When I’m Sixty-Four
by Todd Glasscock
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Sometime around three that morning, I made it to the hospital without any incident, except as I pulled into a space in a parking garage, my heart thrashed in my chest like a fish dying on a pier. Heart attack. That’s it. My left arm did seem to tingle, my chest did tighten. I stiffened with fear. Waited for it. Sweat beaded on my brow, but the pain passed, and I eased out of the car.
I wiped the sweat away, crossed the parking garage, found the elevator that took me to the emergency department, and asked the receptionist, a blonde woman, where I could find my son. The blonde woman gave me a look as if she was expecting me.
“Sneaky,” I mumbled to myself, as she explained that Danny had been taken to the ICU, and she directed me to a bank of elevators down a hallway. “A woman. You make it a woman.”
“Sir?”
“Oh, nothing.” I turned from her desk and headed down the hallway. All the time, my back was to her.
I tensed my back and walked stiffly toward the elevators, waiting for the bullets to hit. Even though I had seen my death many times, I couldn’t imagine what the bullets would feel like when they tore into my body. A hard slap? Maybe something like a hornet’s sting? Or would I notice at all, except maybe a metallic taste in my mouth as it filled with blood?
They never make it clear at what moment when I’m shot that I die. Do all the bullets hitting at once kill me instantly or do I die when I hit the ground or after? Some things They won’t let me know.
No bullets smashed into me as I stepped into the elevator and pressed the black DOOR CLOSE button and slumped sweatily against the back wall of the elevator and felt the rush of blood to my head as the elevator ascended heavenward. It smelled like stale coffee inside, and there was a brown stain on the floor under my knee. The smell turned my stomach some, or maybe it was the motion of the ride, or maybe I was imagining my stomach churning and lurching as the elevator rattled upward with me sick from paranoia and fear. Always waiting for the moment my death would come.
And it was then the elevator shuddered, and I swear it dropped a little, and it occurred to me this was how They killed me. The cable would snap like a spiderweb, and I would scream as the elevator plunged to hell.
The elevator dinged then. I was shaking and barely able to push myself off the floor as the doors opened and the glare of fluorescent lights blinded me for a moment.
A shadow hovered above me, and I felt something warm on my shoulder and a voice saying, “Sir, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I whispered up to the voice. “I... I just got a little dizzy on the ride up.”
I vaguely realized this shadow being had offered me its hand and I took it — the hand seemed real enough, warm and doughy like flesh — though I wondered as it lifted me up if it was one of Them finally incorporating to guide me to my last minutes of life.
Once my vision cleared, I realized it was a man in blue scrubs helping me to my feet. His eyes searched mine and he said, “Sir, wait a moment, I’ll get a nurse, someone to check you out real quick,” and he turned his back to me just long enough for me to make my escape.
They weren’t getting me that easily. Sure, get the nurse or whatever. Have that nurse give me some pills, maybe something laced with cyanide. I’ll get a hint of almond in my mouth then crumple to the floor, dead. Not this time. This time, I live, and I saw my escape route before me, in this room of dingy cracked vinyl dreamsicle-orange chairs: Van sitting hunched over, his face buried in his hands.
I made a path toward him, weaving around these filthy chairs, and squat, brown coffee tables, all of it looking as diseased as I assume the patients were in their rooms. I crouched in front of Van, looked from side to side. In my peripheral, the man in scrubs searched for me near the elevators.
Van looked up, bleary-eyed. “Thanks for coming, Dad.”
The man in scrubs — their agent, I was sure of it — had spotted me and was heading toward us. I tugged my son’s shoulder. “Come on. We need to go.”
“Where? We can’t. We’ll miss Audra, she’s in with Danny right now. It’s not good.”
“Come on.” The man in scrubs was only a few feet away.
“Sir,” the man in scrubs said.
Van twisted in his chair to see who was speaking to me, and then gazed up at me with a look of forlorn resignation on his face. I had seen this look before, when he was maybe twelve or thirteen and about to give up on trying to understand a particularly complicated algebra problem that I had no idea how to explain.
“Come on,” I told him, and he got up and walked with me, and I guided him toward the nurse’s station, where a woman in aqua scrubs lifted her face up from her computer screen and grinned at us.
Van pulled away from me and stopped in front of the nurse’s computer. “Audra’s not going to see us, Dad. And Danny. It’s really bad. We thought it was just a cold. But it kept getting worse. Hour by hour. He could hardly breathe by the time we got here.”
My back was to Van; I was watching the man in scrubs. He was a few feet from us. “Dad, are you even listening?”
I glared at my son.
“Sir,” the man in blue scrubs said, “please, I just want to help you.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
Van grabbed my arm. “Dad, please, please, please, please stop.” He looked over at the man in blue scrubs. “I’m sorry. He’s with me. He’s just upset about his grandson.”
The man in blue scrubs nodded. “OK, I see.”
Now that he was distracted, I picked up a clipboard lying on the nurse’s desk, lifted it up and flung it toward the man in blue scrubs.
Cries went up in the waiting room, Van’s among them, the loudest: “Dad! No!” as the clipboard smashed into the man’s chest.
I broke free of my son’s grip and ran, only to collide seconds later into Audra.
* * *
Moments later, so I thought, my vision tunneled to a narrow bright point of light. This was the tunnel to the afterlife, of course, because inside the bright point of light shadowy figures capered. Old friends and relatives, I was sure, waving me toward the light.
The light grew larger, and someone tugged me toward it. So, there it was: They had gotten me. Chill bumps erupted over my arms as the familiar sense of unease washed over me. The shadowy figures grew larger. “Please let me go back,” I pleaded with Them.
“Elmore? Elmore?” A powdery, somewhat familiar voice spoke. “Are you OK?”
“Dad, go back? Where do you want to go back?”
“Danny. Let me go back. Once more to see Danny. That’s all I want. One last visit.”
Something warm touched my hand. “You can, Dad. All you have to do is sit up. If you’re OK to sit up. You’re OK to sit up, right, Dad? We can get someone to look you over.”
“I can’t sit up. I’m dead.”
“You’re not dead, Elmore. I mean, we hit the floor pretty hard, but you’re not dead.”
“Audra?”
“That’s me, old man. Come on. Sit up.” She tugged my hand.
“Come on, Dad. Sit up.”
* * *
Before I collided with Audra, she’d had good news to tell everyone. Danny could breathe on his own without a ventilator, and the doctors were transferring him to a private room. That was where Audra was wheeling me to.
“You sure you’re OK, daughter-in-law?” I tried to glance at her face, but the angle from the wheelchair was all wrong.
“I’m just fine, Elmore. A little sore on the rump, but fine otherwise. We’re all great. Even you.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” The closer I got to Danny’s room, the more my unease grew. But I couldn’t run from Them this time. I just had to face up to what was in my grandson’s room. I knew they were there, in high concentration. I said nothing about Them to either Audra or Van, who was behind us a few feet. I only hoped Danny was safe with Them around.
* * *
He looked helpless in his bed, back flat on the mattress, head slightly tilted by the pillow propped under his neck. A sparkle of light flitted over his face. He stared up at the ceiling, seemingly oblivious to the light.
My heart hammered. They — a mass of sparkling lights — glittered all over the room; it seemed everyone but me was oblivious to Them.
Danny’s mouth moved as if he were talking, trying to talk.
Van nudged my shoulder. “Say something to him, Dad. He’s trying to talk.”
Since They had come into my life, death had haunted me, the prospect of dying. Every time Their show came on, every time I watched myself die in other timelines, it seemed so futile, this life I’d carved out for myself. I had been moderately successful as a science-fiction writer. But, one deranged fan with a gun quickly ended it, ended everything. What was the point of his action? What was the point of the life I’d had up until then? Of the one I was living now. I couldn’t run away from Them. I couldn’t run away from death. That, I didn’t like very much at all.
“Come on, Dad. You know you have some sort of a connection to him. Say something.”
I looked down at my grandson. His lips looked strangely distorted, as if he were trying to say something. As if he were trying to find a voice in a mouth that had never spoken.
My ears began to ring. The lights around Danny sparkled intensely.
“Danny,” I said. I looked up at Audra. “Push me closer so he can hear me.”
I caught a glimpse of Van, smiling.
Audra obliged and wheeled me closer to Danny’s bed.
“Danny? I’m here.”
Inside my head, buzzing. Then a voice. “Pop-Pop? You’re here. You came to see me, Pop-Pop?”
Pop-Pop was the name I’d given myself in the voice I imagined for Danny. That was the voice in my head now.
“Of course, Danny. Pop-Pop loves you. Of course I came.”
“You weren’t afraid?”
“Yes. Yes, I was.” I knew it was Them speaking for Danny. I knew They were asking if I was afraid to die. “But that fear wasn’t going to keep me from you. I love you, kiddo. I love you. I love your daddy. I love your momma. All of you.”
All of them. That was the point. Over the years, I had disconnected from everyone I cared about, everyone and everything I loved. I had isolated myself from the world, afraid to get out, because somewhere out there a killer lurked.
“I’m glad you weren’t afraid, Pop-Pop. Because I love you.” Then the voice drifted off into a familiar song, one I’d sing to Danny when I visited: “Will you still love me, will you still need me...” before trailing off as the lights in the room flashed and flitted excitedly. They disappeared, and I lived to see sixty-four.
* * *
Danny was let out of the hospital a few days before his 10th birthday. Van and Audra had me stay in their guest bedroom, so I could blow out candles with Danny.
It was a time to celebrate another year of life for both of us, and to celebrate freedom of sorts. Danny was free of illness, I was free of Them.
It was with relief that night, after we all put Danny to bed, that I sat in my family’s living room when the late-night news was about to come on. The news would have its ugly parts — murder, car crashes, power-mad politicians — but all that would end in half an hour, and I would have nothing to fear.
Copyright © 2023 by Todd Glasscock
