Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [6]
It’s an ongoing joke, or was. I carry a well-traveled green backpack full of snacks to feed Grandma’s unpredictable food demands and keep up her calorie intake. Before her mental faculties started to go up in smoke, she’d retort with a demand for some exotic foodstuff, like a braised rabbit sandwich, smile, wink, and then settle happily for the cherry fruit roll-up, Snickers, peanut-butter cracker.
This time, she places a frail hand on my right forearm. She looks at me.
“What is it, Grandma Lane?”
She clears her throat.
“Nathaniel, there’s something I should tell you.”
Chapter 4
“What, Grandma?”
No response.
We’ve arrived at the gates to her retirement home. I pull to the side and put my car in park. The metal dinosaur still hums reliably, despite its age. I want to see Lane’s eyes and I’m tempted to put on the inside light but decide it might feel like scrutiny. Nothing is surer to derail her. We sit shadowed by street light.
“What do you have to tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeats.
“What are you sorry about?”
“I did a bad thing.”
“What bad thing?”
No response.
“Grandma Lane, you said there’s something you have to tell me.”
“It’s catching up. It’s caught up. Things from a long time ago catch up, right? Eventually.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Depends on what things, Lane.”
“I did a bad thing,” she repeats.
She looks grave. But I’m never sure these days whether to put any value in her ramblings—or how connected her ideas are. Under the circumstances, this one bears further investigation.
“Are you saying that you did something bad that is catching up to you?”
“Well, I’m sure that’s true, Nathaniel.”
It’s a platitude. One of dementia’s symptoms is that its sufferers tend to respond with stock answers, relying on automated, practiced responses to supplant more sophisticated processing.
I reach for her hand and take it in mine. She resists for an instant, and then relents. Beneath skin withered by time and pocked with age spots, I feel strength coming from her fingers, the flexor digitorum and her other forearm muscles. Grandma’s still in there and kicking.
“Grandma Lane, please. Are you keeping a secret from me? Do you want to talk about it?”
“Don’t pester me!” An outburst.
I fall silent, hoping stillness will bring calm, lucidity. I can’t tell if there’s substance to her muttering—or continuity to it.
She looks up at the home.
“They have a fitness room and soft pillows on the couches,” she says. “But it’s strange there.”
The Manor is a castle-like structure that not only is anomalous for San Francisco’s inner Sunset District, it is indeed eerie. It looks beamed from mythical Transylvania, a cryptically imposing edifice with a spire cloaked in fog.
Its ancient façade makes its innards all the more contrary. Magnolia Manor provides retirees with the highest-tech amenities. Residents have wireless access, dozens of new computers and printers, handheld game devices. In the activities room, dozens of withered octogenarians often sit nose-to-screen playing virtual golf or talking in videoconferences with their grandchildren.
Of late, many of the residents, including Grandma Lane, are using the technology to share their life stories. They sit in cubicles and talk into microphones to record tales of the 20th century. Low-cost cameras attached to the computers capture grainy digital images of the storytellers. This project is called the Human Memory Crusade. It’s ambitious, this transferring of our grandparents’ fading memories into a database.
I drive in through the gates.
“I give up trying to get into that head of yours, Grandma. For now.”
At the Manor’s front desk, we get our first break of the evening.
“You’re lucky Vince isn’t here,” the nurse says. “You’re way past curfew.”
Vince Alito is the home’s director and autocrat. He hates me, or acts like it. He browbeats me for being an insufficiently dedicated grandson and for our family’s failure to make timely payments for Grandma’s bills, including for “extra” services, like car rides and cable television access in her