She could not seem to stop moaning, and sighing.
Alice put a nightgown on her. Natalie didn’t ever wear a nightgown, not since she was girl. Alice had bought her nightgowns of white cotton.
Little House on the Prairie
nightgowns that hung loose around her. Alice had hung them outside to dry, because the dryer was broken. They smelled of sunlight.
Wasn’t Alice here? Alice wasn’t here.
She sat on the edge of the bed smelling the sunstroked cotton and wondering if she should lie down.
Alice was here. Alice had a glass of water and a pill.
There was the risk that the painkillers would launch her deeper into dementia. Already, nouns fled her. She could not seem to hold them and found herself saying to Alice, “It’s started, there is water, from the sky.” Alice said “rain,” and the word was there. Why lose “rain” but not “sky”? Why nouns? Of course, she wasn’t thinking “nouns.” Just a wordless
why.
She had known about dementia once, had understood it from outside. Her grandmother had dementia, not Alzheimer’s but something they couldn’t give a name to, something that progressed differently, something that wasn’t Parkinson’s, or nutrition, or drug interaction, or even (they tested for it) syphilis. Something that took away her grandmother’s mind in dribs and drabs over many years but that was, in a strange way, kindly. It didn’t seem so to everyone else, of course. It was terrifying. And exhausting. The way the conversation looped around the same things. The way her grandmother explained over and over that something had happened to her sister, that her sister had fallen right down (gesturing with her hand) like that, and nobody would tell her what had happened. Nobody knew. The sister had been dead for almost forty years. Still, her grandmother didn’t get angry or agitated or wander. At the beginning she had been upset. She had hid the gaps in her memory. Her driving had gotten bad, and she clung to the shoulder of the road and had once taken out a mailbox. Then her grandmother went to an assisted living place and, in some strange way, relaxed. Except for the business about the long-dead sister.
Not so for Natalie. ADP was not kind that way. It jerked her muscles and made her twitch. Walking, her leg would suddenly rise high as if she were marching, knee coming up, foot kicking out. When she tried to sleep, the twitching woke her up, again and again. Sometimes it was that sensation of falling that comes on the edge of sleep. Feelings rose in her, like flights of birds, fluttering and flinging themselves against the bones of her ribcage. Anxiety made manifest. She said she wanted to be here as long as she could for Irene and Alice, but honestly, she got so tired of the knowledge that she was going to die, of never being able to put that burden down, that she craved oblivion. She took the hydrocodone for her wrist pain. There was a reason she knew that she shouldn’t take the hydrocodone, and she could see that Alice knew it, too.
Alice was giving her the pill. Was Alice trying to poison her? She could not hold on to what she saw in Alice’s face. This woman she knew who suddenly seemed strange. She knew her, and she did not. She was afraid, and she tried hanging that fear on Alice’s face and then on the bulky cast on her wrist, so very, very white, but the fear attached to everything and nothing.
She was lying down, and Alice was covering her with a flowered sheet. “Are you cold?” Alice asked.
She was thirsty. Her arm jerked, and her wrist throbbed. She heard herself moaning, but it didn’t seem like her. She certainly had no control over it. Irene stood in the doorway, watching. She looked at Irene.
It went on and on, and Irene wasn’t in the doorway anymore.
The pill tugged at her, finally, pulled her down. She closed her eyes.
It would be nice to say that she dreamed of Irene. Or that she remembered things. She had delirium dreams: the world was out there, and she could access it on a screen against her eyelids, like her smartphone, but every time she moved her eyes, she moved to a different screen. She had made something happen in the world every time she did that, like hitting enter on a computer, and she didn’t know what she was doing. She was causing trouble for everyone, but her eyes kept flicking.
This was not her. This was a remnant. A fossil.
A few weeks before, Natalie had gone out. She drove, not knowing it was the last time she would drive, but knowing that maybe she shouldn’t. She was hungry and nearby in a strip mall was a place that sold hamburgers. It wasn’t a chain, and she had thought it might be better because it wasn’t a place that had been made to be like other places. It was a placed that dreamed of becoming a chain. Its signature, for God’s sake, was a pastrami cheeseburger. It had six tables and white walls and somehow just failed being either retro or current, but at 11:30 it was half full of people. She lived a relentlessly white, liberal life just five or six blocks away, but here on Venice Boulevard, the kids eating their grilled cheese and chicken sandwiches and bacon cheeseburgers were all brown and black. (None of them had ordered the pastrami cheeseburger, and neither did she.) There were lots of places on Venice where liberal white people went. Thai restaurants, and Indian, and even Himalayan (they had yak chili on the menu), but this was not that kind of place. It turned out to be a place where the fries were made from frozen and the bun had sat in a dry steam tray long enough to get a little tough around the bottom. The kids were chattering and goofing for each other, and a sharp-faced girl was being cynical and unimpressed. They paid no attention to a lady with a cane. The guy who fried up her cheeseburger brought it out to her table instead of calling her to the counter. (He wore one of those paper hats that look like boats—retro short order.) He and Natalie were the only white people in the place and she doubted he was the kind of person who ate yak chili. Irene and her friends might “discover” this place, but they would be slumming, and that would be part of the charm. The kids here today were not slumming. They owned this place, it was in their territory, and she had passed through the semipermeable membrane of class. The burger was fresh and the fries, honestly, were better than those things they served at In-N-Out. She read her book and ate her burger carefully.
When she was finished with her burger, she sat a few minutes to finish her book. She was ignoring the beating anxiety in her chest. She was carefully not thinking about this being the last time, or about the kids with their lives in front of them, although she wanted to ask the kid who had ordered the chicken sandwich if he was crazy. But they said on the news that there was no danger from ADP in the current food supply, and anyway, all of these kids had eaten chicken nuggets in the last five years and for all any of them knew, paperclips were bumping along their neurons.
She finished her book and gathered her things, including her tray. On the TV in the corner there was a commercial for the army. This was the kind of person she had been before ADP made holes in her brain. A person who had not been made completely self-absorbed by disease, unable to think of anything but how frightened she was. A person who noticed moments like this—the joint, the commercial There’s strong. And then there’s Army strong. Which seemed perfectly to suit this restaurant, to be aimed like an arrow at these kids, who were ignoring it, and to have nothing to do with Irene and her friends, who would not dream of the army. And, of course, to have nothing to do with her, who was dying, dying, dying.
Lonny drove because Eva was tweaked and why wouldn’t she be since they were going to see her dying ex-girlfriend and her kid who she had no legal right to? Eva jittered and fidgeted in the passenger seat.
“Quit,” he said. She was picking at her skin. She was looking bad. She needed a haircut. Frankly, she couldn’t handle all the shit the world was handing her. Some people just couldn’t. And it was a lot of fucking shit. “We don’t have to stay long,” she said.
Natalie had a house, a little ranch that must have cost a fucking mint. Eva said her parents had money, and they had made a whopping down payment. Lonny hadn’t picked his parents quite so well. “Pull in the driveway,” Eva said. “You can’t park on the street. It’s residents only.”
“What the fuck?”
“You got to have a permit to park on the street,” Eva said. “You can only get one if you live here. See the tags hanging off the rearview mirrors?”
“That’s assholian,” Lonny said.
“Don’t give me a hard time!” she said. “I can’t take it right now.” She was all tense and rigid. She had done something with her hair a few weeks before, something that made it reddish, and it didn’t do her any favors. Eva was getting hard to take. But there wasn’t a whole lot he could say. What was the point? They were all going to die of APD anyway. Jesus, he’d eaten enough chicken from fast-food joints to start growing feathers. Eva was sure as shit that she had it. She was always worried she had the shakes, but that was just ’cause she was cranked half the time. He wanted to say it was okay, slow down, relax, but it wasn’t okay, and it sounded like a lie when he said it. They just did what everyone else was doing, which was to pretend everything was normal.
“I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “I don’t care. It’s just stupid, you know? No skin off my back, though.”
“We don’t have to stay long,” she said, again. Maybe she did have it. Maybe she was forgetting.
Maybe he was just freaking himself out.
Alice met them at the door. Alice was what, in her thirties, and not what he expected. She didn’t look dykey or anything. Eva wasn’t dyke-looking. Alice looked boring. She had blond hair out of a bottle and big hips and no makeup. Eva was so intense, so alive, he’d just assumed that Natalie would have picked someone more
there
. She looked normal, though. Irene talked about her like she was a freak, but mostly she looked like a bank teller or something.
The inside of the house was un-fucking-believable. Shit piled everywhere. Irene was right about that. The couch pulled out from the wall, and stuff and clothes piled behind it up halfway to the ceiling.
“Thanks for letting me come by,” Eva said. “We won’t stay long. I know it’s weird, having me here and stuff. Nat’s probably told you some crazy stuff. God, that birdcage is so cute, where did you find it? I’ve got to do something with our place; it’s all Lonny’s stuff, and it looks like a bachelor pad. Is Irene here?” Eva seemed unable to stop talking, and she was staring at everything. There were a ton of books. Eva had read magazines and stuff when they first met, but now she couldn’t even sit still for the TV. There were stacks of books beside the chair and the couch, and the couch was covered with more clothes and bags. There were bags from Target with stuff still in them—he could see running shoes with the tags still on them. Alice didn’t look like she was the kind of person who went running, and neither did Irene.
“I was going to straighten up,” Alice said. “It’s just hard. You know, with everything that’s going on.”
“Totally,” Eva said. “I mean, I understand completely.”
“The Home Health Aide was here earlier. She comes three times a week. But the rest of the time it’s just me.”
“And Irene,” Eva said. “But I know you’re doing the lion’s share and all that.”
Irene came out of her room. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi, baby,” Eva said.
Irene was Natalie’s biological daughter. There had been some thing about Eva’s brother being the sperm donor, but Eva said he had freaked out about it, and they had ended up using an anonymous donor. Irene looked a lot like Natalie. Not fat, but short-legged with thick ankles and wrists. She had longish light brown hair and brown eyes. She wasn’t pretty. Mostly, when Lonny saw her, she was like this. Monosyllabic. Eva said she was smart, and ever so often she said something sharp and sarcastic, and he’d see what she might be like with her friends. She didn’t like him, but that was okay; he’d never been too excited about the guy his mom lived with in Tennessee. He wondered if she was gay. Not that it was genetic or anything, but still, growing up with two moms and all that. Eva hadn’t turned out to be exactly gay.
I was confused
, Eva said once, but honestly, he suspected that she really was gay but that it didn’t really matter that much to her who she had sex with, exactly. Which sounded fucked up, but he didn’t know any other way to think about it.
Eva headed for the bedroom and he trailed along behind, not sure if he was supposed to wait in the living room or what. There wasn’t any place to sit down in the living room anyway, and the kitchen table and chairs were piled up, too.
The bedroom was crowded. One whole wall was stacked with those plastic storage containers with more piles of clothes on top of them. The other side was like a miniature hospital. He saw a package of adult diapers and averted his eyes. It smelled like a hospital, too. He wouldn’t have known Natalie. She was emaciated, dressed in an old-fashioned white nightgown. Her head looked too big for her neck. Her eyes were huge.
“Hey, look who’s here to see you,” Alice said.
Natalie’s eyes rolled toward them. She had a cast on one wrist. She tried to say something but her voice was a smear.
“She’s hard to understand,” Alice said. “Sometimes she’s better, but she’s had her antianxiety meds, and they make her slur more.”
Eva was stricken. Lonny didn’t blame her. This was it, the future. This was what they were all going to be. Holy fucking Christ. By the time he got it, with his luck, so many people would be sick, there wouldn’t be enough people to take care of them. He figured if he got sick he would go to the VA, but really, if he got like this, he was going to OD. Take so much stuff his heart shredded.
He went back out to the living room and then, since there was no place there, out the front door to sit on the front step.
Irene came out and sat down beside him.
“Sorry,” he said. The house across the street had bougainvillea blooming and a lemon tree in the side yard. California. It was unreal.