Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  I examine Vince, whom I’ve privately nicknamed the Human Asparagus. He has a ’70s hairstyle, puffy and curly on top tapering into his neck, and a thin torso that widens out slightly through his hips. When he walks, he looks like a single shuffling stalk. His skin has a dark hue that suggests a lineage that is one-quarter Asian or southern European. He’s got a perpetual light cough that provides me mildly entertaining internal debate. I vacillate between thinking the cough stems from any number of disorders—from hay fever and postnasal drip to reactive airway disease—to instead thinking it’s kind of somatization: in other words, a deep-seated psychological tool used to communicate his sense of being put-upon and always under duress.

  “I’m kidding,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “About your dedication to cleaning under beds.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “It looks to me like you’re snooping around Lane’s room.”

  He turns his head, and I follow his gaze toward the edge of the bed, where he’d been kneeling. Nestled between the bed and the nightstand is a white space heater.

  “You need to cool down, Mr. Idle.”

  “You need to stop treating me like I’m something you found in a bedpan.”

  “No wonder Lane is agitated,” he says, then adds after a pause, “given the attitude of her visitor.”

  I let go of Grandma, and I step toward Vince.

  “Please go,” I say.

  He pulls his lips into a tight smile, then looks at Grandma.

  “Are you okay, Lane Idle?” he asks. It sounds genuine and tender.

  “Not too bad, Mr. Van Gogh.” She’s long since nicknamed him after the painter.

  Vince looks at me like he wants to say something. But he shakes his head and leaves.

  “That one would never cut off an ear,” Grandma says. “He likes to hear himself talk too much.”

  It’s a rare moment of lucidity. Maybe I’ll be able to get Grandma to tell me about the man in blue or about someone named Adrianna.

  I guide her to the bed, where she sits, mute, hands folded in her lap. I look around the antiseptic room. It’s tiny enough to make me wonder if society, through our boxy retirement rooms, is preparing our elderly for the comfort of a coffin.

  On the wall across from Grandma’s bed is a framed poster of a train from the 1950s winding through snow-capped German Alps. Grandma loved trains. She said that train travel made it feel like the world was standing still so that you could, for a few moments, catch up with it.

  On her dresser sit three small silver picture frames. One image shows me and my brother in matching overalls, taken when he was four and I was two. A second shows Grandma in her mid-fifties, wearing her karate gi, the ceremonial uniform. Grandma once confided in me that she disliked hitting things but she loved the focus the discipline gave her. And she said she liked the idea that karate taught her how to fall down with grace.

  A third photo shows Grandma Lane and Grandpa Irving on the deck of a cruise ship they’d taken in the early 1970s to Alaska. Grandpa wears his prototypical near-smile, a look that says: “I like this place well enough.” His hair is short, face round but lean and closely shaved. He looks like he could’ve been the extra in a movie about a gang of likeable toughs, but not the lead. I imagine that anti-war protestors at the time would’ve mistaken him for a Nixon man, when he was a left-leaning guy unperturbed by dissonance or different tastes but didn’t like to stand out himself.

  I look under her bed where Vince had been kneeling. I see nothing but floor and space heater, as advertised.

  On the nightstand is Grandma’s long-kept unabridged dictionary and a copy of Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. Something about the fairy tales stops me; the edge of a piece of paper sticks out from inside the front cover. I open the book and pull out the piece of white paper.

  “Nathaniel,” Grandma says.

  “Yes.”

  “You know the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie’?”

  She’s a big fan of grammar niceties, and likes to test me.

  “I won’t lie, I still have no idea. Or should I say: I won’t lay?”

  She seems to take a moment to digest my response, then smiles. I suspect it is a rote reaction, an if-then program triggered by my jocular tone she’s come to recognize.

  “Are you trying to distract me?” I ask.

  “I don’t understand.”

  I hold up the piece of lined notebook paper. “Would you mind if I look at this?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’ll just glance and if it seems too personal I’ll put it away.”

  On the paper, in Grandma’s jagged scrawl, she’s written: “I have three children.” But she’s crossed out “Three” and written “Two” next to it. Below that, she’s written: “We came from Eastern Europe? Western Europe?” She’s also penned: “Irving drove a blue Chevrolet.”

  My heart drops. The notes must be part of Grandma’s desperate attempt to hang on to her memories, to clarify her life.

  “You raised two great sons, Grandma. My dad and Uncle Stevie,” I say.

  “I know that.”

  “It’s no fun to get old. We all forget things. Anytime you have any questions about the old days, you should ask me. I’m right here.”

  I fold the piece of paper and put it in my pocket. “Grandma, can I ask you something?”

  No response.

  “Favorite grandmother, I have a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is something making you afraid?”

  “David hated to talk about his feelings. He hated to talk about anything, like Irving.” David is my father.

  I take her hand.

  “You mentioned a man in blue. Would you tell me about him?”

  “You are much more like me, and David is much more like Irving. Isn’t that strange?”

  I take a deep breath. How can I get her to remember? Grandma Lane has become by far my toughest interview.

  “Yesterday, in the park, you referred to a man you’d seen earlier. Am I making sense?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  These are complicated questions, even for someone who has fully functional gray matter.

  “Grandma, yesterday you joined me at an office for a meeting. We went to your dentist. Did you see a strange man there?”

  “This isn’t fun.”

  “Do you have a friend named Adrianna?”

  Grandma looks down.

  “Who is Adrianna?” I ask, pointedly.

  Her head jerks up and looks at me wide-eyed. She lets out a terrible wail.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here,” I lean in close. “It’s okay.”

  She is quiet again, and breathes deeply.

  “I love you, Grandma Lane.”

  “I love you,” she finally says. “I can trust you.”

  “Of course you can trust me.”

  “What?” she asks.

  “You can trust me. Always,” I say.

  Suddenly, she no longer looks afraid. She’s serious, like a college professor. “Adrianna can’t breathe,” she says. “They made it that way.”

  “Who did? Who made it so Adrianna can’t breathe?”

  Before she can answer, I hear a knock on the door, and it opens. In the entrance stand Vince and an obese guard. The guard has his hand on a wood baton cradled on his belt he certainly hasn’t had cause to use for a decade.

  “Vince, I already asked you to leave,” I say.

  “And now I’m asking you to leave.”

  “Get out.”

  “Under state law, I have the right to bar anyone from the premises who presents a disruption to a resident, even family.”

  The fat guard’s breathing is labored to the point of wheezing. He drums his fingers on the baton.

  Chapter 13

  “Thank you for your concern, Vince. Lane is doing okay,” I say, suppressing more confrontational urges. “She got a little frighten
ed.”

  “Nevertheless, I feel it would be best for you to go. She needs a calm environment, maybe a sedative. You seem to be exacerbating whatever is troubling her.”

  What pops into my mind is, No way that I’m leaving Grandma. I don’t like or trust Vince. I don’t understand the keen interest he’s suddenly taking in us. I’m also struck that I’ve no idea what are my legal rights.

  “Give me a few minutes to say goodbye to her,” I say, adding after a pause, “in private.”

  He looks at the guard and back at me.

  “We’ll wait outside. Five minutes.”

  They leave and shut the door.

  “Grandma, you said you trust me, right?” I whisper.

  “I have since you appeared on this earth and I started changing your diapers. And do you want to know something?”

  “What, Grandma?”

  “You were a big pooper. Explosive. Oh goodness you could go through diapers.”

  She smiles. I pat her hand, and smile back.

  Grandma has a semi-private bathroom. It connects through a locked doorway to the room of Victoria Xavier. She’s a guileless former romance novelist, five years Grandma’s junior, whose family lost most of her money in the dot-com bust. Over the last two years, she and Grandma have become good friends, sufficiently so that they have exchanged keys so that they can get into each other’s rooms late at night to chat.

  In Grandma’s nightstand I find the key to Victoria’s room.

  “Mr. Idle,” Vince says through the door.

  “I’m settling her down,” I declare. “A couple of more minutes.”

  I quietly walk to Grandma’s closet. I open it, loosing the smell of mothballs and cheap detergent. Inside, I find a wheelchair. I unfold it, roll it to the bed, and lower Grandma into it. From the closet, I pull out her knee-length wool jacket and drape it over her legs.

  I put my finger to my lips.

  “I’d like the thingy,” Grandma says. “Please.”

  I’m bewildered by this request. Again, I put my finger to my lips. “Please, Grandma.”

  She swivels her head around, looking for something. She pauses and I follow her gaze to the dresser. On it sits the phone Grandma uses to play video games.

  “Your thingy,” I whisper, handing her the phone. I stuff the charger into my pocket and grab my backpack.

  “Mr. Idle,” Vince says from beyond the door.

  “Just changing her shoes,” I say.

  Grandma cradles her video game as I wheel her into the bathroom. I put the key into the lock of the door to Victoria’s room; I turn the key. The door opens.

  Victoria sits in bed. She faces in our direction. She’s watching a soap opera on a flat-panel television that is a few feet to our left, volume up high. She looks surprised, then smiles widely.

  “Idles!” she exclaims. Thanks to her ongoing Botox treatments, her forehead remains relatively placid, despite her enthusiasm. She’s still handsome, long hair flowing over her shoulders scrubbed of gray and tinted brown. It’s mid-morning but she hasn’t changed from her flower-patterned nightgown.

  Grandma waves.

  I put my finger to my lips. “Shh. Please, Victoria. I’ll explain in a second.”

  “Are you okay?” she responds, just above a whisper. “Can you believe how much nonsense there is on television?”

  “May I ask a favor?”

  I hear the guard knock his baton loudly on Grandma’s door. Apparently, he and Vince didn’t hear Victoria’s initial outburst over the TV. I return to Grandma’s room, shout, “Just another minute. Please!”

  I return to Victoria, and close the bathroom door behind me.

  “What’s going on?” Victoria asks.

  Victoria’s royalties pay for a nicer room than Lane’s, and it has a sliding glass door that leads to a patio and the property’s lawn.

  “Can Grandma and I go out that way?” I ask, pointing at the patio door.

  “Sure, but . . .”

  I interrupt her. “When Vince comes in here, tell them that we left through the door to the hallway.”

  It is unlikely this gambit will work, or that Victoria will be able to pull it off.

  “Is Lane okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, pushing Grandma to the patio doors.

  I pull out a business card and hand it to Victoria. “Call my cell phone and I’ll explain.”

  “You’re scaring me, Nathaniel,” Victoria says.

  “If her other friends ask, just tell them I took Grandma to a family reunion. Vince is being nosy.”

  “Where are you taking her?”

  Then I hear the shouts—coming from Grandma’s room.

  “To a family reunion.”

  “Oh,” she says, then adds almost as an afterthought. “Speaking of family, I was just thinking about my first husband, Clinton. You should have seen him at our wedding. He wore a crisp blue suit. Pinstriped. Stop me if I’ve told you this story before.”

  “You haven’t and I’d love to hear it. How about next time I visit?” I say.

  I feel the cloak of Victoria’s loneliness as Grandma and I exit through the glass doors, and I slide them closed. I roll Lane through a gate on the patio and onto a cement path that winds through the gardens in back.

  Minutes later, I’ve piled her into the car. I push the wheelchair behind a small bush in the median of the parking lot.

  Twenty minutes later, we’re sitting outside a nondescript office building. Inside, is Grandma’s neurologist, Dr. Laramer.

  I don’t know if I’ve broken any law by absconding with Grandma. But it’s another question whether I’m defying common sense. I’ve been shot at twice in the last twenty-four hours, gotten a home visit from G.I. Chuck, and have a meeting in a few hours with someone who sent me a mysterious thumb drive warning me of danger.

  “Grandma Lane?”

  “Nathaniel.”

  “Let’s get inside that head of yours.”

  Dr. Laramer may prove a useful guide, even if getting his help entails provoking a few of my own demons.

  Chapter 14

  In Dr. Laramer’s office, a receptionist tells us the doctor has agreed to squeeze us in during his lunch hour. The receptionist has a hitch in his gaze that takes a second to identify as amblyopia, a subtle case of lazy eye that probably went undetected through his early childhood.

  I take a seat next to Grandma.

  “Lane, I wonder about the road not taken.”

  “I used to do that, Nathaniel.”

  “What?”

  “Brood about the past.”

  “You did?”

  “You should try forgetting. It can be better.”

  “How very lucid, Lane.” I smile at her.

  “If you say so.”

  “Can we talk about the man in blue?”

  “Live in the present, Nathaniel.”

  It’s a platitude. She’s gone again. I sigh.

  “My untaken road went through a utility closet on the third floor of San Francisco General Hospital,” I say to Grandma in a low voice.

  It was there I had spontaneous sex with Kristina Babcock, my bombshell medical-school mate.

  In my second year, we were rotating through the psych ward. Our attention was consumed with “the Acrobat.” That was the moniker of Frederica Calhoun, a schizophrenic who believed she was the reincarnation of a 16th-century French acrobat. We’d walk into Frederica’s room and find her standing in some impossible position, or balancing a toothbrush on her head.

  The question facing the attending physician was whether to force Frederica to take medications under court order. Weeks earlier, when off her medication, Frederica did a handstand on the ledge of an eighteen-story building, bringing a crowd and the fire brigade. But in our frequent conversations, she also was lucid, functional, thoughtful. She implored Kristina and me to argue for her freedom from meds that she said made her a “Gap-wearing, 21st-century automaton.”

  The attending physician didn’t spe
nd nearly as much time with Frederica. He recommended to a court she be forced to take medication.

  “Is there a halfway house, or some alternative living situation that would give her a chance to live drug free?” I asked the doctor during our consultation outside the Acrobat’s room.

  “She’s not capable,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “It seems like she deserves a shot to be herself,” I pushed back.

  “You do seem to really enjoy this rotation, Mr. Idle,” he responded. “I’m recommending you repeat it.”

  On the way out, Kristina grabbed my hand and pulled me into a utility closet. “You’re the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century romantic,” she said. “You always side with the freaks.”

  “I’m not cut out to play God or any other powerful administrator,” I said.

  For the next two months, we fell towards love—great conversation, laughter, the real stuff. Then I turned on her. One night, I came to Kristina’s apartment for our first weekend away—Santa Cruz, a Van Morrison concert, a cheap motel, sex near—and possibly on—the beach. Seemingly, uncomplicated fun. To me, a demarcation line I wouldn’t cross. In fact, I wouldn’t even cross into her house. I stood in her doorway and, without prompting, coldly poured out my resolve. I told her I didn’t love her and never would.

  It might not have been true. But Kristina was the embodiment of medical school, of a path towards a clear future. Rules, bureaucracy, checking off boxes and filling out paperwork, passion and patient care overwhelmed by monotony. A few months later, I broke up with my career, too.

  I’d lucked into a prestigious summer job at the forensic clinic at Stanford. The day I was supposed to report, I was on a sleeper train in Rumania, having spontaneously decided to spend the summer traveling instead. When I returned to school for my last year, I was student non grata.

  Meantime, Kristina started dating a studious and ambitious classmate named Pete Laramer. The pair were married by the time they graduated, and soon had three beautiful daughters.

  Then, a year ago, I was walking with Grandma in Golden Gate Park when I ran into Kristina, Pete—Dr. Laramer—and the family. We had an awkward interaction in which Grandma, who in retrospect may have been suffering the very early stages of dementia, referred to me as Irving. As we parted, Dr. Laramer gave me his card.