Inseparable

Inseparable willmaguiretn@mail.com When I was seventeen and living on my own, certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home. My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead.It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living. The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door. The only thing past there was the interstate, the county line and the cemetery. That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter. I was poor and dumb and usually hungry and broke so I was always looking for another job. Passing through one day, I saw a Help Wanted sign and answered it. They hired me on the spot. The people there were so old I thought they were another species. Kind of human, but not like me. They weren't racing through the days or trying to chase down the future. They weren't revving their hearts or trying to make some girl. And they had stopped trying to catch up to some should-be kind of life. Instead they were hanging onto each day, like they understood Time and everything it carried could not be caught. Only caressed or savored. For me at seventeen, living was a matter of speed. I was chasing happiness and love and money, trying to outrun hunger and doubt and lonely. But everything I was trying to catch always seemed to have another gear and so was always just beyond my reach. That summer I became the groundskeeper at the Hereafter. My job, I discovered, was to make the world look neat and trim, to make the calamity of isolation seem orderly, and to try to forever sweep away the dread that seemed to settle in its halls. After midnight I’d mop floors and try to make the place feel a little less lonely, like it could ever be washed away. The lady that ran the place never gave me a hard time about when I did the work, as long as it got done. I can recall cutting the lawn at night a few times. Drunk once or twice. I even snuck a girl in a time or two to some empty bed on the ward. The Hereafter was as good as any place to chase love, at least the 17 year old version of it. There was this old man on the main floor. His grown kids had abandoned him there. That’s really how it is. They drive by a couple times, sign the papers, then drop an old man or woman at the far edge of living into the Hereafter. This guy's kids would come by once a month and, because he was hard of hearing, holler at him in a loud voice like he was a thousand miles away. I suppose in a way he was. But he wasn’t an idiot and I could see how much it humiliated him. To be yelled at by his kids who felt like they had to make this pilgrimage every once in a while just so they could look into the mirror. I watched it a few times. It was like watching some bad rerun. “How are you, Dad? Can I get you anything, Dad?” You know the routine. It was merely obligatory, like he was a stranger who just happened to have the same last name. It was like they had gotten a bill that said they owed love and respect but had forgotten the actual debt. This guy was a plumber. He had crawled around in tight spaces, kitchens and basements, on his hands and knees for fifty years. So he knew a busted pipe when he saw one. And he could tell at a glance that the pipes in his grown kids eyes were rusted out long ago. He was the kind of man that was self-reliant. And proud. Fixing things makes a person self-reliant and proud. And he truly believed there was nothing in this life that couldn’t be fixed with duct tape and sweat. But he could barely walk anymore. And try as he might there was never any way to fix the pipes of the time he had left. They were just worn out, stripped at the nut from too many days. He was crawling in the basement of his last year and knew it. But after all that time on his hands and knees he just wanted to stand and walk toward his fate instead of waiting in a bed for it to find him. So every night, very late, he’d angle himself off his bed and unsteadily grab one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs and slowly drag himself one tiny uncertain step after another out into the hall. He’d only do it at night when there was no one to holler at him about how he shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t be trying to move, shouldn’t be doing anything but lying in a bed waiting on Death to finally find his room. And sometimes late at night we would meet. The seventeen-year-old kid mopping the floors and the eighty-something plumber who, feeling his life leaking away, was trying to stand on his own two feet and walk through the Hereafter. I was afraid he would slip and fall on my mopped floor And I was afraid that Death was so close to him that it might take a long hard look at me if I got too close. But I got into the habit of waiting for him to make his great escape each night. He wasn't trying, like me, to catch up to happiness. He was just trying to pull even to some slower version of freedom. And trying, too, to walk away from every bit of worry and doubt and stillness that waited by his bedside. I found him late one night leaning against a wall in the dark. He had slipped and could not quite regain his footing. I was drunk and unsteady myself. It was after midnight so the hall was dark except for the light from his room at the end of the corridor. I saw him there, a shadow in the darkened hall, and stumbled over and grabbed his arm trying to lift him up. The unsteady seventeen-year-old with a lifetime ahead and the unsteady eighty-something with a lifetime behind, leaning for a moment on each other. His arm felt like a twig in November. Not really bone anymore, more like the memory of it. He whispered hoarsely to me, “No No No. I’m fine.” Brave. Self-reliant. At seventeen I had never seen real courage before. The simple daily kind. The kind of courage that's found only in darkened hallways, when the floor is slippery and a soul is unsteady. I let go like a person building a house of cards lets go of the last card and moved my hands slowly away certain it could all come tumbling down any second. Then in that darkened hall, the old man, just a shadow in the dim, crept away toward the light. A few days later, the old man found a way to walk away forever. My boss, an old lady with butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo, asked me to fill in one month on the morning shift. This was a problem because I had a couple other jobs and I liked to finish late and drink beer until I couldn’t remember how poor and stupid and full of myself I was. But she was insistent. So I’d show up around 8 am with my head aching and smelling like I had spent the night face down in a puddle of stale beer. Early each day I began to notice another old man in the visitors room. He was the always the first one there. Always wore a white shirt and tie, combed and shaved and neat. He walked with a cane and when they opened the ward for visitors he would always check himself in the mirror, like he was going on a first date and wanted to look his best. His wife of sixty years was in the ward. She had started falling and then started forgetting. Little things at first. Misplaced keys, misplaced glasses. And she would ask him, “Where did I put them? Would you remember for me?” Then one day she got lost coming home from the grocery store. And then a week later he found her confused and terrified, unable to find a way up and out of their own cellar. He took her to a doctor finally. They waited on the tests then listened as the doctor quietly explained that the past, every bit of it, would eventually disappear. So the old man tried. He held her hand and guided her through the days and tried to become her compass. And all the while he wrestled with the doubt and the worry and the guilt until it became clear that he could not care for her. So he found this place at the edge of the Hereafter, sold their house and took an apartment as near as he could. He made all the arrangements, all the time fighting down the growing panic at the thought of being apart. When he signed the papers and walked her in, he felt like a traitor to every secret vow a man’s heart can make to itself. I was there that day mopping the floor. He was stricken with loneliness and with dread. I saw it in his face, though I’m sure I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How could I? What did I know of having your heart hollowed out at the prospect of losing everything ahead of you, and everything behind? She cried when he left that day. And without him near seemed to lose her bearings. It can happen like that. A heart can become unmoored. And mopping the floors some nights I would hear her calling out that she didn’t know anyone or where this place was or even sometimes who she herself was anymore. Trying to find the way up and out of the cellar of her own soul. I would stand outside her door listening, trying to translate that kind of terror into something my naïve heart could understand. It was like listening to a foreign language. Of loneliness. But the old man would show up every morning outside that simple room with its bed, chair, and wall clock. He would stand in that spot outside her door steeling himself. Day after day he would paint a smile onto his face and turn into her room and in a loud voice brightly say good morning and how beautiful she looked again. She was gaunt and confused and a little more lost each day. But he meant it, and I think truly cherished saying it to her, like he knew there would be a day when he would pray to God he could say it just once more. She would brighten at the sight of him, like a young girl in love for the very first time. And he would sit by her side and each morning say, “Do you know who I am?” Somedays she would laugh and respond, “Of course. What a silly question. You think I could ever forget my own heart? My husband of sixty years?” And he would retell her things she had forgotten. A trip to the Cape each summer. The night he asked her to marry him. That first tiny house before the kids. Sometimes she would understand and ask, “We did all that?” And sometimes she would not, could not understand. Like the glue of memory had gotten so old that it cracked and fell away. “Never mind. Never mind that, darling,” he would say. “I’ll remember it for you.” Near the end of the month I watched him again, cane in hand, dressed like he was going on a first date, stand in that spot outside her room then, once again, turn inside. I went and stood by the door, mop in hand and listened. Once again he was gently asking, “Do you know who I am?” There was no answer. So he put his face close to hers so she could see him clearly and he whispered again, “Do you know who I am?’ Her eyes searched his trying to summon some forgotten landmark. Then she whispered to him, “I don’t know where this place is. Or who I am. Please,” she pleaded. “I know I should. I know I should know.” He tried to quiet her. “Hush. Hush now. It’s all right.” “I know I should know,” she protested, her voice breaking. Then searching his eyes, she whispered, “Won't you tell me your name?” The old man's face fell. For a long moment he did not move Then struggling to his feet, he gripped his cane. He swung at the wall clock again and again until its face was broken and its hands were still. He fell to his knees, reached out and took the old woman in his arms. “Never mind, never mind that darling,” he said. “I’ll remember for you.” I didn’t want to hear anymore. I never wanted to hear anything again. I stumbled away, back down the hallway of the Hereafter, threw the mop and kicked over the bucket. What was the point? How could the world ever be clean again? I quit that morning and I never went back. That was long ago, and now the Hereafter seems closer to me than ever. That summer an old man lost his legs and grew courage in their place. A husband and wife of sixty years lost everything they ever knew or did. And their love became not smaller, but larger. There is some strange arithmetic at work in the human heart. Take away something you cannot do without. Subtract it, and the sum somehow becomes greater. Scrape a sorrowful thing and you expose the beauty. Scrape a thing of real beauty and there’s always some sadness at the heart of it. They require each other. They grow together. Inseparable. I was a poor boy with only a glimmer of understanding. But standing there that day listening I felt some part of me quiver. And since then that quivering, like a small earthquake only I can feel, has never stopped. I feel that shaking some nights in my dreams. I feel it sitting wordlessly in the dark on my shoulders whispering its tremor into my sleeping heart. It whispers to me about courage and about love. It whispers of things taken and of things granted only through the taking. And now some nights I hear it whispering about this life, whispering there is just one kind of beauty and it comes entwined with struggle. And I hear it whispering still about the Hereafter. WLM