Chapter 3 – Only the Deserving Receive Medicine…
Clara Fitt’s shrunken body deflated as she expelled a long, desperate hiss. “I think I miss coffee more than anything. Real coffee. The kind made with beans that used to grow out of the dirt. I would sell my soul to smell real coffee again one morning.”
Miranda Peters, Clara’s personal orderly, snarled. “You had more than your share of mornings to idly enjoy your coffee. You should’ve listened when people tried warning you that the climate was collapsing. But you didn’t want to hear it, and now no one’s going to taste real coffee again.”
Clara’s lips trembled. “I didn’t know. I promise. I didn’t know.”
“You knew,” Miranda growled. “You only shoved your head deeper and deeper into the sand.”
Clara sobbed. “No one told me anything. They really didn’t, Miranda. I would’ve done something if I knew. I would’ve done more if I understood.”
Ben Cane’s hands shook has he gripped the playing cards. He wished Clara would shut her mouth, wished she would stop complaining for one afternoon and let Ben and his friends enjoy an afternoon session of Euchre. Did Clara still think she was the only person in the home who went without comfort? Butch had been rough on Ben that morning. Butch poked Ben with so many needles that the old man’s arms bruised. The fingers of Butch’s giant and ugly hands left dark welts to show where the orderly’s vice grip had squeezed on Ben when wrangling the old patient out of cots and into wheelchairs. Orderlies always knew how to inflict a good amount of hurt without causing lingering injury. Did Clara still not understand that complaining about coffee would only motivate Miranda to treat her more harshly? Why did Clara insist on lamenting about her fate? Why couldn’t Clara accept that complaints would help no one?
Ben’s body throbbed with hurt. The chemotherapy’s chill still ran through his blood, no matter how many blankets he tossed over his legs, or how many shawls he slung over his shoulders. His stomach wouldn’t settle; he could hardly keep sips of carbonated water down, and Ben realized that the IV that forever remained in his arm would supply the day’s only lasting nutrients. Pain vibrated from his fingers and his toes. Yet Ben didn’t complain. He knew none gathered at that card table felt any better. Ernie Hanks didn’t whine at all about the second leg amputation the diabetes forced him to undergo last week. Mattie Swenson never cried about how roughly her orderly tended to her colostomy bag. Viola Landers said nothing about the broken hips and legs she suffered those morning when her orderly refused to help her out of bed and instead laughed at her Viola’s struggles. Ben and his friends didn’t gather at that card table to hear more misery. They came to that table positioned in the recreational commons to find reason to smile, and Clara’s constant complaining detracted from that goal.
“Shut the hell up, Clara, and settle for a cup of the synthetic Joe,” Ben growled. “You’re not as sick as the rest of us. You haven’t been here nearly as long as some. So shut the hell up and be happy with what you get.”
The attending orderlies traded smiles. Ben hated all those blue-frocked bastards for the pleasures they took in watching their patients suffer. The orderlies applauded when the residents snarled at one another. Little made those orderlies happier than the spectacle of the sick and old clawing at one another.
“Save your energy, Ben,” Mattie tossed the Jack of Clubs onto the table. “Talking to Clara won’t do you any good.”
Ernie nodded. “And there’s no reason to resent her for saying what we all feel. She’s no more responsible than any of the rest of us for what’s happened to the world.”
“And you’re saying we’re not responsible?” Ben raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not saying that.” Ernie sighed.
“Somebody play,” moaned Viola.
The game felt dull to Ben. All the moves felt automatic. He had played Euchre tricks for too long. He had spent too many afternoons beneath the bright, harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs. He wanted out. He wished he could lay down and hold his breath and wait for his heart to dry into ash. He had outlived the world. But Ben knew there was only one way out of that home filled with tormenting orderlies. The only exit waited in that chamber of translucent walls sitting in the middle of their recreational commons. The only exit was in that chamber occupied only by a stool, in that room whose glass walls made no effort to conceal anything from those patients who gathered in the surrounding commons. All of the machines beeped to maintain old heartbeats. All the medicines fought to keep those residents breathing. The orderlies never left their charges’ sides, ever vigilant to confiscate the straight razor or the poison an old guest might seek to employ in an effort to avoid that glass chamber. The machines and the orderlies performed that job well, so that death very rarely claimed the old before the world’s last generation of children forced their grandparents to, finally, accept their responsibility for ruining the world in the middle of that surrounding glass.
Ben casually tossed his cards onto the table, and his thoughts, as they so often did, drifted to measure the part he bore in the world’s desecration. So many among the old believed they held little responsibility for the waste. So many believed they had never possessed the affluence and the sway that might’ve persuaded the industrial moguls and national leaders to change their course and retreat from the precipice of self-induced annihilation. Ben disagreed. He remembered how those of his time – from the evangelical minister, to the ironworker, from the farmer to the tax accountant – ignored every symptom of their sick world. He remembered how those of his time denied every bit of evidence testifying the planet was dying. Ben remembered how his neighbors derided, and then persecuted, those who warned how the sky was falling. He remembered how the citizens of his country had buried their heads into the sand. Ben remembered because he had buried his hand as deeply into the ground as anyone else. People didn’t want to lose jobs. People didn’t want to lose their comforts. They didn’t want to abdicate their seats of power. No one wanted to sacrifice convenience. So they sacrificed the world.
And Ben Cane thought it no mystery why the last children despised their grandparents.
“There’s trump!” Ernie grinned as he gathered the cards, and Ben fought the urge to slap the smile off of his friend’s face.
Mattie hesitated before she took her turn shuffling the cards. “I received my postcard from Jonah yesterday.”
Mattie carefully set a postcard onto the table’s center. It was a picture of a bright, turquoise sea beneath a cloudless, blue sky. Ben failed to see a trace of gray anywhere on the snapshot. The shore’s sands glowed in tans and oranges. Sun umbrellas dotted the coastline like rainbow mushrooms. People frolicked in the water, carelessly exposing their skin to the elements. That postcard spoke of another time. Ben’s fingers reached for the glossy cardstock, but he drew his hand away before he might mar the image with an oily fingerprint.
“My. My.” Viola whistled. “Did all that color really exist once in the world? Was all that color really once something more than just fantasy?”
“Don’t you doubt it for a second,” Ben mumbled. “I remember swimming in water like that. I remember sun-bathing on a beach like that during my honeymoon.”
“When was that?” Ernie asked.
Ben shrugged. “Why does that matter? Maybe it was sixty years ago. Maybe it was a thousand.”
Like everyone else gathered at the table, Ben knew the postcard was only an image of the holographic light that filled the vision dome. That postcard showed only a reflection of a lost world, a place children visited shortly before the world’s poisons lowered them into the grave. Mattie’s was far from the first postcard he had seen placed upon that table. Their glossy stock framed so many scenes – forests filled with moths and butterflies, rainforests of light and shadow, mountains spotted with rams and wolves. Every postcard was a photograph of a ghost, each one a reminder of what was wasted and lost.
Those postcards were not printed to simply share the
vision dome’s false beauties. Each postcard held a much more significant purpose. The postcards told the old that death nipped at the heels of their grandchildren, and that the old would soon face their appointments within the glass chamber.
Mattie’s wet eyes glistened. “My grandson Jonah sent that card to me straight from the vision chamber. He wrote on the back that he especially liked the Redwoods.”
No one at the table responded. Such postcards no longer delivered joy.
“The cancer is really squeezing him now,” Mattie continued. “Don’t ask me what kind. There are so many. But it’s in Jonah’s lungs now. It’s even in his brain. There’s not much time left to him.”
“Have they given him the presentation?” Viola asked.
Mattie shrugged. “I can’t say. They’ll give Jonah the presentation, and then Jonah will come for me. Isn’t that how it works for all of us? All I can do is wait, and pray that there’s still a little mercy in Jonah’s heart when he visits me in that glass chamber. Don’t I deserve at least a little mercy?”
Ben didn’t voice his doubt. He wasn’t sure if any of them deserved an ounce of forgiveness. He thought about his best friend Clint Klasing, of all those afternoons they spent playing chess following difficult rounds of cancer treatment. He thought of all the conversations he had shared with his friend, talks about books they used to read, of jobs they once held. For a while, both of their grandchildren had remained healthy, so that the friendship Ben and Clint shared helped them bear the torment of their orderlies. But then Clint had informed Ben that the leukemia clutched upon his grandson, and Ben remembered the postcard Clint’s grandson had sent that showed a picture of a brilliant, pink Ibis perched upon a wetland landscape.
Clint received no mercy the day his grandson visited to hold him responsible for the world the old gave to the young. The orderlies made everyone witness the sentence Clint received from his grandson; the orderlies always made everyone watch through that chamber’s glass walls. Clint sat on that stool, crying before the orderlies escorted his grandson into the chamber. Sometimes, the grandchildren screamed. Sometimes, the grandchildren pleaded with their grandparents, begged their grandparents to tell them why the world the young inherited no long possessed living seas, or why there were no more playful and happy dogs. Sometimes, the grandchildren gave the old opportunity to explain what the young had ever done to deserve the illnesses the wasted planet inflicted upon them.
Clint’s grandson wasted no time with mercy when he visited his grandfather in that glass chamber. That teenage boy didn’t say a thing before unleashing his fists upon Clint. Clint grunted at each blow, and he cried through those brief moments when his grandson caught his breath before assaulting the old man with a new and savage round of fists. That boy didn’t relent. He didn’t stop when Clint’s face swelled, not when blood covered the broken skin.
The orderlies never let any of the elderly residents turn away. The orderlies made the old watch every punch. The orderlies made the old count every gash. That grandson beat Clint until his hands bruised so badly that he could no longer close his fingers into fists. Those gathered on the other side of the glass walls failed to recognize the friend beneath the gore. That grandchild delivered injuries from which Clint would never recover, and still the boy’s anger was little satisfied. The orderlies gave that boy a metal baton when he could no longer strike with his hands, and the sick grandson struck over and over until he claimed all the revenge he could from the face of that old man seated upon that single stool kept within that chamber of glass walls.
The spectacle of that beating still filled Ben’s nightmares with blood and bone.
Mattie hesitated before she played her first card in the new round. “I’m sorry if I’m sobbing like Clara, but it breaks my heart that the doctors don’t do more for my Jonah. My mind hasn’t decayed so badly that I don’t remember what the doctors used to do for sick children. The world used to have so many medicines for girls and boys. What happened to the idea of making the young healthy again? I know the world has the medicine to help Jonah hold out a while longer. The world injects enough of that medicine into our old blood, so why not give some of it to the children? They don’t give Jonah any medicine at all. They give him nothing to ease his pain. They give all the treatments to old people like me. We’re the ones who take so many of the doctors’ resources and time. It doesn’t make any sense to me. After all these years in this center, it doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
Ernie’s eyes didn’t lift above the edge of the cards held within his hand. “You just have to look at it the right way, Mattie. Think a little harder.”
Mattie frowned. “I’ve been thinking about it since I got the postcard. I wish someone could tell me why they work so hard to keep us alive while they just let the children suffer and die.”
“Come on, Mattie. You’re brighter than that,” growled Ben. “It’s your heart that doesn’t let you say it. My heart’s a little harder, so I’ll tell you the reason why. All the doctors show the children a great mercy by just letting them die. They know it’s for the best to give no medicine to all the coughing girls and boys. Medicine would only prolong the pain, nor is there anything left to give the children should they survive long enough to become adults.”
Ben smirked. “Oh, but we’re different. The doctors have good reason to keep us alive. Every day we breathe is another day we have to look upon what we did to the world. They can force us to swallow our ruin for just as long as they keep our hearts ticking. The doctors will spend all the medicine they have on us if doing so means that our grandchildren will have the chance to punish us for what we’ve done to this planet.”
Viola shook her head. “No one deserves that kind of punishment.”
“We do. We all do.” Ben hissed.
Ben tired of cards, and he tired of talk. He pushed his wheelchair away from the table and winced as the IV drip pulled at his arm. Butch grinned and followed Ben as the old man grunted and rolled himself into a quiet, lonely corner in the room. There, Ben wondered when he would receive a postcard of his own from his granddaughter Mallory, and he wondered what vision of a lost world Mallory would choose to mail to him. Ben did his best not to cry. He didn’t want to give Butch the satisfaction of witnessing any more of his suffering.
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