Late Stories (20 page)

Feel Good

H
e thinks: I'm getting worse. My hands have trouble typing. They don't feel connected to the keyboard. I make a lot of mistakes, and then make mistakes correcting the mistakes. Sometimes I can't get the Ko-Rec-Type tab underneath the ribbon to type a word or letter out. I have to retype a page ten to fifteen times now to get it right, when before it was only around five or six. Also, my fingers tighten up, and sometimes, but only a few times, though it never happened before, they curl up and get so stiff I have to pry them apart with my other hand. Though if I wait a minute or so, they usually come apart by themselves. Other signs. I can barely hold a pen sometimes. And when I can write with one, the writing's so small I can't read it, even with the magnifying glass I keep on the window ledge next to my desk. And my feet feel cold almost all the time now, when before it was just a few hours a day. I wear socks when I go to bed now, but they don't help much. I wonder how long it'll be before my right foot can't feel the gas and brake pedals of my car. I also have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Not just the morning. It happens a lot, since I have to pee three to four times overnight. To get out of bed I have to sit up slowly, then stand. The bathroom's just two feet away from the left side of the bed, the side I mostly sleep on because it's the closest to the bathroom. It's also the side nearest the chair that has my clothes for the next day and on the floor right beside that side of the bed are my socks where I left them the previous night when I undressed for bed, thinking I might put them on in the morning. I usually change
my socks every other day, but I've often gone three days without a change. I think that's because they've been stretched so much the last two days that they're easier to get on. When I stand up from the sitting position I sometimes feel a bit shaky on my feet and think I might fall. So I sit right back on the bed and try to stand up a minute or so later. That usually does it. I have fallen a couple of times, which isn't much in almost a year, and it wasn't hard to get up again. Though the last time I fell was around six months ago, so who knows how hard it would be now to stand up or get back on the bed from the floor. And of course I'd first sit on the edge of the bed, but not too close to the edge, before I'd try to stand again. Anyway, I didn't hurt myself those two, or maybe it was three times I fell. The room's carpeted—my wife's idea after we moved into the house, to cushion her falls if she fell, which she did increasingly over the years. Off the bed where she was sitting or out of her wheelchair if she wasn't strapped in, and once when she was strapped in and fell over in the chair and broke her nose. That bedroom's the only place in the house that's carpeted except for the short hallway right outside it, which the carpet company threw in for free. Then walking. Mornings, after I put my socks on and get off the bed and do what I have to in the bathroom and dress, is probably the worst time for that. That's because, or at least is the likely cause, I haven't taken the pill for my illness, which I do three times a day, since around six the previous night. So I take the pill while I'm in the bathroom and then exercise with two ten-pound weights and stretch a lot before and after I exercise with the weights, but nothing seems to help my walking much. I'm getting worse. No question about it. If I go to my doctor and tell him what I think's happened to my body since I last saw him, around six months ago, he'll increase the dosage of my medicine, which is what he did the last time I told him I thought I was getting worse, and now I'm sure I'm worse than I was then.

My back, he thinks. The lower part. This has been going on for a year: sometimes it hurts so much I can't walk. Or I can, but only tiny steps—more like a slow shuffle—and not for long. If I fell, when my lower back hurts this much, I don't know how I'd get up. It's never happened, but I'd probably have to stay on the floor or wherever I fell till I felt strong enough and not in so much pain to get myself up. If I was home I might have to crawl to the living room couch or my bed to support me as I lifted myself up. If I was outside, and nobody was around to help, I don't know what I'd do. Stay there, that's all, till I felt better. Sometimes, and this really creates a problem, my back hurts so much that I can't get my hands far enough around me to wipe my behind. I take a healthy-back class at the Y twice a week, where I'm taught various stretches to prevent and relieve the pain in my back, but they only help for about an hour after the class is over. Same when I do these stretches at home at least once a day. These back pains could be tied to my illness, or maybe not. My doctor says “Perhaps, but it'd be unusual. It's probably just your age and that you exercise too much and too strenuously.” And I keep calling what I have an illness when the right word for it is disease. And my right leg. No, my left. I don't know why it's always one and never the other, and neither does my doctor. But sometimes it hurts so much I can barely walk on it and it feels like it's going to collapse on me. So I have to sit, or stand without moving, or hold on to the top of my dresser or the dryer or washing machine in the kitchen and swing that leg back and forth, meaning forward and back. And after I do this about ten times, hold it straight out behind me or as straight as I can get it behind me while I'm holding on to one of these objects, till my leg feels better or doesn't feel it's about to collapse from under me. Is this also tied to my disease, or illness, for both are just as good, because what else could it be? And my doctor? Again he only says “Perhaps,” or “Maybe,” and
again that it more than likely comes because I exercise too much and too strenuously. That, he says, may explain a lot of my physical ailments. Have I ever thought of reducing my exercising routine by half or even cutting it out entirely for a while to see if my back and leg pains would go away? “I can't,” I said. “You yourself have said it's slowing down my main disease. And I only feel good, or let's say better and stronger when I exercise at home with weights in the morning and sometimes before I go to sleep, but mainly for an hour every day at the Y on the resistance machines and stationary bike and the weights there.”

And my bowels, he thinks. The medications I take for a number of things are affecting my bowels and my sleep and my mind too. It's not as clear and sharp as it used to be before I started taking them, that's for sure. I feel I'm losing my memory. Maybe that has nothing to do with my illness or disease, and it's just age. But sometimes it takes me a week to remember something that used to come to me instantly. For instance, I was talking to my older daughter on the phone two weeks back or so. I said “Do you remember the name of the opera we all went to at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore? I'd say about fifteen years ago, before you started college. It's on the tip of my tongue and has been there for a week. It's in Russian, Tchaikovsky, and your mother's favorite of all operas.” She said “I never knew its name except probably when we went to see it. I do remember a grand ball scene and lots of dancing and that the scenery was huge and pretty and the opera was very long and I wanted to go home before it ended.” “Funny what one remembers,” I said. “And it's not
Prince Igor
. That's Borodin, if that is an opera and not a ballet. But something with royalty in it, I think. It's not
Boris Gudunov
, either, which is about a czar, and another of your mother's favorites. I'll remember it, though it's been killing me that I can't. For some reason I feel my mind depends
on it.” She said “Don't be silly, Daddy. Everybody forgets.” It took me another week to remember it was
Eugene Onegin
. I could have looked it up online or in the encyclopedia of music book we have, but that would have been too easy. I wanted to remember it as sort of a memory test and to prove something, but it did take me two weeks and that worries me.

Face it, he thinks, I'm getting worse in almost every possible way. I know it and I know my daughters know it, but they don't want to say. It's why they call me every night and come down from New York every two to three weeks, or why I think they do. And it's why I never go to New York. I never go anywhere. My joke is I never leave Baltimore County. That's an exaggeration. I go to Baltimore city about once a month, cross the border between the city and the county to go to a Whole Foods or the Starbucks next door to it. But that's as far as I go. I never go deep into the city unless I'm with my daughters and we go to a movie or restaurant or museum there. I feel uneasy when I'm alone and not near my home. Not near my desk and my bed to rest or take a nap on whenever I want to. Not near my typewriter, even though I don't type anywhere near as well as I used to. Oh, what's the difference? I still type, with two fingers now instead of the three a year ago and the four a year before that. So I'm getting very anxious about my health. Not my health: my sickness, my illness, my disease. What it's doing to me. What it's going to do. And there's no cure, and the medication, my doctor says, only works up to a point, was the way I think he put it. But there are other medications I can take for it, he said, if the one I'm taking stops being effective. “But one medicine at a time,” he said, “at least for the same illness.” So he refers to it as an illness too. I just realized that.

I used to run, he thinks. Mornings, almost always, and before I had breakfast. Up, wash, exercise, dress, and out I'd go. If my wife
was still in bed, and this was after she got sick, I'd check up on her, see that she was all right, and then leave. Three to four miles a day, and I did this almost every day for about thirty years. Snow, rain, bitter cold; nothing but ice coating the streets stopped me, though they might have slowed me down, and when it was that icy outside I ran in place at home for twenty minutes or more. I was as compulsive about running as I am about writing and have been about a number of other things. Then, starting a few years ago: two to three miles a day and then just two and then one and then even less than that and then no running. My legs couldn't do it anymore. Or something couldn't. So I started to walk a couple of miles a day. Maybe just a mile. First a fast walk—what might be considered a power walk, but that didn't last long. When I couldn't do that anymore, then a normal walk for about a mile. Then half that and so on, till I could only walk about five hundred feet, and not every day. I also tried to take a second walk early evening, if it wasn't too hot, but by that time my back and leg hurt so much that I could barely make it to my mailbox and back, a total of about a hundred feet. So what am I saying? What I've been saying. I'm getting worse in almost every way but I don't want to go to the doctor to be told so. Of course I'll have to eventually go to him, but what will I do if the new medicine he prescribes for my condition—my illness, my sickness, my disease—doesn't slow it down for even a little, or does but just a little though not for long? And the medicine after that does nothing, or very little, but even for a shorter time, and so on. Till it ends up where no medicine works and I can't do very much for myself. Where my hands and feet are practically useless. Where I can't get around by myself except in the house, and there mostly by holding on to things as best as I can—grab bars, tables, chairs, walls—as I move. Where even a walker doesn't help much. I won't be able to shop for myself. Maybe not even dress myself.
Brush my teeth, hold a fork or spoon, cut my food with a knife, turn a book page, get off the toilet ten times a day, clean myself up. Where someone needs to help me with almost everything. I know what it's like from my wife. Get her in bed, out of bed, down for a nap if she didn't want to do it in her wheelchair, hold the glass or straw to her lips. She hated all of it. Seated at the computer most of the day. Same will happen to me. At my typewriter, not that I'll be able to peck anything out on it by then. Learn how to use her old computer for that, or even a new one? Oh, yeah, I can just see myself doing that. Voice-activation system, as she tried to do for her work? Took her two years of private instruction to learn how to use it where she got something done. And it still didn't work half the time, and that drove her nuts. She'd cry and cry and I'd rush into her study. Forget it. And I couldn't expect my daughters to do for me even half the things I did for her. They're my children; she was my wife. So what'll happen to me then? An assisted-living facility? A nursing home? One of those? Both, if there's a difference between them. Oh, no. Not for me. Not so long as I can do something about it. If I can't, then I think I'd go the same way she did. No food, water, nutrition or medicine or fake air through machines of any sort. But my hands. They're all right now, aren't they? No stiffness or pain? I open and close them several times and they seem fine. See how it goes when you don't think of them? Same with my legs. Feet feel a little cold, but no pain anywhere, and I stand. Back, too. Well, it never hurt all the time. And my mind? It's all right, right? It's not in that bad a shape. Quick, a test: What are the three early Stravinsky ballets, starting with the one I think was first performed in 1910? Yeah, 1910. And that one I almost always get.
The Firebird
. The other two, 1911 through 1913, I almost always forget when I try to think of them all as three. Sometimes takes me a couple of days to come up with those two, if I don't look them up.
Petrushka
and
The Rite of Spring
.
And if I need another one as proof of how well my mind's working, and I never thought of them as four:
Pulcinella
, in 1920 I'm almost sure. And even another one:
Agon
, '56 or '57—anyway, when I was still in college and saw it done several times at the City Center on West 55th Street, by the New York City Ballet. Allegra Kent, the principal dancer. I think I went to this ballet, alone or with friends, just to see her, not that I could see much from so far up in the second balcony or if I managed to sneak down to the first. She was such a beauty, and what a dancer, and she was my age—if I remember, a year younger.