Alternative Truths

by Bob Brown

  An hour later, my head was swimming. I tried to work on a freelance project, but even with the computer assisting me I couldn’t draw a straight line. I sent my client an email saying I was sick and would be a day or two behind. I had to offer her a discount, but in the end she was content.

  Things got worse. My whole forearm swelled. I had chills so bad I was shaking. James carried me out to the car like I was a child and zoomed past the protestors to the most upscale hospital in the city, Metropolitan Emergency Medical Essentials.

  “Welcome to MEME. How can we be of service?” asked a woman who was identical to the one from WESUC. This one wore a nurse costume that had to have been inspired by a porn film.

  “My wife has an infected wound in her arm,” said James. “Fever, chills, and swelling.”

  “I’ll need her name, credit identification number and date of birth,” said the woman.

  “Melissa Whitfield. 00978653. June 25, 1987.”

  “Yes—it looks like she has basic coverage, but there is a special today, upgrade to premium care for just $549.41 and qualify for expedited wait time, private rooms and freshly prepared meals.”

  “She’ll upgrade,” he said.

  “Please proceed to Triage Desk A,” said the woman, pointing us toward a room gleaming with white and steel.

  The nurse at the triage desk took one look at my arm, pushed a button, and a cloud of brightly colored scrubs and hairnets surrounded me. They scanned me with devices I couldn’t name and pumped me full of fluids that made the pain disappear. The world got too bright. It spun. I lost consciousness.

  ~o0o~

  When I came to, I was in the softest bed I’d ever felt. The pain was gone but my head was still a little fuzzy. I opened my eyes and saw the room had pale green walls, vinyl flooring that looked like real wood, and a plush sofa upon which James, curled up under a mountain of micro-fleece blankets, was quietly snoozing.

  “James,” I whispered. I put extra force behind the words because I was expecting my throat to be hoarse. It wasn’t, so the whisper was more of a shout. James jumped upright, getting himself tangled in all the blankets.

  “How are you feeling?” He disentangled himself and walked over to my bedside.

  “A lot better. Can we really afford all this?” I asked looking at the large flat screen and the tablet which displayed a short stack of pancakes for $20. I could only imagine how much a chicken dinner cost.

  “These days things are go all in or don’t go at all. Anything short of the best would have left you dead.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked playing with the buttons on my bed until it had me propped up.

  “I found some real reviews buried in the 3,864th page of Google search results. There were stories of people coming into even the best hospitals with basic coverage and being treated carelessly in unsanitary conditions. The doctors often made horrible mistakes; some reviews implied the mistakes were on purpose. One woman went in to get stitches on her arm, wound up with an antibiotic resistant infection and had to get it amputated. When they brought her in for surgery, they took off the wrong arm. She lived, but has no arms now. If she didn’t have dedicated family, she’d be dead on the streets.”

  “That could’ve been me,” I said thinking about the shitty room my alleged cancer was removed in.

  “But it wasn’t. We’ll just have to rework our budget so we can afford the extra coverage. We’re locked into the upgraded rate for the next 12 months.”

  ~o0o~

  I was released the next day, without even a scar as evidence of my spot, or infection, just smooth, pristine, unblemished skin. As we walked down the bleached hallways, I asked the doctor how they made me heal so quickly. He responded with a flurry of technical terms and the names of devices I had never heard of.

  He left us at the checkout desk, where another blonde woman in a skimpy nurse uniform informed us we owed $765,000.

  “But, we upgraded our coverage,” said James. “Is that really 20% of our bill?”

  The woman’s smile never faltered. “Your policy does not cover malpractice. When we admitted your wife, we thought it was an accidental injury, but upon looking into her records, we saw it was an inferior attempt to remove a potentially cancerous skin blemish, so nothing was covered.”

  “But we just don’t have that much money,” I pleaded.

  “We do not expect you to pay up front.” The woman’s grin grew as she handed us a tablet. “We offer a variety of finance packages, and since you have upgraded to premium coverage, you qualify for the shockingly low interest rate of 7.8999%.”

  END

  PATTI 209

  K.G. Anderson

  The alarms went off at midnight, up and down the hall: beeps, chimes, clicks, and snippets of golden oldies from 2018. God, I still loathed Taylor Swift.

  “It’s twelve A.M.,” an electronic voice informed my fellow inmates.

  I could hear the clamor even through the locked door of the bathing room where I hid in the scratched-up tub, reading an old paperback mystery. Last week someone had complained I used too much of the hot water.

  “It would be appreciated if you would try drinking a hot beverage instead,” read the reprimand I’d received. It was signed “Charming Devreaux, Care Manager.”

  That bitch wouldn’t know Care if it bit her, but she certainly knew how to Manage. Every bite of food, every washcloth, every toothbrush—to say nothing of every bandage, battery, adult diaper, or pill—was accounted for. As was staff time. Staff who wasted time giving Care were replaced by less expensive, more tractable staff. Our underpaid caregivers were a far cry from the skilled professionals and intelligent robots we’d imagined 50 years ago when designing Fiddler’s Green. Robots—hah!

  All right, so the prices of everything, from utilities to medical services, had soared beyond our original estimates. But it was envy that led one of my fellow inmates to rat me out for excessive bathing. I was the only one of us still limber enough to get in and out of the tub without help.

  Thanks to the yoga regimen I’d started at 50 and adhered to grimly for 35 years, old Patti 209 was still a moving target.

  I stood up carefully, grasped the grab bar, and stepped out onto the mat. I toweled dry then wrapped myself in a worn blue robe with letters scrawled in black laundry marker, front and back: Patti 209.

  Yep, that’s me.

  I made a face at my reflection in the chipped bathroom mirror: a mop of wiry white hair, a wrinkled face, and dark eyes with a glint in them. A little old lady. But not a nice one.

  I padded quietly down the wide, dim-lit hallway—not that anyone would hear me. The lone night aide would be dozing at his desk downstairs in the first-floor office, earbuds in, snoring away.

  An hour ago he’d failed to respond to the muffled crashes from the common room downstairs where my husband, Danny, was having another bad night—pacing back and forth, cursing, and upending furniture. Those gene-targeting dementia treatments I’d spent a fortune on weren’t having much effect.

  Through a half-open door I saw our newest inmate—Tod? Or was it Ted?—slumped at his desk in front of a tablet. He had his pants open and a porn vid running.

  Ragged snores came from Chuck Olsen’s room, where a battered black mobi sat by the bed.

  In the next room a series of soft beeps indicated a vital-signs monitor sending cardiac data to some device-maker’s network. How reassuring. Except we’d found out last month, when Kamala Pasil died in her sleep, that there were no longer people at the other end reviewing those data transmissions. Though the company kept sending us the bills.

  Beep. Beep.

  I knocked on Rachel’s door.

  “Come in.”

  Rachel sat in her faded wing chair holding one of those stupid robotic Petsies on her lap. A dog, I guessed. Rachel has macular degeneration and the Petsy’s glowing green eyes, connected to her brain by an implant, give her a kind of vision.

  “Agent 209, sneaking back from clandes
tine bathing activities,” I announced as I entered. We giggled. Then another crash from downstairs sobered us.

  “Danny’s having another bad night,” Rachel said.

  I didn’t answer, but sat down on the bench beside her chair. I was glad she couldn’t see my face. Just the mention of my husband’s name and I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

  “Not how we pictured things, is it?” Rachel went on. “What did that stupid magazine article call Fiddler’s Green—‘the new old-age lifestyle?’”

  I snorted. “For us old New-Agers.”

  Thirty years ago Rachel and I had designed what we were confident would be an alternative to the cheerless nursing homes where we’d guiltily warehoused our own parents. Foundation grants poured in to our design collective. Conferences across the country lauded our work. In 2016 we’d opened Fiddler’s Green, complete with solar power and universal access, gray water recycling, ergonomic design and lighting, workshops and gardens. Just add old people, and—

  Another crash from downstairs, followed by a bellow of rage.

  “Patti . . .” Rachel hesitated. “We all love him but Danny can’t go on like this. Not with the police.”

  Danny kept escaping. His new electronic tracking bracelet had taken the Fiddler’s Green staff several days to figure out but Danny, with his engineering background, had disabled it in minutes. He kept on wandering away and they kept on calling the police to find him. If this kept up, he’d be kicked out of Fiddler’s Green.

  “Our nephew back East is furious,” I told Rachel. “Special memory-care facilities are expensive. If I pay for one, it will eat up the money he thinks he’ll inherit.”

  “Surprise the greedy nephew and leave your money to the treehuggers instead,” Rachel said. “Are there any trees left these days?”

  I chuckled, but, sadly, giving away our money wasn’t an option. Little remained of the three million-dollar nest egg we’d had 20 years ago, thanks to the 2018 repeal of Social Security and the collapse of Medicare in 2025, at the start of the third of Trump’s terms.

  Now tens of thousands of old farts—oh, excuse me, the elderly—lived in decaying houses, their utilities disconnected, or were homeless in camps and shelters. Danny and I were comparatively lucky, owning a founder’s share in Fiddler’s Green and praying the place could stay in business until—well, until the two of us were gone. There was talk of British Columbia annexing the Pacific Northwest, but we’d been hearing that since 2028, when Kushner’s first act as president had been to sell what was left of Florida—including the impoverished residents—to Cuba.

  “If I don’t shell out for the memory-care place in Seattle, management is going to send Danny to a state facility.”

  Rachel gasped. We’d heard horror stories about these grim warehouses they’d set up for the poor devils who’d failed to respond to the new Alzheimer’s pill.

  “But you and Danny are founders here,” she said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

  I shook my head. “You’d think. But my attorney said it would take years to fight this. And the courts are barely functioning. Even if we won, it would be too late for Danny.”

  “Oh, Patti, you’ll miss him.” Rachel reached out and found my arm. She squeezed it.

  “No, I’ll go with him,” I said. “He’s my husband—what’s left of him. I can’t just send him away, and—”

  Rachel’s stuffed robot gave a doggy little yip. Probably sick of my maundering.

  “Damn. Time for my pills.”

  Rachel groped around on the table beside her. I handed her the little plastic box with compartments coded in Braille.

  “All I do these days is look for things I’ve lost,” she said. “Or think I’ve lost something and end up wondering if I ever had it at all.”

  She took a sip from a bottle of water and gulped a pill. “No wonder they gave us all numbers.”

  Numbers? Oh yes, numbers. I didn’t tell her I’d overheard Charming on the phone with someone, asking about tattooing our numbers on our arms.

  “But it’ll make it easier to keep track of them,” she’d whined.

  At least the woman hadn’t said anything about furnaces.

  I gave Rachel a quick kiss goodnight and continued down the hall. Fiddler’s Green. My life’s work. I doubted a soul in the place except Rachel and the bookkeeper could remember my last name. Or knew that I was the architect who’d designed the place.

  Even Danny rarely recognized me, poor man.

  I started down the flight of stairs (wide and securely bannistered, but not very well lit these days—what had become of the motion sensors?) to the ground floor kitchen. I resisted the temptation to take the elevator, even though the argument with Danny’s nephew this morning had worn me out. I’d have gone to bed right after my bath, but I’d have felt guilty. Because I wanted to make cocoa and toast for Sharelle.

  Sharelle, my best friend for more than fifty years, was in the garden shed. In July she’d talked the housekeepers into moving her bed into the quaint, shingled cottage with its rudimentary half bath. It was a whim, Sharelle told us, deploying her Southern charm to deflect our concerns. How she enjoyed the summer nights in her garden, and there would be so few summers left . . .

  Now the nights had turned cold, but Sharelle refused to come back in the main building except to take a shower or gobble a meal. I’d taken to luring her into the kitchen with a late-night snack. I still had the codes for the locked refrigerator and cabinets and I’d bribed the night aides into looking the other way.

  Sharelle and I would sit at the little Formica table one of the housekeepers had put in the kitchen and reminisce. Though the past few nights she’d responded to my remarks with nonsensical phrases, wolfing her toast as if she thought someone were going to snatch it. I tried to ignore the way she used the hem of her baggy sweatshirt as a napkin and let her long gray dreadlocks trail in her food.

  Minetta, the newest housekeeper, had been ordered to move Sharelle back inside. She’d enlisted my help, but when we went out to the cottage Sharelle just shook her head and curled up on the rug, a Moroccan carpet brought from her old room.

  “Patti, Sharelle’s not in her right mind,” was how Minetta put it after we’d retreated to the kitchen. She tapped one finger to her neatly-coiffed head and pursed her lips.

  “Yes. I know. I’ll call her daughter.”

  “Will you? Really?”

  “Soon.”

  “We have to move her inside by Friday. Charming says so.”

  We sighed. Minetta patted my hand, her touch so warm, and turned to unload the dishwasher.

  To my surprise, Sharelle was not waiting for me in the kitchen tonight. It must be the rain. Peering out the window, I saw the cottage was dark. She’d fallen asleep.

  I went ahead and made our cocoa, flavoring the drinks from a tiny bottle of vanilla I kept in the pocket of my robe. I loaded the cups onto a tray, covered the tray with plastic wrap to keep it dry, and headed cautiously out to the shed. We’d designed the back door to open level to the deck and pathway—no treacherous steps to contend with. That was fortunate, because in these days of short-staffing, the deck was untended and covered with moss.

  We hadn’t been completely stupid. We’d understood the house. We’d understood old people. We just hadn’t quite grasped that the frail old people we were so tenderly designing it for would be us. Or that the country we lived in would wish we were dead.

  When I entered the dark cottage the fragrance of potting soil and drying herbs rose up like the fumes of an aged Scotch. No cleansers, no mopping solution, no stench of overcooked food and under-washed bodies. Couldn’t blame Sharelle for making this her refuge.

  “Sharelle? Sharelle!”

  I slid the tray onto the table and felt around on the wall for the light switch. A soft glow from the single bulb fell on the table, revealing a delicate etched cordial glass with a few drops of red wine left at the bottom.

  Sharelle lay on the be
d in the corner.

  “Sharelle? Honey?”

  I grabbed her hand. It was limp and cold, the wrist without pulse. I put my face to her lips. Sharelle wasn’t breathing.

  The world stopped, and I stood outside the reach of time. I had prepared myself to be old but not to feel so utterly alone.

  I backed away and crumpled into a chair.

  Old. Alone.

  Some minutes later, I came out of my trance. Sharelle’s body still lay there on the bed. Our tray still sat on the table.

  I slowly removed the plastic wrap, fumbling as tears blurred my vision. I raised one of the warm cups to my lips, toasted my friend, and drank. It was Dutch chocolate, mixed with sugar, heated in a pan with milk slowly added, taken from the burner when it was just hot enough, and kissed with a few drops of vanilla. The way my grandmother had made it, and my mother. I’d begun making it for Sharelle after she’d confided that our usual tea was keeping her awake at night.

  Oh, Sharelle!

  I closed my eyes, remembering Sharelle last summer, tucking a bottle of pills into an antique copper vase. I’d held the chair while she climbed onto it to set the vase on a high shelf above the table. It held a prescription bottle with our secret stash of pills—opiates that should have been doled out under the watchful eye of a nurse.

  Well, someone hadn’t been so watchful.

  I opened my eyes and looked up. Yes, the vase was gone from the shelf. Now it stood on Sharelle’s bedside table. I turned it over and dumped out the contents. The bottle was there, but half of the pills were gone. There was a note penned on a scrap of paper in a faltering script.

  “Patti, it was time. Saved half for you, girl. Love, Sharelle.”