Prosper’s turn at last, after the nurse had rung the curtains around
his bed and washed him with some awful carbolic. A long black razor
on the tray, opened, and a bowl of soapy water—they shaved his back
and buttocks right down into the crack, why, when there wasn’t any
hair there. Charlie’d said they would: Doan ledm slice your GNUTS
opff, he’d cried.
They put a mask over his face, and told him to count backward from
ten, and that’s all he knew of that afternoon, until he knew himself to
be back in the ward again, his head at least afloat above a body that
seemed not to be his. Nurse Muscle Eenie told him that while he lay
there neither in nor out of the world his mother had come to visit him.
Charlie confirmed it—a lady came and sat and stood by him; Charlie
tried to imitate how she had hovered, how she had wrung her hands.
Prosper felt, when they said these things, that yes, she had been there,
had looked down on him, but in his remembrance she’d worn a white
dress and a white veil, like nurses in pictures during the War, maybe
even a cross on her breast, and that couldn’t be; the picture persisted,
though, and when he was older he’d still be able to summon it up, and
question why he’d got it in his mind—maybe he’d mixed it up with a
nurse who’d also leaned over him, but the nurses there weren’t wearing
those angel outfits any longer; maybe he’d got it from a movie, but
which one? Anyway he’d somehow missed her, this nonsensical scrap
all he had, and she didn’t come again. She’d got sick, the nurses told
him. She’d sent a message. She was thinking of him, but too sick right
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 125
then to visit. For days Prosper himself was too sick to think of any-
thing; and when he was no longer sick he was so changed he didn’t
know how to think of her or where he had come from. He’d been put
to sleep in the hospital, and when he awoke fully—when the spell was
lifted—he was still there, only now it was where he lived, and always
had been.
The next thing he would remember with any clarity was the doctor,
his white coat collared like a priest’s, who came to hover over him,
read his chart and tell him what had happened to him in that limbo.
The operation on his back had gone well, the doctor said. He would
stand straighter than he had before. He wouldn’t be able to bend over
quite as well, but he hadn’t been able to bend very well before, except
at the waist, wasn’t that true? It was true. Prosper hadn’t yet tried
bending over with his new back so he didn’t know what the difference
would be.
“Better than that,” the doctor said. “It won’t get worse now. If we’d
done nothing it would have got worse.”
Prosper couldn’t respond to that. They’d told him often, the doctor
and the nurses, that he’d get worse and worse if he didn’t have the
operation, but he hadn’t felt himself to be in bad shape, and didn’t
know what “worse” would mean.
“All right,” he said.
“So.” The doctor smiled, ready to move on.
“But can you tell me,” Prosper said, “how come I can’t move any-
thing.” He made to move a leg, to show him it couldn’t.
“Temporary,” the doctor said. “You’ll get over that.”
Maybe it was temporary, though everything that happened in those
days was so new and unknown, any transformation or decline or wast-
ing or empowerment possible, that even transitory states seemed to be
forever, no matter what the nurses said; Prosper poked at his unresist-
ing thighs, as cold-skinned as a chicken leg and seemingly no more
his.
Each day a nurse removed the front of his brace and washed him.
Then the brace was buckled back together, and two nurses lifted him
in his brace and with great care and much instructing of each other
they turned him over, and let him lie facedown for a time. It was like
turning over in sleep, except that it took a very long time, and two
126 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
other people. After a week, it was different when the nurse came to
wash him. He was different. He could feel it: the warm water, the
smooth soap, the rough cloth. Not the way he had before, but as though
he were awaking with the sun and hearing confused noises not yet
resolved into birdsong and kitchen clamor. He could feel it and held his
breath. His penis when the nurse lifted and swiped it, swiped under his
testicles, suddenly rose and swelled, as though also startled awake. She
cleaned his inner thighs and reached deep down between his legs. Pros-
per thought of looking at the ceiling, or closing his eyes, but couldn’t.
Without looking away from her job the nurse said, “Feeling a little
better, huh?” and at the same time flicked at his crotch with the middle
finger of her free hand, the way you do when you want to send some-
thing—a spitball, a bug—a good distance; her nail struck sharply
against the tender underside of the pink head that was peeking boldly
out, Prosper yelped, and the whole collapsed and shrank.
Feeling better. Still his legs remained cold, as though asleep, below
the middle of his thighs. In a few days the doctor came again, and
lifted Prosper’s legs, and laid them down again. He talked to the nurse
about Prosper’s back, his legs, the healing of his wound (they called it
a wound, as though they had done it by accident), and he went away
again, with a wink at Prosper that made him wonder.
After a month he came back, and this time drew up a chair by
Prosper’s bed to have a talk.
“So the operation was a success, and your back is doing well,” he
said. “But it didn’t go as well in another way.”
Prosper grew momentarily conscious of the cast he lay buckled in.
The doctor was regarding him, maybe with truth and frankness in his
steady gaze, but it seemed sinister to Prosper, the intense stare of people
in the movies who are about to reveal crimes, or accuse others of them,
or change people into monsters.
“The side effects of an operation like this can’t be predicted,” he
said. “It hasn’t been done in this way for very long. In the future we
will . . . well. In your own case. There’s a lot of complex innervation
running up that spine of yours. Well up everybody’s. And placing the
instrumentation can have unintended consequences.”
He put a hand strongly but gently on Prosper’s leg. Prosper could
feel the warmth.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 127
“You’ve had a certain amount of paralysis.”
Prosper nodded, not knowing what the word meant exactly though
it was one spoken around the ward. Infantile Paralysis. “The nurse
said it would get better,” he said. “It already has.” He almost told
about how he had felt the nurse washing him, the effect it had had and
what she’d done, but stopped before he did. “She does the massage
every day. I couldn’t feel it, now I do.”
“Well that’s fine,” the doctor said without a smile. “But in the long
term. You’re going to need some help walking.”
Prosper pictured two nurses, the nice one, the other, by his side
always, helping him along.
“We’re going to teach you all about that. How to use some crutches
to get along. You’ll do fine when you get used to them. Everybody
does.” He rose. “You’ll need a little bracing to keep these legs straight
and strong for that. Braces and the crutches. You’ll get along fine.”
“Okay,” Prosper said. The two of them, Prosper on the bed and the