“Little trouble breathing. I’m okay now. The nurses never come when you ring. Once I was dreaming. I flailed out at something. And knocked this oxygen out of my nose. Pain woke me up, my nose was bleeding. Suffocating in here, regular air now and I suffocate. Can you imagine that? So I rang the bell. And they never came. Managed to pick the tube up. Stuck it in my mouth ’cause my nose. Bleeding. Stayed that way ringing the bell. Nurse came at seven when the new shift started. Graveyard shift sleeping. I did that myself, working at the Mobil station. Around three all the work done, no one awake. Whole town quiet and foggy, streetlights blinking red. I’d sleep by the heater under the cash register. Or walk around picking up cigarette butts off the asphalt.”

“When was this, Tom?”

“But when I wake up it’s only this room. Do you think they put me in prison for something? I do. Public defender for too long. I’ve seen too many jails. They all look like this. People are cruel, Jim. How can they do it? How?”

Tom stops, unable to catch his breath anymore, and for a while he only breathes, sucking the air in over and over. Jim holds on to his clammy palm. It seems he has a fever. He rocks his head back and forth restlessly, and when he talks again it’s to other people, a whispered outrush of words punctuated by indrawn gasps, incoherent muttering that Jim can’t make sense of. Jim can only hold his hand, and rock in the chair with him, feeling like a black iron weight will expand out of his stomach and fill him and topple him over.

The old man looks up at him with a wild expression. “Who are you?”

Jim swallows, looks at the ceiling, back at Tom. “Your great-nephew, Jim. Jim McPherson. Lucy’s son.”

“I remember. Sorry. They say the oxygen loss kills brain cells. According to my calculations, my brain is ten times gone.” He wheezes once to indicate a laugh. “But I may be off by a magnitude.” Wheezes again. He looks out the window. “It’s hard to stay sane, alone with your thoughts.”

“Or in any other situation, these days.”

“That so? Sorry to hear you say that. Me—I try not to think too much anymore. Save what’s left. Live in, I don’t know. Memory. It’s quite a power. What can explain it?”

Jim doesn’t know what to say. Nothing explains the memory, as far as he knows. Nothing explains how a mind can cast back through the years, live there, get lost there.…

“Tell me another story, Tom. Another story about Orange County.”

Tom squeezes his eyes shut. Face a map of raw red wrinkles in gray skin.