The Oasis

by Chris W. Martinez

  THE OASIS

  Chris W. Martinez

  Copyright © 2014 by Chris W. Martinez

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Keri Knutson.

  NONE OF THIS HELL would have been unleashed if that woman had just kept her mouth shut. Her allegations about the decline of her elderly father’s health at the Oasis at Palm Village caused other families to speak up. Within a week the outcry looked like it could grow into a scandal, so my boss decided to put a reporter on it.

  He took a chance and assigned the story to me even though I was only a few years out of journalism school. Funny how lucky I thought I was at the time.

  In angry letters to the editor and calls to state officials, the families detailed their loved ones’ rapid deterioration—the bed sores, the weight loss, the increased signs of dementia—at the hands of overworked and undertrained employees. Seemed straightforward enough at first: to undercut their rivals and maximize profits, the Oasis had admitted as many residents as possible while skimping on anything that cost money, from staff to building maintenance.

  I had to give the Oasis corporate management credit; they could have just gone quiet and hoped the story would fade away on its own. Instead, the CEO granted me an interview and an all-access tour of the facility.

  Maybe the place wasn’t so bad after all, I had thought. People with something terrible to hide don’t give young, ambitious reporters that much unconditional access.

  I was wrong.

  The television commercial showed the Oasis staff arranged in a wide, welcoming formation in front of the main building, bookended by palm trees. They smiled broadly, hands steepled together at their waists, their crisp, white uniforms gleaming like coconut flesh in the Florida sun.

  At the front stood the silver-haired CEO, Clyde Coronado, his tanning-bed-orange skin darker than his linen suit, his shirt the same intense shade of blue as his eyes.

  Mr. Coronado spread open his arms and the grinning phalanx behind him shouted in perfect unison.

  “Life starts anew at the Oasis!”

  From there, the video whirled through an expertly edited series of scenes as spa music played: a clean, colorful resident’s room filled with sunlight; a pretty nurse beaming from beside an elderly man’s bed, his hand in hers; green, expansive lawns encircling the building like country club fairways; a cheery groundskeeper waving from the edge of a manmade pond.

  When I got there, Mr. Coronado wasn’t waiting for me outside with his bleached grin. Although he had agreed to give me a tour, I hadn’t provided a specific day of my arrival, not even to my boss or my colleagues.

  I parked my car in the visitor lot and headed for the entrance. The automatic doors parted and a wave of air conditioning washed over me as I went through.

  The woman at the front desk looked up at me with her neutrally pleasant face. Her expression matched the smooth jazz playing quietly from the ceiling speakers.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning.” I firmed up my voice, trying to sound more seasoned than I was. “My name is Aaron Plummer. I’m a reporter for—”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Plummer. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “So, our visitor from The Tribune is finally here!” Mr. Coronado had a politician’s voice—loud, confident, and clear, even from across the room.

  He walked toward me from the hall, arms open in a way that made me think he might try to hug me. To my relief, he extended a hand instead.

  “A great pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Plummer.” He clamped my hand in both of his, shaking it hard. His hands appeared leathery but they felt baby-soft. “To finally get the chance to set the record straight with a paper as fair and objective as yours.”

  “Good to meet you, sir.” I freed my hand from his grip. His bronzed face had a tautness that suggested plastic surgery and Botox. “Thank you for agreeing to an interview and tour of your premises.”

  He flashed his ten-thousand-dollar smile. “Shall we start with the tour then?”

  I pulled out my pen and notepad. “Let’s.”

  Mr. Coronado showed me the recreation center first, a sprawling, open space with couches, chairs, and card tables scattered throughout. Elderly men and women played board games and assembled jigsaw puzzles. A few of them watched a cooking show on the fifty-inch flatscreen TV on the far wall.

  Nothing struck me as abnormal or particularly substandard. Despite their advanced age, the residents appeared to be clean and in relatively decent health.

  “Not bad, huh?” Mr. Coronado gave me a wink. “Bet you wouldn’t mind spending the day in here, nothing to worry about, nowhere to be.”

  I nodded toward the TV. “I prefer Days of Our Lives.”

  The carrot-skinned CEO chuckled.

  A few feet from us, four old women played cards at a round, plastic table.

  I approached them. “Pardon me, ladies—”

  “Uh, Mr. Plummer.” Mr. Coronado’s voice became tense. He stepped between me and the women and gently pulled me aside. “I’m afraid I can’t let you speak with the residents.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s our policy. To protect our residents’ privacy, we only allow their family members and personally invited guests to speak with them.”

  “But you promised me an unfettered tour of—”

  Mr. Coronado silenced me with his blazing grin. He led me away from the table. “A tour, yes, but that doesn’t include speaking with the residents, I’m afraid. You do understand why we can’t just let reporters disrupt the peace and tranquility of these seniors, don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “They’ve earned the right not to be disturbed in their retirement, Mr. Plummer. Come on, I’ll show you the cafeteria next.”

  The rest of the facility struck me as no worse than mediocre. So far, the worst I could say was that the furniture looked like it had been purchased at auction from a bankrupted Holiday Inn.

  Still, there had to be something to all those allegations.

  We returned to the cafeteria, where Mr. Coronado got us some bottles of water from the cooler.

  “So, what’s left?” he said as he unscrewed the cap from his bottle. “Interview back at my office?”

  My eyes fell on a reedy man at a nearby table, muttering at the plate of cookies and small carton of milk in front of him. He picked up the carton and brought it to his mouth but swallowed nothing—the carton was empty. Frowning with disappointment, he set it back down.

  A moment later, the elderly man tried a second time to take a drink. Again he discovered the carton was empty and set it down.

  That’s when I remembered something.

  “Memory Center.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The Memory Center. The special section mentioned in your commercial, the one for people with advanced Alzheimer’s and dementia? You haven’t shown me that yet.”

  “Oh… You want to see that?”

  “Well, yes. It’s part of the Oasis, isn’t it? In the commercial, you talk about how revolutionary—”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Mr. Coronado shifted on his feet and took a quick drink of water. “You’re very observant.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do the interview first? I would hate to run out of time for that.”

  I said nothing.

  “No? You want to see it right now?”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Coronado led me back to the main hall. For the first time since we started the tour, he didn’t speak a word to me.

  We arrived at the elevator and he hit the down button. The doors opened and we got on.

  He checked his pockets. “Oh shoot,” he said with exaggerated concern. “I think
I left my keycard in my office. I need it to access the Memory Center floor. Would you please give me a second?”

  We stepped off the elevator and he half-jogged to his office.

  Several minutes later—longer than it should have taken him—Mr. Coronado returned with his keycard. We got back on the elevator and he swiped his card through the reader and pressed the button for level B-1.

  We descended.

  When the elevator doors parted I jumped at what I saw standing before me: a tall, pallid, wraithlike man in a faded yellow hospital gown, mouth hanging open, jaundiced eyes staring straight through me with a chilling mixture of befuddlement and fear.

  A woman in nurse’s scrubs stepped up from behind him and took his arm. “Come on, Mr. Halbert, let’s go this way, okay?”

  The man mumbled unintelligibly, his foreboding gaze locked on me until the nurse pulled him away.

  I followed Mr. Coronado off the elevator and down the hall, to a set of unmarked double doors. He swiped his card through the reader and its light went green.

  When he opened the doors, the acrid stench of urine and potpourri-scented air freshener hit me like a punch in the solar plexus.

  The room had a similar layout as the recreation center one floor above: spacious and open, card tables, chairs, and mobility scooters scattered about. Unlike the recreation center, however, no sunlight reached this windowless space—just a ceiling full of fluorescent lights, casting the room in a cold, sterile glare.

  A few of the white-haired men and women sat paired with Oasis employees. The employees spoke softly as they showed them picture cards and puzzles, but the residents remained as silent and still as condemned ghosts.

  By the far wall I saw two wispy women on either side of a card table, gawking at the checkerboard between them. The one on the right inched her hand up from her lap and slid a red piece forward with a trembling, knobby finger.

  After a long pause, the other woman groaned and dragged her arm across the board, scattering the plastic disks to the floor.

  None of the others looked or reacted in any way.

  “Okay, so,” Mr. Coronado said with a clap. “This is the Memory Center. As you probably remember from the video—”

  “This doesn’t look anything like what I saw in the video.”

  “We do truly groundbreaking work here in the area of memory and cognitive rehabilitation,” he continued, reciting the words from the commercial nearly word-for-word. “Intensive therapy sessions incorporating a variety of spacial and analytical tasks, coupled with enhanced…”

  I tuned him out, unable to ignore the festering odor of deteriorating humanity all around me. I watched a sickly, mantis-armed woman paw at a drawing of a circle, the pale skin of her hand nearly translucent in the wash of the fluorescent lights, and a shiver blew through me like the onset of a fever.

  “You okay, Mr. Plummer?” Mr. Coronado touched my shoulder. “You look a little green.”

  My forehead felt sweaty. “I’m fine.”

  I swallowed back a wave of nausea. Every breath tasted sour with decay. “Can we see another room, please?”

  “Well, this is where most of the rehabilitation happens. The rest of this floor is just residents’ rooms, just like the ones upstairs.”

  I headed for the door, desperate to escape the Memory Center’s choking air. “I want to see them anyway.”

  Down the hall and around the corner, we came to a corridor of doors, all closed.

  Mr. Coronado shrugged at the row. “Well, there they are.”

  My mind finally began to clear. “As you know, a lot of the allegations against the Oasis are that patients at the Memory Center—”

  “We prefer to call them residents.”

  “That residents at the Memory Center show no signs of cognitive improvement or even stabilization. If anything, they decline more rapidly than before, some people say.”

  “Some people say.”

  “I’ll be honest with you.” I gestured back with my thumb, “That hardly seemed like a therapeutic environment, to put it mildly.”

  Mr. Coronado took a step closer to me, his chin raised, mouth squeezed into a sly half-smile. “Editorializing now, are we, Mr. Plummer?”

  “I’ll ask again—”

  “You didn’t ask the first time.”

  “Are the allegations true? Is your Memory Center doing more harm than good?”

  Mr. Coronado opened his mouth to speak, but another man’s voice interrupted. Thin and weak, it came from the opposite end of the hall.

  “Help!”

  I turned my head. “What was that?”

  Mr. Coronado froze.

  I headed toward the voice.

  “Mr. Plummer. Mr. Plummer, we need to respect our residents’ privacy.”

  I kept walking.

  “Help!”

  “Mr. Plummer, stop.”

  I reached the end of the corridor and came to a partially open door. I pushed it open and peered in.

  None of the lights were on. The only illumination came from an old TV mounted high on the wall. It cast a faint, gray glow down on the twin bed, the tinny laugh track of an eighties sitcom barely audible above the rattling, industrial hum of the dehumidifier in the corner.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw the man on the bed. Shriveled like a discarded apple core on the thin, beige sheets.

  When he noticed me in the doorway, he abruptly turned to his side. Eyes glinting in the dim light, he sucked in a deep breath and shouted even louder than before, the anguish straining his voice into a rasp.

  “Heeeelp!”

  A nurse suddenly appeared beside me. She gave me a tight smile, stepped inside, and flicked on the light switch. “Excuse me,” she said and closed the door.

  Mr. Coronado cleared his throat. “Mr. Plummer.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. He does this constantly. All hours of the day and sometimes throughout the night, for no apparent reason.” Mr. Coronado put his hand on my back and guided me away from the door. “Please…”

  “This doesn’t seem right to me.”

  “Everything is fine. You have to understand, these people suffer from dementia. They have very erratic, sometimes strange behavior. Behavior that can be alarming to people who are not used to it. Tell me, have you ever been in an elder care facility before?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Please, Mr. Plummer. Let’s give this man some privacy and let our nurse take care of him.”

  As we started to walk away, I glimpsed a door with a small, rectangular sign on it. None of the other doors in this corridor had signs like that.

  I stopped to read the lettering.

  “SPECIAL THERAPY.”

  “What’s this?”

  Mr. Coronado glanced at it. “Oh, that?” He sounded a touch too nonchalant. “That’s just our Special Therapy room.”

  “Yes, I can see that’s what it’s called. But what is it?”

  He crossed his arms. “You are an inquisitive young man, aren’t you?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Of course. The Special Therapy room is for, well, special one-on-one therapy sessions with Memory Center residents. We employ cutting-edge cognitive rehabilitation techniques, tailored to suit each individual resident’s psychiatric and medical profile.”

  “Sounds like an important part of the Oasis’s services. Can we go inside?”

  “I’m afraid not.” He spoke louder than necessary. “Closed door means there’s a session in progress.”

  I eyed the door. It had a keycard reader next to it.

  Mr. Coronado watched me. “It’s locked. For privacy.”

  A faint, stifled moan came from inside.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Did I hear what?”

  “I thought I heard—”

  A door behind me opened and I jumped. The nurse emerged from the room of the man who had been yelling for help.

&nb
sp; She shut the door and looked at us. “Is everything okay, Mr. Coronado?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. We were just about to head back upstairs, weren’t we, Mr. Plummer?”

  “I—”

  “We’ve gone way over the time I allotted for the tour. I’m sorry, but if you want to have more than a few minutes to interview me, we need to head back up now.”

  I took out my phone and checked the time. He was right.

  We made our way down the hall, both of us mute. My mind churned with the disquieting sound of the voice in the Special Therapy room.

  We arrived at the elevator and Mr. Coronado pressed the button.

  Soon I would lose any chance to learn the truth about the Memory Center and the Special Therapy room. I knew better than to expect anything but vague non-answers from Mr. Coronado’s interview. He would smile behind his desk and feed me his canned responses to my questions, and I would discover nothing but his talent for prevarication.

  The elevator opened and Mr. Coronado stepped on. He held the doors open for me.

  I stayed back.

  He stared at me. “Coming?”

  “Mr. Coronado…” I didn’t know what to say. My pulse spiked and I felt the skin on my arms flare with perspiration.

  “Yes?” The gregarious sparkle in his eyes faded, extinguished by growing suspicion.

  I tried to sound resolute. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not done down here yet.”

  His face went dead. Suddenly Mr. Coronado looked like a wax figure of himself, bereft of any trace of charm and warmth. “Oh, you’re done, alright. You’ve seen quite enough.”

  “No, Mr. Coronado.” The air ran scared from my voice. “I need to see the Special Therapy room.”

  “You are not seeing the Special Therapy room.”

  “But—”

  “Young man,” he nearly shouted. “Get on the elevator. Now.”

  I shrank to the stature of a child, blinking and uncertain, powerless to resist his command. I got on the elevator and stood beside him, my face hot with humiliation.