by Jan Carson
However, the Baptist Retirement Village was a game of two halves and the second kingdom hovered like a Death Star over even this, his simplest hope. The Center was more than a building; it was, to Malcolm, evil incarnate. Some of life’s larger travesties, he was coming to realize, were just too monumental to ignore.
Malcolm Orange lived in constant denial. ‘It’s only a building,’ he told himself. ‘It’s just a building like our house, or next door’s house or the house we lived in for six months when I had the chicken pox. Buildings can’t really hurt anyone.’ Malcolm’s sensible head – the section capable of arithmetic and evaluating his mother’s increasingly outlandish behavior in a reasonably objective fashion – continued to reassure him that buildings were unworthy objects of fear. The more prominent part of Malcolm’s head – the section devoted to dinosaurs, to X-Men and outbreaks of perforated hysteria – was incapable of shirking the sensation that something truly horrible was taking place in full view of his bedroom window.
At the far end of the cul-de-sac, masked by a suspiciously large privet hedge, stood the Center, a four-story brick and metal cage, puckered with occasional screen-sized windows. A single double door opened on to the front of the building permitting assisted entry, one patient at a time, to the Center’s foyer. A second door protruded from the building’s backside, expelling food waste, laundry and the occasional chain-smoking employee.
The Center received elderly people on an almost daily basis.
Malcolm, on the days when he wished to remind himself that God, despite his recent benevolence, could not be trusted, hid out behind the privet hedge and watched the Center swallow a series of rickety old folk. It was hard to tell from ten feet, but each of these individuals appeared extremely reluctant to enter the building. Though most were beyond the ability to resist with violence, several offered mouthfuls of prehistoric expletives, whilst the most mobile swung canes and walking devices, kicking the porters pointedly in the shins.
It was common cul-de-sac knowledge that the Center had been significantly placed at the end of the road. Malcolm had yet to see or hear of an elderly person emerging from the Center’s doors, either front or back. Those who left the cul-de-sac for the Center did not return. Those unfortunate to arrive at the Center in ambulances and relatives’ hatchbacks were destined to disappear before any of the regular residents could even catch a Christian name.
Malcolm’s mother worked in the Center. She washed old people and fed them turkey dinners liquidized in a blender. She changed their monster-sized diapers, injected them with habit-forming drugs and twice a week rotated the elderly men out of Monday’s pajamas and into Thursday’s. Malcolm’s mother hadn’t a good word to say about the Center or the Director who ran the outfit, somewhat anonymously, from the big bungalow on the hill. Martha Orange knew a shitty operation when she saw one, but for the sake of sustenance and a quiet life, held her tongue on the subject. Malcolm himself lived in constant fear of the Center, suspecting the building capable of fast-tracking even the healthiest individual towards the crematorium. It was all he could bear to permit his mother to slip into her powder-pink scrubs and enter the Center each morning.
‘If you feel sick while you’re in there, mama,’ he exclaimed adamantly, ‘even normal sick, like a headache or an upset belly, you need to get out right away. Call me if you need me to break in and save you. You’ll just get sicker and sicker if you stay in the Center. People die in there you know.’
‘Yes, Malcolm,’ his mother explained for the umpteenth time that week, ‘people do die in the Center. They die because they’re old and they’re done with not being dead. It’s a perfectly natural process, nothing to be afraid of. I’m not going to die in there.’
‘Promise.’
But Mrs Orange no longer believed in promises. The Volvo-shaped space in her driveway served as a constant reminder to the fact that all promises, even the eternal kind, bound together with antique wedding bands, tended to disintegrate in the end.
‘I can’t promise, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘It’s unlikely that I’ll die in there but who knows? I may have an accident in the kitchen, stranger things have happened. I’m pretty sure I won’t die in the Center though.’
‘How sure, mama?’
‘Pretty damn sure, Malcolm.’
‘Like ninety-five percent?’
‘I don’t want to measure it in a percentage.’
‘Seventy-five percent?’
‘Drop it, Malcolm. This conversation is getting ridiculous.’
And, because his mother had refused to be drawn into percentages, Malcolm Orange nurtured the morbid fear that some morning, most likely a morning least expected – a birthday for example, or Thanksgiving – his mother would leave for work and simply never come back.
Malcolm Orange did not trust the Center, but he could not keep himself away from its ominous front door.
He spent long afternoons buried in the privet hedge with Ross’s sports bag wedged at his feet, while he watched the front of the building through a pair of binoculars lately stolen from Roger Heinz’s shed. Malcolm kept a careful tally in his notebook. Over the past three weeks, some sixteen elderly people had entered the Center. Only one had escaped, slipping bare-assed through the laundry window to run loud and naked round the cul-de-sac. The entire street had come out to cheer him on and mock the orderlies as they attempted to curtail him by the turn circle. After less than five minutes of liberation the poor man had found himself swaddled in a baby-blue hospital blanket and dragged, against his will, back into the Center. The cut of his naked buttocks, slapping like a pair of shrink-wrapped fillets, had been the last visible sighting of the Center’s only known escaped prisoner. Just two weeks later Malcolm Orange feared that the bare-assed man no longer existed.
Malcolm Orange knew every inch and angle of the Baptist Retirement Village. Only the space beyond the Center’s electric doors evaded his scrutiny. He kept detailed notes, priding himself on omniscience. Malcolm could not permit anything, even the smallest cul-de-sac incident, to occur without his knowledge. Secrets offended his attention to detail.
This morning, above all ordinary noises, Malcolm Orange found himself preoccupied with the sexual grunts and wallows floating through his bedroom window. Here was an anomaly: a not yet recorded piece of data happening right beneath his nose. Scientific Investigative Research demanded he look further into the matter. Sheer laziness kept him flat on his back, surreptitiously picking his nose and wiping it on the duvet cover.
Malcolm Orange lay in bed for a few moments, arms folded behind his neck, trying to concentrate on other more pressing concerns: absent fathers, halfwit mothers, and his own disappearing parts which had, no doubt, multiplied during the night. He inspected the inside section of his left wrist, removing his watch to aid investigation. Beneath the plastic strap, in the space normally occupied by a series of raised dots, he found a missing section roughly the size of a nickel. Holding his arm to the light so it formed a kind of telescope, he was able to read the Coca-Cola clock right through his own wrist. It was five past seven now, almost ten past. If he angled his arm right Malcolm could frame the entire clock face so it looked like an actual wristwatch. He played around with his arm for a few seconds, closing one eye and squinting at the window, at the dresser – one drawer wedged open to reveal a still-sleeping Ross – and at the poster of Wolverine which he’d recently tacked to the bedroom wall. Watching the world through your own arm, Malcolm Orange concluded, was really friggin’ weird.
In the kitchen he could hear his mother muttering in Spanish as she fixed a full day’s worth of meals to leave for her children. Milk bottles for the baby would be left in the fridge, ‘morning’, ‘afternoon’, ‘evening’, and ‘emergency’ scrawled in eyeliner pencil on the side. It was Malcolm Orange’s duty to stick the correct bottle into Ross at the right time of day. He performed this task with the utmost insincerity, occasionally missing a bottle or emptying all four in one go. Ross did not seem to m
ind and continued to grow at the acceptable rate for a small infant, prematurely born. Malcolm Orange had eventually come to conclude that it mattered not one jot what he fed the baby and had lately taken to spoon-feeding his younger brother Campbell’s condensed cream of chicken soup, unheated, straight from the can. He had yet to mention this experiment to his mother but justified it under the disclaimer that milk was all very well and good but most likely somewhat bland after the third month’s straight consumption.
Malcolm’s own meals – sandwiches, ramen noodles and microwaveable macaroni dinners – were left in a stack by the cookie jar; a silent nod to the fact that should all else fail, cookies could always be relied upon to keep him coasting towards the next square meal.
Most weekends, Mrs Orange was released from her duties in the Retirement Village, and the Oranges ate like kings and tiny princes, rotating their dining adventures between Red Robin, IHOP, Denny’s and Shari’s, where they often bumped into the more mobile members of the Retirement Village treating their elderly dates and spouses to a Seniors Special for two.
Malcolm Orange dozed on until the Spanish sentiments petered out. Five seconds later the swooshing front door heralded his mother’s exit. He counted to one hundred the old fashioned way – using thousands to measure the seconds – and, when he was all but certain that his mother had safely made it across the parking lot, pulled back the covers and slipped out of bed.
Standing in the early morning sunlight he inspected his naked chest for perforations. It was difficult to say with any certainty, for his investigations had yet to officially begin, but Malcolm Orange appeared to be a great deal holier than the previous evening. There was a fresh constellation of tiny pinpricks clustered around his right nipple, whilst in the centre of his torso, congregating around his belly button, a number of larger holes had merged, forming a sort of doughnut-like tunnel right through his intestines. Unaware of any biblical undertones, Malcolm Orange unfurled a single doubting finger and pressed it deep into his belly. It disappeared up to the knuckle and upon withdrawal came away cleanly with not so much as a hint of blood, bile or anything more sinister.
Malcolm repeated the finger experiment several times, applying increasing amounts of pressure as he delved deeper into the dark cavern of his own innards. Each time his finger came away smooth and clean as a well-oiled earthworm. For a brief moment, temporarily distracted by the unholy coolness of being able to stick his hand right through his own belly, Malcolm Orange forgot about the fact that he was disappearing, forgot about his Mexico-bound father and his Spanish-speaking mother, forgot about the very fact that he now lived in a Retirement Village, surrounded on all sides by the old, the odd and the mentally unbalanced. Malcolm Orange, who was – despite fervent prayer and supplication – still his father’s son, stood in the middle of his own bedroom, naked from the waist up, poking himself repeatedly and trying to work out whether this was something he could do on television, for money.
The unmistakable sound of sexual climax, louder now that he’d crawled out from beneath his X-Men duvet, brought Malcolm Orange back to reality with an undignified thump. It was time for a spot of undercover investigation.
He slipped a T-shirt over his pajama shorts, located one flip-flop under the bed and the second beneath a pile of pre-worn pants and socks which were evolving, Everest-like, from the foot of his bed. As an afterthought he carefully placed the Oxford English Dictionary on top of Ross’s sleeping chest. ‘Try wriggling your way out of that one,’ he muttered, but Ross said nothing. Ross, aged almost three months, possessed the lackluster ability to sleep, undisturbed, through natural disasters, marital implosion and all but the top three volume notches on the remote control. Malcolm Orange observed his brother for a few seconds, watching his bottom lip furble and flop over each baby breath whilst the dictionary rose and fell unencumbered. Satisfied that Ross would not escape the underwear drawer this morning, Malcolm Orange grabbed a notebook and pen, lowered himself through the bedroom window and landed, unobserved, in his mother’s flowerbed.
(There was no need for Malcolm to be endlessly entering and exiting the chalet via the bedroom window. The Oranges’ new home was perfectly well equipped with not one but two external doors, each of which was capable of opening and closing as doors should. ‘Yes,’ Malcolm would later admit to his mother as she complained for the millionth time about her dead and dying flowerbed – the only six-foot scrap of her garden which refused to submit to the lush growing conditions of a Portland summer, ‘technically I could use the door but the window just seems more like an adventure.’
Thereafter, Mrs Orange, who could no longer bear the physical intimacy associated with an actual thrashing, threw all six sofa cushions at her son, angrily and with vicious accuracy. ‘Dammit, Malcolm!’ she screamed. ‘Use the door like a normal kid or so help me, I’ll make you sleep in the broom closet again.’
The broom closet was a legitimate threat, visited upon Malcolm on various occasions in various motel rooms when conjugal rights required a spot of privacy for the older Oranges. Aged three to seven, Malcolm had barely made it through a single broom cupboard night before the sheer, unrelenting blackness had triggered an unfortunate outbreak of diarrhea. Between the ages of eight and eleven, finally wise to the ugly drama unfurling on the far side of the door, Malcolm had manipulated the moment, bartering his way into candy bars, five-dollar bills and, on one notable occasion, an entire pack of Lucky Strikes, un-smoked.)
Standing up to his ankles in dead begonias he raised a single hand to his ear and cupped it firmly, forming a half-assed funnel. Most all of the cul-de-sac’s subtler sounds were lost on Malcolm, who could barely hear Christmas through the well-waxed remnants of Kleenex which kept his inner ear canals permanently congested. He held his breath, ignoring the bloody thump of his own pulse, and, above the perpetual hum of traffic stop-starting its way along 82nd, the hymns from two doors down and the telephone trilling faintly on the Center’s reception desk, Malcolm could just about distinguish the sound of bedsprings creaking in obvious relief.
He followed his suspicions two chalets down and one across, all the time holding his ear like a tracking device. Eventually the sounds led him to Chalet 7. He paused by the gate and made a tremendous show of tying his shoelace, hoping no one would notice the obvious lack of lace on his drugstore flip-flops. As he crouched on the edge of trespass, Malcolm continued to listen to the drama unfolding inside Chalet 7.
Even from this distance Malcolm could make out every word of the post-coital conversation, for Mr Roger Heinz – the current occupant of Chalet 7 – was one of the many screamers who lived on the cul-de-sac. Having lost the hearing in one ear, every utterance, even of the most intimate nature, was delivered with all the delicacy of an amplified juggernaut.
‘Just leave the plate in the microwave, pumpkin, I’ll heat it up later and you can pick it up when you come back for round two. If I get the chance I think I’ll change the bed sheets before this evening. They’re starting to stick together!’ he yelled. ‘Or maybe we could do it on the sofa for a change tonight.’
The response was lost on Malcolm, for Mr Heinz’s lover had none of his hearing problems and was able to execute conversation at a discreet level. Bent forward like an upturned paperback, Malcolm could see nothing beyond his own toes and the tiny clumps of gum and dog shit which littered the asphalt sidewalk, but he could well picture what was going on in the living room of Chalet 7. In such circumstances the polite, and unarguably American thing to do, would be to walk away, imagination intact. Malcolm Orange was neither polite, nor particularly American in his outlook. In Malcolm’s world, manners took a backseat to Scientific Investigative Research and so he ventured surreptitiously forth on an impromptu reconnaissance mission. Rising to his full height he made a showy attempt at stretching, checked the cul-de-sac for casual observers, and slipped unnoticed down the side of Mr Heinz’s aging Chrysler. In the alleyway between Chalet 7 and 8 Malcolm crouched behind the recycling b
in and peeked over the windowsill.
Chalet 7 reeked of masculine occupancy. A single La-Z-Boy armchair, already reclined, dominated the floor space. To the right, at arm’s length, a number of empty beer cans and a well-stuffed ashtray bore witness to the chair’s integral role in Mr Heinz’s day-to-day existence. On the wall, directly opposite the window, an enormous television was showing footage of a recent golf tournament with the volume set to mute. A stack of filthy plates and dishes almost two foot high was threatening to topple off the edge of the coffee table. Malcolm Orange swiveled on his heels, taking in the open-plan kitchen unit, encrusted as it was in a thick layer of oily grime. Dust motes danced frantically in the single sunbeam peaking beneath the kitchen blinds. A solitary pair of sap-gray briefs, probably male, hung impotently from the kitchen chair.
It was an undeniably masculine room – ageless in a sense, for the occupants could easily have been early-twenties slackers, middle-aged divorcees or elderly men in sweatpants. The thinnest smell of stale fart and tube sock was slowly leaking through the living room window. For Malcolm, who had grown up on hand-me-down army fatigues and the gummy dregs of his father’s Budweiser cans, there was something familiar and faintly reassuring about the sheer manliness of this squalor. ‘When I grow up,’ Malcolm Orange thought to himself, ‘I will have a room in my house just like this room. The rest of the house will be normal but one room will be exactly like this.’ The thought pleased him immensely. He planned to make a note of it as soon as an appropriate notebook became available.