Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Martin shot a panicked glance toward Wendy, who sat facing down at her food with both eyes closed, emitting a low, deep snore, a thin string of drool trailing down from her mouth. When he turned back, Jerry was breathing heavily, gripping the sides of his lunch tray. “Are you all right?” Jerry couldn’t speak just yet, so gave his head a quick shake.

“I get it, okay?” said Martin. “I understand why you can’t stay like this for very long, why you had to . . . do that television thing like you did.”

“. . . corporeality’s a bitch . . .” whispered Jerry. “I liked it a lot better when I was just a flight of fancy. It’s easy, being a dream or manipulating electromagnetic waves. Flesh demands too much of the mind and heart. I don’t know how human beings do it.”

Martin started reaching for Jerry’s hand, thought better of it (how would it feel? ), and so started to rise. “Can I get you anything?”

“Nothing. Please sit down.”

Martin complied.

“What it boils down to is this: right now Bob is lying in a dim little shit-hole of a room in the Taft Hotel in final stages of Alzheimer’s. He’ll be dead soon—maybe a day or two, maybe less—and when he dies, Gash is going to get out. Not as the disease he once was, not as Alzheimer’s, but the thing the Alzheimer’s is becoming .” Jerry closed his eyes and put a hand against his chest, pulling in three broken breaths that obviously hurt like hell. “It’s getting bad. I don’t think this is it , but it’s . . . it’s gonna be an awful one.” He opened his eyes. “You got time for one more question, then I need to go elsewhere and rally my ass.”

“Why me? Why are you—why is Bob , someone I don’t know— why are you coming to me?”

“Because you were kind. Because you did more for him that day than you remember. Because he thought of you as a friend. And because, in his last moments of lucidity, before the dementia got its hooks in all the way, he called on some superhuman reserve of will that I still can’t comprehend and managed to do two things: help me to escape, and remember you.” He pressed his hands against his eyes and pulled in a strained breath. “Listen, I gotta boogie-two-shoes for a little while. You stick around here . . . something tells me it’s going to get real interesting . . . .”

And with a flicker, he was gone.

When Ethel came out from the nurses’ station five minutes later, she found Wendy passed out at the table and Martin sitting in front of two trays of half-eaten food.

“My, my, aren’t you the one with an appetite?” she said to him.

Looking at her, Martin thought: Would she remember Jerry if I said something? Then decided, what the hell, he had nothing to lose: “Jerry couldn’t finish his, so he said I could have it.”

Ethel stared at him, blinking as if trying to remember something, then gave a slow nod of her head. “Oh, right, Jerry . I guess he’s still not . . . feeling well . . . .”

“He didn’t look too good to me,” Martin replied.

Ethel seemed about to say something else Jerry-related, then looked at Wendy, blinked again— I should take care of this, yes, that’s what I came out here for —and walked over to the unconscious girl.

Martin finished off his food, then what was left on Jerry’s tray.

If things were only about to get interesting, he was going to need all the energy he could store away against the effects of the drugs.

4

The rest of the day was torture.

Shortly before the scheduled second group session, Ethel came out and put a red Xthrough the rest of the day’s planned activities, then Wendy woke up long enough to pitch another fit about being in “. . . this fuckin’ fruitcake factory!” before having to be sedated once again (though Martin had to give her high marks for her alliteration, accidental though it probably was); Martin watched The Best Years of Our Lives (with no ad-libbing from any of the actors, only crying at the very end when he remembered watching this with his dad), read half of a John Cheever short story collection he found on one of the shelves (having forgotten how sad Cheever was—a damned great writer, but depressing as hell), walked around the basketball court a dozen or so times before getting that Waiting for Godot feeling and deciding to shoot a few hoops (he’d sucked at basketball as a kid, and discovered that the ensuing years had done little to improve his stats), taken a second shower, checked out his window to make sure the Onlookers hadn’t decided to come back for an evening performance, and was about to resort to counting the holes in the ceiling when Bernard announced it was chow time.

Wendy all but inhaled her dinner, never once acknowledging Martin’s presence, then went back to her room. Martin sighed, got himself a tray, and was just removing the cover when Ethel came out to join him.

“Want some company?” she asked.

“Yes, please. All this ‘quiet time’ is losing its charm.”

Ethel sat across from him and smiled. “Things here are usually a lot more structured than this, Martin; but right now it’s just you and Wendy. I’m sure we’ll have more folks in here come tomorrow and things can get back to normal—well, what passes for normal in here.”

“I’ll try to occupy myself.”

She leaned forward, her face growing serious. “It must have been hard on you, losing both your folks so close together like that.” It didn’t seem like something that required a response, so Martin made none. “You took care of them for a long time, didn’t you?’ “Yeah . . .” “You should be proud of yourself; a lot of people wouldn’t’ve done that.” “Didn’t change things.”

“But that doesn’t mean you failed. They were both very sick. Just because they left you, that doesn’t mean they love you any less where they are now.” Martin looked up from his Jell-O cup and tried to smile. “I wish I could believe that.” “You promised to take care of them, and you kept your word.” “I tried.”

“You’re not God. You couldn’t make them not be sick.”

He set down his spoon and leaned back. “No, I couldn’t. All I could do, in the end, was watch them die.”

“At least you were with them; at least they didn’t have to die alone. I know that probably doesn’t seem like much, but it ought to count for something, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what to think, Ethel. That’s most of the reason I wound up in here.” “You’ll be better when you leave. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.” “That might be nice.” In the nurses’ station, Amber answered the phone, then called for Ethel.

“I have to go see who that is,” she said, rising. “I think you should spend the evening out here and not in your room. Watch another movie, or some stupid sit-coms. I’ll make popcorn in a little while, how’s that sound?” “Sounds okay.” “You strike me as a decent man, Martin. I just wish you saw it yourself.” Martin thanked her, finished his dinner, and spent the next few hours in front of the television.

Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just Ethel’s saying that he and Wendy were the only clients—Jerry hadn’t shown himself for hours, so why would she remember him?—it was this nagging sense that something was about to happen.

Soon.

And it bugged the shit out of him that he didn’t know what. Jerry had told him just enough to tell him almost nothing at all.

Because you were kind. Because you did more for him that day than you remember. Because he thought of you as a friend . . . .