2020 (17 page)

Geropods

Grow old along with me, the best of life is yet to be. . . .

—Browning

L
IKE ME, MY TWO ELDERLY COMPANIONS
had outlived their wives, but I was new to Arcadia. You know the sort of place I’m talking about, somewhere between a nursing home and a morgue: pastel walls with prints of rolling hills in “quality” antiqued frames, sturdy plastic furniture, a tiled, low-maintenance floor. That afternoon, the digital holo in the corner of the sunroom was tuned to
THE YOUNG AND THE OLD
, a trendy soap starring the ancient McCauley Culkin, his already pale colors so washed out by the late afternoon glare he looked transparent. The air was laced with the odors of antiseptic and urine. Distant rattling and the indistinct conversations of the old echoed through the chip-array hearing aid I wore like a baseball cap.

I’d come out of a long stay in the hospital—my total deafness aside, a Parkinson’s-like movement disorder was getting the best of me. Pinkie and I hadn’t had any kids. After a long career as a shrink, it looked like I’d moved into my final home.

“Bored?”
Kaplan said from his wheelchair. “Are you kidding? I used to be a Hollywood agent. Bored? It’s so boring here it must be a new medical condition, right?”

“That evidence is accepted by this court,” Judge Ortiz said from the couch, waving his red and white striped cane. The dot from its laser guidance flew around the room like a bug.

“I had depressives who literally put me to sleep,” I recalled from my practice. “But, OK, maybe we do break new ground here. The question is, what’s the alternative? We’re disabled and technically incompetent. The law says we can’t leave.”

“Not quite right,” Kaplan said. “Judge, tell him about Geropods.”

“Geropods?”

The Judge shushed me in a conspiratorial way as an orderly cruised in behind a trolley rattling with glass and plastic. I already knew him as Dennis, his hair the color of straw, his neck wider than his ears. He passed me my dopamine agonists in a little plastic cup and ticked his stylus on his palm chart. “DIDN’T SEE YOU AT THE LUAU LAST NIGHT, DOC,” Dennis shouted, as if my hat was out of order.

“That’s because I
lived
in Hawaii during the Aussie war,” I muttered, watching my hand shake and water splash out of the cup. “Luau Night here is pathetic. Hawaii without the beach.”

“Exactly,”
Judge Ortiz agreed.

Kaplan swung his wheelchair around, just missing Dennis’ shin. “Casino Night without the money,” he chimed in. “Casting without the couch.”

Dennis, who’d gone a bit pink, tucked the palm chart into the trolley. “Valentine’s Day coming up,” he said ingenuously. “Let’s see. That would be sex without the . . .”

Kaplan pumped his arms and nailed him with quick reverse sweep of his chair.

“Re . . .strictions . . .” Dennis hissed when he could speak. “Going to talk to . . . Nurse Tucker. . . . Re . . .strict . . . you all from . . . recreation . . . room. . . .”

When we were alone again, Kaplan wheeled over to the Judge. “All right,
tell
him about Geropods. The Doc’s been in the hospital.”

“OK,” said Judge Ortiz. “Supreme Court decision last month. Civil rights case brought by the AARP. You’re correct; the law says we can’t leave as individuals—danger to ourselves, incompetent, all that crap. But the Court ruled that any
group
of infirm old people whose
combined
physical and mental capacities constitute the powers of a single, competent individual, is collectively entitled to act
as
an individual, as a single, legally defined human being.”

“A Geropod,” Kaplan chimed in. “Free as a blue jay.”

“Justice Kirkpatrick’s term,” Ortiz said. “I’m blind, but Kaplan here can see. Kaplan’s in a wheelchair, but you’re ambulatory. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who’s going to move us around.”

“Me?”

“We’ve been looking for a guy like you. Of course, you’re stone deaf without your hat, and you goddamned vibrate all the time. . . .”

“Parkinson’s. . . .”

“So you need help yourself. But among us we’ve got all the parts.”

“And where would we go?”

“Mr. Kaplan has a
burning mission
,” the Judge told me, his face swinging from side to side.

“My daughter Monica,” Kaplan explained, “is in her late forties. Five years ago she marries a client of mine, ‘Boots’ Bacci. From that talk show on the moon? Remember him? Always wore silver boots? I get admitted into Cedars with a stroke, the snake talks me into signing over the house in Brentwood. I get released from Cedars, and instead of taking me home, he gets behind my wheelchair, crams me into his sports car, then pushes me in here.”

“Time for a little payback,” Judge Ortiz said, pushing on his cane and rising from the couch. “Are you with us?”

A sharp animal sound, a yapping, came from the direction of the lobby. I adjusted my cap, feeling a bit frail. My companions didn’t strike me as completely stable, but . . . “Is that a dog?”

“No, it’s a Yorkshire terrier. Animal therapy day.”

I like animals, but I recalled how the previous week a pot-bellied pig had fouled the library floor. “I’m with you, gents. Let’s roll.”

* * *

And I so stood there the next morning, shaking on my walker, leaning on the gurney, fresh air just ten feet away. Dennis was scanning our forms into the web station with a frown, Nurse Tucker looking over his shoulder. Partly because we were dressed in street clothes, my two partners in old suits, myself in cords and a cardigan, we’d attracted a bit of a crowd. There was Agnes Dorchester with her humped back and blue nightgown, Ted Makelena with his robe pockets filled with sweets, Marjorie Walters in her ridiculous tracksuit.

Nurse Tucker grimaced over the terminal. “What about him?” she asked, pointing to the gurney that Kaplan had instructed me to push.

“He’s with us. Tiger Montelban,” Judge Ortiz said. Even I remembered him as a screen playboy. He’d been Kaplan’s most productive client.

“Medical data’s in order, but what’s he do for your ’pod? He’s been comatose for a year.”

“He can pee, which I can’t,” Kaplan said. “Wanna see my catheter?”

Tucker rolled her eyes. Actually, so did I.

“Look here,” the Judge snapped. “It doesn’t matter if he can do anything. The law says that the sum of our powers merely has to replicate those of a normal adult.”

Tucker sighed, puzzled over the terminal, then it beeped. “Admin says you guys can go,” she said with quiet surprise. “What name?” As a new single legal entity, we had to provide a separate name.

“Story Musgrave,” the Judge answered. Musgrave had been my idea. The bald ex-marine, one of the first astronauts, had been active into his nineties, had six graduate degrees including one in medicine, and at ninety-seven was with the crew that went to Mars.

The sliding doors opened, and we took our first step through.

* * *

It was surprisingly easy going at first. We weren’t fast, exactly, but the gurney I was pushing stabilized my tremor and provided a platform for Judge Ortiz to walk along as he tapped his way. Kaplan was out in front, leading us to the parking lot. He’d been savvy enough to hire a van, a big one, into whose capacious back the driver helped us slide Tiger Montelban’s gurney.

I took a deep breath and smelled the hot pavement, the wet grass under the sprinklers. I heard noise from traffic on Wilshire, and, yes, birds!, so loud I had to turn down my hat. The sunlight was amazing, the sky huge. I knew Pinkie would have been proud of me. I swung closed the rear door. “Why
are
we taking this guy along?” I wondered.

“Kaplan said he owed him one last ride,” Ortiz shrugged. “Now help me in.”

At the Judge’s suggestion, Miguel, our driver, first drove us toward the Pacific at Venice, then through the park in Santa Monica and up along the beach in Malibu. Ortiz had his head out the window like a Lab, his thin hair streaming in the wind. What a pleasure it was to be along the blue ocean, the wide stretches of sand, to see the girls on their maglev boards weaving down pedestrian tracks. Trees! Dogs! People whose hair wasn’t white! At a crosswalk, an infant in a stroller made me realize how much I’d missed seeing children. When we turned back toward the city, I rolled down my own window and caught a scent on the breeze and remembered something else: Mexican food!

But before we could eat, Kaplan insisted, we had an assignment at his house in Brentwood.

“What’s the plan?” I asked, not for the first time. The night before, Kaplan had prattled about “degrading assets,” but he hadn’t been entirely clear. I had him diagnosed as manic, the judge as suffering from cerebral arteriosclerosis, one of whose side effects is senile dementia. I suppose I had a touch of that myself.

“First step, we shake him up. Ground zero, the garage,” Kaplan said. “That sports car of his? He’s got one of the first fuel-cell Lamborghinis. The model that looks like a shuttle?”

I sucked in air between my teeth. “We’d stoop to petty vandalism?”

“No no no no. He loves that car more than he loves Monica. It’s his financial security, see? His first two wives got all his money, and it’s the only asset he has. Aside from my daughter.” From a pocket of his wheelchair, Kaplan extracted a small black case. “I’ve still got a remote for the garage,” he whispered.

“And?”

From another pocket, he pulled a spray can with an ugly, mustard-colored top. “Think you can handle this, Doc?” he said with glee. “The idea is, I open the door, then we . . . Well, you . . . decorate the Lamborghini.”

I raised a shaking hand. So vandalism it was. My first impulse was to refuse, but then I took a deep breath . . . and imagined Pinkie laughing. So what if we got caught? And maybe we could get it over with quick, like a prostate exam. We could have a wonderful day. “And then?” I asked.

Kaplan hesitated, his eyes glazed with confusion.

“And then the rest of the plan develops,” Ortiz said gamely. He was still half out his open window, the breeze on his face, a self-absorbed smile on his lips. “We take it one step at a time.”

* * *

From a block away, Kaplan’s house looked to be an impressive small mansion in the Tudor style. It had a gabled portico, two stories with a large east wing, a sizeable pool and a cabana in the side yard, and a four-car garage.

“Somebody’s there!” Kaplan choked. Miguel pulled along the curb, and I watched a heavyset man heave himself out of the pool. I saw him slip on silver sandals and with a shock recognized that it was Boots Bacci himself. He had put on a lot of weight since he’d returned to Earth’s gravity, and the way he scratched his ample belly, he was not expected at the studio anytime soon. He pushed his wet black hair back, and it seemed to lift from his scalp. “Say, how old’s that guy?”

“Sixty-two,” Kaplan muttered. “You’d think he’d have more consideration, right?”

Boots bent toward his towel and sunglasses, picked up a script, threw the towel around his shoulders, looked toward the street. He cast a quick, hostile glance at our van, and walked into the house.

We could follow his progress through a side window, see him step half naked into a small room, ease his dripping body into a leather chair, hoist his feet up. . . .

“My teak desk,” Kaplan said in a small, unhappy voice.

Then Boots pointed a remote toward the window and closed the blinds.

Kaplan had Miguel move up the block, putting a stand of bright pink oleander between us and his house.

Kaplan and Ortiz started bickering. Under the pretext of a battery problem, I took off my hat and fiddled with it as they talked. That’s the one thing, the only thing, about my deafness for which I am grateful: I don’t have to hear anything I don’t want to hear. You can imagine what that did to my psychiatric practice toward the end. Now, though I’d lost confidence in Kaplan, I was still glad to be away from Arcadia. My jiggling foot tapped a rhythm on the van’s floorboards.

After a while I realized that Kaplan was shouting at me.

“I can hear you now,” I said, adjusting my hat.

Kaplan ordered Ortiz and me out, got out himself, and dispatched Miguel back to the house. His mission was to ring the doorbell and ascertain if Monica was at home. Kaplan’s idea was that if she was home, we could discreetly enter through a side door and occupy the screening room, where we could lock ourselves in. The plan sounded lame.

Turned out
she
was at work, at her desk at the William Morris Agency in Studio City. And Boots Bacci made it clear to Miguel that if “that van” didn’t “evaporate” from the neighborhood, he was calling the cops.

“Do you think he made us?” the Judge asked as Miguel put the van in gear.

“I tol’ him we was gardeners. You know, mow and blow?”

“Where now?” the Judge asked.

“Weapons,” Kaplan said. “Tasers. Pipe bomb.”

“Dios,” Miguel muttered under his breath.

“You’re obsessing, Marv,” I told Kaplan in my best professional voice. “You’re going to give yourself another stroke. I prescribe lunch.”

“All right, Miguel,” Kaplan said with dismay. “Head for Casa Escobar. On Alvarado Street.”

* * *

The new “old” Mexican part of town, for all its advertised ethnic uniqueness, looked a lot like the Beverly Hills Mall. Half the buildings were sand-colored stucco, with heavy black timbers, Mission-style arches, and red tiled roofs. Many of the arches opened onto recessed mini-malls disguised as blocks of market stalls. Miguel maneuvered us into a disabled parking space, and we formed our pod again, Ortiz and Montelban and I in a wedge behind Kaplan’s wheelchair.

We moved through the crowd fronting Pescado Mojado like a tanker in heavy seas, past Selena World, past Hologames R Us, past Alberto’s Secret. I had forgotten the theme park domesticity of the new old part of town, the fountains, the fishponds, the forests of cacti and rented ficus, the tidy upscale families with their matching body studs. Interiors were uniformly dense with epiphytes and those sheet-water walls that have become so big. Really, I hate it when I accidentally lean against one.