Aldo Giovannitti
The Man with Parkinson’s
From afar, watch the burning pixel in the blackness of sea and moonlight. Closer now, it becomes the glowing porthole of a vessel adrift. Inside, the mother and the father eat supper at the table. Their son, returned from a long absence, sits with them. As on each visit, he’ll be gone in a few days. The table is small; their knees touch beneath it.
~
The man was relieved to see his son, but even more so that his visits would shut down the factory. That meant no morning nurse processing him from the bed to the armchair. No forced walks, no timed toilet visits, no drivers whisking him to rehabilitation. No evening nurse reprocessing him into a night’s larva. Canes and portable urinals vanished; rugs and non-disposable kitchenware reappeared.
It was she who had built the system of routines she called the factory, and she held the sole authority to halt it. Halting the factory, however, meant doing everything herself—getting down onto the production lines in her overalls, to replace the entire staff with her bare hands. A labor that served and annulled the joy of reunion in the same breath. She did it each time to protect their grown son; she staged the ghost of what had been their world.
~
The woman served herself last, and no one would speak as they ate. Only the kitchen fan, the black hills outside, and the man's spoon rattling against his bowl. She checked him from the corner of her eye. Rattle after rattle. She gripped her cloth. The son pretended not to hear, his luggage still unopened by the door. And at the next rattle, she shot out her arm, cut the man’s meat into rough pieces with her knife, and withdrew.
They carried on, until the man's cloth slipped from his collar onto his lap. The man grabbed it, but his arm wouldn't lift. When the son moved to help, she raised her palm: she would handle it herself. She stood and crossed to him, and when she reached, he shut his eyes. She pulled the cloth, but he wouldn’t—couldn’t—let go, until she wrested the cloth from his hands and tucked it back into his collar. She noticed stew drops on his beard, briefly considered cleaning them, then let the thought slip, and returned to her seat.
~
“Keep an eye on him,” she said as she moved to the sink. And for a good reason: left alone too long, the man tended to make decisions of his own. As if proving her point, the son distracted, and he had already removed his dentures, raising them like a trophy, with that demented smile of his. The son hadn’t even known his father wore dentures—she had managed to keep that from him for a year. In the reflection, the son reclassified his father: a man with dentures. His arms stayed high, stiff as wood; his hands, bolted at the dentures.
And now, witness this. His arms began shaking, failing to bear their own weight. That demented smile, contorting into a snarl of pain. When she saw him she snapped, grabbed a plate, crossed the room, and slammed it onto the table. “Drop it here,” she said. His expression kept twisting into shapes no one knew his face could produce. “In the plate,” she said.
He willed his arms down but no signal reached them. They shook harder and harder before his eyes. He forced them down in pain, a hoarse “Aah,” came from his now-visible gums. “Down!” he thought, eyes flicking between the wife and the dentures, hoping she would understand. The woman, the wife, the mother, the nurse, the operator—she looked at the ceiling, palms wide, muscles taut—one… two… three… four long breaths.
~
If we let him work through it, he will rebuild motor control: it was the son’s non-intervention policy, likely born of the luxury of distance. Each time he dropped in, mandated principles cast in rarefied air, then left, to return when the seasons had turned. The woman, instead, belonged to the opposite school—one shaped by the urgency of daily production-line output. At first, when the air was still soft with reunion, she bore his theories to please him. After all, he only stayed a handful of days. But as the days wore on and the mood thinned, she began cutting scenes short, clearing obstacles herself.
They let him struggle, stepping in only when the embarrassment became unbearable—not to him, but to the son. It was never the man who chose when to stop; it was always the son. Now the man’s eyes watered, and the shaking had grown so that it shamed those who watched. The limit had been reached: time for the son to press his father’s arms down. The arms’ block rotated down, hinged at the shoulders. A loud “Aah.”
The man finally rested his elbows on the table, the dentures hovering on the plate. The son saw drops of saliva about to fall from his father’s hands but did nothing. It’s over, the man thought, and a smile brushed his lips.
But the smile’s formation was cut short, for the woman now took charge. What’s next in the assembly line? She seized his wrists. “Let go,” she said. Nothing. She tightened her grip. A jolt. Still nothing. The man turned to the son for help that didn’t come. Back to his hands—still clenched. “Just drop them,” the man heard from somewhere. There had to be a way out for the man. But what was left for him to do? Flee, obviously.
And that is what he did. Shutting his eyes so hard, he fled the room. The harder the jolts, the more he shut them. Tears bled through his eyelids—the kind that would have stayed in, had he kept them open. Shielded in the darkness behind his lids, he managed to spin off the body from the head. The jolts went on, but no longer on his body. Just the void around him. Her voice, softened by the darkness, flakes of coal falling about, almost pleasant. No, pleasant indeed. This, he could bear. Now you can carry on my dear, he thought.
When the dentures finally fell into the plate, saliva sprayed around. The son hesitated to wipe his cheek, as though doing so would dishonor his father. When the man opened his eyes, he saw his hands, still in position, but holding air, and now a smile formed fully: he knew he had just gained about ten freedom-minutes, as he called them.
The son watched the dentures in the plate. At first, he only glanced at them—chewed matter, fluids pooling. He looked away. On the second pass, with clinical curiosity, he lingered. The third time, he studied the corrugations on the palate—a negative of his father’s. An inner organ, extracted. Part or not part of his father? Its surface. Rough and tender, as a tortoise’s back.
But no time to lose, for the curfew looms. She pinched the cloth from his collar and drew it from each finger’s base to the tip, rotating through the motion, squeezing harder than necessary. The automatism in the way she operated revealed an established protocol of two outcomes: fix the man, temper her own ire. A wipe, another, and another—each a micro-punishment to the man she nursed and that could not escape. Each, a blow to the walls of the prison she had helped the man erect around them, week after month after year—until they were both walled in alive, with no doors, nor vents. Her hands wiped; her mind excavated the walls. Then she ran through her checklist of the outstanding stations: pills, walk, toilet. Undress, diaper, re-dress. Put to bed, sleep an hour, toilet again. The early rise. Tomorrow even earlier. Can you hear it? The hammering cadence of her years-long days.
He regarded his hands being wiped as if detached objects. He was grateful to his wife for sorting out the dentures business, until she would raise the next challenge. And immersed in these thoughts, the increasingly hard wipes rocked him into sleep.
~
A sound woke him, and he sucked in to recall the saliva that had pooled in his mouth. The dentures incident had already left his memory permanently. He felt something had happened, but he couldn’t place it. Before him two figures moved. Maybe three. He checked his wristwatch, but nothing made sense from that dial of huge indices, designed for giant children. He looked up. Morning? Afternoon?
But for him, right now, there was no hope of figuring out what time it was. At least not outside of the golden window (as the son called it), the magic place from four to seven in the evening. There, time was the easiest he could grasp, and he would lecture on take-off procedures, loan amortizations, and the upcoming car overhaul—though, sadly, his condition discounted the value of all he said, for it coated, or rather soaked, each of his words with unreliability.
They had hypotheses about the window. The pill cycles being the most popular—an opening between the phase-off of some medications and the phase-in of others, where his mind was clear. Contenders were the heavier rehabilitation schedule, or the newly introduced melatonin, which managed to stretch his sleep by a few inches. “And what about the remaining twenty-one hours?” she would tell the son to dismiss the topic.
In the remaining twenty-one hours, time had ceased to be a measure of life to him. No minutes, no hours, no dates. No seasons. Only the grinding rhythm of the stages—processing and reprocessing him into someone bearable for the following few minutes. A loop of assembly stations, each feeding the next in a perpetual, headless cycle. The day was both the process and the product of the factory. The man kept checking his wristwatch, still, through days that weren't his anymore.
Back to work now. Next station: evening pills. The son poured them before his father. “Your dessert, pa,” then refilled the pillbox with tomorrow’s doses. The man narrowed his focus. One by one, with his index finger, he slotted the pills into the squares of the checkered tablecloth—one, two, three. Well in order. Then he studied them. “This is Levodopa,” the man mumbled, brushing a fingertip over the pill, as if it were a pill-sized kitten. Then the next: “Or maybe this one is…” She called out, saying that it was always the same pills, as she marshaled the scene from the sink. But her words interrupted his focus, and his gaze glided from the pill to his finger. The nail. The cuticle. The skin, silky and reflective; taut and loose at once. This very finger—still his childhood finger to his eyes.
From one side, his son saying, “Drink the whole glass,” to make sure he swallowed them, and from the other, his wife saying, “I warn you, don’t drink the whole glass,” to prevent him from waking mid–first sleep to empty his bladder, and having to throw away the diaper (he will soon wear). “And don’t spit the pill back into the glass,” she said. The son picked up the pill and shoved it through his father’s lips. “Quick now,” she said, “or it’ll glue itself to his lips.”
The son lifted the glass—his father’s hands only attached to it the way children are trained to drink—and he swallowed, and swallowed, rivulets of water spilling from the corners of his mouth. With this, the man had won another batch of freedom-minutes. A small effort for such a reward, this had been an easy trade. Save that, when the glass was down, the pill sat at the bottom. Son and father met gazes and snapped to repeat the operation, hoping she wouldn’t notice.
Next station: walking. One of acute pain, for after an hour seated, his feet had welded to the floor. Standing, let alone walking, was the man’s chief fear. When the son pulled the chair to extract him from the table, the man shut his eyes, hoping for a miracle, or a brief delay… anything. Then, in the dark, he felt the double tap on his arm. Familiar, expected. It was their code, developed to hide from her his moments of non-cooperation. Two taps: ready. Three: action. The signal meant imminent pain and filial love simultaneously, and the latter outweighed the first. To the man, walking was always a profitable trade, for its immense cost purchased three resources at once: freedom-minutes, his son’s approval, and a delay in his wife’s ire.
And here came the triple tap. But those wooden legs wrapped in denim didn’t move. A few attempts. Then, at the fourth, he rose, with the son’s hands at his armpits. And once up—his son’s arms cocked round him for a catch—he clung to the table’s edge as if on a precipice. He stared at the miles-deep floor and thought danger, danger, danger. “Quick,” she told both, “or he’ll freeze in that position.”
Imagine walking—just a normal walk of short strides from outside. Now imagine walking, with hundreds of needles sunk deep into your quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves. Not pricking—but well driven in, plunged fully, all embedded at conflicting angles, twisting, pressing deeper or wrenching back—as the flesh, both liquid and solid, inflates and exhales as each step commands. There are twenty-five pounds of this flesh in each of the man's legs. He struggles to control them—but the sensorial crucible, he retains fully.
To complete a lap, he had to knock at the windows at either end of the apartment. He and the son moved arm in arm. The strides were so short. The floor a magnet, and his feet, feet of steel. At each passage by the kitchen she would say, “Lift those feet,” at the next, “Longer strides,” and the following, “Apply yourself.” And so on. On top of these mental obstacles were the physical. Rugs above all. To the man who could only move by slithering his feet, a rug’s edge was dangerous as vipers had once been to his former self. There had been talk of removing them, as well as of rearranging the furniture to clear the paths. But it wasn’t the case, she had concluded, to turn the place into some ward.
What the man and his son thought as they walked round and round? In the first laps: pain took all of the man’s brain, and whatever attention remained, went to the rugs. He’s much worse than last time, the son thought.
In the middle laps: “Enough?” the man asked at the end of each, as his son coached him into the next. Now the pain began to dull, and a few longer strides emerged. Knock the frame, turn, back again. Knock. Longer strides. Raise your feet. Repeat. His legs felt more fluid though.
In the final laps: a shadow of pleasure crept through the pain. By now the longer strides outnumbered the short. The son felt his father’s weight lift from his arm—and then he got pulled forward. Speed. This was speed. “Look at this!” the man said, as they passed the kitchen. His greatest joy, after all, was still to impress his wife. Those are quite long strides, she thought. “Get rid of that left stoop, rather,” she said.
(Walking was one of the two warheads left in the woman’s shrinking arsenal against his, meaning her, sleepless nights. The second: nap deprivation in the afternoon. A clap of hands, “Up, up!” she would say, breezing past the living room. “Up, up!” to the man folding in on himself in the armchair. “Up, up!” a cloth to his neck, for the saliva pooled and dropped, if not sucked back in time by this man awake and asleep at once.)
The last lap ended in the bathroom, where they sat him on the toilet. “Call when you’re done,” came from the corridor. The underside of spousal privilege meant she had to handle this station of the factory. She waited a long time by the door. Then she glimpsed inside, saw, and clapped, “Wake!” and to this, the man woke.
No need to put the trousers back on. Peel them off instead. He walked to the bedroom arm in arm with his wife, wearing only his shirt. The bedroom: she called it the FAL—Final Assembly Line. “Can I sit?” the man said. “You can sit,” the woman said. And he landed on his side of the bed, onto the blossomed diaper she had laid for him. She wrapped him—buckled him up for the night’s voyage—and as she worked, he checked his wristwatch and nodded.
The son came in with melatonin. “Aaaah,” the son said. “Aaaah,” the man said. They counted the twelve drops under the tongue. Four weeks ago, it had been eight. Two weeks before that, six. “Add a couple,” she said, pulling her hand off the rings. The bedroom: dim. In the far corner, a cane in a plastic bag. Above the bed lamp, a framed photograph—a man taking off from a mountain with a paraglider. Well shoved under the bed, a urinal. (Not stained, no—painted in urine-yellow straight from the shop.)
“I’m going to load up the car tonight,” the son told both.
The woman gripped the bedsheet and hesitated. She had held back mentioning this all day, but now she went for it. “We can… still cancel,” she said. She released a deep breath.
Each looked down and waited for the other to speak.
Then the son’s “No,” broke the silence. He looked up, but not towards her. “We spoke at length about this. It’s his best chance.”
Her eyes glossed, and she gripped the bedsheet tighter. With no other avenue available, she turned to the man and pointed a finger to him: “You don’t even think of waking to pee.”
They would all rise even earlier than usual, tomorrow. Long, the trip ahead. The son reached and tapped his father’s shoulder four times. It meant: no more for today. The man smiled, his eyes already closed. Hours and hours of freedom-minutes. “Still my champ,” he mumbled.
“Good night,” the son said.
Aldo Giovannitti writes about shifting perception, moral ambiguity, and transformation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Open Journal of Arts & Letters, DIALOGIST, and Abstract Magazine, alongside essays in The Diplomat and South China Morning Post. He is a member of The Poetry Society and PEN America and is based in London.
