Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  “Which hospital?” I say.

  Mrs. Jesse tells me and hangs up.

  My mother is in a room with another old woman who is sitting up in bed, engrossed in a book she’s reading. The other woman has a stack of books on the table in front of her, and she wears cat glasses with a cord that goes around her neck. My mother is groggy; she doesn’t have her wig, and what little hair she has now sticks to her head in places. She knows who I am, but she’s too sleepy to talk. When the nurse comes in, I ask her how my mother is, and she says I’ll have to talk to a doctor. I tell her I have a job, and I don’t have time to wait, but she says I won’t have to wait long. Suddenly I feel selfish, so I sit down in a chair next to my mother’s bed, half looking out the window, half dozing.

  Waking up, I see the doctor examining my mother. He is a tall East Indian. When I stand up to stretch, he shakes my hand. I ask him how my mother is and when she can go home. He says my mother had a blood clot caused by her chemotherapy, and her kidneys aren’t working right. She’ll be in the hospital a while yet.

  He also says she will need constant supervision when she comes home and she will have trouble getting around. His voice is soft and caring, but he catches hold of my elbow and looks me in the eye while he talks. He keeps using the word serious over and over again like he’s afraid I don’t understand what he means, but I know what he’s telling me. I look at my mother in the bed, still and pale, twitching a little. I rub my eyes. The doctor keeps talking about live-in nurses and nursing homes and hospices. He says there are very nice retirement communities, more like apartment complexes than nursing homes. He tells me I can schedule some counseling, get some advice. I can pick up a list of phone numbers at the information desk. I thank him and say I have to go to work soon. I kiss my mother good-bye. I go home and sit beside the telephone, looking over the list of phone numbers.

  After work, I buy a couple pints of Early Times to take along to the movies. At the theater, everything is the same as it was the first night: the closed ticket booth, the one unlocked door. Inside, I take my seat in the back row. Tonight the theater is half full when the movie starts, with more of the familiar-looking faces, but still no one I know by name. Just before the lights go out, I remember to check the front row, and someone is there, right where the sleeping man was the first night. Then darkness. The film chronology starts in the early middle ages, with scenes of village life, and warring with shields and swords. There are wars and slaughter, with cities and castles under siege. Then out of nowhere, people start getting together and building cathedrals. On his back, on a scaffolding, Michelangelo recreates the creation. People take to the sea in sailing ships, land on tropical shores where there’s fresh fighting, fresh bloodshed. The pace seems to be growing faster.

  Soon we get to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. He starts out as a kid, silent, throwing snowballs in black and white, and meets defeat at Waterloo portrayed by Rod Steiger, in glorious Technicolor. I am taking hits off the first of my Early Times bottles. At one point I start to get up and go to the concession stand for a Coke to mix my drink in, but I remember that the Lyric isn’t a regular theater anymore and there is no concession stand.

  Now we are in the nineteenth century, and the film begins to concentrate more on America, with greater detail given to the War of 1812, with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner defending New Orleans, and the American Civil War, with battle scenes from Gone with the Wind, Gettysburg, and Glory. There are also scenes of people living out normal lives in cities or farming in the countryside: people waking up in the morning, working in the fields, eating dinner together, singing and drinking, and going to bed at night. There are slaves on plantations in the South, soldiers on battlefields, frontiersmen, and Indians. President Lincoln is shot. The movie follows his casket to the White House. As I watch and drink, the faces of the people from history begin to look similar to me, and it’s more than that they all have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. They look almost familial, and I’m wondering if the movies have been tampered with, if I’m part of some kind of subliminal media experiment.

  Tonight the movie ends with the Spanish-American War, mixing in the first newsreel footage with the fictionalized versions from the movies. The next big thing to happen will be the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia, but it will have to wait until tomorrow night.

  I get up to leave the theater, having finished only about half of the second pint, and there he is immobile in the first row as the others get up and head for the exits. I can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks like the same head as last night.

  People file out past me. None of them seem to have noticed him, and I start thinking maybe I’m losing it. Maybe I’m the only one who can see him, a phantom who haunts the Lyric from the old days, the ghost from the midnight show.

  No, he’s real, as real as the Lyric, as real as the people running this chronology. This time, when I look up at the projectionist’s booth, I can see a shadow of a person moving around the projectors in the dim light. I walk down the aisle to the front and arrive at the sleeping man just as the last of the audience is leaving. The sleeper has a long beard with gray streaks in it. His face is wrinkled and troubled.

  “Hey, buddy,” I say. “The movie’s over.”

  He moves a little when I shake him, and saliva dribbles out of the side of his mouth. I hear a thud, glass on carpet. A bottle of Mad Dog has fallen out of his coat and landed on the floor. The light in the projectionist’s booth goes out, darkening the whole auditorium, except the exits. I tell myself it’s okay, safe enough and warm here. A theater is a fine place for a wino to sleep it off.

  Once outside, I head over to Mike’s, but the dishwasher has locked the door and gone home. I search my pocket for my keys, flipping through the ones on my chain, but the key to Mike’s is missing. I can’t remember what I did with it or why I would take it off the chain. I must have had it when I locked up last night, or did I lock up? I have some beers back at my place, but I wanted to sit on a barstool and drink beer in a glass. Being locked out of Mike’s sets me off, although I know there’s a lot more back of it: looks I’ve been getting during work, attitudes from Mike and from others.

  The movie was much longer tonight. It’s twelve-thirty, and the town is deader than ever, no one on the streets. I start walking around town, taking swigs from the last bottle of Early Times and cursing everything I see: Mike’s Bar and Grill, Cook’s Cleaners, the National Bank, and Corner Drug Store. I’m really pissed off now, wandering down quiet streets, along the avenues toward my mother’s house, finishing the bottle on my way and tossing it on someone’s lawn.

  After I pound on the door and my mother doesn’t answer, I remember that she’s in the hospital—how could I forget? I start cursing my mother for being sick and in the hospital. Why does she have to be sick?

  Next I’m running up and down the sidewalk in front of the house, kicking the picket fence. I break some of the pickets, but only a few. Then it becomes a game. I keep making passes and kicking them and breaking them until I see the headlights of a car. I run across the yard, jump the fence on the other side, and hide in the bushes next to the neighbor’s house. Across the yard, I see the car slow down in front of the house. The window rolls down, and a light shines on the damage. After the car moves on, I cool down. I walk home, where I drink the last few beers before I sleep.

  The next morning I’m lying in bed, trying to decide if I can fall back to sleep when the charcoal figures of history return. This time I’m one of them, seven years old, sitting with a bunch of relatives in my aunt’s basement. After lowering a screen from the ceiling, my aunt clicks on a movie projector. I’m at a family reunion, watching a home movie made a couple years before I was born. On the small screen I see my mother and father only a year or so after they were married. They stand next to my grandparents, all of them smiling and embarrassed because they’re not used to being filmed. My dad puts his hands in front of his face, doing som
e corny routine to make my mom laugh. Squinting to see them, I can’t decide where I am, lying in my bed or sitting in my aunt’s basement, and I begin to feel seasick.

  The phone rings, and it’s Mrs. Jesse again. She is at my mother’s house, complaining about the damaged fence. She asks me who would do such a thing. I say I don’t know anything about it, but I will come over later and clean up the mess.

  “Why do you hate your mother?”

  She catches me off guard with this. My mind tumbles and, for a moment, I am back in my aunt’s basement. Only this time I am on the screen and the faces of my relatives stare at me.

  “I love my mother,” I say. “I don’t know what happened to the goddamn fence.” It’s a lie—only half of it—but I can’t explain the truth about what happened to the fence, about how upset I was. This time I hang up on her.

  I arrive at the hospital just before noon. Mrs. Jesse is standing at the nurses’ station talking to my mother’s doctor. I slip into my mother’s room and sit down next to her, noticing the bed beside hers is empty.

  “Looks like your roommate has gone home,” I say.

  My mother opens her eyes. They focus on me better than they did the day before. She whispers something, and I lean my ear directly over her mouth, but I still can’t make out what she’s saying.

  “You’ll go home soon,” I say. I rub her shoulder, and she closes her eyes.

  Hearing my name in the hallway I try to straighten up, but I lose my balance and have to grab for the little table with wheels by the bed. It moves with my weight and for a moment I feel like Charlie Chaplin doing a ridiculous dance with the table.

  My mother’s doctor is standing in the doorway with Mrs. Jesse behind him. He’s the one calling me. He says he wants to talk to me outside. Mrs. Jesse stares at me as I pass her.

  Once in the hallway I say it looks like my mom’s feeling better.

  The doctor nods, staring at me, full of whatever Mrs. Jesse’s been telling him.

  “Yes,” he says, “she’s somewhat better. Have you been drinking today?”

  I look him in the eye and say no.

  “Your mother’s very ill,” he says. “You shouldn’t see her unless you’re sober.”

  I tell him I am sober.

  He smiles and says very calmly, “You should go home, have some lunch and come back in the afternoon.”

  I say I want to talk to my mother now and start to go back into her room. The doctor grabs hold of my arm. I pull back from him, but his grip is tight. He tells me I must leave the hospital and come back later. If I love my mother I will do this. I feel a fever come over me. The long, yellow, antiseptic hallway looks like a giant funnel pouring back to the nurses’ station where the white uniforms move back and forth and the intercom voices are muffled.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll just go.”

  He holds onto my arm and walks with me until we are at the elevator.

  “Are you driving?” he says.

  I shake my head.

  “Have some lunch,” he says. “If you want to talk to your mother, come back this afternoon. We’ll talk again then.”

  But I don’t go back in the afternoon. Instead, I lie in bed listening to the phone ring, missing work. I try to get everything straight in my mind. I try to line up the events of my life so they fit some kind of pattern, something I can work with that will help me understand what’s going on.

  Once, years ago, Jean, my girlfriend in college, got me interested in hypnosis, the kind where you walk back through your past lives. We were in college, and I went with Jean to see this psychic, Mrs. Abrazeri. I lay on a couch while Mrs. Abrazeri hypnotized me. I paid her thirty dollars. In one of my past lives I was a wealthy man. I was standing on a floor inlaid with jewels and gold. The only other life I remembered was very early in history. I was standing beside a rock wall looking at a grove of trees. I looked down at my hands and they were broken and crumbling from hard labor. Several fingers were missing, and those that were left were swollen.

  I hurt just looking at my hands, and that’s how I feel now, looking at my life, trying to understand what’s going on. At one point I fall asleep and dream a real dream—the first one in years—a nightmare where I am back at the hospital, searching for my mother in the funnel of yellow walls that happen to be lined with the picket fence from my mother’s house. I am tumbling down a hallway past the doctors and nurses, trying to reach her room where I know my aunt is showing her home movies of all of us, where we are all okay.

  This is the last night of the film series, so I pick up two pints of Early Times and an eight-pack of pony beers. Tonight I leave my bottles in a line at my feet, a monument to the old days. It doesn’t matter if someone catches me now.

  The man in the front row is still there. The phantom is back to haunt the hallways and back staircases of the big Gothic room after we leave. In my heart, I know better. He is a wino, and after tonight, after this run of good fortune, he’ll be back to spending his dreamless nights on benches or on the ground, with only newspapers to protect him from the cold and the rain.

  The others file in, more than the previous nights put together, but I am safe in the back row. No one will see my bottles until it’s time to go.

  Tonight we start with World War I and the Russian Revolution. I recognize scenes from All Quiet on the Western Front and the baby carriage from Battleship Potemkin rolling out of control down the steps. News footage of Lenin speaking to crowds, and of American women carrying signs demanding voting rights. Humphrey Bogart, armed with a Thompson machine gun, delivers a truckload of bootleg whiskey to a speakeasy. Although I have started with the pony beers, the thought of prohibition makes me thirsty for the hard stuff, so I jump ahead of plan and crack open one of the Early Times bottles.

  The film switches to scenes of small-town life in America. In one film clip, a man in a coat and tie toils away behind a pile of ledgers in a bank. The man looks familiar and ordinary, and I immediately think of It’s a Wonderful Life, but the man is not Jimmy Stewart. I’m left shaking my head, wondering how I know him. Soon, Adolf Hitler is shouting at a crowd during a rally. His picture dissolves into the skies above London, the bombers and the fires of the city, news footage of Pearl Harbor, of the Normandy invasion, of ground fighting in Europe, and the liberation of the concentration camps. The Second World War ends with the mushroom cloud above Hiroshima.

  The man from the bank is back, his hair starting to gray. He is in an auditorium, at a ceremony of some kind. I shift in my chair. There is a close-up of a young woman in a robe walking across the stage, collecting a diploma. The film is color, a home movie, and it skips and stutters.

  Then I know the woman. She’s my mother.

  The Korean War begins and ends before I can move. On the screen, ships are docking. Women are awaiting their husbands and boyfriends who are returning from the war. I know who I’m going to see next, my father on one of the gangplanks, waving to my mother. Eisenhower is in the White House, Nixon delivers his Checkers speech. My parents are getting married. President Kennedy is assassinated. I learn to walk in the living room as he lies in state on the TV. My parents are arguing, fighting at the kitchen table while I scream and cry. In Alabama, the police spray fire hoses on civil-rights marchers. The Vietnam War begins. One morning, my first day of school, I wave good-bye to my mother from the back of a yellow school bus.

  I’m sitting very still in my seat, holding onto the Early Times bottle. How long since my last drink, I can’t even say. I don’t even know if I’m crying.

  A woman near the middle of the theater gets up and moves in front of the screen, shuffling past the people in her row. I know already there is something familiar about her, something I don’t like.

  She starts up the aisle.

  The Vietnam War ends. My father dies one day while I’m at school. He has a heart attack at forty-seven. This time I watch him die in his office. Then I stare down at him in the casket. Then I’m in high school, wrecki
ng my first car, fighting with my high school girlfriend. I’m at college. I get my own diploma, with my mother in the audience. I’m drunk, yelling at Jean in the parking lot of the apartment building where we lived for a short time after college.

  The woman walking up the aisle stops at my row and starts to move toward me. It comes to me she’s Mrs. Jesse, come to the theater to find me, to tell me my mother is dead.

  On the screen, my mother is sitting up in the hospital bed, speaking to me in her wig like there’s nothing wrong with her, only there’s no soundtrack so I can’t hear what she’s telling me.

  “Enough of this,” I say to myself. “Nothing has changed.” In the hospital across town, my mother lies in her bed, hanging on. In the morning, Mrs. Jesse will find another reason to call and chastise me about something else I should be doing, or something I shouldn’t have done.

  Holding onto the seat in front of me, I stand and move away from the woman who is moving toward me. Averting my face from the screen, because I don’t want to see it anymore, I inch along the row, looking down at all kinds of shoes, at bottles and cigarette butts. I’m bumping into knees in pants legs and stockings. At the end of the aisle I run right into the woman I’m trying to get away from. She grabs ahold of my arms, catches me as I’m falling.

  She’s not Mrs. Jesse at all. She’s the woman with the cat glasses, from my mother’s room.

  I push her away and stumble into the seats. Feeling my way down the sticky wall, I find the door behind the curtain, the exit I remember from the old days. Soon, crossing the street, I will ease my shaky bones down on a bench, wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve, and light a cigarette. Part of me will wish I never came here, never even saw the flyer, and the other part will wish the chronology would keep going so I could come back every night, so I could lose myself again and again in something greater and sadder than my life.