And then there was you, me, us, red and black in the evening light lost to the wearing of hats and eager to return to stories that used to make some sense eager to recall easily demarcated boundaries of identity and designation and eager to resketch the likenesses of faces that were either familiar or desired wanting in the darkness of the wee hours which were no smaller than the rest to smell cooking that promised to free all of us from the chains of understanding yes ourselves and all those we loved or hated sought or dismissed the beautifulest of all visible things the lightning strikes of summer the stars the nebulae the nebulæ for only etymology’s sake some sea tempest and thus awaiting in an alley then to that day with a vacant hugeness of loss looming we counted our weapons one of us anyway and aligned with our comrades and lined the halls with maps of our plans and stretched all things to their limits the budding disleafing and felling of trees notwithstanding my skull a great blue vault with eyebrows and anger in its large awkward gianthood rustling like some human noise in a forest a howling wind with no place to go a Brobdingnagian with a clumsy ham-fisted gait pretended to seek refuge while raising a hammer stood in a doorway prepared to fight in rude corridors and terrible closets and on beaches from which south extended until it stopped left unexplained left untouched left strange like a glance through a glass pane without a frame without an agent for beauty is a witch and did not we feel it so that the wretched made for lousy company not cheerful at all while hell and purgatory and paradise blended like clay on one spinning table upon which also rested my peaceable disposition until rough and then far rougher weather upset that temperament and forced me into that perplexing jungle that deep root-riddled tangle of wilderness that was myself
In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.
34
A pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the sun.
Emily Kuratowski had in life been married to a mathematician, she liked to tell people. She had been one as well but seldom mentioned that. She told me once that she had spent her life working on projective limit topology and canonical projections and she even tried to explain it a bit to me, but my glazed-over look made her smile politely and pat my twenty-year-younger head. That is why I don’t think about these things anymore, she said. I would rather eat cherries and think about the wind. Emily was what kids in my day used to call walleyed, but was called later lazy eyed. In her case her left eye pointed slightly out and so she suffered exotropia. She and I talked about that and I told her that the condition sounded more like a nice place to visit. She told me that her husband had worked on ring theory. I didn’t understand his problem and neither did he, she said. And none of it served him in life. He died bitter and, finally, unsolved. She picked up her yellow cup from the tray in front of her and drank through the bendable straw. I’m feeling a little better now. God, I hate this hospital.
Emily had money problems, stemming, she told me, from her inability to balance a checkbook. Oh, I can explain the Hausdorff maximal principle or Banach-Tarski paradox, but don’t ask me to subtract seven from twelve. My husband was even worse, insofar as he had his head stuck so far up his ass he could smell his own breath.
You must have loved him, I said.
I suppose I did for a while. Then we just got wrapped up in life and work and love and the idea of it just fell away.
That’s sad.
If it hadn’t been for my constant affairs it would have been.
I laughed.
He never noticed. He never could have noticed. He never would have wanted to notice. If he had noticed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have understood.
Too much in the clouds?
Too stupid. Thank god we never had any children.
I thought you had a daughter.
I do.
Oh. Just how old are you, Emily? My question came off as indelicate, I think, but she didn’t mind.
I’m ninety-nine. Palindromic ninety-nine. At this age I look the same coming as I do going. And before you ask I have no sentimental or egotistical desire to reach one hundred for the mere sake of doing it. One hundred is not a terribly interesting number. In the Qur’an there are ninety-nine names for Allah. That’s a funny thing for a Jew to know, isn’t it?
We end up knowing all sorts of funny things. Imagine how many of them we forget in a lifetime.
Or two.
Or two.
35
The dining room was quiet and then quieter when Harley and his henchmen walked in. They made their noises and stood like weeds near the salad bar. Harley smiled. So, the keys have turned up, he said. I’d like to know who took them, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Anyway, thank you. But know that I am still angry. This is my kingdom. He rocked there on those words for a prolonged moment, then repeated, This is my kingdom. He walked out, his workers on his pheromone trail.
I looked at the faces in the room. None was terrified, but none was happy. They had all come to terms with the idea and the reality of death, but a change in the suffering along the path to death was unsettling. At their ages, they had a right to expect routine, even in pain, even in torment.
The regional inspector is coming tomorrow, Sheldon whispered to me.
The feckless, perhaps shiftless, certainly slothful regional inspector made four visits a year to our facility. If he was not somehow profiting from whatever the Gang of Six was about, then he was at least so incompetent that a complaint to him would prove meaningless. Also, the residents were just too intimidated by Harley and his thugs to be seen speaking to him. Yet, for some reason, beyond me and probably any sane person, I was going to have a conversation with him. Just looking at him, in his plaid jacket and chinos and oversized metal-framed glasses, I imagined him with his father, a hidebound pedant without knowledge of man’s nature or of a boy’s, giving lesson after lesson to this dutiful dolt, in some dead language of morality. In other words, he was a Christian, and not the good kind. He was a spit-hurling, brow-raking participle grinder. How are we doing? What are we eating today? Speaking of sleeping, are we sleeping well and doing our exercises and going here, there, hither, and yond?
We’ve got a problem, I said to Finley Snerd. I kid you not.
We’re having a problem?
Yes, some of the orderlies are abusive.
I’m seeing the problem. You’re telling me that some of the orderlies are abusing the residents?
That’s exactly what I just told you. I refused to be sucked into his participle gurgling vortex. We were sitting rather conspicuously at a picnic table on the lawn and I saw the brute Leon see us. He nodded his monster’s head.
What sort of abuse are the residents experiencing?
Neglect. Mental and emotional ill treatment. I suspect there is some extortion.
I’m listening and telling you that these are serious allegations.
I am aware of this.
Are you willing to name names?
Harley, Leon, Ramona, Tommy, and Billy. And let me not forget Cletus. I’d like you to write this down, all of it. They killed William Marshall.
You’re telling me they were responsible for him dying?
That’s what killed means.
Keep going.
They attacked his room, his life. They damaged a photograph of his deceased daughter, it was very special to him, an extension of his being, and that upset him so much that he moved too quickly, fell and hit his head.