FICTION

CAN YOU STILL HEAR ME?

The drive to the Veteran's Home is a four hour ordeal of twists and turns along back roads and into forgettable little towns, speed traps, crawling with swag bellied cops and lank faced meth addicts.

How he ended up down here is a tale too long and sad to tell you. It was the best option available at the time. Or so we tell ourselves.

The complex is an old TB hospital, a crumbling reminder that the health panics of one age inevitably give way to the panics of the next. The red brick buildings sit atop a densely wooded hill; the view stretches for miles across a vast National Forest.

There are a number of benches on the lawn where a man could sit and enjoy the landscape but I've rarely seen anyone in them. The patients are mostly too far gone to notice the scenery. They remain in their sparesly furnished rooms or in front of the TVs that never go quiet.

What surpised me most was the absence of photos in the patient's rooms. Families just quit trying, I guess. I know we did.

His room is dimly lit. He sleeps most of the day and even when awake his hair has that matted, bed head look to it. There is an odor of unwashed feet to the room, ironic given his fastidiousness about such matters. As a boy, I would watch him sink his pale feet into a basin of indigo water to cure some eternal itch he caught during basic training.

Today, I do not bother to wake him. Instead I sit next to his bed and soak in unadorned grief. I want to believe that in his dreams there remain grainy images of me, perhaps some with crackly sound. Somewhere in his heart a skinny kid in cut offs zig zags bare foot over a summer lawn yelling, Hey, Dad, look at this, watch........Dad!

Can you still hear me?