24 Baz
24
Baz
When Dorian pulls into the parking lot of Cedar Grove Retirement Home, I groan. “Seriously?”
“You want me to age like everyone else,” he says curtly. “I think you should take a long, hard look at what you’re asking of me.”
“Do you know someone here?”
“Yes. Two people, actually. I lived in Charleston for a while back in the 1950s, and I met them both around then. Haven’t seen them in decades, though.”
“But you kept track of them. Why?”
He gets out of the car without answering, slams the door, and strides up the walk on those long legs of his. I jog to catch up. It’s nearly noon, and the concrete radiates blistering heat.
“Dorian,” I persist as we swing through the double glass doors into the bracing chill of the air-conditioned lobby. He’s already sanitizing his hands, placing a thin mask over his mouth and nose.
“You care about them,” I say, arranging my own mask. “Enough to keep tabs on them for decades. Who are they?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. They are shriveled husks waiting to die. Now hush.” He approaches the window where a tired-looking woman sits behind a computer. “We’re here to visit Gabriela Escarra and Alan Campbell.”
“Alan Campbell?” The woman raises her eyebrows. “Okay…that’ll be Room 132 and Room 215.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem, honey.” She’s staring at him, chomping her gum and batting her fake eyelashes, completely oblivious to me.
And she’s not the only one who stares. As we head through the lobby door and down one of the hallways, many eyes follow our progress.
“See how they watch us,” Dorian whispers. “The yearning in their expressions. They’re starved for the youth and beauty they once had. They’d drink our vitality into themselves if they could. Any of them would kill you in a second if they thought it would give them a chance to be young again. A chance at a second life.”
“That’s not fair to assume,” I hiss back.
I’m unsettled, because in some of the faces we pass, I do see that kind of resentful avarice and bitter hunger. But there are gentle eyes, too, lit in delight and wonder, kind faces crinkling with smiles at the sight of Dorian and me. Pleasant voices, thin with age, rise from women chatting in a huddle of wheelchairs. There’s robust laughter from a group of men playing a game and the click of needles from two women knitting companionably.
A spotted hand lifts as we pass, reaching for Dorian’s arm. He pauses, taking the questing hand and laying it gently back in the elderly woman’s lap. She smiles up at him.
As we turn a corner, I fall back and walk behind him, skirting a cluster of wheelchairs. More hands reach for Dorian, shaking fingertips grazing the crisp folds of his shirt, and I have a sudden, sharp memory of a coloring page I was given as a kid at the Catholic church—a picture of Jesus walking through a crowd of the sick and injured who stretched their hands out to touch a bit of him, even the hem of his robe.
Dorian may look like a young god, but there’s no salvation in his beauty.
We pause outside an open door, and after a moment’s hesitation, Dorian forges in.
The room smells faintly of ammonia and body odor. There’s a small pile of clothes on the floor. An oxygen machine hums and hisses at intervals.
Dorian approaches the woman on the bed. The oxygen tubes in her nose have slid askew. She’s staring blankly at a game of golf on TV.
I step forward, adjusting the loops of tubing over her ears so the short pieces fit properly in her nostrils again. She blinks at me, then at Dorian, her straggling eyebrows puckered in confusion. She has high cheekbones and a distinct jawline that not even sagging skin can disguise. Soft gray hair feathers from her scalp.
I can tell she was lovely once.
“Gabriela,” says Dorian quietly, and he tugs the mask down so she can see his face.
She blinks again. Then she lifts one shaking hand.
“Mi cielo,” she says in a cracked voice. Her wrinkled lips wobble, and her dark eyes glisten with tears. “You are not real. This is not possible.”
“I’m real, Gabriela. I’ve come to visit you.”
Her head rocks back and forth on the pillow. “No, no—you’re young. You cannot be him. You can’t be the man I am thinking of. That man had pieces of the sky in his eyes, but his heart was like an iceberg.”
“I am that man.” Dorian kneels beside the bed and begins speaking to her in a flood of Spanish. I know some Spanish from classes in high school and college, but I can’t keep up with the fluent rush of Dorian’s words. He curls his right hand around hers while his other hand strokes her forehead.
I stand motionless at the foot of the bed. What I’m witnessing is sweet and terribly sad, and it makes me hot with illogical jealousy because Dorian clearly shared something special with this woman. I thought I might be his first love since Basil. I’d hoped I was. I… But that’s silly, because Dorian doesn’t love me. We had sex—deeply connected, truly thrilling sex—but that doesn’t mean we’re in love. This isn’t a fucking Disney movie.
After a few minutes, they switch back to English, and Dorian introduces me. Gabriela points to the pictures on the walls of her room—her children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. She can’t remember their names, but she knows they are hers. Her family.
There’s a black-and-white wedding photo, too. I peer more closely at that one, fascinated by the gorgeous, vivacious-looking Gabriela of the 1950s. She’s wearing a crisp white gown, and a voluminous veil is pinned into her neatly curled hair. The man next to her is short and broad, with a genial smile and kind eyes.
When Dorian tells her we have another visit to make, Gabriela pats his hand. “Take off that—that—” She waggles her finger at the mask he has replaced.
“The mask?” he offers.
“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 it was 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, one hand 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’t not give 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.”
“I’m sure that happens sometimes. I’ve always thought euthanasia should be an option if the person wants it. But there have to be safeguards in place to be sure they really want it, that it isn’t just some family member who doesn’t want to be bothered with their elder anymore.”
“Ah, but no one wants to be bothered. You don’t want to admit it, but that’s the way everyone feels. Younger humans put the aged away in small rooms so they don’t have to look at them. They say it’s because the elderly need special care, services they can’t provide in a home environment, but that’s bullshit. The truth is the young just want license to keep living their lives unencumbered while the ones who birthed them shrivel into helpless husks, void of delight and purpose except to wait for the angel of death. And yet I don’t blame anyone who does it. I’d do it myself if I had any relatives left.”
“Not every culture crams their aged into group homes.”
“Most do. Trust me, I’ve seen it all. It’s not just an American thing. In some cultures, they stay with the family longer, true, but there’s a point at which they have to go somewhere else for care—or proper care isn’t provided in the home and they die as a result. As I said, maybe that’s for the best.”
“I think you’re being ageist or ableist, or both,” I say. “These folks deserve respect and dignity.”
“Of course they deserve that!” His words are a blast of passionate exasperation. “There’s no perfect system, Baz. Keep them at home until you can’t anymore, or put them in places like this. Visit every day; don’t visit at all. None of it fucking matters, because the real enemy isn’t a person, it’s death. Death steals their beauty, their health, their independence, their minds, their memories, their senses, their speech, and yes, every shred of their dignity.”
“They’re still people,” I exclaim.
“I know they’re people, Baz. I don’t hate them. I wish them a pleasant and speedy end. But I don’t want this to be me. I want to be able to wipe my own ass when I shit. I want to be able to turn myself over in bed. I don’t want to be sore everywhere, in all my joints and tissues. I don’t want to lose my mental agility. I don’t want pieces of my memories to disappear one by one. I don’t want to shrink and wither and ache. I don’t want to tremble when I can’t remember where I am. I don’t want to panic when my failing organs tell me something is going wrong deep inside me.”
“Dorian, stop.” I’m shaking with anger. “What you’ve described—that’s the reality of life for a lot of people, not just the elderly. Sure, nobody wants that or chooses it, but your revulsion against weakness or helplessness is so fucking wrong. You have to stop idealizing heath and youth and beauty—those things are nice, sure, but they’re not what’s important.”
Desperation flashes through his eyes. “They are. They have to be, because…”
Because that’s all he has.
Oh…fuck. That’s why he’s so insistent. It’s not just the terror of his body decaying—he’s afraid that if he admits the truth, that his values have been misplaced all along, the pretty husk of himself will crumple into ash and dissipate, leaving nothing behind.
The duality of it grips me, splitting through my heart. In spite of all the polite things I’ve been taught to say about old age, I understand the terror Dorian has been trying to communicate to me. I dread the thought of lying helpless in a bed for hours, wanting something I can’t really remember, always feeling like something is missing, like bits of me are corroding, crumbling away until there’s nothing left . There’s a difference between the Gothic romance of mortality, celebrated in my paintings, and the grotesque reality of human decay. The slow, grinding, irreversible decline down to the end of life.
But the other fear clutches my heart, too, with colder fingers and sharper nails—the horror of someone realizing, when it’s too late, that they devoted their existence to emptiness, to fragility. Like breaking the lovely crust of a crème br?lée to find no satisfying dessert beneath, only air.
My eyes pool with hot, sudden tears.
“Dorian,” I whisper.
He cups my cheeks between his long fingers. His face is an oasis of beauty in a wilderness of death.
“And you want me to rot,” he says softly. “You want me to endure this. To waste away and die like everyone else. Baz, I don’t want to keep living if I can’t be young and healthy and beautiful.”
In this moment, I understand him, and some part of me agrees. I’m not proud of it. It’s ableist as shit. It’s wrong. It’s part of a cultural mania that worships beauty, youth, and health.
He’s right, though—it’s not a one-culture thing. It’s a human thing. In every country, the beautiful, the young, the intelligent, the healthy, and the rich are celebrated. It’s been that way since ancient times, since the Greek and Roman civilizations, and even before that. Humans have always desired beauty, celebrated physical feats, and gloried in all the potential of youth.
It’s a primal mentality, I guess. An evolved attraction to the most desirable, fertile mates, to the physically strong who can offer protection, shelter, and food. It’s instinctive, animal on some level. But we’ve perverted that instinct, like we do everything, and it has become an obsession.
An obsession that gleams in the blue eyes of Dorian Gray as he stares into mine. But there are fractures in his gaze, too, cracks in the surface of his value system, which confirm to me that he’s capable of self-reflection. Of change.
I leave it there, because pushing too hard could make him close up again. I let him sit with that uncertainty, with the crevices in his confidence. We don’t linger in the room with the elderly man, since he doesn’t seem aware of our presence. But before we leave, Dorian kisses his forehead.