[Memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing Warning, this memory contains: Feels, sadness, implied death
Thursdays at three.
It’s a constant. You’ve never been good with time. You linger. You hear the word again in the irritated brogue of the one physician for whom you were always late on rounds whenever you catch sight of the watch-face on your wrist, the one you leave on the sides of sinks all over this place. You’re not very good with watches, either. But linger. He used to say it as if it were something to disapprove of, to wait with someone. Often fearful. Illness does that, it erodes the certainty that mortality is a very long way away, it brings home how very near it actually is. You’re meant to have minutes. It’s how this whole thing works, people have seconds, minutes if they’re lucky, it works on clockwork time but you’ve never been very good with either.
Thursdays at three. It’s the one appointment you’re very good at keeping. You’ve dwelled here. It’s not visiting hours but you don’t much track visiting hours, you needn’t, in the coat that still feels a little silly, a little impossible. You visit the ones who don’t have visitors in what time you have (there it is again, time, as if it’ll run out) besides the ones you must see. You smile, it’s apologetic, you don’t quite meet the man’s eyes as you make your apologies, your excuses, you look instead at the hill of his feet in hospital blankets, the paraphernalia of the rehabilitation specialists. You can feel the censure of your grandfather from somewhere very far off. He’s fond of eye-contact.
But it’s Thursday. At three. And your shoes, the heel flaps a little, parting from the rest of the rubber of the sole, they’re old, they’re comfortable, you’re not in the habit of replacing things often and you’ve meant to attend to the heel you just simply ...haven’t got there yet. Your shoes, they squeak on linoleum and you’ve a passing moment with the nurse, the one who rules this place with a rod of something alike to iron, but fiercer. She has an expression your grandmother would like to borrow, actually but she allows you because you’ve the white coat and - you suspect this carries more weight - it’s nearly over, you see. Your Thursday appointments.
He’s ill. The man in the bed, behind the curtain. He’s a large man. Or, he was a large man. His bones are folded into his skin now, slack and the sun damage is visible. He used to stand tall enough to blot out the sun, now he’s pale, a greyish yellow against the livid white of the pillowcase. You can see his scalp through the strands of his hair, a pale, rather vulnerable pink and he looks old, the tissue of skin bruised like violet petals, although he’s not even sixty.
There are no bars here. No plastic glass, no phone someone else has muttered into not ten minutes back, fervent, the sorts of wishes and promises people make into a mouthpiece, hoping some of what they mean transmits along the wire to the person behind all of that. They made him into someone else, for a while. But there’s no orange here. He’s handcuffed to the bed, but that’s symbolic. There’s nowhere for someone like him to go.
You sit. The chair is plastic, it has no give in it, but you sit and you’ve no intention of going anywhere. You don’t have ten minutes and then a bell, you haven’t plastic tables or a guard to tap a clock. You’ve a white coat and the doors mean nothing. There’s no glass here, where the dying live. Perhaps it would be less cruel, if they did. Less potent. Glass blots out the impact. Of tears. Of touch. Of all the recriminations or consequences or missed opportunities. You’d many of them, the first time you sat behind it. That first Thursday. It’s been the same for months, and you’re not sure how many Thursdays you’ve left.
But you reach, for the swollen fingers curled into his palm, the surprised, pleased look that opens on his face, tired gratitude. You’ve Thursday and it’s three and really, it could be all the time in the world but it wouldn’t really, be enough.