The Wheelchair Diaries - Ch 15

It has been a week since Ben left the bag and I keep pretending I am not orbiting it. I move it like furniture I am testing out. Chair by the wardrobe. Kitchen table. Floor beside the bed. Every time I set it down, I feel a small lift in my chest followed by a drop, like I have tricked myself and then remembered I cannot be tricked.

Work is the worst for pretending because there is time to notice everything. I sit very straight at my desk and give myself chores. Pressure relief every hour. Lift with arms, count to ten, let the chair take the weight. I do it a count longer than I need so it reads as care. When I reach for a stapler and my hip tries to help, I correct it and make that correction look like routine. Feet on the footplate, heels flat, toes quiet. They never stay quiet. The carriage shudders on the Tube or a colleague bumps my desk and my toes try to curl in my boots. I keep my face smooth and move my ankle with my hand like that was always the plan.

In the accessible stall at lunch I do what needs to be done. Wheelchair close. Brakes on. Grab bar. Underwear to knees. Eyes forward. When I am under the injection there is a clean absence, a silence that starts around my navel and widens, and the stall feels like a little private room where the world makes sense. This week the stall is full of effort. I can feel every second of it. When I manage to let go it is because I choose to, and the choosing is loud in my head. If I release into the diaper, the day stays believable. If I cannot, I hate how aware I am of trying. Either way I swap for a fresh one and roll out like nothing happened.

Nights are a carousel. Shower chair. Steam until the mirror cries. I watch my knees. When the injection is in me my feet drift apart and stay, loose bookends around the drain. I have sat there and felt the water become only pressure, then nothing. That quiet is perfect and frightening. This week the water draws a precise line down my spine and keeps going, and my body behaves like it wants credit for participating. I sit on the bench and practice stillness until my thighs tremble. The tremble ruins the scene and I tell myself to accept that the scene needs ruining. Then I towel off in the chair, diaper, clothes. I choose clothes that blur the shape of my legs. I look in the mirror and lower my shoulders a fraction so effort has a shape. It is ridiculous to calibrate posture in millimeters and also exactly what I need.

Some evenings I watch other women on YouTube and study angles. Footplate height. The slackness of an ankle when a heel falls off the edge. The way a knee caves in and stays because the body is not arguing back. I pause frames and copy the positions. I pick up my own ankle and set it down with both hands. Hold. Breathe. Do not correct. My calf twitches anyway. I put a book on my lap to remind my hips to be still. It is a game and it is a life and I cannot tell the difference.

The bag does not let me sleep. I hear the latch in my head. I see Ben's hands laying things out in a row. The tone of him telling me to breathe, like we were doing something ordinary. I replay the lift in my body when the silence started, a slow sinking, a soft switch. Thighs heavy. Ankles gone. Feet turned into objects that belonged to me but did not report to me. The diaper mattered in a different way under that silence. I think about that and feel sick with wanting it.

Midweek I almost text him. "You left your bag here. Did you mean to?" "Are you asking me to decide?" I type all of it and delete it. I imagine him at the hospital, thumb hovering, and then I imagine him not hovering at all. I give him a dozen motives so I can practice my answers. He forgot. He is testing me. He wants an alibi. He wants kindness without ownership. He wants me to prove I will not do it. He wants me to prove I will. Every reason feels right for five minutes and then falls apart.

Thursday there is a small leak on the Tube and I feel heat spread and then cool and I pray to go faster. I look at the advert above the door and let my face go blank like I have practice being blank. When I get home I shower again and the bench squeaks once and I jump like someone has heard something private. I sit there with water on my thighs, practicing the absence I remember. I hold my knees apart with my hands and count to twenty. I am exhausted by the work of chasing quiet.

Friday I try to hate the bag. I put it in the wardrobe and close the door and sit on the floor with my back against the wood. I listen to the hallway traffic and smell someone's toast and decide to be a person who can move on. I last twelve minutes. I take the bag out and put it back on the chair. Moving it is the only part that makes me feel like I have any control.

Saturday I take a long, slow transfer to the sofa. I make it look like the chair is doing the work and my arms are helping, not my legs. I set each foot down with my hands and enjoy a fraction of pride when they stay where I put them. The pride turns into shame because I know what real looks like now and this is mimicry. I put music on low and try to relax into the mimicry anyway. I manage half an episode of a show before I realize I have been staring at the bag the entire time.

Sunday morning I catalogue the week like a bored clerk. Times I drafted a text and did not send it. Times I touched the zipper. Times I made a choice and pretended it was reflex. The numbers are stupid and they help. I make coffee. I do the bowel routine like a person who has done it for years. I wait until the decision part is as small as I can make it. I let the release happen and pretend it arrived on its own. I change the diaper and tell myself the weight matters even when it is my choice that made it heavy. I dress slow. I roll to the window and watch a cyclist run a red light and feel furious at how freely everything moves without having to think about it.

It has been a week of bargaining with the same two truths. I want the quiet so badly I feel it in my teeth. I am afraid of how much I want it. The bag sits on the table like a question only I can answer. I lift it. I feel the contents settle. I set it down. I wash my hands. I sit in the chair and rest my palms on my thighs the way Ben did to steady me, and I breathe until the room slows. I am good at pretending. That is the problem and also the only skill I have right now. So I keep the routines clean. I keep the story tidy. I keep the bag closed. And I live with the click of it, loud in my head, every time I go past.

I don't sleep. I let the laptop chew a hole in the dark, skipping through calm voices and blue drapes, diagrams with arrows pointing at places I can't turn into my body. None of the videos are filmed in a bedroom with a leaning lamp and a cheap chest of drawers. None of them are filmed by a woman in a wheelchair with her heart in her mouth. At five, when the sky goes paper-white, I say it out loud: today.

I pull the bag onto the bed. The latch clicks, the sound lives in my stomach. I lay everything out in a row the way Ben did. Not because I know what I'm doing, because order is the only thing that keeps me from shaking. I roll to the mirror, angle my phone to use the camera as a second set of eyes, and then give up on seeing. This is about touch. I brace my forearms on the mattress and fold forward, breathing in counts until the air stops scraping my throat.

My fingers find the ladder of small bones down the centre of my back. Bump, bump, bump. I count, lose the count, start again. My skin is warm from the heater; my fingertips are cold from nerves. I trace the shallow valley between two nubs and feel a soft, certain drop I think I remember from his hands. "Here," I whisper, and my voice sounds like someone else's. I mark the spot with a tiny dot from an eyeliner pencil, then a second dot when I doubt the first, then wipe away the second because I need to believe in one place.

Antiseptic stings. The smell is hospital and school science lab and fresh snow all at once. I wait for my breath to settle. I line my chair closer, wedge the brakes harder than I need to, and curl forward again so my back opens. The room is too quiet; even the radiator has stopped its ticking.

I start. Then flinch. Everything in me pulls back at once, a reflex like a door slamming. Heat rushes my face; my palms are slick on the push rims. I want to throw the bag across the room and crawl out of my skin. I don't. I breathe. I find the dot again with the pad of my finger, slow circles until the panic drains to something I can hold. I adjust a fraction, just enough to feel like I'm listening to my own uncertainty.

Then I do it.

A pressure meets a pressure. It hurts like a bitch. The world narrows to the point on my spine and the sound of my breath. Then the first sensation changes. Warmth, small and definite, like lighting a match in a cupboard. Warmth turns into weight. Weight becomes a distant. The place where my thighs begin tilts away from me, as if someone is turning down the room from the waist down.

I stay folded, still counting, because counting is the only rope I trust. Four in. Four out. I wait for pain that doesn't come, for regret that doesn't either. I glance at the mirror and see nothing dramatic, just me in a hoodie, forehead creased, breathing, but my body knows. I press two fingers into the outside of my thigh and the feedback arrives late and dull, like sound through a wall. I try to wiggle my toes out of habit and nothing answers, the relief is so clean it almost hurts.

I stay there and listen for disaster. The kettle clicks itself off in the kitchen. I keep one palm on each thigh the way he did, just to check, and what comes back is soft and far away, the memory of pressure more than pressure itself. A laugh slips out of me. Then I say I'm sorry to no one in particular, because there's a part of me that wants forgiveness for wanting this.

I leave just after seven and the street looks washed out. Quiet legs. Loud head. The chair feels heavier than usual, or maybe I am. I make a mental note to remember to pump my tyres tonight anyway.

The lift at the station is already crowded. A man with a bicycle squeezes in and apologises to no one. I watch my reflection in the scratched metal, cheeks too bright, a shine along my hairline that makes me look like I have been running. I have not slept. I keep seeing my hand on the dot on my back. I keep hearing the click.

On the platform the heat climbs my face even though it is not hot down here. When the train arrives, I line up, front casters first and a small push. My palms slip slightly and I blame the sanitiser. Inside, someone offers a seat and then realises what they are doing and smiles at the floor. I park by the doors and stare at the map so I do not have to stare at my body. The carriage shudders and my stomach lurches. A fizz starts in my ears, low, like a radio not tuned properly. I try to breathe it away. Four in. Four out. The breath will not go deep.

Halfway to my stop my fingertips go numb and tingly at the same time. Sweat gathers behind my ears and at the base of my neck. I cannot feel my legs, which is the point, but right now the quiet doesn't help. I tell myself it is just the Tube, stale air and nerves. The fizz gets louder. The tunnel lights smear past like someone dragging a finger through paint. I watch a woman read a recipe on her phone and decide that if I can keep reading the words on her screen with my eyes, I will not faint. I lose a line. I try again.

At my station the lift is slow. The floor tilts while I wait and then rights itself. On the street the light is a punch. I roll the two blocks to the office and every push feels like I am moving through oil. The glass doors whoosh, cool air hits my face, and it does not help.

"Morning," the receptionist says, and then, "You okay?"

"Fine," I say. My voice sounds thin.

By the time I reach my desk there is sweat running in a line down my temple. Liv clocks it before I can wipe it. "Jess, you look ill."

"I'm fine. Just the Tube." The smile I make is the kind I practice for strangers, brief and not open to follow-up.

She steps closer anyway. "You're burning up."

I laugh because that is what I do when I am afraid. "I'm okay. Really."

"Do you want water?"

I shake my head and the room moves half a second later. My screen is bright and full of numbers and none of them will stay still. I try to log in and my fingers miss the keys. The fizz in my ears turns into a narrow hiss. A tunnel starts at the edges of my vision, grey first, then black creeping in like damp. I think, not here. I think, do not make this public. I think, breathe.

"Jess," Steph says from somewhere to my left. "You look white."

"I'm fine," I say, and the words come out wrong.

Her hand touches my forehead and the contact makes the world flip. "You are so hot," she says, and the sentence echoes like she is speaking into a cave.

The hiss sharpens. The numbers on my screen jump. My hands slide off the push rims. Someone says my name again, far away, like through water. I try to say I am okay one more time, a reflex I cannot kill, and the last thing I notice is how heavy my head feels on my neck. Then the room tips sideways and goes out.