"Hmm?"
"Are you dying?"
Henry opens his eyes and focuses on Alba. "No." "Alba said you died."
"That's in the future, Alba. Not yet. Tell Alba she shouldn't tell you those kinds of things." Henry runs his hand over the beard that's been growing since we left the hospital. Alba sits with her hands folded in her lap and her knees together.
"Are you going to stay in bed all the time now?"
Henry pulls himself up so he is leaning against the headboard. "Maybe." He is rummaging in the drawer of the nightstand, but the painkillers are in the bathroom.
"Why?"
"Because I feel like shit, okay?"
Alba shrinks away from Henry, gets up off the bed. "Okay!" she says, and she is opening the door and almost collides with me and is startled and then she silently flings her arms around my waist and I pick her up, so heavy in my arms now. I carry her into her room and we sit in the rocker, rocking together, Alba's hot face against my neck. What can I tell you, Alba? What can I say?
Wednesday and Thursday October 18 and 19, and Thursday, October 26, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)
Clare: I'm standing in my studio with a roll of armature wire and a bunch of drawings. I've cleared off the big work table, and the drawings are neatly pinned up on the wall. Now I stand and try to summon up the piece in my mind's eye. I try to imagine it 3-D. Life size. I snip off a length of wire and it springs away from the huge roll; I begin to shape a torso. I weave the wire into shoulders, ribcage, and then a pelvis. I pause. Maybe the arms and legs should be articulated? Should I make feet or not? I start to make a head and then realize that I don't want any of this. I push it all under the table and begin again with more wire. Like an angel. Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul... It is only the wings that I want to give him. I draw in the air with the thin metal, looping and weaving; I measure with my arms to make a wingspan, I repeat the process, mirror-reversed, for the second wing, comparing symmetry as though I'm giving Alba a haircut, measuring by eye, feeling out the weight, the shapes. I hinge the wings together, and then I get up on the ladder and hang them from the ceiling. They float, air encompassed by lines, at the level of my breasts, eight feet across, graceful, ornamental, useless. At first I imagined white, but I realize now that that's not it. I open the cabinet of pigments and dyes. Ultramarine, Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber, Viridian, Madder Lake. No. Here it is: Red Iron Oxide. The color of dried blood. A terrible angel wouldn't be white, or would be whiter than any white I can make. I set the jar on the counter, along with Bone Black. I walk to the bundles of fiber that stand, fragrant, in the far corner of the studio. Kozo and linen; transparency and pliancy, a fiber that rattles like chattering teeth combined with one that is soft as lips. I weigh out two pounds of kozo, tough and resilient bark that must be cooked and beaten, broken and pounded. I heat water in the huge pot that covers two burners on the stove. When it is boiling I feed the kozo into it, watching it darken and slowly take in water. I measure in soda ash and cover the pot, turn on the exhaust hood. I chop a pound of white linen into small pieces, fill the beater with water, and start it rending and tearing up the linen into a fine white pulp. Then I make myself coffee and sit staring out the window across the yard at the house.
At that moment:
Henry: My mother is sitting on the foot of my bed. I don't want her to know about my feet. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. "Henry?" she says. "I know you're awake. C'mon, buddy, rise and shine." I open my eyes. It's Kimy. "Mmm. Morning."
"It's 2:30 in the afternoon. You should get out of bed." "I can't get out of bed, Kimy. I don't have any feet."
"You got wheelchair," she says. "Come on, you need a bath, you need a shave, pee-yoo, you smell like an old man." Kimy stands up, looking very grim. She peels the covers off of me and I lie there like a shelled shrimp, cold and flaccid in the afternoon sunlight. Kimy browbeats me into sitting in the wheelchair, and she wheels me to the door of the bathroom, which is too narrow for the chair to pass.
"Okay," Kimy says, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips. "How we gonna do this? Huh?"
"I don't know, Kimy. I'm just the gimp; I don't actually work here."
"What kind of word is that, gimp?"
"It's a highly pejorative slang word used to describe cripples."
Kimy looks at me as though I am eight and have used the word fuck in her presence (I didn't know what it meant, I only knew it was forbidden). "I think it's 'sposed to be disabled, Henry." She leans over and unbuttons my pajama top.