mess, every drawer and cabinet crammed with stuff—and discovered, in his mother’s dressing table, a velvet Tiffany box. When he’d looked inside he’d found a bracelet—a diamond bracelet. Probably it had cost as much as his father, a civil engineer, had made in a year. It was nothing he could have afforded, and the box’s location—concealed in the back of a drawer beneath a pile of moldering gloves and scarves—had told Guilder what he was looking at: a lover’s gift. Who had it been? His mother had been a legal secretary. One of the lawyers at her firm? Somebody she had met in passing? A rekindled romance of her youth? It had gladdened him to know that his mother had found some happiness to brighten her lonely existence, yet at the same time this discovery had sank him into a depression that had continued unabated for weeks. His mother was the one warm memory of his childhood. But her life, her real life, had been a secret from him.
Always these visits to his father brought these memories to the surface; by the time he left, he was often so dispirited, or else seething with unexpressed rage, that he could barely think straight. Fifty-seven years old, yet still he craved some flicker of acknowledgment.
He positioned the room’s only chair in front of his father. The old man’s head, bald as a baby’s, was tipped at an awkward angle against his shoulder. Guilder retrieved a rag from the bedside table and wiped the spit from his chin. An open container of vanilla pudding sat on a tray with a flimsy metal spoon.
“So how you feeling, Pop? They treating you okay?”
Silence. And yet Guilder could hear his father’s voice in his head, filling in the spaces.
Are you kidding me? Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even take a proper shit. Everyone talking to me like I’m a child. How do you think I am, sonny boy?
“I see you didn’t eat your dessert. You want some pudding? How would that be?”
Fucking pudding! That’s all they give me around this place. Pudding for breakfast, pudding for lunch, pudding for dinner. The stuff’s like snot.
Guilder tucked a spoonful between his father’s teeth. Through some autonomic reflex, the old man smacked his lips and swallowed.
Look at me. You think this is a picnic? Drooling on myself, sitting in my own piss?
“Don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately,” Guilder said, delivering a second spoonful into his father’s mouth. “There’s something I thought you should know about.”
So? Say your piece and leave me alone.
But what did Guilder want to say? I’m dying? That everyone was dying, even if they didn’t know it yet? What purpose could this information possibly serve? A chilling thought occurred to him. What would become of his father when everyone was gone, the doctors and nurses and orderlies? With everything that had happened in the last few weeks, Guilder had been too preoccupied to consider this eventuality. Because the city was emptying out; soon, in weeks or even days, everyone would be running for their lives. Guilder remembered what had happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes, first Katrina and then Vanessa, the stories of elderly patients left to wallow in their own waste, to perish slowly of hunger and dehydration.
Are you listening to me, sonny boy? Sitting there with that big dumb look on your face. What’s so all-fired important that you came here to tell me?
Guilder shook his head. “It’s nothing, Pop. Nothing important.” He spooned the last of the pudding into his father’s mouth and wiped his lips with the rag. “You get some rest, okay?” he said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
Your mother was a whore, you know. A whore a whore a whore …
Guilder stepped from the room. In the vacant hallway, he paused to breathe. The voice wasn’t real; he understood that. But still there were times when it felt as if his father’s mind, departed from his bodily person, had taken up residence inside his own.
He returned to the front desk. The nurse, a young Hispanic woman, was penciling in a crossword puzzle.
“My father needs his diaper changed.”
She didn’t look up. “They all need their diaper changed.” When Guilder didn’t move, her eyes darted upward from the page. They were very dark, and heavily lined. “I’ll tell someone.”
“Please do.”
At the door he stopped. The nurse had already resumed working on her puzzle.