Eugene Fischer - Husbandry

"Yes it is. You're talking about people forty years older than me, and canned soup, and MRSA. I'm not doing it."

"With what they charge, I doubt that they serve canned soup."

"If they don't, they should. It's not like any of the patients would be able to tell the difference."

"That's really probably not true. The whole point of a place like this is that the staff are experts at Alzheimer's care. There's every reason to believe that the patients there are doing better than they might be otherwise."

"I don't buy that for a second, Gerry," said Marilyn, sliding in a bookmark and clapping her book shut. "If I'm going to have problems with memory consolidation, the worst thing for me is to go somewhere where what I can remember is irrelevant. And you are both a health professional and someone who, you know, loves me. You can care for me better than anyone else. Hell, your medical specialty is dealing with patients who can't communicate with you, right?"

"My patients aren't human. You shouldn't compare."

"Well, maybe you can find a book about humans and adapt your techniques. Because you're hired. The job is yours."

The pictures in the brochure showed elderly patients doing a jigsaw puzzle on a covered porch, and cheerful nursing staff changing bed linens. "Marilyn. I don't know that this is a job I can do."

"Well that's too bad, isn't it! You applied for it, and it is yours! Do you regret applying for it now? Are you saying you want to quit?"

"No! Of course not!"

"Well good. Because I'm not going to some retirement home to die of infected bedsores."

"No, you're not," Gerry had assured her, "of course you're not."

Tonight the two of them are upstairs in the bedroom, getting ready to turn in. Marilyn has been very quiet today. Gerry has seated her facing the window while he gets undressed, because she likes looking out of windows. If it were light out she would be able to see the fiberglass pool, empty save for a layer of moldering leaves, in the yard which used to belong to the irritating neighbors before they moved away. Gerry gets into his drawstring pants, not bothering to tie them, and then helps Marilyn into her pajamas. He thinks he will be taking them back off of her once they are in bed, but having a set routine is important for her, so they go through the motions.

Gerry is seven. In his room he has a dresser, which is covered in smiling faces from a sheet of stickers that came free with a subscription to a children's magazine. On top of the dresser is a new fishbowl in which a goldfish is poking at bright blue gravel. He got the fish two weeks ago, as a party favor at the birthday party of a classmate. He had never had a fish before, and after the party his parents took him to the pet store where he held the plastic bag with the fish in it up to each bowl and tank and decoration and asked, "Do you like this one?" as they picked out something for the fish to live in and bought food and tools. He named the fish Alvin.

His parents warned him when he got it that goldfish usually don't live very long. But it has been two weeks now, and Alvin is still doing just fine. Light moves like a candle flame over his scales as he bobs around the rocks. Gerry pushes a chair next to his dresser, stands on it, and uses the green net his parents bought for cleaning the bowl to scoop Alvin out of the water. Alvin jerks and flops with no real rhythm as water drips off of his body, through the green mesh and back into the bowl. He looks different in the net than he did in the bowl. Not luminous any more, just slimy and drab. Gerry drops Alvin and the net back into the water, and runs to the bathroom to get some paper towels to take back to his room. He folds the paper towels into a mat next to Alvin's bowl, and then scoops him out again and plops him down onto the towels, with the net resting over him like a cage. Gerry doesn't really know how long this takes, so he leaves Alvin flopping there for an hour before returning him to the water. Alvin stays still for a while, then swims down and circles the bottom of the bowl. He doesn't go back to poking at the gravel, but seems contented enough.

After several days of food flakes building up and decomposing on the surface of the water, Gerry's parents tell him that his fish is dead. Gerry disagrees. He screams. He refuses to let them take Alvin away, but of course they do anyway. They offer to get him another fish, but he says he doesn't want one.

In the future, Gerry will remember everything about this event clearly, and think of it often. But he will never tell anyone the story of leaving Alvin on the dresser. Gerry will always maintain the fiction of not believing the fish was dead.

Gerry had a dream last night. It went like this: he is on a mountain. It might be Mount Olympus, or Helicon; it is one of those mountains popular among immortals. He is dressed in paper. Sometimes clothing made of paper, sometimes rolled up in paper like a rug. He is visited by three goddesses. They come to him, each carrying a year in each hand. Actually, their hands are different sizes, so one of them carries slightly more than a year per handful, and one of them carries slightly less, but it averages out. They rub the time into him: into his armpits and chest and eyes and nostrils and anus. He wants them to touch his penis, but they don't, and he is too embarrassed to ask for it. They tell him that he must transcend himself. He must stop being flesh wrapped in paper. He must learn how to be paper wrapped in flesh. The dream ends when Marilyn wets the bed. Maybe that's the only way it could have ended, and if he hadn't forgotten to replace her diaper it would have gone on forever.

Gerry thinks about the dream as he drives home for lunch. It has inexorably fragmented in his mind, despite his attempts to retain it. He can remember something about turning inside out. He thinks it might have been a sex dream.

He has Chinese takeout sitting on the passenger seat of his car. He only asked for one pair of chopsticks. Going home doesn't feel like going home. It feels like he is still at work. At work all day he has been handling animals. Now he is going home to handle Marilyn. She doesn't talk anymore. He's put a bed on the ground floor, where Marilyn sleeps now so that she can't fall down the stairs. But she rarely gets up on her own.

When Gerry pulls into the driveway, he sees that there is an animal on the front porch. It is a coyote. There have been lots of them in the neighborhood ever since the new neighbors started keeping chickens in their backyard. As Gerry walks toward it carrying the Chinese food, the long tube of its nose twitches toward him, and then the animal runs off.

Inside the house, Marilyn has gotten out of bed. "I got us Chinese food," he says to her. She is crouched in the corner, and there is something strange about her face. Gerry comes closer and sees that she has put a cockroach in her mouth, and its antennae are sticking out between her lips. This is his fault. He's been letting the dishes stack up in the sink, and he was a little late in getting here. She got hungry, and she was confused. He goes to her, tries to take the roach out of her mouth. When he puts his hands to her face, she puts her hands up at his and scratches him and pokes him in the eye.

"Marilyn! That's not food! I got us Chinese food!" he yells at her, and forces her jaw open and flicks out the insect. Her arms are still flailing at his head, so he catches her wrists. She shakes herself back and forth violently at the shoulders, but he can still easily drag her back to her bed, where she will lie calmly, and she will eat Chinese food, and she will keep turning maps around and upside down inside her mind until she figures out a way around the obstacles and figures out how to come back to him again.