But she was correct just the same. Once upon a time he did think he had the answers for everything. Now he understands how little he knew. But he cannot tell her.
And if he could speak, what might he say? What would he talk to her about? What message would he bring to the dead to show he understood even a bit of their plight?
He might say no. He might say yes. He might yadda yadda yadda.
He might say there is a new flower growing in the window box. A yellow tulip, his wife’s favorite. He might tell his wife he still loves her. He might tell her that he loved her and he loves her and he always will. What better thing might a person say?
The strangest thing about his immobility, he thinks, is how much he moves inside it. His chest rises and falls, ever so slightly, not much more palpable than his thoughts, but still discernable. Sweat traces his face like the fingertips of blind angels. Fluids and gasses move deep inside him, down in the hidden chambers of the self.
And his eyes move, even though he is rarely aware of it. He sees, but what he sees could be the dream he’s having, he has no way of telling. He has no way of telling anyone. His eyes might even be cameras, replacements for the eyes he used to have. Click and click again. Can they do such things? They can do so many things he does not understand. He does not understand.
And the world moves, changes and spins because of something he has done. He is done. The world changes colors and brings forth strange and wonderful creatures who dance and lick and scream, and he knows he is the cause, but he does not know how.
In the other bed his wife stares at him. She may have died but he cannot be sure. Sometimes he thinks a look can last longer than a life. She has stared at him so intently for a very long time. She does not miss a thing. He understands that for a very long time she stared at him with a love beyond anything he had ever experienced before, beyond anything he might imagine, but he suspects the intention of that gray-eyed gaze has changed over the time of their imprisonment to become of another kind of focus and intensity, but he was never quite sure what words might best describe this new state. In his more fanciful speculations, in fact, he imagined that his wife invented a brand new emotion: one that goes beyond love, one that factors the despair of knowing, the knowledge that comes from living with death so close at hand.
He prefers to look not into those hazy gray eyes but at her hairline, at that place where the hair parts above the middle of her forehead, where the combined scents of shampoo and brain heat so often gather, where she smells clean and vital, where her smell is like a taste of the entire of her, where he would live forever if he could.
The phone rings again, a physical tearing of the sour air in the bedroom. His daughter’s answering machine picks it up. A loud click followed by another loud click, as if something is snapping. As if the bones of this sorry animal, this answering animal, are breaking, and soon it will answer no more, its sad carcass draped over the nightstand.
Once upon a time it did answer, and so efficiently recorded the details of their daughter’s death, which he would not believe at first, because she only went out for some milk, she promised them both (although neither of them could answer) that she’d be right back, and who could die in such a way, on such a small errand?
The voice on the machine had been so crisp, so professionally sympathetic as it delivered the terrible news, who could not believe it?
Now the male voice on the machine asks, “Are you there? Pick up. Pick up. Are you there?” with an urgency that surprises him. Some boyfriend he does not know about? Was that where she was really going when she left here? Did she tell him about her parents, so that maybe he’ll think to call the police and send them to her house?
There’s always a chance. He used to tell her, from the time she was a little girl, there’s always a chance, sweetheart.
“Are you there?” Even if he could answer, he does not know what he could say.
His daughter left on her little errand eight days ago. He knows because of the calendar on the wall just above his daughter’s desk. He can barely see it, tucked around the corner there, but it is still clear enough. Kittens above the black, dated squares. He cursed her sweet name for her arrogance, so convinced with her nursing degree that she could take care of them both. No nursing home, no nursing home, Dad. Damn her carelessness. And her driving has always lacked caution, no matter how much he tries to teach her. She thought she knew. She thought she knew. Her father’s daughter, she took after him.
No one knows he is here. And no one knows her mother is here. Now the eighth day is passing, slipping like ooze from broken hydraulics, dripping off the edge of the table and out of sight.
And damn her for being dead. She’s broken his heart. And now nothing can be right. There is nothing he can say. Even when there is so much to say.
His wife’s arm hangs limp off the side of the bed. She’s been strapped down, but in that last seizure the cloth tears, the arm flopping free, then limp. He’d wanted to be closer then, but all that moved were his desperate tears.
Eight days and some strong smells have faded, some gradually making their presence known. The smell the body makes as fluids give way. The smell of the orange on the sunny table. The stench as the body dies incrementally. The reek of time, wasted and misused, the days thrown away. The foulness of regret, accumulated until the very end.
His wife was always fussy about matters of toiletry. She had no more odor than a glossy magazine ad. She cared for no variety of incense or perfume, and found even cooking odors somehow rude. She could not be said even to smell fresh. She was cured. She was sealed. She was statuary. Her nose was an anchor for her eyes and nothing more.
Illness, as he would have told her had she just asked, brings indignity. He was the first to fall, robbed of speech and mobility by a blood clot, and he greatly admired the way she put aside her prejudices in order to take care of him. Even changing him when the aide was off duty. She didn’t complain, not even involuntarily. She simply did what needed to be done for someone she loved. Could he have done the same for her? He wasn’t so sure. At least not with such care, such equanimity.
She’d been bent over him, rearranging his pillow, making it so that it fit perfectly beneath his ears, and he was feeling absurdly grateful, because a crease in the case had been torturing him for hours. Then he detected an ever so faint aroma of urine, and he stared at her in surprise as her expression changed, as if some startling idea suddenly entered her consciousness, and almost immediately he knew it was a stroke—she’d been assaulted by the fairies, and she fell away from him and he couldn’t even shout his outrage at the terrible thing. The anger leaked out of him a bit at a time over the following hours, weeks, and months.
What is left of the woman he loved in the nearby bed he cannot know. There is so much he cannot know.
He does not know when the ringing in his ears first began. It seems a recent event but he cannot be sure. He suspects it’s the song the brain sings when it dies but of course there is no way for him to know if this is true. Sometimes it is loud and sometimes it is quite soft. Sometimes it is all he can do not to weep when he hears it.
One of the things his wife and he enjoyed most was listening to music together. Now those days are gone, he thinks, or are they? Perhaps even now they are listening to the same tune.
Suddenly there is quiet as if a door has been closed. This is the way. This is the way. When the view becomes unbearable, then shut the door.
He closes his eyes against her death and a loud voice grows, singing from somewhere far below him. It is his own voice he hears, even though his lips do not move.