Far From Nanga Parbat
“Are you nervous?”
“Not really. Just tired.”
“…I am.”
She looks out the window, pushing her hand over the glass windowpane and into the wet breeze of the highway. It’s morning, and she is not fully awake. Only enough to put on a hoody and feel uncomfortable.
It is silent for a while. Her father is angry but quiet – his scariest mood. Her stomach is hurting.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“A few months ago.” Then silence.
She tries to start a conversation by herself. “I think it’s been about 3 years, for me.”
Nothing. He swallows, and his neck tightens. She sinks farther into her seat, pulls her hand in from the window.
“What time is it?”
“It’s almost 8:30… just look at the clock.”
“Oh.” She pretends to giggle, “Sorry.”
***
The car glides farther down the vast expanse of desert freeway, passing 7-Elevens and home-furnishing department stores. The sun is slowly peeking over the mountains in the distance, just high enough to dash painfully into their eyes. She tries to pull the car shade down, but it doesn’t go low enough to cover her face. The car suddenly pulls into a parking lot, passing a sign for her grandfather’s nursing home: “Pleasant Valley”.
Neither of them says anything as her father drives the car around the side of the one-story building, passing a number of open gardens along the monotone brick wall. Everything is covered in drab morning sunshine – the far side of the desert is still waking up, the sun now beginning to ascend into the open sky.
“This is the ward for the residents with dementia.” He finally says sullenly. “That’s why they have the big wall around the garden – so they can’t escape.”
He quickly points to a 9 foot tall dark-red wooden wall that has introduced itself to the surrounding scenery. It isn’t like the other wards’ open gardens. It’s the trade mark of the dementia-ward. So they can’t escape.
The car comes to a sleek stop at the front of the dementia-ward, its electric engine quietly shutting off. Her father gets briskly out of the car and then walks across the phony lawn towards the door. The grass isn’t real, she knows, because down here in the desert
of Colorado they don’t get grass like in New York – they have to install it. She makes her way out of the car as fast as she can and comes to a stop at the door with her father.
He softly takes her shoulders and points her so that she is looking into the hallway of the ward. There are a few scattered residents ambling about beneath the skylights of the hallway, all forlornly gazing into space. Her father knocks on the glass doors, loudly, so that the nurse in a floral-patterned apron at the far end of the building can open the door for them. Within a few anxious moments of waiting, they are let in.
“Thanks Pam.” Her father says. He does not smile.
She follows her father through the glass doors and into the cool air of the dementia ward. It smells like air-fresheners and disinfectant, like the hospital that her father works in up North. There is an almost blue-like lighting in the hallway, the early-morning sunlight having spilt through the skylights above them and danced, like a taunting child, over the speckled tiles on the floor and through the open doors of the residents’ rooms.
Today is the 4th of July, and the nametag outside of each inhabitant’s room is decorated with crisp red and blue construction papers and miniature American flags. She tries to stay close to her father, avoiding the mumbling white-haired men and women that struggle passed them. Her father passes an elderly woman with a walker; her hair is tightened and pulled back into a bun, a few strayed grey strands are floating about her face, and her lips are painted dark purple.
“That’s a good boy… that’s a good boy. How come my boy didn’t come today? You’re a good boy” She repeats it shrilly, watching the girls’ father intensely as he walks down the hall.
A nurse approaches the woman. “That’s not your boy, Mrs. Ellis. That’s Dr. Richards.” But the woman doesn’t hear her. She keeps staring at the girl’s father, following him down the hall.
Her father eventually reaches the main desk. “Hello, John. Did you get the copy of his last results?” When she sees the girl, she adds, “Coming to take him out for lunch?”
“Yup. Yeah, I did. Thanks Amy.” He pauses. “This is my daughter, Grace. This is Ms. Rico, Grace.” The girl greets Ms. Rico quietly.
Her father asks Ms. Rico about his father’s most recent prescriptions and about how long he has been sleeping and what he has been eating. She leans against the wall, not listening to the conversation, but instead thinking about the last time she saw her grandfather.
***
It is grey and dull outside, the color of Northern winters. The girl is sitting on her brother’s bed with her grandfather, a tall man with a large torso and skinny legs. His hair has receded, and his eyes seem to be as big as her fists. Her tiny legs dangle over the edge of the bed next to her grandfathers’ as she listens to him speak.
“Make the monkey face again, Be-bop!” she says, smiling. She waits for him to twist his face into that of a gorilla by sticking his lower lip out and smiling – the overall effect is usually very amusing to the 10 year old. She often asks him to make the face because it’s one of the only things he can do now, and she wants to make him feel like an entertaining grandfather.
But he doesn’t. It’s almost as if he hasn’t heard her – she can’t really tell.
He begins to recite a favorite book of his, a piece of memory that has stuck in his brain. “A thousand miles North of Kangchenjunga, at the far most Western end of the Himalayas, lies the merciless peak of Nanga Par –”
“Grandpa!” He still does not respond to her call. “Grandpa!”
He stops, and looks at her. He has been staring through her this entire time, smiling, as if he knows that what he is reciting will amuse and impress her.
But she is not amused. “Grandpa! What about the monkey face? Can you make a monkey face?” She wrinkles up her own face in an effort to get him to mimic her.
He looks at her for a moment, and then imitates her, bringing his low, sagging lip out over his chin. He smiles for an instant, and then begins again, just as dramatically as before, watching her as he speaks, trying to entice her with his words.
“A thousand miles North of Kangchenjunga…”
“Grandpa!” He looks at her for a moment more, and then, looking away as if disregarding her, he begins to whistle.
It’s a song that her father plays on the piano every once in a while – its melody is sad and romantic, almost haunting. It’s a song that she knows by heart, but she has no idea what the name of it is. She hums along with her grandfather, going up and down with the notes, flowing, with her grandfather, through a stream of the subconscious; never missing a note, never missing a beat.
***
Finally, her father is done talking with Ms. Rico. He turns to his daughter. “You ready?” He asks, almost mockingly. He again moves to walk farther down the hallway. They pass a Thomas Dulson, a Mary Horner, a Jacob Yutan-Max, and a Roger Franks before they reach “William Richards”.
She stops before going into the room, even though the door is open. She is almost afraid to go in, thinks it’s too soon, thinks she’s not ready to see him.
Instead, she reads the mini-bio stapled to the nameplate outside his door.
“William Richards has lived all over the country, including Colorado and Alaska. He worked as a psychiatrist, and served in the US Air Force…”
It’s like reading a cross between an obituary and a personal ad. She stops, and looks in.
And there he is.
An old man is asleep in a beige leather chair, his face strikingly similar to the girl’s own fathers’. He is slightly drooling into his own lap, his chin slumped forward onto his chest, his hands limply lying over the arm rests of the chair.
This man is her grandfather.
His hair is disheveled and thinned out, and his slacks are tightened over his thighs so that they leave his socks uncovered above his shoes, like high-water jeans on a kindergartener. She feels, above all else inside her, a fluttery feeling of pity and nostalgia.
She follows her father into the room, the door still open like it was before, displaying her grandfather like a painting in a museum to all that pass by. There is music playing from a small boom box on a shelf in the corner – Frank Sinatra: “I’ve Got the World On A String”.
“And here he is!” her father cries, like a babysitter that has just found a child in ‘hide and seek’. He walks over to the old man’s chair and kneels beside him, quietly, as if not to wake him.
She watches her father as he kneels there, hands over his own fathers’, eyes studying the aged image of his own face. Her grandfather’s chin hangs from his neck like the wattle of a rooster. His skin is brown and dotted with age spots. His eyes are closed, his long lashes bent over his cheeks, his drooping lips puckered in sleep.
She walks up beside her grandfather, and feels afraid of him: his massive, hulking form, his wrinkled arms and wide face. There is something frightening about his dementia: she feels like she is sitting unprotected beside a powerful stranger.
She looks around the room. There is a shelf above her grandfather’s cot that is covered in cheesy stuffed animals that his girlfriend has bought him over the years. The newest one, sitting on the table at the foot of the cot, is a teddy bear holding a stuffed red heart with a “PRESS ME” button on its hand. When the girl presses it, it plays “Close to You”.
There are pictures of her aunt and her father on top of the dresser, even an old one of she herself around the age of seven or eight, sitting with her brother. Each picture is labeled with the subject’s name, and it reminds the girl of animals labeled in children’s books.
“You like the view?” her father asks, pointing out at the dried up garden outside the window at the edge of her grandfather’s cot. The light is brighter now, more solid than the faint light of the morning. She nods, unable to speak because of a knot in her throat that has begun to grow.
Her father points out a group of Congo drums sitting in front of the window. “We bought those for him a while ago, when we noticed that he liked to drum out rhythms. We thought he might enjoy them.”
She gives her grandfather a pity smile and watches his chest move up and down. Her father stands, crossing his arms over his chest and lowering his chin to look more deeply at his father; his forehead wrinkles.
And suddenly they are both crying, turning away from the old man in the chair, clutching their faces in their hands, quietly leaking thick tears of pain.
“Who was this man?” She asks herself desperately of her grandfather. Today he is a blank stare, a baby, an oblivious shrug in a room. He is not with them anymore, and she struggles to accept that this living man in front of her is not really living. He is already dead, or if not, then dying.
“A thousand miles North of Kangchenjunga, at the far most Western end of the Himalayas, lies the merciless peak of Nanga Parbat…”
And yet, he awakens.
She turns to see him open his eyes, look around the room with raised eyebrows, and then close them again.
“We can let him sleep for a little while.” her father murmurs, and they do.
***
It is almost 12 noon, and the girl is sitting in the back seat of the car, her father at the wheel and her grandfather in the passenger’s seat. They are driving up the road to the top of a mesa. The sun is stronger than ever, its heat beating down on the roof of the car and then blowing away in the wind. They reach the top of the mesa and her father puts the car in park.
His features are calmer now; he is exhausted from getting his father into the car, and he slumps forward onto the wheel.
The girl is staring at the back of her grandfather’s head, at his huge monkey-like ears and broad shoulders. Her grandfather sits quietly, not having even noticed that the car has stopped.
For a few moments, there is stillness. And then song – her grandfather is whistling a tune she has heard before.
A tune she can hum along to.
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