The forth floor of the St. Mercy Hospital in Springfield is a hive of buzzing medical equipment, telephone calls, and pacing doctors and nurses. The men and women weave past each other down the linoleum lined halls hardly looking at each other. They instinctively avoid the carts outside each room, parked there like classic cars at a drive in restaraunt. The LED lights glow and the spiraling electrical cords hang to the floor from keyboards and beige metal boxes on stainless steel casters.
We waited until the the janitor and her cart slowly navigated the hallway past my grandmother's room and then we entered. I followed my mother and father inside the room to the bed by the window where she was sitting.
The curtain was drawn and the gaussian light shone on her. I wished for a minute she was imagining along with me that the other side of the window was a spacious sunny grassy field, filled with that afternoon light and swaying stalks of queen anne's lace. I hoped she imagined a fence row at the far edge of the field, with a dense stand of calm hemlock and hickory trees, staggering deep into the horizon the quiet landscape. The kind of landscape that envelopes you, comforts you, offers the feeling that there is always more to see, more space to traverse. That there is more secrets simple and silent, waiting.
My mother sat on the side of her bed and explained clearly some basic facts; that her mail had been checked, the weather was hot, and that she was getting better, and that she was moving out of the hospital and back to the assisted living center where she had most recently been before she refused again to take her medicine. My grandmother listened and her eyes were clear. She nodded gently. Then she turned to the doorway and ran her hand down the bridge of her nose frowned.
"I wish where was a way to stop those hateful messages." She said.
"They keep playing them on the loudspeaker. The are so hateful. I never said those things. They must have tricked me into saying them and recorded them some how." She leaned up to look into the hallway. "Why are they playing them?"
My mother leaned up and sternly interrupted. "Mom, there are no messages playing like that."
"Yes. They play all the time." My grandmother replied.
"No, I promise you, there is nothing playing like that."
My grandmother leaned back in her bed and laughed quietly and resigned from the conversation.
"Mom." my mother said as she stood up, "what I am telling you is real. I would never lie to you. What you are hearing is not real. You just have to tell yourself that. You need to ignore those voices. They are not real."
My grandmother cocked her head and looked at her with frustration and steadfast refute. She looked at her the way a child looks at a broken toy he cannot fix. The way a crusader looks at a heathen he cannot convert. The way fire fighter looks at a house he cannot save.
She looked at my mother the way we all look when the life we live in stares blankly back at us.
I felt the closeness of the four walls around us. I felt the immeasurable distant between my grandmother and her daughter.
Reality is relative to perception and belief is just a particular state of chemistry in the brain. Memory and faith and logic and reason are all just microscopic lightning storms inside the skull, and the winds that carry them seem to blow in different directions for each of us. There was nothing my mother or any of us could do to change my grandmother's mind - her reality was as true to her as the rain that falls on all of us.
My mother moved back to the foot of the bed with my father. I knelt down and held my grandmothers hand. Her indignant posture melted to one of an aloof gaze. The curtains hung motionless over the window. A beeping signal repeated from a machine at the foot of her roommates bed behind the curtain.
I used to think a person's body was the prison in which we are all confined. But as my kneeling knees strained by the side hospital bed, and my grandmother sat in silence. it seemed the mind is where the warden lives. There was nothing to argue over. We both knew that. Arguing is left for those who have more in common.
My parents gave an overly-optimistic goodbye and left the room. I sat on the bed with her. We talked while the light shone in through the curtains; the doctors and nurses walked down the hallway; the telephones and buzzers rang in the air.
As I stood up to leave, I looked between the curtains.
Outside the window, there was no field, not hemlock nor hickory. In the bright summer light was a flat roof covered in black rubber with pale bleached gravel raked over it. A large square air conditioning unit sat hard and still in the middle of the stones. Just past it, galvanized duct work ran into a flat white cinder block wall that rose up beyond the view out of the window. It was sitting flat and cold in the open sun blocking the view of everything else, staring blankly back at me.
Imaginations are a wicked gift we cannot return to the giver - be it God or Science; either of which, without our gift, we could claim to understand.
I said goodbye to my grandmother. She was no longer looking at me. She was staring at the curtain covering her window.