1
The morning started like always, with Nurse Nora rapping on my door, and me hollering at Carl to get his sorry ass out of bed so we didn’t miss breakfast. And then there was Nora again, with her coffee breath and her hum of gospel songs, helping me stand and pulling up my trousers and shushing me and winking at me and telling me to let sleeping dogs lie, and Why can’t you be nicer, Mr. Duffy, and me telling her if I were both nice and handsome, people wouldn’t want to be friends with me.
And then, sure as the sunrise, Nora smiled despite herself, because I have that effect on people, and said, “Who went and told you that you’re handsome?”
“A man simply knows these things,” I said, sliding my shoes on, using her shoulder as leverage. “Hey, Carl, did you hear Nora calling you a dog?”
“I heard her call you ugly.” Carl’s walker squeaked on the green linoleum floor as he made his way around his bed, smoothing the wrinkles out of the covers. “She’s right too. I’ve said before that I can’t tell the difference between you and Margaret Thatcher, but I think you take it as a compliment.”
“I do,” I said. “Old Maggie had bigger balls than me.”
“Who doesn’t?” Carl said, snickering at his own little joke.
Oh, how I loved our daily spar. There was no better way to sharpen the knives and start the day. “Those are fighting words, sir. If the lady of the house wasn’t here, I’d set you straight.”
“Boys,” Nora reprimanded, or rather, as I called her, my Nora—my beautiful honey-skinned, big-breasted, long-nailed, hard-nosed Nora. She was a songbird built like a spark plug, like any good nurse should be.
She said, “The scrambled eggs go cold fast, and I know it’s gonna take you a good ten minutes to get down that hall—”
“We move faster than that,” I said.
“Mm-hmm. Not if you squeeze in your social hour on the way.” She ran a hand over my cowlick and floated over to Carl to dust off his shoulders, where he kept a never-ending collection of dandruff.
“You are simply the best, Nora,” he said, chin tucked so she didn’t miss a spot. “Do you want to take another one of my books? Or maybe some saltines? I saved them from yesterday.”
“What’ve I been telling you, Mr. Carl? If you keep on giving things away, you’re gonna go broke.” She knelt to Velcro his shoes, then wiped her hands on her pants and stood. “Listen now. I’ll be seeing you boys down there. I’m gonna help Mrs. Zimmerman bathe this morning.”
Carl let out a low catcalling whistle while I pretended to gag.
“You’re awful,” Nora said to me on her way out, which was true.
I turned to Carl and regarded him, with his spindly legs and his cardigan hanging on him like he was a little kid who had borrowed the sweater from his old man. “Why on earth are you whistling? You have something going with Mrs. Zimmerman I don’t know about?”
Carl fidgeted some, then fixed his watery eyes on me. They were set deep, no lashes; he always looked half-surprised.
“Well?” I said.
“Of course not, and you shouldn’t make fun of her like that.”
I waved off the suggestion and set about closing all the half-open dresser drawers. In the meantime, I could feel Carl’s gaze boring into my back. He was trying to force his sense of decorum onto me, because he knew my tasteless impersonation of Mrs. Zimmerman was brewing. He never did like when I pretended to have a bout of dementia, which required me to holler obscenities in my falsetto while following him around like he was my long-lost love.
After slamming the last drawer shut, I turned to find Carl’s face pinched up in worry. Like he thought I might eternally doom myself if I didn’t behave.
“Relax already,” I said. “I won’t clown around today.”
“Thank you.”
“But perhaps you shouldn’t have started it with your whistling.”
“You’re right,” he said. “No more jokes at her expense.”
“Fine.”
“Especially since she has no idea where she is most days,” he added, as if I hadn’t already obliged him.
“Right.”
“Have you heard her yelling out her daughter’s name?”
“Yep.”
“She sounds possessed. It’s such a shame.”
“It is.”
“She has no clue what’s about to happen to her either. Imagine what it would be like if she realized that she’s headed to—”
“Christ, Carl,” I said. “Would you shut the hell up?”
Silence followed, cold and injured.
For a second, I regretted being an ass, but the moment passed, like it does. And anyway, he’d made the mistake, not me. He knew better. He knew we never talked about what it meant to be put out to pasture. Not that or being put in a box.
Yes, Mrs. Zimmerman was on the tail end of her thirty-day notice, and, yes, she was fixing to be dumped at that infernal nursing home I refuse to name, and, yes, I felt bad for her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to make it part of my morning chin-wag. I preferred sleeping tonight in lieu of staring at the ceiling, imagining the wasteland beyond this place. Remembering the little peek my uncle had given me while rotting away in his piss-smelling bed. It would take me days to recover from the thought, to shove it back into its dark corner, where it would bide its time, waiting for the next opportunity to eat its way out and keep me wide-eyed and wrestling with my sheets in the middle of the goddamn night.
So, no, we would not discuss Mrs. Zimmerman’s fate. Living it would do.
Carl straightened up. Cleared his throat. “Shall we go eat?”
“As if you need to ask,” I said, relieved.
Together, we turned to the door and prepared to meet our constituents for breakfast. And this is not an overstatement. Carl and I, we were the benevolent rulers of Centennial, crowned because we were able-bodied for the most part, intellectually sound, and, as I point out to my Nora whenever I see her, movie-star handsome. Never mind that Carl’s face was back-end ugly when he didn’t have his dentures in; he always remembered them, and that’s what was important. And truthfully, between the two of us, Carl preferred to be the brains in the background while I served as the bullhorn. Which is how come I wanted him to get his ass into gear. Our people needed to hear from us, lest they think us dead.
I motioned impatiently for him to go in front of me, on account of him having a tendency to throw his walker into my heels if I didn’t keep pace. He motioned back, equally annoyed, then made his way by.