A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “Yes. Well. Thought I could do with a shave and all that,” he said, trying to come up with a way to end the conversation.

  “I remember that jacket. Wasn’t that a special occasion jacket?” she asked.

  She was clearly thinking back to a time when Lucey had selected his clothing for him. He couldn’t remember which of his clothes qualified as special-wear. He didn’t want to think about it, or about her adjusting the collars of his shirts as she buttoned them up with her soft hands. She had dressed him for Eva’s baptism. He had squirmed under her ministrations, mostly for show, because he loved when she fussed over him, and the more he squirmed the more she fussed. Eva had cooed and gurgled at them from her bassinet.

  What a glorious day that had been. Sun shining. Lucey looking as beautiful as ever. Their families and all the neighbours out for the big occasion. It felt so long ago, and the memory of it somehow felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone happier.

  “Just a jacket,” Joel mumbled as he felt his breath quickening.

  “What’s on the agenda today then?” Una asked, noting his sullen demeanour.

  “What’s on the agenda in this place on any day of the week?” he shot back bitterly. “TV in the common room until they shove us into the dining room like spent cattle? Read a book and listen to Mighty Jim babble incoherently?” He couldn’t quite understand why his voice was getting so loud. “Find a corner of a room to doze off in and hope that when you wake up you’ve killed enough of the day so you don’t have to be bored living through it?” The last was almost a shout.

  His words took him by surprise. They took Una by surprise. Both surprised, they stood awkwardly staring at each other for a minute. He heard them coming from his mouth, so he knew that he had said them, but he didn’t know that he had been thinking them.

  “Eh… Sorry. Don’t know where that came from,” he tried to explain quietly.

  “Anything you want to talk about?” she asked.

  “No. Really, I must apologise. That came out unexpectedly.”

  She looked at him with genuine concern.

  “Maybe there’ll be something good on TV today, eh?” he suggested, trying to force some joviality into his tone, trying to sound normal. “And that show we were watching last week was all right, wasn’t it?”

  She continued to look at him with concern.

  “Maybe we should get Nurse Liam…” she started.

  “No, no, no,” he cut across her. “I’m fine. Perhaps I’ll chance a game of chess with Mighty Jim.”

  He moved off before she could answer, his long strides taking him out of harm’s way before she could insist on getting Nurse Liam. He tried to think about where his words had come from. It might have been seeing Una in Lucey’s old cardigan. Or perhaps his quiet fear of Rhino. It could have been his frustration with being treated like a child. But Joel suspected it was that bleak something else that had settled on him. A part of him wanted to analyse it, understand it, but he feared it, feared looking at it too closely. He shook it off and went in search of Mighty Jim.

  *

  That afternoon, poring over the chessboard in the common room, Joel tried to ignore the nagging feeling that had been pestering him since his outburst that morning. His mind kept floating back to it as soon as he loosened his grip on his thoughts.

  “What I say is relative. It should not become a dead end…” Mighty Jim whispered to himself as he waited for Joel’s turn. Joel had long since given up trying to understand what the older man was saying. He’d been a resident here for nearly a decade, and his ancient face was lined, his back was bent, and his gnarled hands were crippled with arthritis. His mind had left his broken body many years before, and now he mumbled nonsense wherever he went, all the while wearing a great big grin plastered across his beaten face.

  Joel remembered when Mighty Jim had been Mayor Jim Lincoln. A politician, sharp and savvy, in stylish suits with a serious demeanour and a handshake for everyone he encountered. He was a symbol of strength, authority and command, a totem of manliness. He was unrecognisable now, which Joel suspected was just as well for Jim. The memory of the old mayor would live on as a powerful man, and not this bent old thing with dementia and a warped, semi-permanent smile.

  The moment he had allowed his mind to wander, the cloud of doom returned, coalescing around his head, bringing its negativity and despair. He felt it almost as a physical sensation. He had felt isolated before; in fact, he had felt isolated since Lucey had left him here, on his own, but this cloud was new, new and terrifying.

  Part of it, he concluded, was to do with the look of shocked concern on Una’s face. She had been kind to him ever since Lucey’s passing. Checking in on him, trying to include him in her Gardening Club, asking his opinion on soap operas and bringing him her unfinished crosswords to ask for his help. Joel had left school at fifteen, to start his mechanic’s apprenticeship, so book learning was not his strong suit. He read often, but nothing highbrow. That had been Lucey’s area of expertise. He had no answers for Una’s crossword questions, but felt a small burst of gratitude that she would think of him anyway, despite his continuing and obvious limitations in the field. He didn’t like the idea of upsetting her, after all her kindness. But it wasn’t just that. There was more to his unexplained anger than he had managed to put his finger on. Mostly it was the terrible sense of despair that seemed to have crept up on him, a sense he couldn’t seem to shake. Looking at it a little closer, a few moments of introspection might have helped, but that sort of thing was well outside Joel’s wheelhouse, so he opted instead to try to ignore it again.

  Joel moved his knight into position carefully. In hundreds of games with Mighty Jim, he’d never won a single encounter. Whatever terrible affliction had taken hold of his opponent’s brain, it hadn’t yet managed to get the part of him that remembered how to play chess. Frustratingly for Joel, he had never lost either. Games with Mighty Jim had the predictable charm of repeating the same pattern; Jim would go on the attack, wipe out half of Joel’s forces, and then settle back for a stalemate that had no ending. Every time, Joel would tell himself he was done with this stupidity and vow to leave the old man to his pointless shenanigans, and days later he would inevitably find himself back at the table, determined to win this time. Just this one time.

  “We simply must reach a greater understanding,” Jim told him seriously as he moved his bishop into a killing position.

  “Absolutely,” Joel replied, as he tried to ponder a way out of the inevitable slaughter.

  Behind them a burst of laughter from a gaggle of women, with Una sitting at its centre. The laughter set his teeth on edge.

  “The hell do they think is so funny?” he asked Mighty Jim testily. Joel did a lot of things testily.

  “The romantic lie in the brain,” Jim replied sagely.

  Joel nodded. He wondered idly how much Jim understood, and how much Jim expected him to understand.

  “The laughing doesn’t bother you then?” he enquired.

  “Ninety percent of people in the world that have a religion are all wrong,” Jim replied, his broad grin breaking through. He laughed a little to himself, delighted, and returned his gaze to the chessboard.

  His happiness set Joel’s teeth on edge, too. What exactly, Joel wondered, did the old devil have to be happy about? He studied the old wrinkled face across from him for a moment. He seemed happy. Genuinely happy. His smile, crooked sometimes, was not a false effect; he just didn’t see or didn’t care about the conditions he lived in. He didn’t care about his own slow decline or the decline of the residents around him, He didn’t care about the mediocre desserts or the constant stream of pills being shoved at him. He was fully senile and fully delighted about it. Ignorance truly is bliss, Joel thought to himself.

  Across the room, rapt in front of the television, some of the residents had gathered to watch the soaps again. Joel shook his head at them and looked for his next move. There had to be a way to beat Mighty Jim.


  Later in the afternoon, he sat in the common room by a window with a view all the way down the hill. It was a beautiful view, in its own little way, with tall trees that enclosed the gardens and would have been majestic, if they didn’t feel like walls too tall to climb over. He flipped through the pages of the crime novel he was reading, enjoying the sensation of being transported away from Hilltop. It was a welcome distraction from the nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong, which seemed to be seeping into his mind, distracting him, infringing on his consciousness. Joel’s reading intensified. Somewhere in his head Joel reasoned that if he read the words quicker, then he’d be less likely to be distracted by whatever it was that was imposing itself on him.

  He read until he was bored of reading. Then he went for a walk, down the long drive toward the gate of Hilltop and around the path that ran outside the line of tall trees that circled the extensive garden. He walked until he was bored of walking.

  In the evening time, at the appointed hour, which was always the same hour, Joel took his supper in his bedroom to watch football on the television. The food was good, though he would have liked to complain about it. He had no doubt that The Rhino had invested her money well when she had hired Cook. The woman obviously loved her work; she had stayed in the nursing home for years, and to Joel it seemed that a woman of her talents could have taken her pick of places to work, places considerably more glamourous than Hilltop. He grumbled at the football as he ate.

  “Can’t decide if it’s bad management, or crappy players, but one way or another, we’re one god-awful team, eh, Miller?”

  Miller was silent. He never said a word at suppertime.

  “Honestly, someone’s going to start getting worried about your mental health if you keep talking to Mr. Miller, Joel.”

  Liam had come through the door with the medication. Again. He would insist on staying while Joel took it. Again. Joel suddenly found this infuriating.

  “Just leave it on the stand please, Liam,” Joel told him brusquely.

  “That’s not how it works and you know it, Mr. Monroe.”

  Mr. Monroe. It was always Mr. Monroe when he was being told what to do. Oh it was fine to be all “Joel this” and “Joel that” when Nurse Liam was trying to be all chummy, but as soon as he got to giving orders and dishing out demands, it was suddenly Mr. Monroe. Joel hated the duplicity of it all.

  “On the stand please,” he said more firmly.

  “Absolutely,” Liam replied, changing tack. He put the medication on the stand by the bed and then folded his arms and stood there.

  “Help you with something?” Joel asked.

  “Nope. Got nowhere to go, and nothing to do.”

  “Your shift ends in an hour. I can wait that long.”

  “I’ll make overtime out of you yet, Mr. Monroe. I ain’t going anywhere until you’ve taken the pills.”

  The fact that Joel needed the pills was absolutely irrelevant. That he’d once had a stroke, a tiny one by all accounts but a stroke nonetheless, and the medication was likely the only thing keeping him from having a much more serious event, was secondary to the fact that Joel Monroe mightily hated being told what to do. Regardless of whether or not it may save his life.

  They stared at each other. The nurse was implacable with his steady hands and his blue-eyed stare. The argument was pointless. He was going to lose. He knew it. There was little value to be had in engaging in the row in the first place, but a sour energy had taken a hold of Joel and made him pugnacious.

  He backed down eventually, but refused to break eye contact, even as he reached out for his pills and the glass of water. He didn’t blink as he washed them down, but grimaced at the slight nod of satisfaction from Nurse Liam. He turned back to his television in disgust.

  “Is there something bothering you, Joel?” Liam asked.

  Joel again. After he did what he was told like a good little boy, he went back to being Joel.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Joel replied, but in his gut, he knew. He’d been desperately avoiding asking himself that question all day long.

  “You’re not yourself. I mean, you’re cranky and everything, nothing new there, but there seems to be something else.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with me that won’t be fixed by a little peace and quiet, boy,” Joel said, returning fire.

  “Are you sure? It’s just that Una mentioned…”

  Before he could finish, Joel exploded for the second time that day.

  “Well, maybe she and you ought to mind your own business,” he shouted. “Maybe my problem is that it’s not enough for all of you to run my life. Eat this, eat that, take these, drink this, drink that… You also all seem to think that you have a right to know what’s in my head. Maybe my problem is that there’s no such thing as privacy around here and I’m not allowed to have a thought without everyone around here poking at me.”

  Liam looked shocked, but he was a career nurse, with a long track record working in Hilltop. He’d seen worse, encountered worse. He got past it quickly. His kindly face seeming to absorb the shock.

  “I think we both know there’s plenty of evidence that there’s something going on with you, Joel,” he said softly, empathetically. “If you want to talk about it, I’ll be here in the morning. In the meantime, do you want a cup of tea?”

  He was smooth. Capable of adjusting. If he had taken offense at the outburst, he gave no sign of it. This was enough to infuriate Joel. Did Liam think so little of him that he couldn’t even be bothered to be offended when he was being insulted?

  “I don’t want any damn tea,” he lied.

  Liam nodded and withdrew. Joel tried to watch the football again. The game was still going on, the players moving here and there, but Joel didn’t see any of it. He was trying to answer the question Liam had asked him. What was bothering him?

  *

  Joel dozed off in the late evening, after the game was over, without any answers. He was awakened several hours later by the gentle footfalls of Nurse Angelica coming in to turn off his TV and check on him and Miller. He knew it was her from the smell of her perfume and the soft humming to herself that was her calling card. Joel kept his eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. He was still upset that he had lost his temper twice during the day, and was no closer to knowing what had caused the outburst. He didn’t want to make small talk, as he sometimes did late in the night when he couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t want to insult the soft-spoken Filipino lady either. She had a good nature, and he was worried about giving her the rough side of his tongue.

  She killed the TV and shuffled about the room. Then she stopped. He could hear her breathing quicken.

  Something was wrong. He opened his eyes, to see her leaning over Miller, checking his pulse. Something was terribly wrong. She hit the alarm on Miller’s bed and ran from the room. Joel searched his roommate for the telltale rise and fall of his chest. It was still. He felt a rising panic grab him, paralyse him. Silently he begged for the chest to move, for Miller’s ancient old body to twitch or spasm or do anything other than lie there so dreadfully still.

  He remembered the terrible stillness of Lucey’s corpse, lying in that very same bed, the slack look on her face. Without life in it she looked like something frightening and awful. He had been paralysed then, too.

  Angelica trundled back into the room with the other nurse, all action, moving quickly. Alarmingly quickly. Joel watched as they pulled back the sheets that had covered old Miller’s frail and bony little body, all wasted away from years of coma. He watched them tear open the cotton pajamas and begin CPR. Their hands were rough on the spindly little body, pulling at the sheets and clothes as they had, and then thrusting urgently on his chest. He looked like a little twig; their hands were like mallets. He worried that they’d break the poor man, so brittle and helpless against their relentlessness.

  The frightening part about Lucey’s corpse had been its frailness. She had been dynamic, qui
ck to smile, warm, open. Her dead-still corpse was so frail, looking like it might shatter or crumble if you touched it.

  They started with the chest compressions, Angelica’s large hands pushing down and up implacably. She paused to check his airways. Joel felt a spark of hope that died as soon as it was born when she began pressing on Miller’s bones again.

  He began to silently cry as he watched them try to resuscitate his roommate. He cried for Miller, but also for himself. The all-pervading feeling that had been bothering him that day was surfacing.

  They were frantic now, desperately trying to shove the life back into the little chest, the movement of which had been Joel’s only way of knowing that his roommate was a living being. Its constant rising and falling, slight as it was, had been Joel’s link to another human, and now they were pounding on it, the little body bouncing up and down in the bed under their rough ministrations.

  Nobody had tried to resuscitate Lucey. She was dead the moment she had died, and that was that. Dead and frail and cold and still.

  Joel couldn’t tell if he wanted them to succeed with Mr. Miller. Maybe the old man was better off? What kind of life were they bringing him back to? If he had a say, would he want them to bring him back? Joel wept all the harder for not knowing if Miller was better off dead.

  Still they pushed at the body, pushed as if the life that had left Miller could be squeezed back into him. Joel watched in turmoil, thinking the man was better off dead and silently begging them not to stop, to find a way to bring him back so Joel could watch his broken little chest rise and fall again.

  That bed was going to take another life. It was going to take Miller the way it took Lucey. Quietly. Without warning. Sneakily.

  Then suddenly it was a moot point. They stopped. Mr. Miller was a corpse now. What tiny spark of life had lived in him was gone, and even though he knew that they had tried to save him, Joel imagined that the nurses had just pummeled it out of the old man.