Jim was still groggy from the anesthesia, so Dr. Le Page made sure that Jerry understood what he was saying—handed him the prescription for pain medicines, which he said Jim would definitely be needing. “The bubble will dissolve slowly,” Dr. Le Page explained, “with the gas being absorbed first into the bloodstream, and then expelled back into the outer atmosphere via the lungs. As the bubble slowly dissipates, his vision will return. Right now he won’t be able to see around the bubble—it’ll be like trying to see around a brick wall—but in time, as the bubble subsides, light will be able to reenter the brain. It was a good surgery,” Dr. Le Page said, with confidence. “He’ll be able to see again.
“He’s going to have about a two-hour grace period,” Dr. Le Page said, “before the anesthesia wears off and he starts feeling really, really sick.” Jerry nodded and shook hands with Dr. Le Page, who had already stepped out of his blue scrub suit; beneath it he was wearing a dapper gray houndstooth suit with a bright blue tie, and a starched white shirt, and black dress shoes. After having spent the previous day clinging to the belief that $5,000 an hour was usurious, Jerry found himself of the opinion now that it was a bargain; or that any price, high or low, was irrelevant, compared to the worth and beauty and wonder of Jim’s full eyesight being returned to him.
Jim had to walk with his head pointed straight down at the ground so that he could see, through his one good but fatigued eye, no farther than the tips of his shoes, and Jerry took Jim by the crook of the arm.
Even in his drugged stupor, Jim resented the help, or the fact that he needed the help, and sought to pull free from Jerry’s supporting hand, but after he did so he found himself standing alone in the parking lot, still staring down at his shoes, without a clue as to where their truck was parked; and so he had to relent and submit to being led and guided, helped—though it would only, he told himself, be for seven days. Soon enough, he would be fierce and strong and independent again, and this period of need, of deep need, would pass like a breeze, like a summer day, like a scrap of bright, colorful cloth blown by the wind.
…
It was as Dr. Le Page had predicted; they had not been back at their room for more than an hour (foolishly, stubbornly, Jim had drunk a quart of beer and eaten a pint of ice cream) before the anesthesia faded and the agony struck.
It began as the low, vague awareness of pain deep in the center of his skull, like a dull fire that soon enough catches a breath of oxygen and burns brightly; and this escalating pain (his eye soon felt as if a horse had stepped on it) was coupled quickly with an explosion of nausea and diarrhea.
It was the worst of both worlds: the pain made Jim want nothing more than to curl up on the bed, hunched on his hands and knees, motionless, in order to keep the bubble in his head tipped perfectly level—and yet the roils of nausea demanded that he stagger from the bed every five minutes and make his way into the bathroom to expel the toxins and confusions of his illness.
Dr. Le Page had prescribed pills for both the nausea and the pain, and Jim began to take them in earnest—first one, then a second, and a third, and a fourth—but either they weren’t powerful enough for the magnitude of his torment or he was simply jetting them back out with his diarrhea before they could be absorbed into his bloodstream, for his agony continued unabated.
Jerry felt terrible that there was nothing he could do. He got up and went out to fetch a bag of ice for Jim to place over the injured eye, but it was no use, nothing was of any use, and Jerry finally had to place his head under the pillows of the hide-a-bed to try to drown out the sound of Jim’s thrashings and convulsions in the next room.
All night long Jim shifted and groaned, trying unsuccessfully to find some middle place of numbness between nausea and agony; and there was no part in him, not one cell of either hope or memory, that could see or imagine an end to the misery.
The gas bubble he sought to balance so perfectly at the back of his eye was suppressing the function of the tear duct, so that even as he imagined that his injured eye was tearing, watering profusely, no fluids were emerging from that eye—there was only a dry and rapid anguished blinking and twitching—nor were any tears produced in the eye’s sympathetic partner, the uninjured one.
Jerry slept fitfully as well, his slumber interrupted by Jim’s ceaseless comings and goings, and even lonely as he was, chained to a gray-sky marriage, Jerry recognized the degree and value of his freedom: the absence of physical pain or even ailment. The love in his marriage was not the amount he had once had, when they’d first been in love and he had been unable to do any wrong in the eyes of his beloved, or even later, when she had still loved him fiercely even as his myriad imperfections and flaws and failings were revealed; but he was still strong and
