Visiting Hours

The fuzzy yellow stuffed chick swings in and out of my line of sight.

"Happy Easter!" coos my nurse, Brenda, in the sing-song voice adults instinctually use with the very young or mentally feeble.

Brenda believes that I am the latter. Brenda is wrong.

"Would you let up with that?" says Steve, from the doorway.

Brenda looks up. "What?" she asks innocently.

"It's creepy."

"You're creepy," Brenda returns, but she has a playful tone to her voice. She leaves the duck on the table by my head and walks behind me. I hear the click of the door lock and a moment later feel someone sit on the foot of my bed, inches from my legs. I can't see what Brenda and Steve are doing, since they're behind me, but I'm guessing they've come to do what they usually do in my room on quiet Sundays around here. Visiting hours aren't for another forty-five minutes, and my room has a spare bed since my roommate, Jerry Gilson, died two months ago at the age of ninety-six: They're working in a quickie.

I hear wet mouth sounds and my bed jiggles.

"Not on his bed," Brenda whispers, and she appears in my periphery, dragging Steve around my bed and over to the one Jerry vacated.

My eyes have been (annoyingly) locked on an (extremely uninteresting) ceiling tile for the last twenty minutes. Now, in a fit of unexpected usefulness, they decide to swing hard to the left. I suddenly see Brenda and Steve clearly. They are lying on the bed ten feet from me, pulling urgently at one another's clothes.

Brenda sees me see her. She pushes Steve away. "Steve," she hisses. "He's looking at us!"

"You're crazy," Steve insists, continuing to nip at Brenda's neck.

She smacks him in the chest and points a red-nailed finger at me. "Look."

Sighing in exasperation, Steve stops what he's doing and looks. We lock eyes. It does not have the same impact on him as it had on Brenda.

"Bren," he says, "the guy's non compos mentis. You've read his chart, same as me. 'Profound retardation,' babe. The stroke rebooted his brain. It's just a blinking cursor. He's not in there."

As I watch Brenda scrunch her brows, my own face blank and passive, I root silently for her.

Come on, Brenda! Tell him I'm in here!