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Arielle Angel
New York University
It is on my way back
from the bathroom that the power box confronts me. The
little black boxes within the gray one suggests a face, two eyes
and a mouth. Do something, he says.
I can
still hear traces of the hundreds of old people fussing
indolently in the high-ceilinged auditorium at the end of the
hallway. Despite their numbers, there is only a hushed
restlessness about the place; rusty metal cots squeak painfully,
old radios desperately throw numbers in a low fizz—105 miles
per hour, 106 miles per hour— bored elderly couples
murmur to one another over disinterested games of pinochle. And
the wind, always the wind, squeezes himself through small
tunnels under the shutters and whistles with an eerie joy.
I dread
that large, open room. After only 38 hours, it is already
saturated with the smell of old. I’m stricken at how similar it
is to the smell of infants-- baby powder and jarred food and
dirty diapers, but without Hope, which helps us to recognize
that it is unmistakably the stench of expired life.
I sit
down Indian-style in the hallway, facing Mr. Box.
If I
weren’t so stubborn, I would’ve been in Colorado. My mother had
pleaded with me to join the family for a hiking trip, but I
declined, fantasizing about the parties I could throw in the
empty house. If it wasn’t for Hurricane Frances, I would surely
be sprawled, and hung-over on the living room couch,
eyeing the muddy footprints on the rug and the empty beer cans
making rings on my mother’s oak table.
Instead, I am looking
after my grandparents at a “special” shelter in West Palm
Beach. These shelters are equipped to care for the community’s
elderly population, many on life-preserving machines that
require a working electricity source.
Hurricane Fucking
Frances, I mutter. I picture a giant heavy-set schoolteacher
with thick-framed glasses, a cheap floral dress with the slip
showing, and an enormous ass, throwing massive chalky erasers at
the frame of the shelter, clink, bang, thump, the white spray
flying in the wind like ash.
Do something.
When I left my
grandparents they were snug in their wheelchairs, parked between
the neat rows of cots, conversing with a Ms. Helen Marcone.
Besides proximity, the thin tubes that sprout from her nostrils
to a machine on her cot make her a good candidate for a mindless
friendship. My grandfather is dependant on a similar apparatus
for oxygen, and they recognized each other instantly as part of
the same sad club.
I heard somewhere
that the elderly hold an aged wisdom and hence, spent the first
four hours of my incarceration trying to eavesdrop and garner
some for myself. All I heard were endless combinations of the
same words, “physician… HMO… new procedure… mobility;” the
doctors are miracle-workers or they’re bastards, the children
ungrateful or kind. Their chitchat is interchangeable. The
elderly present their swollen ankles, dusty lungs, and curved
spines as teenagers wear fashionable clothes, present
them in place of personality, the friendly banter about football
and movie stars replaced by matter-of-fact doctor
recommendations and anxious listing of pills, machines and
helpful apparatuses.
A reporter dressed
casually in jeans and an oversized T walks out of the heavy
double-doors and down the hall. She smiles at me.
“I understand why
you’re out here. You need a break. Bet you wish there was
someone here your own age,” she says.
“Mmhmm.” I nod.
“Hang in there.” She
walks past me towards the bathroom.
I just heard her interview
a couple camped just to the left of my cot. They were retirees
from the North. Mrs. King was a sociology professor at the
University of Connecticut, Mr. King a biology professor from the
New York State University at Albany. Mrs. King conversed freely
with the reporter in a forced gaiety. Money was tight for this
couple; they could be making a lot of money lecturing around the
country, but Mr. King has advanced emphysema and spends most of
his time on his back, hooked to some machine. What, I couldn’t
make out. They’ve been married 43 years.
Mr. King did not
stir, his chest barely moved with breath. The young reporter
turned to him and asked, “How do you feel about having your
world reduced to a cot and a chair in here?”
He roared, “Do you
think my world at home is any different?”
His wife blushed and
quickly apologized to the reporter; she said, Mr. King tends to
get grumpy this time of night.
I didn’t catch the
reporter’s face; I was distracted by the man on my right. He
couldn’t have been younger than 90. He was hunched over an
upside-down milk crate trying to get a full spoon of gloopy
shelter-food into his soft, dark maw. He was talking to
himself; he was alone. “Good food. Better than the
restaurants. Good food here.” With every bite, he repeated
himself and his smile grew in a foolish delirium, until his
hymn, became an unintelligible burble.
The reporter exits
the bathroom and smiles nervously at me once more before walking
back into the auditorium.
I think about my
grandfather. I picture him sitting beside my grandmother
blankly as she talks to Ms. Marcone. He never talks. Last
week, I brought him dinner from a sushi restaurant. I told him
the wasabi was avocado,--I don’t know why, just wanted to
see him get riled up about something, I guess. He placed the
whole chunk in his mouth, smushed it with his tongue and
swallowed. He looked at me, his eyes slightly moist, and said
softly, “that was sure hot for avocado,” and kept on eating. I
tried to get him to watch the football game with me after
dinner. He wanted to lie down (he sleeps all day). I hear my
mother in the hallway at night, talking to my uncle in muted
tones. He wants to die, she tells him, when she thinks I am
engrossed in my algebra homework. I have since noticed the thin
prescription bottle with the name of an anti-depressant I
recognize from my father’s medicine cabinet sitting ominously on
the kitchen table wedged in between the candy coffee stirrers
and my grandmother’s address book, filled with names of people
who have either died or broken contact.
My grandmother, once
a bubbly socialite and notorious optimist, now only looks at me
from her wheelchair across the kitchen table. “Can you believe
what happened to us?” she asks as she raises her hands. She
repeats herself. It’s unbearable. She writes me letters though
I live around the corner. They remind me of suicide notes, like
she's trying to wrap something up. When I speak to her she asks
meekly if I will please save them.
Do something. Please.
And
suddenly, before I know what I am doing, I have jammed my
fingers into Box's eyes and snapped his head open to reveal two
rows of little black buttons. In two forceful chops, I click
them over and there is a sound, like 10,000 televisions shutting
off simultaneously, and all is darkness, and there is a deep and
harrowing moan and then, there is silence. And I feel something
growing in my stomach, an ocean, and I feel relief.
In the
next thirty seconds, I am alone in the darkness, the hero, and
all the aged, the dying, the hybrids of man and machine, are
stifled. They are dead. And oh, the relief.
But the
back-up generator kicks the power on, not as it left, but
inconspicuously, noiselessly, and there is light. And I hear
the old man and his cot creaking beneath him, “Good food. Very
good food…” | 