Mrs. Novak is Mom's roommate. The squirrel is Eva.

At St. Anthonys, the first floor is for people who forget names and run around naked and put chewed food in their pockets, but who are otherwise pretty undamaged. Here are also some young people fried on drugs and smoked by massive head traumas. They walk and talk, even if it's just word salad, a constant stream of words that seem random.

"Fig people road little dawn singing rope purple veil gone," that's how they talk.

The second floor is for bed patients. The third floor is where people go to die.

Mom's on the first floor for now, but nobody's there forever.

How Eva got here is, people will take their aging parents to some public place and just leave them behind with no identifica­tion. These are old Dorothys and Ermas with no idea who or where they are. People think the city or state government or who­ever will collect them. Kind of what the government does with litter.

The same as what happens when you ditch your old car and take the license plates and the VIN decal off so the city has to tow it away.

No kidding, but this is called granny dumping, and St. An­thony's has to take a certain number of dumped grannies and ec­stasy-fried street kids and suicidal bag ladies. Only they don't call them bag ladies, or call the street girls prosti-tots. My guess is somebody slowed their car down and just shoved Eva out the door and never shed a tear. Kind of what people do with pets they can't house-train.

Eva still trailing me, I get to my mom's room and she's not there. Instead of Mom, her bed's empty with a big wet dent sunk in the mattress soaked with urine. It's shower time, I figure. A nurse takes you down the hall to a big tiled room where they can hose you clean.

Here at St. Anthony's, they show the movie The Pajama Game every Friday night, and every Friday all the same patients crowd in to see it for the first time.

They have bingo, crafts, visiting pets.

They have Dr. Paige Marshall. Wherever she's disappeared to.

They have fireproof bibs that cover you from your neck to your ankles so you don't set fire to yourself while you smoke. They have Norman Rockwell posters. A hair dresser comes twice a week to do your hair. That costs extra. Incontinence costs extra. Dry cleaning costs extra. Monitoring urine output costs extra. Stom­ach tubes.

They have lessons every day in how to tie your shoe, how to button a button, snap a snap. Buckle a buckle. Someone will demonstrate Velcro. Someone will teach you how to zip your zip­per. Every morning, they tell you your name. Friends who've known each other sixty years get reintroduced. Every morning.

These are doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, who, day to day, can't master a zipper anymore. This is less teaching than it is damage control. You might as well try to paint a house that's on fire.

Here at St. Anthony's, Tuesday means Salisbury steak. Wednesday means mushroom chicken. Thursday is spaghetti. Friday, baked fish. Saturday, corned beef. Sunday, roast turkey.

They have thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles for you to do while you're running out the clock. There isn't a mattress in the place a dozen people haven't already died on.

Eva's wheeled her chair up to my mom's doorway and she's sitting there, looking pale and wilted, as if she's a mummy some­body just unwrapped and then set its thin cruddy hair. Her curly blue head never stops bobbing in slow, tight little prizefighter circles.

"Don't come near me," Eva says every time I look at her. "Dr. Marshall won't let you hurt me," she says.

Until the nurse gets back, I just sit on the edge of my mom's bed and wait.

My mom has one of those clocks where each hour is marked by the call of a different bird. Prerecorded. One o'clock is the American Robin. Six is the Northern Oriole.

Noon is the House Finch.

The Black-capped Chickadee means eight o'clock. The White-breasted Nuthatch means eleven.

You get the idea.

The problem is, associating birds with specific times can get confusing. Especially if you're outside. You turn from a clock watcher to a bird watcher. Every time you hear the lovely trill of the White-throated Sparrow, you think: Is it ten o'clock already?

Eva wheels a little bit into my mom's room. "You hurt me," she says to me. "And I never told Mother."

These old people. These human ruins.

It's already half-past the Tufted Titmouse, and I have to catch my bus and be at work by the time the Blue Jay sings.

Eva thinks I'm her big brother who diddled her about a cen­tury ago. My mom's roommate, Mrs. Novak with her horrible big hanging breasts and ears, she thinks I'm her bastard business part­ner who gypped her out of a patent for the cotton gin or the fountain pen or something.

Here I get to be all things to all women.

"You hurt me," Eva says and rolls a little closer. "And I've never forgotten it for a minute."

Every time I visit, some old raisin down the hall with wild eyebrows, she calls me Eichmann. Another woman with a clear plastic tube of piss looping out from under her bathrobe, she ac­cuses me of stealing her dog and wants it back. Anytime I pass this other old woman who sits in her wheelchair, slumped inside a pile of pink sweaters, she hisses at me. "I saw you," she says, and looks at me with one cloudy eye. "The night of the fire, I saw you with them!"

You can't win. Every man who's ever passed through Eva's life has probably been her big brother in some form. Whether she knew it or not, she's spent her whole life waiting and expecting men to diddle her. For serious, even mummied up in her wrin­kled skin, she's still eight years old. Stuck. Just the same as Colo­nial Dunsboro with its granola crew of burnouts, everybody at St. Anthony's is trapped in their past.

I'm no exception, and don't think you are either.

Just as stuck as Denny in the stocks, Eva's arrested in her de­velopment.

"You," Eva says, and pokes a trembling finger at me. "You hurt my woo-woo."

These stuck old people.

"Oh, you said it was just our game," she says and rolls her head, her voice getting sing song. "It was just our secret game, but then you put your big man thing inside me." Her bony, carved little finger keeps poking in the air at my crotch.

For serious, just the idea makes my big man thing want to run screaming from the room.

The trouble is, anywhere else at St. Anthonys it's the same deal. Another old skeleton thinks I borrowed five hundred dollars from her. Another baggy old woman calls me the devil.

"And you hurt me," Eva says.

It's tough not to come here and soak up the blame for every crime in history. You want to shout in everybody's old toothless face. Yes, I kidnapped that Lindbergh baby.

The Titanic thing, I did that.

That Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.

The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.

The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again.

The correct way to handle a case like Eva is to redirect her at­tention. Distract her by mentioning lunch or the weather or how nice her hair looks. Her attention span is about a clock tick long, and you can shove her on to a more pleasant topic.