You’re lying here. Your eyes, which have grown used to the half dark, have no trouble picking out the gleam of your wheelchair’s steel components. The chair isn’t next to the bed or at the foot of the bed, but over by the window, shoved into the corner between the window and the closet (and you curse the idiot who stuck it there for convenience’s sake, no, out of pure laziness, so that she, the healthy one, the ambulatory one, the one who can get around fine, wouldn’t keep tripping over that stupid handicapped contraption). Theoretically, you could lower yourself carefully onto the pink throw rug beside the bed (God, you hate pink!), haul yourself half-upright and drag yourself, ass first, toward the wheelchair, until finally you’re able to pull yourself into it by the strength of your arms alone; practically speaking, anyway, you could’ve done that thirty years ago, maybe twenty years ago, but you’re an old man now, an old cripple, and you know that the very attempt, not in theory, but in praxis, would leave you spent and gasping on the hard floor, instead of lying in a soft bed like you are now, and so until further notice, you’ll continue to lie here in bed.
The whole house is full of a ringing silence that makes it seem twice as large. What was it she said? Being married to you, she said, is like hauling around a sack full of rocks every hour of every day, rocks that aren’t good for a damn thing; and even though you can stop and rest for a moment, you can never put the sack down, she said. Is the maid coming by today or tomorrow? You can’t remember. She’s always been quiet and timid, you think, timid and quiet. She’s done everything you’ve asked of her. No, not everything. She’s done everything she was supposed to do. And not a lick more. You’ve never asked for whims. What she calls whims. Could it be? you think, that the whiny, two-faced termagant really? In that case, she could’ve at least put things back where they go, you think, at the very least the telephone, you think. What are you supposed to do, though, when both your wheelchair and the telephone are out of reach? Is the maid coming by today or tomorrow? You can’t remember. You feel an urgent desire to call for help, as if you’ll burst from the pressure of it building inside you if it’s not released through your mouth, but you manage to hold the scream back. You’re not going to panic. You try to focus on the advantages of the situation, namely that you don’t have to be up and about, indeed, you can go back to sleep in good conscience, since you’re stuck in bed anyway and can’t do a damn thing about it.
You’ve really got to pee. What if she? you think, is she really? for good? you think, that means that (and you feel a sudden surge of joy sweep through you like a breath of fresh air, a gleeful sense of nervous anticipation, as if, somewhere deep down inside of you, someone had taken a dust rag to a magnificent crystal chandelier and then lit it in celebration), and at that moment you realize that’s it’s finished, that there’ll be no more endless whining, endless gloom and doom, endless absence of imagination (you wonder if, in the end, that’s why she married you; she simply wasn’t capable of imagining what life with a cripple would be like), the stubborn efficiency, the perpetual attentiveness (broken by fits of cynicism, like when a faithful family dog suddenly turns around and, to the owner’s amazement, bites someone, and then, as if to avoid being put down, returns to being the faithful family dog it was before, watching both owner and maimed victim with the same friendly, mournful, almost human brown eyes), she’s done everything you’ve asked of her, no, not everything; she’s done everything she was supposed to do, and not a lick more; in which case, you think, you’re finally, in a word, free, free! from the miserable creature on whom you’ve been completely dependent for years, for far too many years, whom you (with clenched teeth, repressed rage, physical disgust) have had to let lift, hold, support, wash, push, turn, and wheel you, and so on and so on; in that case it’s over and done with, case closed, bye-bye birdie, you’re free! you think, free! to do what you want when you want, without her weighing you down, or rather, without you weighing her down, no, without her weighing you down, who’s weighing who down, would a normal man have filed for divorce a long time ago, you think? Definitely. In any case, you’re free.
These pleasurable thoughts keep you occupied, and the pictures you paint for yourself grow steadily more detailed, and this goes on for a while, or at least for several minutes, until you’re brought up short by the unpleasant fact that you’re a crippled old man no one wants, that you can’t just hop out of bed and conquer the world, that it’s too late, definitely too late to begin a new life, that you’ll never have enough money to do what you want, that not even the loosest nurse at the assisted living facility would let you grope her; and the more you think about it, the more you realize that your prospective, newly won freedom is useless, as worthless as a lottery ticket that’s managed to miss the jackpot by a single number (and it hits you that, in practical terms, that’s true of every lottery: someone out there is holding a ticket that’s only one number away from the jackpot, neither more nor less than that, all the other numbers match except for the number that, for example, should’ve been a four instead of a three, and so the ticket (the one ending in three) is as worthless as any other ticket, is as worthless as a ticket that missed the jackpot by five thousand and sixty-nine, for example).
You’re lying there in bed. Is the maid coming by today or tomorrow? You can’t remember. The telephone is out of reach. The wheelchair is out of reach. The toilet is out of reach. Within reach, however, are words, fragments, such as berth, spicy, every Tues., fine cuisine, all-you-can-eat buffet, special offer, the number to call, w/rice, salad, and sauce, 1:00 p.m., boa constrictor; these and others like them have been carefully glued to a purple background, a collection of torn, crumpled pieces of newspaper arranged almost (but not entirely) by chance on a piece of purple cardboard; the collage by your little grandnephew, who hasn’t learned to read yet, hangs beside your bed, a series of random fragments literally ripped out of their contexts, sometimes in direct opposition to a given word’s meaning, also words like Indian food, though he, the child who can’t read, is ignorant of the many Hindu gods, Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, Devi, Krishna, Rama, Kali (the two-faced goddess: merciful, loving mother on the one hand, and the terrifying destroyer who likes to dance on skulls on the other), of karma and metempsychosis; to your grandnephew, you think, all these signs, all these letters and numbers are still charged with a vague, childish sense of wonder, a magical kind of eminence; he also can’t read words like burning hate and evil (and even if he could read them, he wouldn’t understand them), because these words, you think, have come to rest where they are (on a purple piece of cardboard) thanks to nothing more than blind, analphabetic chance, right now they’re just raw material, and it’s only after many years have passed that your grandnephew will be able to understand their significance, that he’ll be able to look back on his creation (if it even still exists) and discover a meaning there that wasn’t his own.