Room

Her room.

It is easily envisioned. Not cramped, but not large. Comfortable but not personal. What you expect of life in an institution. Thus:

1) Her bed: a technical marvel. It is inflated. It rises and falls and shifts positions all by itself. This to fight bedsores. At the foot of her bed is a machine that contains controls and an air pump. It huffs and it puffs and moves the mattress according to some mysterious and complicated algorithm of its own. We ignore it. It ignores us. We are thus, man and machine, united in indifference to one another.

2) Entertainment: twin TVs on the wall, one of her, one for a potential roommate. Turned on by the nurses and aides. They show Sesame Street, Elmo and Bert and Ernie, The View, Celebrity Chefs, DIY shows, rebuild your house in seven easy days (she was a great fan of home construction. Putting in a ceiling or installing sheet rock was a pleasure to her, and a hardware store more fun than a candy shop)…sometimes adventure movies, science-fiction, Men In Black is a fav. She watches it. Her eyes open. Not quite staring. Not quite anything else.

3) Decoration: Mostly photos, and mostly on the wall in front of her. There is a collage of family scenes my wife put together on cardstock—assorted images, some familiar, some strange. My father in a heavy jacket, standing tall against some distant winter's snow. Her and him at the beach. Texas, I think. My son as a child. The dogs. We show them, the pictures, to her. She looks at them. She does not change expression.

4) Medical devices: A metal stand next to her bed supporting a plastic bag. It contains the chalk-brown fluid that is her nutrient; a long tube aches down to the insertion point in her stomach. Another, similar tube snakes down from under her bedclothes to the catheter balloon where it hangs under her bed, filling laboriously, drop by golden drop.

5) Flowers: Or, rather, flowering plants in pots on the windowsill. One is dead but remains, dry, yellow, straw-like but somehow still clinging to shape and color, like a dried herb. One lives, after a fashion. It is something we bought at the grocery store and bought to her. ("Wait, wait," she said, when I showed her the plant and to my amazement she reached for it, would let not me take it away, not until she had brought it to her chest and held it between clinched fists.) It sits on the sill and I water it when I remember. The flowers droop. Grow brown.

6) Dressers: two, one beside her bed, the other across the room from it. They, along with the little closet at the end of the room, hold her clothing, folded or hung. Also medical supplies, spare Foley balloons, plastic tubing, adult diapers, a dozen other things industrial and gray.

And last.

7: The Window…

Only one of those, but it is beside her bed. It looks out into the parking lot but also beyond it. Look up, look over the parked cars, over the little bus that takes the seniors on their outings, over the pickups of the lawn crew, over the vans making their deliveries of oxygen tanks and processed meals, over the ambulances that appear without sirens and carry their sheeted burdens out the back, over all of that and …you will see the mountains.

The mountains.

The Sandias. Blue in the morning. Rose at sunset. Reaching up from the mesa. Enormous. Vigorous. Glorious. A promise.

A Certainty.