O Mangi Questa Minestra…
by John Kaufmann
(this is part II. read
O Mangi Questa Minestra…
from the beginning)
Resource Allocation
When my father was my age, old people died at their own pace. His father had lived until he was a hundred ten, in what they used to call old-age homes here or, in England, sunset homes. My mother’s parents had set up house with their oldest son, my uncle, and the five kids who had remained in Taiwan. My father’s father had ended his days in an old folks’ home in New Jersey. His second wife died when he was a hundred and two and she was ninety-seven. When they had married at ninety and eighty-five, my grandfather told my father that he, my grandfather, had robbed the cradle. By the end, my grandfather had become a cicada, fed his meds by a succession of Black and Filipina women who never lost their patience with him, even when he spat out the meds, shat in his diaper, tore off his clothes or yelled insults at them. All of my grandfather’s money had been sucked dry and the fee for the sunset home was paid by a now-defunct branch of the government. “A shitty use of public resources”, my father used to say. “Land belongs in usufruct to the young.”
Even before he got squashy, my father recycled his content. He’s at it now. “You know, when I met your mother, she wouldn’t even say the word ‘fuck.’”
“I know, dad.”
“Her mother didn’t speak with her for a year after we got married.”
“You’ve told me.”
“She came around, though. I would kiss up to her. Pat the horse’s ass. She would giggle when I spoke with her.”
“You know where we’re going, dad?”
“Facetime was –“
“Like a daguerreotype.”
“You take a banker to lunch, you chat about nonrecourse funding, you spill your beer on the ground, and before you know it, you’re a repo man.”
Some of what he says makes sense only if you’ve heard it a million times. Otherwise, not so much. My father looks out the car window. His eyes twitch and he points.
“Me and Sammy Cohen used to fish there. He called them ‘bigmouth bass.’”
It is only an accident that we are driving through his old neighborhood. He lives in the City now, and the lustration facility is in Putnam County. He told me this land was all green when he was young. It was second-growth forest, low stone walls that marked pre-revolutionary land boundaries, a few ponds, horse farms. It snowed in the winter and you could walk outside at high noon in the summer without fear of dehydration or cancers. Now it’s grickle-grass, sand, scrub. It’s twenty below at night and forty-eight or fifty during the day in the summer (he told me that some of the states that are now Super Dakota had threatened to secede when we switched to the metric system, but I have never seen that confirmed on-line). The stone walls remain. There is no water where he and the Cohen boy used to fish, just a brown, sandy depression.
“We called it ‘Tucker’s Pond.’”
“You know where we’re going, right?
“I voted for mandatory lustration in Ninety-Nine, kiddo.”
When I was little, he would pat me between the shoulder blades three times – pat, pat, pat with an open palm – to show he loved me, and I learned to reciprocate – pat, pat, pat, smile – before I could speak. I visited the facility a week ago, to drop off his paperwork and educate myself about the process. The seventy-five-year-olds are dropped off in the facility parking lot, alone. Their young people do not accompany them into the building. The staff do not want people not directly involved in the process in the facility during the procedure. My car is an older Musk which only fits two passengers. When I bought it, I had it configured for me and one slender guest, so there is not a lot of wiggle-room in the cockpit after you strap yourself in. I will not be able to fit my palm between his back and the seat in order to pat-pat-pat when he opens the car door to get out. Most seventy-five-year-olds walk from their car to the gate by themselves. Those who can’t walk are put in wheelchairs and assisted by a crew of Black and Filipina women in late youth or early middle age who speak little but never complain or snap. The room where they are brought after processing and registration looks like a college dorm room or a room in an economy hotel – single bed, clean sheets, a chair and a table, light-colored walls and ceiling, a pad and a keyboard to write a final note, linoleum floors, clean, plenty of light. The government offers three choices for the specific method of lustration, although citizens can also use private options. I had initially chosen the cleanest and least painful method, but my father had requested the cheapest. “That money belongs to you and the kids. Your mother would want it that way. I’m a cheap bastard, but your mother was cheaper.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I’ll bring back some new material.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
His back is rounded, as it has always been, and he shuffles a bit as he walks toward the gate. He waves to another seventy-five-year old man being rolled in a wheelchair to the gates by a large quiet woman of indeterminate age, stops to hold the gate open for them, and then enters the facility himself.
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