Isn’t that what people mostly say when they have finally figured out how to get rid of a problem that walks and talks?
It’s been a little over two years. The eerie thing is that I don’t know if it feels like two years, or longer than that, or shorter. My sense of time seems to be melting, like a kid’s snowman in a January thaw. It’s as if time as it always was – Eastern Standard Time, Daylight Saving Tune, Working-Man Time – doesn’t exist anymore. Here there is only Georgia Pines Time, which is Old Man Time, Old Lady Time, and Piss the Bed Tune. The rest … all gone.
This is a dangerous damned place. You don’t you think it’s only a boring dangerous as a nursery school at naptime, but it’s dangerous, all right. I’ve seen a lot of people slide into senility since I came here, and sometimes they do more than slide sometimes they go down with the speed of a crash-diving submarine.
They come here mostly all right – dim-eyed and welded to the cane, maybe a little loose in the bladder, but otherwise okay – and then something happens to them. A month later they’re just sitting in the TV
room, staring up at Oprah Winfrey on the TV with dull eyes, a slack jaw, and a forgotten glass of orange juice tilted and dribbling in one hand. A month after that, you have to tell them their kids’ names when the kids come to visit. And a month after that, it’s their own damned names you have to refresh them on.
Something happens to them, all right: Georgia Pines Time happens to them. Time here is like a weak acid that erases first memory and then the desire to go on living.
You have to fight it. That’s what I tell Elaine Connelly, my special friend. It’s gotten better for me since I started writing about what happened to me in 1932, the year John Coffey came on the Green Mile. Some of the memories are awful, but I can feel them sharpening my mind and my awareness the way a knife sharpens a pencil, and that makes the pain worthwhile. Writing and memory alone aren’t enough, though.
I also have a body, wasted and grotesque, though it may now be, and I exercise it as much as I can. It was hard at first – old fogies like me aren’t much shakes when it comes to exercise just for the sake of exercise
– but it’s easier now that there’s a purpose to my walks.
I go out before breakfast – as soon as it’s light, most days – for my first stroll. It was raining this morning, and the damp makes my joints ache, but I hooked a poncho from the rack by the kitchen door and went out, anyway. When a man has a chore, he has to do it, and if it hurts, too bad. Besides, there are compensations. The chief one is keeping that sense of Real Time, as opposed to Georgia Pines Time.
And I like the rain, aches or no aches. Especially in the early morning, when the day is young and seems full of possibilities, even to a washed-up old boy like me.
I went through the kitchen, stopping to beg two slices of toast from one of the sleepy-eyed cooks, and then went out. I crossed the croquet course, then the weedy little putting green. Beyond that is a small stand of woods, with a narrow path winding through it and a couple of sheds, no longer used and mouldering away quietly, along the way. I walked down this path slowly, listening to the sleek and secret patter of the rain in the pines, chewing away at a piece of toast with my few remaining teeth. My legs ached, but it was a low ache, manageable. Mostly I felt pretty well. I drew the moist gray air as deep as I could, taking it in like food.
And when I got to the second of those old sheds, I went in for awhile, and I took care of my business there.
When I walked back up the path twenty minutes later, I could feel a worm of hunger stirring in my belly, and thought I could eat something a little more substantial than toast. A dish of oatmeal, perhaps even a scrambled egg with a sausage on the side. I love sausage, always have, but if I eat more than one these days, I’m apt to get the squitters. One would be safe enough, though. Then, with my belly full and with the damp air still perking up my brain (or so I hoped), I would go up to the solarium and write about the execution of Eduard Delacroix. I would do it as fast as I could, so as not to lose my courage.