Thursday, 1:17 p.m. by Michael Landweber

Author:Michael Landweber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffeetown Press

Chapter 22

The Hallucination That Played on Infinite Loop While I Was Feverish That Wasn’t Actually a Hallucination But a Memory I Wish I Could Forget

“I have to go.”

Her voice was so weak in those last weeks that sometimes when I heard it I didn’t recognize it, mistaking it for a thought of my own.

I had been reading in the corner chair of her room, dozing between paragraphs. My mother always had a stack of books on her nightstand, sometimes so many that one was hard pressed to identify the piece of furniture beneath them. When she was moved from her room upstairs into the office, into that hospital bed, I gathered the books from her to-do pile, fifteen in all, and started to read them. My original thought was to read them aloud to her, but I found myself reading silently in her presence and feeling that was enough. She would often just stare at the ceiling, eyes half closed, breathing in the rasp that had become background noise like the hum of the air conditioning units. I was working on A History of God, a book my mother had added back to the pile for a second reading on the night she was diagnosed with the tumor. I could barely get through three pages without falling asleep—no disrespect to the author, but it had become my most reliable sedative.

“I have to go.”

A little stronger, the voice, a little more urgent.

I sat up. She was trying to raise her head. She could maintain a seated position and feed herself simple foods without sauces, change the channels on the TV if the remote was placed in her hand and her finger guided to the right buttons—though all those abilities, one by one, in inevitable succession, would soon be taken from her. But moving from a reclining position to a seated one is harder than it looks, the number of muscles involved, the order of operations that need to be sequenced properly. This was something she could not do anymore. I hurried over to her side, pulled her up toward me into an embrace and organized the pillows behind her—actions that had become reflexive to me.

“Do you want some water?”

“I … have to … go.”

I had moved her too fast and she was laboring for breath. I was still dazed, not yet fully awake, and I chastised myself for not being more careful. I listened to her words for the first time.

The portable toilet was in the opposite corner of the room. At this point, I was only alone with my mother overnight. We had nurses come in during waking hours, but the dead of night was still my responsibility until help arrived the next morning. I had seen them—my mother and the nurses—struggle to use the toilet. They would lift her and I could tell that she would chafe at the indignity and I would hurry away to another part of the house, ashamed that I had seen even that much. She had never needed me to help her.

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