Troika by Adam Pelzman

Author:Adam Pelzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

135 DEGREES

Julian Pravdin awoke—not to the sound of her choking, and not to a remarkable clearing of the throat, but rather to nothing more than the faintest hint of a gasp emanating from the parched throat of his paralyzed wife. The brain, he once read, has malleable properties. Neuroplasticity, they call it. The injured brain, the weak brain, the brain with diminished capacity can evolve, mutate, compensate for its deficiencies. It can create new neural pathways, new connection points, new wiring. The brain, he learned after the accident, can remap itself.

And so it was, after Sophie became paralyzed from the waist down, that not only did her brain crackle and spark and mutate into a different organ, one that allowed her to exist, to eat, to drink, to brush her teeth, to communicate, to laugh, to grieve—to extract some modest amount of pleasure from a life that had become irreversibly less enjoyable, but so did Julian’s own brain undergo a conversion.

In response to her injury, Julian’s hearing became acute, animal-like, so that he could now register in the early morning darkness her somnolent gurgle before it occurred. His myopic vision, once the object of Sophie’s playful ridicule, could now detect in the lilac twilight a nearly invisible, purplish hue in her calf, a ruptured capillary that foretold a circulatory crisis. And his sense of smell became so acute that, from a distance of twenty feet, enveloped even amid the foul stench of a Chinatown street in August, the odor of feces from her soiled diaper would rip through his nasal concha and set off his olfactory receptors—prompting Julian to move his wife to a bathroom and clean her up as she grimaced in shame.

And it was these heightened sensitivities that allowed Julian to care for his wife, to keep her alive, to ensure that her reservoir of dignity would remain protected, untouched.

When Julian heard her gasp, a result of the sleep apnea that had plagued her since the accident, he turned and reached for her shoulder—and at that moment of contact, the muscles in the back of her throat flickered and tensed, opening the passageway and again permitting the free flow of air. Julian reached for a pillow. He watched her lips twitch, listened for her raspy exhale. He lifted the pillow and observed the contour of her face, the bump on the bridge of her nose, the beauty mark on her right cheekbone, a pale scar along her hairline—imperfections that perfected her.

As if he were strangling the last breath from his most odious enemy, Julian squeezed the pillow. He calculated the angle of his approach and cleared a strand of hair from Sophie’s forehead. Then he lifted her left shoulder and wedged the pillow underneath her, elevating her upper torso and turning her slightly to the side—a position that drew her tongue away from the back of her throat and allowed her to breathe more freely.

Julian rose and moved to the foot of the bed. There, he checked to

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