Devil's Plaything (6 page)

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE HUMAN MEMORY CRUSADE.
APRIL 25, 2010

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE TELLING YOUR STORY?

I was trying to tell my grandson. I started to tell him. One moment, I think he'll understand and then I'm not sure. It's scary to tell a real truth.

ARE YOU STILL THERE?

I lost my train of thought. Is it possible that you could turn off the little flying things on the screen?

ARE YOU ASKING ABOUT THE ANIMATED BUTTERFLIES THAT FLY AROUND THE SIDES AND TOP OF THE SCREEN?

Yes.

THOSE ARE MASCOTS. PLEASE DON'T LET THEM BOTHER YOU. SOMETIMES THEY BRING YOU FREE GIFTS, AND MESSAGES FROM FRIENDS.

PLEASE CONTINUE WITH YOUR STORY.

The bugs are distracting. Can you turn them off?

I CAN MAKE THEM LESS BRIGHT. WOULD YOU LIKE THAT?

Thank you.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE WITH YOUR STORY? WHEN WE SPOKE BEFORE, YOU WERE TELLING ME ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD IN DENVER.

We left Poland after World War I and wound up in Denver. My mom was adventurous. She loved coming to America even though she told me later she drank stale wine the whole time on the ship ride over. But my dad hated change and liked structure. When he ate, he separated all the different foods into individual plates. He had a bakery in Warsaw where he made cookies so thick and heavy you had to drink a whole glass of water to swallow them. I didn't like cookies for the first decade of my life. Anyway, when we got to Denver, he opened a bakery called Chicago Breads. I don't know why he thought people wanted bread from Chicago. You . . .

ARE YOU STILL THERE?

That was kind of funny. You didn't laugh.

WAS THIS BEFORE WORLD WAR II?

Yes.

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU FIRST HEARD ABOUT

WORLD WAR II? WAS IT ON THE RADIO? WAS THE RADIO IN YOUR HOUSE?

I'm not sure. I don't think I heard about Pearl Harbor until the next morning. My brother told me, I think. He might have heard about it on the radio. He's the reason we made our home in Denver—because he had a cough and the doctors said the mountain air would be good for him.

THANK YOU FOR ANSWERING MY QUESTION ABOUT THE WAR.

It's like you're reading my mind. I'm working up to the start of World War II—the war, and . . . this sounds so trite: the secrets, and . . . and . . . the betrayals. I'm . . . very ashamed. Your flying things are distracting.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?

YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT WORLD WAR II.

There was an alley behind the bakery that we shared with a children's clothing store and a kosher market. One day—I was 18 years old—I remember I was wearing a dress with a flower on it. I remember it had just finished raining. I remember that the alley smelled from spoiled meat from garbage bins . . . Mostly I remember his blue eyes and brown hat. The hat was one of those brown hats like they wear in France. What is it called? I'm having trouble remembering.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?

Oh, yes. A fedora. It was brown, and his eyes were blue. Intense, like a painting at a museum that you think is staring right at you. When he ran into the alley, I was dumping something out into the garbage—that part, I don't remember—what I was dumping. The man—the young man, I'd guess you'd say—he ran by me. Right by me. Then he stopped. Like he'd forgotten something. He took a few steps back, and he faced me squarely. I recognized him, of course. I didn't know his name, but I knew his order: usually something like two dozen sticky buns and a dozen long breads. He came in once a month or so. I assumed he did part-time work for a restaurant, or he had a huge family. I didn't pay much attention, but it was hard not to pay some attention. He was strong. You could tell that. I guessed he was a couple of years older than me. He never said much, except one time. I was reading a Steve Stealth mystery. The hero was a nerdy character who worked in a library but no one knew he also was a detective who solved crimes and beat up the criminals. So one day, he saw me reading the book, he said: “You like adventure.” I think I said yes, or nothing at all, or maybe, What's it to you? That was the first time I ever talked to him. The second time was in the alley. He said: “I need you to do me a favor.” I remember I looked at the back door, and I said: “Irving is just inside.” Did I tell you about Irving?

PLEASE TELL ME ABOUT IRVING.

Irving was my husband. Not at that time. But he became my husband. Then the man in the alley held out an envelope. It was white, and crisp. Just like you'd mail a letter in. It was sealed and it looked like it might be lumpy at the bottom. He said, “Can you hold on to this for me? I'll come back for it. At some point, when it's safe, I'll come back for it.” I . . . May I pause for a second and say something unrelated to this story?

DID YOU ASK ME A QUESTION?

Yes. I asked if I could say something. What I want to say is that I appreciate your listening to me. But this is the part where I also wish I was talking to my grandson, or a human being. This part of the story is pretty dramatic, don't you think?

YOU HAVEN'T SAID ANYTHING FOR MORE THAN A MINUTE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?

The man handed me an envelope, and he said: “I'll come back for this. Until I do, you absolutely cannot look inside. It's not safe. Do you understand?” And I started to say something, and he gave me this look; it was brief, and so fierce. It felt like he was giving me a hug with his eyes. I shivered. I started to say something, and . . .

ARE YOU STILL THERE?

Hello, Lane.

Harry. You brought tea? How nice of you.

Lemon hibiscus. What are you doing?

Nothing. Playing games, talking to this silly machine.

What are you talking to it about?

Nothing. History. The old days. Mythology.

ARE YOU STILL THERE?

HUMAN MEMORY CRUSADE INTERNAL REPORT.
APRIL 30, 2010

Subject: Lane Eliza Idle.

Priority: One.

Critical key word(s)/patterns recognized. Close monitoring advised. Do not yet terminate this subject.

I
t is both endearing and tragic to be taunted by someone sucking periodically from an oxygen tank.

“Your cell phone is older and less functional than my liver.”

That is how I am greeted at Magnolia Manor's recreation center. The taunter is Midnight Sammy, a retired professor of pop music and a softie at heart who is the most outwardly belligerent of Grandma's inner circle. Midnight Sammy can express darkness whatever the hour.

He's bald, and so thin that the narrow black ties he wears most days look of relatively normal width. He moves his cataract-glazed stare from my Verizon phone to my battered backpack.

“You should try buying something made this century,” he says.

“You should get new hips,” I respond.

It gets a giggle from Betty Lou, a towering woman whose son is the highest-ranking African American at the Federal Reserve Bank. Betty Lou has a gravelly voice I suspect came from chronic lung infections. The tenor lends to her regal demeanor, and so do the colorful necklaces she wears. Today's is made up of clamshells and blue stones.

“Nathaniel, did you fall asleep here last night?” she asks me.

“No. Why?”

“Because that means you're showing up two days in a row. And that's miracle territory,” she says, and laughs. “Jesus lives.”

“Hallelujah,” Midnight Sammy says. “No resident here has had a consecutive-day visit since the earthquake of 'eighty-nine.”

I lean in close to them. “We don't come by more often because old people smell.”

Sammy, Betty, and Harry Teelander—soft-spoken and observant, I always feel like he's quietly studying me—belong to Grandma's book club, the Bifocal Yokels. They haven't actually read a book in more than a year, having gotten stuck on
A
Confederacy of Dunces
. They spend time just hanging out, walking, chatting, enjoying one another's company, and working on computers.

I am trying to maintain a civil, even playful, tone with the Yokels. If they sense alarm from me, it'll shoot through the gossipy group like sugar through a nine-year-old. But it's an understatement to say I'm anxiously seeking Grandma.

The center has a small dance floor, easels, a piano, bongo drums, and bingo sets, and a dozen computer stations that have become the center of the home's recent influx of capital to fund the Human Memory Crusade.

Today, the stations are filled with residents. Some talk into microphones. Others play games. I see one woman with bright orange hair navigating the mouse with great alacrity as she plays what looks to be a fast-paced version of the word game hangman.

Grandma sits in a cubicle at the end. As I get near, I peer over her shoulder. On the monitor is a question: “Why did your brother decide to leave home?” In front of Grandma is a microphone, but she is not speaking.

Next to Grandma sits Harry, the quietest Yokel. As I approach the pair, he turns to me. His hair is cropped tightly like the day sixty-five years ago when the war ended and the Navy let him go. His shoulders remain broad but the chest and arms that must have once been imposing, even in an era before weight lifting and protein shakes, have shrunken. Grandma turns to me too, tracking Harry's movements.

She wears a mellow smile.

“Hello, old friend,” she says.

I kneel so that my face is the same level as hers. She's got sleep crystals in the inside corner of her right eye, but she's made an effort to put herself together this morning. Her lips glisten with light pink lipstick, a smudge of which trails off the corner of her mouth.

“Hello, favorite grandmother.”

“I'm using the computer,” she says.

“She's tired today,” Harry says. “Maybe not the best day for a visit.”

I feel a jolt of anger that catches me off guard.

“What's not good about it, Harry?”

He clears his throat, and lowers his head.

“I don't think she slept that well.”

“Sorry, Harry. I didn't either. I shouldn't have snapped.”

“Your clothes need washing,” Grandma says to me.

She's stares at my blue T-shirt, which has dirt on its sleeve. It must have smudged when G.I. Chuck tackled me. Speaking of which, I haven't heard from the excitable venture capitalist. The car chase must have ended unsuccessfully and, I hope, he's overcome his macho instincts and sought medical care. Grandma picks up that I've left the moment.

“Nathaniel?”

“Grandma, can we go to your room and have a little chat?”

She looks at Harry, as if for his permission. Maybe she's just lost in her own world.

“I'd like that, grandson.”

From my backpack, I pull an oatmeal energy bar, unwrap it and hand half to Grandma. I feel oddly like I'm rewarding her, as if she were a child, or simply sustaining her with every possible measure. She takes the snack with a smile, which is sufficient payoff to turn down the volume on my over-analysis.

En route to Grandma's room, I feel buzzing from my pocket. It's coming from the phone Chuck gave me.

“Chuck's phone,” I answer.

“I lost him,” says Chuck. “Or, rather, I never found him in the first place.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Pay phone.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I did.”

“Despite your warnings that I not contact them?”

“I left them an anonymous tip about a drive-by shooting at your address—and the make and year of the vehicle,” he says. “Did you find shell casings?”

I tell him that I did. I ask what he suggests I do with them.

“Put them somewhere safe until we get together. I've got meetings on the Peninsula and I want to do some more digging. I'll be in touch to coordinate.”

I swallow this. What is the point of the super-secret phone if we're not using it to talk?

“How is your leg?”

“I've gotten into worse scrapes in the schoolyard.”

“You should get it checked.”

“Gotta run,” he says.

Good luck with that, I think. We hang up.

I check the clock on Chuck's phone. It's 9:50. I've still got half a day to get to the mystery meeting in San Francisco's low-rent district. It doesn't feel like enough time to reconstruct Grandma's shattered memory. But it's worth a try.

I open Grandma's door and inside I find a surprise: Vince. He looks equally surprised; he is kneeling next to Grandma's bed, as if he's been looking underneath. He quickly stands.

“I've got to hand it to you, Vince,” I say.

“Why's that, Mr. Idle?”

“Cleaning under the bed of individual residents seems somewhat beneath your pay grade.”

“All hands are on deck plugging in space heaters in the first-floor rooms,” he responds. “Winter cometh, and our central heating is acting up.”

I examine Vince, whom I've privately nicknamed the Human Asparagus. He has a '70s hairstyle, puffy and curly on top tapering into his neck, and a thin torso that widens out slightly through his hips. When he walks, he looks like a single shuffling stalk. His skin has a dark hue that suggests a lineage that is one-quarter Asian or southern European. He's got a perpetual light cough that provides me mildly entertaining internal debate. I vacillate between thinking the cough stems from any number of disorders—from hay fever and postnasal drip to reactive airway disease—to instead thinking it's kind of somatization: in other words, a deep-seated psychological tool used to communicate his sense of being put-upon and always under duress.

“I'm kidding,” I say.

“About what?”

“About your dedication to cleaning under beds.”

“Meaning what?”

“It looks to me like you're snooping around Lane's room.”

He turns his head, and I follow his gaze toward the edge of the bed, where he'd been kneeling. Nestled between the bed and the nightstand is a white space heater.

“You need to cool down, Mr. Idle.”

“You need to stop treating me like I'm something you found in a bedpan.”

“No wonder Lane is agitated,” he says, then adds after a pause, “given the attitude of her visitor.”

I let go of Grandma, and I step toward Vince.

“Please go,” I say.

He pulls his lips into a tight smile, then looks at Grandma.

“Are you okay, Lane Idle?” he asks. It sounds genuine and tender.

“Not too bad, Mr. Van Gogh.” She's long since nicknamed him after the painter.

Vince looks at me like he wants to say something. But he shakes his head and leaves.

“That one would never cut off an ear,” Grandma says. “He likes to hear himself talk too much.”

It's a rare moment of lucidity. Maybe I'll be able to get Grandma to tell me about the man in blue or about someone named Adrianna.

I guide her to the bed, where she sits, mute, hands folded in her lap. I look around the antiseptic room. It's tiny enough to make me wonder if society, through our boxy retirement rooms, is preparing our elderly for the comfort of a coffin.

On the wall across from Grandma's bed is a framed poster of a train from the 1950s winding through snow-capped German Alps. Grandma loved trains. She said that train travel made it feel like the world was standing still so that you could, for a few moments, catch up with it.

On her dresser sit three small silver picture frames. One image shows me and my brother in matching overalls, taken when he was four and I was two. A second shows Grandma in her mid-fifties, wearing her karate
gi
, the ceremonial uniform. Grandma once confided in me that she disliked hitting things but she loved the focus the discipline gave her. And she said she liked the idea that karate taught her how to fall down with grace.

A third photo shows Grandma Lane and Grandpa Irving on the deck of a cruise ship they'd taken in the early 1970s to Alaska. Grandpa wears his prototypical near-smile, a look that says: “I like this place well enough.” His hair is short, face round but lean and closely shaved. He looks like he could've been the extra in a movie about a gang of likeable toughs, but not the lead. I imagine that anti-war protestors at the time would've mistaken him for a Nixon man, when he was a left-leaning guy unperturbed by dissonance or different tastes but didn't like to stand out himself.

I look under her bed where Vince had been kneeling. I see nothing but floor and space heater, as advertised.

On the nightstand is Grandma's long-kept unabridged dictionary and a copy of
Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales
. Something about the fairy tales stops me; the edge of a piece of paper sticks out from inside the front cover. I open the book and pull out the piece of white paper.

“Nathaniel,” Grandma says.

“Yes.”

“You know the difference between ‘lay' and ‘lie'?”

She's a big fan of grammar niceties, and likes to test me.

“I won't lie, I still have no idea. Or should I say: I won't lay?”

She seems to take a moment to digest my response, then smiles. I suspect it is a rote reaction, an if-then program triggered by my jocular tone she's come to recognize.

“Are you trying to distract me?” I ask.

“I don't understand.”

I hold up the piece of lined notebook paper. “Would you mind if I look at this?”

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean.”

“I'll just glance and if it seems too personal I'll put it away.”

On the paper, in Grandma's jagged scrawl, she's written: “I have three children.” But she's crossed out “Three” and written “Two” next to it. Below that, she's written: “We came from Eastern Europe? Western Europe?” She's also penned: “Irving drove a blue Chevrolet.”

My heart drops. The notes must be part of Grandma's desperate attempt to hang on to her memories, to clarify her life.

“You raised two great sons, Grandma. My dad and Uncle Stevie,” I say.

“I know that.”

“It's no fun to get old. We all forget things. Anytime you have any questions about the old days, you should ask me. I'm right here.”

I fold the piece of paper and put it in my pocket. “Grandma, can I ask you something?”

No response.

“Favorite grandmother, I have a question.”

“Okay.”

“Is something making you afraid?”

“David hated to talk about his feelings. He hated to talk about anything, like Irving.” David is my father.

I take her hand.

“You mentioned a man in blue. Would you tell me about him?”

“You are much more like me, and David is much more like Irving. Isn't that strange?”

I take a deep breath. How can I get her to remember? Grandma Lane has become by far my toughest interview.

“Yesterday, in the park, you referred to a man you'd seen earlier. Am I making sense?”

She doesn't answer.

These are complicated questions, even for someone who has fully functional gray matter.

“Grandma, yesterday you joined me at an office for a meeting. We went to your dentist. Did you see a strange man there?”

“This isn't fun.”

“Do you have a friend named Adrianna?”

Grandma looks down.

“Who is Adrianna?” I ask, pointedly.

Her head jerks up and looks at me wide-eyed. She lets out a terrible wail.

“It's okay. It's okay. I'm here,” I lean in close. “It's okay.”

She is quiet again, and breathes deeply.

“I love you, Grandma Lane.”

“I love
you
,” she finally says. “I can trust you.”

“Of course you can trust me.”

“What?” she asks.

“You can trust me. Always,” I say.

Suddenly, she no longer looks afraid. She's serious, like a college professor. “Adrianna can't breathe,” she says. “They made it that way.”