The Other Side of the Curtain

 

They put me in 314b because I wasn’t going anywhere. That is the polite way the social worker said it. I am Art Brennan, eighty-four, former shop teacher, current permanent resident of a double room twelve feet by twenty, split down the middle by a curtain the color of weak tea. My half has the window. The other half has the door and a policy as firm as the mattresses: men with men. Until a “real” room opens, they park fellows over there like leftover luggage. When the other bed is empty I can hear the radiator click and the fluorescent light hum and, if I am lucky, nothing else. Those days are gold. I eat pudding without commentary. I watch the parking lot. I pretend the curtain is a wall. It never stays a wall for long.

The first one was Earl. Hearing aids the size of walnuts sat in a dish he never used. Earl communicated exclusively in volume. “ART! YOU AWAKE?” at 5:12 a.m. “ART! THEY STOLE MY TEETH!” His teeth were in the same dish as the hearing aids. He told the same joke about a priest, a rabbi, and a bedpan every afternoon and waited for a laugh he could not hear. When I gave him one he squinted and shouted, “WHAT?” so I had to shout the laugh back. Nurses learned to mouth words at him. He accused them of whispering plots. One night he decided the television was talking about him personally and argued with a weather girl until security came. He left three weeks later for a “quieter placement,” which I took to mean a room without another human being who could still form sentences. The silence afterward felt like a gift I had not earned.

Bernard arrived on a Thursday with a transfer board and a look that said the floor was lava. He could not walk. He announced this fact hourly in case anyone had forgotten. “I used to coach rec basketball,” he told me through the curtain, “and now I cannot get to the commode without a committee.” He rang the call light the way other people breathe. When staff took too long he narrated their failures: “Still waiting. Still waiting. A person could grow a beard.” He had a son who visited with sports magazines and guilt. Bernard accepted the magazines and returned the guilt with interest. At night he whispered, not to me, “I hate this body.” Then, louder, “Art, you awake? Don’t you dare pretend you’re sleeping. I can hear you not answering.” I started timing my bathroom trips for when his game was on so I would not have to pass the foot of his bed and receive a performance review. When they moved him to a single I felt both relief and a small, traitorous sadness. He had been awful company and honest company, which in this place is almost the same thing.

Norman believed it was 1962 and that I was his brother-in-law, Ray. Alzheimer’s had sanded the present tense off him and left a polite man who kept offering me a cigarette I could not accept because smoking had been banned since before some of the aides were born. He packed an imaginary suitcase every morning. “Ruth’s waiting in the car,” he said. Ruth had been dead eleven years. I learned not to correct him after the first try; correction made his face collapse like wet paper. So I became Ray. I asked about the Ford and the union meeting and whether the kids had finished their homework. He relaxed. He told good stories about a bowling league that may or may not have existed. One afternoon he looked at the curtain as if it were a picture window and said, “Pretty sunset.” It was 2 p.m. and overcast. I agreed it was a pretty sunset. When they found him a memory-care bed I shook his hand and he called me Ray one last time and asked me to tell Ruth he would be right there. I said I would. It is the only promise I have kept in this building that I knew was a lie when I made it.

Roy had a different flavor of dementia. He did not forget so much as invent with confidence. He had been a roadie for Elvis, a spy in Lisbon, and the man who invented the twist-tie. He told these things the way other people tell you they had toast. At sundown the inventions turned sharp. He accused the night nurse of stealing his “backstage passes.” He tried to climb over the bed rail to catch a bus that had not run since 1987. I lay on my side and listened to him argue with a past that would not stay still. Once he asked me, very clearly, “Do you know you’re dying too?” I said everybody in here is, just on different calendars. He nodded as if I had confirmed a rumor and went back to looking for Elvis. They moved him after he wandered into the day room in only socks and a conviction that sound check started at dawn. The odor of his aftershave lingered a day longer than he did. It was cheap and sharp and somehow braver than the rest of us.

Then came Stanley, and with Stanley came the smell. Bowel incontinence is a phrase the brochures put in small type. In a room twelve by twenty with one tired curtain it is not small type. It is weather. Stanley was mortified and also past the point where mortification helped. The aides were kind and fast and still not fast enough. The first night I learned that air freshener only argues with a problem; it does not win. I breathed through my mouth and stared at the ceiling tiles and invented names for the tiles so I would not invent names for what I was smelling. Stanley apologized to the curtain. “I’m sorry, neighbor. I used to be a man who made appointments.” I told him it was all right, which was a lie and also the only decent thing to say. He cried once, quietly, when he thought I was asleep. The crying was worse than the odor because it had no product you could spray. They got him a room with better ventilation and a roommate who, I hope, is deaf. After he left I opened my window as far as policy allowed and let the parking-lot air in like a guest of honor.

Marty had no filter and excellent hearing, a dangerous combination. He narrated other people’s bodies the way sportscasters narrate games. “That’s a stage-four face if I ever saw one.” “His kid hasn’t been here in nine days. I counted.” He included me. “Art, you’ve got the look of a man who still thinks he might go home. Cute.” He told me about his three marriages in descending order of disaster and asked whether I had ever had “the good kind of stroke,” which I did not know was a category. He was funny in the way a fire alarm is loud: you cannot ignore it and you cannot pretend it is trying to help. When his daughter stopped coming, Marty’s jokes got meaner and then stopped. Silence from Marty was more unsettling than his commentary. They transferred him after a fall he insisted was “just a rehearsal.” I missed him the way you miss a radio you kept threatening to throw out.

George refused the premise. Inability to walk was, in his view, a scheduling conflict. He had a tee time in November. He had a cruise packet in the drawer that the nurses kept moving so he would not try to pack. “This is temporary,” he told me every morning. “I’m getting my legs back. You watch.” His legs did not watch. They stayed the color of skim milk and did what damaged legs do. He planned menus for a restaurant he would never enter. He asked me to hold his nine-iron, which was a rolled-up magazine. I held it. Humor in this place is often just agreeing to the bit. The afternoon they told him the cruise had been cancelled “for medical reasons,” he stared at the curtain for a long time and then said, “Well. Then I guess I’ll die here like a chump.” I said most of us would. He laughed once, short, and asked if I played cards. We played until the aides came with the chair he swore he did not need. He needed it. He still waved the magazine like a club when they wheeled him out.

Amos was the latest; the bed has a way of making you lose count. He talked to God the way other people talk to the aide with the snack cart: familiar, slightly impatient, expecting service. Hearing loss had taken the high notes, so his prayers were delivered at a volume that made my fillings buzz. “LORD, I HAVE BEEN READY SINCE THURSDAY.” He was not unkind. He offered me a pocket New Testament I did not want and a butterscotch I did. At night he sang hymns off-key and with great conviction. Between verses he would say, “Art, are you saved?” I told him I was saved from having to share a bathroom with eight different strangers in one year and that would have to do. He thought that was the funniest thing he had heard in months and repeated it to the chaplain. When a bed opened in the faith-based wing he packed his saints and left me the last butterscotch. The room smelled like peppermint and certainty for two days.

Between them there were gaps. Days when the other mattress was stripped and the over-bed table was empty and I could hear my own chewing. I guarded those days. I did not complain when they lasted. I also did not pretend they would last. This building abhors a vacuum. Someone is always coming down the hall with a chart and a suitcase that is too small for a life. I have learned the soundtrack of other men’s endings: the shout of a man who cannot hear himself, the bell of a man who cannot walk to the thing he needs, the polite time-travel of a mind that has stepped off the calendar, the wild biographies of a brain rewriting the script, the chemical war against a body that will not keep its appointments, the sportscast of other people’s decline, the itinerary of a man who will not land, the loud negotiation with heaven. None of it is dignified in the brochure sense. Dignity here is smaller. It is the nurse who knocks before she opens the curtain. It is Stanley saying sorry to a piece of fabric. It is me answering to Ray so Norman can finish packing for Ruth. It is closing the window after the smell is gone and not mentioning it again. Tonight the other bed is empty. The curtain hangs straight. I can hear the elevator and, far off, somebody’s television laughing at a joke I cannot make out. Tomorrow there will be a new chart, a new affect, a new way for a body to fail in twelve-by-twenty feet. I will listen. I will complain to the tiles. I will laugh when it is allowed. That is the job, on this side of the curtain. The other side is only temporary. Mine, they tell me, is not. I eat my pudding and wait. The radiator clicks. For now, that is enough.