Interference & Other Stories (10 page)

He stared at the bookshelf. “I'm tired, Patrick. I'm all done. Everybody here is sick of me, including me. I'm sick of myself. I'm boring. I wake up every morning and say ‘Aw, shit.' I'm ready to die. I don't have anybody else to say that to, and that's the truth.”

“The doctor says you're depressed.”

“That dipshit Diebenkorn? He wants me to take some of his happy pills. I told him right where he can tuck his pills. You can't know what it's like to be this tired. The priest here, what's his name—the Polish one—tells me to pray. And I do. Before I fall asleep I pray I don't wake up. Last week they took my belt, my shoelaces, even my hairbrush. Suicide watch. Like I was going to kill myself with a hairbrush. They had a nurses' aide in a chair by the door around the clock. Mostly she slept. One time I woke and saw her there so I clapped my hands and she jerked awake and looked at me. But just for a moment, mind you, then she fell back asleep. For Christ's sake, Patrick, I'm not going to kill myself. I just don't want to out-live myself.”

I was struck, as I listened, with how frail he'd become. His gruffness had hidden his diminishment; maybe that was its function. Though he was still thick around the middle, his arms and legs were thin, shriveled, his wrinkled skin too big for them.

“You take these poor bastards here. Have you seen them?” He pointed to the door. “In pain, every goddamn thing there is to be wrong is wrong with them but they just can't die. Their hearts just keep banging away. You take a heart—I saw this on a TV show one time—you can take a heart out of a dead man's chest, suspend it in saltwater, give it a good electric shock and goddamn if it won't beat. A stupid muscle. Mechanical. I'm all done, Patrick. I'm just waiting for the wagon.”

I leaned forward and touched him on the forearm. While I struggled to think of something to say—everything that occurred to me seemed wrong—he closed his eyes, heaved a loud sigh, and fell asleep. I watched his stubbled face for a while; a medley of muted emotions seemed to play on it until it slackened into a deep slumber.

Absent-minded and fidgety, I took Aristotle from the shelf. Stiff. Brand new. The spine uncracked. I put it back and took up Marcus Aurelius, which was just as unyielding. Virgil, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pascal, Freud—not a single volume had ever been opened.

On my way back to Diebenkorn's office I had to cross an open space near the nurses' station where a dozen or fifteen wheelchairs were arranged in front of a screen, a slide projector behind them. Some of the old people had trays on their wheelchairs; others were kept from falling out by a sheet tied across their chests. A young woman, maybe twenty, an aide, was operating the projector, cracking her gum, asking cheerily as a third grade teacher, “Would anyone like to read this one?” Silence. Across the top of the screen it read, “THIS DAY IN HISTORY. January 26, 1945. The Liberation of Auschwitz.” She cracked her gum again and read aloud: “The Libbershun of Aus, of Awsk, the Lie-ber-a-teeon of Askwits, the Liber. Liberation…” until an old man right in front of her, a long white cowlick rising from his head, rocking hard in his chair against the white sheet holding him, bellowed, “Auschwitz! Auschwitz!”

“Thank you! Boy, I had a lot of trouble with that one!” She changed the slide. “Who wants to read this one for us?”

I got slightly lost before I found my way back to Diebenkorn's office; the layout of the place was like a Parcheesi board, an open square in the middle, the nurses' station at the center of it, and four corridors radiating from there. I'd taken the wrong one and had to interrupt an aide who was in conversation with two others about the pool for Sundays game.

“Have you had your visit?” asked Diebenkorn.

I remained standing. I guess I didn't want to stay any longer than I needed.

“We spoke. He's sleeping now.”

“And? Do you see what I've been saying?”

“He wants to die,” I said. “He says he's finished. He's tired.”

“So you see what I mean. Were concerned for his quality of life.”

“He has no quality of life. He doesn't want to be here.”

“My point. If we treated his depression, he might come round to participating in some of our activities here. The staff tries very hard to match activities to residents' interests. But none of that is of any use if the resident is suffering from depression.”

“Who do you like in the Super Bowl?” I asked him.

“Pardon me?”

“My uncle was a football fan all his life. Now he doesn't care enough to mention the game on Sunday.”

“A deep depression can do that. The bottom line is that depression can be life threatening. And then there are his terrors, his sundowning. As I said, I think we can alleviate his suffering if you'll help us.”

“No.”

“I'm sorry?”

“No. I'm not authorizing any pills.”

“No no, it's not just pills. The medication is only a part of the overall treatment plan.”

“No.”

“You could be saving your uncle's life. Lets give it a try at least.”

I excused myself. Diebenkorn rose behind his desk but did not come around. He asked me to think it over and call him if I changed my mind.

In the hall, Jorge and another aide were trying to get a group of elders to play a game that involved keeping a pink balloon in the air. The ceiling speakers showered Sister Sledge on everyone.

Uncle Danny was still asleep, his jaw slack, tongue resting on his lower lip. I stood by the bed and stared at his momentary peace. The pillow was still on the bookcase. I could hear Jorge in the hall, “Tap it! Tap it! Up! Up! Aw. Okay, we'll try again!” The whole time I kept looking at Jesus adrift and off his cross.

 

As I left, the broken white-haired woman was still in her wheelchair by the door, her useless hand above her head. “Hello dear,” she said.

“Hello.” I smiled at her, and then I bent down close to her and whispered in her ear. “Colonel Mustard,” I said, “with the pillow. In the library.”

Guy scanned the want ads. He was supposed to be looking for a job, of course, but as his eyes moved down the columns, the question of how to make some money quickly swelled into the panicked demand for the missing explanation for his life. Where did he fit? What was he supposed to do with a PhD in ethics?

He continued to scan the page. What the hell was an Assembler? What did an Assembler assemble? What did an Auditor listen to? An Estimator estimate? An Expediter expedite? And what in the name of God was an Oracle Developer?

Guy felt misunderstood. Well, not misunderstood, exactly, so much as not understood at all. As he went about his day, busy with first this and then that, so he went about his trackless life. On a good day he felt the equanimity of the disinterested spectator, bemused by the looks on peoples' faces, the intensity of their exertions, the occasional grace and justice of their actions. On bad days it was as if he were trapped in a meandering joke.

“Quit staring!” said Guys wife.

Gazing into the middle distance, Guy was out of it again, as ifhed passed through a cognitive one-way door and couldn't get back in. His wife, Wanda, was at the table making a list on a special pad of paper with “TO DO” across the top and a vertical row of boxes inviting emphatic checkmarks. Guy understood that her list-making was a kind of prayer, an alignment of her intentions with her energy. One day he spent about half an hour looking at one of her checkmarks: it was, up close, a gorgeous bit of thoughtless grace. In the way it began, downward, hard, and then changed direction, gaining lift and velocity until it vanished, implying itself into the invisible, it was as perfect as any Zen masters brushwork O. Guy's heart swelled with love and appreciation.

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” said Wanda when he tried to tell her, but he could see she was pleased. Wanda had half a dozen items on her list. She paused the slightest moment, never looking up from her paper, then wrote down half a dozen more to fill the sheet. “I'll be gone at least three hours,” she said to Guy as she paused in the doorway. “You have any interviews today?”

Guy looked at her.

“Any prospects?”

“We'll see,” he said.

Prospects, prospects. Anything was possible. Maybe a new species, the next evolutionary tsunami, was swelling in his consciousness even then; maybe there, in the middle distance, the utterly transforming notion of the next, the new, the unforeseen (though perfectly foreseeable in retrospect)
Homo contemplatus
would come to birth among the dust motes glittering in the sun: the pollen, the cat dander, bird down, occasional mosquito, and airborne viral life, all charged with the same command to mutate toward perfection that had long ago inspired that first ancestral ape who, sucking on his fingers and scratching his ass, first glimpsed there, three or four feet from his nose, the irresistible idea of the human. Who could say?

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” Wanda finally said. She turned and harrumphed down the walk, her high heels clicking on the pavement.

Guy watched her behind and thought how lucky he was. He'd had the best education other peoples' money could buy, and he felt some responsibility to all the people who had contributed to his development as a thinker. That responsibility included the commitment to use his gifts responsibly, to “first, do no harm,” and to exercise restraint. To Guy this clearly meant not doing anything at all when he was unsure what to do; not making things worse was, after all, as important as making them better. If he was patient, what he should do would come to him. He felt sure of that. He had determined a long time ago that no matter how many opinions there were about any course of action, no matter how many schools of thought, there was always another, not under discussion, that involved going back to bed.

He went back to bed.

A
jackass, his long ears lying back flat and his big teeth clacking with every word, was preaching a sermon to the assembled creatures. His post as preacher had been acquired by virtue of his loyalty to his master, whose cart he drew wherever he was told; in fact, his loyalty, much remarked upon, was really an abiding hunger for carrots, bunches of which were his for merely going where he was directed and pulling this or that load no questions asked.

He cleared his throat:
Ggrhawwwwwwww!

A pig in the first row farted, loudly.

“Pew!” said the hyena behind him, shrieking with laughter. “Get it? Pew!” and he cracked himself up again, along with all the young nearby whose parents shushed them with stern looks.

“Today,” said the jackass, “it is my sad duty to chastise you, my congregation, for your lasciviousness, your licentiousness, your concupiscence, and … and … and your scriptural, that is to say doctrinal, theological rebelliousness made manifest, shall we say, in the near catastrophic rise in the numbers of you who seem to believe that simply because spring has arrived you are free to frolic and to gambol, that is to say, to fornicate with abandon and at every opportunity!”

The rabbits bowed their heads self-consciously, wrinkling their noses, trying to muster some shame, some remorse, each of them? becoming very quiet and inward-looking, listening for the still, small voice of self-correction, reform, and spiritual renewal, but all they could hear were their own horny little hearts thump-thumping in their soft delicious chests. To a one they resolved to look contrite until the service was over when they could head for the hedgerow lickety-split.

Not so the goat. He curled his lip and snorted; he stepped into the center aisle of the chapel and stomped the hard polished floor with a forehoof.

The jackass went on preaching. “Think on these things my brethren. Examine your conscience.”

The pig let out a long, almost musical belch, echoed soon after by the mockingbird in the choir loft. The goat brought up some cud and chewed it, mulling the preachers words.

“Ought there not to be in this world a race of creatures disciplined to restrain themselves, to submit to law and reason those bestial appetites that drive the merely pleasure-seeking weaklings among us? You know who you are, my brethren, stunted in your spiritual growth—you fornicators, lotus-eaters, profligates!”

The goat gulped back his cud and stomped the floor again. “You carrot-chomping, bucktoothed hypocrite!” he said. “You cannot, so you preach that we shall not. Your father was a horse, your mother a mule, and you are worse than a gelding, you bio-engineered hack! You cannot mate! You cannot reproduce! He begrudges us, dear friends, what he cannot have. I'll have no more of this garbage!” And with that, the goat clomped down the aisle and out the doors of the chapel.

This was news to the congregation and set them to mumbling and fumbling from the pews, filing out of the place and looking for places among the shrubs and tall grasses where they might take their private pleasures guiltlessly.

The jackass, from his pulpit, brayed and brayed to the empty pews.

When the jackasss master heard the story of that Sabbath morning, he did what all masters do—he thought about how to turn the situation to his own advantage. First he set about buying all the available carrots, lettuce, radishes, and what stores of nuts and apples had been laid by. Then he bought whatever property, especially tillable land, that he didn't own already.

Soon everyone was mighty hungry. Those few heads of lettuce that anyone might grow, those few hidden nuts wrapped in a rag in a drawer, became as precious as gold and nearly as expensive to buy. And of course with all that procreation going on, soon there were many more mouths to feed. The situation became desperate. Luckily, the jackass's master had been watching closely for the moment when his philanthropic impulses might be exercised to the greatest good and to his greatest advantage. The word went forward across the land that plenty of lettuce, radishes, seeds, apples, nuts, fruits, and hay were to be distributed after the services at the chapel each week, right after the sermon, and that all—pigs, cows, horses, sheep, all manner of birds, squirrels, and rabbits—were welcome. Everyone but the goat.