OLD THAT WAY

THERE HE WAS, the old man this day, with only one eye and smothered in bulky layers of woolen blankets that pressed his bent frame deep between the wheels of his chair and seemed to smell of wet mule. The old man was always stuck in that chair of his, brooding in silence periodically punctuated by a wheeze or shiver as all the tubes and wires that protruded from his nose and limbs and other places I'm not so clear on went about gurgling and dripping and clacking and monitoring what little activity there was left to monitor inside him. When he wasn't in that chair he could always be found in the bed with white railings. The railings prevented him from rolling over and falling off should he ever muster enough strength to do so. He didn't do much of anything, the old man. He didn't watch TV. Even Dozer likes to watch TV and he's just a dog.

Dozer was a present to me from Dad when I turned four, when he still lived with Mom and me. In dog-years I think Dozer is now old enough to be a great-great-grandpa just like the old man. But the old man wasn't so great. He didn't fetch. He didn't play. He was just old that way.

It used to be that being old, old like the old man was old, meant that no matter how impetuous or cantankerous or bumbling or befuddled you actually were, you had at least managed to get old and were to be respected for doing so. You'd made it this far, by God, and were entitled to unrelenting gobs of love and selfless understanding from even the most recent and unfamiliar additions to the family brood. For all those decades of hardship and tribulations and sacrifices you'd been subject, you were to be regarded with courtesy and patience, even if there at the Thanksgiving Day table you should one day find yourself simultaneously prodding cranberries on your plate and breaking wind in your seat.

It's true.

"Gramps!" came the admonishing, if any at all. "Get a hold of yourself."

Nowadays Gramps would be committed for senility to a convalescent home with a room the size of a walk-in closet. There he could whittle away the hours with a triple E shoe box, sifting through artifacts of a lifetime kept cozily within.

"Go on, Boiler. Go inside." Mom nudged me into the room containing the old man and myriad machines which pumped slothful existence into him. I didn't want to go and made a raucous at informing her so, after which, I conceded and obeyed. I did a lot of that at my age, conceding and obeying. Not that I minded much, though. Both Mom and Dad had agreed to lunch together in an attempt to solve the mystery as to why they were so often compelled to shout hideous insults at one another so often when they lived under the same roof. Because of some difficulty in locating a proper sitter, I was to spend the day with the old man while they went out and tried their darndest not to shout hideous insults at one another under somebody else's roof.

Mom and Dad call me Boiler.

Most sitters call me Trouble-with-a-capital-T!

Fidgeting before the wheezing old man staring morosely into the grey morning drizzle drooling blurry curiosities on the opposite side of the windowpane as hospital apparatus continued their gasping, sucking, pumping, prolonging of reluctant life, I stood. He probably didn't even know there was somebody else in the room with him. Maybe I could watch some TV, I'm thinking, when suddenly I see for the very first time, the old man's eye fill with dim recognition. He jabbed a jagged digit my way and beckoned me forward.

Fear is often your driving factor as a kid, ascared of the unknown nestled precariously on a perch next to fearlessness of that which grown-ups implore you to know good-and-well to fear -- grown-ups by this time having determined that the only thing to fear is everything that is known. Known, that is, to kill you when clinically induced in gratuitous amounts ample enough to keel-over a gross of pink-eyed mice; or known to cause unfathomable anguish when the money you are producing can no longer keep up with the money that you owe; known that every scrupulously laid plan, every spoken word, every action that you make can most assuredly be counteracted with even more meticulously thought-out plans, and more intimidating, caustic words, and greater, more powerful actions capable of wielding such thorough devastation to the fiber of your existence as to cause you unrelenting misery for the remainder of your life; known for certain that sooner or later you are going to die, or worse, exist plugged into a machine and be rendered incapable of dying.

It's the simple fear of the unknown that got me. So again, for the umpteenth time this day so far, I conceded and obeyed.

I stepped toward the old man. Dull shushes of pure oxygen sucked in and thrust out of his withered lungs. He wrapped a flaccid arm around my neck then, un-enthused to speak because the cancer which polluted his body had eaten so many holes in his throat as to make speech unpleasant, directed me to a drawer of his bedside table. I retrieved from this drawer a leatherette eyeglass case badly chewed on one corner where tin was exposed. Dozer had done the chewing years before, once mistaking the compact for a dinner ham-hock bone.

The old man's eyeglass case is brown. Ham-hock bones are generally pink rimmed by gristle the shade of buttermilk. I believe now that Dozer was color-blind.

What I figured then was the old man wanted the spectacles put on his nose for him. When he was still living with us at home, and Dad too, before he was rendered incapacitated by the fierce legions of sickness which raged war on his entrails, he would sit for hours peering through his spectacles in a corner of the room without ever once saying a word to me or anybody else. Sometimes he would chuckle to himself, or whimper, or just sigh sadly so, for no apparent reason. We all just figured he was old. Sickness was making him do these things.

I know better now. He had every good reason to moan, indeed. He had good reason to chuckle, too, and sigh and weep, for that matter.

His old head lurched violently from my hand.

"What? What is it?" I was afraid the sudden movement might tear it from that spindly neck. His breathing hastened with the effort to form words. "You want me to, to p-put on the glasses?" I said. "Is that what you want?"

The old man bobbed, digging his sunken carmine eye deep into both my own. I wanted to look somewhere else, away from that pleading eye. Terrified I was, though I don't know why. I wanted to bolt out the door and out of the room and away from the old man.

"Put them on," he choked.

"Me?" I said, impelled to do that which, as I've stated, I did best. My arms were less obliging. They were lead-filled pipes welded to my sides.

The old man leaned forward plucking the spectacles from my rigid little fist. He regarded me, stern, face vacillating not unlike a withered muppet.

"Close your eyes."

I closed my eyes tightly and felt cool steel coil tug the fleshy lobe of my ears, adhering his spectacles to my face. They were antique and weighed heavily.

He said at length these words to me: "Your eyes boy. Open your eyes!"

I open my eyes and peer through dark lens mashing against my cheeks. Cold lumpy weight smothering me, trapping me and locking me down. I can't move, can't breath. What air there is to breath is cold and foul and rank with smothering weight. Frantically I writhe, kicking my legs, groping and tearing with my hands to be free of all this dead weight that crushes down on me and feels like wet branches relinquishing moist bark beneath my scraping fingernails. Face slapped suddenly by whipping chill, I break through to the surface gulping mouthfuls of cold, untainted air.

Dawn gives birth to day above barren tundra sweeping past me and, adjusting my spectacles, I focus on the gruesome specter around and beneath. I'm in an open-air freight car lugged behind a chugging locomotive belching black smoke into alabaster sky. The car in which I sit is filled with the bodies of dead people old and young and common-clad. Some are swollen and purple. Others too freshly dead for that.

They had assembled us all in the plaza to preserve as much ammunition as possible, the Red Army. When it came time to kill everyone Mama guided us to the middle of the throng, then sat us both down wrapping herself around me, huddling me close to prevent bullets from boring all the way through. Then came the gunfire, each barrage louder than the last as the screams were rapidly reduced. Somewhere in there Mama went limp. I felt her. She just groaned and ceased shivering. When it was over they gathered us up. I had promised Mama to do as she instructed, and I did. They never suspected I was alive. They were too busy shoveling all the corpses into the freight cars for that.

Hours later now and here I sit atop this jiggling heap of dead traveling to some foreign mass burial ground. Mama is here underneath me somewhere. She didn't give me any instructions as to what to do if I got this far. I don't know what to do. I'm scared. I close my eyes and cry . . .

My boy, my first born, Zachery Melbourne. Sired in America he was. Polio wrecks his tiny body and I'm off to war. "The War To End All Wars," this one. No need to stick a number on it. Who would think that in twenty-some years it would require a number to distinguish it from an even larger, more ferocious war?

For weeks on a ship I travel to crouch for months in stinking muddy trenches laden with burst eyeballs resembling busted pink egg yolk plucked out of terrified young faces full of carnage and fading visions of returning home. I, too, leave behind an eye in a shriek of hot white flash and singing metal, and wander haltingly over the fallen mutilated, compelled by the odorous mustard gas that bubbles on my back driving me forward with the memory of my sick boy.

Long before the ship can return me to the shore, my boy will die of influenza during the sacred quiet that hushed all the world for a full one minute on Armistice Day, November eleventh, nineteen-eighteen. He was joined in death by over a half-million other influenza victims in the United States, and they by over twelve million people in India alone by the time it was over . . .

An automobile of our very own. We ride along gaily, my wife and I, engine sputtering happily to envious onlookers we pass. She is the loveliest woman I shall ever hope to know, possessing in her smile such radiance and charm I'm forced to look away, both proud and embarrassed that any man, one-eyed or not, could be as fortunate as I to have a smile as enchanting as hers all for himself. And an automobile to boot!

President Harding has deemed alcohol as being illegal and un-Godly. National Prohibition is here yet whenever we travel to the city there seems to be more saloons now than even before it was considered illegal and un-Godly to drink. We dance and laugh and sing as she turns to me and illuminates the room with her smile and tells me we are again with child. The initial elation of this news sends my spectacles flying from my face and across the floor as I, full of un-Godly libation, lend toast . . .

Lucky Lindy did it! That's what the headline reads. May twenty-one, nineteen-hundred and twenty-seven, and Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh actually flies his airplane all the way across the Atlantic ocean. He did. Imagine, soaring from New York City to Paris, France in only thirty-three and one-half hours!

My son now says he wants to be an aviator . . .

Can't find work. For every opening that comes along there's twenty or thirty other men applying for the job, duel-eyed men, equally fit, just as able and hungry as I. We're all hungry, the whole damn country is hungry. Famished is what we are. Sold the car, but it won't be long 'till the bank forecloses on the house. Rumor has it that there's some thousand homes being foreclosed every day despite President Roosevelt's "New Deal" promise. Today's my turn to eat breakfast. I figure my boy needs something in his belly more than I so I slide my egg and toast on over to him. He smiles at me. It's a wonderful smile. It's his mother's smile. He's got my eye, though. A matching set, in fact. We sit listening to the radio and hope and pray for an end to these hard times . . .

The Germans are at it again, and this time they're in cahoots with the Japs. World War II. Now there's a mixed blessing. "A day that will live in infamy," FDR called it over the radio yesterday. Those little yellow bastards swooped down from the sky and killed over two-thousand of our boys stationed in Hawaii. Two-thousand!

"There's going to be hell to pay, let me tell you. They're messing with God Almighty's own, good ol' U-S-of-A!" That's what my boy tells me. First thing this morning he joined the Army and now he's going to be right there in the thick of it. His wife isn't too happy about it, with the baby coming and all. Neither is his mother. But I'm pleased as beans. Mighty proud of him, I am. Mighty proud. He'll show them krauts a thing or two. I'm thinking about going over there myself but the recruiting sergeant says I have only one eye.

Can't very well hide a hole in your face!

My son's son, incidently, would not grow up to enlist in the Army, but would grow up to be selected for less-than-voluntarily service in the United States Marine Corps in another war another twenty years down the line.

War has changed a bit since "The War To End All Wars," though, and WW II. The sense of us against them, of right against wrong, good embattling evil, has diminished, I think. The objective is still the same, of course, kill, maim, disfigure, decimate and conquer, but the ideal of battle has become foggy. Now adays they inject kids with fluid to vanquish the sting of shrapnel, set them on their feet and shove 'em back into the field. When they return home they're questioned and ostracized for their killing ethics.

I wasn't aware there was anything ethical about being usurped from your family by your government, instructed to disregard morality and trained to become a political murderer. But I hadn't yet reached this cynical perspective, and would not, until long after my second son was murdered in Poland in World War II . . .

Two separate blinding sheets of sun dropped from the sky, obliterating two cities and incinerating nearly all the unarmed inhabitants of both, abruptly ended the war in nineteen forty- five and informed the world that mankind was now ingenious enough and quite capable of splitting an atom and annihilating his species both, instantaneously. Two bombs is all it took so this method of destruction was deemed more economical than the standard dropping of countless costly tons of conventional bombs. This was, in fact, such an impressive demonstration of awesome destructive force, these two bombs, one dropped over Hiroshima, Japan at eight-fifteen on the morning of August six, and the other over Nagasaki, Japan only three days later, that the Japanese people would later concede that military altercation was not the most effective means in which to acquire world dominion, and so would in the future obey their governments concentrated efforts in reeking the fruits of capitalist-export to one day very nearly monopolize the world trade market.

Meanwhile, my second son was dead . . .

A doctor by the name of Jonas Salk discovered a serum that stops polio from crippling children. This medical breakthrough of his comes about in the year of nineteen fifty-five. Some thirty-seven years too late to benefit my first born. Wrong antidote entirely for my second. Angry burning metal bits killed him, spinning wildly from a projectile that was launched at his relative position from a canon sitting on a railway track several miles distant. He lost both eyes in the mishap and most of the matter contained directly behind them. My spectacles fog from tears rolling down my cheeks at the memory of his death.

Incidently, the railroad tracks on which this massive cannon sat at the time, if negotiated properly, would lead to one of many factories designed to manufacture dead people of specific ethnic heritage out of live people of specific ethnic heritage. The dead people could then be melted down in large pits and used for candle wax. These factories, which were constructed by Nazis, would be shut down by wars end, but the motives behind them, prevalent to a Nazi Germany of the time, would later serve to influence a score of similarly lamentable renditions to take place in regions such as South Africa, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Iran, and other countries, though without such fervid publicity. And though the objective is usually the same, facilitating a people's extinction -- my own species -- the formula and ingredients of the recipe often change . . .

John F. Kennedy murdered in Dallas. I watch the footage again and witness the unbelievable assassination of this young President of the United States on television. Television. I witness the death of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at the hands of one Jack Ruby "live" and also in Texas. Turn the channel and a black man by the name of Dr. Martin Luther is murdered by a white man in Memphis. Four weeks later and 1800 miles away, I witness from the same chair the killing of another Kennedy, nearly five years after his brother. I witness on my television a rocketship carry Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, members of my species, to the moon July twentieth, nineteen-hundred and sixty-nine. I see carnage in Vietnam, rioting in Chicago, Israel in upheaval, and a supersonic transport called Concorde lift-off from France on its maiden voyage to shrink the globe, and more . . .

I crouch alone over the grave of my wife, unwilling to face the vacuum the departure of her smile has left, nor the blur of changes which surround me. I am excited at the sight of my son's son's drooling baby boy and eagerly await the times I will spend telling him of the things I have done, the history I have seen -- and I will. Just as soon as he is of age . . .

I lay condemned to a mattress unable to speak but in wretched tongue, awaiting death that may not come as life is continuously filtered into me. Silent I stare, helpless and feeble at the wide-eyed boy with spectacles that is me . . .

Supinely placed atop his bed by a fastidious nurse with rubicund ears, the old man. Trying to wipe away my tears I forgot all about the spectacles completely, ended up bopping them right into the bony part of my nose. I saw the old man now like never before. I thought of the cruel irony of being born to the crib an infant fragile and helpless, only to endure the storm of nearly a century of life so's to lay again lingering at the mercy of the crib.

White bed railings snapped-up tight, the nurse exited without word leaving the two of us alone again. I understood fully what the old man wanted. I then knew what must be done and conceded to this recognition to obey his wish. I bent down and kissed him on the cheek. It is because I loved him that I did. And planting my feet firmly flat against the wall I took in both hands the big grey plug fueling the machines which forced life and pulled. With only his one eye the old man winked and I smiled, and through the white railing held his hand until he passed on.

Then pocketing the spectacles I thought of my dog, Dozer, and something even more miraculous, even more glorious, even more entertaining than TV. I thought of it then as I do most every day since. I'm thinking of it now, in fact. Care to guess what it is?

Copyright © 1989, Michael Steven Gregory. All rights reserved.