Interference & Other Stories (9 page)

The young woman shook her head. “Not me, oh no. I mean I would go, of course, if I got sent, but why would somebody want to?”

“A lot of people want to fight. Look at the world. A lot of people want to fight. Sometimes they ask me if I ever have any second thoughts about joining up.”

“I didn't ask you either of those things.”

“I know. That's good.”

“Because I know you'd have to tell me what you think I want to hear.”

“Girl, there you go again. Why you want to be like that now?”

“I'm just saying. I mean, it's your job to get me to join.”

“I'm trying to help you to join.”

“I know. I know. And I appreciate it. I already know I want to do it. This is the only chance I got to do what I want. But you know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish you would tell me that you understand because the Marines were your only chance, too. Because I see that. That's not hard to see. I'd just feel better if you told me, like, ‘Me too' “

“Whatever. That don't make much sense to me. We better go back to the office and get some new forms.”

The waiter came with the check, a saucer of pineapple chunks with toothpicks, and two fortune cookies; he gathered up the dishes.

The Marine offered the cookies to the young woman, and after she had taken one, he cracked the other and opened the strip of paper.

“What does yours say?” the young woman asked him.

“I think this one is yours! It says,
Gather wise counsel, then delay no more”

“And you're the wise counsel, right?”

“You should listen to the rooster!” He held up his hands, his palms toward her, and smiled.

“Mine is
Nothing is sometimes the best thing to do.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I think it means that you should send the forms in that I gave you.”

“But why? To see if I was right that they'll reject you?

“I want to know that this is right for me. If they don't think I could be a good Marine because of things that happened to me, then I believe them. And if you, the Marines, can't help me fly or be a doctor, I don't want to join ‘cause those are the things I want to do.”

The Marine leaned toward her across the table. “I tried to tell you how it works, that's all.”

“So send my application in. Just like it is.”

The waiter arrived with the check and a brown bag folded down and stapled at the top. The Marine sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He took out his wallet. “I can't believe they don't have pupu platter,” he said. “What kind of Chinese restaurant don't have pupu platter?”

“Here,” she said, holding out some money. “This is for my soup.”

“No no, the Corps pays for this. It's in my budget. It's on the Corps.”

“No thanks, Corps.” She shook the bills at him.

“I'm not taking that.”

“Then leave it for a tip.” She shrugged, put the money on the table, and began to slide from the booth.

“I don't get you, girl.”

“That's right,” she said. “I get that. I can see that.”

M
y sister Colleen called late last Thursday and asked me to visit our Uncle Danny at the nursing home where Danny Jr. had to put him when he couldn't care for himself. The truth is that all the home health agencies refused to send their people to his house anymore, he abused them so badly. The men were all thieves who had come to take care of him only as a way to case the house for future burglaries that, of course, never took place. The women, he was absolutely certain, wanted him to make love to them, and all their protests to the contrary were merely evidence that, being young, they were not as perceptive about their erotic urges as he. After nine aides from four agencies, including one plain-clothes nun from Corpus Christi community outreach who lasted all of twenty minutes, Danny Jr. had run out of options.

So I went. Last week. It fell to me because there's just the three of us at this point out of the whole family: me, Colleen, and Danny Jr., and he's someplace in Afghanistan, looking for bin Laden I guess. Danny Jr. wanted to transfer power of attorney to me in the event that any medical decisions would have to be made, and I agreed that that made sense.

The first thing I saw when the receptionist buzzed me in was an old woman in a wheelchair bent almost double with her elbow on the armrest and her bony hand, ropy with blue veins, waving around above her head. She looked like somebody trying to make a shadow puppet of a swan. “Hello dear,” she said.

“Hello. How are you?”

“Hello dear.”

“Hello,” I said again.

“Hello dear.”

Music came from metal discs, perforated like showerheads, mounted in the ceiling at regular intervals so that the volume ebbed and swelled as I walked the long corridor—awful disco stuff, Donna Summer I think.

When I asked at the desk for Uncle Danny's room number, the nurse told me to wait and got on the phone. It was as if they were expecting me. “If you'll wait right here, sir, Dr. Diebenkorn would like to speak with you,” she said as she hung up. “He's our medical director.”

“Is something the matter with my uncle?”

She smiled or smirked, a little bit of both, and looked at me steadily. I felt a little embarrassed; she was right, it was a stupid question to ask in here. Of course something was the matter. Something was always the matter. You could smell that much, for godsake. Aides were pushing wheelchairs everywhere. The halls were full of slumped and sleeping white-haired people. A rhythmic shrieking punctuated Donna Summer pouring from the showerheads.

“I'm Dr. Diebenkorn, Lewis Diebenkorn,” he said offering his hand. Clean-shaven, bow tie, bright smile, good grip.

I introduced myself.

“If you'd be so kind, I'd like a word about your uncles condition.” He put a hand on my forearm as if there were, or were going to be, a secret between us. “My office is just down the hall” He turned away and I was clearly expected to follow him. Maybe it was that, that imperious body language, but already, trailing him into his office, I didn't trust him.

“Sit down. Sit down.”

I did so and took the envelope from Danny Jr. from my pocket.

“Your uncle is a difficult resident to care for. You probably realize that.” He brought his hands together as if in prayer and rested his chin on his fingertips. “But I'm getting ahead of myself. Excuse me. How would you describe your relationship to your uncle? If you don't mind my asking. Would you say you're close?”

What was this about? “Yes. Well, we were close when my sister and I were little. I haven't seen him in a long time.” I thought of the kitchen table at his house, the one with the shaky leg where we played endless rounds of card games and Monopoly, and Clue, which was always our favorite. We sat there after school or on Sunday after church, my uncle chain smoking, drinking a can of beer, using an empty for an ashtray, Colleen and Danny Jr. and I with our glasses of Tang, trying to determine if Professor Plum or Mrs. Peacock or Mr. Green was the murderer, with the rope or the gun or the candlestick, and where—in the billiard room or the conservatory or the ballroom. We learned to ask questions, to challenge the answers, to notice everything and arrive at the truth through a series of deductions.

“He hasn't had a visitor in quite some time,” Diebenkorn said.

I explained that there were few of the family left and that Colleen was a single mom and Danny Jr. was overseas. I also let him know—I held up the envelope—that Danny Jr. had transferred power of attorney to me. I'd read it over and it was pretty straightforward: no heroic measures if his heart stopped, no life support, no autopsy. The autopsy part was especially important to Uncle Danny, who took great pride in the fact that he had never had surgery; he'd “never been cut,” he would always tell us, as if that proved he'd taken good care of himself when, in fact, he'd abused his body nearly every way he could. I handed the envelope to Diebenkorn and while he examined the form, I looked around. The whole office was furnished in fake cherry from Staples. Along with his degree were various plaques that said Best this and #1 that. And of course a crucifix; it was a Catholic nursing home, after all. Not a crucifix as I remembered it from boyhood though, the plaster Christ with sunken eyes rolled up to heaven, blood dripping down his face, his beard, an open gash in his side, hanging heavy from the spikes in his palms; this Christ was robed and chasubled and floating half an inch in front of a plus sign, aluminum or pewter, bloodless and serene.

“Thank you for this,” Diebenkorn said. “I feel more at liberty to talk with you now. You uncle has been refusing treatment and is, in my opinion as a physician, suffering needlessly. I'm sure you will see what I mean when you visit with him. We would like to start him on a medication for his depression.”

“Depression”

“Yes.”

“Hes eighty-seven years old.”

“That's neither here nor there, if you don't mind my saying so. We have three residents here at Mercy Manor who are ten years older than that. And quite healthy, I might add.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn't.

“We also expect that treatment would help with his sundowning as well.” He went on to explain to me that many elders in “settings such as this” seem to lose their bearings as the day wears on, becoming disoriented and delirious, a form of pseudodementia that corrects itself by morning. “It can make the night a terrifying experience,” he said.

One night, he told me, Uncle Danny had got it in his head that he was a prisoner of war, that he'd been caught behind enemy lines. He gave the aides a hell of a time, insisting he had to escape and rejoin his unit, calling them Nazi bastards, saying they'd get theirs when his unit arrived. Diebenkorn seemed to think this was amusing, or else he thought I would find it amusing. In either case, I refrained from telling him that my uncle had, in fact, been a Nazi prisoner during World War II. It was a subject he would never talk about, not a word. “We had to administer a sedative. Actually, we've had to do that several times. I have all his charts here showing the necessity of our medicating him, if you'd like to review them.”

“I only came to visit him,” I said. “I'd like to see him.”

His desk computer dinged. E-mail. He glanced at the screen and turned back to me. “I'm going to ask you, as his power of attorney, to authorize us to treat his depression. I want to try an antidepressant first, and if that doesn't give him some relief, some ECT.”

“And I can authorize this? Without his consent? Even though I haven't seen him for six or seven years?”

“You have power of attorney. And I can document that he is no longer competent to act in his own best interest.”

“I want to visit with him.”

“Of course you do.” He pressed the intercom and summoned an aide, who arrived a few awkward moments later. “If I'm not here when you finish your visit, please have me paged. We'll need to talk again before you go.”

The scene outside the office was chaotic and strange, a mix of lively staff and inert elders. My escort, Jorge, explained that it was Super Bowl Week and that the whole place was several days into a morale-building competition called the Care Bowl in which staff were awarded plus or minus points for different tasks: room cleanliness, resident grooming, and general cheerfulness were all subject to the awarding of points or demerits, and the staff members with the highest tally by the big game on Sunday would get a free dinner and a movie for two. We walked by a group of elders who were being urged to throw a foam rubber football into a wastebasket set up for the purpose. As we walked, Jorge let me know that Uncle Danny wasn't doing much to help his score, that he wouldn't even get out of bed. Jorge knocked on the door and announced, “Mr. Quinn, we have a visitor for you.”

My uncle was propped in his bed and writhing in distress over a pillow behind him he couldn't reach. “Give me a hand here, willya? Take this one out. Take it out!” I extracted the pillow and managed to arrange the others to his satisfaction. I put the pillow on top of the plywood bookcase next to his bed. I remembered that bookcase from boyhood. His proudest possession, it was filled with The Great Books, Every month another would arrive in the mail and take its proper place in the bookcase the publisher sent to each subscriber. On the wall above the bookcase was another hydroponic Christ drifting off his holy rood.

“So, Patrick, what brings you here?” I sat in the high-backed vinyl chair next to him. Even now, thinking back on that day, I'm moved by the look he gave me then. And don't dare bullshit me, it said.

“Came to see how you're doing,” I said. His eyes narrowed, scanned mine. “How's Danny?”

“He's fine, I guess. He hasn't caught Osama yet.” He kept his gaze on me and I read the fear behind it. “Uncle Danny, I wouldn't lie to you.”

“Ha,” he said. “Do me a favor. Raise me up with that thingamajig. Just a little.”

Jorge knocked and asked if he could get us anything. “You can get the fuck out of here,” said Uncle Danny. “I'm talking to my nephew. Georgy Porgy, that's what I call him. Christ, he's in here every five minutes trying to get me to go and finger-paint with the biddies in the rec room.”

“He's trying to take care of you.”

“Aw, you can't leave a fart in this place without somebody sniffing it and writing down what it smelled like. How's your sister? She get married yet?”

I told him that Colleen was happy. That her daughter Tanya had just turned three.

“I always figured her for a nun, you know. I remember how she used to carry all those holy cards in her little purse. You with your baseball cards and her with her saints.”

I took the opportunity to steer the conversation to good memories. My good memories of him. I can't remember anyone in our family ever saying thank you or sorry, at least not to one another, but we certainly communicated gratitude or apology in other ways. Nothing was ever direct. I wanted to find a way to say thank you and sorry I hadn't been to see him in so long. I think he knew I was appreciative. The whole time I reminisced, he looked away. I tried to make him laugh with the story about the time Danny Jr. caught him cheating, sneaking a peek at the three cards in the envelope during a pee break while we were playing Clue. But he put his hand over his face as if I were freshly accusing him. “I see you've got all your books here. Catching up on your reading?”