Tabulae mundi mihi, Lenition
This is a companion piece to 'A Net to Catch the Wind',
which can be found here.
The Changeling
Nexis Pas
© 2010 by the author
As the curtain opens, a solitary child sits in a small chair at an old desk beneath an open window at stage right. He is seen in profile, looking out the window and holding a pencil. The room is dark. The only light comes through the window. Behind him in the room there is a child’s bed, a bookcase, a wardrobe. There are pictures on the wall, toys atop the bookcase, a rug on the floor. None of them can be clearly seen because the lighting is so dark. There is a door in the rear wall.
Before him on the desk is a piece of paper with a drawing on it. The boy looks back and forth between the paper and the world outside the window comparing the image on the paper with the scene outside as he makes marks on the paper. His efforts to depict the reality he sees through the window fall short, and he scratches angrily over the drawing with the pencil, gouging the paper. “I’ll never get it right,” he shouts. He wads the sheet of paper into a ball, tosses it onto the floor, and runs from the room. The noise attracts the attention of his mother, and a few moments later she enters the room and finds the ball of paper. She carries it over to the window, unfolds it, and tries to smooth the sheet flat on the desk. Innumerable folds bend and distort the paper. The picture is unreadable, wrinkled into indecipherability.
*****
The man in the hospital bed was so crumpled. His skull had been shaved so that a drain could be inserted to draw off fluid and relieve the pressure on his brain. Only an inky stain on his scalp was left to attest to what once had been a dense thicket of black hair. Most of his body was covered with bandages or encased in casts. The half of his face that was visible was swollen and black with bruises. A line of tiny stitches crossed one cheek. He was connected to several machines, and the monitors blinked and hissed and beeped constantly. He didn’t look as if he were breathing. The track on the heart monitor was more alive than he was. The machines must have been connected to someone else. No one could survive that much damage. They were showing me a corpse.
When the critical care ward sister approached me and asked if I wanted to see David, I leaped to my feet. I had to restrain myself from hugging and kissing her in gratitude. More than a day had passed since the accident, and I had spent most of that time waiting at St Brendan’s for that moment. She held up a hand to stop me for a second. “You can’t stay long,” she cautioned. “Just a few minutes.”
I was so happy. I dogged her heels and practically pushed her down the hall. I thought she meant that David was conscious again, and I could say something to him, reassure myself that he was all right. When she pulled aside the curtains and I saw the creature in the bed, I thought she had shown me the wrong person. “This isn’t David,” I almost said. “You’ve made a mistake. I’m here to see David Scotthorn. Take me to see David. Please.”
She patted the bed and made some minute adjustment to one of the machines. “You mustn’t stay long, Mr Somerset. And please don’t touch him. He’s very fragile at the moment.” She stood there like a clever sixth-form college student demonstrating her science project, a man reconstructed from an inept drawing.
I didn’t know what to do or say. No one had written lines for me to speak or told me how to play the role. I stood there frozen, fearful to move lest something more break.
*****
Alexis called me on her mobile within minutes of the accident. She kept interrupting her conversation with me to talk to someone on the street. I could hear her giving David’s and my names to someone and explaining that she was talking with David’s partner. I think it must have been a policeman because she insisted emphatically that we were civil partners and that I was legally David’s next-of-kin. In the background ambulance sirens grew louder and louder. There was a confusion of people shouting “stand back”, “let us through”, doors opening, and then Alexis calling out “Where are you taking him? Where are they taking him?” And someone saying “St Brendan’s”. And then doors slamming and the sound of the siren starting up and more confused talk.
I was asleep when Alexis called. I was in Cardiff filming a movie. I had a makeup and wardrobe call for 5:00 the next morning. We were scheduled for an outdoor scene, next to the harbour, and the director wanted to start shooting as the sun was rising. I thought I was dreaming at first. When I finally realised the phone was really ringing, it took me several seconds to find the light switch and then recall where I had left my mobile in the hotel room. By that time the message recorder had come on, and Alexis had hung up. The phone started ringing again within seconds.
I was irritated at being awakened from a sound sleep when I had to get up early the next morning. I let my anger show when I answered, but Alexis ignored that. A deluge of words came over the phone. I couldn’t make any sense of what she was saying, just that something terrible had happened. I wasn’t fully awake and I was annoyed, and she was distraught and alarmed. And when she finally made me realise that something had happened to David, I became equally distraught and alarmed.
“They’re taking David to St Brendan’s. I’ll go there. You have to come right away, Richard. He’s so broken. He was lying on the ground, only his body was wrong. It was all twisted about.” She was crying.
It took me an hour to get away. I had to wake the director and explain why I was leaving. He wouldn’t let me drive. That was for the best. I would have been stopped for speeding and reckless driving within a few miles. He pulled on the first clothes he could find and drove me to London. I was frantic by the time we left. The traffic was light on the M4 until just outside Reading when we ran into the lorry traffic taking the day’s load of goods into London. We were in Hounslow within three hours of Alexis’s call. Neither of us knew how to get from there to St Brendan’s. We had to stop at a police station and ask directions. By the time we arrived at the hospital, it was five in the morning.
No one would tell me anything. Just that David was being prepped for surgery. I couldn’t find Alexis. My mobile wasn’t working. The person at the counter at the main entrance finally sent me to the waiting room outside the surgical theatres. I checked with the attendants at the desk there every few minutes, until one of them took pity on me and went through the doors marked “No Admittance Authorised Personnel Only” to find information. She returned with the news that it would be several more hours before David was out of surgery and then several more hours before I could see him. She told me to go home and come back that evening or the next morning. But I couldn’t do that. I found a seat in a corner and gingerly lowered my body into it. The world had become fragile, and I felt that I had been compressed into a heavier form of being and that the chair would collapse under my weight. I didn’t move for hours. I feared that if I left, even for a minute to run to the toilet, a nurse delivering a message would think I had abandoned David and gone home.
Peter once told me a proverb he learned from his Russian grandmother, the Slavic equivalent of “Hope springs eternal”: “In the Kingdom of Hope, it is never winter.” I think that proverb originated in an era before hospitals. Over the next few weeks, I spent many hours in waiting rooms, and I became familiar with winter.
The committee that chose the furniture for the waiting rooms at St Brendan’s must have thought that bright and cheerful furnishings would lighten the burden of those waiting. A different committee chose the colours for the walls and the paintings that hung on them; it opted for soothing and bland. The results hurt the eyes. Both committees agreed that everything had to be easy to clean. The moulded plastic chairs may have been red and yellow and blue, but they were hard and uncomfortable. The paintings—reproductions of famous French impressionist works—were encased behind hard plastic covers that mercilessly reflected the light. I doubt if many people studied the décor, however.
So many people wandered in and out of those waiting rooms. The traffic never ceased. Most people spoke softly, but so many people were talking that there was a constant drone of conversation. The staff were always chatting among themselves, but they seldom spoke of their work. For the most part, they discussed their life outside hospital. Whenever I approached the nurses’ station to ask a question, there would be a group of four or five people talking. When they noticed me, one of them would break away and say brightly, “Yes, Mr Somerset? Is there something?”
There were others who talked so loudly—not the staff, but visitors. In the relative silence of the hospital, they seemed to shout. Everything they said was audible throughout the waiting room. They rarely mentioned their reason for being there—they had tacitly agreed to avoid that topic, as if ignoring the sickness and injuries around them would make them disappear. Mostly they gossiped or chattered on about television shows. They always seemed to be eating crisps and biscuits or drinking endless cups of coffee and tea. They brought the food with them in large tote bags. There was always a motherly figure who doled it out. Sometimes I sat there and let myself become absorbed in their speculations about the identity of the father of Ruby’s child or their complaints about the local council and the bin collections. I revelled in their normalcy. When they did speak of the person they were visiting, it was always with loud protestations of hope. Stridency itself apparently guaranteed fulfilment of their wishes.
There were many people like me who were there alone and had no one to speak to. We stared at the air, we checked our watches against the clock on the wall every few minutes, our eyes followed every nurse and porter who walked past, hoping that they were coming for us. We paced. We constantly shifted in our chairs, trying to find some comfort. We read or, rather, we pretended to read. I know I had a novel with me. I could not now tell you its title or what it was about. I could not remember what was happening from one sentence to the next.
Many who were there with others said nothing. There was one elderly woman and a younger women, her daughter I think. I saw them several times over the course of the first two weeks. The daughter could never sit for more than a moment. She would wander off and return shortly with a Styrofoam cup of tea, the label of the tea bag fluttering in the air or stuck wetly to the side of the cup. She would hand the cup to her mother. The mother would look at it without recognition, as if she had no idea how she came to be holding the cup or what she was supposed to do with it. She might take a sip, but then she would set the cup on the table beside her. The two of them might sit there for an hour waiting to be called back to the bedside of the person—husband, father, son, I never knew—they were visiting. When they left, the table might hold six or seven cups of cold tea.
Even in my memories, I focus on the waiting room, not that other room, the room down the hall, the room with David in it. I studied my fellow sufferers. I mined them as ore for future roles. This is how a hand gestures grief. This is how the tilt of the neck and the set of the shoulders mime despair. This is how one wears the mask of hope.
The population of the room changed constantly. I can still call to mind so many of the people who sat there. I was so irritated with all of them and with the hospital. Until I saw David. When I had to confront what now bore David’s name, I wished I were still in the waiting room, on the M4 mired in traffic, in Cardiff, on a plane headed across the Atlantic, anywhere but that room and the loud silence on the bed.
*****
I sat in David’s room for all but a few hours each day for the next several weeks. In the beginning, I had to force myself to enter it. When they let me see him after the initial round of surgeries, I hadn’t known what to expect. The next visit I knew what awaited me behind the curtains, and that step through the curtains into the area that held the bed was the only act of true courage I have ever performed. I was almost physically sick. I felt terrified and alone. Luckily they kept David heavily sedated for the first few days, and he hardly moved. I wouldn’t have survived evidence that he might be alive and in pain under all that machinery.
I was the only visitor allowed to see David at first. If either of his parents had been willing to see David again, I suppose I would have been supplanted during their visit. On the second day, I rang his parents to tell them what had happened. David’s father answered and, when he understood it was me, told me to bugger off. “David isn’t our son. Not since he took up with your lot.”
Our friends and colleagues came by in a continuous stream. After three days, David had been moved to a room in the casualty ward. I had to leave David’s room each time someone arrived and speak with them in the hallway. Alexis saw that I was not up to dealing with their condolences and sympathy. She organised them and restricted visitors to a few each day. She took my mobile so that I didn’t have to answer all the calls from people who had that number and brought me another. She dealt with the media and kept them from hounding me for information. In some ways her efforts were a great help. In others, they meant that I had to spend more time sitting beside David’s bed, watching him be nothing.
Each morning they wheeled him away on a gurney. He would be gone for several hours. Usually some bit of medical jargon would be thrown at me in explanation as he was taken out. “Procedure”—every day another “procedure”. Couldn’t they have found a less pretentious term to describe their barbarities? Every time they brought him back, I would be told that David was “improving”. If I pushed them for more information, they would say “Mr Scotthorn is doing as well as can be expected.” Then they would point at him as if that explained everything.
They treated him like an object, moving him about, prodding him, talking over his body as if he weren’t there. Every doctor who came into the room lifted his unbandaged eyelid and shone a light from a penlight into it. Every nurse took his pulse, even though the heart monitor flashed the current rate with each beat. Three or four times an hour someone walked in and disturbed him. Then they would make a mark on his chart, nod at me, and walk out.
They told me repeatedly not to touch him. Finally one night I couldn’t hold back. His left hand and forearm were unbandaged. The arm was arranged atop the sheet so that the nurses could attach the saline and glucose drips to the shunt in the arm. I stepped up to the bed. They had shaved the arm, I suppose to make it easy to keep it sterile. It looked so naked and so small and so pale without the familiar mat of black hair extending from just beneath the elbow to his wrist.
I never told David, at least not in words—I suppose I feared that he would think that I was silly—but I loved stroking that hair. It was so silky, and beneath it were the firm flesh and the blood vessels beating with his life. All the contradictions that I loved in him were there—the tenderness and the warmth, the strength and the ferocity, the energy and the joy. I guess they’re not really contradictions, are they?
On the underside of the wrist about an inch from the palm, he had a tender spot. A little gasp of pleasure escaped his lips when I touched him there, and his hand jerked involuntarily. Sometimes he held his arm up for me so that I could caress it. I would let my hands glide over his forearm, barely touching him. Soft rumblings would come from his throat, and he would move closer to me, angling his head to fit against my shoulder. The pleasures of a Sunday morning, the curtains pulled back and the sun shining across the bed, laughter and conversation from people on the street far below us coming through the open window and playing around us. And the two of us anticipating the joys that were to come, but not rushing them.
“Whispering,” that’s what David called it. I was stroking his arm once, and he said, “Your fingers are whispering to me.”
His hand lay palm up on the bed. I reached out with a fingertip and stroked the pad of his index finger and then traced a line along the outside of the finger and then the outside of his thumb and down to his wrist. His fingertips trembled and contracted inward a bit. Perhaps I just imagined that. I wanted a sign, some sign he knew that, of all the people who touched him, there was one special one.
I wanted him to open his good eye and wink at me and say, “I hope this is done soon so that I can get out of this costume and take this makeup off. Let’s have takeaway tonight. Just the two of us. I don’t want anyone else around. I’m tired of all these people. I want to be alone with you.” And the director would ask me to step back, out of the shot, and the camera and lighting crews would move in to finish filming the scene, this medical drama in which he had a starring role.
His hand was so cold. So alien. His skin was rubbery and too soft, like a balloon that isn’t fully inflated. I shrunk away from him. I wanted so much for all this to be undone, for it never to have happened. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be the watcher who had to sit there because someone has to sit and watch, if only so that someone will sit and watch for us when our time comes. I couldn’t leave David alone, to die alone. He deserved my presence. After all he had done for me and meant to me, I had to stay there, with him. My mate, friend, counsellor, companion, mentor, coach, fellow prankster, co-conspirator. My ferocious foe and ardent defender. My lover.
If he survived, the days would lengthen with his care. His body might be beyond his control, his mind perhaps gone. No one would commit to a prognosis. There was one doctor who was more forthcoming than the others. He spoke of injuries to the brain, the ruptured spleen, the damage to the “soft tissues”, by which he meant the liver and kidneys, the lack of response in David’s legs. He never said that full recovery wasn’t impossible, but he was trying to prepare me for the worst. When you expect the worst, anything even minimally better is a victory.
If David couldn’t recover fully, then I hoped he would die. I didn’t want him to live if he were less than himself. And I didn’t want to live with him if he were less than himself. I hated myself when I realised that. I wanted him to be well, but only if he were totally himself again. I knew I was being selfish and thinking only of myself. I tried to persuade myself that that was what he would have wanted as well.
I didn’t understand why his body clung so to life. He was so heavily sedated that I knew it wasn’t a conscious decision. It could only have been some primitive part of the brain—the ghosts in the machine, I read that somewhere. The primitive layers of the brain kept sending out the signals that made his heart beat and the blood circulate and the organs function however feebly. It is still a mystery. He was broken, held together by wires and stitches, his body oozing fluids, connected to machines that forced air into his lungs and fed him and cleaned his blood. Had he not been drugged, he would have been in enormous pain. Perhaps he still was inside. Perhaps the painkillers merely kept the pain from showing and distressing those of us who had to watch. His mind had been unplugged from his body, except for that one small part that held fast to living.
I sat in a corner, on an uncomfortable chair, alone in a darkened hospital room with machines beeping, the respirator pump gasping and clicking, the sounds of conversations in the corridor muted by a closed door, a lifeless body on the bed. The perfect ingredients for prompting thought. I had no one else. I didn’t have to pose for anyone. There was no one I had to impress, no one I loved whom I had to protect from the truth about myself. I could confront myself without artifice. And the truth was that if I had been lying in that bed, he would have battled for me. If I were never to recover and had to spend the rest of my life lying in a coma, he would have battled for me. I didn’t have that sort of strength within myself. I was always on the verge of tears, but I couldn’t let myself cry. The only person who could have comforted me lay a few feet away. If I started crying, I had no one who could help me stop, no one to hold me and to crush the sorrow within me with his living warmth.
I compulsively revisited every scene of our lives together—well, not every scene. Just the good ones. I was like a figure skater, drunk on the joy of overcoming gravity and whirling in the air, unmindful for that moment aloft of the bone-jarring contact with the hard dark ice at the end of the leap. I glided across our time together.
“Should we practice the kiss?” David wore his most solemn look, the true professional interested only in his craft. He was helping me rehearse a scene—I was the male lead in a student production, and the scene we were working on ended with a kiss between my character and the female lead.
We were sitting on the couch that doubled as his bed in that awful room he rented above a stationer’s store when we were students. The room was barely big enough to contain the couch and a wardrobe. It smelled of dust and mould. The one window was so dirty that it admitted only a diffuse grey light.
When I spoke the final line in the scene, I lowered my copy of the script and closed it. David looked up from his copy. “Should we practice the kiss?” He looked so serious. But his Adam’s apple gave him away. He gulped, and it bobbed up and down. Until then, I hadn’t been sure if he was attracted to me. I was certainly attracted to him. I had been chasing him for weeks, forcing my presence on him at first until he accepted me. It had taken me days to persuade him to allow me to visit him at his digs. He kept insisting that there wasn’t room enough for two people. He was right about that, but I shamelessly manoeuvred him into an invite.
I shrugged. “I was thinking it would be better not to do one of those stage kisses. You know, the kind where the lips meet tentatively and then the kiss grows more ardent as the two people realise they really are attracted to each other. I thought it would be better to do something more like this.” I demonstrated what I had in mind.
“Hmm, that might work. But what about something like this?” He placed a hand behind my head, slid down a bit, and then pulled me down. His arms grasped me tight. I could feel the heat rising from his body into mine.
There was no subtlety in our first encounter. We were attracted to each other, horny, lustful, hormone-programmed. We learned to be lovers later, to experience each other with joy, to approach the act of love with kindness aforethought. But all that came later.
The first time we spent the night together, I woke up in bed next to David. The window in his room had no curtain. The light coming in from the street was almost blue. It fell on David’s glossy black hair. It was as if silver dust had settled on his hair. And I knew that I wanted to spend my life waking up beside him and watching the light in his hair.
That’s what I remembered as I sat waiting for him to die.
Of course, David didn’t die. At least the body to which his name was attached didn’t die. But much of the David that I had known, and loved, died in that accident.
The changes in his condition were gradual. The bruises on his face started to fade. The black gave way to green and then yellow and finally a pallid white. The drain was removed from his scalp. Some of the bandages weren’t replaced. He began breathing on his own, and the respirator was disconnected. The nurses began opening the curtains again to let in natural light.
One day as I was sitting there watching him, I realised that his good eye was open. He appeared to be looking at something on the table beside his bed. It held a vase of flowers, several brightly coloured get-well cards, a box of tissues, and a clutter of hospital odds and ends. I stood up and said his name. His eye moved toward the sound of my voice but didn’t focus on me. Then it closed again. I said his name again, but there was no response. I didn’t tell anyone. It was my sign. I didn’t want to share it with anyone. But I pulled the chair closer to his bed and sat there very still, concentrating on his face and watching for any movement.
I knew he wasn’t asleep. He never slept during those first weeks. I’ve watched him sleep. His face is alive then, the eyes rolling the lids, his mouth twitching slightly. Dozens of little movements. But in hospital his face was always slack. That’s how I first knew that he was coming back—when I saw his face move. As I watched, his lips pursed slightly, and his eyelid quivered. His face was alive again, if only for a moment. But those moments became more and more frequent.
And one day he looked at me and said “Ri–” and “Wh–?” He tried to shift his body on the bed and then groaned in pain. His eye began searching for me, and I moved into his field of vision and touched his hand. His fingers clutched at mine spasmodically, as if he had forgotten how to move them.
Every day after that, there was another sign of improvement. The day the final cast came off, the day the shunt was removed from his arm, the first day he could sit in a wheelchair—sometimes I became frustrated and impatient at the slowness of his recovery, but there was always some new evidence of his return.
The doctors wanted to send him to a long-term care facility. When I protested, they told me that he would require too much help, that it would be months, if ever, before he could manage by himself. I badgered them, and they finally gave me a long list of adjustments I had to make to our flat before they would release David to me. I also had to hire an attendant. I surprised them with the speed with which I got it all ready.
The best thing was seeing how happy David became when he started improving rapidly. He was so chuffed at the prospect of leaving the hospital. His progress had been so rapid. He was allowed to have more visitors, and I came in on him one day to find him entertaining several members of the cast of the play he had been in when the accident occurred. He was joking with the man who had taken over his part that he needn’t worry about David returning to play the role.
“I can’t remember the lines. Not a one. That car knocked them out of my head. So you’re safe for the run of the play. I don’t even remember what the play’s about. Alexis told me it’s called
Autumn Garden. So I suppose it’s about fallen leaves decaying in the cold rain. Terribly sad. Yet the promise of spring is there too.” He mugged sadness and then followed it with a look of bedazzled hope with his tongue lolling out. Everyone laughed, he loudest of all.
He chatted on, making light of what had happened to him and dismissing the remaining physical problems as only temporary. He would, he told them, return to work as soon as he could walk again. He even called his agent in to begin planning what roles he might play.
His optimism grew boundless. He insisted that I arrange for physical therapy at a place near us so that he could walk and eventually jog there and build up his legs faster. He had me buy several new pairs of trainers for him. When one of the doctors suggested he buy a motorised wheelchair with more controls, he vetoed that. “There’s no need to spend the money. Just rent one that will get me about for the first few weeks.”
As soon as he could spend most of the day sitting up, he wanted to be in his wheelchair as much as possible. Just being mobile and able to leave his room meant so much to him. Every time I came to visit, I had to enlist the help of the hospital staff to find him. He took to roaming the halls and visiting with the other patients. I would often come upon him in earnest discussion with someone. People opened up to him so much. They told him their life stories, they introduced him to their families, they turned to him for comfort. When the two of us were alone together, he would tell me about them. He obviously felt that they deserved more pity and sympathy than he himself did. In his own mind, he was healthy and whole again, his current infirmities but minor, temporary problems.
One day he was in the children’s wing when I arrived. He was acting a panto version of Aladdin’s Lamp. Somehow he had co-opted the ward sister into taking the part of the lamp. The children and their parents and the other nurses erupted into laughter every time he rubbed her stomach and commanded the genii to come forth. He was surrounded by smiles, the centre of a circle of onlookers, as he hammed his way through the various parts, his voice changing effortlessly as he moved from character to character. They were entranced by the story he was telling them. For a few moments, all of them were in some other place.
That was the day I dared begin to allow myself to hope for a complete recovery. Our lives had been on pause for so long. We hadn’t dared make plans because we didn’t know if we had a future. Now we could press the button again and start the tape running again.
The day before his scheduled release, I was with him in his room when the doctor in charge of his treatment came in to talk to him. I stood up and walked to the window and looked out with my back to them. I wanted to give David some privacy but be near enough to hear any special instructions. David sometimes had lapses in his memory. He could be like an old person who forgets something seconds after he is told it.
The doctor had the results of the final series of tests that had been administered to David over the preceding week. In the most technical language he could muster, without any attempt to soften his message, the doctor bluntly told David that he would never walk again. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t express regret.
For weeks everyone in that hospital had held out the hope to David that he would recover fully. They could have told me and let me break the news to David gradually. I think that doctor enjoyed telling David he would never walk again. He was so smug and self-satisfied, as if this were a punishment David deserved.
David didn’t understand as quickly as I did the import of what the doctor was telling him. But when he did, he moaned. That’s all, just one soft moan as all hope drained from him. Even then, the doctor droned on. David slumped in the wheelchair. All emotion had disappeared from his face. He had fled from his body again. I lost my temper and shouted at the doctor to get out. That at least brought David back to reality. He looked at me and held out a hand to me. When I grasped it, he broke down in tears. Great ugly gasps tore through his chest as he struggled to breathe. He was trying to say something, but all that came out were whimpers. He shook his head from side to side in denial, each swing more violent than the last. He was struggling to stand up, to prove the doctor wrong, to show himself that he could walk.
I wrapped his head in my arms and hugged him tightly against my chest. I didn’t know what to say. I babbled on, trying to comfort him. We would consult other specialists. We would find someone. We would hire a physical therapist. I had to give him hope.
That became my principal role in the weeks that followed—giving him hope. Well, not so much giving him hope as seconding his frantic insistence that he would recover. He scorned any suggestion that he might not recover fully. Even a warning that he should take it easy and not overextend himself too quickly provoked assertions that caution would only delay his recovery and the day when he would regain full use of his legs.
He tried so hard. He saw the physical therapist three times a week for an hour-long session each time. Those were the one appointments David never missed. Paul Norman—the home healthcare aide we hired—had some training in physical therapy, and David forced Paul to devise ever more intensive routines. He and Paul spent hours exercising each day on the equipment David rented and had installed in our flat.
Before the accident, David had always kept himself in good shape. He jogged and worked out daily, but he had never been a fanatic about exercising. During the stay in hospital, his muscles had atrophied. His upper body and arms responded quickly to the hours of exercising, but his legs remained stubbornly unaffected.
I came home one day to find him sitting in his wheelchair in front of a mirror. He was wearing only shorts. He had just finished exercising, and I could hear Paul in the bathroom preparing to bathe him. David’s body was glistening with sweat. I walked up behind him and leaned over to kiss his neck. His skin was still damp and felt cold. I met his eyes in the mirror and realised that he was struggling not to cry. He tried to smile at me and say something, but his mouth was distended by a rictus he apparently could not control. He began compulsively pounding his thighs with his fists as if he could beat life back into them.
I grabbed at his wrists to try to stop him and he turned on me. Despite my greater size, his exercising had made his arms strong and he shoved me away. “Get the fuck out of here. Leave me alone. You’re always pushing at me, trying to help. I don’t need your help. I will do this myself.” He wheeled around violently and drove at my legs with the chair. In an effort to get out of his way, I lost my balance and tumbled to the floor. Paul rushed into the room and helped me to my feet.
David backed away and began struggling to lift himself out of the wheelchair. His upper body had become so powerful that he was able to raise himself out of the chair and put his feet on the floor. But he had forgot to set the brake on the chair, and his attempt to stand up made the chair roll backward and out from beneath him. He fell to the floor, striking his back on the chair. He cried out in pain. His legs were bent back beneath his torso, and his arms became tangled with the chair as he fought his body to right himself.
Both Paul and I rushed to him and tried to help him back into the chair. His clumsiness and helplessness made him furious. “I told you to get the fuck out of here.” His shout was directed at me. He clung to Paul. I think if he had had the use of his legs, he would have kicked me away.
Paul turned to me and whispered. “Let me deal with this.” He pushed me out the door and closed it behind me. I could hear David saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck” over and over and then Paul’s voice murmuring. I stood there with my forehead pressed against the door trying to hear and guess what was going on. Eventually David stopped speaking and then I could hear Paul bathing him.
As the weeks passed and his legs failed to respond, anger replaced hope. Paul alone could handle him—I think because David was Paul’s employer and that made David feel as if he were in charge. Paul was the only person David ever thanked. Anyone else who attempted to help him was greeted with irritation and impatience at best. The more frequent response was rage.
One day I found the sitting room floor littered with the torn remnants of a script that David had been reading. David and Paul were absent. Paul told me later that Jeremy Castle, David’s agent, had dropped by. David had pushed him to secure David a role in the play he was reading, and it fell to Jeremy to explain that the role was physically beyond him. David had become livid with anger and shredded the script and then attacked Jeremy. Jeremy had fled, and Paul had taken David out to allow him to calm down.
My feelings towards Paul were—are—complex. On one hand, I was grateful that he was there to deal with David for most of the day. I couldn’t have left David alone, couldn’t have escaped the emotional miasma of our flat, if Paul hadn’t been there to care for him. And I needed to escape that poisoned atmosphere if only for a few hours a day. On the other hand, I was jealous of David’s growing attachment to him. Paul and David are cut from similar patterns and have similar backgrounds. They often speak a language that I do not understand. Paul is so intimate with David that I suspect them of having secrets, even though I know David’s new body is incapable of physical intimacy. Yet the two of them have developed a mental shorthand that allows them to communicate with the merest of gestures. Paul understands the new David better than I do, perhaps because it’s the only David he’s ever known, perhaps because he wants to.
There were so many levels on which David and I had to re-establish our relationship. One night, about two months after his return, I went into David’s bedroom to check on him before I went to sleep and make sure that everything he might need was in reach. He had raised the top half of the bed so that he could sit up and read. I asked him if he wanted anything. He pushed back the covers a bit and said, “Just you.”
We hadn’t shared a bed in months. He was still recuperating. He often felt cold at night and had taken to wearing the top from a set of flannel pyjamas. In the V-shaped opening at his throat, I could see the beginning of the scar line where the doctors had stapled his chest together after the operation to close the puncture wounds in his lungs and rejoin the broken ribs. The scar itself was stark white, and the flesh puckered around it was red. He hadn’t been outside in the sun for months, and the tan he always achieved so easily had faded. His chest was smoother than I had ever known it. The hair has never grown back as it was before. There are small patches of thick hair surrounded by hairless areas. Much of his skin was scarlet, as if it had been burned. Some of that was due to the medication he was taking.
He lay there with his glasses on, his bad eye drifting to the left. “It’s too soon,” I protested. “I might hurt you.”
“No, you wouldn’t do that. I just want . . .” He looked so forlorn, so devoid of hope. I think it would have killed him if I had said no.
I sat down on the bed and stroked his hair. It had grown back very stiff, more like bristles than hair. Paul kept it cropped short because it couldn’t be coaxed into lying flat. “Let me get undressed. I’ll be back in a moment.”
When I returned, he had manoeuvred that top half of his body nearer to one side of the bed. He hadn’t been able to move his legs, and they still lay in the centre of the bed. I pulled the covers back and helped him out of his pyjama top. I couldn’t bear to look at his flesh closely. I turned the lamp to the lowest setting. I eased myself onto the open side of the bed. I lay on my side facing him and gently lowered my topmost leg onto his legs.
David slipped his arm under my neck and around my shoulders so that my head was resting on his shoulder with my face pressed against his neck. He kissed me on the forehead, very lightly, and then said, “I’ve missed you.”
I knew he wasn’t referring to the two of us being together. He meant that he missed us being intimate. It wasn’t until I was in bed with him, with my head resting on his shoulder and his arm around me pulling me into him, that I realised how much I had missed being intimate with him.
I began kissing his neck and stroking his chest. His flesh felt so alien. In many places it was devoid of texture. It was too smooth. His body was corroded with scars. Everywhere on his chest was evidence of what he had been through. Beneath my fingertips, the scars felt larger than they were. His body was so cold. It was repulsive.
“I love you.” That’s all he said.
It was enough. I had never before felt his love as a burden, but that moment the weight of my responsibilities toward him almost crushed me. My guilt smothered me. And I grew angry, angry at myself for feeling guilty, angry at him for making me guilty, angry at the world for dealing me this hand. And the worst was I couldn’t show it. I had to fake pleasure, for him, so that I wouldn’t disappoint him again.
We would not repeat the experiment for many months. It did, however, have a result. I became even more reluctant to be with David. I took to leaving early and returning shortly before I knew that David would become tired and go to bed. I arranged for Paul to work longer hours on the excuse that my involvement with a new television series was requiring more of my time. Rather than confront what David had become, I spent hours sitting in cinemas or in pubs. I paid no attention to the movie on the screen. I hardly tasted the drinks I ordered. They was simply excuses for not being with David.
There is no excuse for what I did next. I rehearsed the pretexts for my behaviour many times, trying to justify what I did. I had been celibate for the months since David’s accident. I told myself that as long as I didn’t care for the person, it would be a meaningless transaction. It wouldn’t harm my and David’s relationship. I needed the comfort of another body, if only for an hour. There was an actor on the television series. He had a minor role, but he appeared in most episodes. He was young, good-looking in a conventional way. More important, he was nothing like David. He had hinted that he would be interested, and one day I took advantage of his interest and his availability.
He was kind about what happened. But at the end, he asked me if I had ever had sex with a man before. What could I tell him? That he wasn’t David, and that he didn’t know how to be David. That guilt is not an aphrodisiac. That he couldn’t be a substitute for what to me was the only real thing. The problem was that the real thing no longer existed. Someone had snuck into our bedroom and substituted a changeling for David, and I wanted him to go away and for David, my David, to return. I was an actor, alone on an empty stage, facing a vacant theatre, without lines to speak or stage directions to follow.
All the guides to relationships tell you to talk out such problems with your partner. And in the past David had been the person who had helped me through every problem. He listened. He talked. He could be more angry and indignant on my behalf than I was myself, he could be infuriatingly impartial and objective if he thought I needed to see myself in perspective, he could make me laugh at myself. Somehow he always knew the way to help me find the solution to my problems. We would be talking and suddenly I would know what I had to do.
But how could I tell David that I couldn’t deal with him as he was now? That I was so shallow that his mangled body revolted me? That the very memory of the love and passion we had shared had become a torment because it was impossible to restore what had existed before?
That night I waited until late to come back. I checked the windows of our flat to make sure that all the lights were out and David safely asleep before I went in. I didn’t want to face him. He would have known instantly what I had done. As always, I looked in on him before going to bed. He had pulled the blanket up to his chin and only his head was visible. In the dim glow of the night light in the hallway, he looked like the old David. “With the right lighting, I can create any illusion,” a stage director once told me. I watched David for a few minutes and then continued down the hallway to our bed, my bed now.
As I tried to find a way back to the relationship we had once had, I realised that now I had no one to talk to—that was the worst injury we had sustained. Our friends were no help. They were sympathetic at first, but as the months passed, many of them began avoiding us. I don’t blame them—I would have liked to have been able to avoid the situation as well. Others cheerfully assumed that all was well now and were thus able to ignore our problems.
David is an actor, a good actor, and for our casual acquaintances and friends he could sustain a plucky façade, the courageous cripple who has overcome his handicaps and never burdens others with his problems. And they were happy to accept him in that role.
What David was learning, what he was making me learn, was a foreign language for our friends. None of them could comprehend the daily frustrations of his life—the embarrassment he felt when his wheelchair caught in a doorway, his silent rage at others’ good intentions, his despair when he realised that he would never work as an actor again. Outsiders just did not want to see what he was really going through. I don’t flatter myself that I fully understood either. I, too, didn’t want to see what he was really going through.
And it could be hard, bloody hard, to deal with him. I tried to remain calm when he provoked me. I knew that he was taking his frustrations out on me because he had no one else, because he thought that I was his safe haven, the one person he could shout at whom he could depend on to understand, who would love him no matter what he said.
There were days when I couldn’t stand it, when he pushed me too far, and we had some blazing rows. The neighbours must have wondered if their lives would ever be calm again. I had to learn to be strong in a way that was new for me. David had always been the strong one in our relationship. I had to keep his hopes up, force him to continue his exercises once he realised that he would not walk again, force him to contemplate the future optimistically in terms of what he could do rather than what he wanted to do.
It was difficult for me to keep him focused on the future when we both wanted the same thing—a restoration of the past. I often felt as if I were a robot programmed to perform the motions of daily life, to pretend that all was normal and that nothing important had really changed, that a wheelchair was nothing more than a piece of furniture, that a husk was the same person that I had loved for a decade.
David must have sensed my feelings of estrangement from him and my reluctance to confront fully what he had become. He grew secretive and uncommunicative. In some ways, that suited me. I didn’t have to deal with things I knew nothing of. There were days when we were nothing more than flatmates, two individuals whose lives intersected only at breakfast over hurried cups of coffee.
I didn’t, for example, learn until several weeks had passed that he had begun attending a group therapy session for adults like himself who had become crippled. I think that helped him a lot—he could talk frankly with people whose experiences were similar to his own. And I didn’t know until the arrangements were complete that Jeremy had found him a job as a director for a repertory company.
That job more than anything saved David. Both Jeremy and David claimed that David had always planned on becoming a director eventually, but it was something he kept putting off to the distant future. I had never heard of this before, but it is now firmly part of David’s history of himself. The credit really goes to Jeremy, I think. He somehow persuaded David to try directing. And David loved it. He was back in the theatre, perhaps not as he had planned, but still he was working, and he had a talent for it. It was wonderful to see him find himself in this new role. He was so excited about it. Jeremy—and work—saved David.
Our flat quickly became littered with scripts and set designs and costume sketches. I would return home to find David conferring with one or more members of the repertory company. He would greet me with the briefest of nods and then resume his discussion with the others. I was a supernumerary in this new production, far less important than Paul, who was co-opted into a new role as David’s assistant director, a role he handled with his usual efficiency. When David began working, it was like one of those old movies in which someone exclaims brightly, “Let’s put on a play,” and suddenly all problems dissolve.
Yet, he still missed being an actor, I think. I came home very late one night to find him in our bedroom, sitting in his wheelchair, a script in hand, examining himself in the full-length mirrors that line one wall.
“I was just acting out some of the roles in this new play, trying to figure them out. We begin rehearsals tomorrow.” He lifted his head for me to kiss.
“How’s it coming along?”
“The play? A few problems to iron out, but we’ll be ready. If you were asking about me, then I still have a few problems to iron out as well.”
I sat down on the bed behind him and looked at him in the mirror.
“If I were to play Caliban now, I wouldn’t need any makeup or a costume.” That was the first time I heard him refer to his damaged body so casually and frankly. He spoke softly, his gaze fixed on his image in the mirror. He seemed to be inventorying it, and his attitude towards it was strangely objective.
“You were great in that role.”
“Yes, I was. I won’t be modest about that. But that’s behind me, now that I’m
tout court so to speak. Now I couldn’t manage all of Caliban. I maybe have enough for ‘Cal’. I could just about play that part.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ll live to play Prospero some day.”
“No, not Prospero. Prospero’s your role. You could be a great Prospero—with my help, of course. I’ve always been better with Shakespeare than you.” He turned half way round and smiled at me.
“You’re enjoying directing, aren’t you?”
“And why not? It would be fun to boss you around. You’ve always been a lazy actor, never lived up to your potential, always opting for the easy way out, the safe roles.” He was teasing me, but there was a hardness beneath his comments. He was pushing at me, trying to make me see something.
I didn’t say anything. I was worn out from the months of tension and disappointment. I couldn’t take another argument. I was tired of struggling.
David wheeled his chair around to face me and took my hand in his. He began quoting Prospero’s final speech. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown and what strength I have’s mine own, which is most faint.” For the time it takes to speak those lines, he was Prospero begging his audience to free him from the stage on which he stands and the role he is playing. “But release me from my bonds with the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails, which was to please.”
When he finished, I began crying. He tried to embrace me but the chair was in the way. I knelt beside him and put my head on his lap. David stroked the back of my head as I gave way to great racking sobs. “We’ll be all right, Richard. We’re going to make it.” He kept saying that over and over until I calmed down.
We remained in that clumsy embrace for several minutes. After a time, I resumed my seat on the bed. I went through a box of tissues. It was as if the dam inside me holding back months of emotions had given way, and I was free to stop playing a role beyond my abilities. My eyes were red and my face was blotchy. We sat there holding hands for close to an hour, eventually joking and laughing about inconsequential things, having a gossip for the first time in months. It wasn’t so much what we were talking about as the fact that we were talking that was important.
It grew very late and when both of us began yawning, he asked, “Will you help me get into bed, Richard? It’s easier when I have help.” That was no longer true, but we needed things to do together that night.
I suddenly felt like a schoolboy, wanting to suggest to a date that we sleep together but uncertain of how the remark would be received. “I, uh, . . . could you, I mean . . . .” I gestured feebly toward the bed we hadn’t shared in months.
“Yes.”
