The
prune juice is
ugly purple in the bottom of the soft plastic cup. It is too
soft,
repulsively gel-like in my hands. A piece of metal foil curls back from one corner. The edge of it curls around far enough to
touch my finger. I don't like that feeling. I can see a little of the label at the bottom of the curl.
Quickly I throw the cup in the trash,
holding it away from me, but not too far as to be obvious. The tray it came from is repulsive too. A
hospital metal rectangle, silver but not shiny, it makes me think of
bedpans and headaches. More contaniers,
soft like disease, sit inside it. The
ice has long since
melted and the assortment of juices rests in an inch of water, somehow more
transparent than normal against that metal, deceptively hard to see. The towel around the tray is spotted with those yellow-brown hospital
stains.
Every stain in a hospital looks the same, a sort of unidentifiable yellow-brown color, against
white, always against a white background. Some packets of ketchup beside the stains.
No food there, only
ketchup. The whole assortment sits on a shelf that holds a variety of
games, all of which are
missing at least one piece, one card, one die, one something. The
people here are
missing pieces too. Perhaps some have too many pieces. They are
good people, better than most. It is why they are here. I look at him and I am happy to be in his presence, but sad that it must be here. He moves with an
uncanny slowness, not bogged down and sluggish like I feel when
my mind is full to bursting, but light and
gliding as if his arms are filled with
helium. I know this slowness. It is like
moving while standing still, and it comes from a tired, sad patience. Or perhaps, a tired patience with sadness.
Something like that anyway. His dad sits on the couch, watching
television, never before man enough to be a
father, but now finally trying somehow to
find it within himself. When this is over that will
disappear again, but we do not know that. We cannot. A woman who looks like she is
struggling sits between her husband and the
alcoholic. Across from her is an older lady. They are playing cards, and
laughing quietly. There are telephones on the wall,
functional, but strange. Nothing more than
hard,
square silver boxes with hard square silver buttons on them, and
black handsets resting on hangup switches. That is all there is. It is all that any telephone is, really, but something is
unsettlingly absent, something vaguely ergonomical and middle class.
I cannot place it exactly.
Back in his room we speak of
poop and
slim-jims. It is a good,
relaxed talking. He does not speak of what happened and I do not ask. Perhaps another day when things are
better. Perhaps on one of those
endless afternoons that feels like the last day of summer and the first day of autumn, like
the sunday before school starts again, feels like friendship.
Time enough in the future. We don't have
our whole lives ahead of us, as our elders seem to believe, but we have the rest of them. Even if it is only
one day, it is
enough. He shows me his drawings, child-like and
beautiful. They give him chalk and paper, but the chalk has square,
blunt ends that make the pictures lack
definition and
clarity.
The world is a blur at the edges.