by Rachel Khong
Later, when I steeled a patient for her tracheotomy, and held a clubfooted baby for his tired mother, I thought about that heart, alone and spinning.
Today you were sitting in front of the computer. An actor’s face was tiled on the screen. Later, on the same computer, I saw the tabs you had open. Searches for electricity and Berlin and memory improvement.
An hour today, you spent shouting. You said we’d stolen money from you. You threw your pillows over the fence and into the Grovers’ pool. You broke the legs off of your dining table chair. You smashed almost all of our drinking glasses.
In a matter of days, Lung had said, it can go from being manageable to scary.
And after you’d frightened us all completely, you sat in the living room and quietly ate a banana you found in the piano bench. And after that, you wept.
You said you were sorry, after that. You said you wanted to help. You said you wanted to help us get ready, for when things would be worse.
We wrapped everything breakable. All of Mom’s favorite colored glasses we wrapped in newspaper and put away. We hid the knives. We picked out colorful plastic tumblers at the store.
Two sets of doorknobs was your idea. For the front and back doors, working doorknobs lower. There’s a knob in the regular position, one that doesn’t turn—you can’t actually turn the knob to get out of the house. The functional knob would be lower on the door, near our ankles.
Trying the knob located in the regular position, you’ll assume the door is broken, and this will deter you from leaving. When things get worse, that is.
Today we marked handles and the light switches with red nail polish.
Today we separated everyone’s dark and white clothes, as though for an enormous load of laundry. All the darks, we donated to the Goodwill.
It was on the forum where I had read: dark colors can appear threatening to the patient with dementia. Black clothing can cause anxiety. If you put a black rug on the floor, an individual in the disease’s later stages will be afraid to step over it, for fear that it is a hole.
Today you held your open hand out and I shook the pills into it, same as every day. Fish oil. Magnesium. Vitamins D and C and A. Gingko biloba.
“Hello, water,” you said, holding the glass against the moonlight and shaking the pills, like they were dice you were ready to roll, in your other hand. “Goodbye, vitamin.”
We bought nightlights, because darkness—lack of sunlight—causes confusion and disorientation. The increased agitation and anxiety is called sundowning. Lung recommended that we keep a light on at all times.
I tried using the nightlight in my room but quit: I couldn’t fall asleep.
Someone on the online forum also said: Imagine you are preparing the home for an inquisitive child. We looked at a childproofing list. We put away anything you could choke on. You described the process of childproofing the house for me: how I would stagger around like a small drunk person, making loud and confident proclamations.
Today, buying refills of vitamins, I bought two of each type, so from now on, I can take them with you.
Today we cooked dinner. We baked a “hummingbird cake” for dessert: pecan halves on the top. Various spices. Why hummingbird? You asked the question, but we didn’t bother to look it up, just because.
We’ve locked away the scissors and the knives in a drawer using one of those plastic childproof locks.
No more poisonous plants, in case you decide, down the line, to eat them. We got rid of everything inedible. We posted emergency numbers to the refrigerator: doctor, police, fire department, the Poison Control Center.
Today I applied for sonography certification. It’s a two-year program. When it’s through I can be a cardiac sonographer.
Today I found an almond with a slight curve and I didn’t eat it. I found another nut with a curve. I put the two anomalous nuts into a jar. Because, well, what can I do?
October
Today I looked glum, I guess, and you told me it was perfectly normal. “It’s called ‘the fall,’ my love,” you said.
Today we ate grapes from a mug and met a white dog that looked like David Bowie.
Today we watched something on PBS about the evolution that’s happening right now, right under our noses. Cliff swallows in Nebraska are evolving shorter wings so as not to be hit and killed by cars. Otter penis bones are shrinking because of pollutants in English and Welsh rivers. Earlier I’d stepped on a coffee cup lid and liked it, then thought, What if, someday, we evolve to like the crunch of coffee cup tops more than leaves? And the streets just stay filled with them?
Today we went for a run together, at the high school track. Though it makes no sense, you’re in better shape than me. You lapped me handily, pumping your fist as you did.
Today Theo came over with a six-pack of root beer and chicken taquitos and Monopoly. We spent four hours as a hat, boot, terrier, and thimble, which Theo wanted but let me have. You bought Boardwalk and Park Place, and Theo accumulated property after inexpensive property, while I languished in jail, seemingly forever. It was Linus who won, in his quiet, diligent way.
After he left you said, I’m senile but I’m not blind.
What? I said.
That wasn’t so bad, was it? you said.
Today at the store you stole a chicken, by mistake. What happened was we lost each other at the store, and after I had paid for our things, I found you outside, clutching this chicken like it belonged to you—like it was your motorcycle helmet. I knew immediately it was theft: you hadn’t brought your wallet with you.
What do we do? I said, panicked, and you shushed me, and we walked, briskly, to the car.
We should bring it back, I said, at home later.
Don’t be ridiculous, you said, and we put it into our Ronco rotisserie.
Today we went to the Boomers! that used to be a Family Fun Center, that used to be a Bullwinkle’s. We played skee ball. We ate a funnel cake. We shook hands with a man in a dirty moose costume. We sat in a photo booth and a few minutes later it spat out a strip of photos of us.
Today we went to the pumpkin patch—the same patch where, when I was seven, a pumpkin farmer reprimanded me for picking one up by its stem. That same farmer was there today; he still looked dour.
All the pumpkins were $4.99, regardless of their size.
You picked out a small pale white pumpkin and I chose one in regular orange, with the longest, most twisted stem. At home we carved the faces, and you told me mine was familiar. That makes no sense, I argued with you.
Later you rummaged in a shoe box until you found it: a photo of me, seven years old, grinning stupidly with a pumpkin I’d just carved. It was this pumpkin’s twin, with an identical face.
Today I found an avocado skin on the dish rack, like a drying dish.
Today I saw you and Mom in the living room, reading, sitting very close. My foot fell asleep, you said to her. You took her hand and placed it on your foot and asked Mom, Can you feel it, tingling?
November
Today a court summons came in the mail for me. I don’t know how they managed to find me. On Monday, I’m supposed to show up for jury duty.
“The word testify,” you said, “comes from testicles. Men used to swear by their balls.”
Today Mom told me that she ate apples during both pregnancies because she heard it’d keep Linus and me from having asthma. You’d shave the wax off them with a butter knife, was what she told us when we asked about it—because earlier we had watched you diligently shave the wax off a Pippin apple.
I’d picked my phone up without noticing who it was, and the voice asked how you were, and the voice belonged to Joel. Now we were having a conversation. I was in the grocery store. I was staring at a pink pyramid of foreign tomatoes.
I said you were good and he said, That’s good.
He said, Tell him I say hi. Tell your mom hi, too.
(Joel says hi. This is how I’m telling you.)
The next thing he sai
d was, I’m getting married.
Congratulations, I said, the way people do.
Kristin is actually pregnant, he admitted.
Congratulations! I said again, and asked how she was, and how far along.
It’s scary, he laughed. It’s exciting.
I had an idea of what was coming, what was inevitable: in no time at all I would feel bereft and intractable. Joel’s getting married, I could handle, but Joel’s making a new human with Kristin, for some reason, I couldn’t. Bonnie was on vacation, in Mexico, with her parents. I dialed Theo.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi there,” he said.
“What do you say to a night of heavy drinking?”
“What’s the occasion?” Theo asked.
“Oh,” I said. “No reason.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said. I could tell he was smiling. “But I accept.”
“On one condition,” he added.
“Anything,” I said.
“No getting sad-drunk,” he said, very seriously.
“I won’t,” I said, just as seriously.
We met at Nelly’s downtown, where you used to like to go, I know. While I stood by the bar, waiting for Theo, a man asked if I was Chelsea, and another man asked if I was Audrey.
“Why is that?” I asked, when Theo showed up.
“It’s a popular spot,” he explained, “for blind dates.”
This was because there weren’t many watering holes to choose from in town. Theo pointed out the regulars. There was a man who looked like Hemingway. Theo said he’s been there ever since the day he outlived his wife. Whenever he is here, he buys two drinks, one for her, which he intends not to drink. The first he drinks slowly, but in the end he can’t bear to let the second go to waste. He always drinks them both.
There was a man named Joseph, who spent years in prison, and in that time had managed to loosen and ultimately extricate one eye with a coffee stirrer. His left eye, because he’d heard about the heightened senses of the blind and wanted to better hear his heart, in case it ever stopped.
There was Leonard, who—after a few drinks—will stand on the bench outside throwing a cotton sheet into the air, trying to catch some old ghost.
“With a bedsheet?” I asked.
“You have a better idea?” Theo said.
What Leonard figures is that a ghost is something like wind, and the sheet will catch the shape.
“It’s not about catching, like a trap,” Theo explained. “More like capturing, like a photograph.”
Leonard sipped quietly at something that resembled a Shirley Temple, stood, and fed several quarters into the jukebox. His selection, it turned out, was “Blue Bayou.”
Somebody was telling his friend, in a conspiratorial way, “Listen, Louie. You’re never gonna see your name in lights unless you change your name to Exit!”
There was a couple who looked to be on a date, with numerous empty and uncollected glasses in front of them. The woman was fishing the lime out of the man’s drink, dropping it into the clear contents of her own cup. A way of flirting, I guess.
“You’re so pretty for no reason,” the man said, thoughtfully. He said it like he was proud to have arrived at that insight.
“Don’t get drunk,” Theo said all of a sudden, noticing me. He held my gaze. “Don’t get drunk, Ruth.”
And then to take my mind off what he knew it had troublingly rested on he started rattling off trivia.
He asked me did I know that, when you get a kidney transplant, they leave your original kidneys in your body? The third kidney goes in your pelvis.
He asked did I know that it rains diamonds on Jupiter? Did I know that Russia is bigger than Pluto?
And I asked did he know that Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, was blind in one eye from a champagne cork on his wedding night? And Theo said yes, for whatever reason he did happen to know that, and did I know that he was tangled up in patent infringement lawsuits with Ford and Chrysler, because after Kearns had tried to sell the technology to them, they installed his wipers anyway?
He won against Ford and Chrysler but lost against GM and Mercedes. His wife, Phyllis, whom he had married that champagne-cork night, ultimately left him because all the litigation got to be too taxing.
He explained that he had trouble sleeping through the night—he woke up in the middle of the night, almost every night. The trick was not forcing yourself to go back to sleep. The trick was to eat a bowl of cereal, go on the Internet, and read list after list of facts, until you’re lulled into something like sleep.
All of a sudden Joseph materialized in front of us.
“She’s Howard’s kid?” he said to Theo.
“I am,” I said.
“There’s a resemblance,” he said to me. “Tell your dad Joseph says hi.”
By the jukebox Leonard was repeating “I’m awed” or maybe “I’m odd,” over and over.
“I’m selfish,” I started to say. I stopped, realizing that saying so was, itself, pretty selfish. I hung my head.
I remembered the time Joel and I had met after work to have a couple of drinks at the bar down the street, and how we’d meant to stop by for only happy hour, and how we wound up playing pool until midnight—how, outside the bar, a man was standing with a cardboard sign that said: WAKE UP, YOU DRUNKARDS, AND WEEP. This was attributed to the Bible, Joel 1:5—how hilarious and how appropriate it had seemed then.
When I brought it up, months later, Joel said, “What are you talking about?” because he didn’t remember it—he’d forgotten it completely—and it was at that point I realized that I could remember something and he could remember something different and if we built up a store of separate memories, how would that work, and would it be okay? The answer, of course, in the end, was no.
“That’s not allowed,” Theo said. “Despair’s off-limits. That was the condition, remember?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do we do instead?”
“Instead,” he said, like he was really considering the question, “basketball.”
Another couple was outside the bar. “We had a time.” The man was agreeing to something or other the woman had said, a smoke in his hand. She seemed distraught. He’d taken a drag and blown, so they looked to be cocooned in smoke.
“But times end,” the man was saying. “Even the good ones. Especially the good ones. That’s what they do.”
Everybody everywhere, I think, is always talking about the same shitty thing.
We made our way to the park. Officially, it was closed. Unofficially, there wasn’t anybody around to enforce the rule. We stopped at the Shell station, on the way, and picked up a sixpack of those skinny cans of sugary black coffee. We played Horse first, then one-on-one. I knew he expected me to be terrible. Everyone does. I look like the sort of girl who throws like a girl. But I can play basketball because you taught me. I like to surprise people with that.
We played until the coffee ran out. We sat on a bench—just sat—and watched the sun light up the sky over the mountains. We sat close because we had no choice: the other half of the bench was covered in bird shit. He didn’t try anything and I didn’t try anything, and we only sat, without thoughts, tired and colder than we wanted to admit was comfortable. It was, I admit, nice. It felt like a stupid movie, and I knew I would waste all of the next day sleeping to make up for it, and all of a sudden I hated that word, waste; wished it didn’t exist; wished I’d been braver on so many long-gone occasions; wished things were not as they were.
Why don’t we get married? was how Joel had proposed.
“Why don’t we?” he liked to say. What a chickenshit way to say things.
“I don’t believe you,” I said to Theo.
“What?”
“About the kidneys,” I said.
I texted Grooms to see if it was true and even though it was who knows what time, she texted back, immediately, that it was.
“What else don�
��t I know?” I said, and Theo grinned.
The sun had come up fully by now, and he squinted—smiled.
We walked to his car. There were sweet gum leaves stuck to it—the dew had affixed them like glue. The leaves were beautiful, the color of Fanta. He opened the door and on the way home we listened to the soft-rock station, which was already playing Christmas songs. Theo sang along to “Little Drummer Boy.”
At home you were reading the newspaper and eating a pancake with your hands, dipping it into the syrup.
This week a poster showed up on our street, describing a missing cat as “muscular.” There was a bike handcuffed to the bike rack outside the post office. We watched a man throw a ball to his dog, who obediently fetched it. But the ball seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. When we came up close, we saw that the ball wasn’t a ball at all, but a hard, round dinner roll.
Dr. Lung, today, didn’t look happy or sad. He just looked.
There were pigeons wandering the parking lot of the medical center. They appeared lost, though of course they weren’t. They’re famously never lost. They’re the type of birds that carry messages. The likelier explanation was that they were hungry. The birds, roving the lot, looked hungry.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I drove us back to the In-N-Out we’d passed on the way. I ordered two strawberry shakes and a box of fries, and handed one of the shakes to you. We sat on the curb and fed fries to pigeons. We saw Dr. Lung make his way to his parked car. It was a compact Japanese car that looked recently washed. At first, I almost didn’t recognize him, because without the white coat he looked like anybody: someone’s goofy cousin.
“This is a nice day,” you said. I had been wondering if feeding the birds was jogging a memory for you. I had been preoccupied with wondering. There was a breeze and the breeze was carrying the smell of eucalyptus, and the day was cool but not too cool.
You repeated about how nice the day was, either because you really wanted me to know it or because you’d forgotten you already mentioned it, but all of a sudden, it didn’t matter what you remembered or didn’t, and the remembering—it occurred to me—was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the day was nice—was what it was.