A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  While Joel tried to control his weeping, the nurses consoled each other with hugs and pats on the back. They had tried, tried their hardest, he knew that, but he irrationally hated them for stopping. His mind was a confused jumble of emotions.

  Across the gap between the beds he reached his hand out. He didn’t know why. The nurses didn’t see him. Miller didn’t see him. Instead, Angelica carefully and with reverence redressed Mr. Miller and pulled the sheets up over him. The other nurses left to make the appropriate phone calls and arrangements, but Angelica stayed, muttering her prayers over the departed. When she was done, she turned to leave, and her eyes met Joel’s, the tears still streaming from them. She opened her mouth to say something, but whatever it was died on her tongue as Joel rolled over in the bed, to weep alone.

  Chapter Two

  The following morning, Nurse Liam ambled into the room at his usual time, carrying Joel’s breakfast. He didn’t make jokes, or mess with a napkin. He didn’t force the issue of the pills. He took one long look at Joel’s eyes, red-rimmed from crying and from lack of sleep, and simply patted him on the shoulder and left.

  Joel was grateful for it. A touch was enough, a quiet nod to Joel’s desire for privacy, to be left alone to mourn the passing of a friend he had never spoken to. The most agreeable friend he’d ever had.

  He ignored his food and stared at the empty bed across the way. They had come for Miller early that morning, taking him away for disposal with borderline alarming alacrity. Now where his silent friend had been there was silent emptiness. They had come for Lucey like that, too. Here, and then gone. He remembered three years earlier, when he had been in the very same bed that he was now, staring at the same emptiness across the room, where his wife had once been.

  She had been up late, couldn’t sleep, she said, and when the night nurse had come to check on her, they had whispered so as not to disturb Joel. He had been faintly aware of their chatting, a quiet noise that kept him on the edge of sleep. She asked the night nurse for a cup of tea. The night nurse left to make the tea, a mere three minutes out of the room, and by the time she had come back, Lucey Monroe had quietly slipped away, leaving the shell that his wife had once occupied. A year shy of fifty years married together, and then she was gone, and Joel was left to make his way in life without the captain of his ship.

  She had been the real linchpin of the family. He had never had a fantastic relationship with their daughter, and consequently with their grandchildren, but he had enjoyed their visits, and he liked going to their house for dinner on occasion. Without Lucey, all the weaknesses of a distant father had revealed themselves, and so Joel had lost a wife, and for all intents and purposes, a daughter and two grandchildren.

  It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time when Eva was small, and Joel owned his own garage when he had played with her there. She had talked all day to him, in her little serious voice, and he had been impressed with how clever she was. He could remember moments just like that, a thousand of them, but somehow couldn’t recall the moment when Eva had slipped away from him.

  When they had selected Miller to be placed with Joel, they had done so with careful consideration for Joel’s feelings. They had let him mourn for a year before they placed him with someone else. In a way, Miller had become a transitional friend for Joel. Now he was gone. The same bed that had been his wife’s, then Miller’s, was now empty again, and Joel, still here, still alive when all the others were checking out, felt every bit as empty.

  There were over fifty residents living in Hilltop. Some, like Mighty Jim, were inaccessible, but most, like Una Clarke, were perfectly fit and healthy mentally. There was a nursing staff of fifteen, in rotation. Nice, kind, caring considerate people. All told, in excess of sixty-five people, plus guests coming and going, and yet for all of that, Joel realised, he was terrifyingly, cripplingly lonely.

  That had been the answer to the questions he had asked himself the day before. That was the creeping cloud of darkness on the horizon of his mind. It had reached him, it settled over him and enveloped him: he was a lonely, scared old man. Worse than that, he was a lonely old man who had lost the will to live.

  Sitting up, his tea going cold on the stand beside him as he stared across at the empty bed that once held his wife, Joel Monroe decided he was going to kill himself.

  Kill himself before something else killed him.

  Chapter Three

  He thought he could do it. He pictured himself trying. Visualising, he disconnected his thoughts from the emotions and imagined how he might do it. He couldn’t see himself hanging. He had heard that men often voided their bowels when hanged, and the thought of the nurses finding him soiled was beyond repugnant to him. Overdose wasn’t an option, since the pills were tightly controlled and he was watched. Though if he could get out of Hilltop, he thought he could gain access to a gun. He had hired a man in his garage, a man who still owed him a favour, and he thought he might be able to get a gun from that man. It fit better. He liked the idea of himself with a gun. It was powerful. He’d be like Charlton Heston without the gravelly accent.

  The river was enticing to him, too. The thought of slipping below the water, feeling it close in all around him, wrapping him up, carrying him off. He had heard that drowning was painless. He thought he could see that one best of all. Simply step off the bridge.

  When he was gone, then he could see what was on the other side.

  Joel visualised his suicide until it became firm to him, real. He could do it. He could find it in himself, if it meant leaving this place. It was almost an exciting thought. A sort of queasily enticing thought. He could do it this afternoon if he wanted. His father had always told him that where there was a will, there was a way. His brutal, rigid, mean-spirited father, but apparently a wise enough man. He could be rid of this life and this god-awful retirement home by the afternoon, and never look at the bed that had taken so much from him again. Maybe Lucey would be waiting for him.

  Lucey.

  The thought of her stilled him. If she was waiting she’d berate him quite savagely for killing himself. The thought of his ghost getting a telling-off for bad behaviour brought a grimace. He could see her now, her form ethereal, flowing, floating in the netherworld, her arms folded grumpily across her chest.

  “What exactly is the meaning of this?” she’d ask, as she had asked so many times before when he’d shirked his responsibilities or mucked about with their daughter until her clothes were ruined.

  His ghost would try not to look embarrassed, scuffing its transparent shoes on the floor of the beyond. He smiled a sad smile for the thought of her and her ghostly admonishing. He would wait on his decision. Killing himself could wait, a little while at least.

  It wasn’t very often that she’d taken him to task during their lives together. When he had spent Sundays watching football instead of playing with his grandchildren, or when he’d scowled at the young men who came calling for Eva, there had been a few tough words, but mostly things between them were kind and gentle and lovely. Some of that, he thought, was because the idea of disappointing her or letting her down in any way was anathema to him.

  Instead Joel spent the day trying not to feel. As thought exercises go, it was surprisingly easy to him. He felt a void in his mind, an absence of something, an open yet painless wound. The more he thought about it, the more it felt like he might fall into that nothing and never come out.

  He wondered if that was what had happened to Mighty Jim. Had he just wandered into a hole in his mind and never come out? It was a singularly terrifying thought. Worse than death, actually. The indignity of it. The terrible fear that a tiny part of his mind might survive in that hole, and never know its way back out. A prisoner in his own body. More alone than ever before.

  Joel pulled back from the brink of nothingness and watched television in silence instead. It was a game show he turned on. One he had seen before. He didn’t care. He sat there ignoring the empty bed and his own feel
ings until it was time to sleep again.

  “I’ll miss you, Mr. Miller,” Joel eventually whispered into the black room as he turned out the light.

  Sleep wasn’t easy coming. Instead Joel slept in fits and starts, punctuated by long stretches of wakefulness in which his mind wandered back to the night before. The thick meaty hands of the nurses crushing the tiny, unresponsive body of Mr. Miller. The give in the bed as the corpse bounced up and down under the force of their effort to save his life. He wondered, idly, at half past four in the morning as he stared at the vacant bed, if they hadn’t broken any of old Mr. Miller’s ribs in their efforts to save him. When the day dawned again his mood had blackened through the night, and he found himself thinking about killing himself again.

  The ease of it, the convenience, the finality. He wondered if, when the time came, he would have the strength to do it. He thought about Mighty Jim, and his plodding descent into senility, and decided he would.

  “Are you okay, Joel?” Nurse Liam asked as he brought Joel’s pills in their little cup that morning.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem fine.”

  “Psychologist now, too?” Joel asked.

  “It must be hard for you, especially considering…”

  “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Joel cut him off.

  The last thing he needed was Nurse Liam skirting too close to the bone. Now he’d made the decision that he wanted to die, he had to guard the secret closely. They’d only try to stop him if they knew.

  “Not at this exact moment, no. You’re my priority, Joel. I just want you to know that there are people here for you, I’m sure this must be affecting you. Part of my job is to keep an eye on the mental health of residents here too. You know that, right?”

  “Why on earth would it be affecting me?” Joel asked, ignoring the question. Nurse Liam and his questions and his feelings and his gentle demeanour.

  “Because Mr. Miller…”

  “Was a corpse when he came in here,” Joel barked. “Little less animated than the walking corpses we keep in this place, but a corpse nonetheless. A lousy conversationalist, a terrible football pundit and utterly useless at chess.”

  He regretted it as soon as he said it. Miller really had been a thoroughly agreeable chap, and Joel supposed that at some point he might have been a nice guy. Maybe even a decent chess player, but he was not about to be provoked into expressing his feelings by Nurse Liam and his soft-spoken sympathy.

  “That’s beneath you, Joel,” Liam told him, with something that looked like it might be approaching anger.

  He’d never seen the young man angry. Impatient a time or two, a rare sight indeed, a little vexed by Mighty Jim’s rambling insistence now and then, and stressed a few more times by the whirlwind comings and goings of The Rhino, but never angry.

  Joel turned his face away and tried not to look embarrassed. He stared out the window and down the long drive to the gate. A slight breeze was moving the tops of the trees in the garden, swaying them ever so slightly. Nurse Liam tried to wait him out, but eventually gave up and left the room. Alone again, Joel decided to watch some television, flicking idly between the channels until he found a sports network showing repeats of classic fights. His mood black, his heart heavy, and his patience thin, he couldn’t find anything to hold his attention and decided instead to go back to sleep, lying on his side, staring over at the bed across the room.

  When he woke sometime later, early afternoon he figured, Joel observed two significant changes. One was that someone had changed the sports to some ridiculous soap opera. The second was that at the head of the bed across the room, there now stood a tall hat stand, populated entirely by scarves, at least fifteen in all. There was a dark navy silk one with sky-blue swirls, a linen bronze scarf with floral patterns, a woolen scarlet scarf, and a white-and-black polka-dotted one. The hat stand swirled in a riot of conflicting colours that dangled down toward the floor. Of their owner there was no sign. Joel regarded them suspiciously for a time before the racket of the soap opera, an old episode judging by the quality of the footage interrupted his thoughts. He reached for the remote control to switch the channel, only to find that it wasn’t on his bedside stand where it had lived for the last three years. Grumbling, Joel hauled himself from the bed and found it precisely where he feared he might. On the bed across the room. The sheets were a touch unkempt, as though someone had been lying on them; the owner of the scarves, Joel surmised.

  He checked the wall clock to discover it was past three o’clock. He had slept for nearly seven hours, catching up on his restless night the night before no doubt, and in the meantime, an interloper had sneakily arrived. As he climbed back into his bed, changing the television station on his way, there came a loud guffaw of laughter from the room next door, followed by the sounds of many voices all at once. He recognised Nurse Liam’s good humour among the laughers, and Una’s genteel chuckle; several others were unrecognisable, but louder than them all was a man’s deep and booming laugh. It was a reverberating baritone, a laugh of comradely friendship, and it had no place in Hilltop, not at such a sensitive time anyway. Joel knew it for the laugh of the interloper. He didn’t know how he knew; he just knew.

  It would be his luck to get trapped in the same room as that laugh.

  He settled back into his bed to watch the sports channels and placed the remote control on his bedside stand, where it rightly belonged, wondering whether or not he could get away with chaining it to his side of the room, and set to waiting for the newcomer. He tried to listen to the conversations coming from the room next door, but it was garbled and unintelligible to his admittedly less than perfect ears. From what he could hear, though, it sounded good-natured, friendly even. He maneuvered himself in the bed, leaning out the side toward the open door.

  Unfortunately for Joel, he greatly overestimated his own dexterity and began to slip from the bed. He reached out for balance, his arse sliding out from under his sheets, all thoughts of the interloper vanishing as he desperately tried to keep himself from spilling onto the floor. His arms windmilling to find purchase on anything that would steady him, he knocked over his bedside stand, only righting himself when he managed to catch the frame of the bed.

  The stand going down had also taken with it the remote, his unfinished tea from the morning, his glass of water for his pills, and a framed photograph of Lucey, which all smashed on the floor. The crash alerted the gaggle next door, and the silence in its immediate aftermath was followed by the sound of them rushing into his room. Joel righted himself in the bed and adjusted his pajamas and covers before they could get in to him, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. His dignity reflected in his cool demeanour.

  “Everything okay there, Joel?” Liam asked as he bustled over to Joel, fussing at the blankets and checking over him for injuries.

  “I’m perfectly fine, thank you.”

  “What happened?” Una asked, regarding the smashed glass and cup and the spilled liquid.

  “Nothing,” Joel replied, before realising how appallingly stupid that sounded. Too late to back out, he decided to stick with it.

  “Nothing?” Liam asked skeptically.

  The interloper looked like he was trying to stifle a laugh. Joel turned to him coldly.

  “Something amusing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” the interloper replied, almost giggling.

  Una suppressed a smile, even Liam looked like he might giggle. Joel clenched his jaw and fixed the interloper with a steady look of disdain. He wasn’t a tall man, nor was he particularly short. Average, and yet not average-looking. He had aged well; his face was lined and wrinkled like every other resident of Hilltop, but there was a youthfulness about him, a certain quality of energy and vitality that seemed to make a lie of all the wrinkles. His gray hair was still somehow shot with streaks of dark brown, and it was wavy, almost girlishly long, swirling down around his ears and the nape of his neck. He was, in truth, a handsome
sort of fellow. His suit was obviously old and of poor quality but clean, complete with waistcoat that housed a small pocket watch. The word popinjay was the first to spring to Joel’s mind, and he said so:

  “Popinjay.”

  “No, sir,” the interloper replied. “I am Frank de Selby.” He paused after he said it, and then added: “Yes. The Frank de Selby.”

  He stood there waiting, as if for applause. Una beamed at him encouragingly, and Liam smiled tolerantly. Joel withered him with another look, but if de Selby noticed the disdain he paid it no mind; instead he continued to wait for the ovation he apparently thought he deserved. Joel wondered how much of this lunatic’s brain had gone missing on him. His moment, however, was ruined by the timely arrival of The Rhino.

  “Mr. Adams?” she enquired, no nonsense, as she approached de Selby.

  De Selby coughed, embarrassed.

  “Yes, well… de Selby is my stage name. Yes. I am Frank Adams.” He offered his hand.

  Joel snorted his laughter at the popinjay. De Selby indeed. What an ass.

  Frank’s discomfort lasted but a moment, and suddenly he was back into his dash and charm. He beamed a huge smile at The Rhino and kissed the back of her hand as she took it to shake, and extended one leg to bow with a flourish. The Rhino cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “I take it the belongings in the hallway outside are yours?” she asked, ignoring the kiss and the popinjay and his stupid bow. She didn’t wait for de Selby or Adams or whatever he was called to answer. “If you need a hand carrying them, ask Nurse Dwight to help you with them. Nurse Dwight, see to this spillage please and then assist Mr. Adams with his belongings, and tuck in your shirt.” She demanded impeccable appearance from all of her staff.

  Not bothering to listen for an answer to that either, she departed as abruptly as she arrived.