He loves the night, when the darkness envelops him and soothes his old, weary body. Everyone else is locked in their rooms, squirming between their sheets, flailing about in their nightly battles with sleep, muttering incoherent ramblings, some of them bound to their beds with the senility and insanity swarming from their skulls in multitudinous droves. Forgotten people, creatures abandoned by their young. People existing in their own universe, absently awaiting acceptance into the exclusive club of death. Awaiting death, awaiting difference. Their days drag on, timeless.
Age and wisdom have made him calm, placid. Necessary requirements for a job like this.
He loves to walk down these halls, each old weary foot faithfully plodding him along these rooms, these cages, these possessions.
He owns this place. His name is not on the deed but he owns this place. He knows everyone, he sees everything. He is the omniscient overseer, the caretaker of this forsaken corner of the universe.
He knows that the lady in Room 256 cries every night for the child she buried. He knows that there’s a little boy who visits his grandfather every day, religiously, although the crumpled bag of bones in Room 469 spits at him and flings objects in his direction. He knows there’s a woman in Room 562 who had been raped of her memory and remembers nothing but hymns, which she sings every night before going to bed, her powerful and haunting voice piercing the paper-thin walls.
He knows everything, every square inch of this place. Age and wisdom emanate from his core. Age and wisdom and pride. He owns this place. Nobody knows it but he owns this place.
He pauses sometimes, standing in the corridor outside the room of one of his favourites, his ear straining to discern what may be happening behind closed doors. He loves their unpredictability, their unusualness. Others, the unconfined ones, are too governed by rules. These people, his people, follow no such rules, no conventions of human behaviour, nothing. Others pity them, send donations to support them and to silence their own conscience. Their lives are permeated with pity, scattered with haberdasheries of brittle, plastic compassion.
He does not pity them. He admires them. They are his people.
Sometimes, the families visit. The little girls gleefully hugging a bewildered Grandma, the little boys chattering away to a nonchalant Grandpa, the unisex teenagers shifting their weight and looking anywhere but at the decrepit creature in front of them that they used to love a long long time ago before they discovered sex drugs and rock ’n roll. The adults, nudging their young forward insistently, whilst nervously hanging onto the edges of the room themselves.
Ah, the sweet hypocrisy.
He loves it, though… the transparency of their actions. Such simple creatures. These are the ones he pities. The visitors. The others. The outsiders.
The ones that stare into the cages, inwardly hoping for eternal youth and sanity, praying to a forgotten, absent, ill-willed God for more time whilst praying for their parents to die and end their misery and lift the burdens placed on their offspring.
They never stay long. They pack up their cars and drive away, relief flooding their faces, their shoulders un-hunching themselves, their smiles re-etching themselves into their faces.
He is always happy to see them go. He likes his people to be left under his care.
He loves it most at night, when the on-call nurse is dozing at her station, when no one notices him dragging his weary old body along these corridors, when he can look in on his pets caringly, lovingly, without masking the depth of his emotion, without being rudely interrupted by the medical staff tumbling all over themselves and getting in his way.
He owns this place. Every brick, every wall, every room, every building. He owns this place and these people, these people abandoned by their young who no longer want to own them. He owns them all, and loves them all, a father figure to hundreds of lost minds trying to find their way home, trying to find their way into that exclusive club of death.
He loves it at night, when everyone is asleep, these individual beings so exempt from the conformity of the modern world, these individual pets in their cages.
The caretaker finishes his nightly rounds and returns to his roost, settling down beside the nurse’s station in his box, curling his tail around his body and licking vigorously at the disobedient stray fur before tucking his paws under and snuggling down deeper into his worn woolen blanket. He is old, but he is particular, precise, set in his ways.
An old man, much like his pets, much like his beloved creatures trapped in their own decaying minds and enclosed in their cages.
