift.

  3. Sponge baths for residents who are too frail to walk to the shower room. They can be given on the first shift to save time and prevent injuries due to rushing.

  4. Nightly meetings of all nurses’ aides, after first rounds, to identify the most troubled patients that night. This information can be gleaned from notes from the second shift nurses’ aides.

  5. More extensive notes from second shift aides.

  **

  There was a new janitor on the third shift. I learned from Darla and Ruth that Kel had been fired and arrested for stealing meds. I almost asked them whether he left any “presents” for me. Then I panicked, thinking that he might have told the inspectors—or the cops—that he’d sold drugs to me. I already had a possible manslaughter charge looming. I didn’t need to add drug possession.

  That night, Mrs. Platt called me to her office. Her voice, always pitched comically high, was in the stratosphere. “Well, Tyler, I can say with certainty that the inspectors have been absolutely horrible to work with. At least one good thing came out of this mess. Your safety recommendations were excellent and some are going in the updated training manual.”

  My right leg bounced like a jackhammer. I crossed my legs, but that only made both legs pump.

  “The board ruled as I thought. Milagro’s death was due to negligence.”

  Okay. Another reference I cannot use. Now for the firing. I had been expecting to be fired ever since Milagro was found dead. I didn’t assume my safety recommendations would act like an extra credit assignment at school. Keeping residents alive was the ma
in job, and I had failed.

  “So you’re absolved.” It took a few moments for the information to sink in. I asked her what she meant by absolved, even though I knew the dictionary definition. “Courtney should have helped you turn Milagro. She’s being let go, just so you know.”

  My leg stopped hammering.

  “But there’s another issue. I’m afraid it’s quite embarrassing for us.”

  My leg started up again. I was going to be busted for drugs.

  “The inspectors went through the files to verify the identity of everyone working here. I’m afraid we didn’t vet some of our employees as well as we should have.”

  She meant me.

  “You’re seventeen. On your application you stated you were eighteen. Your photo I.D. was a fake. Someone should have noticed. We’re in a bit of hot water over this.”

  I was hoping that, just like being absolved of manslaughter, I would slip through this knot as well.

  “So they’re going to let you go. I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “Let me go means…?”

  “Fired. Not working here. As of tomorrow. I begged the administration to let you finish today’s shift. We’re seriously short-handed.”

  She took off her wire-rimmed glasses, folded them, and rubbed her eyes. She looked very tired. She shook her head and smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. “Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. Why’d you have to do it?”

  “I wanted the job.”

  “Yes. Of course.” She uttered a sigh/laugh.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No sorrier than I am.”

  I had nothing to say in my defense. But I did share one thing that had been bothering me. Right after Milagro Sanchez died, I hypothesized that she had tried to kill herself, that it was a self-suffocation. She had been caught with a cache of pills. It seemed plausible. I put that in my report. But the following night, a new resident had been put in Milagro’s old bed. Her name was Flora. The roommate, Edna Brown, was awake during my first round. I hadn’t made much small talk with her while Milagro was alive, mostly because every time I spoke louder than a whisper, she told me to shut up. When I asked Edna how she was getting along with her new roommate, she said Flora talked too much and she might just have to kill her, too. She said too.