Old Dean

by Desmond Astaire

Old Dean spent his old days staring out the windows of a nursing home. Most of them he lost the fight against his dementia, and the sun was setting on that lost battlefield. When snippets did come back here and there, it seemed to be feelings of regret. Or so he believed today.

Rusted but still running might have described his perpetual state of senility. Walking, but with a faulty compass. Lost. It was the same whether he was alone or having a visitor, like the sharp-dressed woman standing before him.

“Howdy,” Old Dean said in that vintage Southern way.

“Good afternoon, Dean. Do you remember me from before?”

“I’m sorry,” the old man said. “My noggin don’t work so good anymore.”

“That’s okay, sir. My name is —” Dean immediately forgot it, but her voice was gentle and comforting. “I’m a cerebral archivist with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.”

“Oh!” Dean didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded significant enough for an impressed response.

“I’m here with good news,” the archivist said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve selected your memories for holographic archiving. Your judiciary career was very significant in our nation’s history. We want people to be able to experience your life virtually for generations to come.”

“Oh.” Dean winced. Significant didn’t feel like a good fit for the blurry cloud where memory used to be. Regrettable did. Empty, too. “Well. When do you wanna do that?”

“The medical staff here have run a diagnostic on your genome terminus, and I’m afraid it’ll have to be soon. I’m very sorry, Mr. Dean. There’s just not much time left.”

Silence fell upon them, punctuated only by the constant tick… tick… tick… of an antique analog clock clicking through the fog. Dean snapped his attention back to his guest when he realized he was drifting away, but he couldn’t tell how many minutes or hours had passed. These were how his days went now.

“I just want to confirm; your file says there’s no family we should contact?” the archivist asked.

“Nope. Just me,” Dean said, staring back out the window again. He couldn’t forget that. “Reckon I shoulda made time for a family.”

Dean laid back in his bed — the best a legendary defense attorney’s retirement could buy — and the archivist took care securing an apparatus around his head.

“This is gonna hurt,” Dean said.

The archivist stopped to take a knee next to the bed.

“I promise you, this is completely painless,” she said, her voice like a harp. “It’ll be like watching an old film playing backward, very fast — your whole life, all in a matter of minutes.”

“This is gonna hurt.”

The archivist chalked it up to dementia, but Dean knew. Sometimes the pain of the mind was more excruciating than the body’s.

“How’s this doohickey work?” he asked.

“It uses quantum entanglement to transliterate your synaptic memories into digital data. Then we use four-dimensional mapping software to convert that data into a virtual, augmented reality for the museum.”

“I don’t think I know what that means,” Dean said.

“It’s okay, Mr. Dean. Neither do I. It just means it makes your memories so people can see them.”

“But why?”

The archivist sensed the pained undertone in the question but didn’t understand it.

“People appreciate history. ‘To discover the constant and universal principles of human nature,’ they say.” The archivist made some final calibrations and stood before Dean with a remote trigger. “Alright, Mr. Dean, you just lay back and relax. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

Dean’s wrinkled eyes crested with tears, and the archivist knew something wasn’t right. She’d completed this procedure dozens of times, but now some instinct prevented her thumb from pressing the remote. So instead, she walked over to hold his hand.

“Dean?” she asked. “What’s your favorite memory?”

Old Dean took a moment to recall.

“Well… I suppose… I had me some waffles this morning. They warmed up the syrup and —”

The archivist pressed the trigger.

Dean’s film accelerated backward from the present, too fast for him to fully make out. Only flashes and snapshots, some Dean didn’t want to relive.

Alone in the nursing home. Silence. Stale air. The sun going down, the sun coming up. Over and over and over again.

A slip on the icy sidewalk that ended his independence.

The fruitless quest for meaning in retirement. No dollar amount could fly him somewhere where absolution awaited.

The country vacation lake where he realized his youth had escaped him forever.

The day he retired. Turning in the keys to the law firm — everything he had, everything he was — over in one simplistic moment.

Touching the keys of a grand piano in some lobby of some building somewhere, wishing he would have learned how to play when he was younger.

A news headline declaring, “Cuba Edgecomb executed for voluntary manslaughter.”

Another saying, “Acquitted socialite arrested again.”

Promotion to partner with the law firm. Through the celebration and never ending rounds of drinks, Dean remembered stifling a haunting suspicion that he hadn’t found contentment.

Dean Parish — a.k.a. The Jesus Christ of Criminal Defense — representing Cuba Edgecomb on the (first) charge of homicide. Van Gogh used paint. Beethoven used a piano. Dean used reasonable doubt.

The intoxicating reputation of salvation for guilty clients.

Sacrificing everything to graduate law school summa cum lade.

One final brawl with his father before leaving for college. They never spoke again.

The fury of suffocating in claustrophobic adolescence.

Surviving every day to drown again the next.

Every spark that ever ignited a fight with —

Discord shook Dean’s bones like a needle tripping across a vinyl record. He grit his teeth through the violent, disorienting skips of thrashing lights and nauseating motion until the film stopped and started playing in real-time. The memory was alive.

The low lights, long hallways, and smell of chemical sterility clued it to be a hospital. A young man leaned against an observation window separating the dark hallway from a nursery of newborns, his thousand-yard stare aimed at a single baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Dean would have recognized the stubbled face in the reflection, whether it was 30 or 50.

“Pa?”

The man flinched and turned away from the window.

“Yeah. I’m his pa.”

The man’s eyes simmered red with a hot glaze. It was about as much feeling as the hardened steel worker would allow himself.

“Where’s his ma?” Dean asked although he thought he already knew the answer.

Dean’s father clenched his teeth to force the words out. “She passed.”

Dean hobbled over to join him at the window and peered at the innocent baby through his faded eyes. The newborn was so pure, untainted by any experiences to come. The child’s entire life was in front of him, and it ignited a bitter fire deep inside Dean — a primal intensity to which he hadn’t granted freedom in so long.

Dean fought through his mind’s fog, turned to the man next to him, tightened his slack jaw, and mustered four words with as much clarity as he had felt in years.

“It ain’t his fault.”

Pa’s chin and lower lip shook. “I know it.”

Then why’d you make me pay for it?

Dean collected every ounce of power in his husk of a body to lift his shaky, wrinkled hand and grab hold of the man’s collar. He tried to make a fist and didn’t care if slugging his dad broke every brittle bone in his hand, but arthritis wouldn’t let him.

He slid his hand from his dad’s collar to his shoulder. If time didn’t grant him retribution, it might allow him obviation. 

“You be real good to him, now. You’re all the boy’s got,” Dean said, pointing a warped finger. He felt the sting in his own eyes, and his throat became tight, sending his voice soaring an octave. “Don’t be too hard on him, y’hear?”

“I know it,” his father said again.

“His ma had a piano, right?” Dean asked. “Let him play on it when he misses her and wonders what she was like.”

Pa’s strength collapsed, and he choked out sobs of pent-up grief and fear. Dean let him lean on him.

“Love him. Don’t grudge him. Just love him,” Old Dean said. “You promise it. You promise it.”

“I will.” Pa slid against the wall to the ground and just cried. “I don’t know what to do.”

One of Old Dean’s professors gifted profound encouragement to his first-year law students in the overwhelming face of learning the legal system.

“Just do what’s necessary, Pa. Then do what’s possible. Before you know it, you’ll have done the impossible. Trust me. Works every time.”

Dean was no longer staring at newborns through a window but at a pair of youngsters staring back at him in the room of his mediocre nursing home, the best a third-generation steelworker could afford.

“Hi, Papa! Hi, Papa!”

“Where’d that lady go?” Dean asked.

“Who, Dad? Your nurse?” a man and a woman asked from across the room.

“The archivist. She was downloading my memories.”

The couple exchanged looks. Dean knew what it meant; his noggin didn’t work so well anymore. But surely he hadn’t imagined the archivist?

“Papa, there wasn’t anyone else here,” Dean’s daughter-in-law said.

“She said I was going to pass soon.”

“Hey, Dad, don’t talk like that. You’ve got plenty of gas left in your tank,” Dean’s son lied.

Dean tested the theory and dug deep into his memory for any shred of proof. Then, finally, he grabbed hold of a little something and grinned.

“Mutatis mutandis. It means ‘once the necessary changes have been made,’” he announced.

“That’s great, Dad,” Dean’s son said. “Did you hear that on one of the court shows on TV?”

Dean didn’t answer but just sat back and smiled. He remembered.

“Papa! Papa! Play us a song,” the children begged.

Were these his grandchildren? Dean reckoned he’d never seen two more beautiful little cherub faces.

“A song?” Dean asked. “Oh, sweetpeas, I don’t know how —”

“Go ahead, Dad,” Dean’s son said. “Play that bluesy one the kids love. Remember it?”

Dean’s son pulled a harmonic out from the dresser drawer, and the children brought it to Old Dean. The faithful aroma of old brass and maple fired up his smoldering memory, and his palms curled around it like a hug. He knew the music, even if he forgot every once in a while.

Old Dean spent his old days staring out the windows of a nursing home. Most of them he lost the fight against his dementia, and the sun was setting on that battlefield. But, when he could remember, it seemed to be recollections of warmth. Or so he believed today.