‘What would you like?’
‘Another whore.’ Donnell jerked his head toward Jocundra. ‘I’m bored with this one.’
‘Would you really prefer another therapist?’
‘Christ, yes! Dozens! Orientals, Watusis, cheerleaders in sweatsocks for my old age. I’ll screw my way to mental health.’
‘I see.’ Edman scribbled furiously, his eye downcast.
What gruesome things eyes were! Glistening, rolling, bulging, popping. Little congealed shudders in their bony nests. Donnell wished he had never mentioned the visual shift because they hadn’t stopped nagging him since, and he had begun to develop a phobia about eyes. But on first experiencing it, he had feared it might signal a relapse, and he had told Jocundra.
Edman cleared his throat. ‘It’s time we got to the root of this anger, Donnell.’ Note-taking had restored his poise, and his tone implied an end to games. ‘It must be distressing,’ he said, ‘not to recall what Jean looked like beyond a few hazy details.’
‘Shut up, Edman,’ said Donnell. As always, mere mention of his flawed memory made him unreasonably angry. His teeth clenched, his muscles bunched, yet part of his mind remained calm and watchful, helpless against the onset of rage.
‘Tall, dark-haired, quiet,’ enumerated Edman. ‘A weaver… or was she a photographer? No, I remember. Both.’ The eye widened, the eyebrow arched. ‘A talented woman.’
‘Leave it alone,’ said Donnell ominously, wishing he could refine his patch of clear sight into a needle beam and prick Edman’s humor, send the fluid jetting out, dribbling down his cheek, then watch him go squealing around the room, a flabby balloon losing flotation.
‘It’s odd,’ mused Edman, ‘that your most coherent memories of the woman concern her death.’
Donnell tried to hurl himself out of the wheelchair, but pain lanced through his shoulder joints and he fell back. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted.
Jocundra helped him resettle and asked Edman if they could have a consultation, and they went into the hall.
Alone, his anger ebbing, Donnell normalized his sight. The bedroom walls raised a ghostly gray mist, unbroken except for a golden fog at the window, and the furniture rippled as if with a gentle current. It occurred to him that things might so appear to a king who had been magicked into a deathlike trance and enthroned upon a shadowy lake bottom among streamers of kelp and shattered hulls. He preferred this gloom to clear sight: it suited his interior gloom and induced a comforting thoughtlessness.
‘… don’t think you should force him,’ Jocundra was saying in the hall, angry.
Edman’s reply was muffled. ‘… another week… his reaction to Richmond…’
A mirror hung beside the door to Jocundra’s bedroom, offering the reflection of a spidery writing desk wobbling on pipestem legs. Donnell wheeled over to it and pressed his nose against the cold glass. He saw a dead-gray oval with drowned hair waving up and smudges for eyes. Now and again a fiery green flicker crossed one or the other of the smudges.
‘You shouldn’t worry so about your eyes,’ said Jocundra from the door.
He started to wheel away from her, upset at being caught off guard, but she moved behind his chair, hemming him in. Her mirror image lifted an ill-defined hand and made as if to touch him, but held back, and for an instant he felt the good weight of her consolation.
‘I’d be afraid, too,’ she said. ‘But there’s really nothing to worry about. They’ll get brighter and brighter for a while and then they’ll fade.’
One of the orderlies sang old blues songs when he cleaned up Donnell’s room, and his favorite tune contained the oft-repeated line: ‘Minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days…’
Donnell thought the line should have continued the metaphorical progression and sought a comparative for weeks, but he would not have chosen months or years. Weeks like vats of sluggish sameness, three of them, at the bottom of which he sat and stewed and tried to remember. Jocundra urged him to write, and he refused on the grounds that she had asked. He purely resented her. She wore too damn much perfume, she touched him too often, and she stirred up his memories of Jean because she was also tall and dark-haired. He especially resented her for that. Sometimes he took refuge from her in his memories, displaying them against the field of his suffering, his sense of loss, the way an archeologist might spread the fragments of an ancient medallion on a velvet cloth, hoping to assure himself of the larger form whose wreckage they comprised: a life having unity and purpose, sad depths and joyous heights. But not remembering Jean’s face made all the bits of memory insubstantial. The hooked rugs on the cabin floor, the photograph above their bed of a spiderweb fettering a windowpane stained blue with frost, a day at a county fair. So few. Without her to center them they lacked consistency, and it seemed his grief was less a consequence of loss than a blackness welling up from some negative place inside him. From time to time he did write, thinking the act would manifest a proof, evoke a new memory; the poems were frauds, elegant and empty, and this led him to a sense of his own fraudulence. Something was wrong. Put that baldly it sounded stupid, but it was the most essential truth he could isolate. Something was very wrong. Some dread thing was keeping just out of sight behind him. He became leery of unfamiliar noises, suspicious of changes in routine, convinced he was about to be ambushed by a sinister fate masquerading as one of the shadows that surrounded him. There was no reasonable basis for the conviction, yet nonetheless his fear intensified. The fear drove him to seek out Jocundra, she in turn drove him to thoughts of Jean, round and round and round, and that’s why the weeks seemed like goddamn centuries, and the month - when it came to be a month and a little more -like a geologic stratification of slow, sad time.
One summerlike afternoon Jocundra wheeled him out to the stone bench nearest the gate and tried to interest him with stories of duels and courtship, of the fine ladies and gentlemen who had long ago strolled the grounds. He affected disinterest but he listened. Her features were animated, her voice vibrant, and he felt she was disclosing a fundamental attitude, exposing a side of herself she kept hidden from others. Eventually his show of boredom diminished her enthusiasm, and she opened a magazine.
High above, the oak crowns were dark green domes fogged by gassy golden suns, but when he shifted his field of focus he could see up through the dizzying separations of the leaves to the birds perched on the top branches. His vision was improving every day, and he had discovered that it functioned best under the sun. Colors were truer and shapes more recognizable, though they still wavered with a seasick motion, and though the brightness produced its own effects: scroll works of golden light flashing in the corners of his eyes; transparent eddies flowing around the azalea leaves; a faint bluish mist accumulating around Jocundra’s shoulders. He tracked across the glossy cover of her Cosmopolitan and focused on her mouth. It was wide and lipsticked and full like the cover girl’s; the hollow above her lips was deep and sculptural.
‘How do I look?’ The lips smiled.
Being at such an apparently intimate distance from her mouth was eerie, voyeuristic; he covered his embarrassment with sarcasm. ‘What’s up in the world of bust enhancement these days?’
The smile disappeared. ‘You don’t expect me to read anything worthwhile with you glowering at me, do you?’
‘I didn’t expect you could read at all.’ Flecks of topaz light glimmered in her irises; a scatter of fine dark hairs rose from her eyebrow and merged with the hairline. ‘But if you could I assumed it would be crap like that. Makeup Secrets of the Stars.’