by Melanie Tem
Just in the last few months, her father's bulk had noticeably diminished, so that he seemed smaller, not frail yet, though that would likely come, but somehow occupying less defined space, less volume. His body seemed, like his mind, to be slipping out of reach, even nudging the basic boundaries of what was normal and predictable for a human being. When she looked at him, listened to him, there was no longer, for instance, the expectation of symmetry; no part of him could precisely be termed deformed, but nothing really matched anything else, either, and there was the generalized impression of something being awry. Sometimes he walked and sat and stood a trifle clumsily, as though the layers of the physical world and his body in it were not exactly familiar to him anymore, no longer quite aligned.
Rebecca had seen that in other people at the beginning stages of dementia. She'd been taught, in fact, to regard all such changes, subtle at first and then picking up speed — physical awkwardness, emotional lability, inattentiveness and forgetfulness and mental blankness that came and went — as symptoms that, taken together, were diagnostic in that they comprised a syndrome that could be defined and named. Not treated, though. Not reversed or interrupted or even slowed.
She'd also been taught that reorientation was the treatment approach of choice. In long-term care facilities and other institutions, the environment tended to be featureless and self-referential, contributing to the confusion of minds that already wandered. So in more enlightened facilities, activity directors and social workers gave painstaking instruction in Reality Orientation. Rebecca had led many an awkwardly chipper discussion constructed around the date, the day of the week, what was on the menu for lunch, what the weather was like outside, who the President of the United States was. Signs were posted: ' Today is . . .' Nursing home wings were color-coded. Staff was cued to slip references to time, place, and person into their routine conversations with patients.
All this reality orientation had never seemed to have much long-term effect. Nobody emerged clear-headed from dementia or was able to reorganize drifting thoughts. But for a few minutes, a few hours after each class, a few people did seem to be more aware of their own identities. She guessed that was a benefit.
Assuming that 'identity' was a constant and 'reality' a concept with truth beyond the convenience of common agreement. When she'd started working in gerontology, Rebecca wouldn't have entertained any notion to the contrary; what was real and the basic outlines of person, place, and time the composite factor labelled on medical charts 'orientation × 3'had been static and clear. Now, increasingly and unwillingly, she wondered.
Her father had subsided again. His bald head glistened under the fluorescent lights Rebecca wished she could afford to replace throughout the facility with incandescent bulbs. The literature reported that the flickering and harshness of fluorescent lights seemed to contribute to the disorientation of patients with dementia, as well as to the hyperactivity of schoolchildren, but nursing-care facilities used them for the same budgetary reasons schools did.
Now her father seemed to be struggling to get up from his chair, at the same time apparently struggling to push himself deeper into it, staring wide-eyed at thin air and croaking something incomprehensible. Probably it was an actual word that meant something to him; it might even have meant something to her if she'd had a context for it, but a single syllable and out of the blue, it was nothing more then a nonsensical bray. Several of the residents did that, and Rebecca was put in mind of the speech of a baby just before its native language emerges in recognizable form more directed and organized than babbling, but not quite words. From her own father, it both irritated and chilled her.
'Faye!' Dad was flailing now, though in a peculiarly languid way, his hands undulating as if caressing shapes in the air, his thin forearms and sharp elbows fluttering. Rebecca found herself looking for the haloes she'd noticed around her own hands the other night, but saw nothing like that. The expression on his face might have been fear, or might have been just confusion; Rebecca had been trying to read the expressions on her father's face all her life, off and on, and the more senile he became the closer she seemed to get to being able to do so. That bothered her, to be gaining something from his affliction. Right now she would swear he was, among other things, leering.
He was determined to get up. He was awfully unsteady. Sooner or later he would probably have to be restrained. She hated the thought of it. Her mother was already complaining that the staff — in other words, Rebecca — wasn't doing enough to keep him safe. He could fall. He could wander off and be hit by a car, or fall down that hill in back and break a hip. He could have eaten the paint. 'If he could take care of himself he wouldn't be in such a place,' she kept saying. 'If I could take care of him at home, I would. You know I would.'
His eyes were bulging now, and he was drooling.
Hastily Rebecca folded up the report and slipped it into her briefcase. It obviously wasn't going to be feasible for her to get any work done while she kept her father company; she'd have to talk to her mother about it, a prospect which made her stomach ache with dread.
She went to him, took his hands. 'Dad, what's wrong?' He couldn't tell her. He was looking over her head. He used her hands as leverage to stand up and then sit down again. She sat beside him and put on a classical tape. The piano and violin music agitated her, but it wasn't long before her father was sitting calmly, not asleep but not fully conscious, either. The innumerable things she had to attend to scrolled through her head, and she could hardly sit still. After a few minutes she kissed his cheek, which seemed a terribly impertinent thing to do, and told him, 'I have to go back to work, Dad. I'll leave your door open and somebody will be in to check on you. Here's your call light in case you need anything.' With an obvious effort he brought his gaze to her face, but it slipped away again, and she knew the concept of a call light was beyond him, so she was, in effect, proposing to leave him unattended and alone.
Impatient though she was, it was hard to tear herself away from him. She sat beside him for longer than she should have and watched him. Then she wasn't watching him anymore but she still sat there, lethargic, hands in her lap, her thoughts and gaze on nothing in particular, oddly reluctant to get back to work. Her father sat relaxed in his chair with a small smile on his lips, and neither of them had anything to say for a while — a unit of time that was, for Rebecca, calibrated into minutes whose passage she could virtually hear; for Marshall, they didn't pass at all but blended into one long smear.
Her mind was racing. His was, too, but more as though underwater than on hard ground. In and out of his mind and back in again flowed images from his own past and present: being tied in a chair; being immersed in the layered sensation of being lost in a place he had been for a long time; being hurt. Images came to him, too, with no personal attachment, as if his were not the life that contained them, even as if they hadn't been lived at all but stored, set aside, imbued with a different sort of reality than being lived would have given them.
Rebecca worried at the endless list of things she had to do, many of them things she hadn't gotten done yesterday though she'd been here till after ten at night; she wouldn't get them done today either. The worry, though, softened into some other kind of mental process, swirling with her father's. Not memory, exactly. Before memory.
A car in a deep woods, overgrown, vines through the windows although all the glass was intact. Multicolored vines, soft and flowing, like scarves. Himself stumbling toward it; herself at the same time skirting around. The bulk of it brown as sunlight on treetrunks, golden as delicately tanned flesh.
Not a car. A body. Not a person. Something else.
Being summoned.
Answering, approaching, and discovering it was nothing, a hillock covered with vines that weren't multicolored at all, not a pink or lavender among them, only green and gold. A curious torpor, disappointment and sweet relief.
As soon as Rebecca forced herself to stir, energy and anxiety returned. As soon as she was
on her feet and moving toward the door, had her hand on the knob , which should be a lever so people with limited hand motion could use it (she took time to fish the spiral notebook and pen out of her pocket and add a note about doorknobs to the list)as soon as she was out in the hall, the feeling of being tugged on was strong, the threat of engulfment acute, and also the anticipation that here at The Tides, maybe, she would discover who she was without even having time or inclination to think about it. She was the person who had this never-ending list of things to do. She was the one in charge.
She could have started her rounds right here. Instead, needing to get away from her father, she hurried along the corridor to the lounge in the middle, where the restored mural - not quite the same as the first one, but exuberant and expressive in its own right - caught the morning light and lifted her spirits just as it was supposed to. There was a pink spot on it that hadn't been there before, a small sunburst pattern near the floor. Rebecca liked the idea that somebody had been inspired.
As she went outside, it occurred to her that the door ought to be re-hung so that it opened inward, to make it harder for wanderers like her father to get out. On the other hand, maybe this knob also ought to be replaced with a lever or a bar for conflicting safety reasons: so that, in the event of a fire, residents with limited mobility could get out. She'd have to check the regs. It would be easier if she could just call the Health Department and ask for advice, but Dan had warned her not to do that for fear of triggering a visit or a full-fledged survey, and The Tides wasn't ready for that.
'The Health Department is not your friend, babe,' Dan had told her, laughing a little, all but patting her head. 'Trust me.' Rebecca wasn't entirely sure she believed that;
Dan had had a running battle with the Health Department for years, which made him something less than objective on the subject. Theoretically, they were all on the side of good patient care. But she wouldn't call about doorknobs.
She went out the back door, thinking to check the condition of the grounds behind the facility first. A scraggly privet hedge later in the spring she'd get somebody to come look at itmarked off a haphazard boundary that served no purpose, since the nursing-home property extended through the empty and partially filled-in lake bed to a street considerably more than a block away. Surprised and displeased by her own unwillingness to venture out that farit was, after all, broad daylight now, and nothing sinister had happened to her there anyway; she'd just slipped, and dusk had made things look and sound odd — she pushed through the hedge, noting dot a few of its scratchy branches were dangerously at eye level.
She made her way around the end of the building where it abutted Elm Street, wondering whether it was the property-owner's responsibility to fix the buckled sidewalk, or the city's, and went out onto the front porch. She'd start at the parking lot, the way visitors, surveyors, and prospective residents and their families would experience the facility. It was easier to breathe outside than in. Rebecca harbored a fantasy that The Tides could someday be air-conditioned, though such a major construction project was quite out of reach now. At this time of year the building was only stuffy, but when she first got here last summer, it had been stifling.
Rebecca walked to the far cast side of the crowded parking lot and turned to look at her facility. A rush of pride made her catch her breath. It looked nice. It looked, if not inviting, at least not hostile or depressing. She could do good things here. She could make her mark.
There were a few pieces of trash along the curb. She picked them up, made a note in her notebook, and started deliberately along the front sidewalk, determined to notice every detail. Not noticing, though, the distortion of air around her, like a double image or the negative of a shadow.
The three people on the porch all noticed it, but none of them reacted. They were all used to seeing and hearing things that couldn't be explained. They didn't react to the bright sun in their eyes, either, didn't squint or turn away or took down. It was as if the sun didn't hurt their eyes, or as if it didn't matter that it hurt.
Petra Carrasco, in fact, didn't give a damn about the glare. Very little mattered to her, or everything mattered so much that she couldn't stand it , Bob's presence beside her on the chair and the thought of him inside her, his sudden and total and tragic absence from her life when he stepped to the edge of the porch to flick ash from his cigarette, her husband's violent death real or imagined, wished for and dreaded, reconstructed in her mind over and over, the warmth of the sun, the nest of red ants she knew had lodged in her rectum, the glare of the sun in her eyes. Petra was crazy. She had been crazy most of her life. She knew she was crazy, and it didn't matter, and it had mattered most of her life so much she couldn't stand it.
There was somebody else in her head. A new voice, one she'd never heard before. Petra cursed out loud. None of the others even looked at her, except Rebecca, who glanced up sharply and was embarrassed to find herself embarrassed and wishing she could think of some morally justifiable way to get Petra to be crazy somewhere other than the front porch.
Petra would screw or blow or jerk off any man in the place for cigarettes, and she always had enough takers to supplement nicely the one pack a day her doctor said she could have. When she went with her husband for the weekend she could still sometimes earn a few dollars, a few pennies, a few beers on the street. Her husband loved her and he beat her for doing other men; he beat her and he loved her because even now, crazy and sick and getting old , however old she was: forty or fifty or sixty even now with the fiery red ants she delighted in telling people about busy inside her rectum, she could still earn more money than he could.
She loved him desperately, though sometimes she forgot who he was. For a long time they wouldn't let her see him because of the things he did to her; then she had thought she would die, had tried to make herself die, was often convinced she was already dead without him. When she took the Thorazine they put it in orange juice or burritos so she wouldn't know it was there, and sometimes she didn't it made her crazy, and when she didn't take it she was a different kind of crazy but crazy still.
Petra opened her blouse to Bob, who didn't seem to notice, although he did notice, furiously. The voice inside her head, a woman's voice brushing like gauze against the inside of Petra's skull, softening, tickling, murmured nice things that Petra couldn't quite make out. Bob got up off the swing again and picked a pine bough and brought it back for her like a bouquet.
Gordon Marek was asleep. Awake. Asleep. He'd been up and down all night. All his life he'd been used to sleeping about three hours, being awake three hours, sleeping another three hours. At the other nursing home they'd made him take a pill so he'd sleep all night and they'd rolled up his bed during the day to keep him out of it. It had worked, they'd established a normal sleeping pattern for him, and he'd felt awful. Here he could listen to the all-night jazz station, sitting on his bed with earphones on, snapping his fingers in approximate time to the music. Several times a night he'd leave his earphones on his bed with music seeping tinnily out of them and go quietly out the side door, against all fire and safety regulations propping it open with his shoe. He'd brush away dirt or snow or pine needles and lift the hidden bottle to his lips, sitting on his haunches under the stars, until the booze hit.
Now his puppy slept warm and round in his lap. A bottle with half an inch of Ripple in it teetered between his feet. Ripple or Thunderbird or Annie Greensprings by now, by the fifteenth of the month when he was back to counting pennies in the bathroom and making booze runs for twenty-five cents commission each from the poor suckers who couldn't get out to get their own. Or wouldn't, wouldn't take the chance. His check from the welfare came on the fifth and then he could do it like it was meant to be done, man; heavy sweet purple port wine, the first long swig going down like an alto sax in his head, the next like the thrum of a big ol' bass, man, the natter and search of drums. Twenty-nine dollars from the welfare every month, and on the sixth and seventh he didn't have to do no favors f
or nobody. But often he did anyhow: a six-pack for the Mexican dude, a sampler Jim Beam the old guy in the wheelchair could hide under the sheet they used to tie him in. It was a rare twenty-nine dollars that Gordon spent entirely on himself. Since he got the puppy, a lot of it went for dog treats.
But now it was the middle of the month, a long time till the next check. Gordon sat back a little, rocking and bouncing on the L-shaped metal supports of the chair, and dozed in his purple haze, which was already beginning to fade from his eight o'clock trek to the liquor store. The puppy rearranged itself in his lap and fell back asleep, too.
All of a sudden Gordon wanted to dance. All of a sudden he was dancing. His feet in their tennis shoes with flopping soles moved on the concrete in a sliding two-step he'd never learned, and his squat body swayed gracefully. Groggily nonplussed, he opened his eyes and looked around to see who was making him do these things, but he was looking outward, which was the wrong direction.
After a few minutes, Gordon sank back into his torpor, which was rather a pleasant state to be in. He stopped moving and his awareness was swaddled again in thoughts of drink. He knew the lady who ran the liquor store was afraid of him and felt sorry for him, both, because he lived in a nursing home. He'd heard her indignant, embarrassed conversations on the phone. 'He's up here again. I feel sorry for him and all that, but you better come and get him and you better keep him out of my place. This is a place of business.'