by Joe Meno
Five
AGE SEVENTY-SIX, HENRY CASPER, FORMER AIRCRAFT engineer, widower, father, and grandfather, does what he can to make himself disappear. Resting his silver transistor radio in his lap—the noise and melody of which announces his looming, watchful presence—he wheels himself down the blue-toned hallways of the South Shore Nursing Home, warily observing the second-floor security doors, noting the times when the desk attendant leaves them unguarded. Secretly, he keeps a list of when the staff dispenses medicine to other residents, noticing the precise moments when the glass doors must be propped open in order to accommodate the plastic trays of lukewarm meals that appear on rolling silver carts three times a day. In his yellow notebook, which he quietly retrieves from the breast pocket of his faded robe, Henry writes down any new useful information, detailing the odd hours with a few additional sketches, planning another escape. By now the notebook is almost completely filled with these furtive observations, along with a number of impracticable drawings of heretofore unrecognized aeronautical shapes—airplanes as thin as sheets of metal, jets as long and narrow as needles, helicopters as small as children’s bicycles. When one of the nurses finally notices the quiet buzz of Henry’s radio, when the muscular security guard looms directly above the old man to ask what it is he thinks he is doing, when, at last, the squeaky left wheel of his chair gives him away, Henry, overcome with fear, finds he is unable to speak. Henry suffers from a neurological condition known as verbal apraxia, a disorder that has afflicted him since childhood. His mouth becomes peaked and rigid, his remaining teeth chatter together without a sound, and his words simply fade away.
To Whom It May Concern,
You had a wife named Violet. She was two and a half inches taller than you. She had a laugh like a musical triangle. Once, the very first time you touched her skirt, you thought she might float away.
Each day, Henry does what he can to make himself vanish, removing any fingerprint, any trace of life that may have been left in the semiprivate room, in the recreation center, in the cafeteria, in the dull, looping conversations of the other unfortunate residents chattering around him. Each day, he uses one less word, counting down the remaining days until the moment he won’t speak to anyone again, the moment when he has absented himself once and for all from the dreary hallways of the retirement facility. Each day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Henry eats one slightly smaller portion of the dreadful beige turkey, the sadly yellowed mashed potatoes, the irregularly green mashed peas, leaving the rest among the divided sections of his plastic tray. Each day, he gives away another article of clothing, offering to his fellow residents another moth-eaten sweater, another pair of old black socks, another unworn undershirt. Out of sight, hidden behind the white radiator in his room, are the few things Henry has not been able to abandon—a single color Polaroid photograph of his wife and son, Violet and Jonathan, a number of smudged and faded letters from acquaintances and family members now long gone, an old metal toy airplane, and a few other curious objects from a childhood that he can almost no longer recall—a decoder badge from a science fiction radio program he listened to when he was eight, a paper flower he was given when he was fourteen, a drawing of an imaginary aircraft he made in his forties—these small, unnameable things, the only evidence of a man whose existence has now become a complete blank, the sum total of a life now lived anonymously.
To Whom It May Concern,
You were always afraid of the dark. When you were afraid, you could not speak.
And soon, in only a few days, Henry will slip through the front glass doors of the South Shore Nursing Home, flag down a taxi, ask the driver to please hurry, speeding off toward O’Hare International Airport, where, among the lines of weary-looking people, among the badly damaged suitcases and the stewardesses in grim uniforms and the little children timidly holding their mothers’ hands, he will buy a single one-way ticket, then board an unassuming plane, asking for assistance with his wheelchair only when he really needs it, and then, when the airplane’s engines begin to roar and the disagreeable force of gravity shakes the cloth seat beneath him, when the plane has departed from the ground, hurtling itself through the blue and white sky, Henry will once again be happy, the aircraft becoming lost somewhere just over the cloudy horizon, and who he once was, who he might have been, or who he has failed to be, will have all but vanished.
To Whom It May Concern,
You were too young to fight in the Good War.
At the moment, Henry is as tricky to spot as a ghost. His transistor radio switched off, the squeaky left wheel of his chair now silent, he wheels himself past the nurses to the far end of the cafeteria, and stops in front of the enormous window in the recreation room, gazing out at the boundless blue sky, completely unnoticed. Once, only a few months before, Henry managed to follow a nurse named Leticia through the glass security doors, into an empty elevator, through the ground-floor lobby, and out onto the street, before being chased down by a bullnecked security guard, just as a taxicab had finally pulled up. A second time, only three weeks ago, Henry made it as far as the cab ride. But when answering the cabbie’s questions he found he had said too much, and the cabdriver immediately pulled over on the side of the expressway to radio the police.
To Whom It May Concern,
You had a nervous breakdown in your thirties.
In the afternoons, when he is not busy counting his remaining words, Henry does away with his memories, disposing of them all, scribbling down his few remembrances. Once they are written down and sealed within a white paper envelope, once he has mailed them off, he considers these memories to be gone for good, one less thing to keep him from disappearing. With his right hand cramped from arthritis, having found a secluded spot in the rec room of the South Shore Nursing Home, as far as he can get from the other residents staring up at the droning television, drowsy with their anti-Parkinson’s medication and their willy-nilly arts and crafts, he begins writing another short letter addressed to himself:
To Whom It May Concern,
You were one of the designers of the F-4 Phantom airplane. You worked on the nose cone and the wings and were able to reduce the drag coefficient on both by almost sixty percent.
Or:
To Whom It May Concern,
You used to like music by Woody Herman and Glenn Miller and sometimes Artie Shaw.
Or:
To Whom It May Concern,
You used to be able to speak some German. Your father and uncle were both tailors.
Or:
To Whom It May Concern,
The only thing you ever stole was a comic book, when you were eleven years old. You had the money for it but you wanted to see what it felt like to steal and you didn’t get caught but you wish you had and so you never even read it.
Henry will then date the letter, slip it inside a plain envelope, write the address of the South Shore Nursing Home on the envelope, fumble for a stamp somewhere within the breast pocket of his shabby red robe, and hand the letter to a nurse to be sent out later that afternoon. When the mail arrives, he does not open the letters he has written to himself. Instead, he carefully places them in a box of personal effects he intends to leave to his son, checking the postmark on each envelope, filing each one in order by date. When evening comes, and his right hand has grown sore from writing, Henry will wheel himself back to his room and stare out the tiny window—the empty, regretful branches of a single oak tree the only sight he ever sees—trying to ignore the inevitable appearance of night, a vague reminder of the approaching certainty of his most unimportant death.
To Whom It May Concern,
You had eyes that weren’t brown or green but which your mother called hazel. Your mother prayed all the time.
By the time midnight arrives, the moon settling outside Henry’s small window, the old man has become lonesome, the oak branches etching odd-looking shadows along the tile floor; he feels afraid. He has always disliked the silence, the dreadful soundlessness of night. So
when the shadows have crept to the middle of his room, to the edge of his wheelchair where his feet rest, Henry looks about his room for his silver radio and switches it on, searching among the AM stations for an old standard by Benny Goodman or a rebroadcast of a Lawrence Welk show, or maybe an episode of Inner Sanctum Mysteries or The Airship Brigade or The Shadow. He wheels himself to the room across the hall, where Mr. Bradley, eighty-seven years old, lies in bed, his papery skin covering a sunken-looking face, eyes taciturn and fully resigned. He is too weak to even smile, but his thin gray eyebrows move slightly, this small gesture the only sign that the older man has noticed Henry sitting beside him. Together, the two elderly residents will listen to the worn-out jokes, the worn-out radio stories, the worn-out ballads. And when the static begins to clear, when an excited voice hurriedly calls out from beyond time and space, Henry recognizes it as the brave tenor and pitch of Alexander Lightning, teenage commander of the adventurous Airship Brigade, a science fiction show Henry loved more than anything else as a boy:
ALEXANDER: Gee whiz, Doctor Jupiter. That was a close one. I thought for sure we were going to be crushed by that mysterious meteor belt!
DOCTOR JUPITER: My dear boy, I was hardly worried, knowing our spacecraft, the amazing X-1, was safely in your hands.
ALEXANDER: Now if our gyrometer would only tell us where we are.
DOCTOR JUPITER: It appears that we’re on a direct course for the moon.
ALEXANDER: All we have to do is find somewhere to land…but what’s that? It’s a city, made entirely of silver clouds. And what now? Oh, no, they’re firing at us with a strange ray of some kind. Everyone, take your crash positions in a hurry!
DARLA: Father, I’m afraid.
DOCTOR JUPITER: There’s no need to worry, my dear. As long as Alexander is at the controls—
ALEXANDER: Oh, no, we’re going down!
ANNOUNCER: Will the Airship Brigade survive the awful radio ray of the mysterious city in the clouds? Stay tuned, listeners, and…
WHEN THE ADVENTURES of that particular episode are over, and the clarinets and saxophones have played their final tune, Henry wheels himself across the hallway back to his room, glancing up through his window at the cloudy silver moon, the stars looking like pinholes poked in the dark fabric of night. He stares up at the sky and murmurs, Enough, enough, enough, and then he begins counting on his fingers the number of hours and days that remain until he will have made himself vanish. Eleven more days, he whispers. Only eleven more days. Can’t you wait that long? Can’t you? No?
No.
No.
No.
ONLY ELEVEN DAYS LEFT, and yet today, Monday the eighteenth, Henry has decided he will wait no more and that he must try to escape this very morning. He has written down the appropriate numbers in his notebook to help him remember. There. Just above a drawing of an elliptical zeppelin: 11-3-5. At approximately 11:35 a.m., when Jeff, the tall, bearded orderly, props open the glass security doors to deliver the rolling metal racks of preheated lunch, Henry, only eleven days away from being completely invisible, will quietly sneak past, wheeling himself to the first bank of elevators as quickly as he can. Arriving at the ground floor, he will hurry through the front lobby with a dignity and confidence he has very nearly forgotten, proudly wheeling himself outside, where he will hail himself a cab, and then, speeding toward the airport, he will disappear once and for all.
To Whom It May Concern,
You had a sense of humor which you kept to yourself. You were afraid of other people’s laughter.
At the moment, Henry looks up and sees the clock above the television set: 11:33. He nods, gathering what little courage he has left, wheeling himself as quickly as he can toward the glass security doors. In the next moment, Jeff, pushing a large silver cart stacked high with tray after tray of prepared food, whistles past, running his plastic security card through the electronic card reader, swinging the heavy doors wide, propping them open with the small plastic doorstop. Sitting there, just before the glass divider, unnoticeable to almost everyone, Henry wheels himself forward, hitting his elbow against the doorframe, his bony fingers grasping the rubber wheels with all his might. Holding his breath, he wheels past Jeff and the racks of food, then forces the glass door closed behind him, trapping Jeff on the other side of the locked door. He pushes himself toward the elevators, his heart beating like a tin drum in his chest. Without thinking, already terrified and exhausted, Henry presses both elevator buttons, up and down, glancing over his shoulder, hissing to himself as he waits for the heavy elevator doors to slide open. Finally, the elevator on the right gives an electric ding! and Henry’s heart begins to beat wildly, rebelling out of cowardice, out of fear, out of panic. His hands suddenly feel too tired, too weak. He gives himself one final shove, catching a wheel on the metal threshold, almost tumbling out of his wheelchair. He begins to hit all of the glowing yellow buttons, finally managing to get the elevator doors closed just as Jeff begins to bang on the glass.
When, unbelievably, the elevator has finished descending and the heavy doors open on the ground floor, Henry lets out a small sigh of joy. He wheels himself as fast as he can past the waiting families, the off-duty nurses standing beside the coffee urn quietly chatting, the enormous security guard busy reading a newspaper, then all the way across the lobby, swinging wide through the front doors, rolling outside onto the sidewalk beside the busy street. Traffic! What is this? the sound of traffic having been something Henry had forgotten to even begin to forget. A taxicab pulls up and the bearded driver helps Henry into the backseat, folding up the wheelchair, forcing it into the taxi’s trunk. Henry can hear the buzz and static of the cabbie’s CB, the odd snatches of voices like the thoughts and sounds of memories he has yet to dismiss, so that when the cabbie asks, “Where to, pops?” when he turns around from behind the steering wheel and glances at his passenger in the rearview mirror, Henry gives the response he has already planned, speaking six of the eleven words he intends to use today, his voice hesitant, gravelly, predictably weak, as unsure as it was when he was a boy, when his words first began to fail him. “O’Hare. I’m going on a trip.”
Additional Remarks of a Historical Significance
A CLOUD HAS APPEARED WHERE IT SHOULD NOT BE. There it floats, quite mysteriously, as if having fallen from the open vastness of a blue and white sky, drifting in the middle of a marshy field, its gray shape unchanging, hovering only a meter or two above the muddy earth. The cloud has begun to cause some panic among the superstitious villagers whose sugarcane and potato farms lie just outside of Meerut, and so Lieutenant George Kasper has been dispatched to see what there is to see.
George Kasper—unwitting descendant of the London Kaspers, with family relations in England beginning in the fifth century, and with other crooked branches of the same family tree reaching from England to France back to Germany—would rather be drawing his maps. Instead, today, on this morning in the year of 1857, in the unvanquished colony of British India, the young lieutenant stands glaring at the shape of a single gray cloud, unmoving, uncelestial, the soft, wet-smelling sugarcane extending around him in all directions, distinctly marking how alone in this moment he truly is. Ishari, his sepoy scout, forever loyal, only a boy really, age twelve or thirteen, a Hindu by birth but more and more British each day, stands some hundred meters back along the dry road. He watches each of the lieutenant’s gestures, trying his best to read George’s thoughts through his physical expression, his every movement, his every twitch.
“Well, I must admit, Ishari, this is certainly something of a puzzle,” the young lieutenant whispers. George, only thirty-two years old himself, thinks he ought not foul this up in front of the young Hindu. There has been trouble recently in Meerut: unexplained fires in colonial storehouses, and yesterday the British hanged another sepoy, Mangal Pandey, a Hindu private of the Thirty-fourth Regiment who attacked his British sergeant with a sword and wounded a nearby adjutant on his horse. George feels the young boy’s eyes alo
ng his back and takes another step deeper into the swampy muck. The cloud looms closer, making a terrible aching sound. George blinks again. The sun cuts behind an acacia tree. George hears the low, heartbroken moan again, and holds his hand up, shielding his eyes. Suddenly he smiles, relieved, seeing the cloud is no cloud at all. It is a rhinoceros, magnificent and ancient and startling white, lurching there in the mud.
George stares a little longer and sees the poor giant is trapped in what may very well be quicksand, too old to struggle or perhaps just resigned to the fate that lies beneath the florid estuary. Dear old man, George thinks. It seems your reign has come to an end. As a geographer for the British East India Company, it is my sad duty to inform you that we no longer have any use for rhinoceroses of any kind. From now on, you and all of these unpredictable rivers, these septic marshes, these troublesome plains, will all be redrawn, refigured on my map. These plundered kingdoms and useless villages will be made uniform and compliant to the thoughtful order of British rule. The animal gives a low, melancholy groan again, sinking deeper. It will soon drown in the mud. George decides he will have to shoot it, that being the Christian thing to do. A magical cloud? A magical cloud? The sooner these people learn of civilisation, the better off all of us will be, George thinks. The young lieutenant raises his Enfield rifle, aims for the monster’s enormous head, but finds he cannot fire. The brutish creature is staring directly at him now, its head bowed, its great horn radiant. The lieutenant places his finger on the rifle’s trigger, but still he cannot shoot. There, stranded in the weeds and murk, white as carved stone, the rhinoceros looks like a god.
