The Visitor

I’m not sure what it was that drew me to Mr. Moreau. The sight of him alone was ironic: the stark contrast of his shiny, silver hair against his rugged, puckered skin. It was as if his hair had only lost hue, never luster. I could see that time had not been so kind to the rest of him. His jaw was tightly clamped - piling the lines and crevices of his tired skin over his cheekbones, giving way to the sunken outline of a skull. There were divots and depressions in his forehead, and a waxy, scaly film hanging over his eyelids. His chest rattled with a hiccup-like movement each time he drew a breath. He smelled familiar, like the pages of an old novel high atop a dusty shelf. Well-read, once loved, but bested by time.

The nurses would whisper about him in the break room, murmer that he had witnessed the murder of his wife - some even suggesting he had committed the crime himself. They would talk about it over egg salad like they were discussing the weather. His file was locked away long before any of the staff could see it.

I had never seen him receive visitors. After my off-days, I would go back through the visitors log to see if anyone had come. They never did. Mr. Moreau never got so much as a Christmas card. If it bothered him, no one knew. He didn’t speak, except for the disconcerting wheeze he made when the nurse would interrupt his gaze to give him his medicine.

“Sit up, Mr. Moreau. Kat’s gonna read to you today.”

I read to him every day at shift change. I’m not really sure when it started or why I felt the need to continue - it just became a habit. Sometimes it would be the Sunday comics. Others it would be a feature from Time. Every now and then a Shakespearan sonnet. No matter the genre, he remained expressionless, his eyes always fixed on the twisted oaks outside his window.

One day I decided to read some of my own poetry. Maybe it would be so good, or so bad, he would give some kind of response. I shuffled forward, pulling my chair underneath me. My thumb slid under the front cover of my little black notebook, and my eyes floated upward to see if he had noticed my proximity to him. Nothing.

I repositioned myself in a feeble attempt to shutter my ego, but there was no breaking his paralyzed gaze. It was then, I realized -

Mr. Moreau hadn’t looked at me once. I don’t just mean that day, but in all the days - no, months - no, years - I spent with him, he never looked away from that damned window, that bleak scene of sun-bleached Spanish moss and overgrown mounds of vegetation, beaten to hell by hurricane after hurricane but still there, with no acknowledgement of time. What the hell did that view have that I didn’t? Why the hell did I care? In that one moment, I thought of a thousand moments. I thought of all the dates I could have gone on, all the movies I could have seen, all the silly little things I could have accomplished, if only I hadn’t wasted away in the joyless hum of a dingy nursing home, if only I hadn’t drained my youth with some decaying stranger at the end of the hall.

I leapt from my chair and sprinted through the doorway. My notebook had fallen out of my lap, but I was too vexed to go back for it. I knew it would be picked up by one of the nurses. They would recognize it as belonging to the forgettable girl at Reception, and it would be at the front desk by morning. I stumbled into the bathroom and lamented my reflection over the sink before finally resolving to skulk off through one of the side exits and go home. I reluctantly returned to work the next day.

“Mr. Moreau had a visitor last night.”

The visitors log was open. There were no names in the log. I spun in my chair and stared at the nurse in disbelief. “See for yourself,” she gestured toward the end of the hall. I felt like I had been dropped into a Dali painting, the one with the melting clocks. I couldn’t feel my feet on the floor. All I know is I was at Reception one moment and standing in Mr. Moreau’s doorway the next. The bed was neatly made. The floors were freshly mopped. The bathroom smelled of bleach. My notebook sat on the bedside table - that ugly, dog-eared, little black book that set in motion one of the most shameful days of my life.

My heart swelled into my throat and my spine stiffened. It took me a moment, but I somehow willed my legs to carry my body forward. I picked up the notebook and a folded piece of paper fell from inside the front cover. It was a peculiar paper, not like the other pages. This one was thin, tattered, and yellowed. I could see ink bleeding through from some corrected type on the other side of the page. I unfolded the paper with trembling hands, my eyes darting from line to line, perusing for purpose. Mr. Moreau didn’t have much, but what he did have, to the tune of twenty thousand dollars, he left to the last person who deserved it.

“Who came for him?” I shouted. My voice was shrill. No one had heard me. “Who came for him?” I repeated louder, this time turning my head to the open doorway. A few moments later, the nurse appeared. Her lips pressed into a fine line and her brow furrowed with earnest sympathy. She didn’t need to say it.

Suddenly, the scribblings of a despondent twenty-something atrophied at Reception seemed no match for the scene outside Mr. Moreau’s window after all.

Death had treated him more kindly than me.