Second Self - chapter 2 (with images) (Patreon)

The physical therapist comes on the second morning, a contractor named R. Halsey by the badge on her chest, which also carries a laminated photo of a dachshund in a hot dog costume, and she unpacks a duffel of Therabands onto the foot of the bed, cracking cinnamon gum. David signed her order. It's word for word the order I would've written myself, and I find that more flattering than I probably should.

The corridor from the sleep lab to the lobby runs forty-one feet. I know this without a tape, because I walked it for eleven years at a late-for-rounds stride, sixteen steps, arms full of files, past the billing alcove where the copier dust thins into carpet glue. The rail on the north wall predates all of us. A rehab gym leased the suite before we did; the landlord never unbolted it; my partners raised it at two consecutive lease renewals on grounds of aesthetics, which I've always thought rich, coming from men who kept a taxidermied marlin in the waiting room for a decade. Powder-coated steel, thirty-four inches up, wiped down with the pink soap from the scrub sink, so it smells like every exam I've ever run. For eleven years I went past it without touching it. This morning I hang off it with both hands, the horn pads of my fingers printing the cold steel, while a woman with a dachshund on her badge tells me to relax my grip.

Halsey wraps the gait belt around me over the gown and cinches it until I exhale. First step: the leg swings for the distance I asked for and the foot lands early, on tile I hadn't finished reaching. The step chops. The next one chops shorter. Sixteen steps was a man in a hurry. This body takes the corridor in quick bites, grip socks shushing, the gown drafting at the backs of my knees, and Halsey keeps her fist in the back of the belt and a third of my weight hangs off her forearm. I am, professionally speaking, luggage with opinions.

The knees brush. I've examined enough gait to know why without wanting to: the pelvis under me sets each femur at an angle mine never had, and the line I'm trying to walk was surveyed for different architecture. Widen the stance to stop the brushing and the gait goes to a waddle. Narrow it and the knees knock every third step. Knees in, Veronica, Halsey says, mid-chew, and the name goes one full step past me before it lands, and I answer into the second.

Each heel-strike arrives up through the gown a half beat late. I've read a hundred patients' gaits in the arm swing. Mine now carries a second pendulum, mounted on the front, timed against nothing I'm doing, and there's no line for it on any chart I know how to write. By the tenth step I stop fighting the sway and the walking gets cheaper, and I'm troubled more by the cheapness than I was by the difficulty, because it means the body knows the stride and I'm the one who has to learn it.

To test the stride I send one step out at full length on purpose, and the body answers early and I sway forward, and I overcorrect for it, throwing a save sized for a taller column of mass than I've got. Halsey's fist takes the whole of me through the belt, cinnamon breath coming over my shoulder, whoa, easy, and I hang there working it out. Two inches. My reflexes are tuned to a center of gravity two inches above the one I'm currently carrying, and every save I attempt converts the error into a different error, which is, I'll grant the universe, a tidy piece of engineering irony.

At the lobby end she pours a foam cup from the water bottle and sets it on the rail's end cap and says take it. I reach and close on air.

It isn't weakness, which would scatter the misses, and it isn't deconditioning, which would shorten everything about the same amount. The miss errs one direction, the same direction, every time. I do it four more times without being asked, and the miss is constant: short and left, half a tile, and the floor's grid confirms it each time. In the prism studies a nervous system handed displaced goggles recalibrates inside a dozen reaches; mine has been handed a shorter arm. The command leaving my shoulder is the one I've been sending since residency, sized for hardware that ended six inches past the hand I've just closed on nothing, and underneath the embarrassment there's a clean result anyway, and a small, disgusting pleasure in it.

On the return trip I count by the panel. Forty seconds between chirps. The first crossing took three of them; this one takes two and change, which I choose to take as progress. By the second crossing the steel under my grip has taken my heat. Halsey demonstrates heel-toe walking ahead of me and I study her hips like instructional film, the way I would for a grand-rounds video, and am mildly appalled at myself for the comparison approximately one second after making it.

"Nobody warns you how much of walking is hips," I say, reaching for something I imagine passes between women on a subject like this, and Halsey's face tells me I haven't located it. "Uh huh," she says, and keeps counting my steps.

At the sleep lab door she lets go of the belt by degrees, like someone setting down a bag she still doesn't trust.

Chloe is waiting at the lobby end with a folder on her knee. "She did great," Halsey tells her, and writes it on the clipboard, first gait, minimal assist, and both of them look at the clipboard instead of at me while my breathing slows. She gives me the cup on the second try, four inches short and correcting in, and the water is lukewarm and tastes of foam and I drink it in four swallows.

"Veronica, same time Thursday," she says, and the side door lets in a blade of cold on her way out. The panel chirps. I practice the reach twice more, cup to rail, four inches and then three, before Chloe comes to take the cup away.

The charting computer in the alcove has been down since before I woke, so on the third morning Dana does the handoff at my bed, with the float nurse on the far side holding a folded sheet against her chest. Pruitt, her badge says, and under the name a sticker from a children's hospital, a cartoon giraffe.

"Thirty-two, post-bleed day thirty-two, left PComm, clipped, twelve days on the vent, woke up Monday. Oriented times two. Left elbow's got a contracture starting, OT's on it. Twelve kilos down from admit. Swallow's fine on purée, Miller wants a study before we upgrade her."

"Weekend plans first," Pruitt says. "Then medicine."

"John's recital, Saturday, and I have to make thirty cupcakes because I said I would in August. The Gossec gavotte. She's terrified of the shift in the second line." To me, without looking down: "Roll toward me, sweetheart, one two three."

They take me onto my side facing the wall with a coordination that has done this ten thousand times. The gown falls open along my back and the air comes in the whole bare length of me, shoulder blades to the backs of the knees, and I smell myself rise off the sheet, four days of sweat and scalp oil, the tube's plastic still in my breath, tin and puréed turkey under the tin. Dana keeps one hand flat on my back, warm, holding me without pressing. Behind me Pruitt pulls the old sheet free in one practiced tug and runs a palm over my heels and my tailbone, and the giraffe swings forward into my view and back out.

"Heels fine, sacrum fine, no redness anywhere. She's got a good backside."

"She was a violinist, is what I heard."

"Cello. The big one, between the knees. Partner says she was first chair."

They go on across my hips about the recital and a man Pruitt has seen twice who texts in paragraphs, three before lunch, each one a full paragraph, and who has the time for a man with that much to say, and Dana says the time is probably the point, and both of them laugh, and while they laugh they turn me a quarter inch toward center and tuck. The conversation is located at the linen cart, in their Saturday, in their phones. My body is where their hands are, furniture with a pulse. Neither of them is unkind. It hasn't occurred to either of them that the talk is happening anywhere but between the two of them.

"Swallow study Friday morning. If it clears he wants her home Friday. Partner's taking leave, doing the care. He's writing the orders today."

Home. Friday. I face the wall, bare from the shoulder blades down, and learn where I'm going from a conversation held over my body as if over a fence. The sentence I want is four words long - I wrote those criteria - and I price it out: a dead woman's alto, hoarse from her own tube, claiming authorship of the discharge orders, entered in the chart as confusion by two women with warm hands. Silence is cheaper.

"Back we go, one two three."

The new sheet smells of bleach and somebody's lavender dryer sheet, and they tuck it tight enough to pin my toes. At the door Pruitt asks where the linen cart lives and Dana tells her to ask somebody who works here, and the door swings shut on the two of them laughing. Friday stays in the room. I press my thumb into the horn pad of my index finger and hold it there until the panel chirps again.

Dana says I need a proper bath, and Chloe gets me out of the bed for it herself. Sheet folded back, one arm behind my shoulders, the other hand sliding up under my right armpit, and she lifts.

Water closes over me to the collarbones, warm and gray with soap, and the knees in front of me are small and knobbed. Enamel at my back. The tub's curve is sized for a grown body, which makes it enormous, a lake with edges. A plastic cup tips at the crown of my head and water sheets down over both ears and every sound goes to wool and comes back. A woman is counting. Four. Five. The pours. The cup dips, refills, and in the pause she runs the tap and tests the stream with the inside of her wrist. Her fingers work lather at my temples, unhurried, and somewhere in it there's a bar-soap smell over something baking, and at the back of my throat a taste of grape, medicine's grape, a child's grape, and I don't know why I need to know how many pours there are, but I do, badly, and I count them along with her without meaning to. I tip my chin to my chest for the next cupful without being told, because the counting has an end. The water arrives hottest at the crown and cools the whole way down my back. The cup is yellow, something printed on it once, worn to a pale oval with one orange foot left. Seven. The last pour.

The sleep lab comes back. I'm on my feet. Chloe has me at the hip, the tile is cold, and somewhere in the last four seconds my legs did their work on their own.

"Easy," she says. "You went somewhere."

I run the list, methodically, the way I'd work up any four-second gap in a patient's history. A dream, except I've been awake since six. A sedative artifact, except the temazepam cleared three days ago. A focal event, except an absence seizure doesn't stand a person up and walk them two steps. Confabulation, then: a remodeled cortex handing me a story to paper over a dropped four seconds, and I find I don't believe my own differential even as I'm running it, which has never once happened to me before tonight.

I know my own childhood baths. A tub in Cincinnati, my mother singing something with a chorus she made up, a washcloth folded over the faucet so I wouldn't crack my head. No counting anywhere in it. Those knees were a child's. The hands that washed me were an adult's, and the voice counting off the pours belongs to no one I've ever heard, and it didn't arrive like something recalled. It arrived with the whole body attached. Five years old, soap-slick, certain of the number of pours. A memory that isn't mine, passed through me wearing the present tense.

In the bathroom doorway she stops so I can find my balance, and I've already found it. Against her hip. The muscles along my back, braced since the first day, have let go at some point in the last minute. My weight rests into her, and she shifts her stance to take it, like someone answering a familiar question. The tub is filling and the steam carries something sweet. My shoulders drop another degree before I decide anything at all.

She turns the tap off and the room settles into its smaller sounds: water ticking from the faucet, steam moving, the panel chirping down the hall every forty seconds, muffled by the door. The stool stands mid-tub with its rubber feet planted wide. The blue basin floats.

The gown comes off the same way it did with Chloe in the bathroom, two bows, except this time she lifts it away from my shoulders instead of letting it fall. Four days of my own smell rise off me in the heat, sweat and scalp oil and the ghost of chlorhexidine. I take her forearm and step in, and the water takes my foot to the ankle, and she lowers me onto the stool, and it climbs my shins and my knees, stops at the crease of my lap, and the heat keeps traveling up me after the water has stopped. Sitting down changed something underneath me. Everything back there rearranged as I came down onto the stool, shifted and pressed and settled, and there's warm water in places that hold it now. I move a fraction of an inch to see if I can make it happen again. I can. Above the waterline the steam settles cooler on my shoulders than the air was a second ago.

I gasp, low, before I can hold it in.

"Too hot?"

"No." I clear the tube-hoarseness out of my throat. "No. Leave it." It isn't the heat. I don't tell her that.

The tub fits me with room to spare. Eleven years of ducking under showerheads installed for shorter men, of hotel tubs that took me to mid-shin, and now the fixtures have slack everywhere, the one clear upgrade in this whole business. For one unguarded second, submerged to the chest in a tub built for someone this size, I like it, actually like it, before I catch myself liking it and decide this isn't a thought worth following tonight. My knees clear the far end by a handspan. The heat gets into the IV bruise on my wrist, into the left elbow, into the small of my back, and somewhere along my spine a tension I've been carrying since the table lets go without consulting me.

Out of water, this chest hangs. In it, the breasts ride, though the word sitting closer to the surface, unhelpfully, is tits, a word that has never once in my life been about me and now abruptly is. I shift my weight once, to test, and they answer a half second late, drifting toward each other before they settle, and the water moves into the crease beneath them, a strip of skin that until this week had never had weather of any kind. I stop testing. She's rolled her sleeves to the elbow and is watching the water, not me, which I understand as kindness and resent anyway.

"Forward."

I lean, forearms on knees, and they swing forward with me, buoyant, and come to rest against my own arms, warm, heavy, and impossible to assign to anyone else. For the length of one long breath the weight that has hung on me since the first hour floats, and when I sit back up it re-lands all at once, an anchor let go the inch to the floor, and I understand something about the architecture that four days of standing and lying hadn't taught me.

She wets my hair with the basin, poured slow from the crown, and the length of it slides down my back and spreads in the water behind me like something poured out of a bottle. Then the soap, and it's lavender, and the body knows it instantly. The shoulders go down half an inch. The breath gets longer. I've never smelled this soap in my life, and this body has smelled it for years, and the body is answering, and I'm along in the body while it answers.

"Where'd you get the soap," I say. The sentence comes out low and careful. I built it before sending.

"Home," Chloe says. "There are three bottles in the shower. You started stockpiling in the spring."

She works the lather with her fingertips in small circles, unhurried, nails short, and finds the ache where four days of pillow have lived, and the body goes slack again on the second pass, the same slackness the lift found, arriving ahead of any decision of mine. A runnel of suds finds the corner of my mouth and stings it. The water closes over my ears and the room drops away into wool, the copier down the hall and the panel and her breathing all gone at once, and comes back when the pour ends. Her fingers are long. Somewhere in my head a nurse writes bath given, tolerated well in blue pen, and I want to tell her about the water in the creases.

The rinse is the basin, dipped and poured. She doesn't count. I count for her, and at seven I brace, shoulders up around my ears, and there's an eighth pour, and a ninth, and the water runs clear off my hair and nothing ends. She sees the brace. Her rhythm doesn't change and she doesn't ask, and the not-asking has a shape to it.

Conditioner comes from the mate bottle, and the wide-tooth comb from the Fred Meyer bag, working upward from the ends. Every snag pulls at my scalp from a foot and a half away, slow and impersonal, like weather happening to a roof. Through the door, faintly, the billing copier starts up. David is printing something.

She takes the elbow through its range, ten slow extensions, one hand braced above the joint, counting under her breath. At eight the muscle trembles. At ten it aches all through, a good ache, probably.

"OT says twice a day. I'll do the morning one." She lowers my arm back into the water. "Forward again."

The washcloth is white and smells of the lavender dryer sheet from the linen shelf. She soaps it and does my back in long passes, and then her thumb finds the knot beside my left shoulder blade, the one running up into the trapezius, and she leans her weight onto it and I make the sound again, louder.

"All of it lives here," she says. "Left side. Twenty-five years of the instrument, right into this one muscle. She carried it her whole career and it never got a day off." Her thumb works in slow circles. "You stretch it mornings, I'll show you how. And heat, not ice. There's a rice bag at home for the microwave, twenty minutes."

Her thumb travels up to the left side of my neck and stops, at the hairline, where the skin is still a faint rough patch from the upper bout.

"It's fading," she says. Then the washcloth again, and nothing more about it.

"Arms."

I lift my arms. She does my collarbones in two passes, brisk, and then the back of her right hand comes up under my right breast and lifts, unhurried, knuckles only, and the weight of it comes up off the chest wall into her hand, and the cloth runs the length of the crease beneath, one pass, two, and the skin there stings with four days of salt. This is the inframammary fold, and it macerates if it stays wet, and she knows that, and I know that. Then the left, the same, her knuckles a cool plane under the weight, the cloth doing its work in the shadow the weight makes.

"Here first, every day," she says. "Wash it, then dry it before anything else, or it goes raw. I learned that once the hard way, years ago, in a dress I loved."

"How does a person - " I start, and the alto comes out wrong, and I start over. "How did I go four days without anyone doing that?"

"You had a tube in your nose and a pump feeding you. The order of operations was different." She's already down to my stomach, the cloth circling the soft hollow below the navel, dipping brisk into the navel itself. "Knees apart."

I do it, and the water moves in against places that were closed a second ago. She does it fast. The cloth goes over the front first and there's nothing definite about where it lands. It presses and the pressure carries inward and spreads, no edge to it, no single point I could put a finger on afterward and name. Everything down there's folded into everything else. The cloth parts what it comes to and then the parts close again behind it. Somewhere in the second pass it crosses a place that answers differently from everything around it, sharp and disproportionate, gone before I can locate it, and my whole body reports it as an error of some kind. Then the rinse, warm, poured slow, front to back, and the water runs down through and off and keeps going, and I sit there feeling it leave in a way the body I used to have never did. My hands are on the tub rim doing their gripping. Her face is easy, a woman doing a task with a body she has known intimately for nine years.

She stands me up with both hands under my arms and water sheets off me, and the air hits and the gooseflesh comes up my whole body at once, nipples tightening into hard points, and then she sits me on the enamel edge of the tub because the towel is on the counter by the door, six steps away. She covers the distance in two seconds. I sit through it for an age: wet hair slapped flat against my neck, water pooling under me on the cold enamel, arms crossed over my chest for warmth, which now means gathering an armful of my own weight against myself and holding it there. The panel chirps. I count to forty and it chirps again and she's back, and the towel goes over my head first, twisted into a wrap that holds on its own. I don't know how towels do that.

"Dry under here first." She lifts each breast with the backs of her knuckles again and pats beneath, per her own rule, and then does my shoulders and back in rough passes. For between my legs she puts the corner of the towel in my hand and steadies my shoulder while I pat myself dry, giving the job back without a word, and I'm grateful and annoyed in exactly equal amounts. She does between my toes herself, one foot propped on her knee, humming something with no tune in it.

"Every day you bathe, everywhere you can reach, and I'll get the rest," she says. "Eucerin, the pump bottle, it's in the bag. The elbows crack by February if you skip. Her skin drinks the stuff. I used to find bottles in the case pocket of the cello."

"You always - " she says, and stops. "She got goosebumps. After every bath, nine years, like clockwork." The steam drips off the faucet. Neither of us spends the silence, and then she's reaching for the bag.

The underwear is new, nude cotton, tags snapped off between her teeth. She holds the waistband low and I step in and she draws them up my legs and settles them at my hips, snug, flat in front, nothing to arrange, the leg openings sitting high on the hip bone, a second layer of cloth along the center seam where my old underwear had engineering for a different payload. Then the bra, wire-free, soft cups, hook and eye. She holds it open by the band and I thread my arms through the straps, and she fastens it from behind, three hooks, and the band draws snug all the way around my ribs, a pressure with a whole circumference to it. A finger runs under the band at my back to check the tension. Each strap shortens with a slide of the adjuster, and everything I have is lifted and set forward and held there, load taken from below and hung from above, a rearrangement I can feel arrive in my shoulders. Something in them eases, from a direction I didn't know the load was coming from, and I decide not to enjoy it, and the decision is late.

"It'll do," she says, "until someone measures you properly."

I reach back before I've decided to. My fingers are clumsy at the hooks, wrong side, wrong angle, three tries before the band lets go all at once and the weight of everything drops the half inch it had been held. I work the straps down my arms and hold it out to her, wire-free, still warm from my own skin.

"Not this, not for me," I say, and the register holds down on its own for once. "I want my own underwear. David has some at the apartment, his own, not new. Ask him to bring some by."

She takes it without a word and doesn't ask me to explain.

The sweatpants are gray and the waistband settles above my navel, where this body keeps its middle, and she ties the drawstring in a bow and then doubles the knot. "So it holds in the wash," she says. The T-shirt goes over my head with her guiding the left sleeve past the bad elbow, and then socks, and then she stands back with her wet sleeves and looks at the whole of it, me, wrapped and dressed and warm, sitting on the closed toilet in new clothes.

"Twice a week for the hair," she says, and dumps the basin into the draining tub. "More than that and it goes limp. She's strict about it." The tub empties with a small whirlpool sound. On the mirror there's one clear streak where her sleeve brushed it, and it's fogging over again from the edges. A superintendent walking a new owner through the systems, and the maintenance history is in her voice, and I sit dressed in what it knows.

On the fourth morning the room is empty, and the phone in the sleep lab is the desk line, because Chloe has the cell with her, gone for the morning, and I dial the clinic's front desk from memory and ask for Dr. Miller and the receptionist puts me through without asking who is calling.

"Miller."

"It's me."

A pause with paper in it. "Veronica." He's decided to use the name on the phone, where anyone might hear. I can hear him deciding it, in the half beat before he says it. "How are you feeling?"

"Like the first day of residency, in a smaller building. Listen. I want to talk about the data."

"The data."

"The mapping data. The raw acquisition, the write log, the impedance runs from the dry - "

" - tests, all three nights, plus the volunteer." Paper moving. "I pulled them Tuesday."

"Of course you did."

"I haven't opened them."

"No," I say. "You wouldn't have." And he wouldn't, because opening them alone means being the only reader, and neither of us has ever trusted a first pass we ran by ourselves; it's the one piece of intellectual vanity we've never let ourselves have. "You're four days post-procedure," he says, and I hear him set down a pen.

"I'm four days post-procedure and I'm the only person alive who can read the write log, because - "

"Because you designed what it was supposed to mean. Yes."

"Then you know what I'm about to say about the section eight language."

"That it assumes the subject is a stranger." A breath through the nose, half a laugh, the one I make when I've been handed the objection I was already making myself. "I've had that argument twice this week. I lost both times."

"Who won?"

"Me," he says.

It is, for something under a minute, the best conversation I've had since I woke up. The sleep logs look like a seismograph, he says, but that's just - and I have it too, nobody sleeps in this building, the practice's oldest line, said over every bad sleep chart in eleven years of Tuesdays, and we say it in the same instant, and for a second the phone is a wire between one person. We both stop. Then he laughs, and the laugh is my laugh, down the line, and I can feel the shape of my own face making it somewhere across the building.

"I'm ninety feet from you," I say. "Wheel a laptop down the corridor and sit with me for an hour."

"Veronica - "

"David. I know the protocol. I wrote the protocol. The protocol says the subject doesn't analyze his own data, and the protocol was written by a man who expected the subject to be a vegetable with a borrowed filing system, and the man who wrote it is the subject, so the protocol has a hole in it the size of the whole experiment."

Silence. Then, carefully: "You've been thinking about this."

"I've been thinking about it since before the tone came in the left ear. You have too. You checked the channel integrity before you woke Chloe."

"To confirm the acquisition."

"To find out whether you were still going to be the one who - "

"Don't."

The pen goes into the breast pocket. I can hear it. Nine hundred times I've heard that pocket and I've never once heard it from the outside, and the ninety feet of corridor between us is, just now, the only fact in the building that matters. Another pause, longer. "Monday," he says. "After discharge. Come in and we'll go through the first pass."

"Discharge."

"Friday, midday. There's nothing more to do here that can't be done at home. Chloe's taking leave."

"What are you doing between now and Monday?"

"Working. We'll cross the rest when we get to it." We. The word comes out of his mouth with my habits in it, and I let it pass, professional courtesy, one investigator to another. "Monday, then. Nine."

"Nine." Before he can hang up: "One more thing. Chloe was going to ask you and I don't know if she did. I want my own underwear. A few pairs from the drawer."

A pause, the kind he'd give a request for the wrong reagent. "She didn't. I'll bring some tomorrow."

He hangs up without goodbye, my own habit, and I hold the receiver through the dial tone and set it down. The receiver is warm on the side that was against my face and cool on the other, and the hand holding it's small, and the calluses on the left hand are in the wrong places.

Each line left my mouth planned. Anyone composes; this was planned, the whole sentence laid out end to end before the first word, and pitched. I dropped every one of them a third below where the voice wanted to sit, down out of the alto toward the register my voice has lived in my whole life, and I held it there through the man who wrote it is the subject, which is a sentence that only works if it doesn't rise. I was doing it before the call connected. I've been doing it for two days, to Chloe, to Dana, to the ceiling, and this is the first time I caught myself from the outside: an instrument I'm tuning without being asked.

Chloe comes in an hour later with the Fred Meyer bags and says she ran into Dana in the parking lot, and Dana said Friday, and isn't that wonderful. She's looking at me while she says it, with the grocery bags cutting into her wrists, and the question inside the question is whether I want to go, and the question inside that is whether I'll come home with her, and there's no third option on the table anywhere.

"Friday," I say. "Wonderful."

She sets the bags down and starts unpacking the shampoo. I pick up the receiver again and put it down without dialing, because the person I would call about any of this is the person I just hung up with, and we've already talked.