ignore his thousand discomforts and get some sleep, he couldn't stop
thinking about the movie, the million dollars, the harassment Toby had
taken at school, the vile graffiti with which their house had been
covered, the inadequacy of their savings, his disability checks, Luther
in the grave, Alma alone with her arsenal, and Anson Oliver portrayed
on-screen by some young actor with chiseled features and melancholy
eyes, radiating an aura of saintly compassion and noble purpose
exceeded only by his sex appeal.
Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness far worse than anything
he had felt before. The cause of it was only partly the claustrophobic
confinement of the body cast and the bed. It arose, as well, from the
fact that he was tied to this City of Angels by a house that had
declined in value and was currently hard to sell in a recessionary
market, from the fact that he was a good cop in an age when the heroes
were gangsters, and from the fact that he was unable to imagine either
earning a living or finding meaning in life as anything but a cop. He
was as trapped as a rat in a giant laboratory maze. Unlike the rat, he
didn't even have the illusion of freedom.
On June sixth the body cast came off. The spinal fracture was entirely
healed.
He had full feeling in both legs. Undoubtedly he would learn to walk
again.
Initially, however, he couldn't stand without the assistance of either
two nurses or one nurse and a wheeled walker. His thighs had
withered.
Though his calf muscles had received some passive exercise, they were
atrophied to a degree. For the first time in his life, he was sore and
flabby in the middle, which was the only place he'd gained weight.
A single trip around the room, assisted by nurses and a walker, broke
him out in a sweat and made his stomach muscles flutter as if he had
attempted to benchpress five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, it was a
day of celebration. Life went on. He felt reborn.
He paused by the window that framed the crown of the tall palm tree,
and as if by the grace of an aware and benign universe, a trio of sea
gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica
shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so,
like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in
an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched
them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from
the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below
him.
Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins
peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his
waist, Jack ate his share.
That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide
wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily
westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but
always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace
with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were
