“Yes, Mom.”
She moaned at the sound and lay back against the mattress. She placed her hands palms down on her chest, covering the tiny wooden cross that had hung from a dull silver chain about her neck since before Dad had passed.
I was visiting well outside prescribed visiting hours, as the nurse had tersely informed me when I tried to sneak in unnoticed. Not an easy accomplishment when your knees refuse to bend without cracking, and your ankles refuse your commands to walk on tiptoe. I kept a scarf wrapped around the lower half as my face as I stopped at the nurse’s station, a toque pulled low over my forehead and a pair of ski goggles over my eyes. I took in a breath and emitted a full vocalization of my intentions to visit my beloved mother, and Nurse Luckless vanished into unconsciousness, panic frozen on her face.
Mom’s roommate N. Nowlan (his name designation on his chart — sometimes, when you’re bored enough, you’ll read anything you can) would not have appreciated my efforts at silence, having been in a coma long before Mom moved in next door. The seesaw rasp of his ventilator and the intermittent submarine pings of whatever else was hooked up to him would cover any noise I would make. N. Nowlan had never had a visitor, not once had I seen anyone other than a bored nurse even look at him with anything other than muted disinterest.
Not for the first time I marveled that we put down animals for having broken limbs, that my mother had my dog euthanized for shedding too much in his old age, yet we keep people alive through machinery long past sensibility. What was the point of preserving loved ones as living taxidermy other than sentimentality and fear and guilt? I wasn’t any different; Mom’s mind had been unhurriedly deflating for years, it was only through some ill-defined sense of responsibility that I had exhausted my savings to keep her in a level of comfort she’d never recognize. And here I was, beyond death, yet still umbilicaled to this shriveled husk by a spiritual cord that nourished me with nothing save self-condemnation.
A pang of hunger nipped at my insides. I looked at the desiccated shell in the next bed longingly, a gourmand at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Would anyone miss him? Would anyone even notice if I took just a nibble? Could this be a source of easy food, coma patients and the like? The thought nauseated me, but not as much as it would have the week before. I was clearly going to have to continue my existence for a few more months at the bare minimum, and there would have to be a feasible menu. I tabled the notion for later review — whatever was happening, had happened, to me, it was still too early in the process to begin sketching out my meal plan.
“How are you?” she asked me.
“Fine, Mom. Relatively.” This promised to be a rarity. Actual comprehension. Perhaps we could have a conversation without the need for guises. Over the past year, I had pretended to be her brother Everett, her father, her mailman, her classmate from junior high. I hadn’t been myself with Mom in a very long time. Or ever, come to think of it. Even as a toddler I was guarded against her, knowing that she and I had deep character divisions, knowing that it was up to me to take on a guise and make her happy. “It’s been . . . interesting of late. I’ve actually got some news. Good news.”
“My Sheldon,” she slurred. “My little Menno-knight. Always by my side.”
The old pet name brought a smile to my lips. She called me that after Dad passed, spelling it out for me so I knew how special an appellation it was. A knight was a brave soldier, she said, someone who would always protect his loved ones. Later, when I was older, less tolerant of her passive-aggressive smothering, I grew to hate it. I would amend it to myself, Sheldon, the Menno-not. Now I cherished the memory, distorted though it was, and took on the role of loving son once more. “That’s me.”
“How have you been?”
“Oh, fine.”
“Was school all right today? Did you learn anything?”
“Math was tough today,” I decided. “Had a test. Aced it.”
“Good boy. So smart.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. “So handsome.”
“Aw, Mom.”
“Any pretty girls you’d like to tell me about?” I squirmed in my chair. “Look at you. So shy. You’ll like girls soon, you know. You don’t think you will, but all that changes. Soon, you’ll look at girls and can’t imagine a life without them. All knights do.”
“Jeez . . .”
Her eyes drifted off. “I’ve been lonely, waiting for you.”
I braced myself, sensing a shift, the fading from one memory to another. “Sorry, I had to work.”
“We all have excuses, don’t we?” This was said to herself, talking to me without noticing me. “Everyone has excuses, no one ever takes the blame. That’s the way it is.” Her eyes focused on me briefly, flitting with contempt, before looking away, her sight already fuzzed over with memory. “I always worry about Sheldon.”
“Goddammit.”
“Don’t blaspheme, Roland, you know how that upsets me.”
I was suddenly glad I lacked the ability to inadvertently vocalize a sigh. Not that she’d remember the slight. Mom’s memory had been getting steadily worse as delirium clearcut her brain, carving off large chunks of her past. She’d had good days, especially when she first arrived. She understood the nature of her surroundings, the purpose of my visits. Our conversations then were not all that different from talks we’d had over the previous thirty years. Mom was an insular creature, always focused on her own self and how the world outside continually failed to live up to her exacting expectations. Chats were drastically one-sided affairs, and I often mused that I was not at all necessary to the dialogue, as her running commentary included her perceived responses from my end.
“You know Margaret Evans, down the street. She has that house with the fence, the one that should have been painted green. Her daughter, Felicia, you went to school with her, she was a year or two behind you, you know her, hee hee, she’s now a doctor, something to do with the eyes, an—” and here Mom would consult her notepad to freshen her memory “ophthalmologist, isn’t that something. Well you could have never predicted that, she was always a mean child, she pushed over our fence once — I’m sure it was her — but she’s rich now, so there you go.”
Many times I pitied the poor people who crossed her path — librarians, cashiers, mail carriers, food court service personnel, grocers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the homeless — as she would launch into her structureless stream of consciousness without hesitation, assuming the person unlucky enough to cross in front of her eyesight was already a participant in her nomadic tête-à-têtes, knew of the people she mentioned, summarily agreed with her assertions. Her lapse into dementia was thus so subtle a process that it went nigh unnoticed by me until the day she prepared a mighty Thanksgiving feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, squash, corn, and apple pie, all for me and my decades-dead father, all on July 17th.
So at first our visits were actually comforting in their inanity, and I convinced myself that her condition, while severe enough to merit a move to a home, was as bad as it could get. She’d berate me for not visiting enough, and then switch topics to whatever she had seen that day on the news. She’d ramble on while I sat next to her, holding her hand and reading scripts, memorizing lines, or channel surfing. It was inconvenient, but tolerable. Quickly this changed, and each visit became the first in a good long while. She’d claim through angry sheets of tears that I hadn’t been around enough, even though I had visited two days previous. Then she began to smile when I came around, glad to see me, how had I been, but it was a front, politely covering up the fact that she had no idea who in the world I could be. The talks at this point invariably swirled around bizarre delusions that festered beneath her surface. Fears of persecution ran rampant through her few remaining neurons. Asians were destroying the free market system. Her sister Carrie stole her favorite teacup. Her neighbor Mr. Wallis poisoned her cat, she was sure of it and she’d confront him on it the next time she saw him. Mr. Wall
is was a WWII veteran who had retired and passed away long before we had ever gotten a pet, a beagle named Cooper that mom had never cared for but was the totality of my world for years after Dad’s accident.
Accompanying these imagined persecutions were lengthy sermons on her concept of God as indefinable cloud of wrath, scourge of evildoers, fornicators, homosexuals, and actors. Each visit was a front row seat to the very worst in human prejudices, a ticket to a terrifying Baptist revival, a marathon viewing of Fox News. Her diatribes were so predictable I could mouth silently along, lip-synching to the righteous arbiter of morality. Karaoke hatred.
And still, I welcomed her insanity as a long-overdue form of freedom. No longer did I have to hide my lovers under the guise of “acting partners.” Mom’s lunacy set me free of her chains, at least hypothetically. And very soon, the nurses told me, her memory would be sanded down to a smooth plane of nothingness, at which point we’d have “the talk” to discuss her move to the tenth floor, the floor of the walking dead, the ward of the tattered ambulatory cadaver, where residents freely roamed the halls, bare of feet, clad in old nightgowns and PJs, muttering softly to themselves about past triumphs and woes in never-known glossolalic languages until a passing Samaritan found a few precious minutes to guide them back to their rooms.
Maybe I should check myself in.
“Sorry, dear,” I replied, taking on Dad’s role. “It’s been a long day. At the office.”
“No excuse,” she muttered. “What if Shelley heard that kind of language coming from his father? Can you imagine how damaging that could be?”
“I’ll watch my tongue, dear.”
“Such a good boy.” She played with her crucifix for a few moments, intent on making it dance across her chest. “I don’t think he likes girls, Roland,” she said offhandedly. “Not one bit. A bit of a sissy, that one.”
My mouth went drier. “What makes you say that?”
“Oh, a mother knows.” She smiled to herself, suddenly a young woman. “He hides it, but I can tell. Thinks I don’t notice when his friends come over. Oh, they’re just from my class, that’s what he tells me. Lying to his mother. Shameful.”
“You’ve known? All this time?”
“I didn’t want to admit it to myself. And think of the scandal! Do you think I could show my face in church again? No, better he hide it in shame, alone.”
“Couldn’t you have just . . .” I struggled with the words. “Couldn’t you. Accept him?”
“Certainly not! We don’t just pick and choose which sins we ignore. If he would just tell me the truth, we could go seek help.”
Knowing it to be an impossibility, the veins in my head nonetheless began to throb. “Maybe he’s just. Afraid of what you would say.”
“Oh, how can you say that? I love him, Roland. I just want his soul to be safe. He could always tell me anything. I’d forgive him, I know I would. And together, we’d walk out of the darkness.” Her words spiked with barbs. “It’s all your fault, anyway. Don’t think you’ve ever fooled me.”
I stayed silent, uncertain how to end the topic. Not sure if I should.
“With your trips out of town. You know.”
“Trips?”
“When was the last time we had sex?”
Oh, God. I leaned in. “Hon, what are you. Saying? What trips?”
“You think I didn’t know? I thought you’d stop when we married. I guess I’m the fool, aren’t I? A few kind words, too much wine, and there you go, forty years of denial. What a joke I am.”
“Stop what? What trips? Where did I go?”
“I hired a detective to follow you!”
“What did I do?”
“Sheldon, when did you get here?”
Fuck!
“It’s good to see you, dear. I’ve been so lonely.”
I clasped my head in my hands. So close, I thought, but close to what I still wasn’t sure. “I’m fine, Mom. Just been . . . real busy.”
“No.” She pulled her blankets up to her chin, her eyes shot through with fear. “It’s not you.”
“It’s me, Mom. It’s Sheldon.”
“It’s not you. I know who you are.”
“It’s Sheldon, Mom,” I tried again, struggling to keep my voice down to a harsh whisper. “Your son.”
“You’re not Sheldon,” Mom said, her eyes suddenly wide but focused on the wall behind me. I could count the veins beneath the opacity of her skin. Hell, I could hear the blood sluicing its way through her system. I clutched at the armrests and the metal dented under the pressure. “I know my Sheldon, you’re not him. He’s a fornicator and a homo.”
“Got it in one, Mom,” I mumbled.
“I speak to God about Sheldon,” she continued. I shifted my lips in an effective mime show of her harangue. “I speak to Him every day and I pray every night that He might show Sheldon the error of his ways. He lives a life of sin. He doesn’t know that I know. I thank the Lord his father died before he could see the abomination his son has become.”
“Your husband was gay,” I interrupted. “I’m pretty sure. You just said so.”
“Roland was a good man. I kept him from temptation.”
“Whatever you say. Mom, I’ve got some news. I don’t have. A lot of time here.”
“He was a good boy once. I don’t know what happened. He strayed.”
“I got a job, Mom. A good one.”
“He became an actor. That’s what made him queer. All those liberals. That’s how they get you.”
“It’ll pay enough to. Help you stay here.”
“I asked him to pray to God for guidance.”
“Maybe I could have you moved. To a better place.”
“Do you know what he said to me?”
“If I’m an actor. Then this is what God wants.”
“‘This is what God wants.’”
“God doesn’t make no mistakes.”
“‘God doesn’t make no mistakes.’ Even then, he was lost.”
“I was there, Mom. It’s me.”
“I love you, Sheldon. That’s what I said to him.”
“Now you’re just. Flat-out lying. What would God think about that?”
“I love you, but God will surely punish you for your sinful ways.”
“You might have. Had a point there,” I admitted. I took her hand, feeling the throb of her blood push into my palm. It was like cradling an injured sparrow. “Mom, I have to go now. I don’t know if you’ll understand. I just wanted. I don’t know what I wanted. But you’ll be fine. I’m going to make sure of it.”
“I love my son,” she said. “I always tried to make sure he knew that. Please believe me.”
I held myself still, barely able to keep from squeezing her hand harder. “I know you did. What happened to him. Was not your fault.”
“Sheldon was not the easiest child to like. So many problems. So intelligent. Always asking questions.”
“I’m sure he just. Couldn’t help himself.”
“I don’t want you to take him.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t take him, I promise.”
We sat in conflicted silence.
“Take him where?” I asked.
Her hand tightened around mine. “Please tell me you won’t take him. Take me, please.” I pulled my hand away. Mom breathed out a whine and scratched ineffectually at me. “Don’t take him, he’s a good boy. He’s just confused.”
“Who do you think I am, Mom?”
Her clawing became more agitated, pulling at the sheets. She whipped her head back and forth, her sparse hairs getting caught in her mouth. “I won’t let you. You can’t have him. It was all my fault, I should have been stronger for him.” I took her hands and held them still. She fought at the familiarity of my touch, gasping in rage, but there was no muscle
behind the battle. She quickly went limp, but her eyes glared at me, seeing me, seeing something. “I hate you.” There was no confusion in her eyes, no fear or pretense. For perhaps the last moment of her life, she was focused on the now.
“Where do you think. I’m going to take Sheldon?” I asked.
“To Hell.”
“Mom, it’s Sheldon,” I hissed. She writhed and groaned at the sound, but I refused to let her go. “Please see me, Mom. Just this once. I’m right here.”
“You’re a trickster,” she snapped. Her teeth were bared in her fury, she was a dancing skeleton in my arms. “You’re the devil, but I won’t let you take him.”
“It’s me, Mom. Please.”
“I’m not afraid of you. I spit at you.” A weak stream of drool slipped over her lower lip and moistened her collar. “I spit in your face for the glory of God.”
“Who am I, Mom?” I yowled. Her face flattened under the force of my yell. N. Nowlan’s heart rate monitor rushed faster. “Tell me! Who do you think I am?”
“You’re Death,” she said, and she collapsed to the bed, eyes shut.
I shook her by the shoulders, snarling. I should eat her. The idea ran screaming through my skull. Eat her. Destroy the bitch. That’ll show her who’s death and who isn’t. I lifted her hand to my nose and took a sniff, glorying in the aroma, the meat so tender, bones so fragile. Like chewing on salmon bones. The thought made me grin. I placed her fingers in my mouth. They lay slack atop the points of my incisors, the skin dimpling. It’s what she deserves, after all. They all deserve . . .
I stopped, letting go but keeping my teeth tight around the fingers so that the arm swung from my mouth. Who deserves it? Who deserves what? What was I contemplating here? A feeding frenzy? Indiscriminate killing? I had my mother’s hand in my mouth, I had almost eaten my mother. Was I serious? For fuck’s sake, something was seriously wrong with me, and I had better come to grips with its implications before I took such an enormous step. There’s survival for the sake of survival, and I understood that the eating of live flesh was somehow now an essential part of my being. I wasn’t yet prepared to search for an efficient means of exterminating myself, so I was going to have to find a way to manage my appetites somehow.
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