Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (8 page)

Distance, spread, even steps to a goal, all wash out unless I make an effort to anchor, but mostly I don’t bother. It’s not worth the time.

I knock the card table when I stand up and it jerks away from me, its legs scratching along the room’s old people warehouse carpeting. Loud, halting ping-bongs resonate up through its hollow legs and into the fiberboard top. It’s like the table’s a speaker or something, and its tightly stapled vinyl cover only makes vibrations moving through it louder.

I can’t tell if I see this change. The table did change—I heard it. I smell the faint dusty plastic smell of disturbed industrial carpeting and I swish the air around on my tongue desperate to lock onto some sense of time, hoping I’ll taste something.

But no. The table stays the same—timelessly positioned just so in Willa’s remarkable room.

“Will you come back?” Willa asks. Not
when
will you come back, but
if
.

I stare at her. I can’t help myself. She’s old yet she’s a dancer. She’s rich yet she’s here. She asks questions and she’s Willa and I know, without a doubt, that she’s got a marble somewhere inside her body. Because she swallowed it.

Something tasteless and timeless like glass is sitting
somewhere
inside her. Me, I must be shattering. My disability finally got the best of me. My brain’s had enough of floating through my life devoid of context and decided to snap which is why I’m smelling the electrical stench. It has nothing to do with the open cabinet and everything to do with me. My head’s making enough ozone to choke everyone in the nursing home.

My gaze moves from Willa to the indistinct buzzing behind the metal door. It’s black like it’s always been black, and always will be. Like it was black before someone rolled it out between two massive drums and flattened it into sheet metal. Like when the Earth is done and the sun’s most of the sky, it’ll be right where it is, just as black and just as scary.

The space behind the cabinet door is too big, just like the room is too cavernous. Not that I see anything other than darkness and shadow, but somehow I know. Black means
void
and void means
big
.

I suddenly wonder what
big
tastes like. Maybe it would taste better than the ozone my overheating, shattering psyche is making.

I don’t answer Willa. Coming back, not coming back, I feel as if leaving the question alone, as it hangs like a thing of its own in the air between us, is the best course of action. It’s not really a question of right now, anyway. It’s a fulcrum between past and future.

I move my legs and shuffle my feet across the carpet toward the door. It’s a well-worn path, one made by more people than I can count, and I only add a little to it. Here, the carpet doesn’t have that faint, dusty plastic smell.

The way out of Willa’s giant room, the many steps passing through strips of light from the overheads and lines of shadow from corners and doors, kicks up decade upon decade upon decade. If I dropped to my knees and felt the tattered ends of the fibers under my fingertips, I’d know what all those decades were. I’d lick my fingers and I’d taste it all: Willa’s fresh oranges. The carpet installer’s level, salty boredom. Dry bits of wars fought in far off lands and then tracked onto this very floor like hot spices. Small hints of alcohol, the cheap kind, the stuff that tastes like paint thinner.

This is why I don’t look at people. I can’t handle the ghosts.

I’m out of the room before Willa can ask me another question.

***

Outside Willa’s room, in the glaring rainbow harshness of the nursing home’s pulsing fluorescents, I move too fast down the concourse-wide corridor. I keep thinking about kindergarten and large rooms full of people and always being told “No running in the halls!” and feeling like a child again.

Because I know being a child was in my past. Otherwise I’d be so confused I’d lap myself, looking over my shoulder as I ran by the “normal,” confused me.

Even with my disability, my life has a certain stability to it. Expectations are met: my car starts. I come to work. Rhonda sends me on the same curving path through the home and I end up making beads with Willa. I go home. When it happens, I don’t know. But it does. And I rely on my expectations to fake like I know what time it is.

I don’t taste juice boxes or the astringent grossness of non-toxic glue like I would if I really was in kindergarten, so I know I’m in the nursing home. “No running in the halls!” is just a general expectation of the world and one I’d better adhere to, no matter where I am, here, in the parking lot under the flat not-gray grayness of the sky, in the hallway of my apartment complex. It seems like a smart expectation, one that could save a person from a nasty tumble.

The thing is, old people are fragile. They know it. I know it. We all understand not to body-slam an old person because when they hit the wall, a hip’s going to crack. So when I knocked into one of the residents, I knew what I did. I heard him bounce off the wall, making a huff sound as if I’d stuck a tube down his throat and vacuumed out his air. Things clanged—his walker, or maybe a cane. He uses, or will use, both. I can’t tell what he has now.

He’d been strong, too, most of his life. Not a big guy, but quick and agile and athletic. He’d surprised more than one big burly opponent with a right hook capable of real damage. He’s got decades of engine oil and sweat carved out of what for everyone else was burning plastic and the toxic dust from copy machines.

There are other ghosts around him, too. Lovers, several, none regretted and all missed. Angry grandchildren with smartphones who ignore him when they visit. Hints of Europe. I suspect I’d taste sunshine and the Mediterranean if I licked him.

But all that’s gone. It’s vanished away into time and I don’t know how or why.

I’m not sure if I should help him off the floor. The air tastes acidic, like panic, and I don’t know if it’s him or an aftertaste of the electrical fire in my head.

He’s swearing and I don’t know if it’s at me or at his hip. All I can do is run away down the corridor, praying someone who can see what’s happening will help him.

***

Rhonda’s asking about Willa but all I can think about is the electrical fire in my head. She wants to know what was so terrifying I felt I needed to run down the hallway and smash into poor Mr. Samuelson. Who’s alright, or might be alright in a couple of days. Or was alright before I knocked him into the wall. I don’t know. If I’d tasted his sweat before I ran off, I probably would know. Or at least have some context.

Rhonda’s desk is as round as her, round like a snow globe full of the haze generated by a permanently shaken state. Now there’s a fun metaphor for my life: Shit changes, but I don’t, stuck as I am inside my little disability unable to see out. Or get out.

I must have snorted because Rhonda’s even less happy than she was earlier. I hear it in her voice even if I can’t read it on her face. I’m half tempted to crawl over her semi-circle desk and lick her nose.

We haven’t really done this before, the stern disappointment. It’s new. Maybe I
should
lick her nose.

I hear tapping—she’s banging the tip of her pen against the arm of her office chair, a distinctly sharp sound, clear and precise as if it’s resonating the perfect amount inside the tubes and joints of her seat’s metal frame. Not round at all.

And different.

I smell electrical fire again, a stink as sharp as Rhonda’s tapping. I almost think she smells it too, but it’s bad enough I think any sane person would speak up, which she doesn’t. I pinch the bridge of my nose and clamp my eyes shut, hoping it’ll go away.

“We’re worried about you.” Rhonda’s voice still sounds pissed.

I’m just a random volunteer. It’s not like the nursing home has to pay my medical bills or anything. I’d think she’d have more of a heart and not sound like she’s going to fire me.

Which she is. This moment’s a full-on iron spike into the bulletin board of my life.

I stand up before she can say it. I’m nodding and looking at the floor, more so I don’t have to taste her 80s stale potato chip in plastic life than because I’m acquiescing or anything pathetic like that. I’m a volunteer, damn it. I’m here because I want to be, not because I have to.

But I can tell by the way she’s sitting, and the smell of disappointment in the air, and her tapping and tapping, that I’ll never be welcomed back. My stint here in the nursing home’s done. No more volunteering, and I’d better not apply for any jobs.

I don’t hear anything else she says. Outside her office, the nursing home’s got the slow scurrying feel it always has—people move through the halls all the time, constantly, but they do it in slow motion. Their ghosts, too. The flavor of all the different decades gets to be too much and it flattens out everything else.

I drop my volunteer vest onto the visitor’s bench outside her door. It’s this reclaimed park bench some rich person dedicated so long ago I only get hints of its decade when I run my fingers over it before licking them clean. Rhonda had it brought inside sometime in the 00s. I think the nursing home was remodeled around then—there’s always been this ghost of a different décor hovering over everything. Plastic plants, brown paneled walls, orange vinyl chairs. I never paid much attention.

I’d always assumed it
had
happened and wasn’t a
will
happen. Who, in the present, would put orange vinyl on a chair?

The buttons on my vest clink when they hit the slats and the fabric slides off, making an odd ripping noise, as it slips through the gap between the back and the seat.

I just leave it. It’s vanished into the blackness behind the bench and I’m not sticking my arm in there. Too many ghosts around to take a nip at my fingers.

Willa’s going to be mad if I up and leave without saying good-bye. She’s at the card table when I walk into the room. It’s still skewed in its particular way, with its particular corner pointed at the door. She’s got her back to me, as usual, and she’s working.

Because she’s always working on those goddamned beads. Little round things, perfect spheres, which she shouldn’t be able to make with her fingers. But she does.

The day’s the same flat not-grayness it always is. It flows in through the glass wall that is her floor-to-ceiling window. Her monitor’s off, like always. The machinery in the cabinet is humming and ticking away behind the closed door.

I taste those oranges again, that refreshing and sweet wonder of a perfect and clean life. I see her sitting tall in her chair, her legs stretched to the side
just so
, because she’s a dancer, and that’s how star ballerinas sit. Or tutored movie stars.

Or maybe just Willa. Maybe her rich family found a way to get her this too big, too deep room with the window stretching too high into the sky. But I don’t think so. I think she carved this space out of this nursing home all by herself.

She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t look at me. I’m standing behind her, wondering what to say, and I smell the electrical fire again.

I’d better hurry it up. I don’t want to knock her to the floor, like I did poor Mr. Samuelson.

“Which color, darling?” she asks, still with her back to me. She must be pointing to globs of clay on the table in front of her. Globs I can’t see now, and never could.

The cabinet door had always been more solid, more real than her beads, all black and blank and buzzing, in its unchanging way.

Willa taps the table.

“What?” I ask. She wants an answer about the clay, probably the same answer she always wanted.

Her old lady hands look more dancer-like today. She moves with a grace I’d never seen from her when she turns her shoulders to look at me. The enormous room could hold a stage with Willa on it, twirling and twirling until the entire world gets dizzy. There’d be filigree and shimmering gold and silver and that middle pinkish champagne color. Maybe peacock feathers. Candles, too.

“We need to choose a base color. Which one, darling?” Her finger pokes into one glob on the table, then then other. We’re making beads again, the same way we always make beads. Little balls, always. And they always start with me choosing the color.

Our bead-making ritual dictates I do my best to give her a precise answer by getting the polymer in my mouth long enough to tell her what’s what, but today, I don’t care enough to try. It’ll wash out, I’m sure, and become as indistinct as everything else.

“You choose today, Willa.” All my attention’s on the cabinet. I walk to it, stopping equidistant between Willa and the buzzing machinery, like I’m standing on the center of a seesaw. One foot’s going up and the other down, but at least both sides weigh the same. I’m not being tossed one way or the other.

She’s twisted her head like a puppy listening, ears all cocked. On the other side of me, the cabinet pings, as if it, too, is listening.

It didn’t seem deep enough to be that black inside. The giant monitor hanging on the wall over it only stood out from the wall about six inches and the cabinet didn’t stick out into the room all that much more.