“Yes. I want to see you again.”
He obeys, and she stares at him, a worn smile pulling at her mouth. “No one will believe me. But I suppose that is why you risked coming here, eh? If I told anyone the man who took my virginity looks the same as he did on that summer night, they would think itwas the ravings of a mad old woman. What are you, mijo? A vampire? If you are, you’re too late to change me. Not that I would ask. I have repented of my past sins, and I look to heaven. I have lived a good life. God will be gracious. Before you go, would you change the—” She gestures to the TV. “I do not remember what this game is called, but it’s boring. And I don’t know how this works.” She points to the remote on the little rolling table beside her bed.
“What do you like?” I ask, picking up the remote.
“Oh…I like animals.” She nods, as if she’s remembering something. “Yes, I like animals.”
I find a channel featuring the San Diego Zoo, and we leave her to watch it.
“I’m not sure what you were trying to prove with that,” I say quietly as we walk along the hall. “She’s lovely. She’s had a good life.”
“But she used to dance, Baz, and sing. She had such a beautiful voice. That’s all gone now. She has railings on her bed to keep her from falling, and her voice… Well, you heard it. Those vocal cords, wrecked by time. I hate seeing her like that.” His expression darkens, his fingers curling into fists.
“Did you love her?” The question is barely louder than a breath, but he hears me.
“No. I let her go a few weeks after we met. But she was wonderful, and I have thought of her now and then through the years.”
He pauses outside another door, halfway open, and knocks lightly.
Someone calls sharply, “Just come in already!” and we step into the room.
The figure on the bed is naked from the waist down, turned on their side, facing away from the door. Beside their pale, deflated bottom lies a stained diaper. An orderly stands next to the bed, onehand holding the patient’s shoulder while the other gloved hand folds the diaper together into a bundle with expert swiftness.
The orderly glances over at us, and her eyes pop wide. “Oh shit, I thought you were Mike,” she says. “Go back into the hall. I’m almost done here.” She looks exasperated, and there are dark circles under her eyes.
“Do you need help?” I ask.
“Are you family?”
“Friends.”
“Fine. You could hold him steady while I take care of this.”
I step forward, but Dorian’s quicker than I am. He takes the sweater-covered shoulders of the elderly patient and holds him in place until the orderly nods for Dorian to lay him back down onto the fresh diaper. In moments, the cleanup and changing are complete, and the patient’s thin legs are covered up with a sheet. The orderly hurries out without another word to us.
The man in the bed is bald, his pale skin almost translucent, showing a tracery of blue and green veins. He’s skeletally thin, sockets hollowed around bulging eyeballs thinly veiled by violet lids. His mouth hangs open.
Dorian carefully draws a blanket over the man, up to his waist. He touches one of the motionless hands. Every bone is painfully visible, the veins crawling like dark purplish worms over sticks under a glaze of fragile skin.
The man’s lips are crusty, and he looks thirsty, so I hurry to the tiny bathroom and wet a paper towel. I return and bathe his lips with it, cleaning them. There’s a cup with a straw nearby; I refill it with fresh water and touch the straw to his mouth. His lips twitch, but he makes no effort to drink, so I set it aside.
“Alan,” Dorian says. “Can you hear me?”
There’s a low wheeze from the man, and his bleary eyes open halfway before drifting shut again.
“This man had the body of a god,” Dorian says tightly, pulling the blanket a little higher. “A brilliant mind, too. He was an architect. Unhappily married. I seduced him, and god, we had such wicked, wonderful times.”
“So you took him from his wife.”
“She didn’t know about our affair. Thought we were friends from work. He was so miserable, Baz. I couldn’tnotgive him what I knew he needed. He was glorious, and he deserved to be thoroughly, recklessly pleasured for a few months in his steady, respectable life.”
Who can argue with that? I certainly can’t, so I stay quiet, watching Dorian and the old man.
“You see it now,” he says softly. “Why someone like me can’t bear to become…this.”
I struggle with myself, because I understand what he means, but he’s also being incredibly narrow-minded. “The elderly are a valuable asset to society. There’s so much we can learn from them—”
“Until they can’t form coherent sentences, understand simple concepts, or remember anything from one moment to the next. Yet we do everything to prolong their lives, to keep their bodies running as long as possible, even when death would be a mercy.”
