When it began to happen, the healing, Ivan Frank was reading through a familiar passage, perched on the edge of his seat, facing away from the rest of the rec room.
A few hours prior the room would have been filled with knitting circles and residents playing noisy board or card games, but now it was nearly empty, aside from a few people in front of the screen and a couple of chess players. Ivan did not often leave his room but when he did, it was when the rec room was least trafficked, when he was least likely to be talked to, whispered about, or gaped at.
If he never left his room, well, that would be a routine, and Ivan was afraid of falling into a routine.
Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses, Ivan read and before finishing the rest of the line, he looked up from his tablet and studied the people around him, no one’s attention on him, all of them too absorbed in their activities to pay him any heed.
They did all have their hobbyhorses, but that didn’t mean those horses were unique, that they didn’t need to share their fixations with other residents. Some of his fellow residents played chess at the same time every day, with the same two or three opponents, the games getting a little shorter, a little less complex as time went on. Some of them watched the enormous TV, forgoing the set in their room to be plugged in to their headphones, their chairs spaced far enough from one another so that they weren’t having any contact with their peers.
There was an exclamation of victory as one of the last chess games broke up, an old man whom Ivan recognized but whose name he didn’t know raised his hands above his head, a geriatric Rocky, and strode out of the room, his opponent rubbing his cheek in dumb disbelief, as if he’d really been sucker punched instead of just placed under checkmate.
Eventually, of course, one of these residents would die. But it didn’t matter if it was one of the chess players or the knitters, a new resident would be taken into the fold of either clique, the seat at the chess table remaining filled, the fabric of the Barcalounger not even cooled before another TV addict moved in to take his fallen sister’s place.
Maybe it was because Ivan had been living with physical impairment since he was twenty-two, but he felt that he was much better able to deal with the homogenizing effects of rest-home life. These people weren’t used to isolation and therefore hadn’t acclimated properly, hadn’t found things to spend their time on and that gave them fulfillment. It wasn’t as if Ivan hadn’t struggled with that. He had, after returning from Vietnam, after his accident.
The accident had been stupid, really, existing on some level of irony that he couldn’t step far enough back from to see the humor in. He’d sustained burns on 70 percent of his body after coming home from the war, just out driving his truck. He hadn’t even been drinking, much, he’d just been tired, had nodded off and woken up pinned down by the steering wheel, flames licking him from all sides.
There was recovery, but he couldn’t remember most of it. It was an inky black stretch of memory that was comprised entirely of wet gauze and screaming himself hoarse. After that there were a few years of rage, of being so angry at his condition, at himself, at the perceived cruelties of the world, that his activities consisted solely of drinking, crying, and chopping wood.
Following that period of anger, though, was acceptance, nearly forty years of knowing how to cope was a blessing and made his life much fuller than those of the people surrounding him in the rec room. He had ways of dealing with the loneliness, the exile. They didn’t, so they clung to their groups, bound to other people by their passing interest in bingo, in their soap operas, by their paralyzing fear of dying alone and unnoticed.
With his scar tissue, his bad eye a milky mess that occasionally leaked pink fluid, Ivan didn’t have to worry about going unnoticed, so instead he focused on keeping his mind sharp. With books. With mixing up his routine. He’d even tried yoga, but found it too painful, his range of motion severely limited by his joint problems and melted flesh.
He would attend veterans’ meetings, spurred on by the staff, but he never shared and he went only because he enjoyed listening to the stories of the men around the circle. Those men were the closest thing he had to a group, but Clemson, Piper, Beaumont, and the others wouldn’t consider him a friend. Ivan didn’t know if they hated him, pitied him, or were completely apathetic toward him. They were too hard to read.
Ivan was waiting for death, and he was waiting alone, but it wasn’t depressing to him. He’d always wanted to read the great works, and now he had the time, and the means, with the little Kindle machine that he’d been gifted upon arrival. Most of the books he’d wanted to read were out of copyright anyway, so they were either cheap or free.
Funny as he was, Laurence Sterne wasn’t doing much for him tonight, so Ivan decided to flip back to Moby-Dick, see if he could slog his way through a couple more pages. He’d almost gotten into it, too, had given about forty minutes of time to the book, when the fight broke out.
The early evening serenity of the rec room was sometimes upended by channel disputes, those were usually battles of the sexes, Monday Night Football versus tapes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, but tonight was different. It was a girl fight, over a man.
“Let him go,” the woman closest to Ivan yelled, pulling on the man’s arm.
Ivan turned in his seat to look, angling his good eye to view the TV area.
The three of them were in the last row of seats, the other residents watching the screen with their headphones on, oblivious to the shouting match going on behind them.
In the middle of these two large women, both of them looking older than him by a good decade, and the women’s weight easily adding up to quadruple his, was a tiny bald man, each arm gripped tight by an admirer.
The women considered each other and then growled.
Well, that was enough of that. Ivan wasn’t going to be able to read in peace. It was beginning to smell in here, anyway. Whatever special dessert the kitchen had concocted for dinner was wafting across the hall into the rec room, sickly sweet.
He switched his Kindle to sleep mode, closed the cover, and rose up from his seat. As he left he pointed his eyes to the tile floor, hiding his face from the smattering of residents he passed.
Ivan was not able to reach the doorway without turning around to look toward the seats, though, to see what the wet smacking sound was. One of the women had tackled the other in front of the screen and was pummeling her, alternating shots to the nose and cheek.
Behind her, not only was nobody helping but they were all still seated, their mouths curled into smiles, their headphones still cupped over their ears.
Before Ivan could puzzle out any more of this scene, he felt the tearing begin. What would later be considered the Healing for everyone else felt like anything but for Ivan Frank. It began as an arthritic throb in his joints, but things escalated quickly. His healthy skin and scar tissue were having a disagreement, had decided to split up.
The woman being beaten, the hoots of her audience, were not the only sounds at Mercy House. Down the hallway he could hear younger voices screaming, and it took about a half minute of writhing on the floor before Ivan added his own yells to the chorus.
The pain was complete, the phantoms of the accident and recovery flooding into his synapses, sensations he hadn’t felt in fifty years starting anew, his skin tearing all the while, adding a new level of agony to the mix.
He looked out into the hallway then, his body now half in and half out of the rec room, and saw a group of residents descending the stairs from their rooms above. Some of them laughed at him, some of them didn’t even notice him, looking at the scene behind him. Blood hit the bulb of the projector, sizzled, and turned all the action pink on the screen.
The faces of the group above him were familiar yet foreign, the bones under their skin beginning to shift and change, flesh pulled tight over their skulls. He recognized the faces, though, they were a knitting circle, they had found one another before coming downstairs to investigate.
Ivan felt the sweat cooling on his brow, along all the stretches of healthy skin he had, but he also felt the blood from his wounds, warm as it mixed with the sweat, the salt that fell into his gashes becoming new tiny jolts of pain. He lay there, twitching and blubbering for the better part of ten minutes, residents stepping over him, some of them joining whatever action had begun in the rec room, some of them yelling for food, heading to the cafeteria, but all of them moving together, at least in pairs, and the biggest groups moving like street gangs.
The pain began to subside as his body settled, his bones stopped stretching. Either that or he’d gone numb. Ivan Frank picked himself up off the floor, his most recent taste of pain not only bringing back that rage he’d felt as a young man but making him long for a group of his own, somewhere he could belong.