WE LIVE IN THE WALLS -- Chapter Seven
THE STINK OF OVERCOOKED vegetables and cheap meats overpowers me as I walk into the dining room, looking for my regulars. The dementia patients are big fans, always waving me over to their tables and begging me to listen to their stories. Sometimes they thought I was one of the nurse helpers and they’d ask me for coffee and toast, along with messages that they wanted their loved ones to hear. I know where every will is hidden and every cache of cash stuffed in locked deposit boxes and attics. I fill up fast just walking through the dining room, all that sickness and aged disease pouring over me and regenerating every pore. My Walkman isn’t just repaired, it has the original plastic tabs on it, fresh out of the box. I have to peel the sticky tape off with my thumbnail to get the cassette cradle open.
None of the others at Paradox House caught on that this is the best place to replenish oneself, the symbiosis of those leaving and my taking feeling completely natural. Yes, eventually my feeds would kill them. That was the point. I have a purpose here. I send people on their journey, eventually. I have a real purpose.
But it’s not all good. Nothing is. I’m probably bringing in a flu outbreak, they usually have one after one of my visits. I try to hold back, but damn, tonight I am too hungry.
I get my fill on wafts of cancer and heart disease only to suddenly choke on a terrible, acrid bitterness that makes me gag enough to puke out a steel Levi’s button onto the dining room carpet. Son of a bitch, that was foul. I glance up, my head suddenly aching and dammit, there he is, that fucking prick, he is here, in my special space, milling around my oldies.
The Host.
His voice is loud and obnoxious in its fakery as it echoes across the dining room. I stand motionless, shocked as I watch him make his way around the room, chatting up the nurses. I feel so deep it scares, and the feeling is rage lined, full of the Light and I half wonder if I’m tempting it to come and swallow me. Hate. I hate him so much. I hate that he can be free to go where he wants, spreading his poison, no one the wiser on how high the body count is getting and nobody doing a damned thing to stop him. He is an infected sore on this town, oozing pus, and he has the gall to come here and pretend to be ‘good’.
Hate hate hate hate him hate hate hate..
I feed off of oldies and junkies, and yes, they get sick, (though it’s still a chicken and egg thing, to be fair)....But man, I don’t get off on it. Facts are, unpalatable as it is, people like me serve a purpose. When people are dying, we’re there. I know I’m doing a job. It feels right. It’s a lot easier to let go when you got someone sitting at your bedside who isn’t scared that your soul is stuck to you like some creepy ass balloon.
I can hear the nurse helpers cheerfully engaging with him, telling him how happy they are that he’s there, they’ve been so short-staffed lately and it’s so good of him to help out. I don’t get it. Why aren’t they asking questions, like, ‘Why is a single guy like this coming into the nursing home to help feed people when he doesn’t have any relatives here?’ No one walks into those places looking to get one on one with the dying without an angle, without it being a job.
Here’s a hard fact I’ve learned. People do things for themselves first and others later. I don’t care what your minister told you last Sunday: People are selfish. Whether you are getting a paycheck or a check mark into Heaven, everyone has a reason to be ‘charitable’.
Yeah, I’m bitter, and angry. I had to do my court ordered volunteer hours here when I was in high school, and I hated every minute of it. The stink of piss, the judgmental stares of the nurses, all of it. I was treated like a serious delinquent and all I’d done was spray paint ‘asshole’ on the hood of my mom’s ex-boyfriend’s car. Newsflash: He was one. So I got sent up river to pay for my crime.
But the oldies were okay. Most thought the reason I was there was hilarious. I made some friends. Then they died.
This guy, though. Zero reason for him to be here save for maybe he’s trying to get his karma balanced or some stupid shit like that. As if feeding an old guy some carrot puree is going to cancel out the fact he killed two prostitutes in his kitchen this week.
That’s when I see her, and I instantly feel relief. She’s wearing her hair different, in a tight bun this time and slicked firm against her skull. She has spotless brown skin that still has a healthy youthful glow, so smooth its almost alien.
She’s twenty-two years old and has a face that will be the same when she’s one hundred. Her nurse helper’s uniform had a blue butterfly pattern that looks animated beneath the fluorescent lighting in the dining room. She sees our Host and her happiness dims a little. I hate him even more for that.
She walks back to the receptionist’s desk, well out of earshot so I follow her back to the lobby. She forgot to sign in and she gives the receptionist a dazzling grin as she asks for a pen. “Guess I better make sure they know I was here.”
“You won’t get paid if you don’t,” the receptionist warns her, but not meanly. She glances over her shoulder at the Host who is milling about in the dining room, chatting with the residents. “Your favourite volunteer is here.”
She shivers. “Honestly, Darlene, that’s not funny. Guy makes my skin crawl.”
Darlene the receptionist shrugs. “He got a police check, we do that for all the volunteers. He checked out, not even a parking ticket. We need those volunteers, we’re short staffed and if we end up pulling people off the street so the residents get fed I don’t see the harm.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right getting people to volunteer when people here are paying for services.” She hands the pen back to Darlene and for the hundredth time I check her name tag, bright orange with a happy face sticker plastered to the corner: Happy Meadows Helper: Teena Madhu. We smile with you! “I know you say help is help, but the guy is weird. He’s been coming here once a week for the past couple of months and the residents still don’t like him. Mr. Pritchard called him ‘oily’.”
Darlene chuckles.
“I don’t know how to say it. He’s nice enough, I get it, just...I don’t know.”
The receptionist leans forward into Teena’s confidence. “I understand what Mr. Pritchard means. He is kind of greasy–not dirty in the normal way. I don’t feel clean around him. I told Jenny the RN on the afternoon shift and she said the same thing. We don’t let him take them to their rooms. Feeding them is fine, we’re all there watching.”
Teena isn’t so sure. “He’s like a tiger looking for a snack.”
“Tigers are majestic creatures. He looks more like a badger.”
“I wouldn’t want to run into one of those, either.” She picks up the schedule book and grimaces over the heavily inked page. “Second floor, alone, again. Story of my life.”
The receptionist turns away as the phone rings, her professional persona firmly in place. “Gets better, Irene called in sick. Might be the flu and you know what that means. Lock down city.”
Teena rolls her eyes. “Just great. More overtime.”
Darlene waves goodbye as she answers the phone in her typical sing-song voice, overly happy and eager to please whatever family or board member was on the other end of the line. Teena disinfects her hands with the ready to use hand sanitizer bolted to the wall and then enters the dining room. I follow behind her, curious to see how she deals with our Host in her domain, ruining her shift. I’m fully charged and have no reason to stick around but I like watching her work and I don’t want to leave her alone with our Host. I’m not usually here in the evenings and neither is Teena, she has a morning line. She must be filling in or took in an extra shift.
Teena is a genuinely good person. She is kind to the residents and the really grumpy ones always ask for her by name, no matter how scrambled their brains are with dementia. People always remember kindness.
I watch our Host and realize I now have his full name. The metal lunch box he takes to work has Buckman written on it in black marker and he left with it this morning, not realizing there was still dried blood in the sharp left hand corner on the bottom. His ID badge offers up his first name: VOLUNTEER: TED in bold black and white.
Ted Buckman.
All of us in Paradox House adopted false names because we know the power that was held in our real ones. That was a different life and time and names were attached to it. Mr. Black said a new name was like a new skin and it’s true. I like being called Shadow. It reflects both who and what I was and what I became.
Ted Buckman doesn’t reflect shit.
I watch the way he feeds the oldies, his eyes constantly scanning the room, his expression one of tired disinterest when the people he’s feeding try to talk to him. I can see how focused he is on the young nurse helpers, his gaze gobbling them up, his mind churning through all of his murderous acts and visiting them upon them in his sick imagination. I can tell that’s what he really wants, one of these fresh faced, healthy women, higher in social status than his scrawny junkies and more apt to put up a serious fight. He wants healthy prey, but he dare not touch these women, not when they are his nice guy cloak, his volunteerism an easy alibi. He figures if he does this one little good thing once a week he’ll keep getting away with murder.
So far, it’s working.
Sunlight quickly fades into an early red evening. Time to go.
Teena sits with her back straight and alert while she’s ’feeding Mr. Pritchard’s wife, who picks at her potatoes with a reluctant fork and needs constant prompting. She managed to get in a small teaspoon which the angry elderly woman quickly spat out into the gravy on her plate. Gravy drips down Mrs. Pritchard’s chin and Teena gets up to get a damp towel to wipe it off. I turn to leave at the same time and near collide with her.
“Oh, sorry.”
I stand there, stupid with shock. She looks me up and down and then smiles at me. “Were you here to see your grandmother?”
I nod. What the actual fuck? I feel sick. Scared sick, the kind of feeling I had when I was alive and I’d pissed myself while rooted to the spot, ready to get the shit kicked out of me which happened a lot more than I let anyone know. My neck itches, and I scratch at the side of my throat, every nerve on edge.
“Y-Yeah,” I manage to say. “Violet.”
She cocks her head to one side and gives me a sad smile, the one reserved for palliative family members. “I’m sure it won’t be long now. It’s good of you come to see her, even though she’s not conscious I’m sure she feels your presence. It’s important.” She reaches out to squeeze my shoulder, but I step away before she can. I didn’t want to know how far this, whatever it was, went. I didn’t want to know if a touch from her could erase me.
“Thanks.” The Host is on the other end of the dining room but I can tell he is looking at us, or rather at her, his head trying to interpret it like a simple math question he’s too dumb to answer and ends with: ‘Who is she talking to?’ And it sucks because I sure as fuck don’t want her on his radar, so I wave goodbye and take off fast out the front of the building, not nodding at the receptionist who can’t see me, and the doors aren’t fully open and I’m out of them and onto the darkened sidewalk and then onto the street. I run as fast as I can back to the house because damn...Out There just got way too complicated.