We passed a crafts room where six women sat around a table, making potholders out of nylon loops woven on red metal frames. Their efforts were as misshapen as mine had been when I was five. I never liked doing that shit the first tune around and I didn't look forward to having to do it again at the end of my days. Maybe I'd get lucky and be struck down by a beer truck before I was forced into such ignominy.

The recreation room was evidently just ahead, as I'd picked up the blast of a television set turned up loud enough for failing ears, a PBS documentary by the sound of it. The banging and shrieking suggested tribal rites somewhere in a culture not given to quietude. We turned left into a six-bed ward where a series of curtains were all that separated one patient from the next. At the far end of the room, like the origins of the Nile, I could see the source of the uproar. It wasn't a television set at all. Without even asking, I knew this was Agnes. She was stark naked, dancing a dirty boogie on the bed while she accompanied herself by banging on a bedpan with a spoon. She was tall and thin, bald everyplace except her bony head, which was enveloped in an aureole of wispy white fuzz. Malnutrition had distended her belly, leaving her long limbs skeletal.

The lower portion of her face had collapsed on itself, jaw drawn up close to her nose in the absence of intervening teeth. She had no visible lips and the truncated shape of her skull gave her the look of some long-legged, gangly bird with a gaping beak. She was squawking like an ostrich, her bright, black eyes snapping from point to point. The minute she caught sight of us, she fired the bedpan in our direction like a heat-seeking missile. She seemed to be having the tune of her life. A nurse's aide, maybe twenty years old, stood by helplessly. Clearly, her training had never prepared her for the likes of this one.

Mrs. Renquist approached Agnes matter-of-factly, pausing only once to pat the hand of the woman in the next bed who seemed to be praying feverishly for Jesus to take her very soon. Meanwhile, Agnes, having asserted herself, was content to march around on the bedcovers saluting the other patients. To me, it looked like a wonderful form of indoor exercise. Her behavior seemed far healthier than the passivity of her ward-mates, some of whom simply lay in moaning misery. Agnes had probably been a hell-raiser all her life, and her style, in old age, hadn't changed a whit.

"You have a visitor, Mrs. Grey."

"What?"

"You have a visitor."