Final Stroke Page 8

  As a commercial for Dodge trucks played soundlessly, Betty con tinued stacking magazines, and talking. “That guy from the first floor isn’t even here tonight. Probably sleeping while he can. Yeah, every body sleeping like babies just the way they should.”

  When she finished stacking magazines, Betty sat back in one of the chairs, gave off a sigh, and stared at the large screen television. A commercial for Depends had come on and she smiled at this, shaking her head as she stood up and left the television lounge.

  Now it was quiet in the third floor television lounge. So quiet, the music that had just started playing in one of the resident’s rooms could be heard down the hallway. It was melancholy music consisting of a solo violin wailing sadly in a minor key.

  Sometimes, since his stroke, Steve would catch himself feeling an odd attachment to a man in the past. At first he assumed it was his father. Although he did not remember his father, he’d been told his father died when he was a young man. He’d also been told his father had dark brown eyes like his eyes and that the fixation might be his at tempt to recapture his own past. Perhaps, in his search for a con nection to the past, his mind had played tricks on him. Perhaps that was the reason for being obsessed with an odd array of males like the mysterious man with dark eyes and Dwayne Matusak and Sergeant Joe Friday and Jimmy Carter, and even Sandor Lakatos, the Hungar ian violinist. Perhaps his obsession with Lakatos was not a connection with the recent past, but with a distant past, his stroke having cleared the slate sufficiently so eventually he would be condemned to wander farther and farther back in time, farther and farther away from the world to which he belonged.

  Initially, Lakatos played alone, his violin weeping. But then the czardas began, the rest of the orchestra joining in until the finely tuned melody of earlier turned to chaos.

  When the Lakatos tape ended and the cassette player turned itself off, Steve lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He thought of this final piece on the Lakatos tape as a metaphor for his stroke. First would be the single violin, minding its own business. Then would come the speeding up, many violins and clarinets and the cimbalom join ing in. Finally the melody would change into the rapid whirl of the czardas finale. Within the whirl of music he imagined a weak blood vessel failing. He imagined that single blood vessel as a broken violin string, and he imagined the initial solo a wailing dirge made by violin strings for their brother whom they knew would eventually explode within his cranium. Even though he knew he had an ischemic stroke and not a hemorrhagic stroke, he still visualized blood vessels bursting in his brain.

  Although the nightlight in the room was mounted low on the wall between closet door and bathroom door, and although it was aimed at the floor, the shine of the tile floor reflected upward. Some nights the nightlight was out, the high wattage bulbs apparently overheat ing because of the metal enclosure. When he first arrived at Hell in the Woods, he complained about nights without the nightlight while maintenance took their sweet time getting around to replacing the bulb. Once he even got out his pocket thesaurus and tried to come up with words to suggest to the maintenance man that it might be better if they used twenty-five watt bulbs instead of the hundred-watters he could see on the guy’s cart. That was back when he could barely speak and had to use the thesaurus to come up with words. Now that he was off the thesaurus and probably could manage to get out his suggestion, he didn’t give a damn. Just like he didn’t give a damn about the stu pidity of building a rehab center ten miles from one of the world’s busiest airports.

  The new guy who repeated, “H-A-W-K, Hawk! H-A-W-K, Hawk!” over and over wheeled past. When the guy was finally out of hearing, he heard Phil across the hall say “Jesus fuck,” in a low voice.

  When Steve turned on his side away from the glare of the nightlight, he realized he hadn’t taken off his leg brace for the night and hadn’t put on his hand splint and almost muttered, “Fuckhead,” the way he might have done a couple months back. Stroke victims often resorted to swearing when they became frustrated. His version of this had been to call himself, “Fuckhead.” But that was back in the hospi tal, before he came here and began conversing like a somewhat normal fuckhead thanks in part to Georgiana, who everyone called George despite the fact that she was quite a cute gal.

  As he lay in bed he couldn’t help thinking about Marjorie Gianetti and her conspiracy theories and the circumstances surrounding her death. That damn puddle on the floor outside the activity room, the overlooked blood specks on the doorjamb near the spot where gurney tracks led toward the door to the loading dock. Why had Marjorie broken her routine and gone down to the activity room without her wheelchair to hold onto? What about the rumor that Marjorie slipped in a puddle made by a resident, when in reality it was only water on the floor? If someone on staff spilled water, wouldn’t they have simply wiped it up? Maybe that was it. A staff member spills water, fails to clean it up, starts a rumor about a resident “accident.”

  A couple weeks earlier at rehab, Marjorie had gotten hung up on the phrase “fly in the ointment,” and right now that phrase seemed apt. Of course Marjorie often got hung up on things. When he first met her, she’d said, “Make me whole,” over and over. He thought she was referring to her brain, like making her brain whole again. But an aide named Pete who sat in on a rehab session in Georgiana’s rehab room one day said it was something Marjorie’s husband might have said, being that her husband was in organized crime. “Make me whole is like, pay me in full in the mob world,” explained Pete.

  Getting hung up had been Marjorie’s biggest hurdle when it came to getting out what was on her mind. When she wasn’t saying her Buster Brown in a shoe jingle, or a meaningless litany in which she rattled off roads she probably read in a road atlas, she’d repeat phrases over and over. Georgiana would ask her name and Marjorie would say, “Fly in the ointment.” The next day she’d answer the same question with another cliche like, “Cat got your tongue?” The next day she’d say, “Keys to the kingdom,” or, “It’s a wonderful life,” or phrases he’d never heard of like, “Max the fly.” Other times she’d say, “Poor Jimmy Carter,” over and over while in tears.

  After a few days of this, Georgiana tried to get into Marjorie’s head and apparently discovered the origin of one of the phrases. Using notes and books around the rehab room, Georgiana got Marjorie to concur that “Max the Fly” had been the title of a children’s book she’d read to her son. But when Georgiana tried to find out what “Fly in the ointment” meant, Marjorie went off on another tangent, repeating the phrase “black sheep” over and over until she was so upset she broke down in tears and started repeating Jimmy Carter’s name again.

  Of course who wouldn’t be upset in this place? Especially when you can’t make yourself understood. Like now. A woman dies and no body seems to give a damn about the cause. Maybe it has to do with age. The older you get, the less likely folks want to know why you’re sick, or why you died. Even if it was an accident, someone should at least be collecting information for a report. Or is the doctor’s statement on the death certificate all it takes when someone’s in a nursing home?

  Maybe having some of Marjorie’s husband’s old cronies crash out of their nursing homes for one last hit wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

  The circumstances seemed juvenile, piss on the floor and kids ar guing. He did it! No, I didn’t! She did it! Finally, when he could stand it no longer, Steve reached out to pull his wheelchair close to the bed, put on his robe, and began the struggle to transfer himself on board. Although he could use a walker, and even a cane on his better days, he still got around much faster in his wheelchair.

  The hallway lights had been dimmed for the night. Across the hall were the stroboscopic flashes of Phil’s television, Phil probably asleep with headphones on. Steve leaned forward in his wheelchair to peek around the opening of his door. The nurse at the station held a clipboard while sorting packets of medication into trays. The appear ance of her there, holding a clipboard, combined with the word sta
tion, triggered a memory of a train station, the nurse becoming a station master, a telephone ringing in another room becoming the sound of a locomotive bell, the flash of Phil’s television becoming the flash of crossing signals. In this memory a man bends to shake his hand. For a moment the rooms along his side of the hall become private rooms in passenger cars. But then the phone stopped ringing and the mo ment was gone.

  The nurse was facing in his direction, so he leaned back into his room and waited. After a minute he leaned forward again, and, see ing she had turned the other way, pushed forward, gave the left wheel of his chair a powerful crank to turn himself, and sped down the hall way toward the elevators. Any moment he expected to hear his name called, or perhaps the nurse would simply raise a .357 Magnum she kept behind the counter and let him have it. But neither happened and soon he was in the elevator alcove.

  He stayed back from the elevators for a while watching from a grouping of visitor chairs near the windows. A late visitor snuck out from another wing and took an elevator down. Two nurses’ aides got off an elevator and went into his wing without seeing him. He noticed a stack of magazines on a table between two chairs. He wheeled over to the table and gave the pile a shove so the titles and dates of the mag azines showed. They were old magazines, but not too old, and he real ized these were magazines Jan had brought in during the past several weeks, magazines they had gone through in detail. Events described in the magazines had been annotated in the ten-year chart he and Jan were constructing in his room. As he touched the slick surfaces of the magazines he had a horrible feeling that he and Jan were inside the magazines, their past stuck between the slick pages like pressed flow ers, their blood staining the paper.

  He had to stop thinking like this. Better to keep his part of the bargain. Be cheerful. Tell a joke. Smile. As he stared at the elevators, he wondered if he’d be able to get past the lobby’s main desk without being stopped. He managed it earlier that evening, but this time of night there wouldn’t be people in and out of elevators to give cover. He was on a mission. Not until he got a good look at that hallway down on the first floor one more time would he be able to sleep.

  As he tried to recall the detail of the hallway, he remembered the floor plan he had looked at. It had been mounted to the wall near the door that led to the loading dock. And on the way down there ear lier in the evening, he’d seen another floor plan on the first floor near the elevators. Escape plans. How to get out of the building in case of fire.

  He wheeled past the elevators toward another wing and sure enough, on the wall next to the stairwell door was a floor plan for the third floor. After studying the plan a few seconds he found what he needed. He spun his chair around, gave the left wheel a shove while throwing his body to the left to keep the chair from going in circles, and went to a short hall next to the last elevator. At the end of the short hall was a door that said Staff Only. He turned his chair side ways to get a grip on the door handle, pushed it down and turned again to push through. On the other side of the door was another short hall, and in the middle of this hall were the wide double doors to the service elevator that would let him off on the first floor out of direct line of sight of the lobby’s main desk.

  The service elevator was not as fancy as the passenger elevators and the walls were beat up. He went from three to one without stop ping, and when the doors slid open he faced a blank wall just like he had on the third floor before the doors closed.

  After wheeling out of the elevator, he noticed the first floor hall was longer, with an alarmed emergency exit at the far end. At the near end of the hall was a door to one side he knew would lead to the lobby. Above the door a closed-circuit television camera pointed at him.

  He wheeled as fast as he could to the door beneath the camera. Here he could see that the camera had a view of the elevator, the long hallway, and the alarmed emergency exit at the far end. He could only hope the guards at the main desk had not been studying the idiot in the wheelchair with disheveled hair and a crazed grin on his face, because if they had, they’d be standing outside the door waiting for him.

  Pulling a door open was a lot harder than pushing through one, and this door was not designed for the wheelchair-bound like the doors in the resident wings. Because his right hand was pretty useless, he had to hook the fingers of his left hand onto the door handle and pull the door open by slowly backing the wheelchair using his left foot. It took a while because every time he managed to pull the door open an inch or two, the door would bump his left foot and he’d have to back up another inch or two.

  When he finally got the door open enough so he could wedge the corner of the wheelchair into the opening, he shoved the door aside, expecting to see a couple of smiling security guards. But the guards had remained at their desk. When he peeked around the corner, he could see the tops of their heads above the reception counter. And so, for the second time that night, he turned from the lobby and hurried down the long hallway and through the automatic double doors that led to the nursing home wing.

  The hallway in the nursing home wing was lit up as brightly as it had been earlier in the evening. He saw no one at the nurses’ station, which was still a good hundred feet down the hall. As he wheeled down the hall he heard snores from doorways. One snore sounded like the distant bark of a dog and this reminded him of Marjorie tell ing him about dog days and cat days in the wing. One day a week they brought in dogs for residents to fondle, another day they brought in cats. Marjorie had said, “Everybody dogs them, but I don’t know about cats,” and, after a little back and forth between them with Geor giana egg-nogging them on, he figured out what Marjorie meant. Ev erybody in the wing liked dogs, but not everybody in the wing liked cats. After Marjorie nodded that this was exactly what she’d meant to say, Georgiana asked Marjorie why some people didn’t care for cats. To this, Marjorie had replied, “Sneaky,” with a smirk on her face. He recalled it vividly. It was the same smirk she got on her face when she spoke of her conspiracy theories regarding staff members, and even once when she mentioned a nephew of hers, a nephew whom she seemed to be contrasting with her son.

  Although he’d never been inside Marjorie’s room, she’d pointed it out to him when they were on their way to the activity room for a stroke rehab meeting. Earlier that evening he had not paused at the room, now he did. In rehab, Marjorie once managed to convey that in the nursing home wing they remove the nameplate as soon as someone dies, but they do it surreptitiously.

  Thinking of the word surreptitious reminded him of the word de tective and that reminded him of the Chicago Police Department and that reminded him of Tamara who had visited him here and while he was in the hospital.

  Crazy bastard. A wife who loves him so much she tells him about an ex-lover, and here he is sneaking around where he obviously can’t do any good. Probably end up telling Jan all about his wanderings and maybe even send Tamara an e-mail about it.

  Maybe keeping quiet about a resident’s death was the right thing to do. Maybe he should go back to his room. According to Marjorie, residents near death were usually transported to the hospital, and the other residents found out the person had died by taking turns hanging around the hallway until someone spied a nurse or aide removing the nameplate. Then they’d pass the word. According to Marjorie, one resident recently died in her sleep. “Him name’s gone and she’s still in there,” Marjorie had said. “Him name’s gone and she’s still in there,” she had repeated, even after Georgiana tried to correct the pronoun.

  The word case came to mind again, conjuring up something. Not memories, but a feeling, a sense of what has to be done, a sense that things have to be examined, a sense that within him there is a passion to perform this examination. It wasn’t so much in his mind. It was in his soul. Perhaps he was Don Quixote. For some reason this idea of him being a Hispanic idealist intrigued him. Yes, a man destined to right wrongs.

  He turned on the light in Marjorie’s room only after closing the door behind him. The bed was made, a
pink spread pulled up over the pillow. He began searching the room before he knew what he was looking for. Her wheelchair was there, backed against the window wall. On the deep windowsill were several framed photographs. The largest photograph was of an older man with a thick nose and bald head. The man wore a dark suit and held an award up before him. “Vietnam Veterans” was printed on the award. The man seemed on the verge of winking and Steve recalled Marjorie mimicking this look when she spoke of her husband Antonio.

  Another photograph was of the man—Antonio—and Marjorie together. A studio shot taken decades earlier, Antonio with more hair in this photograph, the faces smooth and flawless as if taken through gauze. Next to this photograph in the foldout frame was another old photo, this one of Marjorie holding a baby while Antonio touches the baby’s forehead with his thick finger. The last set of photographs were of Marjorie’s son. He could tell it was her son because of the chrono logical collage.

  A toddler in shorts who’d gotten more of his looks from his mother than his father. A little boy with a puppy. An adolescent boy playing the piano. A handsome high school boy holding a National Honor Society ribbon. A fine young man in cap and gown. A young man in shirtsleeves stooped on the ground planting a tree. No photos of him playing baseball or football. No photos of him with his father except the one in which his father touches his forehead with a thick finger while … yes, while in the process of either beginning or ending a wink. The father wanting his son to emulate him, but the rest of the photographs implying the son did not do this.

  Something Marjorie once said about father and son. Something about the good old days before the son realized who his father was. But also something else, an aside, an indication—”Antonio never able know,”—that at least some good came of her husband’s death, that she was glad her husband had died before finding out something. Something.