Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  Soothing string music emanates from an excellent sound system in the waiting room, where muted lighting softens the already gentle colors. On the pale blue walls pictures of sunny beaches devoid of swimmers hang beside photos of smiling celebrities or people who want to be taken for smiling celebrities offering handwritten tributes to “my favorite dentist.” Behind the desk in the registration area sits a receptionist with big hair who could easily pass for a starlet. The two trim, well-tanned women on leather and chrome chairs who are leafing through the glossy magazines look as though they’re anticipating a pleasant experience, say a gentle massage or a session of tanning. There’s a scent like incense vaguely wafting through the corridors and the entire enterprise is totally without the sense of dread and dinginess Ziggy remembers from Dr. Zemba’s parlor. Even in the spacious, carpeted rooms themselves where the instruments of the trade are presumably employed, the same soft music plays and the aqua dental chair looks more like a Barcalounger.

  “Nice place,” Ziggy tells his son. “And it sure looks like you’re doing well.” Charlie beams and Ziggy can’t help thinking of Roger W.

  As he gives Ziggy the keys to his car, Charlie turns serious for a moment. “You clear about how to get to Palmdale?” he asks.

  Ziggy nods.

  “Well,” Charlie mumbles, “tell Mr. Przybylski hi from me. That is, if you think it would do any good.”

  “You never can tell,” Ziggy says.

  In a couple of minutes he’s adjusting the seat and the mirrors in Charlie’s dark blue Buick Estate Wagon, a far less sporty machine than Gloria’s, but a big battleship of a car with plenty of horses to get it where it has to go. He’s pretty much memorized the directions to the nursing home, but he starts out carefully as he makes his way along the Glendale streets to I-5 North—the last thing he wants is to get on the freeway headed in the wrong direction. The signs are clear, though, and soon he’s on the ramp, merging with the traffic, and within seconds he’s part of the rushing current on this wide bright concrete river. It’s a beauty of a road. Out here, he’s very much aware of the physical features of the land, the mountains on each side that wall off the valley through which he’s traveling. He can’t let himself get caught up in the scenery, though: remembering Ted’s caution about how easy it is to lose oneself on the complex tangle of roads, he keeps alert, his eye out for the exit that he expects to come to in about fifteen miles for 14 North, which will actually take him northeast.

  To his satisfaction, he manages the maneuver without a hitch. That was the hard part, as far as he was concerned, and now he can breathe more easily. He can see clearly that he’s leaving one valley, as Gloria has told him, the populous San Fernando Valley, and passing through the San Gabriel Mountains into Antelope Valley. It’s different here: the thickly clumped houses of LA are behind him and there are more open spaces. For a few moments he’s even driving by a field of brilliant poppies, but soon the landscape takes on the features of the desert. “While you’re in the vicinity you really should see the Vasquez Rocks,” Gloria said. “They’re like something from another planet, shapes sticking out of the earth, tilted at weird angles—it’s almost as if some other race buried them there. In fact, that place has been used as the setting for science fiction movies and TV shows.” When she told him that, Ziggy couldn’t help remembering the Cadillacs planted in the earth in Texas. Give Gloria her due, she made those rocks sound like something he’d like to see, but he isn’t going that far today. Still, it’s strange enough-looking out here, without all the color of LA and perceptibly hotter once he’s come down out of the mountains. It looks like the desert he passed through on the bus, with cacti and Joshua trees, a little scary, in fact. He can’t help wondering why Eddie would put his father this far away from where he lives. He’d guess that the son doesn’t visit the old man very much. Jesus, he thinks, what a fate: to be turned into a vegetable and stuck out in the desert far away from anyone you know. Maybe that’s what hell is really like. That could be scarier in its way than eternal fire.

  The Oasis isn’t in Palmdale itself but on the outskirts, and it isn’t as easy to locate as Ziggy had hoped it would be. In fact, he passes it twice before realizing that the nursing home is hidden behind a wall of green at what seems like the edge of the desert itself. After noticing the discreet sign at last, he makes his way through an opening in the screen of palm trees into a large open area dominated by a two-story building that looks like a freshly baked loaf of bread, its brown stucco exterior blending in with the colors of the desert behind it. As Ziggy comes closer, he can see that there are a pair of wings jutting out from the trunk of the building back toward the sandy wastes. He parks in the near-empty lot, and feels the sting of the hot dry wind for the few seconds it takes him to reach the entrance, where, once inside, he’s greeted by a blast of refrigerated air. The door closes behind him with a click that seems to suck all the sound out of the room. Not many steps from the door a muscular young man in a dark suit sits behind glass in what looks like the ticket booth of a movie house and lifts his head at the visitor inquiringly. When Ziggy tells him his business, the man gives him a once-over before soberly directing him to a set of doors with frosted glass panels onto which a geometrical pattern has been painted.

  Once past this barrier, Ziggy enters a bright cool high-ceilinged space where the filtered daylight coming from sheets of tinted glass is augmented by pools of illumination from strategically placed domed lamps. At one end of the large room a fire is burning in a stone fireplace. When he hears a shrill cry that comes from the opposite direction, he turns his head and catches sight of a flash of scarlet. It takes him a second or so to make out about a half-dozen tropical birds in a cage spacious enough to allow them to fly. This is some place, he thinks. Colorful plants are arranged around the room and there’s an actual lemon tree with real lemons in a wooden tub on the pale brown carpeting. Though he can’t see anyone yet, Ziggy picks up an ambient buzz of voices from somewhere nearby. Following the man’s instructions, he makes his way to the formidable registration desk, where he presents himself as a visitor. “Would you like to sign in?” a white-haired woman in a checked suit asks him. “Whom do you wish to see?”

  He gives the woman Przybylski’s name and she repeats it, pronouncing it “Pryz-bylski.”

  “Are you a relative?” she asks pleasantly.

  “A friend,” he answers and watches her flip through the pages of a bound tablet.

  “Would you please sign here,” she directs him.

  “Has he had many people come to see him recently?” Ziggy asks, surreptitiously taking in the surroundings. This has got to be costing Eddie a pretty penny.

  “I wouldn’t know that kind of thing, sir,” the woman smiles at him. “Here, Caroline will take you to his room.”

  An attractive light-skinned black woman in a gray dress glides toward him and indicates that he should follow her. As they pass through another door, Ziggy glimpses a nondenominational chapel and a reception room where a TV is playing while a couple of people in wheelchairs silently watch. In spite of those amenities, he’s struck by the sense of emptiness here. He and Caroline continue down the corridor, Ziggy bracing himself for the harsh smell of urine and disinfectant, but somehow the people who run the Oasis have managed to keep both of those odors hidden under a faint, vaguely flowery scent. He hears an occasional cough and once what sounds like a muffled scream, but the place is for the most part eerily quiet.

  Near the end of the corridor he and Caroline enter a large, wide elevator that travels so slowly that there’s no sensation of ascent before the doors open, presumably putting them on another floor. Here the quality of light is subtly different, dimmer, and Ziggy assumes the tough cases have been deposited upstairs. A couple of women in hospital scrubs are talking quietly in the corridor as Caroline leads him briskly along so that he doesn’t have an opportunity to peek into any of the rooms. At last they’ve come to room 230.

  “There you are, sir,”
she says. “I’ll leave you now.”

  “Thank you,” he says.

  Inside the room, a large black woman in the same kind of outfit Ziggy saw in the corridor introduces herself as Amanda. “He’ll be ready for you in a second,” she says. It’s only then that he notices the man strapped into the wheelchair. “We like to have them sit up part of the day,” the woman explains. “For their lungs.”

  Ziggy’s first thought is that’s it’s not Przybylski. They sent me to the wrong place, he thinks. But as he continues to look, he gradually accepts that he might indeed be standing before the former undertaker, now a shrunken, mummified figure, absolutely inert. It’s unsettling that the man’s lifeless eyes, directed toward some corner of the floor, have made no acknowledgment of Ziggy’s presence, no acknowledgment of anything.

  Amanda fusses a little with the green blanket that covers the patient’s legs and lifts herself heavily. “I’ll leave you with him for a couple of minutes but I’ll be close by,” she says.

  “Can he . . .” Ziggy whispers. “Does he understand anything?”

  The woman’s mouth turns down sadly. “I been with him about a year and I ain’t seen nothing. But you never can tell.” She adds more confidingly, “I always think there’s more going on there than you think. You got to believe that. There’s a chair, by the way. Let me wheel him over near the window and you two can have a visit.”

  When she’s gone, Ziggy slowly lets himself down into the chair beside the window a few feet away from Przybylski. “Jesus,” he says under his breath.

  The man’s head lolls, his eyes still directed downward, though Ziggy can’t be sure that he’s seeing anything. His claw-like hands are limp on the arm of the chair where Amanda put them. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, Ziggy thinks, and at the moment it’s hard to think of the man in the wheelchair as anybody’s enemy. He’s simply vacant, there’s no one there. His empty eyes show no signs of recognizing that someone else, let alone someone he once knew and might once have considered a rival, is nearby, and Ziggy takes advantage of his apparent invisibility to study Przybylski carefully. The undertaker used to be tall, he had blond hair, he carried himself stiff as a ramrod. The man across from Ziggy looks shrunken, a few lank strands of dirty gray hair do little to hide the shape of his skull. His eyes are glazed and everything about him sags, pulled earthward. And to think he’s been this way for years. It seems a shame the poor wretch can’t be released from this state. In the last few moments, Ziggy has become aware of the humming of the air-conditioner, of other faint noises involved with the running of machines, and the labored rhythm of Przybylski’s breathing. When he hears another kind of sound, he turns toward the window, where he glimpses a fly buzzing against the glass that looks onto the desert outside. How the hell did that fly manage to survive in a place as carefully managed as this, he wonders. He returns his attention to Przybylski, who’s exactly as he left him.

  What if hell is like this, Ziggy thinks again, just this forever? The idea sends a chill up his spine.

  “Przybylski,” he ventures, speaking quietly. There’s no reaction: not a blink, a twitch, a change in the rhythm of his breathing. No, he thinks, there’s no point in trying to start up a conversation. They say, though, that you never can tell. He listens to the hum of the machines, to Przybylski’s reedy inhalation and exhalation. How much time has he had alone with the man? Seconds? It seems like hours.

  Well, at least I’m here, he thinks. I got here where I said I was going to go.

  Get out of here.

  Ziggy starts. Did the man in the wheelchair really say something? No, he’s exactly as he was moments ago. I’m going batty, he thinks.

  Who are you and what are you doing here? There it goes again. But how can it be Przybylski? Nobody comes to see me. Nobody.

  Ziggy’s trying to get a grip on himself, to calm the rising terror he feels. This is like Eddie’s wake, he thinks. There’s got to be some reasonable explanation. He can see that the man in front of him hasn’t moved a muscle. Still, is it somehow possible to talk to a person without actually talking? Przybylski, is that really you?

  Who else did you think it might be?

  This is crazy. Ziggy knows he can’t really be talking to Przybylski. Still, maybe something’s going on, maybe that wreck of a creature a few feet away can actually communicate, by ESP or something like that. Anyway, what’s he got to lose by going along with this for a while? Przybylski, do you know how long you’ve been here? Do you have any sense of time?

  Was that a groan? I’ve been here forever, I’m going to be here for all of eternity.

  What a terrible thought. Once again Ziggy feels a shiver of dread. This isn’t what he came all this way to hear. No, Przybylski, that’s not right. You’ve been in this place a while, yeah. But you’ll only be here until . . . Actually, it’s probably not such a good idea to go any further in that direction. And as the seconds pass, it occurs to Ziggy that the undertaker may have conveyed to him all he wants to say.

  This is my punishment.

  OK, it isn’t stopping yet. Punishment? For what?

  I don’t know, but believe me, I’ve had time to think about things. What else is this if it’s not punishment?

  The air conditioner hums, the fly resumes its futile buzzing against the glass, obviously perplexed to find the usually friendly medium of air suddenly turned hard and resistant. You can’t think that way, Przybylski. Actually, you’re here because you got sick, that’s all.

  Hah! If you’re sick you either get better or you die. Not this.

  He’s got Ziggy there. I don’t know what to tell you. Things end, though, eventually. This is too creepy. It certainly wouldn’t break his heart if this encounter were to end, and soon.

  Przybylski’s apparently not done, though. This is all I know. There’s nothing but this. Nothing.

  No, Ziggy wants to tell him, you’re wrong about that. He can’t help feeling that, as terrible as the man’s condition might be, it would be even worse to be robbed of all sense of the past. But, Przybylski, there was something before this, don’t you remember?

  Something before this, you’re saying? He sounds challenging, wary. But interested.

  Sure. Do you remember Detroit at all? St. Connie’s, the priests, the numbers? Do you remember the war, when Detroit was booming?

  There’s nothing for a while, as if he’s thinking over this new idea. And then: De-troit. It comes slowly, in two parts, it sounds like a foreign word. Yeah, maybe. Another pause. Maybe there’s something. A long time ago. I might remember something.

  It’s a start anyway. That’s right, St. Connie’s parish on the east side of Detroit. Remember? Przybylski, you and I were the big cheeses in the neighborhood back then, we were in competition. Remember the scoreboard the monsignor got us to go halves on?

  Ziggy doesn’t have to wait so long for a response this time. Oh, yeah, I remember you now: the big shot, the numbers guy. Strutting around in your flashy clothes, giving away a handful of tickets to a Tigers game. Like you were some kind of, what? A duke or a lord or something like that? As if you’d actually earned your money and not got it from other people’s gambling.

  Wait a minute, Ziggy wants to say, bristling at the accusation. It’s the same old Przybylski, isn’t it? Still, even as he feels the sting of being misunderstood, he takes some satisfaction in having jogged the man’s memory. Przybylski, that’s water under the bridge, isn’t it? Hell, we did cooperate on that scoreboard, after all. We might not have liked each other but we pitched in to help the school.

  The man is utterly still. It scarcely seems possible that he’s even breathing. And yet Ziggy listens for more. That scoreboard, I do remember it. I think my share was over nine hundred and so was yours. The monsignor. Yes, a tall, dignified man. Victor Baran. Quite an impressive figure, our monsignor. Crafty too.

  For all his craftiness, Baran couldn’t save the neighborhood, Ziggy thinks. He couldn’t save the parish. I hate to tell yo
u this, Przybylski, but that scoreboard is gone now. They closed the school down a couple of years ago. The grade school and the high school both.

  Gone, you say? The grade school and the high school too? The nuns? The football team that never was any good? Ziggy could swear he just heard something that sounded like a sigh. That’s very sad, but I’m starting to remember more now. I remember how the neighborhood was changing, a whole generation moving out to the suburbs. Well, you could see where that was going to end up. It’s a shame, though.

  That’s not all, Przybylski. It’s even worse than that. You wouldn’t believe how even the church has run down. St. Conrad’s. There’s some talk that the archdiocese is going to try to close the parish down some day pretty soon.

  St. Connie’s, no. Would they really shut it down? The air conditioner coughs and then resumes its regular hum. That was one magnificent church. It was like a cathedral for us Polacks.

  That’s true enough. Ziggy can remember the celebration of the monsignor’s twenty-fifth anniversary as a priest, when the cardinal said mass at St. Connie’s—’48, as best as he can remember. And now . . . They say it’s very empty during Sunday masses. I wouldn’t know. I don’t go except on Christmas and Easter, and you can even see the decline there.

  St. Conrad’s. Yes, I can see it clearly now. Ziggy, that church was built in 1911, the year I was born. My grandmother told me about those days when the Polish-American population was growing so fast they couldn’t put up enough churches, however big they might be. And St. Conrad’s wasn’t only big. There was a majesty to the place. All those weddings, all those funerals, the processions that would spill out of the church and into the street, the priest under his canopy, an army of altar boys, the old ladies with their candles singing in Polish, the flags of the religious societies flashing in the sun . . .