Sunland by Don Waters

Author:Don Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

SUNLAND

Part Two

13

The vine grew long and withered. People entered and exited as though on conveyor belts. A line got marked in the sand the moment we were born. And nothing, nothing, nothing could prepare us for growing old.

Each day bones strained, bodies accumulated moss, and blood, constantly in need of cleansing, was filthy with pollutants.

My nights had been plagued by dangerous, memorable, extravagant dreams.

I sat in an air-conditioned office, sucking in my thirty-three-year-old gut and listening to Grady Masters, Paseo del Sol's Housing Coordinator, who wore a name badge in the shape of a saguaro, like every employee in this amusement park did.

Grady yammered on and on, his elbow propped on his chair's armrest, tapping the air faintly, as though touching each of his words as they emerged from his mouth. “And during the transition period, it's best to keep all parties informed of her progress,” he told me. “We're planning on relocating your grandmother once she's released to our care. Per doctor's orders, she'll have another go-round of physical therapy at the rehab clinic, and when the doctor decides she's reached her plateau, we'll gladly welcome her back. Arrangements are being made as we speak.”

Everything about our conversation was slo-mo, tinny, Xanax-flavored, and I began to think Grady—with his small soft hands and parted hair and bird-boned shoulders and gee-golly nature—must have been lonely at home. A gauzy plane of light cut across the room from a recessed skylight. Specks of dust floated through the light like planets. “You must have questions,” Grady said, and I gripped my chair.

I did. I was a month into it. The days had been fiery and stale and full of question marks. My grandmother had gone from sipping whiskey in the afternoon while tinkering with knitting needles to looking sad, terrified, thin, and incomplete in a wheelchair. Now she had trouble finding words. Now the look on her face annihilated me. She'd already been through a battery of physical therapy, if it was even legal to call her limited movements therapy.

Lift your arm, Nana.

Squeeze the blue ball, Nana.

Smile now, Nana.

The stroke had blinded her right eye. She was weak on that side and couldn't walk. Her physical abilities had been whittled down and destroyed. When I was with her, it was impossible for me not to draw comparisons—she, in a chair; and me, standing. My chest clenched whenever we hugged. I'd found some relief in pills and from brief, violent crying jags in the hospital parking lot.

“Let me get this—let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to move her from her apartment and into the building with the balloons.”

“The building with the balloons?” Grady asked.

“The building at the end,” I said.

“Yes but—I don't follow. What balloons?”

“I've seen volunteers toss balloons at residents.”

“Oh! You must mean the afternoon exercise class,” Grady said. “Yes, they sometimes do use balloons.”

I'd seen for myself balloons carom off the foreheads of confused residents. I'd visited the building several times now, scouting it out. In the mornings the hallways smelled of baby powder concealing lengthy shits.

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