Twelve Stories High
An elderly man, diagnosed with cancer, likes to feel the breeze.
Overlooking the city, my reflection in the glass, backlit by an ornate bedside lamp in an otherwise dull room, shows me an old guy way past his prime.
This room is no different from others, except it has a floor-to-ceiling sliding door, which I’m trying to open if it doesn’t stick and falter. I’ve been trying for an hour. There, it’s open. Traffic noise, twelve stories below, and restaurant smells are what the breeze brings.
When staying in high rooms, do you ever try to count how many windows are opposite? It’s a thing, I suppose. These days, my eyesight is so poor that the lit rooms across the way merge together to look like glowing embers.
Turning, I sit in an uncomfortable chair that hardly fits my outline after two years of fighting stomach cancer. It could be worse; I could be in my sixties.
Milli, my wife of thirty years, passed away, how long ago… twenty…yes,
twenty-one years back. She was a good woman, not a mean bone in her body, which is remarkable when considering everything I said about her.
Naturally, I had to rewrite my will with her being gone. My memory isn’t what it used to be. For instance, let me look here precisely: I’ve left $500,000 to my younger brother Jeffrey — and he’s been dead for the last two years. There’s no reason in hell the strumpet he married should have anything.
I have a niece, Marilyn; she finished college and moved to San Francisco to work at an ad agency. She might have my home in Sonoma. No other relatives live within a thousand miles of the place. Nor do they visit. Fuck’em.
The younger ones have better things to do than visit. I understand and don’t hold it against them. Some people have a life to live, while others don’t. I pause, listening to traffic noises far below. Do you recall when you kept windows and doors open on all four sides of a home to have a draft coming through? Then, in the dead of winter, we all lived and slept in one or two rooms, depending on the guests, to save on fuel.
I remember wearing heavy work shoes in the winter, sitting back on a kitchen chair in front of a pot-bellied stove in the parlour, shoes against its surface, while I worked on my homework.
Soon, I could feel the heat through the thick leather soles, telling me it was time to take my toasted legs down. Sometimes, engrossed in my studies, I would wait too long and could smell the soles burning and smoking from
the stove. Those were good days.
For the last forty years, neither I nor my dearly departed ever had to clean rooms in our home. There were people I employed to do it for us. My biggest failure was that I couldn’t have children. Generic or something with my plumbing, but it wasn’t to be. I forget how many friends suggested adoption. Fuck that. If we couldn’t have our own, the hell with it.
I was good at investing, having stocks and shares, one year making a fortune and the following year tripling it. I’ve been wealthy so long now it’s not of any fundamental importance. I think this is the way many of those born with it are. Lucky sperm babies, we called them at school.
It’s time. No need to linger. I was never very good with physical pain, but I know it will increase. Then, it will get even worse as the horrible days advance. I walk closer, leaning over the safety railing to watch cars speed by far below. The pills help it all seem so impersonal, so surreal.
I lean out farther, taking a deep breath — at least as deep as I’m still capable — a light breeze rustling my gown and feeling the coolness on old, wrinkled skin.
I answer the call, “Sydney, this is the last time. I’m going to put forward that you must have a different room. How you got that door open, I’ll never know.”
“Hi, Doris, is it time for my pills?”
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