max kruger-dull

Gina

Prologue

I don’t kill ants when I see them carrying their goods. I have carried much between my teeth, too. I let those ants slip by me as if they’ve earned their pardons. They pay no attention to their mangled, balled-up hill mates, none of whom looked special to me. I wish the ants good luck with their finds. They are all so strong.

1

My grandmother used to tell me stories about her years as a travel writer, but now she just sits on the couch all day. She sits still like she’s been strapped down and scooped empty. She gets bothered when I try to put her in a clean shirt but has a hard time articulating why. Regardless, I put her in clean shirts. They are all drapey but stiff: too close to hospital gowns. Her name is Gina. I try to think of her as Gina, not as Woman on the Couch. Now Gina always has gunk in the corners of her eyes.

2

Gina is 82 and, until she turned 74, she traveled to volcanoes and rivers and towns with strange customs and countries with eager tourism boards. Gina used to have a sturdy body and would carry me on her shoulders until I turned seven and would sit me on her lap until I turned ten and tell me about places she wanted me to visit and places she wanted me to avoid. Mount Whitney was a favorite of hers. She admired the forest service’s discipline when doling out permits. “Overcrowding is not an issue there,” she said. Blooming wildflowers were in all of her photos.

3

Gina does nothing on the couch, except maybe think or try to think. I do not understand who she is now. When she was 72, we went backpacking in Turkey. The third night at camp, it stormed so I set up a tent. “A tent?” she asked me. “Hand me the rain fly,” I said. “Bathroom?” she asked me. She tripped over our bags. She started to wander away. “Get back here,” I said. “What?” she asked. A gust blew her into a bush. She yelped like she’d never felt wind before. “It’s storming,” I said. “What?” she asked. She wandered further away. “Shut up and get in the tent,” I said. I pushed her inside. She rubbed her cheek like I’d slapped her. In the night, she pissed herself but didn’t seem to notice. “I’m glad we decided to set up that tent,” she said in the morning. I changed her pants without telling her why. For hours, ants hid underneath the wet soil.

4

On Gina’s 82nd birthday, she sat on the couch from dawn until dinner. At one point I watched an ant haul one of Gina’s fallen hairs from the couch to the floor to the kitchen through a hole in the wall. Much of the smoky strand trailed behind the ant like a tail. That ant looked to have great purpose.

5

For several months I’ve been handing Gina a camera to play with while she sits on the couch. She sometimes takes pictures and sometimes looks at her pictures. Her shots are of her swollen knees and of the bottoms of the blouses I put her in and of the couch, most often of the couch’s better armrest. She holds the camera like she still knows how to take a great picture. With something in her hands, Gina looks like a person to me. She looks less dazed, younger, worth taking care of. I remember what it was like to know her. So I make her better sandwiches. So I give her her pills exactly twelve hours apart. It feels like we’re playing Human or Doll. I say, “I want to think of you as real.”

6

It is hard to find a caretaker who thinks of Gina as real.

7

Then the camera stops having an effect on me. Gina still clasps it the same way, but it’s almost become a part of her state. So I give her a book to hold. And then a duffel bag. A pencil. A pressed flower. A map of Madrid. A smooth, white rock she’d brought home from Zanzibar. I can imagine her skipping that rock across a lake. And then I hand her her passport. In her picture, she doesn’t look real, but no one does in tiny photographs. I sit beside her and straighten her shirt. Gina flips through her passport like she’s celebrating her life.

8

When I’m dying, I hope someone resilient is taking care of me. In case that’s not possible, I’ll try to come up with an alternate plan.

Epilogue

I’ve started to kill every ant I encounter. It’s too tiring to crush some and spare others. Now, if ants are holding crumbs or chips or leaves, I pluck each scrap from their mandibles and squash their bodies beneath my thumb. I worry who I’m turning into.