Legacy

Spring 2018

Gabriel woke up in bed. He stretched out his stiff, aching arms, feeling years of trivial injuries, hey-this-will-get-better-soon wounds, and supposedly healed muscle tears ripple throughout his entire body. The years went by so fast. One day he was young, strong, and athletic, and the next, he woke up in a place like—

Wait. Hold on. Where the hell was he?

A sky-blue curtain hung on his left, blocking off the other side of the room. A bulky television set was suspended from the ceiling. The walls were the same color, and he caught the faint stinging odor of antiseptic. To his right was an open door exposing a hallway, from which came the sounds of sirens, loud voices, and beeping.

He carefully rolled over onto his side. His aching muscles resisted the turn, and his bones weren’t much friendlier. His back immediately felt as though it had been exposed to dry ice. He realized that he was wearing a bare-backed johnny gown instead of his usual pajamas.

Tied to the railing of the bed was a vine-like wire, with a red push button on the end. Oh, no. He was in the hospital. But how? When? Was he sick? Had he gotten into a motorcycle accident? Why couldn’t he remember?

Gabriel panicked, breathing heavily. His heart raced. His skin was coated in a hot, syrupy sheen of perspiration. He struggled to sit upright, but his entire skeleton felt so stiff that it might snap at the slightest strain. He was trapped. He threw off the blanket and examined his body for wounds.

Instead, he found wrinkles. His thin, nearly transparent skin had become a crumpled-up piece of tissue paper. Liver spots. Reticular veins. Painful varicose veins on his ankle.

Oh. That’s right. Slowly, tentatively, Gabriel’s memory volunteered its services to him again. He wasn’t in a hospital. He was in a nursing home in New Hampshire, the same nursing home where he’d lived in for five years. Bright New Day Skilled Nursing Center. Yes, that was it.

He frenetically cycled through his usual checkmark system. His name was Gabriel Schist. That part was easy. The president was Bill Clint… no. George? No, Barack. Barack Obama. Wait. Was that the last one? Well, how about the year? The year was 2018. He knew that, at least. As far as his age, he was… what, seventy-five years old? Seventy-two? Seventy-three?

Well, his age had never been important to him, anyway. As long as he remembered the sequence, he was still okay. That was the most important part, the only way to determine if the gears of his mind were still turning properly.

“Zero,” he whispered. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…”

Finally, he felt strong enough to pull himself up into a sitting position. He shivered, his bare feet resting on the cool linoleum floor. He waited for the sharp lines and blurry geometric figures of the world to come into sharper focus.

“Fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four…”

Tacked on his wall were dozens of graphs, a small blackboard with hundreds of tiny equations written on it, analytical essays on his work, and articles on the latest medical advances. Several hastily-written scraps of notebook paper were haphazardly taped wherever they could fit. Beside those were photographs of all the people who’d once loved him. A photo of Yvonne, her arms raised to the sky, was next to one of Melanie. Yearbook-style Polaroid photos of the various nurses, staff, and housekeepers at Bright New Day had been added so that he would remember their faces more quickly.

“Two hundred thirty-three, three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten, nine hundred eighty-seven. Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Gabriel sighed with relief. His mind was intact, for the time being. He almost smiled until right then, right at his moment of liberation, he felt a soggy dampness beneath him. He’d wet the bed again. Gabriel slowly, shakily rose to his feet, and a spasm shot down his sciatic nerve. The sight of that moist, miserable yellow circle on the white sheets was as horrifying as that of a mutilated corpse. He yanked the blanket up to cover the wet spot.

A stream of urine dribbled off the mattress and onto the floor. Wetting the bed. It was degrading to see, degrading to smell, and even more degrading that he had to hide it like a scared little boy. But he refused to wear diapers. Briefs. Depends. Elderly water-soaking-underwear-devices.

The stench was nauseating. He grabbed a face cloth from his counter, intending to wipe up the urine that had escaped to the floor. A gruff cough interrupted him. Someone was moving about on the other side of the curtain, the window side of the room. When did he get a new roommate?

“Ah, hell!” a man shouted. “Did you piss the bed?”

“No,” Gabriel answered. “Certainly not.”

“C’mon, man. Don’t be shy! Y’kiddin’ me? I do that shit all the time!” The man laughed uproariously.

Then, much to Gabriel’s chagrin, his new roommate rolled over to Gabriel’s side of the room in a wheelchair. He was a stout, potbellied man with a scraggly grey beard and lots of skull tattoos. “How are ya?” The man’s mouth stretched into a wide, gap-toothed smile. He was a rough-looking character, though his wheelchair and pale atrophied legs managed to counteract the fiendish menace he probably once wielded. A dangling purple stump hung as a memorial to his right foot’s prior existence. A nasal cannula was plugged into his nostrils and hooked into a cylindrical oxygen tank on the back of his chair, feeding him a constant stream of O2.

Hoarse, raspy breathing that sounded like someone was dropping a bag full of dirty rocks into a rusted gutter filled the room. He had clearly been a heavy smoker. End-stage COPD? Probably.

“The name’s Robbie.” The gruff man offered his hand. “Robbie Gore.”

Gore’s fingernails were dark, almost black, and spoon-shaped, likely because of all the smoking. It could also be diabetes, judging by the missing foot. He seemed to have arthritis, as well. Lymphatic system disorders. Possibly a lack of vitamin B-12.

Gabriel shook his new roommate’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Gore seemed friendly enough. So far, Gabriel liked him, which was rare. He’d always had difficulty adjusting to new roommates.

“So you’re new to this room, I take it?” Gabriel asked.

“Man, you high or somethin’?” Gore scoffed. “My stuff’s been in yer damn room for two weeks. I keep tryin’ to introduce myself, but you’re always out walkin’ around or somethin’.”

Two weeks?Marvelous. “Oh, right,” Gabriel mumbled. “Of course.”

“It’s all good, roomie. If ya weren’t already havin’ bladder problems, I’d ask if ya wanna take a shot of some tequila with me. I got me a bottle hidden in the bureau there.”

Gabriel’s mouth watered. Tequila? Wow. How long had it been since he’d tasted tequila, of all things? He could drink a shot, only a…

No. Absolutely not.

“No thank you,” Gabriel muttered. Trying to block the entire exchange out of his mind, he hurriedly stumbled over to his closet, careful not to trip over his own feet. Since the stroke, he’d had enormous difficulty walking without his cane.

“Why not?”

“I can’t… drink. Not with the Seroquel I’m taking.”

“Ah, sucks. Probably a good thing, though. I’ll tell ya, liquor makes me piss my bed all the time.”

“So I’ve gathered.”

“Yep. Can’t help it. Happens in my sleep. My problem is that the only way I can piss right—while I’m awake, I mean—is that I gotta be lyin’ sideways, and then I have to piss into that plastic bottle… what’d they call it again? The urinal. Yeah, the urinal. But see, I got one other problem, too.”

Gabriel put on his glasses. Tired of parading around in a johnny gown, he carefully stepped into a pair of slacks. He pulled on and buttoned up a long-sleeve dress shirt then glanced back at the bed to make sure the bunched-up quilt was effectively hiding the wet spot. The spillage on the floor could easily be dismissed as having been caused by an overturned glass of water.

“See,” Gore continued, “when I had the surgery done to cut off this damn leg, the doctors screwed up. After the surgery, I can’t pee straight ’cause those asshole doctors fucked up my dick. Y’wanna see it?”

“Um…” No, he certainly didn’t care to see it. As if his own problems weren’t enough, being in a nuthouse like Bright New Day only amplified everything. Gabriel took his cane out of the closet and leaned on it for support, both physical and moral.

“C’mere, brother. It’s messed up, man! Look at this!” Gore tugged down the waistband of his red shorts.

Gabriel looked; he couldn’t help it. Had it really come down to this? He felt like a neutered dog. Had he really reached the point of being so utterly desexualized and dehumanized, that this kind of scene was normal? Surprisingly, Gore’s penis appeared completely normal. “Um…”

Gore glared down at his crotch. “Don’t you see it? Look, man! Those asshole doctors cut my dick off!”

“Oh.” Gabriel shook his head. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror on the wall to Gore’s left. When did his hair become so white? God, when did he get so damn old?

His self-pity was interrupted when he noticed a tiny brown slug crawling up the surface of the mirror as if it owned the place. He’d seen a lot of slugs lately. The nursing home seemed to be infested with them.