Georgie.

I don’t know where this came from. I just started writing about Georgie, the figure of one of my earlier, weirder attempts at pseudopoetic form.

–

Georgie says to me to lean closer. When I do, he says, “Janet never knew anything about me.” He says it more tenderly than most old men say anything, unless they’re on their death bed, and then they’re suddenly devoid of masculinity, and the only thing that matters is that they’re touching a human hand, or feeding off of someone’s love embrace. Georgie is on his death bed.

He says to me, “Ronald, think about that. I knew her for thirty years, and the most we ever said was how pissed we were at one another. That was the common theme.”

To that I don’t answer. Georgie never seems to invite an answer. His words are proclamations. I think he thinks there are things to learn from his speech. I think he wants there to be. Instead, I stand stoically, and every so often I pat his hand, and when his grip becomes uncomfortably tight, I disentangle our hands and make a show of flicking the cord of his IV with my fingers, like they do on TV. For someone as bright as Georgie was in his day, I don’t know if he understands my discomfort, or if he is by now oblivious. Neither would surprise me; both speak to Georgie’s condition. In the former, he’s an ass, or just lonely; in the latter, he’s a little too numb to be alive.

“Ronald?”
“Yeah, Georgie?”
“Janet doesn’t clean my shit up anymore.”

Pause. Beat. Put your hand back in Georgie’s? Keep him from saying anything more…?

“She put me in this place so she wouldn’t have to clean up my shit. I read somewhere that true love is when the person you’ve been with forever is willing to clean up after you when you shit your pants. What does that say about us?”

I want to tell Georgie it means nothing. Cleaning up shit is dirty business. Not everyone is equipped for it. My own mother was a germaphobe; hated cleaning up after our messes. She made our father change our diapers. To this day I wonder how they had sex. Probably they used a condom, even after his vasectomy… Maybe we were adopted.

But that doesn’t wash with Janet. Janet was a nurse during the war. I don’t think there’s much that Janet hasn’t seen, and most of it had to have been worse than shit.

I think the simplest explanation is that Georgie slept around, and Janet always knew, and for a long time that was fine. She would wash his clothes, and listen to him bitch, and when he started to get sick, she would pick up his prescriptions at the pharmacy and agree with him when he thought the game show host on TV was sitting at the couch in their living room. But there was that demarcation line of disgusting things that Janet must have thought she didn’t have to deal with, and, in all fairness, probably shouldn’t have had to. Besides, the war’s long done.

To Georgie, that sort of thing shouldn’t offend. To Janet, it means everything. To Georgie, cleaning shit is love. To Janet, love is when your dick stays in your pants for more than five minutes. There’s a demarcation line.

I finger the IV bag for five minutes before I can think of anything to tell Georgie. He might be kind of an asshole, but he’s a dying man, and there’s going to be no real comfort in his remaining days. The progression of the illness means more than a loss of dignity: it means reckless, sweeping pain; the kind of pain that has no higher reason and survives as long as Georgie does. It’s the pain that worries Georgie most.

I tell him, “Dad,

…

(Unfinished)