The nurse, Dorothy, was huge, and indeed she needed her muscle and bulk to lift him onto the toilet or into the tub.
At first he was shocked to have himself heaved around naked by a strange woman, his white belly, his penis and testicles dangling under a sheet. A detestable intimacy, thrust upon him at #16 per hour, all Commonwealth Health would pay for, not even a nurse but a home health aide with an emergency beeper strapped to her huge hips. But he deserved no better. The food that Melissa or Virginia fed him three times a day as they sat by his wheelchair was wasted. The bony legs, the stomach, the white buttocks in the bathroom mirror were not body but merely numb things attached to his brain stem.
Dorothy handled him like a sack of potatoes, but she was not unkind. Ruddy-faced, she smelled of hand lotion, sweat, and alcohol from disposable towelettes. She had worked for a paralyzed woman, she told him, who recovered completely from some disease that started with a g. “Love is important,” she said, lowering him into the tub. “I sense a lot of love in this house.” “Don’t bullshit me, Dorothy,” said Bill. “What I don’t need is bullshit.” “All right,” said Dorothy. Bill had limited things he could do with his body, but he began licking his lips with his tongue and rubbing his head hard against the back tiles of the tub. “Take it easy,” said Dorothy. Something silver glinted and swung around her neck. Was it a cross? Was she religious, too? He squinted but could make out only the red blob of her face hovering over the tub. “Why do you do this kind of crap?” he asked. “I like it,” said Dorothy. After a few moments of washing him, she said, “Your family loves you.” “I don’t want to talk,” said Bill. A sense of humor was important, she said. “You’re not eating enough, don’t you want to look like me?” Then it would be 5:30, the end of her shift.
Hopeful calls and messages from the attorneys and physicians arrived at accelerating rates as the PET examination approached. Competing theories could be tested. A dozen e-mails a day, sometimes two dozen. “Have informed Dr. Petrov of the analyses that I would recommend. My assistant Dr. Cunningham will be in touch from Paris tomorrow evening.” “We have received some cooperation from the principals at Plymouth Limited.” “Please return below enquiries before 4pm today. Thank you.” The shrink Kripke had taken to e-mailing too. He was writing up Bill’s case for the Annals of Psychosomatic Disease and needed to be kept up to date.
All of these communications were received by Alex, who logged on with his father’s password and then read the printed messages to Bill in the evening. The boy like a ghost at the foot of the bed, his T-shirt in white billows. He was losing weight. “Dad,” he kept saying.
As Bill listened to his messages, he thought: What are these grunts from the other world? And then it would be necessary to grunt back. Alex had developed a streamlined set of replies, so that Bill had only to dictate a few critical words and his son could send off an appropriate response within minutes. One boilerplate for the lawyers, another for the doctors, another for the occasional business associate who still wrote to Bill with project proposals. Alex had also created a new Web site, www.paralysis.aol.com/achalm, a clearinghouse for information on paralysis, with each entry coded by its origin and moment of transmission. After reading the day’s messages, Alex would return to his room, where he remained more than ever, fixed to his terminal beneath the swinging Stademeir speakers.
Bill should have ripped out the wires when he had a chance. He could hardly imagine that he once had a body, volition, movement. Twenty messages a day.
“They’re playing games with us,” Melissa murmured as she lay motionless and drunk across the divan. “Screw them. Haven’t they done enough? What do they think, that we’ve got money? Is that the hell what they think?” She spilled her drink and stared bloodshot at Bill. He stared back at her, dim and wet on the divan. “You know something?” she said. “I never believed our life was real. I always knew we were going to lose what we had. I knew this was going to happen. I never told you, but every day when I woke up, for years, even when we were first married, I wondered if this was going to be the day.” She drank the last swallows from her glass. “It was too good to be true. I never believed it. Henry said I’d be all right. That’s what he said when I got married. And you acted like everything would be all right. I never believed you. Why did you act like that?” She paused. “When I was in high school, I knew the rich girls, the ones from the rich families. I knew I would never be like them. I didn’t want their money. That’s the God’s honest truth. I didn’t want their money. I just wanted … I wanted to feel safe. Was that too much to want? Just to feel safe. Aren’t I entitled to that? Why can’t I be safe. What do I have to do?” She dropped her head and let her arms fall limply over the sides of the divan. “People treat me like I’m an ignorant southern bitch. Maybe that’s what I am.”
Somewhere, as if inside cotton, a clock ticked. No, it was too irregular for a clock, an erratic clicking and clacking, but far away, muffled, entering the empty spaces between Melissa’s breathing. Bill opened his eyes and peered through the dark room, faintly illuminated by a night light in the corner. What was it, two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock? He found himself propped against the headboard. His neck ached. Thirsty. Should he wake his wife for some water? Was he awake himself? Or half sleeping, dreaming that he was lying in bed, the smell of Dorothy’s sweat still on his shoulders, Melissa beside him in her Valium sleep.
There were sounds in his head. Fear swirled in him. Possibly he could no longer distinguish between waking and sleeping. If sound was imagined, then why not his heartbeat as well. He could imagine his heart out of existence. As he listened, the sounds became more distinct, clearly intentional. They came from the other side of the hall, Alex’s room. A clicking, as if from the keys of a keyboard.
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)
Bill hoped to feel something, maybe the tiny subatomic particles exploding inside him. He closed his eyes.
The invisible Armand Petrov said to some invisible technician: “I’ll want a kinetic tracer analysis on each ROI.”
“No problem.”
“This is an amazing machine,” said Petrov. “Mr. Chalmers, I know you can’t see anything from where you are, but you’re getting the best.”
“You want to see it coming in, Dr. Petrov?” said the technician.
“Yes, I’d like to see.”
“Here. I’ve split the screen into twelve sections. Here’s twenty seconds’ worth on each section.”
“The PET is the first and only application of antimatter physics to medicine,” said Petrov. The technician did not reply. “Mark that region of interest.”
“Okay,” said the technician.
“Twenty-fifty.”
“Yes. And there’s the blood count for comparison.”
“Bill, are you all right?” said Melissa. “I’m standing right here.”
“This is completely painless, Mrs. Chalmers,” said Petrov.
“Bill, are you okay?”
Although his eyes were closed, Bill could sense the thing around him, the coils of photocells or wires or whatever they were wrapped around him. It felt in his mind like a giant clasped hand. He was being held by a great hand, maybe it was trying to squeeze the bile out of him, he could sense the thing’s own heat, its own blood pumping through in electrical currents and subatomic particles. The doctor was saying something again, Melissa was speaking, but he was drifting off. He was playing golf with Edward Marbleworth on a rolling, swirling golf course, grass waving in wind. An unspoken friendship lay between the two of them. Bill was now in the inner circle, taken into Marbleworth’s confidence, and he felt the glow of it, the power. Marbleworth hit a golf ball into the trees, lost, then immediately a second swing, a ball going out fast and strong, making a high, perfect arc in the air and landing on the distant green. Now it was Bill’s turn. He swung at the ball and missed it, didn’t even touch the ground. Swung again and got only air. Swung again. His club seemed to have shortened. He swung again, getting only
air. His club had dwindled to three feet. Now it was only two feet. He dropped to his knees and swung again, still missing. People behind him were shouting. He’d made a fool of himself. “You’re finished, Mr. Chalmers.” “What?” “Finished.”
“We’re finished,” said Petrov. “Mr. Chalmers. You can go home now, as soon as we take the arterial line out of your arm. We have a facility for him, Mrs. Chalmers. Maybe he should stay there for now.”
Bill felt dribble on his good cheek, underneath the face mask.
“I’ll take him home,” said Melissa.
“I’ve marked six ROIs,” said Petrov. “They should give us a lot more information. You’ll be hearing from me.”
“You wimp,” said Bill.
SICILY
Read aloud by Alex to his father:
On the morning of the sixteenth day of the month of Elaphebolion, Anytus wandered out of the Melitides Gate toward the harbor. He needed some destination.
He had not slept since Pyrrhias awakened him before dawn and delivered his bad news of the assassin, had spent the next hour slowly pacing the perimeter of the court in his bare feet, watching the rain splatter on the statuary. Finally, he had returned to his bedchamber to lie beside Pasiclea. Her breathing was remarkably simple and untroubled, like waves rolling in. I am your wife, the breathing said. I am your comfort, so breathe with me, let me bring comfort, breathe with me, say yes, then say yes, I am the sea that rolls over you, I am the green and your comfort, lie with me lie with me. Anytus listened and still could not sleep. He studied her, lying so lovely on her back. What did she know of his insides? He told her little, and what he did tell her were lies. He told her little because she would always love him even when he should not be loved. I am the sea that rolls over you, I am the green. He listened but could not be lulled by her waves.
When Anytus reached the Melitides Gate, it was still raining hard, the rain fell like little cold arrows. Able to see nothing, he numbly followed a path beside the ruins of the once great North Wall, which led to the harbor. Several paces behind shuffled Pyrrhias, out of breath, carrying a small traveling lamp that glowed feebly in the damp. Pyrrhias had also brought a drinking cup, an oil flask, an extra lantern, a brush, a wrapped loaf of bread, some papyrus, and an onion, all of which were attached to a rope about his waist. Both men were soaked. Their mantles were heavy with rainwater and hung like bricks from their shoulders.
Anytus was silent and brooding. The eyeless rage of the storm, savage Boreas, was come to punish him. He imagined the old sophist at this moment, enjoying a breakfast of bread and fruit in his dry cell, casually conversing with his friends and confirming their hatred of him, Anytus. Perhaps the old sophist, on his last mortal day, would set Aesop’s fables to verse and sing them to those sitting around his couch. Curse them all. Let them all wallow in bird shit.
“What will we do at the harbor?” panted the slave. Anytus was submerged in his thoughts. He walked ahead in the pouring rain, hardly noticing as he trod past the hilly Necropolis, City of the Dead, its rolling stone slabs like gray faces afloat in the sea. For well over an hour now, the two men had been slogging through the rain and the mud. They were halfway to the Piraeus, two misty silhouettes in the rain. They’d passed no one.
In the distance, the faint sound of a cithara moved like a small animal. Then a trumpet, then only the steady hiss of the rain and the thud of rain into mud. Moments later, music again, wafting in and out like the tides, and voices. Then only rain.
The tanner decided he was conjuring things. He felt feverish. He reached behind him and touched Pyrrhias’s arm, he wanted to feel another human body. Ahead, between the gray beaded curtains, outlines of people slowly formed in the wet air. Heads. Arms and legs swinging. A procession of some kind. Chanting. Beardless young men reciting the oracles. Dancing girls twirling, flute girls attached to each other by rope made of hair. In moments, everything faded in the wet and was gone.
Anytus thought to himself: Could this be the overland return of the Sacred Festival from Delos? The final procession to the city, in this weather? No, it couldn’t be. He was hot and exhausted. Movement again. Dim chanting figures passed in the rain. Gray women and men, dressed in gray wavering robes. A priest of Apollo, wearing a headdress of tiny earthenware bottles. The containers tinkled and clattered against each other as he walked. Musky odors of frankincense and myrrh and lystria. Riderless horses with erections, and dogs. An old woman with paint smeared on her face wailed to Apollo and chewed on something that wriggled in her hand. The ashen figures appeared, then dissolved in the gray rain, then appeared again, soft and unfocused. Anytus reached out to one of the spirits, but his hand met only air. He called out. No one answered. Figures seemed to float only several feet away. He looked back at Pyrrhias. The slave was glancing frantically this way and that, trying to follow invisible motions with his eyes. Half puzzled, half frightened, he stared imploringly at his master. “By Zeus,” he said softly and clutched the tanner’s hand. “Great Laphina. Zeus help us.”
“This is the Sacred Procession,” said Anytus. “It is the end and the beginning of the end. We are honored. We have made the city safe for the procession. Democracy has won out.” He sat down in the mud. The procession continued, over his head. Spirit robes brushed over his cheeks. Men stood on each other’s shoulders, drinking wine from dark vessels. Flutes played strange melodies. Three bald-headed old women limped by, moaning prophecies. Anytus strained to hear their foretellings but heard only mutterings, swallowed in the rain.
“Master, please rise. We must get out of the storm.”
They found shelter in a farmer’s storage cabin standing on a hill next to a fig arbor. The wooden door of the cabin fell off its hinges when they opened it. Inside, the single room was close and dark, and the rain pelted the flat roof like a low drum roll. Smell of corn huskings, hay, linseed oil, mule. High lattices let in a spray of gray light and mist.
Pyrrhias built a fire on the dirt floor, guarding the small flame in his lamp like a heart. He took hay and pieces of a broken wood stool that he found in a corner. The slave helped his master undress, undressed himself, embarrassed by the thick rolls of flesh around his waist. Wrung out the wet clothes and hung them on sticks. The two men knelt near the fire, their skin bristled and clammy. Pyrrhias looked at the naked white of his master, the curving white belly, and unconsciously began massaging Anytus’s shoulders and neck. Under his touch, the skin warmed and melted. Anytus closed his eyes.
I will tell you about Sicily.
Many times Pyrrhias had heard stories of the War. He had heard of the slaughter in his native town Scione in Pallene, from which he was taken and sold to Anytus’s household before his tenth birthday. With Sicily, only fragments, as if Anytus wanted to tell and didn’t want to tell at the same time.
I was a human anchor.
It was the nineteenth year of the War. A grappling hook, hurled at my ship by a Syracusan galley, buried itself in my thigh. They reeled me in, dragged me across the prow of my boat into the sea. The water was on fire. There were hundreds of ships. You could hear them crashing into each other, you could hear men screaming.
One of the lattices in the cabin flew open with wind and let in a gush of rain. Pyrrhias found a stick and closed the lattice, then broke the stick into pieces and fed the fire. He squatted down again beside Anytus.
When the hook was removed, my leg was an open red mouth. The Arcadians bled me, applied sponges and olive leaves. One man, I never knew his name, changed my bandages every day and washed me. They carried me across plains and between mountains to Gela. No, that was later.
First, I sank toward the bottom of the harbor. I was content that my men not see me like that, pierced and caught on a line. I was willing to go to the bottom. I wanted to die a soldier’s death. I didn’t want panic. Oarsmen are like dogs, they can smell fear in your voice. I didn’t want my men to see me pierced, I wanted to sink to the bottom. But the Syracusans wouldn’t let me sink, kept pulling m
e, hauling in on the rope. The curved iron was lodged deep and would not come free. With the pulling, it went only deeper. It held my weight. I was part metal, part flesh, a sacrifice to Hephaestus. I was a blood prayer.
It was the nineteenth year of the war with the Peloponnesians. Amphipolis had fallen. Cleon and Brasidas were dead. The Sicilian campaign had already been two years. At Epipolae some of our infantry leaped off the cliffs, some thrust arrows in their throats for fear of being taken as prisoners. Then the Syracusans tried to burn our fleet. They drove our ships against the shore of their harbor, set fire to an old merchantman filled with faggots and rotting pine wood and let it drift down the wind toward our ships. We should have escaped days earlier, when the harbor was open.
Master, how did you survive when you were dragged overboard?
What? Yes, survive. Anytus sat up and traced the long curling scar on his thigh with a finger. He turned to look at Pyrrhias, only a few years older than the son he could not talk to. The cabin had become warm from the fire, and the slave’s fleshy arms were wet with perspiration.
Why didn’t they kill you?
I was a blood sacrifice. They thought I was dead. From the prows of their ships, Dorian archers and darters looked down at me, half anchor and half man, one rope of twine and another of blood. They cut me loose and threw me back into the sea. The water was thick with floating corpses, bobbing facedown, tangled. Athenians’ legs over arms of Syracusans. Allies and enemies. Dead Lemnians, Camarinaeans, Chalcidians, Styrians, Aeginetans, Corinthians, Iapygians, Eretrians, Himeraeans. I was an offering among them, a red anchor unloosed from its rope, the iron curving out of my body. Arcadian mercenaries, fighting for Syracuse and Sparta, found me raving in the water. They were my enemies. They didn’t know who I was. Later, they didn’t care. They were sick of the war and wanted to go home.
The Arcadians took me ashore and poured burning wine on my leg. They left the iron hook in for a day, debating how to remove it. One of them was a bronzeworker, another a potter. Should I be hammered or worked moistly like clay? They built a litter out of tent poles and canvas and carried me to their camp. At first, they planned to sell me to the highest bidder. I should have killed myself then, in my dishonor, but I didn’t. I could have killed myself, I had a knife. That first night, we Athenians were surrounded, waiting to be butchered in the morning. I should have called out to my men. They were desperate and they had no food. But what could I say to them?