SHRINKING (original version)

This story takes place in Vancouver, Canada in 2029

Shrinking

By Tremain Haynes

Nov. 24 �" 27, 2013  //  6995 words

 

By 2029 the Harper government had been in power for twenty three years. The Prime Minister and his band were no longer considered newsworthy. Ennui had bred despair among voting Canadians and the electorate had shrunk to seven percent of eligible voters, further entrenching the senile sclerotic power elite. The eviscerated ragtag remnants of the fourth estate could not go far enough to lament the situation but they were toothless and nothing changed because real people had their lie detectors on. The opposition could no longer field candidates who actually stood for anything other than the status quo and in the collective mind of the ninety three percent of Canadians too cynical to vote just running for political office was an indication of either degenerate greed or asininity. When they took a moment to listen distractedly �" when they weren’t too preoccupied with surviving and all it entailed - people mocked them as puppets. The shudder Canadians felt when the Tories assumed the mantle of power had been realized and worse had come to pass. Entitlements had been frozen, shrunken, or eliminated. Control over natural resources, minerals and boreal forests, was practically given away to the Chinese and the Americans for a pittance that was spent with no accounting. In 2029 two thirds of the population lived below the poverty line, an arbitrary line constantly manipulated by Harper’s lackeys to tweak or improve ‘the numbers’. The cost of living was way up but full time employment and high paying jobs had plummeted. Robotics had replaced workers in the manufacturing of what few American, Korean, and Japanese cars were still built in Ontario. The working middle class was a moribund paper entity. As a consequence the universally easy credit of the last half of the Twentieth Century became another forgotten footnote of economic historic. Consumer credit still existed but was more rarified, as it had been originally in the days when Diner’s and American Express were a new idea, used only for expensive impulse purchases like Bentley’s, a Sunreef yacht, a gold Patek Philippe watch, or a bauble from Fred Leighton’s or Spink’s by the mysterious oligarchs at the pinnacle of entitlement. These creatures had money to burn but were not so foolish as to keep enough in their wallets or their cash accounts to spend with debit cards for such stratospheric whims. For these they pulled out their trusty Amex cards. Most Canadians who were not homeless and on the street also had debit cards but they seldom could use them, having too little cash in the bank to make a debit payment practical.

The pressure this state of affairs put on citizens, having built up over the previous decade, was universally vexing. It forced the healthy, especially the young healthy, and even the mobile borderline unhealthy to find ways to provide for themselves. With cities having cut back on every municipal service including policing and the likelihood of judicial consequences for crime diminished, opportunity for profiting in criminal enterprise grew exponentially. Young people no longer asked themselves what they wanted to be; they were consumed with how to get by from day to day. Any prospect of doing something for a length of time or on a permanent basis was denied. People lived in the moment, a day at a time. In the old Hippie spirit, which no one remembered by 2029, the masses had to ‘be here now’. But it was no longer an ideal to strive for; it had become urgent.

Some who were old old, physically frail and otherwise unable to supplement their pension, having retired before the conservatives destroyed ‘the social safety net’ with their lying cries of “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” still remembered times when, at least by comparison, life in Canada seemed civilized and sane. Leon was one of them, an urban dweller who had never married. Before he turned eighty-five he had outlived the friends of his youth. He did not suffer the pangs of loneliness because he was naturally self sufficient with a happy disposition. He had been six feet tall in his prime but he now stood five feet nine inches. He had always been svelte but his weight had dropped from a high of one hundred seventy to one hundred forty five pounds. Long before that, in his fifties brown and red liver spots started showing up that now appeared all over the sagging parchment skin of his thinning face and body like irregular islands on an antique ocean chart. His nose had grown considerably larger at some point, morphing overnight - or so it seemed - into his father’s red eagle beak. His eyes, which had been a deep sapphire all his life, were now a pale, washed out aqua, and when he turned sixty he needed reading glasses. His wispy hair turned a washed out yellowish white when he reached seventy. The final insult to this once handsome man came when his ears and nostrils sprouted an exuberant dark thicket and he had to work diligently to prune it because the sight of it bothered him so much. It tickled when he trimmed inside his nostrils and made him sneeze wetly over and over, yet another annoyance of old age. All this, being ordinary, common, and unpleasant subject matter for sharing, he kept inside or found ways to express in his short stories.

When he was forty five Leon had stopped voting. Following a family tradition, he had always been apolitical. His parents voted religiously all their lives and yet paid no attention to Ottawa. As a boy he puzzled over how they made informed voting decisions and when he matured he realized that they had not done so at all. They had voted out of a sense of obligation; always for the Conservative candidate. Leon ended his voting charade after he became certain of two things: that no matter who held power things just kept getting worse, and that no one he voted for had ever been elected. Looking back, he wondered if he and the millions like him were to blame for the debacle of dysfunction that now crippled Canada or if it had been inevitable. After all, the same muddle prevailed over the whole planet.

Leon had not forgotten the days when his pension cheque covered his cost of living and he could have the odd tasty or pretty luxury with a little extra made on the side by selling off this and that objet towards which he’d become indifferent. He’d moved into the apartment he still lived in then, planning to stay, if he could, until ‘the end’. He hadn’t expected to live another thirty years or he might not have taken a place on the top floor of a three story walk up. But he was healthy then and still was; he could still climb those thirty two steps though he’d begun to avoid doing it as much as possible.

He mostly stayed contentedly at home in his apartment where it was still his habit and his pleasure, as it had been as far back as he cared to remember, to devote many hours of every day to writing. After he retired at seventy, after a thirty five year career in men’s retail clothing at Holt Renfrew where they had kept him on because he was a stellar salesman, he found himself with almost unlimited time to indulge his creativity. He no longer kept track of the time. He was a voracious reader, devoted to Joyce, Chekov, Porter, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and other modern story writers and well versed with the last century’s best known novelists - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mann, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and the recherché of his favorite author, the Parisian, Marcel Proust. He thought himself fortunate to have lived long enough to read their works again and again. In his youth he had modelled his writing on theirs but had found his early work depressingly strained and too subservient under their influence. As he gained experience and confidence, he discovered his own voice and style, which was what he’d been after. From then on his technique changed little except to become more distilled and flowing.

At his advanced age Leon was fortunate to have for a neighbor on one side a six foot, fourteen year old Chinese Canadian bean pole �" the son of a woman who worked long hours at an occupation he knew nothing about. Kevin studied classical piano and practiced religiously for hours while he was home alone on most afternoons. Fortunately he played quite well and Leon enjoyed listening through their adjoining wall. Kevin visited him regularly, shopped for him and took down his garbage so he no longer had to do those things. Leon had little money for groceries and little appetite anyway now that he was old. Leon had never been inside their apartment.

They became acquainted one morning when Kevin was eleven. The central fire alarm had gone off one morning around nine, triggered, they later found out, by a young agitated drunk woman in an act of vengeance on her boyfriend, a resident, for trying to turf her after an ‘all-nighter’ of drugs, alcohol and fornication. No one yet knew about this and eventually the tenants all gathered out on the lawn in front of the building until the firemen came and reset the alarm. Kevin was alone when the bell sounded and as soon as it did he knocked on Leon’s door and asked nervously in a small quaking voice if he could come in. He must have thought the building actually was on fire. Leon was calm, a little put out at the inconvenience, and pretty sure they were in no danger. This was their first encounter and Leon liked the boy immediately; he was so meek and gentle. He seemed quite confused, looking for adult guidance and reassurance. Leon was impressed that Kevin trusted him though they had never met. They didn’t refer to the incident afterwards and Kevin seemed to want to put it out of his mind. In the years that followed Leon watched as he shoot up like a jaunty butter-yellow spring daffodil.

The boy knew about low tech �" computers and the internet, which few used or understood anymore. His generation preferred more up to date communication devices. Seniors had found it almost impossible to adapt to the latest devices, but Kevin found lap tops - PC’s, and Apples - quaint and interesting. He took the trouble to inform himself about the old technology, which he found relatively simple to master. He then kept the old man’s machine running and thus made himself essential. As Leon’s hand was no longer steady enough to write in longhand and he now relied on ‘Word,’ he would have been lost without his neighbor.

Leon had been shrinking a long time until he now thought it would never stop, so long that Kevin could now look down at him from a precedence of three inches. The yellow daffodil was growing into a good looking, reedy giant. He had a round face with a fuzzy brush cut that emphasized his moon shape head. A fine mouth, a small nose, smooth beardless skin, two comical protruding pink ears, and furry eyelashes above his brown eyes peering through tortoise shell frames finished the portrait. This confection perched loftily atop a pair of narrow shoulders that hadn’t yet broadened to the degree that his legs had lengthened. But they would catch up soon enough, Leon thought, surreptitiously observing.

Leon hadn’t ever asked him about it but he had the impression that sometimes Kevin felt lonesome. He must, spending so much time at home alone while his mother worked. He always saw Kevin by himself and he wondered if the boy had any friends his own age. But what he said to him on this occasion was not that simple or direct and he immediately wished he hadn’t spoken so offhandedly about it. He said, “How come you’re always alone, Kevin?”

“Mom doesn’t like me to have friends in the apartment,” he replied.

Leon thought his answer was somewhat evasive.

“So you’ve got friends then?” That was going too far, he said to himself, wishing he hadn’t said it. Or just kept his mouth shut.

“Not really. No.” Now Kevin was being brutally honest. ”I’m kind of a nerd. I’m not athletic and I’m a little awkward physically. I hang with some other geeky guys, guys like me, in school. We don’t socialize, I guess. We text sometimes though” he said, sounding apologetic.

“I used to have a lot of friends,” Leon told him, “when I was young. I was social. I goofed around a lot. I knew a lot of losers and a few winners. The winners had little time for me. I was, uh . . . I was not one of them, not a winner. I kind of squandered my resources, if you must know.”

“I didn’t ask,” Kevin said, defending himself unnecessarily.

“No. Of course you didn’t. That was just an expression. Sorry. Anyway, what I was coming to is that when you get as old as me you may find your friends have died before you. I’m alone now, too. Like you. I have almost no friends and they’re all people picked up randomly in the last few years. People like you. But you will make friends and once you do, close friends, you’ll have little reason to drop in on me like you do now. Do you ever go out at night, Kevin,” he asked, remembering how he had cated around at fourteen.

Kevin gave Leon a look of disbelief. “Out? At night?”

“Yes, out,” he rejoined naively, not picking up on Kevin’s unspoken ‘You must be joking’.

“When was the last time you went out at night, Leon?”Kevin asked him.

“I can’t remember when it was,” he admitted, surprised.

“Well, what was it like?” the boy asked.

“I remember that,” he replied. “I only went out for the garbage. No big deal. I was about seven thirty, summer. It was light out. There was a huge mess around the bin; they may have been on strike again. It stunk like s**t. It was s**t. Not just dog s**t.”

“It always smells like s**t,” Kevin interrupted, his face showing how his stomach turned at the thought.

“Does it? Yes, of course. What was I thinking? Actually, I can smell it up on my balcony sometimes when the wind blows from that direction. I close the door then. Homeless people have no place to go, do they, and people can’t be bothered to clean it up. What would they do? Do with it, I mean?”

“There’s just too much of it out there,” Kevin said, interrupting him.

“Anyway, when I went out that time there was another old guy hanging around the bin, on a bike, poking through it for stuff to sell for cash. He was homeless. He asked if I had a smoke. And a young one your age came drifting along, after cans. He was limping behind a rumbling Safeway cart. Your age and already doing that. From my window I see a constant stream of homeless up and down the lane, going through the bins, day in day out. I couldn’t help either of those two. I felt guilty. Got away as fast as I could. Nothing happened, but I felt vulnerable. Anxious - you know what I mean. ‘There but for fortune, eh?’”

Kevin smiled - a rare pleasure to see. Leone liked to see him smile because he usually didn’t, usually wearing a serious or perplexed expression. Then he said, “That’s why I don’t go out at night, Leon. What for? Too much of that. It’s gross. Anything I want to do, I do in the daytime. I leave the nights to the crazies and the troublemakers. They can have the night.

“I’m a lover, Leon, not a fighter,” he added with another more sheepish smile, that being obviously an expression he’d picked up on social media and was using now before he fully understood it.

“Are you really? A lover, I mean? Already?” Leon asked, unable not to grin.

“No. But I’m going to be,” said Kevin in self-defense, giving away his clear innocence as his cheek turned an attractive rosy pink and he, too, grinned.

“Is that what’s happened to the night time, my boy?” Leon asked, reverting to their original topic of conversation. What was happening to him? Hearing himself say ‘my boy’ he realized he’d let himself go again and that Kevin might object this time. But Kevin still showed no sign of having heard him or of taking offence.

“Around here nights are going all to hell. Yes” the boy rejoined quickly and with certainty, without stumbling.

“Do you think it’s different elsewhere?”

“From what I see on the news, I’d say it’s highly unlikely.”

“You watch the news then?”

“Aljazeera.”

“Really? Good for you.” Leon was impressed. Here was a boy who took his news seriously. Kevin was a seeker.

“You?” he asked.

“I’ve given up both, Kevin. News and night at eighty five you get the feeling you’ve seen it all before. Why do it again? I skip the news and retire early.”

·        * * * * * * * *

Another of Leon's contacts with the outside was with a woman named Cadey who had been visiting him for three years. She worked for a privately funded philanthropic organization that provided housing supplements for senior renters so they could remain in market housing instead of moving into subsidized housing, which was limited and often inferior. She oversaw the disbursement of Leon’s subsidy. Her visits were semi-annual and, were it not for being private philanthropy there would have been none and Leon would long ago have had to move either into a smaller, cheaper place or to a publicly subsidized cubicle somewhere else, and likely to one with drug addicts for neighbors. The latter options were largely mythical by 2029 in that there were less than half as many of them and three times as many applicants as there had been in 2009. Cadey’s English was beautifully accented and perfectly clear. She was from Somalia, a light skinned Negress, tall, statuesque, young, modern. Her children were born in Canada. He could count on her to arrive looking stately, like a queen in the bright flowing garb of her country and a tall turban-like headdress. She was always cheerful and tried to help him in ways having nothing to do with the stated purpose of her call, which was primarily to see that her clients were not dead (being seniors) and not abusing the subsidy. In some cases she found her clients had passed away and their families had taken over their apartments and that the subsidy was still being paid into their parent’s bank account. Such abuses were a sampling of the desperation that impoverished Canadian families dealt with. After three years, she knew Leon was not abusing it and that he was still alive was immediately evident. So her visits had become a social occasion to which both of them looked forward. She would make him tea and they would sit in his living room in the sunshine, discussing whatever came to mind.

On her visit in the spring of 2029, he and Cadey were doing precisely that.

“You’re looking well, Leon. How have you been since I saw you last time?”

“Still slowing down. Doesn’t seem possible, does it, that I can get any slower than I already am. I’m not liking it, of course. Who would? It’s been happening so long I don’t expect anything else. But there it is and I try to take it in stride. The only fun I have any more is writing. I like it more and more.”

“Stories? Nonfiction?”

“I’ve finished my memoirs. That took me ten years. Biggest project I’ve ever taken on. But I had to write it. I had to.

“Do you ever think about publishing something?”

“Nah. Too much bother and effort. I’d rather save the energy I have left for writing.”

“But your memoirs; after all that, surely you’d like people, or someone to read it?”

“I’ll leave it to posterity to decide if there’s anything worth publishing.”

“Talking about that, Leon, do you have a will?”

“An old one. I made it on line years ago. Haven’t looked at it in I don’t know how long. Come to think of it, all the people I left things to are gone. Every one. I should do something. Thanks for reminding me. Any suggestions on what to do about a new one?”

Cadey said she would look into it and call him.

Then Leon changed the subject. “Tell me, Cadey,” he said, “what does your name mean, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“’Fair skinned’” she replied, drawing her curled fingers lightly over her cheek to point out her complexion. “My mother and father were dark and the first time they saw me they immediately knew I had to be called ‘Cadey’, ‘the fair one’. It’s a popular name for girls in Somalia. Somalians admire light skin. It’s popular although white westerners aren’t, for obvious reasons.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Leon said, wondering what she meant by ‘obvious reasons’. But he thought twice about probing and held his tongue. “And you’re a lovely, wonderful, kind person,” he added instead, quite out of the blue and a little taken aback. In the last few years thoughts and questions slipped off his tongue without pausing to consider the consequences as they never had before, words he regretted that often embarrassed him. People excused or forgave it because he was old, but he disliked doing it nonetheless. He had just blundered again. What I said sounded like cheap flattery, he thought as his color heightened.

Cadey smiled and blushed charmingly also. “So are you,” she replied. She hadn’t noticed.

At one point a bit farther along in her visit she told him, “There have been some changes to my procedure, Leon. New policy. I have to ask all my clients certain questions I never have had to ask before. The reason is to see if recipients are still mentally sound enough to continue living on their own. I already know you’re mentally and physically sound but it’s a formality and I must comply. Okay? We can’t subsidize people slipping into dementia. Understand? Are you alright with that? If I ask you some questions?”

Leon had no doubt that he was still mentally sharp. His short term memory was not as great as in the past but it was still alright and his long term memory was more than up to the challenge, too.

He agreed to let Cadey test his mental competence and she proceeded to ask him the questions.

He told her the date, his address, his phone number, the name of the prime minister, the name of the premier and the date of his birth.

She did not insult him by congratulating him on getting all the answers right. He needed none of that.

“That’s fine, Leon,” she said. “How are you managing moneywise,” she asked, changing the subject. It was not a question she was supposed to ask. It was personal.

“It’s very tight, Cadey. Every day it’s something else. Difficult choices. What to give up; what do I need most. More and more food items I can’t have anymore. No filet mignon. No caviar. No Champagne. Fortunately I don’t eat like I used to; sometimes tea with toast and jam for supper �" jam, if I’m rich! I need few prescriptions but even so they’re expensive. I haven’t had a raise in my pension for ten years, and the last one was twenty five bucks a month. It’s scary finding yourself at the mercy of the fates, you know. They’re not always kind.

“But enough about that,” he continued, dragging himself out of that dark hole. “How are you getting along? You can’t be making much doing this” he said, referring to social work, a nearly extinct form of employment. “How is your family?”

“Thanks, Leon,” she replied, grateful to any client who asked about her and her little clan. “Yassin is getting big, he’s seven now and goes to school every day. He is in grade two and his teacher thinks he’s smart. I think he’s a dreamer. Maybe he will be a poet. He’s indifferent about school; it bores him. But his grades are actually very good. Hayat is nine. She loves school and she is even brighter than Yassin. She thinks she will be an engineer. They’re opposites. Canada is wonderful. Such opportunity. Even now, after twenty three years of Mr. Harper. Somalia is terrible. It is an impossible country to live in; there is no government, no law. Here there is still work for engineers, I think. It’s not a bad choice for Hayat. We are a fortunate family, living here.”

“Are they healthy?” he asked.

“Thank god, yes. And Jama is recovering well from his back operation. He’ll be looking for work again soon.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Cadey. He should be grateful to you,” Leon said.

Six months earlier, her husband, Jama, had been in a motor accident while driving a bread delivery truck downtown. It left him paralyzed and the driver of the other vehicle, who was faulted for it, dead. Only with a great deal of prolonged finagling and thanks to the luck of her being enrolled in a company medical plan that covered all of them, had Cadey met the costs of Jama’s surgeries, his long hospitalization, and his months in rehab. Now his mobility and health were restored. It had been difficult, providing for the family alone for that long. At first the medical system was stubborn and reluctant to take on a situation like Jama’s with such a dubious outcome. Cadey had written countless letters, faxed documents, sent hundreds of emails to government and insurance offices, and waited many hours, the majority of them wasted, to talk to strangers on the phone attempting to put a spark under the a*s of inert bureaucracy. But in the end it had all been worthwhile. The alternative would have been unbearable: living death for Jama, which would have placed huge obstacles in the lives of her children and hers. This spectre drove her to succeed. The outcome of the surgeries might have been failure �" if, for example, the surgeon had found something unexpected and irreversible or if he had cut too deep or missed something and not cut at all. Who could know all the things that might have gone wrong? But nothing did. And so Cadey, Yassin and Hayat would soon have Jama back the same as always; Jama would have his life back; the family would remain unbroken. Currently all was okay in Cadey’s world.

These thoughts ran through her mind during the few milliseconds of silence before she added, “Things are alright again, Leon. Fingers crossed.”

“Yes. Fingers crossed. Always, fingers crossed. We never know.” Leon gave Cadey a serious smile.

She gave him a peck on his forehead and her assurance that his rent subsidy would continue as before, which left him feeling neither up nor down, as she went off to see her next client. Only a decrease would have affected him. Even a small increase would have mattered little. Either way, he could put it out of his mind for another six months.

·        * * * * * * *

The company that managed Leon’s building liked having him as a tenant. He paid his rent, never fussed, and was grateful to live there. The pool of prospective trustworthy tenants had gotten small and there seemed to be a growing number of odd balls literally ‘out there’. Youngsters would move in, find themselves short of rent money a few months on, and move themselves and their few dirty sticks of broken furniture out again in the middle of the night leaving back rent unpaid. More often than not they could not look after their apartments and left them needing extensive repair work. Then the management had to see to fixing them up and paying for it before they could re-rent them. It was an ongoing and expensive problem. Leon seemed a heaven sent tenant and they didn’t want to lose him. There were also the bedbugs, a frightful plague that had gone on throughout the city for two decades. The prevalence of short term tenant carriers was partly to blame for it but bedbugs were everywhere and it was too late and impossible anyway to pinpoint the cause. Leon had been afflicted by them three times and was just lucky it hadn’t been worse. Many of the tenants around him had suffered more from the miniscule red beasties. Whenever they invaded his suite the building management always brought in the exterminator promptly, paid for it, and apologized for the inconvenience. That was considerable and the upheaval and the hit and miss nature of the long and dreaded process was both disheartening and exhausting, especially for a frail victim like him. Yet the very thought of ever moving again sent him into a worse tail spin and he would not think about it. It would surely be the death of him.

After he had lived there so long and given them no trouble to speak of, they showed their appreciation in an unprecedented way by asking the building manager, Marie, a cheerful, elderly woman of sixty, to do his laundry for him. Every two weeks she came in, changed his bed and took his laundry to the laundry room where she washed, dried, and folded it tidily. She’d been looking after the place a long time and they were already buddies before this came to pass. From then on they visited on laundry days and looked forward to it. He waited for her with loonies and quarters at the ready for the machine.

Marie and her husband Rudy had both  worked for the same company managing rental buildings for them in the neighborhood. Leon barely remembered Rudy. He was a Science professor who had taken up building management to make ends meet when he was unable to find work in his profession after he immigrated to Canada from Warsaw. He and Marie had been renters and when he, leaving her with one income and no pension, she struggled to survive and make the rent on the old apartment to which she was sentimentally attached. She had overcome that difficulty and was still there. Occasionally Marie rented the second bedroom to ESL students for extra income although she found it difficult, being such a stickler for privacy, etiquette, and propriety while playing hostess to strangers for extended periods of time. At the same time she found these students interesting to have around and she usually enjoyed sharing her home with them after she got over the initial discomfort of a stranger underfoot, their peculiar habits and foreign ways.

Marie had osteoporosis. It had given her a large pronounced hump, which, being a devout Catholic, she bore in silence like a soldier saint. She was a small, humble, soft spoken, old fashioned, childless widow with two married sister’s still living at home in Montreal. She visited them twice a year; it was her one indulgence. No matter how poor she was �" and while she never talked about finances her poverty was plain like everyone’s �" she managed money like a pro, always able to screw away enough for airfare, which was expensive. Leon wondered how it was possible. Either she saved or her relatives helped with it. But she was a proud woman and so he doubted that she would let them. Aside from the hump, which was there and which no earthly power could erase or disguise, Marie was not one to spend money on apparel. She seemed to wear the same dull outfits until their long-in-coming death, clean and tidy but faded and worn. She did not wear much makeup and what she bought wore was cheap. In addition to an overly dark black ring of mascara above her unfortunate short stubby eyelashes and below her eyes, which gave a clown like effect she put on only a nondescript shade of lipstick and ghostly white face powder. It wasn’t flattering but she was just vain enough not to be seen without it. She also found sufficient funds to have her hair dyed and perm-ed regularly, and cheaply, producing a thin mass of dark curls that looked absurd against her pink scalp. There was not enough hair to cover it. The impression she made on Leon was that of perfect acceptance of life’s absurdities, she being one example. Marie made him smile.

The next time Marie came for her chore Kevin was visiting. The two of them were engrossed in conversation about spring, which was advancing with more haste than Leon had ever known it to have. The breeze being not from the laneway, Leon had left the sliding glass balcony door open. The mood of the day prompted him to recall for Kevin what spring had been like thirty years before - not long in Leon’s eyes though more than twice Kevin’s age and an eternity in his. It had been more gradual, wetter, cooler, and longer. He was about to begin a self-indulgent ramble about it as Kevin brought a tray with a pot of tea, cups and saucers, milk, lemon, sugar, and a plate of his mother’s homemade cookies into the living room, where Leon was settled comfortably upon a mound of tapestry pillows on one half of the loveseat with his bare feet drawn under him. Kevin also barefoot sat opposite on the rocking chair.

Before he began, Marie knocked.

“Would you get it, Kev” he asked his friend, using the diminutive for the first time and wondering if Kevin would object.

He got up to answer the door without comment. Kevin knew Marie and was aware that she helped Leon with his laundry and so he welcomed her.

“Join us for tea, Marie? It’s hot and fresh,” he coaxed, adding “Kevin just made it and he brought over some of Tammy’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Best in town.”

“Thanks you. Yes, I just will,” she said, sitting beside Leon who now put his feet on the floor to make room for her beside him.

“My, don’t they look delicious! Your place is looking lovely,” she said for openers. She always had something nice to say for everyone no matter how she was feeling.

It does look good, Leon thought to himself. The sun was bright and the sky, blue.

“Thanks. I get good light here. That’s why I took it; the light. The place I was in before this, which I can scarcely remember, faced north. It was on the ground floor. It felt like a cave. When I saw this place I knew it was the one. I looked for a long time before I found it, too. It was no walk in the park. Yes, I’ve always loved it. That’s why I never moved. And I moved thirteen times in 1968, my first year in the city.”

“Really?” Kevin said with some surprise, evidently thinking thirteen moves something of a record and not informed that Leon had lived in one family home until he was nineteen and left for school. “It’s hard to imagine that,” he added.

“Isn’t it just, Kevin” Marie agreed, smiling at both of them, including both of them. She was not like some building managers, a fearsome ogre out for herself and to screw the residents; neglectful and irresponsible. She knew the tenants of her buildings by name and was friendly to them in so far as they let her or wanted her to be. Kevin was a respectful, intelligent boy and she liked him. This was the first time, however, that they had ever had an occasion to have tea or converse.

Leon enjoyed watching them get over their perfectly natural reserve.

“How is Tammy doing with her real estate course, Kevin?” she asked him.

Until that moment Leon had known nothing about Tammy; Kevin never spoke about her and Leon didn’t ask. He was only mildly curious about her and wondered if his lack of interest was a side effect of aging.

“She’s taking her time with it. She’s so busy making a living she hardly has time to study. It will be a while before she can take the exam, I mean before she can sit for it.”

“Yes. I guess accountants are busy people, straightening out everyone else’s mistakes.”

“She works all the time and when she’s at home she studies. I don’t know how she does it. I feel lazy around her �" and she loves to remind me,” he added.

“What about you? Are you looking forward to summer?” Marie asked Kevin, feeling it politic to change the subject.

“I suppose,” he replied, showing little enthusiasm. “My Mom’s sending me to what they call ‘Piano Camp’ for a month. That will eat up half of summer.”

“What on earth is that? You don’t sound excited about it.” Marie seemed to commiserate.

“It’s some awful invention that my piano instructor and a few other instructor friends of his dreamed up where they get their best students into a sequestered setting and do intensive piano studies for a whole month. It’s what I already do all year only more. There’s no time for fun; no freedom. All we’ll do there is practice, practice, practice. And at the end of it, each of us gives a solo recital before all the assembled parents. You can imagine how awful that’ll be. I wish I could get out of it.”

“But Kevin, you play so well,” Leon interrupted.

“No, I don’t, Leon. You may think I do but I know better. You can only hear me through the wall. I don’t want to play piano. I hate practicing. I only do it because my mother insists. My dad, too, actually. I do it to please them.”

“Your Dad?” Marie and Leon said in unison, neither of them having ever heard mention that Kevin had a Dad before this.

“Yes. He lives in New Jersey. He teaches in New York at Julliard. He has this delusion that I’m a born musical genius. They both do.”

Kevin had a peculiar way of leaving a great deal unsaid.

Leon empathized with his neighbor. His own parents had channeled him, against his instincts, into paths he had been reluctant to follow and these efforts had been stillborn. They had pushed his brother to study piano against his will and it had ended, like this with Kevin and his parent would end, with his brother giving it up entirely at sixteen. It had left him bitter towards his parents for what he had missed bent over the keys in the drudgery of endless hours of Chopin and Liszt.

He wondered how much longer Kevin would go on being a good, obedient son. When would he rebel? After all, it must be horrendous, he thought, for a six foot, fourteen year old, overflowing with hormones, to live intimately with a domineering mother in a six hundred square foot one bedroom, even if she was gone all day.

Marie changed the subject again. “So. Leon. How is everything else going for you? Getting what you need? Besides Kevin, I mean?”

Now what did Marie mean by that, he asked self consciously? The woman had a strange way of phrasing things sometimes. She could be awkward about it. This seemed to be such an occasion. He decided to act as if she had not said it. Then, all at once, he thought better of that.

“Kevin is a friend. We like each other’s company and he visits when he wants. I don’t even have your phone number though, do I?” he said directly to him.

“I guess not,” Kevin replied, not offering it to him.

It seemed so like an obtuse fourteen year old to not see the point of a line in a conversation, Leon thought, observing Kevin doing that very thing.

“Yes. He’s a good friend,” he continued. “He helps me out with shopping and he’s good company �" when he wants company. Right?”

Kevin nodded affirmatively, missing the point yet again.

“Fortunately I’m not the kind of person who suffers from loneliness, Marie. I write, and I read, and it goes a long, long way against depression. Kev’s a reader, too, and he also picks up books I reserve online at the library for me. He’s versatile. Pour us all some more tea, my versatile young friend!” he sighed.

“But you asked how I’m getting along, didn’t you, Marie, ‘aside from Kevin’, I think you said.” Leon just couldn’t get that irksome remark out of his head. What was she suggesting? He relaxed despite that and felt his tongue growing loose, rather as if he’d had a glass of sherry.

“Aside from him,” Kevin was looking fixedly at him. He started a new sentence. “I don’t try to do much anyway; I know my limits, Marie. A long life is a challenge for a single man especially if you live alone. Most don’t understand how difficult that can be until it’s too late. Then there it is. All your friends are dead; there’s no one left. My days pass in a dreamlike way. The hours. To my dismay, I have almost outlived hope and desire. Neither of you can understand that but you may one day. It’s really something when it happens. I never thought it would, that I could ever defeat them I mean. It must connect with my having almost no future left. Whatever there is, is just a blip. One bad chill could blow it away and take me, too. But I haven’t answered your question, have I.”

He paused for a second before he finished. “I could use more money, Marie; I believe I would feel more secure. I might even do something; I don’t know. But I can’t complain. I’ve got my health, my work always lifts me up, and I still prefer living on my own. I like it that way. And, for now, if I don’t outlive you, I’ve still got friends.”