State investigators were prowling the halls of Green Palms trying to determine if the poor old souls were being served greyhound in their ground meat dishes. It had been discovered that the little kids at Jiminy Cricket Day Care had been eating greyhound tacos all that month and already were showing severe emotional and behavioral problems simply by being told about it, problems that were now expected to persist well into their teens and possibly beyond. But no proof was found that the old people had been gumming down racing dogs. The elderly inmates, their blood flow slowed to a trickle as it labored up to and around their brains, did not, in fact, give the possibility much credence.
“Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” Elmer said. “It doesn’t taste fast.”
“For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations,” Alice said, “the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table.”
“I won a hundred and fifty bucks once on a horse named Miss Whirl, which was the closest I’ve been to the animal kingdom,” Elmer said. “Not to disagree with you, kid.”
“This your granpa?” the investigator asked Alice.
“Sure he is,” Elmer said.
“I’d shoot myself before I ended up in a place like this,” the investigator confided. “My girlfriend’s interning at Mercy, and you know what they call folks like this there—the ones always clogging up the ER? They call ’em crocks and fogies. They call ’em snags, rounders, shoppers, and crud.”
Alice didn’t much care for this investigator.
“Is this the closest we’re going to get?” Elmer said. “This ground-up greyhound you have to take by spoon? For months I’ve been begging them for an injection. Smash the testicles of a young dog, I say, pass it through filter paper, inject via the leg, and bingo—the diminution of the function of one’s sexual glands will be reversed! One will feel physically improved!”
She didn’t like Elmer either.
The investigator gave a thick chortle, a sort of wet gurgle in which Alice detected the birth of his own cardiovascular problems and irreversible mental decline. She hoped.
She walked down the hall, peeking into the rooms. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. She paused at Annie’s, for she was not sleeping but sitting upright in her chair, watching the six bird feeders—tray, oval, and tubular—that hung at her window and to which no birds came, principally because they hung within rather than without, Annie not trusting the space beyond, a patio occupied by an immense cooling and heating system that serviced the entire floor. Annie had been the subject of some discussion ever since her daughter had brought her husband’s ashes over and placed them in the bottom of her bureau. Annie had not been told that her husband of fifty-seven years had died, since Green Palms frowned on such information being imparted. What was the point when grief was not germane, when it could not be comprehended or withstood? Here only the moment existed. Annie gave no sign that she inferred that her husband rested near her in the third drawer, the one she’d never used much, even when the handsome bureau had resided in the bedroom of the yellow farmhouse in the orange grove they had tended. Annie and her husband had known those trees, the peculiarities and pedigree of each, their yield, the ones the cardinals favored.
“Let them be together, they want to be together,” the daughter had said, dropping off the ashes. She felt badly about allowing her father to starve himself to death in the sensible efficiency she’d found for him after selling the grove against his wishes.
His ashes were packed in a box made of orangewood. Everyone who passed Annie’s room could smell the insistent fragrance. There had been a little shop on the highway side of the grove where Annie and her husband had sold bags of oranges and orange perfume and orange wine, orange blossom honey and boxes made of orangewood with a mirror inserted within the lid. This was one of those.
The staff was quietly observing Annie’s reactions, but she hadn’t had any. The orange was definitely making all the effort. Annie was one of the dear ones, the sweetie pies, still neat and continent and mild, but a wolf or a goose would have sensed and then grieved the loss of its mate more than Annie had, a limpet would’ve detected something missing. If specific compounds could create little dead islands in the brain, could annihilate the glowing shade-wracked jungle of caring and desire and delight and flatten it all to a sunbaked crust over which not even the most primitive thought crept or left a track, of what possible use was anything that happened to a person in this life? It made the staff wonder, even at $6.50 an hour. And although what they knew about neurofibrillary tangles and neuron-secreting chemicals could be fit onto the tip of a pencil, it made them pause as they prepared to go home with a rose and a piece of sheet cake, for visitors were forever bringing sheet cakes and roses to this place. But quickly there was no time for wondering, for the meal had to be made, the bills paid, the child’s drawing appreciated, that crayoned drawing of the spiderweb that looked like the sun.
Alice lingered, chewing on her fingers, thinking about Tommy and all the stories she’d read about grieving creatures, the faithful hounds that wouldn’t depart the hospital steps, the dock, the bar, the bier where the object of their ardor had last been seen. Animals were prescient, determined psychics, insistent in their speechless warnings, their final spectral farewells. Weren’t they always showing up at their loved one’s office in the next town scratching and whining, their silky coats mussed, their ghostly eyes beseeching, when in fact they lay in the street miles away, crushed by a speeding car? Weren’t they always howling and carrying on at the very moment the daughter away at college was being introduced to the serial killer, when the son was skidding into the head-on crash, when the master was breathing his last in intensive care? Weren’t they always wagging their tail in some dead beloved’s garden at something that wasn’t there? And here was Annie, who hadn’t experienced the slightest discomfort when her husband died of starvation, the last thing to see his stomach a bit of oatmeal. They hadn’t spent a night apart in fifty-seven years before she’d dropped that teacup, the lustrous leaves of the orange trees quaking above her, the dropping of a teacup the death visitant, the beginning of the end for many of the female inhabitants of Green Palms. Here now was Annie, blue eyes widely alert, alert to nothing, watching those empty feeding stations. The world was all a mare’s nest to Annie. There was no sign, she gave no sign. There was not the thinnest spirit wire of connection in that room. There was nothing.
Orange labored in a void.