“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~Muriel Rukeyser
There was never a concrete reason to dislike medical facilities, not until he was diagnosed with Fuchs Dystrophy by an ophthalmologist.
The progressive eye disease afflicts endothelial cells in the corneas, and reduces their ability to shed moisture. Short of corneal transplants, he was obliged to treat his eyes nightly with a saline ointment before bed, since it was during these hours that most damage occurred. Fuchs was rare, hereditary, and more common among women than men. He could produce no family members with this disorder, and wondered if his eyes were one more casualty of his benzodiazepine discontinuation syndrome.
Prescription drugs given him to combat his original constellation of symptoms included powerful sleep drugs, which extended his poor sleep by several hours: from his pre-syndrome average of eight up to nine or ten and a half. Though he slept under a fan, which, he believed, could only help with the edema in his outer eyes, he had also started wearing a sleep mask around the time he developed his post-benzos sleep disorder: The mask only further marinaded his eyes and cut them off from evaporation.
He had worn the mask for six years.
The symptoms of Fuchs were nearly identical to cataracts, and included washed-out colors, which was of importance to the painter. These developments were not of the moment, however, and what brought him here did not involve himself but another family member.
Under a light mantle of sweat, the nephew stared into the mostly empty box and could only think it was strict adherence to rules that staffers at the nursing home had not tossed out his aunt’s few possessions: a travel-size tube of hand moisturizer, three get well cards, and a pair of inexpensive house slippers.
The orderly who proffered the box appeared perplexed under a day-old beard, which he scratched like a cat would a settee.
“Have I seen you before?“ inquired Liam darkly. “Did you work at the hospital?”
Something close to terror reached across the young man’s face. He quickly pulled in his expression and chortled after a nervous shrug. “I’ve never worked there,” he said. His eyes grew dramatically wider. “Do not imagine that I worked there.”
Shrinking curtly from the counter, the man exited the vicinity. Only a draft in the hallway remained to escort the visitor out of the building.
The box and its contents were carried to the first available exterior door, yet having strayed into a service area, only a steep elevated ramp where laundry trucks made pickups and deliveries was confronted. Liam was doubling back over his steps when a voice shot out a dim doorway across from him.
“There’s another way out, but you must be careful.”
An elderly gentleman, in an albescent drawstring gown, held forth a urine specimen in a beaker.
“Way out?” was the cautious reaction to him.
The barefooted resident inched closer and made a frightful peek around the corner. He gestured with his sloshing bottle of fluid. “Two doors, side by side,” he explained, “and it can be no accident.” (These instructions would not be simple.) “When you approach, be mindful of someone watching you. If this person does not see you, you will pass through one door and see your fetch passing through the second door. If, on the other hand, you are seen, you will not see yourself exit the second door.”
Liam’s humoring nod masked his confusion. He thought this was perhaps someone suffering from dementia who was left unattended, so looked around for an orderly.
The man’s eyes did not veer from the drab, encroaching corridor. “I cannot tell you how it will be,” he said. “I am too scared to attempt it myself.” The urine again splashed, striking the tile floor and the resident patient’s exposed toes. “This other person is looking for God, you see—for God in light waves. He is a fool, because God is two steps ahead: deferring to expectation, collapsing like a wave function… God becomes another lallygagging particle passed on the street, bound to gravity, and looking for a vending machine that takes dollar bills.”
The listener smiled and listed, hinting that his participation in the science lesson was over. The senior withdrew through the tenebrous cavity that produced him, and the search for a suitable exit resumed.
Trained vines framed a set of double plate glass doors constituting the main entrance. A kiosk sat across from them, although the individual manning it was no one born of a sinister imagination. This was another little old man, only swarthy and with a head full of chalk white hair. His collar was starched; and his grin, atrophied. All he offered were free calendars, but was otherwise a smiling coat rack.
Liam said nothing to him, and past out the door without incident; no doppelgänger was spotted brushing a hedge. He was almost to the sidewalk when rapping fingernails drew his attention around to one of the tinted doors. The man from the kiosk materialized out of the murky dark blue glass and, like an icosahedral die in a Magic Eight Ball bearing fortune, gestured the visitor to return.
“This fell from your box,” he explained, holding forth a calendar.
“That is not mine,” said the other.
“Then it belonged to your family member.”
The recipient did not understand the contrived reason for unloading the calendar, unless this goodwill ambassador had a quota to meet. The gift was accepted, and the anxious pneumatic door ended their business.
Due to its dubious provenance, the calendar was removed from the box of his aunt’s possessions on his return home. It was the sort of kitsch one found in bookstore discount bins, although a preponderance of pinks, blues, and violets meant that a yellow ink plate was omitted from the printing process. (Perhaps the nursing home got the defected calendars in a markdown.)
A passage of Bible Scripture accompanied each image, with the exceptions of November and December, which, as months, were missing. This was either intentional or ironic since the theme of the calendar was inferred to be, from its lack of human figures, The Rapture. Otherwise the artist could only proclaim this to be a simple presentation of landscapes, such as found on laminated dinner place mats in similar discount bins.
Initiative was taken in tacking the staple-bound calendar to a wall, though no important date came to mind to pencil into it. The selected month was September.
The paired picture offered a looming mountain over a spent campfire and tent in a forest clearing. Pristine snow surrounded the site. One might suppose someone slept in the blue tent. Little in the accompanying Bible verse informed an interpretation. The words “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh,” suggested an inconvenient time.
Hanging this calendar was the nephew’s one pitiful attempt at home decoration, yet it indicated nothing of his taste. Few possessions were brought with him when he moved into his aunt’s house, and as the new custodian he could not explain his unease about disturbing her belongings. It was several weeks before he changed the bedding. Similarly, her clothes were left hanging in the closet while his remained in boxes on the floor.
The one exception to this were prescription bottles, which formed a trail leading from cupboards in the kitchen to the night table. Those furthest away were better organized, while those in easy reach of the bed lay in a haphazard arrangement, with many pills spilled behind the headboard. One might impose a timeline of distress to these developments, where the original resident moved with faltering steps backwards into immateriality.
These bottles and their contents had been removed to a shoebox.
Bedroom furniture with no obvious home was parked along a wall in the central hallway. (This was harder to ignore.) A jewelry box jutted precariously from the corner of the high chest of drawers like a finial. His aunt’s scoliosis denied her access to its contents for years, though it appeared she had coaxed the object (or at least the doily under it) as close to the ledge as she dared without risk of toppling it.
A decision was made about moving the obstructing chest after dinner, but the mover’s first shove succeeded only in sending the jewelry box crashing to the floor and scattering its treasure. Once this setback was cleared away, relocation to a pantry was completed. A cobweb of baroque ambition, drooping from the pull-down attic stairs hatch in the ceiling in the same hallway, was swept away in the bargain, making this the happy occasion of two birds and one stone.
Liam tended to lighter sleep toward the predawn hours. He believed, among his many tribulations, that his pineal gland made insufficient amounts of melatonin, and failed, in manner of course, to produce a proper induction of sleep and then to maintain it.
Transient hallucinations sometimes accompanied this weak sleep onset, where thalamic sensory gating processes failed to tune out external stimuli, leading to abrupt, error-prone interpretations of his surroundings, which urgently brought him back to the brink of consciousness: Voices were heard in the hallway outside his bedroom, and then distinctly at his bedside.
That evening he awoke before sunrise with inexplicable alarm. Emotion connected to a pale, vaguely swaying shape past his bedroom doorway. He intuited, before the situation was understood, that this was no threatening outline but a piteous one. In profile, an elderly woman swatted at the attic latch chain with the broad end of a broom. This chain was not the material object of her occupation but, rather, the cobweb no longer hanging below it. She failed to comprehend that the current resident had removed it. If not for her sickly complexion, he may have missed the aunt; and if not for her staring up in defeat, sympathy may have eluded him.
Surrendering her effort, this last shadowy place in the house swallowed its ghost and, too, Liam’s conviction about having seen it.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.