The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (15 page)

Your uncle is in the early stages of dementia,” Ruben said to Robyn. “Maybe a little bit further along than that, but not much. He can converse with difficulty and has some trouble with immediate memory. I believe, however, that the damage is not so far along that it can’t be ameliorated.”

Ptolemy didn’t mind the doctor explaining to the child. She was his eyes and ears in a world just out of reach. She deciphered what things meant and then told him like a busboy in a restaurant that runs down to the waiter and then comes back with information for the cook.

“What does that mean, Doctor?”

“He’s losing the ability to use his mind to solve problems, remember things, and to communicate. His language skills are still pretty strong, but his cognitive abilities are weakening.”

“What’s cognitib—?” Robyn asked, frowning, trying to understand what she could do for him.

“It means thinking.”

“I wanna make it so that I could think good for just a couple mont’s, Doc,” Ptolemy said then. “I got some things to remembah, and relatives to look aftah. And, you know, if I . . . if I mess up, then it’s all lost, my whole life.”

“What will be lost?” the mustachioed man asked.

“I, I . . . well, I don’t have the words right now,” Ptolemy said. “You see? That’s the problem.” Ptolemy placed his fingertips on the edge of the doctor’s desk, as if the image of his words were there.

“There are medicines in general use today,” Ruben said, listing five or six names. “None of them are very effective. I mean, something might be able to keep you the way you are without getting worse for a while, but ...”

“Uncle wants his mind back,” Robyn said, a look of surprise and anger on her lovely face.

Ruben smiled.

“And I’m pretty sure he got medical insurance,” the girl said. “We found some insurance papers when I was cleanin’ up his apartment. He’s a veteran and the army will probably be able to pay sumpin’.”

Ruben’s smile extended into time.

“Well?” the girl asked.

“Mr. Grey,” Bryant Ruben said, like the baker that used to greet him.

“Yes sir, Doctor.”

“Do you want to live to see a hundred?”

A hundred years. Ptolemy thought back over all the time that had brought him to that patient’s chair.

“Time is like a river,” Coydog had told the boy. “It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin’. You couldn’t stop it no more than you could fly away.”

Ptolemy’s river had been rough and fast, rushing over stones, throwing him around like a half-dead catfish. More than once he’d opened his eyes on a day he’d wished he’d never seen.

“No, Doctor. I on’y need a few months.”

Ruben smiled again.

“Robyn?” the doctor asked.

“Uh-huh?”

“Medicine isn’t perfect. Many times, especially with new drugs, they cause as many problems as they solve. They only get better by way of trial and error.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what I mean by that?”

“That if I take some new pill that ain’t been tested a lot I might could get sick?”

“You might could die,” the doctor said, managing not to insult the girl.

Robyn nodded. Ptolemy nodded too.

“This is too much for a child,” the old man said.

“She brought you here, Mr. Grey.”

“If we gonna talk about death, she could wait outside.”

Ruben smiled again. “You’re just about half mad,” he said, “not quite. I’m the other half of that.”

“You like the crazy white doctor down in Adamsville used to come down an’ help colored men get shot and stabbed when the hospitals turnt them away?”

“I’m more like the gunshot or the knife wound.”

Ptolemy heard these words clearly, and he understood, even though he could not have explained this knowledge.

“You want my life, Doctor?”

“There’s a drug,” Bryant Ruben said. “They make it in a town in Southeast Asia where there are fewer laws governing research. A group of physicians from all over the world that work there, remotely, are testing a medicine that might be able to help you.”

“A trial-and-mistake medicine?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah. It’s dangerous, and would be illegal if the FDA knew about it. It doesn’t always work, and when it does, it burns bright for just a little while. We need subjects who have not deteriorated so much that they have lost too much, so that we can tell where we went right and where we went wrong . . . after the subject dies.”

“Dies?” Robyn stood up, putting her hand on Ptolemy’s shoulder. “Let’s get outta here, Uncle.”

But Ptolemy Grey didn’t stand. Instead he bowed his head and pressed his fingertips against the bones of his skull. He’d caught a few of the doctor’s words. He’d grasped at them something like when he was a child chasing chicken feathers floating on the breeze.

“Come on, Uncle.”

Ptolemy raised his head; staring into those beady green eyes, he realized with a shock that he was staring into the face of the Devil.

“Devil a angel just like all the rest,” Coydog had told him more than once. “Devil came to the Lord and demanded more. His wings was singed an’ he was th’ow’d down, but he still a angel, and you got to give him his due.”

The two men, Dr. Ruben and Ptolemy, looked at each other across the desk. There was the heavy scent of roses drifting in from the open door. Robyn’s hand was on Ptolemy’s shoulder.

“Do I sign something?” Ptolemy asked the Devil.

“A form willing your body to a university I have a relationship with. It says that upon your death we can examine your remains.”

“Uncle Grey, we don’t have to listen to this man.”

“Do you promise that it woik?” Ptolemy asked, a slight smile on his dark lips.

“Not always. There are three phases ...”

The doctor explained but Ptolemy did not care, or even try, to comprehend. He watched the fallen angel’s expressions and gestures, looking for signs and portents. There was a rushing sound in his ears and his heart ran fast.

“. . . that has been the last phase,” Bryant Ruben was saying. “We’ve changed the cocktail, hopefully to alleviate this symptom, but I’d be lying if I promised you anything.”

Devil the most honest man walk the earth,
Coydog had said.
He offer you his treasure and take your soul. They call him the Prince of Liars, but he ain’t no different than a bartender: you pays your nickel and drinks your poison.

“Uncle.”

“If I drink yo’ medicine, that will be for you, right?” Ptolemy asked, picking over the words carefully, slowly.

“You’re likely to find relief from your cognitive issues.”

“But you wanna pay me, right?”

“I would give you a sum of cash . . . twenty-five hundred dollars.”

It was Ptolemy’s turn to grin. The back door of his mind was open for a moment. He didn’t understand most of what either of them was saying but he could follow anything the doctor said with an answer that he knew must be true.

“Keep yo’ money, Satan,” he said. “Gimme the poison for you, but I don’t need no money.”

A deal was struck, over Robyn’s protests. Papers were signed, plans were made, and the men shook hands. Ruben saw them both to the door.

“You paid Antoine Church for this?” Robyn asked at the door.

The green-eyed Devil-doctor smiled for her, barely nodding. She sucked her tooth at him.

 

 

 

Ptolemy laughed on the bus ride home.

“Uncle, we cain’t do this,” Robyn said.

“It’s already done, baby.”

“But you don’t have to go through with it.”

“I already done the hard part.”

“What’s that?” the dark child asked.

“I done played the Devil an’ beat him at his own game. On’y way he could take my soul is if he give to me. But I tricked him. I made a fair trade wit’ him. I give ’im my body but not my soul.”

“Uncle, you crazy.”

“Not for long.”

 

 

 

Olga Slatkin, a young woman of Lithuanian origin, came to the apartment the following Monday.

“I vas told by my agency to come here and give Mr. Grey these antibiotic shots for five days,” she said to Robyn.

“That was Dr. Ruben?” the girl asked.

“No. No, I do not know this man. I vork for a voman named Borman.”

Olga was young and unattractive but still Ptolemy liked her face.

She gave him one injection in his left arm and then another in his right.

“Why he got to have two shots?” Robyn asked, hovering behind the nurse.

“One is the medicine, and the other is for what the medicine might do.”

“Like what?” Robyn demanded.

“Fever, nausea, diarrhea, pain,” the Eastern European said, her face flat and her voice matter-of-fact.

“Uncle, I don’t think that you should be doin’ this,” Robyn said after the nurse had gone.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s the only chance we got.”

“But you old,” the child complained. “You might could get so sick that you might could die.”

“I’ma die anyways,” he said. “But this way I won’t get so lost when I look around the room, I’ll have my double-u ara eye en gee for myself, and then I could turn on the thing, the thing, the thing . . . That thing there,” he said, pointing at the television.

Robyn knew what Ptolemy got like when he spoke too long or got excited. If he went on much longer he’d stop making any sense at all and get frustrated and then sad.

“Okay, Uncle Grey,” she said, “but that doctor said that this medicine would probably kill you.”

Ptolemy was looking at his hands by then. He was wondering once again why words failed him after just a few sentences.

That night the place on his left arm where the nurse had injected him started to burn. He didn’t tell Robyn, though. He knew that the girl could stop the nurse from coming if she really wanted to.

 

 

 

Olga came again the next day, and that night Ptolemy’s arm seethed all the way to his shoulder.

“Did you live on a farm?” he asked her on the third day as she injected the medicine.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “How did you know that?”

“You could see the country in people’s eyes,” he said. “It’s like deep skies and long times’a bein’ quiet.”

Olga Slatkin smiled at her charge and then frowned.

“How haff you been feeling, Mr. Grey?”

Robyn was in the living room, watching the TV, because she didn’t like seeing him given his medicine.

“My arms burn some,” he said.

“Do you vant me to stop?”

“No, baby. I could take the pain. I seen Coy dance on fire, but he never told, never.”

By Thursday the pain was in both arms, his chest, and his head too. On Friday, when Shirley Wring came for a visit, Robyn had to turn her away.

“Uncle Grey got a fever,” Robyn told the older woman. “He says that maybe you could come back next week. He’s real sick and cain’t get out of bed.”

Shirley Wring took in these words as she stood there, staring at the teenager.

“Why don’t you like me, child?” Shirley asked at last.

“He really is sick,” Robyn complained. “I ain’t lyin’ to you.”

“I believe you, but you still don’t like me and I don’t know what it is I done to make you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Miss Wring. I don’t even think about you at all.”

“See? Now that’s just rude. Why you wanna be rude to me? I’m your uncle’s friend.”

“He not my real uncle,” the woman-child said to the woman. “But that’s what it is. He don’t know who he lookin’ at or what he sayin’ half the time. People wanna take his money or his things. He paid your utility bill and now you come by all the time.”

Shirley Wring smiled then and nodded. She walked into the living room, noticing that the door to Ptolemy’s bedroom was closed.

“I told you that he cain’t get outta his bed,” Robyn said, a strain of grief in her young voice.

“I ain’t gonna bother him,” Shirley told the girl.

The older woman sat down on a maple chair in front of a TV tray that Ptolemy sometimes used as a table for intimate teas with his friend.

“It was my phone bill,” Shirley said. “I asked him for five dollars and he gave me ten. But I offered him this to hold.”

She placed her faded cherry-red purse on the TV tray and took out a smaller black velvet bag. From this she took the piece of pink tissue paper which held a lovely golden ring sporting a large green stone. This she handed to Robyn.

The girl could see that the metal was gold and the stone was precious. She had seen nice things in magazines, on TV shows, and through thick, bulletproof glass.

“Cabochon emerald,” Shirley Wring said.

After fondling the stone a moment or two Robyn held it out to Shirley, but the half-blind woman would not take it.

“My great-grandmother stoled it outta her ex-master’s house in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s bluecoats freed the slaves,” Shirley said in a tone of voice that was obviously quoting family lore. “She told her son that even though the ring was worth a whole lifetime for a poor black family that he should keep it as a treasure that stood for our freedom. My grandfather was named Bill Hollyfield, but he changed his name to Wring to honor his mother’s gift to him.

“I want you to give that ring to your uncle and tell him to get bettah and that I want him to be well because he has been like a real man to me when I was down past my last dollar.”

Robyn felt the gravity of the old woman’s gift like a stone in her chest. She wanted to return Shirley’s family name and history but the old woman’s wounded eyes stopped her.

“I cain’t take this from you, Miss Wring.”

“It’s not for you, sugah. It’s for Mr. Ptolemy Grey. It’s me tellin’ him how much that ten dollahs he give me meant.”