Marcel had been dreaming of potatoes.
The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands, and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.
Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.
Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.
Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.
