old people

Last night a nurse called me for help: an elderly patient was cursing her, wandering the halls, barging into other patients' rooms and shaking his fist at them. Finally he hurled a phone book at the nurse's head and shouted something about child molesters.

I come across a lot of old people at work. Most of them are a bit demented (some more than a bit) and they tend to go to pieces mentally once they're stuck in the hospital. They wake up in the night and blink around at the dark shadows and think, Where the hell am I? This place doesn't match anything my mind can put a name on. Am I lost? Kidnapped? What happened to my family? Eventually, their brain supplies some sort of answer to try to make sense of things. Damn hot here. What's that weird smell? Oh, Christ, I'd forgotten -- we made land yesterday. Iwo Jima, the sarge called it. OK, you motherfuckers, I'm ready for ya! Come and get me!

The vagaries of mind and memory are amazing to me. One night in med school I woke up in darkness clutching my bed, sure that I was back on the volcano Stromboli in a makeshift tent, with the ground booming underneath me. But under me I felt mattress instead of rock, so I couldn't make sense of anything and fell asleep again in confusion -- like Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time. The next day the local news reported that several blocks from my apartment, an abandoned home had exploded in the night and sent a shockwave through the earth that could be felt a mile away. See how amazing? I hadn't thought of Stromboli in years, but the earth went boom and my body remembered that feeling from the single night, a lifetime previous, when I'd lain on booming earth before. In my sleep my brain slung me backwards like a time-traveler, and I woke up twenty-two in Sicily and in trouble again -- and it felt as real and solid as it had been the first time around. How cool is that.

So now I'm looking forward to senility, when I will at last recapture my lost youth. I'm going to pay someone to set off explosions near me at intervals while I'm sleeping, so I can wake up night after night in Sicily, and be twenty-two forever.