The time traveler's wife(145)
"I've got hands" I say, and finish the unbuttoning myself. Kimy turns around, brusque and grumpy, and turns on the tap, adjusts the temperature, places the plug in the drain. She rummages in the medicine cabinet, brings out my razor, shaving soap, the beaver-hair shaving brush. I can't figure out how to get out of the wheelchair. I decide to try sliding off the seat; I push my ass forward, arch my back, and slither toward the floor. I wrench my left shoulder and bang my butt as I go down, but it's not too bad. In the hospital the physical therapist, an encouraging young person named Penny Featherwight, had several techniques for getting in and out of the chair, but they all had to do with chair/bed and chair/chair situations. Now I'm sitting on the floor and the bathtub looms like the white cliffs of Dover above me. I look up at Kimy, eighty-two years old, and realize that I'm on my own, here. She looks at me and it's all pity, that look. I think fuck it, I have to do this somehow, I can't let Kimy look at me like that. I shrug out of my pajama bottoms, and begin to unwrap the bandages that cover the dressings on my legs. Kimy looks at her teeth in the mirror. I stick my arm over the side of the tub and test the bath water.
"If you throw some herbs in there you can have stewed gimp for supper." "Too hot?" Kimy asks.
"Yeah."
Kimy adjusts the faucets and then leaves the bathroom, pushing the wheelchair out of the doorway. I gingerly remove the dressing from my right leg. Under the wrappings the skin is pale and cold. I put my hand at the folded-over part, the flesh that cushions the bone. I just took a Vicodin a little while ago. I wonder if I could take another one without Clare noticing. The bottle is probably up there in the medicine cabinet. Kimy comes back carrying one of the kitchen chairs. She plops it down next to me. I remove the dressing from the other leg.
"She did a nice job," Kimy says.
"Dr. Murray? Yeah, it's a big improvement, much more aerodynamic."
Kimy laughs. I send her to the kitchen for phone books. When she puts them next to the chair I raise myself so I'm sitting on them. Then I scramble onto the chair, and sort of fall/roll into the bathtub. A huge wave of water sloshes out of the tub onto the tile. I'm in the bathtub. Hallelujah. Kimy turns off the water, and dries her legs with a towel. I submerge.
Later:
Clare: After hours of cooking I strain the kozo and it, too, goes into the beater. The longer it stays in the beater, the finer and more bone-like it will be. After four hours, I add retention aid, clay, pigment. The beige pulp suddenly turns a deep dark earth red. I drain it into buckets and pour it into the waiting vat. When I walk back to the house Kimy is in the kitchen making the kind of tuna fish casserole that has potato chips crumbled over it.
"How'd it go?" I ask her.
"Real good. He's in the living room." There is a trail of water between the bathroom and the living room in Kimy-sized footprints. Henry is sleeping on the sofa with a book spread open on his chest. Borges"
Ficciones. He is shaved and I lean over him and breathe; he smells fresh, his damp gray hair sticking up all ways. Alba is chattering to Teddy in her room. For a moment I feel as though I've time traveled, as though this is some stray moment from before, but then I let my eyes travel down Henry's body to the flatnesses at the end of the blanket, and I know that I am only here and now. The next morning it's raining. I open the door of the studio and the wire wings await me, floating in the morning gray light. I turn on the radio; it's Chopin, rolling etudes like waves over sand. I don rubber boots, a bandanna to keep my hair out of the pulp, a rubber apron. I hose down my favorite teak and brass mold and deckle, uncover the vat, set up a felt to couch the paper onto. I reach down into the vat and agitate the slurry of dark red to mix the fiber and water. Everything drips. I plunge the mold and deckle into the vat, and carefully bring it up, level, streaming water. I set it on the corner of the vat and the water drains from it and leaves a layer of fiber on the surface; I remove the deckle and press the mold onto the felt, rocking it gently and as I remove it the paper remains on the felt, delicate and shiny. I cover it with another felt, wet it, and again: I plunge the mold and deckle down, bring it up, drain it, couch it. I lose myself in the repetition, the piano music floating over the water sloshing and dripping and raining. When I have a post of paper and felt, I press it in the hydraulic paper press. Then I go back to the house and eat a ham sandwich. Henry is reading. Alba is at school. After lunch, I stand in front of the wings with my post of freshly made paper. I am going to cover the armature with a paper membrane. The paper is damp and dark and wants to tear but it drapes over the wire forms like skin. I twist the paper into sinews, into cords that twist and connect. The wings are bat wings now, the tracing of the wire is evident below the gaunt paper surface. I dry the paper I haven't used yet, heating it on sheets of steel. Then I begin to tear it into strips, into feathers. When the wings are dry I will sew these on, one by one. I begin to paint the strips, black and gray and red. Plumage, for the terrible angel, the deadly bird. A week later, in the evening: