The Wasp Of St Judiths

It's funny, the things I've forgotten. I can't remember what Mel looked like. Not her eyes, her hair, her shape, not even the color of her skin. If I close my eyes I feel like I can visualize her perfectly, but when I try to write it down? Like grasping smoke.

Working as a dementia nurse taught me not to take memory for granted. It's not just the things we forget, you understand. It's how easily we forget that we've forgotten, confabulating plausible-seeming stories to patch over the holes in our memory. One of my patients wakes up every day in a room she doesn't recognize, and every day she convinces herself she must be on vacation, because why else would she be away from home?

I've been to a specialist (I didn't tell him the real reasons) and he assures me my mental function is A-OK, that it's just understandable paranoia from what I do for a living. But I

know

I have gaps in my memory. There are patches in my recollection of last year that don't feel right. When I try to think back to that time it's like walking on carpet laid over spongy floorboards. So I want to write this down before I forget more than I already have.

It's tempting to stitch the pieces together, to fill in the gaps between what I remember with the things I only suspect. But I don't trust myself to get it right, and the more I try to remember how things moved from A to B, the easier it is to start doubting whether any of it really happened...and the whole thing starts to melt away like a snowflake held too long in my fingers. So all I can give you is this collection of patches; it's up to you to decide how they fit together.

* * * * *

I know I had a tremendous crush on Mel. She was attractive enough to make my "no co-workers" rule fly out the window. But the only thing I can say for sure about how she looked is the scarf she always wore, an eye-catching pattern of black and gray diamonds like a pantomime Harlequin's checks in monochrome.

Was

it a scarf? I'm not sure it was. Could have been a jacket, or a skirt. But whatever it was, she always wore it. I remember the pattern, the way those dappled shapes slid around her as she moved. It made me think of cold evenings, of chessboards, of piano keys and the Moonlight Sonata.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was the graveyard shifts. If you've ever worked graves for a long stretch you'll know that they mess with your head. It's not just the disrupted sleep cycle, which I've never quite gotten used to. It's the way it isolates you from friends and family, getting up just as they're going to bed, eating "lunch" at three in the morning when the world's as empty and dead as it's ever going to get.

Even trivial things like booking a dentist's appointment were constant reminders that I'd become a citizen of the other side of the day, somebody who needed to make special arrangements to do Normal People Stuff. It felt as if I'd checked out of the human race and become an exceptionally boring kind of vampire, doomed forever to haunt St. Judith's Catholic Hospital and Home for the Elderly, Building H.

Perhaps it was the time of year. Every fall, as the frosts and the mists settle in, I feel the world change: lights become brighter, the dark becomes wider and deeper, a pleasant summer crush becomes a winter hunger that aches sweeter than pleasure.

Between the graveyard shifts and the mists, all the lines in my world had blurred; I had no clear sense of where the ordinary ended and the extraordinary began. Perhaps that's how I saw what I did, how I've remembered it as long as I have.

* * * * *

The evening shift always finished at ten p.m., leaving just myself and Mel on duty. By that time the residents were usually in bed. My job, for the most part, was to sit at the nurse's station and wait for the alarm buzzer that would notify me if any of the patients needed me.

Beyond that, it was up to us to kill the time as we pleased. Me, I listened to music and read, or surfed the net, or scratched in a notebook. Mel's predecessor, a chatty lass named Dhipa, had been fond of late-night TV.

Mel listened to music a little, but mostly she read. She'd bring two or three books in every night and devour them all before sunrise: medical texts, French poetry, popular science, even sometimes a lurid romance novel—her tastes seemed to be cosmopolitan.

I was reluctant to interrupt. I know how it is to be pestered every five minutes when I'm trying to read. And if I'm honest, I was a little in awe of her and terrified of making a fool of myself, the way I do when I'm crushing on somebody. Did we speak at all in the first few weeks that we worked together? I suppose we must have, but I don't remember it.

* * * * *

Sitting in my car, parked across the road from St. Judith's. The night was ice-cold and I had my window open, because otherwise it frosted up and I couldn't see out. Waiting, watching the entrance. I had a blanket and a thermos of coffee to keep me going through the empty hours, and a carving knife hidden under my seat. The cops came by, and I told them I was waiting for a co-worker who was supposed to be finishing up soon.

But that was much later. Just writing it down now so I don't forget. It's important that I come back to that.

* * * * *

The first conversation I can remember between us:

Mel was reading something called "Dead At 27: Janis, Jimi, Kurt, Amy And More". It didn't seem to meet with her approval; every few pages she'd shake her head and make a little "tch" sound. It seemed as good a time as any to try breaking the ice.

"Any good?" I asked.

"Huh?" She started, looked at me as if she'd forgotten I was there.

"The book."

"Oh. Uh, not really." She slapped it down on the desk. "Guy has no idea. His grand theory is that artists use drink and drugs trying to unlock creativity, and that's why they have so much trouble with addiction."

"You don't agree."

"No, I don't. I've known a few creatives in my time. Yeah, a few of them use drugs or booze to break down their inhibitions. Or just because they think all the cool kids are doing it. But half these guys"—she tapped the book—"were trying to

kill

creativity."

"Kill creativity? Why would they do that?"

"Creation is

scary.

" I'd never seen her excited before, but now she was talking with her hands as vigorously as my Italian grandmama. "You're reaching inside yourself to take something secret only you can see, and make it tangible. Words, music, paint, whatever. You just

know

it's going to be flawed, and somebody's going to look at it and say 'this is shit'. And the process is destructive too. A big idea, it wants you to make it real, even if it costs you. Staying up 'til four in the morning trying to make it happen, trying to feed yourself on a cent a word. Robert Johnson said it was like consumption.

"You know some women smoke and drink in pregnancy to get a smaller baby, because they're terrified of childbirth? Lot of artists go like that. Try to kill their big ideas or shrink them down into something small, less scary. That way, even if people hate it...it doesn't sting as much, because you know you didn't give them their best. They can't mock what's inside you if you don't show it to them.

"But those big ideas are hard to kill. It's like chemotherapy, it's tough to poison them without poisoning yourself too. Johnson sang about how he was going to go to the still and drink his blues away. But you know what? He still

wrote a song

about it. Words want to be spoken, songs want to be sung."

"Sounds like you take your music seriously."

"I'm a child of the blues."

"You know Mr. Winstone in 8B used to be a blues guitarist?"

"I have all his records."

* * * * *

About Mr. Winstone:

Henry Winstone—professional name "E-String"—hadn't made it into the 27 Club, but he'd given it a good try. He'd had two big hits and a solid album in the mid-fifties, and made enough money to get into bad habits. After that he had a few lackluster follow-up singles, and then he drifted out of the music business and into the bottle. He'd vanished from the public eye for three decades before his wife Maisy, too old to keep on looking after him herself, brought him in to St. Judith's. By then he was sixty-two going on ninety, yellow-eyed and frail, and he'd been with us another eight years since then.

There are many ways alcohol can mess you up. Korsakoff syndrome is one of the more peculiar. Henry couldn't remember events for more than a few minutes after they happened; as far as he knew, Jimmy Carter was still President. But he could acquire other kinds of information and remember it in a way some of the others never did. He knew his way around the building and ground, and understood that he

was

a patient. He could never remember what day it was, but he'd learned that Sunday and Wednesday were Maisy's visiting days, so we ended up buying him a watch that showed the day, to save him asking every five minutes.

He remembered music better than anything else. If he happened to be up late, I'd ask him: "Heard anything good lately, Henry?" and he'd sing me whatever had been playing on the radio that day, in a voice that cracked and wavered as his fingers picked out the tune on an imaginary guitar. (Maisy told me he'd smashed up his own guitars in a drunken mood: "he never laid a hand on me, just the guitars".) But if I asked him who it was by, he'd flounder and slip back to the seventies: Janis Joplin's "Rolling In The Deep", Canned Heat's "Lonely Boy".

It was never his own music that he hummed. From what I knew of Korsakoff's I was pretty sure he should still remember his own songs, but never once did he play them. Maybe there was something in what Mel said. Maybe he'd been trying to poison his own talent.

St. Judith's was an old building, with exposed plumbing. One time a hot-water pipe in Henry's room burst; it happened in the afternoon and the leak was fixed by the time I started my shift, but it had soaked a lot of his things and they were still cleaning up the mess. But I think that happened later.

* * * * *

Words want to be spoken.

"Mel, there's a folk and blues fair on Friday evening down at North Park. Would you like to go with me? I can bring my car, drive us in to work after."

"Sure."

Waiting in line to get in, my breath fogging in air that had begun to bite. I had a padded jacket on that made me look like a navy-blue blimp, but at least it was warm. Of course Mel was in her diamond checks. As I calculated whether I had time to duck out of the line and get us hot chocolates, she caught me off-guard with a question.

"Hey, is this a date?"

"Um."

Panic.

"Yes. I'd like it to be."

She blinked at me, as if that had been the last thing she expected. In a rush I thought of what rejection would feel like, a plunge into ice-cold water. It makes no sense, but part of me

wanted

that fierce shock, to feel the world sharp and raw on my skin.

"Thank you. That's very sweet of you." And then we were interrupted as the line moved again.

We stood together. Not pressed together like lovers, you understand; at one point I slipped my arm through hers (or was it her, slipping her hand through mine?) But what I remember most, more than what I heard, is watching Mel stand with her eyes half-closed, her mouth half-open, as if she was inhaling the music.

I remember that later, in my car, I almost tried to kiss her. But she was impossible to read, and I was afraid to push my luck, and besides we were going to be late for work.

* * * * *

Mr. Winstone was having trouble sleeping. It's not uncommon with dementia. Somebody had bought him a guitar—how could he not have owned one already?—and sometimes in the dead of night I'd hear him picking away at it. I didn't mind. We'd had one resident who used to walk in circles every night for hours on end, looking for a husband who'd died twenty years ago, and it gnawed at my heart to think of her so lost.

At least I could tell myself E-String was doing something he enjoyed. His fingers were palsied and there were bum notes, but I could recognize Lead Belly and Robert Johnson here and there.

* * * * *

Did we go to other events together, Mel and I? I have a feeling we did. I remember listening music, I remember sitting in the back at a poetry reading, feeling her presence. But I can't be sure whether she was there with me those nights. Perhaps I went with somebody else—I hadn't entirely lost touch with my friends—and just had Mel on my mind.

* * * * *

I was reading about a case in Ireland where a hospital had refused to perform an abortion for a woman with uncontrolled gestational diabetes; the baby lived, but the mother died.

"It's one of those great dilemmas," Mel said. She must have been reading over my shoulder. "You can save the baby, but only by killing the mother. Or maybe you can save the mother but it kills the baby. What do you do?"

"Are you asking for the official St. Judith's answer, or my answer?"

She chuckled. "Your answer."

"I'd ask the mother. Her decision."

Mel nodded. "Babies are strange, when you think about it. People talk about maternity like the mother and the baby are bestest buddies, but they're really not. You know the mother's hormonal system will try to abort the fetus if she's not getting enough nutrition for both of them? And the fetus secretes a hormone that tries to override hers and stop that from happening?"

As it happened, I did know that.

Mel went on. "When the mother eats, her system secretes extra insulin to lock away that energy in her body, get it out of the bloodstream as quick as possible so the baby can't take too much from her. Meanwhile the fetus is releasing hormones to fight that insulin, try to get more food. Sometimes it does such a good job it ends up giving her diabetes, like poor Mrs. Collins in Galway. Forget the lovey-dovey cherub stuff, sometimes it's all-out war in there.

"Have you ever heard of the

Glyptapanteles

wasp? Lays its eggs in a caterpillar. The wasp larvae grow inside, eating the caterpillar, then when they're big enough they crawl out and make cocoons."

"That's horrible."

"To the caterpillar, sure. To a wasp, it's the fucking miracle of life. But that's not all. The caterpillar's not dead, not yet. But one of those larvae stays behind and manipulates its brain. So it loves those little cocoons. It stays there on a leaf watching over them and protecting them from anything that might eat them. It loves them so much, it'll stay there until it starves to death. And then the adult wasps hatch out and fly off to go find more caterpillars and share the miracle of life all over again. Well, human babies are more like wasps than anybody wants to think."

"Better not let the Board hear you talking like that," I said. "This place is strictly pro-life." Not that any of our residents were in much danger of pregnancy.

"Don't get me wrong. I respect the process. If anything, I'm more on the baby's side than you are. But the way people talk about the fetus like a gentle little gift from God, it's so naïve. Reproduction is brutal."

Her intensity had me rapt, and there was something I wanted to say.

"Mel?"

"Hmm?"

"I'd, uh, I really find you attractive. I'd like to go to bed with you." At least the words were out.

She smiled, but it wasn't quite a yes-please smile. "I'm working."

"I didn't mean right now."

"There are ethical implications all the same. Let me think about it."

* * * * *

Sometimes if Mr. Winstone was up late she'd keep him company while I sat at the station with one eye out for the alert light. I'd hear them talking for hours, as he plucked at the guitar, but they were too soft for me to make out the conversation. "Just talking about music," Mel told me. I felt a trifle jealous of him; I wanted her so badly, and I didn't know whether to ask her again or wait for a sign, and I begrudged anything and anybody that drew her attention away from me. And I was jealous of her, too; he'd taken weeks to remember my name, but he'd learned hers right away.

It went on like that for...how long

did

it go on for? It feels like months that my longing burned in the winter dark, driving home at dawn to sleep the day away and come back to my crush. And yet I don't remember tinsel, I don't remember the tree that always stood in the rec room come December. Did it really all happen before Christmas?

And then one day I asked Henry the same old question I always asked, and he gave me a different answer.

"Been writing new stuff."

"New stuff?"

It was the night after the leak in his room. I was sorting through his belongings, filling a basket with clothing that could go in the tumble-dryer, going through a box of damp papers and laying them out on a towel. Most of it was salvageable. His birth certificate, some letters from Maisy.

"Yeah, jus' for fun." He chuckled. "Ain't gonna trouble the charts, but I still got a song or two inside me."

"Feel like playing one for me?"

But he shook his head. "Fella used to say to me, song's like a baby, there's no sense in trying to show it to the public before it's finished."

"Uh-huh." There was a scrapbook, old photos and clippings from his glory days. It looked to have escaped the water, but I flipped through it to make sure. And then I found a page that stopped me in my tracks.

I had to look twice, three times, before I was sure of what I was seeing.

"Y' okay? Look like a landed fish," Henry said, and I realized my mouth was flapping silently.

"Uh. Yeah. Henry, is it okay if I take this one away just to make sure it's dry? I promise I'll bring it back."

"Sure, you do that."

I wrapped the scrapbook in a towel to conceal it until I had a chance to slip it into my bag. I didn't look at it again until I was home.

* * * * *

That was Friday night-Saturday morning. I had the weekend off, and I spent much of it looking through the scrapbook and trying to make sense of it all.

The thing that had caught my attention was just a yellowed newspaper article from 1961, reporting on a county fair. In amongst the cattle-breeding trophies and the baking contest there were a couple of lines about the performance of a group named the Six Strings—that had been Mr. Winstone's first band—and above the article was a photo.

Six young men, each one cradling a guitar, grinning at the camera with all the confidence of a kid who knows himself to be immortal. I recognized Henry, front and center. He'd been handsome in his time. I didn't know the other band members, or the fellow in fancy clothes who was applauding them—some country-fair personage, I guess.

But I recognized the woman standing behind Henry. The photo was grainy, and when I blew it up her face dissolved into formless blobs, but when I half-closed my eyes I was sure. Like I told you before, I can't describe that face, but I'd recognize it anywhere. The face, and that black and gray pattern.

* * * * *

She wasn't anywhere else in the scrapbook, just that one picture. There was no clue as to why she was there. She might just have been some hanger-on for the band, if I disregarded the fact that she looked just the same now as she had when Kennedy was still president.

What do you do with that?

I turned it over in my mind for hours before admitting that I couldn't make sense of it without calling in help. I knew who to ask: one of my high-school buddies had ended up as assistant editor for a certain well-known music magazine, so I took a good scan of the clipping and emailed it to him.