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He was a resident of the Aramaya Rest Home on Neptune Avenue in the heart of Coney Island. It was a three-story brick building not two blocks from the ocean.

The reception area’s walls were lined with chairs and sofas on which reclined at least two dozen old men and women who had outlived their usefulness but still clung to the memories and hope of life.

Mostly but not all white, they stared, read newspapers, talked to themselves or others. Sprawled out, leaning on canes, and trapped in wheelchairs, they napped, dozed, cried, and muttered. The room smelled strongly of urine, dead skin, alcohol, and disinfectant.

I walked down the aisle of tortured souls, a modern-day Dante wandering through a half-hearted beach resort in hell. The inmates reached and called out to me. They watched as I went by, wishing, I believed, that they had the strength to walk away from their private damnation.

“Can I help you?” asked a blue-haired lady in nurse-like white. She was somewhere in her sixties, which made her the second-youngest person in the room.

“Lamont Charles,” I said.

The short, well-preserved white woman’s face brightened and she gave a smile usually reserved for grandchildren and fond memories of the dead.

“Mr. Charles,” she said as if the words were a mantra designed to open the gates of heaven.

“Yes. Can he have visitors?”

“I don’t know why he doesn’t have more. If we had a dozen like him I think we might get something accomplished.”

I had no idea what she meant but asked, “Can I see him?”

The small elevators at Aramaya were in constant use so I took the stairs to the third floor and followed the receptionist’s directions to the recreation room.

It was a large area with a succession of windowed doors leading out onto a deck that looked over the ocean.

This room was a maze of sofas, chairs, wheelchairs, and game tables. There were at least forty residents in the same sad shape as their brethren downstairs. I looked around for a somewhat younger man, three-quarters paralyzed.

“Can I help you?”

The question was asked by a twenty-something black man with bulging muscles and an orderly’s teal garb. He had the use of all his limbs.

“Lamont Charles.”

He was the only person out on the deck. It was a mild day, maybe fifty-five degrees, with a toothless breeze wafting through. Lamont was sitting in an electric wheelchair, holding a mirror in front of his face with his one good hand. He’d put down the mirror, pick up a comb, run this through his hair, and then retrieve the mirror to examine his work so far.

“Mr. Charles?” I asked.

Still looking at himself, he said, “Yes?”

“My name is Oliver, Joe Oliver.”

I moved between him and the view of the ocean.

After a moment he looked up and said, “Cop?”

“Used to be. A long time ago. Now I’m private.”

He put down the mirror and smiled like he used to in the old days before being shot down.

“You like it out here?” he asked. You could hear North Carolina in his voice.

“A little chilly.”

“That’s why I got me two blankets. You know the smell’a that place back there is bound to be bad for you. So I come out here every day to clean out my lungs. I don’t care how cold it gets, a red-blooded man needs fresh air.”

A seagull swooped down and landed on the railing maybe a dozen feet from us. It gave us its sidelong glance, hoping for crumbs or maybe a discarded fish.

“Why you here, Mr. Oliver?”