“Two o’clock,” Victoria said to herself, feeling a bit weary, but knowing this was the usual time to begin her second job: nurse assistant trainee at Providence, the local nursing home. Inside, she pressed the red button to the memory unit, and the double doors opened, and there in the dining room sat Tom and Calvin carrying on their daily after-lunch banter--words, soft and murmurous, running together or disconnected, in tune with their advancing dementia. The uninflected tones were soothing to Victoria; in fact, the whole ambiance of the memory unit was soothing--it was a charmed space. Here there was no fear of disaster, because disaster had already happened, and the memory of disaster had been erased, and replaced with a world of imagination. The two retired school administrators commiserated with each other, “Too many meetings, Cal, too many meetings,” Tom said, “all we do is go to meetings around here.” Cal gave his familiar reply: no words, but a rigid smile.
Tom turned to Victoria, “Where is my departure gate? I have a three o’clock to Chicago.”
Victoria lowered her face even with his and ran her hand through his white halo of hair, and said with a sweet smile, “No more flights today.” Tom turned to silent Cal, and said, “Looks like I’m going to miss a Board meeting.” Cal still smiled, like a gentle piece of carved granite. Through the cafeteria window, you could see dark clouds coming in from the West, and the wind was shaking the chain-linked fence that both prevented the patients from wandering off, and gave them asylum from the madhouse world.
Victoria completed her usual chores, and then helped with the afternoon fill-in-the-blank word games and balloon volleyball. At five o’clock, her normal quitting time, it was raining hard so she decided to take a different exit than normal. She entered a dimly-lit garage space that would take her closer to her car without going outside. As she approached the opposite wall, a ten-foot pile of discarded aluminum walkers loomed near the trash bins like a pile of bleached bones. She stopped and began to cry.
Here she was confronted with all the cruelty, confusion, and general misery of her world in this heap. She felt like a jumbled heap of walkers in a dying world. LIke Tom, she was also looking for her departure gate. Her old world was dying, and a new one was struggling to be born. She felt the same way in grade school when she had let go of one rung of the monkey bars and the next one was not quite in reach. She folded her slender frame into a pose that resembled a folded-up lawn chair, kneeling down and hugging her shins. She cried rocking gently to the rhythm of the rain.
After a good sob, she stood up, looked one more time at the pile of walkers, and exited the parking garage into a driving rainstorm. Little pellets of hail were scattering across the asphalt. Her jet black hair hung in hanks like serpents, the salt tears rinsing out of her large brown eyes by the cleansing downpour. She fell into her Honda Element, and drove back to the flat. She was dead tired by now, and sunk into a benevolent sleep, divinely solitaire, curved like a sliver of moon snuggling her small, stuffed bear. As she slept, the sky cleared and bathed her in moonlight splashing through her austere factory windows.
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