This is the last story I'll read,
and it's the title story from the book.
It's called "Monsters."
One sip of water, this one's a tad longer.
"Monsters."
"Inexplicably, the roommate has hairy flutes and a bumpy snout.
Beneath her bonnet twitched the beige ears of a meadow vole
with pink, waxy, alert interiors.
She is not able to speak above a silvery whisper when she
confronts him, hissing, 'you have to do something about
your daughter.'
Each time he visits, she confronts him thus,
and also hisses, 'she calls me a fucking bitch and tells me she
hates me.'
'It is kind of mean of her,' he agrees patiently.
His daughter has been sick for longer than he remembers.
The daughter's roommate is some kind of monster.
He does not know what kind.
She is humorous looking, but also a bit frightening
with her flutes and snout.
'Try to be nicer to her,' he tells his daughter,
but his daughter's face hardens at the suggestion.
'She can't help it,' he continues.
'Try at least not to swear, or to attack her physically.'
This last was routine, according to the caregivers.
The daughter grabbing a cane or other object
and hurling it at the roommate, or wheeling her own chair
to the edge of the roommate's bed and menacing her.
After much pleading, the daughter
will promise to try to ignore the roommate,
but because she has a memory deficit,
she will soon forget her promise.
'She is brain injured,' he told the roommate once.
'I am brain injured, too,' said the roommate, snout a wobble.
'My brain fell out of my head.
Why do you think I look like this?'
'I know,' he said, though he had no idea.
'And I'm so sorry.'
His daughter has been sick longer than he remembers,
and he visits her in the facility every other day.
He brings her salad and iced mochas, sometimes
a T-shirt or a book.
She does not remember very well, so the book
will go largely unread.
Perhaps the first chapter will be read over and over
for the next year.
At this point, the daughter is declining.
This is not his word, but the word of her
caregivers at the facility.
Decline, he thinks, like the stock market.
He doesn't like the word, because it feels euphemistic.
A gentle sort of word for what is happening lately
to his daughter.
Sometimes, people look at the stars
and marvel how far we have not come.
In other words, they look and they
realize that any progress from factory to grave, as it were,
is less than an eye blink compared
to the progress of planetary bodies over all those millions
of eons, and still shining due to the mysterious business
of light years.
Another way of saying this is to marvel
at how everything outside of our perishable selves
seems to last indefinitely.
When he looks at his daughter, he tries to remember this.
That she, and he, and all others have not
much time on the planet, no matter how implacably
constructed, and so are deeply insignificant.
'I go from city to city, from town to town,' goes the song,
and he hums it as he drives to the facility.
This time he thinks to bring the roommate a little peace
offering.
He does this, he admits to himself, not out of compassion,
but because he believes it might cut down on the complaints.
The complaints knuckle him under.
He has lately been in the habit of inserting his buffler
so he will not feel quite so hollowed out.
He brings a floral scented cushion for the roommate.
The daughter rolls her eyes.
'Why her?
Why always her?' she asks, because she doesn't remember.
'She is declining,' says a caregiver sorrowfully.
'Not only is she not remembering,
she is confabulating.
Now she thinks the roommate is the other daughter,
the preferred sister.'
Today's caregiver gives-- wears a wreath
of orange labbies around her head,
and long, black mards embossed with [? zanims. ?]
'How clever,' he says, indicating the [? zanims ?]
and hoping to distract her from the topic of his
daughter's decline.
'Everything is infectious in today's world,' says
the caregiver. 'We must do our parts to curtail the spread.'
'I go from city to city, from town to town,
looking for a bowl of soup, looking for a dog
to poke,' goes the song inside the father's head.
Usually he pushes his daughter to the Dollar Store,
then to Safeway.
She can have whatever she wants, he tells her.
The sky's the limit.
Today she is on a stretcher, and possibly cannot go out,
they say.
He gets, 'no, you cannot push that stretcher across
the street, even though it is on wheels.'
She is declining.
She cannot hold up her head.
He takes out the buffler in order
to release some of his gnarls.
He remembers the daughter when she was an athlete,
running cross country into the woods where she would disappear
for a little while, and then reappear in front of the pack.
Those moments did not require bufflering,
and there were no gnarls building up.
Only like, one glister after another.
It was a veritable sea of glisters everywhere,
rocking and shining, the daughter running into the woods
and emerging in the lead.
Or later on, the celebrations.
The glisterous celebrations in the bright lee pads.
Her forehead is covered with freckles.
How they have persisted when all else has declined.
He smells the place where her hair stretches back
from her forehead, the place where the freckles begin.
'Is it a nice smell?' asks the daughter.
'It smells like you,' says the father,
'a mixture of ruts and splay.'
'I thought so,' says the daughter.
'It's what I would imagine.'
The roommate is neither happy nor unhappy about the gift
of the cushion.
Her face wears a neutral expression.
'What am I supposed to do with this?' she hisses.
'Perhaps for your bed,' he suggests.
She waves one hairy flute.
'You need to help your daughter.
She calls me a fucking bitch and tells me she hates me.'
'It is a pretty cushion with minions and bings,
a little embroidered monkey swinging
from a branch in the middle.
Perhaps it will cheer you up,' he says.
The stars.
They are, after all, so far as to be nonexistent.
Perhaps all things, perceived at a great distance,
no longer exist.
Only in memory do these things unreasonably persist.
The insides of our minds may as well
be skies filled with what is no longer in existence.
When we look at the night sky, we
are therefore perceiving a vast memory
covered with recollections.
Imagine a mind without memory.
A starless sky, or a sky simply hollowed out,
like a feeling when overcome, or emptier.
The caregiver with the orange labbies and embossed lards
is busily hooking up an apparatus called the Hoyer
lift to the daughter, so that she
can be transported to the toilet, set down upon it,
and then removed.
They say that in deference to the father,
they will allow her to sit in a wheelchair for a short time
today.
Now the father can push her to Burger King
for a salad and a mocha.
Afterwards, they walk up and down the Safeway aisles
looking for shampoo and a magazine,
and the daughter's head is soon resting on her own shoulder
at a horrible angle.
In this pose, she cannot help but stare at the rows
of phosphorescent lights on Safeway's ceiling,
and this makes her say, 'when are we leaving?'
'The sky is so blue today, and the clouds are noble
and stately, like ships passing in front of our eyes,' he
remarks.
'They remind us,' says the daughter.
'Of what?' says the father.
'Oh, who can remember?' says the daughter.
At the Dollar Store, which is going out of business so that
everything is now only $0.50, they purchase a little figurine
of a dwarf that looks as if it's made of mucus and spit.
The dwarf has a very wide face and a tiny grimace which
reveals just a sliver of tooth.
It is so resolutely hideous that they cannot stop themselves
from laughing right in the store in front of the sales clerk.
'Good Lord,' says the daughter.
When she laughs, she gets very red faced
and she clenches her one good fist.
She is one of those who wheezes when she laughs,
and now she is wheezing and wheezing at the ugly figurine.
'Something to remember me by,' says her father,
who is also laughing.
The roommate has the TV on as usual when they return.
'She is a fucking bitch and I hate her,' says the daughter,
matter of factly.
The TV is cranked all the way up because perhaps the roommate's
meadow vole's ears, despite their alert pink interiors,
are defective.
The father approaches the caregiver,
who is still with labbies jittering around her head
as if she were about to be attacked by wolves,
he thinks unkindly.
'Can we get the roommate to turn down the TV a bit?'
'No, that is not possible,' says the caregiver. 'She has rights,
too,' she adds.
A buffler does not repair, so much as stave.
Constructed of translucent slop jet
and a series of prawns and rivels,
the idea is to simulate forgetfulness.
An excellent photograph might accomplish the same,
unless the photograph were to show the daughter having
emerged victorious from the woods,
a good four or five seconds ahead of her competitors,
her sweet face rapt and dripping with sweat,
her green shorts flashing like the neon streak of a dragonfly
past the father's gaze, who is beaming as she crosses
the finish line and accepts the high five from her coach
while still running, then looks up to catch his eye and grin.
No one ever would have predicted that her brain box would not
survive.
How fragile we are, the father often
thinks, thinking also at the same time, how intrepid we are.
Before he leaves, he places the hideous dwarf figurine
on his daughter's bureau, and she
looks at it in bewilderment, as if she had never
seen it before.
'What in the world is that?' she asks him.
This is when he cradles her head in his arms
and smells that lovely place where her hair meets
her freckled forehead.
The TV lowered, the roommate is now
snoozing into her cushion, the rattle of her monster breath
causing the embroidered monkey to somersault
on the embroidered branch.
'Don't love her,' says the daughter.
'Don't ever love her,' At this, the roommate will open one hand
slicked eye and hiss, 'she needs your help.'
'You fucking bitch,' the daughter will then scream,
and this scream will pierce the father's heart and neatly
hollow him out, despite the buffler.
'I go from city to city, town to town, looking for a soup
to sip, a dog to poke, for a rock to throw,
and life has done me dirt, all right.
Life has done me dirt.'
The words to the song are not precisely accurate,
the father knows.
But they capture the defeated spirit of the time."
Thank you.