Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Oh,” Robyn said, and then she smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Miss Wring. Uncle been lookin’ for you for a long time. He been havin’ me comin’ down here just about ev’ry other day, hopin’ you show up.”

Shirley Wring smiled shyly, looking at the man who had been looking for her.

“I ain’t had a man searchin’ me down in quite a while,” she said. “Old woman like me lucky somebody don’t run her underfoot.”

“So we all gonna have lunch, right?” Ptolemy asked, looking into the brown and gray eyes of Shirley Wring.

They had sandwiches at a Subway chain store. Shirley paid for the meal.

She talked about when she moved to Los Angeles from someplace up north. When Ptolemy asked her if she was from California she looked away from him and said, “No. I’m from someplace else.”

“You talk real nice,” Ptolemy said, realizing that he had asked an uncomfortable question. “Did you come here to go to school?”

“My mama wanted me to get a education but I met this high-yellah fellah named Eric and I couldn’t think about nuthin’ else.”

“Robyn gonna go to college in the fall,” Ptolemy said, his voice loud to cover all the things he didn’t know.

“Junior college,” Robyn said.

“Junior college is college too,” Shirley declared.

“That’s right,” Ptolemy added. And he and the woman Shirley Wring smiled for each other across the bright-yellow plastic table.

“We got to get back home, Uncle,” Robyn said finally, to fill in and end the silence.

The days passed in a new kind of harmony for the old man. The TV stayed off unless Robyn wanted to watch her shows at night. Ptolemy refused to have her leave it on for him or turn to his news station. He wanted to run the TV himself without any help. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t ever be able to find his treasure and save his family; he would fail the way he failed Maude Petit and Floppy in that tarpaper house on the outskirts of town.

For the same reason the radio stayed off.

Sometimes Robyn would go out with Beckford Ross, Reggie’s old friend. Some nights she didn’t get in until hours after Ptolemy fell asleep. But the old man did not chastise her. Robyn was looking after him, and she needed to be free, like the birds his father didn’t want him to feed.

Twice a week for three weeks Shirley Wring came over in the afternoon to sit with Ptolemy and converse.

The talks always started pretty well. Ptolemy would tell her about his mother and father and their poor sharecropper’s farm; he’d talk about Coy and a treasure that was lost and her green ring. But after a while he could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making sense. She didn’t frown or get bored, but her smile became soft and her dim eyesight focused on something other than what he was saying. At this point he’d offer her tea and she would say that it was time for her to get home, “before the sun goes down and the thugs come out.”

During this time Ptolemy received a letter from his bank. The letter contained a plastic card that had his name printed in gold at the bottom. Robyn took him to a machine that had a TV screen in it in a shopping mall on Crenshaw. There she put the card in the slot and asked him, “What is the favorite name you like to spell, Uncle?”

“Double-u ara eye en gee?”

“Can you press those buttons?”

He did it twice and the card came back out of the slot.

“From now on all you got to do is remember those lettahs and this machine will give you money,” the child told the old man.

“For free?”

“Naw, Uncle. They take it outta that bank account we started.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, not remembering and disgusted with himself for the lapse.

At a store called Merlyn’s, in the same mall, using his new bank card, Ptolemy bought Robyn a white wooden bed that sat atop three big drawers with pink handles. There was a padded board at the back of the bed that could be folded up to make the bed into a couch. They also got new sheets and blankets, pillows, and bright-red cushions for when the bed would be used as a couch.

When the bed was delivered the next day, Robyn grinned at the men assembling it.

After they left she took her uncle by the hand and pulled him until he was sitting next to her on the well-made bed.

“Are you gonna marry Shirley Wring and kick me outta here, Uncle Grey? I don’t care if you do. I mean, it’s your house and you could do what you want, but I nevah had no nice new bed before, and I’d like it if I could take it with me if you told me I had to go.”

“You wanna go and here we just got your bed?”

“No. I thought you loved Shirley Wring.”

“I’m too old for that. At this age I can only love chirren . . . like you. I love you.”

Robyn got down on her knees, took her faux uncle’s hands, and pressed her face against them.

They stayed like that for a long while, the man sitting up straight and the girl on her knees.

“Are you gonna leave me, Robyn?”

“No, not nevah, Uncle Grey. Not nevah.”

Robyn cooked and cleaned and slept in Ptolemy’s living room every night after that. They took walks in the neighborhood and never once saw Melinda Hogarth.

Niecie called twice.

“Pitypapa is sick an’ I got to take him to the doctor and give him his medicine,” Robyn told her guardian. “But I’ma come home when he bettah.”

“Bless you, child,” Niecie said.

Things went along like that for three weeks, until it was time for their appointment with Dr. Ruben.

The office was a block north of Melrose, on the west side of town. They took the bus and Ptolemy hummed to himself while one young man after another tried to get Robyn’s attention. She smiled and lied and sometimes just ignored them while Li’l Pea and Coy McCann fished almost a century before in the old man’s mind.

The doctor had a room in a courtyard of professional offices that surrounded a beautiful rose garden. The roses were white and gold, red and bright yellow. Ptolemy smiled while Robyn led him along.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “What is this place?”

“The doctor’s, remembah?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah.”

There was no nurse or receptionist, just a large room with a desk on one side and an examining table on the other. Robyn and Ptolemy sat in cushioned chairs before the desk.

Bryant Ruben was a white man of medium height, age, and build. He had a great mustache that made Ptolemy smile and beady green eyes that were not at all off-putting. The doctor’s voice was clear and strong. This made Ptolemy think that even if they were across the Tickle River from each other, he would still be able to understand the smiling doctor’s words.

It started with a memory test.

The doctor would recite a list of words, like apple, tomato, pinecone, orange, sparrow, and stone, and then ask Ptolemy to repeat them.

“Orange stone and, and, somethin’,” he answered on the first try.

After eight lists, Dr. Ruben smiled.

“I’m going to ask you to strip down to your shorts and sit on the examining table, Mr. Grey. Would you rather your niece wait in the garden?”

“No. She could see me right here. I don’t mind. I’m too old to be worried about bein’ naked.”

Ruben examined Ptolemy from head to toe with a rubber hammer, a stethoscope, and a pair of magnifying glasses that had double lenses and sat on the end of his nose.

“Ninety-one, eh, Mr. Grey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re in wonderful physical condition for a man your age. You can put on your clothes and we’ll talk at the desk.”

Robyn helped her charge with his pants and shirt and then got down on her knees to tie his brown shoes.

“Those shoes is older than you, girl,” Ptolemy said, and Robyn stood and kissed his cheek.

Your uncle is in the early stages of dementia,” Ruben said to Robyn. “Maybe a little bit further along than that, but not much. He can converse with difficulty and has some trouble with immediate memory. I believe, however, that the damage is not so far along that it can’t be ameliorated.”

Ptolemy didn’t mind the doctor explaining to the child. She was his eyes and ears in a world just out of reach. She deciphered what things meant and then told him like a busboy in a restaurant that runs down to the waiter and then comes back with information for the cook.

“What does that mean, Doctor?”

“He’s losing the ability to use his mind to solve problems, remember things, and to communicate. His language skills are still pretty strong, but his cognitive abilities are weakening.”

“What’s cognitib—?” Robyn asked, frowning, trying to understand what she could do for him.

“It means thinking.”

“I wanna make it so that I could think good for just a couple mont’s, Doc,” Ptolemy said then. “I got some things to remembah, and relatives to look aftah. And, you know, if I . . . if I mess up, then it’s all lost, my whole life.”

“What will be lost?” the mustachioed man asked.

“I, I . . . well, I don’t have the words right now,” Ptolemy said. “You see? That’s the problem.” Ptolemy placed his fingertips on the edge of the doctor’s desk, as if the image of his words were there.

“There are medicines in general use today,” Ruben said, listing five or six names. “None of them are very effective. I mean, something might be able to keep you the way you are without getting worse for a while, but ...”

“Uncle wants his mind back,” Robyn said, a look of surprise and anger on her lovely face.

Ruben smiled.

“And I’m pretty sure he got medical insurance,” the girl said. “We found some insurance papers when I was cleanin’ up his apartment. He’s a veteran and the army will probably be able to pay sumpin’.”

Ruben’s smile extended into time.

“Well?” the girl asked.

“Mr. Grey,” Bryant Ruben said, like the baker that used to greet him.

“Yes sir, Doctor.”

“Do you want to live to see a hundred?”

A hundred years. Ptolemy thought back over all the time that had brought him to that patient’s chair.

“Time is like a river,” Coydog had told the boy. “It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin’. You couldn’t stop it no more than you could fly away.”

Ptolemy’s river had been rough and fast, rushing over stones, throwing him around like a half-dead catfish. More than once he’d opened his eyes on a day he’d wished he’d never seen.

“No, Doctor. I on’y need a few months.”

Ruben smiled again.

“Robyn?” the doctor asked.

“Uh-huh?”

“Medicine isn’t perfect. Many times, especially with new drugs, they cause as many problems as they solve. They only get better by way of trial and error.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what I mean by that?”

“That if I take some new pill that ain’t been tested a lot I might could get sick?”

“You might could die,” the doctor said, managing not to insult the girl.

Robyn nodded. Ptolemy nodded too.

“This is too much for a child,” the old man said.

“She brought you here, Mr. Grey.”

“If we gonna talk about death, she could wait outside.”

Ruben smiled again. “You’re just about half mad,” he said, “not quite. I’m the other half of that.”

“You like the crazy white doctor down in Adamsville used to come down an’ help colored men get shot and stabbed when the hospitals turnt them away?”

“I’m more like the gunshot or the knife wound.”

Ptolemy heard these words clearly, and he understood, even though he could not have explained this knowledge.

“You want my life, Doctor?”

“There’s a drug,” Bryant Ruben said. “They make it in a town in Southeast Asia where there are fewer laws governing research. A group of physicians from all over the world that work there, remotely, are testing a medicine that might be able to help you.”

“A trial-and-mistake medicine?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah. It’s dangerous, and would be illegal if the FDA knew about it. It doesn’t always work, and when it does, it burns bright for just a little while. We need subjects who have not deteriorated so much that they have lost too much, so that we can tell where we went right and where we went wrong . . . after the subject dies.”

“Dies?” Robyn stood up, putting her hand on Ptolemy’s shoulder. “Let’s get outta here, Uncle.”

But Ptolemy Grey didn’t stand. Instead he bowed his head and pressed his fingertips against the bones of his skull. He’d caught a few of the doctor’s words. He’d grasped at them something like when he was a child chasing chicken feathers floating on the breeze.

“Come on, Uncle.”

Ptolemy raised his head; staring into those beady green eyes, he realized with a shock that he was staring into the face of the Devil.

“Devil a angel just like all the rest,” Coydog had told him more than once. “Devil came to the Lord and demanded more. His wings was singed an’ he was th’ow’d down, but he still a angel, and you got to give him his due.”

The two men, Dr. Ruben and Ptolemy, looked at each other across the desk. There was the heavy scent of roses drifting in from the open door. Robyn’s hand was on Ptolemy’s shoulder.

“Do I sign something?” Ptolemy asked the Devil.

“A form willing your body to a university I have a relationship with. It says that upon your death we can examine your remains.”

“Uncle Grey, we don’t have to listen to this man.”

“Do you promise that it woik?” Ptolemy asked, a slight smile on his dark lips.

“Not always. There are three phases ...”

The doctor explained but Ptolemy did not care, or even try, to comprehend. He watched the fallen angel’s expressions and gestures, looking for signs and portents. There was a rushing sound in his ears and his heart ran fast.

“. . . that has been the last phase,” Bryant Ruben was saying. “We’ve changed the cocktail, hopefully to alleviate this symptom, but I’d be lying if I promised you anything.”

Devil the most honest man walk the earth, Coydog had said. He offer you his treasure and take your soul. They call him the Prince of Liars, but he ain’t no different than a bartender: you pays your nickel and drinks your poison.

“Uncle.”

“If I drink yo’ medicine, that will be for you, right?” Ptolemy asked, picking over the words carefully, slowly.

“You’re likely to find relief from your cognitive issues.”

“But you wanna pay me, right?”

“I would give you a sum of cash . . . twenty-five hundred dollars.”

It was Ptolemy’s turn to grin. The back door of his mind was open for a moment. He didn’t understand most of what either of them was saying but he could follow anything the doctor said with an answer that he knew must be true.