HE STILL WASN’T FULLY SURE WHAT HE WAS SUPPOSED TO DO, however.
“Just move around, circulate,” Maria told him. “Ask someone what their name is, then tell them yours. It’s like a cocktail party but no cocktails.” She gave him a friendly little shove into the Great Room and he looped the long table, waving to anyone who made eye contact, hopeful for an invitation to linger. But nobody was inclined to speak with him, and he only continued walking. At the back of the room the woman named Jill was again at her card table, working on another puzzle. Bob was stepping up to greet her when he noticed the man in the electronic wheelchair and big beret sitting in the opposite corner beneath a wall-mounted television. This scenario struck Bob as the more promising of the two; he crossed over and pulled up a chair. The man in the big beret was watching a tennis match, men’s singles; Bob took advantage of his distraction to make a thorough inspection of his features: a countenance of high, true ugliness. The ample flesh of his face was mottled with inky purple staining, so that he looked as if he’d been poisoned or gassed; he had a broad and pitted nose destroyed by burst vessels; he had no eyebrows or eyelashes, and his eye whites were pink going red. These elements came together to form the picture of a man with unhealthy habits and gargantuan appetites running unchecked across the length of several decades. But there was also an animation about him that spoke of a defiant life force; something like joy, but mutant.
In a little while a nurse with a NANCY name tag and a gold crucifix necklace approached pushing a cart. “Snack time, boys,” she said. The cart held four rows of rounded lumps, ten lumps per row, half of them whiteish and furred, the other half dark brown and resembling brains in modeled miniature. “And who are these gentlemen?” asked the man in the big beret.
“Peanut butter balls and raisin balls.”
“Which are what, exactly?”
“Peanut butter balls are peanut butter rolled into balls and covered with coconut flakes. Raisin balls are just raisins mashed together.”
“And who fabricated them?”
“I did.”
“Can I assume you wore gloves?”
Nurse Nancy looked at Bob fatiguedly, as if for a witness. She brightened when she realized she’d not met him before. “Are you new?” she asked.
“Yes, hello, I’m here by the AVA.”
Now her face became cold, she wheeled the cart backward, away from Bob. “I’m sorry, but the snacks are not for volunteers.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Bob told her. He hadn’t wanted to partake of the snacks even a little bit. But she remained wary, as if Bob might try to lunge and snap up one of the balls when she wasn’t paying attention. The man in the big beret had put on a pair of reading glasses and now was looking over the cart with his head tilted back. “Is there a shortage of food in the pantry?” he asked. “Because it seems to me these are some bullshit snacks.”
“Actually, there is a shortage. And if you think it’s fun to try to piece together a healthy nutritional program from what they’ve given me in there, then why don’t you do me a favor and think again. Also, I believe I’ve already told you what I think about your language, have I not?”
“You did tell me, but it must have slipped my mind.” He took his reading glasses off. “Brass tacks, Nance. How many can I have?”
“How many do you want?”
“How many can I have?”
“You can have two.”
“Two of each?”
Nurse Nancy looked over her shoulder and back, nodded discreetly, and the man in the big beret lifted four balls from the cart, setting them one at a time in a line up his broad forearm. Nurse Nancy wheeled the cart away and the man ate his snacks, quickly and efficiently, looking into space as he chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed. After he was done, then he was at peace; he wiped the crumbs from his palm and held out a hand for Bob to shake. “Linus Webster.” He asked Bob his name and Bob told him. “Bob Cosmic? What are you, in show business?” Bob was restating his name when Linus Webster became distracted by the television and began wagging his hand to call for quiet. A quartet of female players took to the tennis court and he was turning up the volume on the remote control, loud and louder, far louder than was necessary, or appropriate. The game commenced. The noises the players made filled up the space of the center, heartfelt declarations of physical exertion which were also, in any other context, obscene. Jill was twisted all the way around in her chair, glaring at Linus. “He’s doing it again!” she called out. Bob caught Jill’s eye and waved; she stared blankly back. Over the sound of the television, he asked, “How’s your thumbs?” Jill recoiled. “How’s yours?” she demanded. Bob shook his head and explained, “Your thumbs, last time I was here, you couldn’t feel them, don’t you remember?” A look of glad remembrance crept onto her face. “Oh yeah,” she said, then turned back to the wall and resumed her puzzle work. Linus, meanwhile, had propped his head against his wheelchair’s headrest and was basking in his audio experience when Nurse Nancy returned to snatch up the remote from his hand and mute the television. She was breathing heavily, glaring into Linus’s face. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
Linus asked, “If God didn’t want us to appreciate the grunts of others, why did He invent them in the first place?”
“Okay, hey, guess what? You just got your television privileges revoked for twenty-four hours. Maybe you’d better just go to your room, have a rest, and think about things.”
“Seems to me I’ve thought about things enough for one lifetime. But the resting part sounds all right.” Linus winked at Bob and drove his chair out of sight. There came the sound of a muffled clanking from within the walls of the building; a ramshackle elevator that delivered the residents to their rooms on the second and third floors. Nurse Nancy said, “You shouldn’t encourage that one.” She pulled up a chair and began channel surfing. She landed on a religious program and Bob went away from the television, thinking to try his luck once more at the long table.
He took a seat, asking those sitting nearby how they were doing. The answers came in the shape of soft noises rather than hard language, but the general mood, so far as Bob could tell, was one of subdued disappointment: things were not going badly, it was true — but no one could claim they were going very well, either. Chip sat just across the table from Bob, and she was apparently looking directly at him, but as she was outfitted in her traditional ensemble it was impossible to say for sure. He waved; she did not wave back.
In the middle of the table sat a caddy filled with safety scissors, paste, and mismatched scraps of paper. Recalling his library days, when it sometimes fell to him to entertain groups of children, Bob took up a sheet of red construction paper, snapped it flat, and folded it onto itself, over and over, into an accordion shape. He was working with a combination of casualness and care that awakened the curiosity of certain of his neighbors; by the time he took up a pair of scissors and started cutting away at the folded paper, they all had been hooked into the mystery of what this newcomer was up to. When at last he unfolded the paper and revealed a bowed chain of hand-holding doll shapes, he saw that his ploy to engage was a success: he had surprised these men and women, he had distracted them, even impressed them. Some among the group wanted instruction, that they might make their own paper chain, and Bob gave a brief tutorial. It was not long before the group lost interest, but Bob was satisfied by this first contact.