The Setting - If someone asked me, I would call it a convalescent hospital - a large and sprawling building or series of buildings, a complex like some vast old folks home or perhaps a sanitarium on a mountain with sterile-looking white walled corridors, fake flowers in vases, precisely measured rooms with huge windows looking out onto well-manicured lawns - something resembling a hospital in part - but also some akin to some elaborate corporate headquarters. When you start walking around in this place, with its subdivisions and quadrants and terminals - it's easy to get lost...Things look so similar - doors, hallways, signs the mist-like air that has something to do with the new and improved ventilation system.You keep track by the lettering and color-coding on the walls and the strange manner in which the various parts are labelled. And perhaps the ambient lighting is subtly different in each subordinate locale. No doubt the scenery from outside is quite striking, the perennial flowers, the fruit trees and the green lawns like on a golf course, and the sunlight that pours in through the windows in an inviting manner enough to allow a semblance of home. The coffee is not bad - and breakfast is serve hot each morning - with fresh berries and yogurt. I can't complain about any of that. It's just this weird feeling that one gets...So many places on earth really that get one the same impression - nothing really very important happening here...Nothing to see folks, please keep moving right along... Static time - the same old ___ routine - no major changes from day to day... There is a story playing itself out - but what's happening exactly? You hear something like that and you immediately suspect that it can't be right - but when you go looking for clues - and then nothing... just the sound of wheelchairs in the corridors and quiet conversations, like crickets chirping, and perhaps a muffled voice on the loudspeaker paging a nurse to Room 11. An anonymous place really - like any kind of building complex you'd find in some upscale industrial park - a place where old and infirm people are taken to, and who stay there, to recover or to complain, to languish, to linger, and eventually fade off into the sunset, inhabiting rooms, biding their time, wiling away their golden years with weekly activities - bingo nights, story-time, animal visitations, children's choirs marching through. So yes - things are happening - I guess one could say. The residents take up space in this most mundane of mundane environments - and fritter away the days and hours under close watch...Yet still - it is one of those frozen-time zones where everything seems so predictable and ordinary that nothing of much significance ever "transpires" until such time as someone has a relapse or needs increased medication or died - at which time the fact that some change has actually occurred is officially recorded. Perhaps I overstate the tedious, unvaried, humdrum uneventfulness of the place in that the services offered are more than adequate and the staff is impressive. There are nurses, orderlies and doctors on call - not to mention the rotating pool of psychologists, physical therapists and dementia experts. That is something worth noting...What's not entirely clear is how the lucky patients have come upon this facility and the privileges that go with it. The real question I suppose is who runs this facility - as they like to call it and for what purpose. Every two weeks or so - a few big-wigs from the Universal Quilt Co. are sent out to make the rounds - that would be Beverley and her husband Todd Gimlet - who are reputed billionaires - or higher ups in the corporation and who love mingling with the common folk...but who knows - though they play the part well, they too could be paid actors. Beverly with her perfectly coiffed big hair, her peachy pink attire and shoes to match, handing out special coupons to whomever and affable Todd with his wedding-cake white sports coat and loafers - waving to patients and staff. Could these really be the higher-ups - or replicas of, or subordinates, or low-level wannabes? Yes - that's part of it - too - the unreality of this place. It's a real place - but there's something fantastical about it - you can see it as the product of someone's active imagination... When you get sent to a place such as this - it changes your thought patterns to say the least. Because aside from one's state of dotage or fatigue or the regimen of medication that preserves one's brain fog - it is clear that you have been sent here in part because the vast portion of you life is behind you - and as the seasons go - frolicking past spring and summer, and clinging to autumn - you have entered for better or worse the winter of consciousness. As one of the more prominent patients liked to say at first - a person in such a condition was indeed "safe" insofar as there is nothing left to do but to wait upon the end. No one (other than family members) had any reason to seek them out or to care too much about them or embroil them in any foolish schemes or to exploit their vulnerability...Those lucky enough to be well past their primes - were somehow immune from most of the mischief that occurs outside these walls.
The Characters - Along with setting - there are some characters also that I should like to introduce- the first and foremost being our protagonist - a gent by the name of Edgerton - the most perfect fossil and representative of the old school. I focus on Edgerton in part because out of all the guests of this establishment - his mind has been concentrated most intensely on the strange fact of aging - and on the pariah-status that still attaches to those who succumb to its ravages...Edgerton, actually a quite sensitive melancholic (if that were a disease), and relentlessly obsessive-compulsive type - whose life had been "ruined" by a single random unfortunate incident (he will tell you that later, he will, and he will tell you why) - is our detective for this caper - piecing together the strange details of an unfolding case - something big - something really big - despite the relentless leaden appearance of nothing at all really happening... Edgerton felt more intensely than the others a sense of "time passing" - the decades rolling by without accomplishing what he had set out to at the beginning...Life had literally yanked him in another direction entirely with a series of mishaps, fiascos, calamities - until Plan A had turned into Plan Q - a hideous nightmare. And with such setbacks and disappointments - all stemming from that one outrageous accident of fate... there came prolonged bouts of depression marked by ranting and raging - raging against the new... until he found himself in a "facility" where care was being bestowed upon him by attendants dressed in white and he could not help but wonder - how, how did I get here, how did I arrive at this hideous end-point with all my faculties intact - and a such a huge reservoir of regret. A place of "kindred spirits" perhaps? Did they have anything in common other than At this establishment where had been gathered so many interesting "specimens" ...he was aware of the "unhelpful attitudes" of the assembled "maladjusted ones" - how vehemently these patients had rejected the present zeitgeist as so much foolishness and insanity - clinging to their nostalgia and their long-term memories...(Chef Nobu - who made magical breakfast pastries and was head of food services in the kitchen - spoke often of the need for purging and cleansing by means of healthy fibrous offerings - and the same could be said of a catharsis needful for the release of pent-up bad thoughts and emotions ...These sad patients so beset by past gripes and complaints; they spoke of being hounded and persecuted. Edgerton would often say to anyone who would listen: People like to scream about freedom and personal license...No one says enough about order - the need for order... Paradoxically in this freedom-drenched demimonde no one can remember how to allow for human foibles anymore, for everyday human weakness, for bad moods, misstatements, lapses in judgment, ambivalence of feeling, anger mixed with envy, love accompanied by fear, for sadness leading to impulsivity, for smoldering grudges and resentments. he was aware of the obsolescence of opinions and the degree to which his generation's most cherished beliefs had been eclipsed by the new and conquering sense of progress. The new order is more like a prison than the old regimen that i grew up with...He was aware of his dinosaur status and relished it in part... he felt like screaming - don't worry, oh you young folks - we will all be dead soon enough! You'll get your wish!... He was incredulous over the disaster of the present moment for he felt - and would not hide - in his heart of hearts that - society with all of its outward advantages and innovations - was continuing morphing into something worse - a world ostensibly full of promises of happiness, freedom, equality and blah, blah, blah - but housing (or rather not housing) a cauldron underneath of agony and affliction - a world in which (theoretically) every person - in a vacuum of their own narrowly-conceived dreams - would pursue their private fantasies oblivious to the needs of others... a world losing touch with tradition, severing itself from past times, moving rudderless, unreality enveloping reality. As the wise doctor had once told him - there will always be casualties and collateral damage... To have lived to see the world you grew up in die out so entirely - to lose touch with those cherished beliefs that nourished you in youth, to wander for decades in clouds of uncertainty and doubt - with nothing to rely upon but hunches - "This can't be right"...or "This must be so..." it was all so unacceptable... And so Edgerton - during his worst moments - would rage against present vanities - rage against gadgets, rage against condos, rage against health trends, rage against jogging and bicycling, against electives in school, against illicit drug use... No - I know for a fact, Edgerton - that marked man of misery - would never have survived had he not by met up with his special friend, the amazing Stanislaus Synderman - elusive seer and fount of wisdom, a man cursed with a slew of health problems and random pitfalls - who refused to succumb to bitterness or vexation of soul - someone who had one of those "out of body" experiences and "went through the yellow tunnel" that people always talk about (was it yellow or actually purple in his case?) and communed with "angelic beings" and was absolutely convinced of the "celestial bureaucracy" that Daoists speak of (actually a good thing) - - and who became for Edgerton - a genuine medium of cosmic wisdom - someone to rely upon, an absolute anchor amid the chaos. Let us admit it though - Synderman was eccentric - and could get lost in a "fog" of meditation for hours at a time only to emerge with fresh insight and resolve... It was all a matter of properly remembering the visions and revelations that had been imparted to him as he floated above the operating table on that fate day - communing with the celestial beings who share their cryptic secrets....Edgerton was most interested in "unpacking" these "parcels" - for to him they represented a newfound meaning - a way of moving forward in life... I should also mention a prominent lady of impressive intellect and imagination - Dr. Agnetha Vollems-Baas - with a vast resume of publications, books, articles, lectures - and whose one consuming passion has been the calamitous history of humankind - and how everything that could go wrong did. Along with writing books - her hobby has been to imagine that vast structure of historical time unfolding along an alternative path in such a way as to avoid the various errors and atrocities that have blighted the previous 10,000 years - and some of these thought-experiments she has made public as part of her work and others she has kept private. She had spent her entire life trying to elevate the status of progress only to find herself under a cloud recently for a few posts of some obscure site - seeking to affirm the integrity of women ... She found herself accused of essentialism and reification - the worst that could be said about anyone aspiring to cutting-edge philosophy.. But despite her protests - she was overcome by an avalanche of unexpected rejection... and her newfound bitterness was hard to bear... And of course - we must also mention Dame Edna Wright - whose love of theology and cats is unrivaled...She had grown up in a strict upper-middle-class household and had always been something of a severe rule-follower - a goodly girl with that voice in her head reciting the various strictures laid down from above...And thou not kill, nor steal, nor cheat nor lie, neither shalt thou be intoxicated in public nor shalt thou gamble to excess nor shalt thou make land war in the east...Hundreds and hundred of rules and maxims stored up in her mind which she like to recite at will to give her a sense of the divine order that existed on earth - that was prescribed from authority figures...Everything seemed to be so clear to her during the halcyon days of childhood and early adolescence (back then she had the wherewithal to banish all noxious doubts from her mind) but the perceived love of vice and excess among her peers only seemed to grow as the years went on and she found herself isolated in libraries and museums and other safe places...Her theology became her shield, her staff, her calling card until she began injecting new and unexpected rules into the mix...having to do with the proper modes of dress, the proper modes of social interaction, uplifting vs. degrading music and most especially the one thing needful - the love of cats and animals...All humans would be judged on that standard before all else...
