"The Age of Love" by Mary South
The following is a selection from the Spring / Summer 2020 Borders Issue. Click here to purchase the full issue, which features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art by more than 30 brilliant contributors.
Walter Perkins was the night nurse on duty who discovered that certain male patients—excuse me, community convalescents—at the North Shore Nursing Home were getting their jollies by dialing up phone sex hotlines. We were both working the graveyard shifts that week and had bonded over the fact that we were the only two guys on the staff, and by making bets on which convalescents listed on the Critical Care board would expire during their sleep. I went to check on a call light, and when I came back his ear was clamped against the receiver in front reception, his dumb ass nearly falling out of the chair from laughing.
“Hey, babe,” I said. “What’s so funny?”
“You gotta listen to this,” he replied, putting the call on speakerphone.
MAN: What do you look like?
OPERATOR: I’m twenty-two years old, with green eyes, D-cup breasts, and long blond hair.
MAN: You sound like my granddaughter. She just entered college to learn how to restore paintings or some malarkey.
OPERATOR: That’s nice.
MAN: What kind of getup you got on?
OPERATOR: Oh, not much. Black silk nightgown, thigh-high leather boots, tiny thong.
MAN: Have you been a bad girl?
OPERATOR: So bad.
MAN: You know, when I was young, if we were naughty, what we got was a belt upside the bottom. Do you deserve to be punished?
OPERATOR: I’m getting wet just thinking about it.
MAN: You little tramp. I’m not going to hold back.
OPERATOR: I can’t wait, pops. Give it to me.
“Did he say ‘malarkey’?” I interrupted.
“Lower your voice,” he hissed. Then he added, “It’s his third call tonight. Mr. Olson.”
“Mr. Olson, I-have-a-pacemaker-and-no-prostate Mr. Olson?”
“The very same. He’s been calling adult lines and telling girls he wants to come on their faces. Real hard-core.”
“Since when do you listen to the phone conversations of the elderly, sicko?”
“I don’t know, since the week the satellite dish was down. It really takes the edge off.”
When my shift got out at six, it was and wasn’t dark. It was my favorite time of day: driving into the city from the suburbs in advance of dawn, watching joggers huffing and puffing white breath alongside Lake Shore Drive, the ice floes in Lake Michigan rising and falling as if breathing behind them, the Gold Coast cut out crisp and black before it turned gold. I idled down a few blocks looking for a parking spot, then walked to my basement apartment in Andersonville. Grimy light filtered through a single window with iron bars, but it was sufficient. The shower was running as I opened the door. Jill was home.
“I thought I heard you,” she said, walking out of the bathroom.
“You’re back early,” I replied.
“I know. Our last plane never arrived. A blizzard somehow grounded everything in Atlanta. I hopped a commuter from Newark to Detroit to here.”
My girlfriend, Jill, worked as a reserve flight attendant out of O’Hare, which meant she had to be ready at any moment if there was an emergency or a regular got the flu. But considering my unconventional care hours, our schedules were complementary.
“Want to join me in the shower?” she asked.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s get nasty in the rear of the aircraft.”
“I’m tired.”
“But you’re still in the uniform. Give me the spiel,” I coaxed. “It’s amazing to see you again.”
“Just humor me.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard this Boeing 737 jet with nonstop service to Chicago. Please take a moment to find the exits closest to you, keeping in mind the nearest exit might be behind you.” She even threw in the hand gestures.
“We’re expecting a bit of a bumpy ride, so keep your seat belt fastened at all times, even when the seat belt sign is not illuminated.” Undoing all the buttons on her navy coat, she pulled it off with one swoop, exposing the freckles that topographically traced the slopes of her shoulders.
“Now, before we depart, your tray table should be locked and your seat in its full, upright position. Thank you for your attention, and enjoy the flight.” I tugged the stewardess skirt above her hips and bent her over the sofa. Her hair was in a bun, and I unbunned the ensemble while joining the mile-high club here on earth.
Afterward, the two of us lying clean together in bed, I traced a circle with my nose against her damp scalp. Beneath her floral shampoo, I swore I could detect it: the tinny scent of recycled air. It gave me a thrill, almost arousal, from pondering whether she noticed something similar in me, that elephant odor of aged skin. Accustomed to spending such long intervals in enclosed spaces, we both tended to forget how the essence of work lingered with us.
It was a couple weeks before I shared another graveyard shift with Wally Perkins, but when I did, he had news. From a gym bag filled with rank tighty-whities and moldy socks, he dug out a clunker tape deck and a bunch of cassettes.
“There’s more of them,” he said. “They’ve got a posse. A creepy, cradle-robbing posse of geezers who like to talk about finger-fucking teenage pussy.”
“You’ve been recording this nonsense? You should look into therapy.”
“Listen to this one call.”
A woman moaning at the peak of pleasure accompanied by ragged breathing scratched through the speakers. Wally rewound and fast-forwarded until he found the right spot.
MAN: Let’s pretend I’m a gentleman in my golden years currently killing time in an assisted-living facility, and you are my nurse.
OPERATOR: Assisted living? You mean like an old folks’ home?
MAN: Something like that. Your name is Nurse Angela, let’s say. You’re a hot little number, a feisty Latina. You’ve got the prettiest brown eyes. You’ve also got great knockers.
OPERATOR: And what am I wearing? Triangle hat with a red cross on it, white dress with my bust bursting through the buttons, that kind of thing?
MAN: Standard-issue scrubs will do. Pink top and loose pink pants, but bare underneath. Let’s also pretend I’ve got severe arthritis in my joints and lost a foot to diabetes, so I’m confined to a wheelchair.
OPERATOR: Gotcha. So you need me to help with routine tasks, to bend over and lift you in and out of that wheelchair while brushing my big breasts against you, am I right?
MAN: Oh yes. Now, what I want you to do is come into my room and act normal—take my blood sugar, give me my shot, fluff my pillows. Then I want you to shimmy out of those scrubs and sit on my face.
“Wow, so Mr. Harris has a hard-on for Angie,” I said. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve seen him chase her around with his stalker eyes.”
“I’ve seen it, too, but to be fair,” Wally replied, “I think about me and her in all sorts of compromising scenarios. The only difference is I’m actually in prime physical condition to do something about it.”
“Sure, you’re such a dreamboat.”
“I’ve been lifting. I’m getting solid pecs.”
“So what happens next? She fluffs his pillows, then lets him motorboat her lady pillows, as requested?”
“Pretty much. There’s lots of, ‘Dios mío, never before have I felt so much pleasure. Your tongue is like el diablo.’ Want to hear the rest?”
“As it is now, I don’t think I can make eye contact with Angie for a few days.”
“Tell me about it. Mr. Klein—you know, the bowlegged guy with the colostomy bag? He’s wicked into food. He’ll call up girls and be like, ‘I am gonna make me an ice-cream sundae on your beautiful body, with macadamia nuts, chocolate syrup, and a cherry on top of your clit.’ A few days ago, he told a woman he wanted to eat an open-faced turkey sandwich from her open-faced butt crack. I saw him the following afternoon getting some chicken nuggets in the cafeteria, and I had to look away. He was staring at those chicken nuggets like he was going to do terrible things with them. I can’t change his bag anymore without getting the heebie-jeebies.”
“Why are you immortalizing this for posterity?”
“Are you kidding? You should get in on it with me. I’m thinking social media, dramatic rights, book deal, the works.”
Soon enough, more of the staff found out about Wally’s secret project. He would gather anyone who was around for coffee breaks in order to listen to the recent recordings. While he kept trying to convince the rest of us to assist in the taping process, no one took to the idea. Once he managed to set up digital conversions, he privately told me about their online existence in his cloud account. I’d download and queue up one of his audio files in the car during my commute—the hushed voices oddly soothing, like listening to some kind of perverted ocean. On occasion, I would even have them going while cooking a meal or lying on the couch, awash in the nimbus of muted television documentaries on cults.
A virtuoso eventually emerged from among the callers. That was Mr. Rogers, a widower who kept predominantly to himself and who we suspected was the ringleader of the bunch. He was paralyzed on one side due to a stroke a few years prior, and he was all but incontinent. Yet, while he seemed apathetic to physical therapy and regaining his motor skills, he had, apparently through sheer force of will, recovered the clarity and enunciation of his rich speaking voice. We deemed him the best not because he was the freakiest, but because he was in complete command of the conversation from start to finish.
“I bet he got laid like crazy when he could get it up,” Wally said one day, after we had listened to a particularly titillating tape.
“Not necessarily,” Angie replied. “Sometimes these guys only feel safe getting close to a woman when there’s a barrier between him and her.”
“Then we shouldn’t mention that Mr. Harris has been giving you the most delicious cunnilingus ever, should we?” Wally grinned.
“What? Please say that’s not true.”
“Oh, it’s true. You’ve been—¡ay caramba!—having the naughtiest time.”
“Wonderful. That means you’ll have to give him his shots, Walter, since I won’t be doing it.”
“What is wrong with all of you?” Unbeknownst to us, Chloe, one of the head nurses, had come into the break room. “Don’t you realize that our convalescents are human beings who have needs and feelings the same as you? If I hear of any more eavesdropping on their phone calls, disciplinary action will be taken.”
“I guess that puts an end to that,” I said after she left.
“No way, I’m not stopping,” Wally replied. “We’ll just have to be more careful.”
I spent the rest of my shift assisting wrinkled flesh in and out of bathtubs, irrigating infected bedsores, and spooning mashed potatoes into helpless mouths while in a gloomy funk because of Chloe. When Mrs. Walsh apologized for inadvertently swallowing her glass eye again, I didn’t even smile. (“I was trying to give it a clean,” the perennial excuse.)
Jill had been around. When I got home, she was sprawled in her underwear on the couch, absorbed in a romance novel.
“How can you stand that trash?” I asked.
“It’s just a bit of escapism,” she replied. “I pick them up in the airport. What’s gotten into you?”
So I told her about the phone sex, Mr. Rogers, and Chloe’s reaction. She perked up when I mentioned I had been listening to some of the tapes on my own.
“Does it turn you on?” she asked. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. Do you have any with you?”
“Maybe.”
“Can you play one for me?”
While I searched for a file on my laptop, she got comfy in a robe and slippers and opened a couple of beers. I queued up “Mr. Rogers Lake Boobies.” We sat listening on the couch.
MR. ROGERS: When I was young, we used to go to this beach on the lake. A friend of mine worked as a lifeguard, and we would wait until after hours when it was closed to the public, then go skinny-dipping.
OPERATOR: Sounds sexy.
MR. ROGERS: I want you to imagine we’re there now, except instead of summer, it’s late fall and chilly. You’re my high school sweetheart. It’s only us two, and we’ve snuck under the fence in our coats and boots to brave the water before it freezes.
OPERATOR: Okay, I’m with you. I can feel that harsh autumn wind whipping my cheeks. I blow on my fingers to keep them warm.
MR. ROGERS: Yes, good. I take you by the hand and lead you down to the tide. I can feel you resist with each footstep, but only a little.
OPERATOR: I trust you.
MR. ROGERS: While I remove your coat, you lift my sweater above my arms. I unhook your brassiere and your small breasts pucker.
OPERATOR: God, it’s so cold!
MR. ROGERS: You will only have to endure it for a short time. It’s not going to last forever. Are you ready?
OPERATOR: I’m ready.
MR. ROGERS: We whoop and scream and sprint into the lake. You feel the shock of waves slapping your shins. The next sensation is constriction, as if you’re wearing a garment too tight for your body. After that, panic. We dive. You can feel your heart beat fast, then less fast as it fails to combat the icy temperature. We stay in for thirty seconds, two minutes at most. When we get out, that wind cuts into us. It’s almost worse than swimming. You look near tears. We didn’t remember to bring a towel.
OPERATOR: I can’t feel my toes. Come here. I want your arms around me.
MR. ROGERS: The best I’m able to do is gather our clothes and lead you to the beach house. Maybe there we can dry off before the trip home. It’s strung up with Christmas lights that don’t work. Inside, it’s cleaned out for the season, only a few emergency medical kits lying around. I pull you to me so we stand touching rib cage to rib cage.
OPERATOR: Your touch feels so incredible. I love being pressed against you.
MR. ROGERS: I’m sorry that I brought you here. I thought the water would be just enough of a shock to help you forget for a while.
OPERATOR: Oh well, that’s okay.
MR. ROGERS: Your father loved you. He would want you to try to be happy.
OPERATOR: Thanks.
MR. ROGERS: I kiss you. You’re trembling. As my lips travel, I taste lake brine mixed with granules of sand. When I enter the warm slickness of your cunt, my skin is still slightly cold. How strange it is to love someone, I think. What are you thinking? What do you feel?
The call went silent. Mr. Rogers was patiently waiting for the operator to answer. I stopped the recording.
“His conversation didn’t sound like a fantasy to me,” Jill said. “More like a memory.”
“It does. The stuff about the dead dad.”
“It makes you wonder what’s real and what he made up.”
“Yeah. They may have gone in the lake, but I doubt he fucked her in that lifeguard house.”
“It’s actually kind of hot,” Jill continued, lowering her tone. “Like, he’s got a really sexy voice.”
“Oh please.”
“He does. Hey, you want to try something?”
“What is it?”
“Talk to me like that,” she went on. “Talk to me like Mr. Rogers.”
“No. I have to change his diaper tomorrow morning.”
“Do it. Say you want to enter the warm slickness of my cunt.”
“I want to enter the warm slickness of your cunt.”
“No, really get into it. Make your voice sound like his voice.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do this. It’s too weird.”
“Here, I know what we’ll do.”
She got up, opened another beer, then went into our bedroom and closed the door. In a couple of minutes, my cell phone rang.
“Hey, big boy,” Jill said. “Is this better?”
“Not really.”
“I’m lying in bed with my legs spread open, thinking of you and touching myself.”
“Is that so? Maybe I’ll have to make it so you’re walking funny down those airplane aisles.”
“Give me what I want,” Jill replied. “Describe a scene like Mr. Rogers.”
“I guess we’re at the beach,” I began. “It’s summer and we’ve been taking turns cooling off in the water all day. I keep rubbing you down with sunblock and getting really horny.” That was terrible. I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to imagine an original scenario for her, why our phone sex fantasy had to be derived from his fantasy. “Wait. Let me try again. It’s summer, and we’re at the beach. We’ve been swimming all day, but around dusk, clouds tumble in. Families pack up coolers, couples leave holding hands, but we stay.” Almost unconsciously, I started to see us there, felt my skin raw from sunburn, even found my voice changing to mimic Mr. Rogers’s voice like she asked, adopting his deep drawl. “When the droplets hit after sunset, we run to the parking lot, but it’s too late. We’re caught in the downpour. I search my pockets, but I can’t find my keys. I drape you across the hood, and we make love as we’re drenched. The aluminum is hot from stored sunlight. The rain becomes warm as it slides down the car.” I could hear her breathing faster, insistently.
“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me how strange it feels to love someone.”
“It feels strange to love you,” I said.
She cried out in orgasm. Hanging up, I could hear her through the walls. I didn’t go in, though. I didn’t feel like I could.
When I braved the bedroom a couple hours later, I found her folded into a fetal ball, asleep. How I wished I could dissolve into a film that lacquered her skin, an invisible armor to safeguard against imminent pains and abrasions. So I crawled under the covers and spooned her. Why did it feel so impossible for me to lie down tenderly with her when she was awake? Growing up, Jill had been an Air Force brat. Her father was a pilot, so Jill, her baby brother, and her mother were alone. He went over to the Middle East; meanwhile, back home, Jill’s mom had a string of casual lovers. Apparently the father was willing to ignore the liaisons while he was gone, but even after he returned the mother couldn’t break her habit. Jill had hardly seen him: the occasional phone call, the occasional lunch. Her brother, too, enlisted in the Air Force and now flies drones in the skies above Afghanistan.
From Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Detroit, from Denver, Seattle, and D.C., Jill wanted to talk dirty. “Whisper the latest sweet nothings of Mr. Rogers in my ear,” she’d say. Once, she stopped by the home late at night on her way from the airport. She marched in bright and chipper with her roller bag as if she hadn’t been working constantly for the past week.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Can we spy on him?” Reluctantly, I agreed, hoping he would become not so intriguing. We took the elevator up to the Butternut Wing (each wing was named after a different kind of squash) and tiptoed past Mr. Rogers’s quarters. He had dozed off to a novel, reading glasses nearly tipping off the cliff of his nose. Jill watched him for a couple minutes, then left without saying another word.
Around the time she visited, a newly admitted convalescent, Mr. Sullivan, also joined the phone sex squad. He was special in that we couldn’t find his conversations amusing or exciting, merely pitiful.
OPERATOR: I jump in topless and giggling into the hot tub. I can’t wait to get my hands on your giant erection hiding under the bubbles.
MR. SULLIVAN: Can I call you Anne?
OPERATOR: You can call me whatever you want.
MR. SULLIVAN: My wife’s name was Anne.
OPERATOR: Anne is a pretty name.
MR. SULLIVAN: I shouldn’t say “was.” She’s alive, but in hospice care at my daughter’s house.
OPERATOR: I’m sorry.
MR. SULLIVAN: She and her husband didn’t feel they could take care of us both once her mother was diagnosed as terminal. I’m in a geriatric facility until there’s a better plan.
OPERATOR: How awful.
MR. SULLIVAN: I’m worried they’ll forget I’m here once my wife dies. Sometimes I want her to hurry up and die so I can get out of this place. It’s one thing to imagine where you’ll end your days, another thing to know. That bed, this chair.
“I can’t keep listening to him,” Angie said. “It makes me sad.”
“I’m curious what kind of people dial phone sex hotlines nowadays, in the age of internet porn,” Wally said. “Is it just a bunch of grandpas who never got comfortable using a computer?”
“No idea,” Angie replied. “Maybe it’s nice to have somebody who’s participating with you.”
“What do you think our generation will be like when we get to that stage? Will dirty old men be jerking off to money shot montages instead of calling up asking women to behave like nymphomaniac nurses? These are questions of our times.”
I had read a photo caption about eldercare strategies tested around the country. One of them involved giving every resident a plushie unicorn they could cuddle and that would make vague horsey noises of delight. More than a few of the men and women bonded so intensely with their unicorns that they opened up to them as they never did with the staff or even their friends among the residents. The researchers knew this, since there was a microphone hidden beneath the red tongue of each placid unicorn. They hypothesized that people in that late stage of life found it safer to reveal their deepest selves to an object, as it would never abandon them, never judge. Perhaps, they reasoned, the elderly would feel safer being attended by machines. I related this anecdote to my coworkers.
“That’s great,” Wally replied. “I can’t wait to walk in on Mr. Sullivan telling Sparkles that he’s crying because he never got the proper opportunity to say farewell to his wife.”
“You won’t be there at all,” Angie said.
Then, out of the blue, the members of the phone sex clique started to croak. The first was Mr. Olson, the sadist. The coroner ruled he had suffered a massive myocardial infarction. We found him slumped over in bed, pajamas only half on, the bulk of his pacemaker useless inside his chest. The next to go was Mr. Klein, the foodie. The cancer in his bowels grew back, and he was transferred for treatment. Wally still cracked jokes at his expense, supposing the poor guy was calling the hotlines from Northwestern Memorial, telling girls he wanted to eat his fruit cups and Tater Tots off their tits. Mr. Harris, the diabetic with the nurse fetish, was stable but hadn’t placed an outgoing call in forever. We guessed this reticence was caused by Angie getting other nurses to cover his room. That left only Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Rogers, and our incontinent Casanova had also seemingly gone silent. Wally hadn’t played me any of his conversations, and Jill had stopped asking questions. She’d become more aloof in general—calling less when she was away, not in the mood for sex when she was home. So when I saw the light to Mr. Rogers’s phone go on when I was manning front reception on my own, I picked up to listen. Jill was in San Francisco; I had just said good night to her on my cell. I felt an unwelcome wave of déjà vu upon immediately hearing her voice. Of course, this was followed by the recognition that it wasn’t a surprise.
JILL: I don’t think he suspects. Besides, it’s not like I’m doing anything wrong. I haven’t cheated on him.
MR. ROGERS: What is it that you love about him?
JILL: I’m not actually sure. I think I fell in love with his hands. I thought it was nice when he told me that he took care of old people for a living. I liked imagining his hands at work, attending to needs. There was something kind about their clean nails. It feels like there’s something missing in our relationship, though. He doesn’t really want to delve into emotional stuff. I know his father bailed on his mom after she was diagnosed with ALS. They managed on their own for a few years until her condition forced them to hire a live-in nurse. We really don’t have to go into all that. What do you want to talk about tonight?
MR. ROGERS: I’ve been thinking a lot about a girl I used to know. One summer, I worked in the kitchen of a hotel in Maine, mostly washing dishes and drinking with the chefs. The family who owned the hotel also owned one of those corporate coffee brands. Their daughter was there on vacation from Radcliffe, and we got to know each other.
JILL: Good for you—a fling with the boss’s daughter.
MR. ROGERS: It wasn’t erotically intimate, but we spent a lot of time together. I want you to put yourself in her shoes, to talk to me like she did, to tell me your secrets.
JILL: What do I say? I’m going to need a little more information.
MR. ROGERS: Don’t worry too much about the particulars. Do you have any alcohol?
JILL: There’s some in the minibar.
MR. ROGERS: Pour yourself a glass. She had keys to the whole place, and we’d steal bottles from the wine cellar.
JILL: Okay, I’ve got some.
MR. ROGERS: So start talking, Jill. Imagine I’m with you as we sit in a humid and empty kitchen.
JILL: Well, my father wasn’t around much. My mother was sleeping with some men. There were always a couple unfamiliar faces in the house. I remember I got home from school one afternoon, and when I went upstairs my mom was riding this guy with the bedroom door wide open, and as she saw me there watching in the hallway, she paused, smiled, and waved, then started back up.
MR. ROGERS: Did she talk to you about it?
JILL: No, she didn’t. But she often said it was healthy for children to know their parents are sexual beings.
MR. ROGERS: I’d like to kiss you.
JILL: You mean over the phone?
MR. ROGERS: Yes, over the phone.
JILL: I think I’d like to kiss you.
MR. ROGERS: I lean in and part your mouth with mine. Your lips taste—
I hung up. I ran upstairs to the Butternut Wing. Mr. Rogers’s room was locked, but I searched through my set of keys until I found a match. When I crashed in, he was not on the phone with Jill. He was sitting smug, staring down the door.
“What do you think you’re doing, talking to my girlfriend?”
“She’s the one who calls me.”
“I bet the phone sex girls pay you to talk to them, too.”
“Well, it’s clear you’re doing a great job meeting her needs as a lover.”
“You think you can do better from that wheelchair?”
“Kid, you clearly haven’t the foggiest notion of what women want.”
“Don’t talk to Jill again, or I will make you regret it.”
“I shit my pants about five minutes ago. I’m going to need a change.”
Mr. Rogers was an anus. Mr. Rogers needed to die. I imagined smothering him with his favorite blankie or tipping his wheelchair down a flight of stairs or bludgeoning him to death with the phone in his room. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, bitch. Instead, I left him there, marinating in his own feces. There were several texts and missed calls from Jill on my cell, but I ignored them. In my head, I kept replaying both her and my conversations with him the rest of the night, as I drove home at dawn, and into the next day. How could he dismiss me so easily?
When Jill walked in the door that evening, she immediately started apologizing. Wally had suggested that the two of them surprise me with the tapes. The whole thing was meant to be a joke. She was planning on telling me before it went too far, but then she got to like the guy.
“I don’t want you to talk to Mr. Rogers ever again,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” she replied. “I care.”
“Then you’re not sorry.”
“I’m sorry for hiding it from you. I’m not sorry for calling him.”
“Don’t you get it, Jill? He’s using you. This isn’t a real relationship. You don’t know him. How can you trust what he says?”
“I trust him,” she said. Jill came over and sat next to me. She slid an arm around my shoulders. “Have you ever thought that maybe he’s just lonely?”
I tried to kiss her with all the feeling she said she was missing. I wanted affection that felt true and unrehearsed, an urgent kind of love.
“Whoa, slow down,” Jill said.
“Can Mr. Rogers do this to you?” I asked, rubbing my erection against her thigh.
“Nope,” she said. “He can’t.” She stood up from the couch. “I don’t want you when you’re desperate.”
Walter Perkins was fired after Mr. Sullivan committed suicide. His wife was still alive, still in hospice at his daughter’s house, so we figured his depression wasn’t out of the ordinary. He had written a note before sneaking out his first-story window—completely in the nude—to die of exposure in the snow. “Tell Anne I’m going on a new adventure!” it read. Somehow, he had rigged the alarm around his ankle not to sound upon his escape. An investigation was conducted into why the staff had failed to prevent the death. After Chloe learned that Wally had continued to make tapes, it didn’t matter that he hadn’t been on duty when it happened; he was told to collect his things. Right before walking out, he bequeathed to me his recorder.
“I don’t need it anymore,” he said.
“I can’t exactly say I feel sorry for you, Wally,” I replied. “Anyway, I’ve got to get out of here. I’m going to apply to work in construction. A job where I can get ripped. I want to be the guy girls think about when they touch themselves before they go to sleep.”
“Best of luck with that.”
A week later, Angie and I shared the graveyard shift. She and I weren’t chitchatters, but that night she came and sat next to me with her coffee.
“Chloe called me out on avoiding Mr. Harris,” she said.
“Oh, who cares?” I said.
“I’ve felt guilty about it ever since Mr. Sullivan died, yet I can’t make myself go in that room.”
“It’s just a fantasy,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Even if that’s true, I wouldn’t know the first thing to say to him anymore.”
“So tell Chloe he was sexually harassing you, and she’ll assign me or one of the other nurses to him from now on. She won’t give you crap about it. Problem solved.”
“But he didn’t sexually harass me. He had a private fantasy that he thought he had kept private. I wish I had never listened to the tapes.”
As Angie left, I saw the light go on indicating Mr. Rogers was on the phone in his room. I hooked up Wally’s device, clandestinely picked up the receiver, and hit record.
The next day, I tried to fulfill my promise. I went to Chloe and informed her that Mr. Rogers had lashed out, hitting me around the face and shoulders that morning while I dressed him in a fresh diaper and pair of pants. “He didn’t do much damage, because he’s very weak,” I said. “Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time he’s acted abusively like this, and I’m worried it’s becoming a habit.”
Chloe offered me her most medical scowl in response. “That is unfortunate,” she sighed. “He’s been such a model resident until now, so calm and polite. Has anyone else reported this kind of behavior? They can get funny, our elderly, about particular staff members for no discernible reason. I can see to it that he’s usually covered by a different nurse.”
I told her that Mr. Rogers had been the mastermind behind the phone sex ring, and he had also egged on Mr. Harris to harass Angie, who felt bad for him and didn’t want to formally complain. Wasn’t aggressiveness and lack of inhibition a side effect for a man in his condition?
“Indulging in sexual fantasies is not a side effect of stroke,” Chloe replied. “But that is serious. I promise my handling of this will be a priority.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“There’s an entire procedure we have to follow by law before transferring problem residents to a more rigorous facility,” she explained. “I’ll start by contacting his family.”
I felt satisfied that the future that lay in wait for Mr. Rogers involved him getting punted to some nightmare prison for the senescent where he would be handcuffed to a bed for the rest of his days; thus I had won. But when I came home after my shift, I found Jill packing for one of her trips, and she didn’t acknowledge my existence.
“Where to this time?” I asked.
“It’s an international flight,” she said, “London Heathrow, then on to Berlin. I’ll be in first class. Somebody called in last minute with food poisoning.”
“That’s fancy,” I said. “Have fun.” I went to kiss her, but she turned away to zip up her roller bag.
“I wanted to let you know that I’m not going to live here when I get back,” she replied. “I’ll come by when you’re at work and get my things. You won’t have to see me.”
“Are you breaking up with me?”
“Did you honestly believe I wouldn’t find out? He has my cell phone number. Apparently someone reported him as a ‘disruptive influence in their senior community.’ I think that’s how it was phrased. The head nurse called his stepdaughter, who adores him. He paid for her education and her wedding and adopted her and everything.”
“So this is about Mr. Rogers? I wasn’t the one who reported him. I mentioned repeatedly that he was dangerous.”
“I told him he has my consent to disclose the nature of our relationship to your boss, so we’ll see what happens,” Jill replied. “You’re not a good person.” She buttoned up her coat and adjusted her navy hat.
“Jill, wait,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”
“I don’t have time,” she said.
I watched the icicles melt from our barred window and imagined Jill commuting to the airport. In a couple of hours, she would be thirty thousand feet above the earth and breathing the same air as three hundred strangers. The illuminated nerve centers of our human cities would pulse below as the plane winged its way toward a refreshingly light continent, free of her memories. She had told me she missed being in flight, so I bought her a white noise machine. However, it quickly ended up in the storage closet. It couldn’t simulate the feeling of distance, of being confined in a space with no one you were required to know. I could see her distributing pillows and blankets. I could see her offering beverages to passengers passing the time in their seats. I could hear her voice collectively soothing them over the intercom. When she finally exited the aircraft, the mouths would speak a language she could not understand. Maybe when she deplaned a plane in another country she could pretend she was an entirely different person.
I had saved Mr. Rogers and Jill’s last conversation. I found it and turned the speakers on our stereo up as loud as they reached.
JILL: I think I’m at the point where I want to leave him, but I’m afraid.
MR. ROGERS: Why are you afraid?
JILL: I’m afraid I won’t find anyone better. I don’t want to be alone. What was it like when you lost your wife?
MR. ROGERS: I didn’t know what to do with myself at first. But I didn’t love my wife any more or any less than the women before her. In the end, of course, everyone either leaves you or you leave them. Everyone is afraid of old age, but it’s not so terrible. If you’ve been lucky enough not to let misery get the best of you, old age can be the age of love.
JILL: What if I never find someone to love me again?
MR. ROGERS: Don’t worry. You have your whole life ahead of you to love someone. You are so young. You are so beautiful.
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Excerpted from YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN: Stories by Mary South. Published by FSG Originals, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2020 by Mary South. All rights reserved.
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Mary South is the author of the collection You Will Never Be Forgotten (FSG). A graduate of Northwestern and Columbia University’s MFA program, and an editor at NOON, her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Words Without Borders, and The New Yorker. Maile Meloy awarded her story "Not Setsuko" an honorable mention in the Zoetrope: All Story fiction contest. She lives in NYC.
