All That Glitters

I won’t die today. Maybe only next week. Or so I imagine the doctor says as he hustles out of my room, just before the big weekend. I heard him talking to my nurse, “Can hardly wait, gotta new boat and girlfriend, it’ll be great!”

My doc kind of goes with the sunshine that streams through my window, all patterns of luminescence, dancing through the lace curtain which moves with the spring breeze.

That and the curly Q special lunch with a surprise! Dessert a la supreme chocolate cake, minuscule portion. Part of my special recovery diet!

The kitchen didn’t get the memo. I wasn’t asked what I wanted for my last meals. But what do they say? Life is what the living do, not all the predictions, the fears, the whatever will happen. I’ll never live through that! Until you do. Because that is what living things do.

I’m supposed to be wise, and full of what everyone wants. What do I want? To live.

She comes to see me though. Practically every day. That niece. You’d think she’d sleep ‘round the clock, in that chair that everyone steals from some other room, from where it will not be missed. She would never leave me if she only knew what I had to tell her.

But whatever! I’m in no state for small talk, though big talk was never much of a part of my life either.

“So how they treatin’ ya?” said that shock of blonde hair that cascades across fresh vibrant skin colors. You hardly hear words when such an attractive person like my niece drops by. Too much to take in.

Funny how that goes. All your life, you’re trying to get a word in edgewise but now here she is, looking for words from beyond the grave, so to speak.

Where’s my voice? I cough, then motion for a tissue. “Oh, don’t get up!” she exclaims, grabbing the box that’s perched on the tray slung across my bed, just out of reach. She hands me a handful of these obnoxiously small bits of fluff. Mere nothing, never enough. Never enough of anything.

Phlegm. Now there’s a word. I turn away from her and hack into the fluff. She pretends not to notice. There she is holding a wastepaper basket out to me. I toss it in. She sits again.

“What was it that you asked me?” I croak. She shrugs her slender shoulders, clad as she is in a skinny crimson sweater, so low at the neckline, and flips her blonde hair while fussing with whatnots, errant cat hair, or a wrinkle in her wondrously black skirt. Her perfume has just the freshest tantalizing aroma, so unlike the reek of detergent all about me.

Oh, to be young, a jaunt over to the hospital, then he’ll pick her up with dinner for two and a half flirtatious nod will bring all those dreams that overflow and spawn such a carefree life. If it were not for such unfinished business, this uncle of hers…

“You said you would tell me something very important…” she starts. Then she lowers her voice. “If you are up to it.”

It’s all I have left. I find myself trembling. No one else to speak to. I try to compose myself. “Don’t tell anyone,” I whisper, grasping at my pillow as I struggle to breathe. She nods and draws closer to me. I start to form words. They should come as usual, yet for a torrent of beeping from a machine, then nothing at all.

#

Dreams of gold and silver flood over me. Stacks of coins, hundreds of them worth thousands each, a lifetime of saving, squirreled away from prying eyes. A bachelor uncle’s hopes for immortality, so many dreams. Coins commemorating this and that, so long ago. Stacking is what they call it. This hobby consumed me.

There could never be an end to all the beautiful things that filled my life. Inanimate, yet living. The vacations, the promises to myself, that this would be the year! My coins would take flight and all of everything would begin, the storied hope of what would be if only I could complete the puzzle of living. The puzzle of me.

Writ large through a kaleidoscope of dreams, realized through what I alone control. Those coins, the shiny down payment on the life I would live. If only I could live it. I came to and she was gone.

It was night and quiet. Then I dozed and the sun filled the room. Another nurse bustled in and checked my vitals.

“Doc’s not in today,” she says, her back turned to me. She patted an empty bed next to me. “Mac is gone! I heard you nearly left us last night too!”

I’m thinking, what can you say that makes any sense? Tears come to me before words. The fluff box. I can just reach it. “Don’t tell anyone,” I manage to say. She rounds on me. “Say what?” I start coughing, huge racking coughs. She gets me a glass of water and has me sit up to drink it, which by that time, she’s in a rush to leave, of course.

I steel myself inwardly, a furious rage consuming me. I will see this through. My favorite niece will come to see me again. She was the only person who ever took an interest in me, everyone else having died or moved away. What is her name? I must ask her.

#

I can feel myself draining away. Not that it was an uncomfortable feeling, what with that button that controlled the pain being so near me. But the button meds made me want to sleep constantly and I had to be able to think and plan how I would speak to this young woman who I had known all my life.

I dozed again. I was in a forest as green and glittery as the gold that weighed upon my shoulders. In that forest, I dug an enormous hole that swallowed all my coins and it swallowed me too, so helpless and alone.

Someone was calling me. Somehow, I clambered up the slippery slope of that hole, but I had to leave my trusty spade and the gold behind. Then quite magically the hole caved in upon itself as if it was afraid and had to get away. I wasn’t in a forest after all. All of this was happening in the backyard of my house.

“Uncle Bob! Uncle Bob, I’m here!” I was in so much pain. I hadn’t touched the button for what seemed like hours, not wanting to miss my chance. I opened my eyes. My tongue felt so thick, and my throat was incredibly dry. I motioned for a glass of water and somehow found the strength to sit up and drink.

“Sarah, I have something very important to tell you!” My words were so strong and clear that I surprised myself. Now Sarah had tears in her eyes. “You remembered my name!”

She looked so beautiful, her eyes glittering as she wiped my mouth and held my hand. It was like I was entranced by the moonlight, so long ago, my earliest memory. Falling asleep in a stranger’s house after crying for an hour or more as infants do, so exhausted from the trip, all the new things crowding in, the new experiences.

Now it was this beauty before me, this vision of perfection that enraptured me. I struggled to speak one last time. But for the journey, I would have made myself understood.

“Your golden hair is so beautiful…” She squeezed my hand. “Just sleep, Uncle Bob. Just sleep.”