On the track down 405 to Seizure World he clicks on the radio, they’re playing The Pudknockers’ latest and he blasts himself with a full hundred and twenty decibels of volume, singing along as loud as he can:

I’m swimming in the amniotic fluid of love

Swimming like a finger to the end of the glove

When I reach the top I’m going to dive right in

I’m the sperm in the egg—did I lose? did I win?

Seizure World spreads over the Laguna Hills, from El Toro to Mission Viejo: “Rossmoor Leisure World,” a condomundo for the elderly that used to be only for the richest of the old. Now it’s got its ritzy sections and its slums and its mental hospitals just like any other “town” in OC, and overpopulation sure, there’s more old folks now than ever before, an immense percentage of the population is over seventy, and two or three percent are over a hundred, and they have to go somewhere, right? So there are half a million of them densepacked here.

Jim parks, gets out. Now this place: this is depression. He hates Seizure World with a passion. Uncle Tom does too, he’s pretty sure. But with emphysema, and relying completely on Social Security, the old guy doesn’t have much choice. These subsidized aps are as cheap as you can get, and only the old can get them. So here Tom is, in a condomundo that looks like all the rest, except everything is smaller and dingier, closer to dissolution. No pretending here, no Mediterranean fake front on the tenement reality. This is an old folks’ home.

And Tom lives in the mental ward of it—though usually he is lucid enough. Most days he lies fairly calmly, working to breathe. Then every once in a while he loses it, and has to be watched or he’ll attack people—nurses, anyone. This has been the pattern for the last decade or so, anyway. He’s over a hundred.

Jim can’t really bear to think about it for too long, so he doesn’t. When he’s out in OC it never occurs to him to think of Uncle Tom and how he lives. But during these infrequent visits it’s shoved in his face.

Up the wheelchair ramp to the check-in desk. The nurse has a permanent sour expression, a bitchy voice. “Visiting hours end in forty-five minutes.”

Don’t worry.

Down the dark hallway, which smells of antiseptic. Wheelchair cases bang into the walls like bumper cars, the old wrecks in them drooling, staring at nothing, drugged out. A young nurse pushes one chair case down the hall, blinking rapidly, just about to cry. Yes, we’re in the nursing home again. (“Did I lose? did I win?”)