If it’s easier for you to read in .doc format, here that is.
–
Henry was in a mess, because he thought he was better than he was. From day one, he had told himself he wouldn’t be one of those guys, striking up conversations at bars, lamenting sad marriages and bad jobs. He thought people should make better choices for themselves. Save them the trouble of divorce by never getting married. Not cheat on their wives by…not cheating on them. His equations were simple, because life was simple. Consequence followed action. That was it.
When on a dreary Sunday morning he awoke with no feeling in his face, he began to change his mind about some things.
“What the hell is going on?” he thought. He tried to move his lips, but they seemed locked in place, frozen and drooping downward. His expression was one that dogs give at rest. He patted his face tentatively with the pads of his fingers, and though his fingers encountered stubble, his face felt nothing. He felt pressure, but it was vague. He thought about his doctor warning him of “pressure” after he applied the local anesthetic. “You’ll feel some pressure,” he’d said. Henry hadn’t worried then. Pressure was better than pain. Now, everything was indiscernible; the sensation was alarming.
Henry didn’t panic. He had never had reason to panic before. So when he encountered this barrier to sensation, he thought he’d test it for its source. He’d never heard of a man having a stroke that paralyzed his entire face, so he thought it must not be a stroke. He lifted both arms to be sure, and rotated them in circular motions. He hopped on one foot and spun in a circle and skipped around the room and was finally satisfied that he had not had a stroke, and his brain clicked like a cog moving one turn forward, and he thought about the next thing. He thought, “Maybe it’s a dream.” He knew he could resolve this quickly, so he pinched himself and knew it was not a dream. Henry rarely had dreams anyway. When he was busy sleeping, he didn’t have time for dreams.
Then he stopped and the cog slipped forward haltingly, and Henry had a thought he’d never had before but made sense in that instant, and for the moment it was enough. He thought “Maybe my wife has poisoned me.”
It made sense. Henry hadn’t spoken to his wife in ages. She was taken to fits of shouting and gesticulating. She was often late for functions. Sometimes she was drunk before morning was up. Henry thought she might be the kind of unreliable wife who poisoned her husband. Then he thought how absurd it was, and he tried to smile, but his frozen face wouldn’t yield.
It seemed a reminder to Henry, and he took a moment to think on it before he allowed himself to really entertain the thought. Was it permissible to think of one’s wife in that way? Henry wasn’t accustomed to conflict, and the dueling thoughts were too much for him, and he had to sit down. He approached the bed they shared and noted that her side was neatly made before he allowed his headache to encroach. One thing at a time. He rested his hands on his knees. “It has been one of those days,” he thought, and he was amused. It was a phrase he had heard often at the bar. He had never had occasion to use it, but this seemed a day for new things.
Henry fingered the bedding on the bed. It was smooth between his fingers, and he couldn’t resist bringing it up to rest against his face. He gripped one end of the bedding in his hand, and moved a small triangle of it against his whiskers. He felt nothing but the swatch of bedding in his hand. He heard the brush of his whiskers and he repeated the motion. He was entertained by the sound. He thought it was funny that the sound should seem disembodied when he knew its source. He was reminded of the last time he had gone to the dentist, and when he spoke after his surgery, how the Novocain numbed his words, and there was a disconnect between his thoughts and his words even though he was saying exactly what he thought. When he paid, the receptionist was confused at his absent look, but Henry didn’t notice. He was rarely whimsical, and the thought disrupted much of his activity for the rest of the day. It was only after he got home that his wife startled him out of it.
Henry rarely thought about his wife. She was prone to bouts of childishness, and Henry didn’t have patience enough to deal with her. He thought she was flighty. In another context, he might have thought she was a typical woman. But Henry didn’t know many women, so he’d never really thought about it. Instead, he avoided his wife so he wouldn’t fight with her. “The secret to a good marriage,” he’d say, “is maintaining distance.” He had a lot of phrases to that effect, and he’d tell people at work who were complaining about their wives or girlfriends. He’d say “Women need their space. They don’t like to be coddled. They would rather figure it out without you.” The men he worked with would laugh and think he was being wry. Henry would smile and turn in his chair to finish up his work. Sometimes they would invite him to the bar, and they would smile at Henry’s jokes, and Henry would look bemused and think to himself that these men had an awful lot of problems that could be solved by following his advice. The bonds of his marriage were in silence.
“Henry, you’re an asshole,” his wife said yesterday. Henry was lost in a book on his side of the bed, and it took him a moment to register what she’d said.
“You don’t mean that,” he said. “We have a great marriage.”
His wife seemed taken aback that he’d responded in this way, but she was pleased that he was being so candid, and was eager to get to the bottom of their failed marriage.
“Henry, you don’t ever talk to me. You’d rather I was completely silent. What kind of marriage is that?”
“We have a good marriage,” he repeated, and his eyes stayed trained on the book in front of him. “Silence makes good marriages. Your problems are your problems, and my problems are mine. We don’t bother each other with our personal issues.”
“Don’t you see how that’s a problem?” she asked.
Henry shook his head and began citing a statistic that said over 50 percent of marriages failed in the first three years, and they were clearly long past that; in addition, most marriages dissolved because of “irreconcilable differences.” Henry said they were better off not spouting their differences for fear of divorce. He said they’d stayed together so long precisely because they didn’t talk. “How can you have differences if you don’t talk about them?”
He smiled at her comfortingly, then, just as he had a thousand times before, pleased that he had articulated himself so well, and thinking this brief talk would sustain her for another few years.
He was not concerned by her crying, then, because he knew women were emotional, and when he saw her take her evening pills, he knew she would sleep well that night. She wouldn’t toss and turn as she sometimes did, and the bedcovers wouldn’t get wrapped up in her body, and the air wouldn’t be hot beneath the covers from her motion. Henry would sleep well too.
When she returned from the bathroom with a glass of water, Henry accepted it gratefully, and he took two big gulps before remarking that the water tasted stale.
“Our pipes burst a few days ago while you were at work. I had to call a plumber to have them fixed. I told you this.”
At this Henry nodded, and he said he remembered and he was sorry. In fact, he didn’t remember. He was sure he hadn’t paid attention when his wife had told him. Probably he was thinking of something important and work-related. He couldn’t know for sure.
“The plumber said our water would taste a little off for awhile. Something about the sealant he used to bond them. I don’t really remember, Henry.”
Henry said that’s all right, and he drank the rest of the water to assure her that it was fine and he didn’t mind. He thought it was odd that he was now thirstier than he’d been before he drank it, but he wasn’t a plumber, and he fell asleep thinking about his own job.
When Henry awoke the next morning, his face was paralyzed, and as he sat at the edge of the bed recollecting the previous night, he thought he would call the plumber when he could to see if the problems were related.
When Henry stood up again his movements were more stilted than they’d been before, and he tried to go about the routine he’d established earlier, testing for the stroke, bouncing on his heels and skipping about the room. This time he noted the jerk in his right leg as he lifted it to skip, and how his left leg dragged to strike a balance. His right arm too was moving spasmodically, ripples coming from his shoulder and affecting the movements of the rest of his arm. He watched rather helplessly as it flopped and then went rigid, and he felt a curious sensation as the blood in his veins curdled. He thought he saw little bumps like cottage cheese marching through the prominent veins of his forearm, one-by-one, and he shook his arms to settle the curds, thinking irrationally that this was how one thinned paint. When the flailing motions of his arms eclipsed his balance, he toppled to the floor and shook. The movements were ungraceful, and Henry was, for the first time in his life, helpless. He felt his stomach expand slightly, and the taste in his mouth was no longer neutral, but toxic. He knew, as any beast does, what would happen next, and he rolled to his side as best he could, and retched.
His mouth was open only slightly, and not being able to move it himself, he prized it open with his fingers to let the vomit come out more fluidly, in a bigger stream, to prevent himself from choking. Already he felt the weight of the chunks of vomit, lodged behind his teeth, collecting. Henry felt a mounting sense of dread, and for the first time in his life, he panicked.
Struggling to lift himself up on his forearms, he crawled through his vomit to the door of their bathroom, and he pushed his arms as hard as he could against the ground to come up to a kneeling position. He felt the curdling all over. He gripped the door knob with a shaky hand and pushed the door open. Dawn was rising inside the bathroom. Slivers of light peeked through the window curtains and collected on the floor, and the walls were a dull pink glow. Henry might have noticed that it smelled like summer, but his face was a mess, and he couldn’t smell anything.
He finally stood after gripping the counter as tightly as he could and heaving himself upward. He rested his forearms on the counter for support, and began rifling through the medicine cabinet. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Proof, maybe, of his wife’s disloyalty. Aspirin for his headache. Something magical to cure him of his ailments. He knew he was very sick. He didn’t know what his wife kept stored in this cabinet, but he had always found it fully-stocked, and he was counting on finding something to help.
Instead he found little of use. A bottle of nail polish remover. Foundation. Antiseptic wipes. A jug of hydrogen peroxide. A tube of Zinc Oxide. Sunscreen.
But he did find aspirin. After a few moments of fruitless attempts at opening the bottle, he finally managed it, and several spilled across the counter. He gathered them up and shoved them in his mouth. He placed them on his tongue (he looked in the mirror to see), drew a glass of water, pinched his nose, and swallowed them. He was hoping the curdling would stop. He knew that aspirin thinned blood. He thought he would be fine if the aspirin kicked in.
A little less urgently, he surveyed the rest of the bathroom. He shuffled to the other side of the sink, and he was surprised when the first thing he saw was a faint blue powder clinging to the countertop. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but his heart began beating more wildly, and he felt his dread return.
He thrust open the first drawer he could reach, and he searched within it frantically before he found a yellow prescription bottle with his wife’s name on it.
Henry searched the label on the bottle, and he saw “Prozac (Fluoxetine) 10mg – Take as directed, no more than twice daily.” He twisted open a capsule with his fingers, and the dusty blue-white powder collected on the countertop, next to the powder already there, a trace amount.
His fingers were already wet, and he dipped one of them into the powder and brought it to his tongue. He tasted the stale water from last night, and again he retched, this time into the sink. He extrapolated the amount from the size of the glass, and the concentration of the drug in the water. This was his job. He approximated 150 or 200mg. Ten dosages. One application.
He thought Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. He walked clumsily to the toilet and sank onto the seat. He was helpless. His legs were no longer capable of movement, and the telephone was too far away, downstairs. He could not call for help. He couldn’t even dial for help. He resigned himself to waiting, and he thought of everything his wife had ever said.
The end was near. Henry knew that. And he knew that distance didn’t make for good marriages—it made for death.
–
Henry’s wife walked up the stairs expecting to find him dead. She was shaking. She hadn’t had a drink or a pill all day.
When she came into the bedroom she saw flecks of blood and vomit on the floor, and spittle strewn across the carpet. She could not help feeling sorry for Henry, who was so divorced from feeling that it must have been a shock to be in agony.
She saw where the trail led and was not surprised to see him fallen on the floor of the bathroom. His eyes were rather glazed, and his mouth was bleeding. His body was siezed into an awkward shape, and way his limbs were bent implied a kind of rigor mortis. The only indication that he wasn’t dead was the way his lips moved slightly with the ebb and flow of respiration, his chest thrumming silently and seeming to reverberate all the way up his throat. She wondered what he was thinking, if he was thinking at all. She was no expert in matters of medicine, and she wondered if this was shock.
As miserable as Henry had always made her, she knew now that he hadn’t done it on purpose. He was the kind of fanatic who believed in all the terrible things he did, thinking they made for a better world or marriage. She knew that now, but she could only be so objective.
She bent down to the floor and sat upon a part of the rug untouched by his fluids. She moved his head to her lap and cradled it there. She clamped her hand firmly over his mouth and nose, and she whispered, “Poor, poor Henry,” for he was about to die, and he had never needed anyone before then.
