Удушье (Choke)

Wearing a bib the color of food, she says, 'You hurt me, and I'm telling Mother.'

Where they have my mom, she has to wear a bracelet. Not a jewelry kind of bracelet, it's a strip of thick plastic that's heat-sealed around her wrist so she can never take it off. You can't cut it. You can't melt it apart with a cigarette. People have tried all these ways to get out.

Wearing the bracelet, every time you walk around the hall­ways, you hear locks snapping shut. A magnetic strip or some­thing sealed inside the plastic gives off a signal. It stops the elevator doors from opening for you to get on. It locks almost every door if you get within four feet. You can't leave the floor you're assigned. You can't get to the street. You can go into the garden or the dayroom or the chapel or the dining room, but nowhere else in the world.

If somehow you do get past an exterior door, for sure the bracelet sets off an alarm.

This is St. Anthony's. The rugs, the drapes, the beds, pretty much everything is flameproof. It's all stain-resistant. You could do just about anything anywhere, and they could wipe it up. It's what they call a care center. It feels bad, telling you all this. Spoil­ing the surprise, I mean. You'll see it all yourself, soon enough. That is, if you live too long.

Or if you just give up and go nuts ahead of schedule.

My mom, Eva, even you, eventually everybody gets a bracelet.

This isn't one of those snake pit places. You don't smell urine the minute you step in the door. Not for three grand every month. It used to be a convent a century ago, and the nuns planted a beautiful old rose garden, beautiful and walled and fully escape-proof.

Video security cameras watch you from every angle.

From the minute you get in the front door, there's a slow scary migration of the residents edging toward you. Every wheel­chair, all the people with walkers and canes, they all see a visitor and come creeping.

Tall, glaring Mrs. Novak is an undresser.

The woman in the room next to my mom is a squirrel.

With an undresser, they take their clothes off at every possible moment. These are the folks who the nurses dress in what look like shirt and pants combinations, but are really jumpsuits. The shirts are sewn into the waistband of the pants. The shirt buttons and the fly are fake. The only way in or out is a long zipper up the back. These are old people with limited range of motion, so an undresser, even what they call an aggressive undresser, is trapped three times over. In her clothes, in her bracelet, in her care center.

A squirrel is someone who chews her food and then forgets what to do next. They forget how to swallow. Instead, she spits each chewed mouthful in her dress pocket. Or in her handbag. This is less cute than it sounds.

Mrs. Novak is Mom's roommate. The squirrel is Eva.

At St. Anthonys, the first floor is for people who forget names and run around naked and put chewed food in their pockets, but who are otherwise pretty undamaged. Here are also some young people fried on drugs and smoked by massive head traumas. They walk and talk, even if it's just word salad, a constant stream of words that seem random.

'Fig people road little dawn singing rope purple veil gone,' that's how they talk.

The second floor is for bed patients. The third floor is where people go to die.

Mom's on the first floor for now, but nobody's there forever.

How Eva got here is, people will take their aging parents to some public place and just leave them behind with no identifica­tion. These are old Dorothys and Ermas with no idea who or where they are. People think the city or state government or who­ever will collect them. Kind of what the government does with litter.

The same as what happens when you ditch your old car and take the license plates and the VIN decal off so the city has to tow it away.

No kidding, but this is called granny dumping, and St. An­thony's has to take a certain number of dumped grannies and ec­stasy-fried street kids and suicidal bag ladies. Only they don't call them bag ladies, or call the street girls prosti-tots. My guess is somebody slowed their car down and just shoved Eva out the door and never shed a tear. Kind of what people do with pets they can't house-train.

Eva still trailing me, I get to my mom's room and she's not there. Instead of Mom, her bed's