- Am I?
- Sure. How do you feel?
- Oh, not so good. Not so good tonight.
- Let's see you move your right hand.
She raises if off the counterpane. It floats splay-fingered in front of her eyes for a moment, then drops. Thump. He smiles and she smiles back. He asks her,
- Did you see the doctor today?
- Yes, he came in. He's good to come every day. Will you give me a little water, John?
He gives her some water from the flexible straw.
- You're good to come as often as you do, John. You're a good son.
She's crying again. The other bed is empty, accusingly so. Every now and then one of the blue and white pinstriped bathrobes sails by them up the hall. The door stands open halfway. He takes the water gently away from her, thinking idiotically: Is this glass half empty or half full?
- How's your left hand?
- Oh, pretty good.
- Let's see.
She raises it. It has always been her smart hand, and perhaps that is why it has recovered as well as it has from the devastating effects of the 'cortotomy'. She clenches it. Flexes it. Snaps the fingers weakly. Then it falls back to the counterpane. Thump. She complains,
- But there's no feeling in it.
- Let me see something.
He goes to the wardrobe, opens it, and reaches behind the coat she came to the hospital in to get at her purse. She keeps it in here because she is paranoid about robbers; she has heard that some of the orderlies are rip-off artists who will lift anything they can get their hands on. She has heard from one of her room-mates who has since gone home that a woman in the new wing lost five hundred dollars which she kept in her shoe. His mother is paranoid about a great many things lately, and has once told him a man sometimes hides under her bed in the late-at-night. Part of it is the combination of drugs they are trying on her. They make the bennies he occasionally dropped in college look like Excedrin. You can have your pick from the locked drug cabinet at the end of the corridor just past the nurses' station: ups and downs, highs and bummers. Death, maybe, merciful death like a sweet black blanket. The wonders of modern science.
He takes the purse back to her bed and opens it.
- Can you take something out of here?
- Oh, Johnny, I don't know .
He says persuasively:
- Try it. For me.
The left hand rises from the counterpane like a crippled helicopter. It cruises. Dives. Comes out of the purse with a single wrinkled Kleenex. He applauds:
- Good! Good!
But she turns her face away.
- Last year I was able to pull two full dish trucks with these hands.
If there's to be a time, it's now. It is very hot in the room but the sweat on his forehead is cold. He thinks: If she doesn't ask for aspirin, I won't. Not tonight. And he knows if it isn't tonight it's never. Okay.
Her eyes flick to the half-open door slyly.
- Can you sneak me a couple of my pills, Johnny? It is how she always asks. She is not supposed to have any pills outside of her regular medication because she has lost so much body weight and she has built up what his druggie friends of his college days would have called 'a heavy thing'. The body's immunity stretches to within a fingernail's breadth of lethal dosage. One more pill and you're over the edge. They say it is what happened to Marilyn Monroe.
- I brought some pills from home.
- Did you?
- They're good for pain.
He holds the box out to her. She can only read very close. She frowns over the large print and then says,
- I had some of that Darvon stuff before. It didn't help me.
- This is stronger.
Her eyes rise from the box to his own. Idly she says,
- Is it?
He can only smile foolishly. He cannot speak. It is like the first time he got laid, it happened in the back of some friend's car and when he came home his mother asked him if he had a good time and he could only smile this same foolish smile.
- Can I chew them?
