XII (Fourteen) - Calvin Yardley
Spongiform ruin of the palace, as bequeathed by the great equalizer of the living and the dead alike. Time, progression and procession by any other name.
Seated silently in a ward soaked in the sickly scent of urea and kareishu, he’ll linger a while, the first death given to him some odd months ago. He has been dying for some time, starting back when the world had a name and the people therein offered up thanks to great suppliers of grain and vacuums. His wife, as he quietly cracks up at the flicker of an iron ball in his mind, has mourned his first passing since he started to refer to his home of some forty years as a boarding house.
His wife, who he’s been married to since they finished high school. His wife, who he can’t remember the last time he saw.
He is dead. A man walking, a very much dead one, a husk of the man he used to be, hobbling around some days and roaring around others, belly full to bursting with tapioca and quetiapine, blood heavy with plaque and lorazepam. The soft spoken thinker, reduced to a man afraid of his own shadow, quick to anger and quicker to blows.
Hence the antipsychotics, which taste of honey and fill his limbs with lead. It is undoubtedly the gasoline and paint and pipes of his youth that brought him here, along with little white crystals scattered about all the things he liked. Were he a Turk, he’d be delighted, most certainly, at the gelatine and starches, the glucose and the burnt cells of the pancreas. He is no Turk, never even was.
Maybe he was, in a past life, far from now, munching on British snacks and imbibing complicated brews drawn in from sand-heated cauldrons and pots. Coffee.
His wife used to make coffee for him. It wasn’t the best that was to be had, but who gives a shit? His wife, who he’s certain has been dead a few years, used to make him cups of black tea and give him little white pills, told him to take them.
Take them. Maybe in reference to the kids, to Poughkeepsie, a few hours in some direction, get some donuts and some fish, hell if he knew. All three of them, who live with him in his little shack in the woods, where everything smells bad and all the housekeepers are nice enough. Everyone lives with him now, in this place to call his own.
Place. His mom’s house, bulldozed for a luxury condominium development for university students and affluents of the academic persuasion. He tried, a few times, to go somewhere like that. Never stuck. Never needed to, by virtue of different times.
Times. All the time he doesn’t have left, all the thoughts left unthunk, ‘cause who’da thunk any of it? Did you think I would think?
Think. He can’t remember any more. He hasn’t, a while now. No reason to. His brain is too busy, at the physical, chemical, and spiritual level, cannibalizing itself. What a shame it is, to die twice over, the second time an eventuality, looming like the inevitability of taxes or...well...death.
Death. Do you think he fears it? Do you think he’s even there? Lights are on, but no one’s home. Poor fella fits the definition of senile, and here’s his grandkid, writing soliloquies and ballads of the dying man, speculating and positing the nature of a dying man’s last few months of sapient thought.
Thought. I have one. What a thing it is, that man is capable of dying so ingloriously. Sequestered away in the broom closet of a hospital, rotting away in beds, dying from the inside-out like a tree or a government. Should man, assured of his dominance over earth, not be afforded the grace of a swift, merciful end when the water reaches the chin, threatening to drown and defile the living form?
Form. He’s been transferred between three different facilities, by virtue of his assaulting of a handful of orderlies. Blows come to evictions, and when nurses turn to orderlies, one is sure that the jig is up. Hence the antipsychotics, which taste like lead and fill his limbs with honey. Honey. He used to call his wife that.
Wife. What was she called again?
Again. Am I dying?
Dying.