I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can’t alter.
    Shit, said the man with Dad’s voice. Bullshit.
     
    T IME FOR A walk?
    My brother was on his feet. I saw that his jaws were stubbled and that the stubble glinted gray. My younger brother, no longer young! My own jaws were clean-shaven. Out of anxiety I shaved twice a day. I wasn’t certain if Dad had spoken as I’d seemed to hear him. I wasn’t certain if Dad had spoken aloud. In the Manor, voices tended to be louder and higher-pitched than normal. There were mirage voices, that possibly didn’t exist, like upside-down and reversed images at desert horizons. And beneath these voices the murmurous quietly laughing TV voices. When I spoke, which had not been often in Dad’s room, my voice cut the air like an awkwardly brandished blade, a machete perhaps. I was remembering who the sunken-chested man was, I thought.
    Who the sunken-chested man had been.
    Three of us on our feet. My brother led the way. We walked slowly. There was no hurry in the E-wing. In Meadowbrook Manor there was no visible hurry. My brother who knew the way led us past the TV lounge and the upright piano and the resident fat dog sprawled in sleep. My brother led us past a nurses’ aide putting soiled diapers into a black plastic bag on a cart. The double door to the garden wasunlocked. The garden was a secure place though you could not see the seven-foot chainlink fence through the dense hedge of wisteria. If there were video cameras trained upon every square inch of the garden you could not see them. My brother was saying in his loud cheerful voice, Dad is one of the best gardeners here. Dad, show us your tomatoes.
    The tomatoes were indeed lush, staked to a height of four or five feet. There was really no need for Dad to show us, we were looking at them already.
    Dad, show us which flowers are yours. Zinnias?
    The word zinnias confused. The word zinnias met with no visible response.
    We were circling the garden slowly. A graveled path, which we took counter-clockwise. Though we were on a more or less level plane it felt as if we were struggling against gravity on this path. For in this place time had virtually ceased. Perhaps between one heartbeat and the next time had in fact ceased. There was the danger of falling sideways in time, as when you pedal a bicycle too slowly, you fall sideways. In my right hand, somehow related to this strange cessation of time, was an elderly man’s hand. It was a bony hand, unresisting. My brother gripped the elderly man’s other hand in his left hand. A strange word, zinnias! I seemed to be hearing it for the first time. A combination of sounds like hot coiled wires that might spring suddenly out, and sting. Zinnias. There was a sound here too of wasps. I wished my brother wouldn’t repeat in his unnervingly loud and buoyant voice Zinnias! See the giant zinnias these are Dad’s zinnias! Almost, if you were wearing an electrically sensitive bracelet, you might think that zinnias was a code word or a means of torment.
    Dad’s hand trembled yet remained unresisting, like a hand made of slightly crumbling clay.
    We were not alone in the garden. Other grown children were visiting with elderly adults. There were visitors, usually women, or couples. Never more than three individuals in a party, for too many visitors confuses the elderly residents of the E-wing. By chance we were all walking in a counter-clockwise movement on the graveled path. We did not glance at one another. An instinctive dread of glancing into a mirror. We don’t see you, you don’t see us. We really have no ideawhat we look like. Before my brother had punched in the code to open the E-wing doors, he’d told me that Dad no longer recognized himself in mirrors, so don’t expect him to recognize you.
    I had not that expectation.
    I took my cue from my brother, I smiled. I had no expectations to be thwarted or mocked.
    The season was fall. Yet hot as