In Memorium?

In November, our next-door neighbor stopped Amber as she was about to enter our apartment. We have lived beside him for the better part of a decade, during all of which he has seemed elderly, shivering slightly, stooped but in good spirits -- though these spirits have often come from a bottle. He maintains the property for a discount on his rent, the rest covered by Social Security, we assume; he has no other job. What he did before landing in this situation is a question to which we have never cared to find answers.

Our knowledge of Jake is only a few observations and anecdotes. Each time we accidentally discover one -- we do not seek these out, curious though I am by my nature as writer -- we share it with amused eye rolls.

He drinks so much that he once allowed a truck (I use the indefinite article here because I do not know that it was his or the property of the complex) to roll down an embankment, explode, scorch the small woods, and catch the roof on fire. He was not in the truck at the time but left it running near the dumpster so that he could find some refreshment on a balmy day. After this, the courts took his license. He became a bike rider out of practical necessity. (When he needs more than his basket can carry or must go further than a man in his middle seventies should, our neighbor Amy sometimes drives him.) He once asked me to get his DVD player working, a matter of fixing the position of the batteries in the remote, when I learned that he likes action movies. He has repeatedly knocked on the door with his Jitterbug phone in hand, baffled why it wouldn't turn on. Once, in drunken frustration, he had partially disassembled it and then marveled that I could fit the puzzle piece back together in front of him; these phones are not made complex. He smokes pot and, though it should do without saying after learning that, sometimes blasts seventies rock through our shared wall.

He is divorced and had a brother, who died not long ago. Not coincidentally, Jake then drank so much that he needed to be hospitalized. I did not know that he had been hospitalized, only that his window and door had been opened to their screens for days, all the lights on. I spoke to the postal carrier, who was, to my surprise, also concerned. I found a police officer on the street and asked for a wellness check, fearing the worst. I realized then that I had a non-zero chance of discovering first that Jake had died.

When he thanked me later, mentioning precisely that possibility, my worry for him only increased. Despite the biking -- which he does in all weather -- his health has never been robust.

When he halted Amber this day, it was to tell her that he had terminal cancer. Doctors could do surgery (again? He had it before?), but they decided not to. What good would it do but make him miserable at his end? His prognosis was six months.

When Amber relates this to me later, her demeanor is only a fraction more serious and startled than an ordinary Jake story. Amber is put off by his speaking to her -- especially after working, the number of voices Amber wants to hear number three -- but we are friendly with him as a rule. Our neighbor across the building openly hates him, which always seemed like an overreaction to an old man who means well for the most part.

This past Christmas, we left him gifts (action movies, a robe, slippers) on his doorstep, given to me by my mother for this purpose. (My parents have crossed paths with our neighbor a few times. My mother has always found him helpful and was sad when I mentioned the cancer.) He thanked us by note thumbtacked beside our door.

When it was warm in November, he gave the property a once over with the ride-on lawnmower. He raked the leaves. When it snowed, he cleared the path for us.

He never stopped me to talk about his cancer, though I run into him more than Amber would when I am walking into town. I assumed he trusts that Amber has told me, and the topic was not worth revisiting unless it came up organically in a conversation that I would find no reason to have.

Given six months, I do not know how assiduously I would maintain the property. I would not want to live alone. I do not see or hear him having visitors -- and I likely would. Has he somehow kept his prognosis from his family? Does he not have a family any longer?

At some point, he will worsen enough that he will no longer be able to shovel snow or clear a space under the bird feeder. Will the property manager -- we have had several over my tenure -- be compassionate enough to allow him to ride out the final months? Will he leave to be nursed by someone? Will he drink so much that he is, as he put it once, dead in the bathtub for days?

I think about this whenever I see him, looking not much worse. His being jittery, irritable, or slurring comes with the territory lapsed alcoholism -- with six months today, staying on the wagon might seem irrelevant. He goes about his chores because, I suppose, what else is he going to do? He has his routine. It gives him something to occupy his days better than dying.

And then I found him outside his apartment on a day where spending any longer than one must in the punishing air is near to madness. (He also has his screen door open -- his is the only one in our complex allowed a screen door because he installed it without asking; the cold may not bother him much.) He approaches me and mentions that his phone is with "Ashley" -- he means Amy -- because it is stuck in airplane mode. He would like to me resolve this for him rather than returning to my warm home.

He looks drawn, or maybe he only does because I expect him to now.

"I don't have COVID," he says a little too loudly. My apartment door is three feet away. I have just come home from work, but I walk in the other direction, toward Amy's apartment.

"I'm not sick or nothing," Jake assures me. "I'm just old."

Not sick? This would be the time for him to says, "The cancer drugs are knocking me on my ass" or anything else indicative of his diagnosis. He doesn't even allude to it.

We enter Amy's -- she has lived here as long as I have, but I have never even peeked in her window in passing. He complains that she keeps it too hot.

She is in front of her computer, trying to find a solution. With a few button presses, as he complains that he needs a simpler phone, I fix it. He waves it in the air of Amy's apartment until full bars reappear, then thanks me.

I scurry back to my apartment, locking it behind me as I consider this morsel. Has Amber misunderstood? Surely not. He said something about terminal cancer. Amber will later say that he was perhaps too drunk to remember that he had cancer. I more generously wonder if he might have been too drunk to remember having told her.

Or could it be that he doesn't have cancer? There is no tactful way of asking him what the truth is. He does not owe me any explanation, concerned party though I am. He is old beyond question, the sort of old that cannot be disguised with a suit and standing up straight. The irrevocable oldness where hearing a cancer diagnosis, you say, "That's a real shame," while thinking that it was going to have to be something one of these days. Now that Jake has gone from tragedy to mystery, it is unclear how one writes the rest of his story.

(It is possible that he does have terminal cancer and didn't bring it up, but, in this context, it would be odd not to.)

I have no reason to have to prepare for much for his future. I might go to his wake if someone -- Amy, I suppose -- told me about it and it was in town. However, if he is merely old and drunk, that hypothetical becomes nebulous and unnecessary. I wouldn't wish my neighbor the slightest pain or discomfort, surely not a death by cancer. Having resigned myself to it though, I am made uneasy by his continued, unsteady health.

last watched: Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story
reading: Gideon the Ninth