f I could take another one without Clare noticing. The bottle is probably
up there in the medicine cabinet. Kimy comes back carrying one of the kitchen
chairs. She plops it down next to me. I remove the dressing from the other leg.
"She did a nice job," Kimy says.
"Dr. Murray? Yeah, it's a big improvement, much more aerodynamic."
Kimy laughs. I send her to the kitchen for phone books. When she puts them
next to the chair I raise myself so I'm sitting on them. Then I scramble onto the
chair, and sort of fall/roll into the bathtub. A huge wave of water sloshes out of
the tub onto the tile. I'm in the bathtub. Hallelujah. Kimy turns off the water, and
dries her legs with a towel. I submerge.
Later:
Clare: After hours of cooking I strain the kozo and it, too, goes into the beater.
The longer it stays in the beater, the finer and more bone-like it will be. After four
hours, I add retention aid, clay, pigment. The beige pulp suddenly turns a deep
dark earth red. I drain it into buckets and pour it into the waiting vat. When I
walk back to the house Kimy is in the kitchen making the kind of tuna fish
casserole that has potato chips crumbled over it.
"How'd it go?" I ask her.
"Real good. He's in the living room." There is a trail of water between the
bathroom and the living room in Kimy-sized footprints. Henry is sleeping on the
sofa with a book spread open on his chest. Borges"
Ficciones. He is shaved and I lean over him and breathe; he smells fresh, his
damp gray hair sticking up all ways. Alba is chattering to Teddy in her room. For
a moment I feel as though I've time traveled, as though this is some stray moment
from before, but then I let my eyes travel down Henry's body to the flatnesses at
the end of the blanket, and I know that I am only here and now.
The next morning it's raining. I open the door of the studio and the wire wings
await me, floating in the morning gray light. I turn on the radio; it's Chopin,
rolling etudes like waves over sand. I don rubber boots, a bandanna to keep my
hair out of the pulp, a rubber apron. I hose down my favorite teak and brass
mold and deckle, uncover the vat, set up a felt to couch the paper onto. I reach
down into the vat and agitate the slurry of dark red to mix the fiber and water.
Everything drips. I plunge the mold and deckle into the vat, and carefully bring
it up, level, streaming water. I set it on the corner of the vat and the water drains
from it and leaves a layer of fiber on the surface; I remove the deckle and press
the mold onto the felt, rocking it gently and as I remove it the paper remains on
the felt, delicate and shiny. I cover it with another felt, wet it, and again: I plunge
the mold and deckle down, bring it up, drain it, couch it. I lose myself in the
repetition, the piano music floating over the water sloshing and dripping and
raining. When I have a post of paper and felt, I press it in the hydraulic paper
press. Then I go back to the house and eat a ham sandwich. Henry is reading.
Alba is at school.
After lunch, I stand in front of the wings with my post of freshly made paper. I
am going to cover the armature with a paper membrane. The paper is damp and
dark and wants to tear but it drapes over the wire forms like skin. I twist the
paper into sinews, into cords that twist and connect. The wings are bat wings
now, the tracing of the wire is evident below the gaunt paper surface. I dry the
paper I haven't used yet, heating it on sheets of steel. Then I begin to tear it into
strips, into feathers. When the wings are dry I will sew these on, one by one. I
begin to paint the strips, black and gray and red. Plumage, for the terrible angel,
the deadly bird.
A week later, in the evening:
Henry: Clare has cajoled me into getting dressed and has enlisted Gomez to carry
me out the back door, across the yard, and into her studio. The studio is lit with
candles; there are probably a hundred of them, more, on tables and on the floor,
and on the windowsills. Gomez sets me down on the studio couch, and retreats
to the house. In the middle of the studio a white sheet is suspended from the
ceiling, and I turn around to see if there's a projector, but there isn't. Clare is
wearing a dark dress, and as she moves around the room her face and hands float
white and disembodied.
"Want some coffee?" she asks me. I haven't had any since before the hospital.
"Sure," I reply. She pours two cups, adds cream, and brings me one. The hot cup
feels familiar and good in my hand. "I made you something," Clare says.
"Feet? I could use some feet."
"Wings," she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor.
The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They
are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of
freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two
feet, of running, running like flying. The dreams of hovering, of flying as though
gravity has been rescinded and now is allowing me to be removed from the earth
a safe distance, these dreams come back to me in the twilit studio. Clare sits
down next to me. I feel her looking at me. The wings are silent, their edges
ragged. I cannot speak. Siehe, ich lebe. Woraus? Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft! werden
weniger... Uberzahliges Dasein! entspringt reir Herzen. (Look, I am living. On what?
Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller.. .Superabundant being/ wells up in my
heart.)
"Kiss me," Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the
dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.

FEET DREAMS
October/November, 2006 (Henry is 43)
Henry: I dream that I am at the Newberry, giving a Show and Tell to some
graduate students from Columbia College. I'm showing them incunabula, early
printed books. I show them the Gutenberg Fragment, Caxton's Game and Play of
Chess, the Jensen Eusebius. It's going well, they are asking good questions. I
rummage around on the cart, looking for this special book I just found in the
stacks, something I never knew we had. It's in a heavy red box. There's no title,
just the call number, CASE WING f ZX 983.D 453, stamped in gold under the
Newberry insignia. I place the box on the table and set out the pads. I open the
box, and there, pink and perfect, are my feet. They are surprisingly heavy. As I
set them on the pads the toes all wiggle, to say Hi, to show me they can still do it.
I begin to speak about them, explaining the relevance of my feet to fifteenth
century Venetian printing. The students are taking notes. One of them, a pretty
blonde in a shiny sequined tank top, points at my feet, and says, "Look, they're
all white!" And it's true, the skin has gone dead white, the feet are lifeless and
putrid. I sadly make a note to myself to send them up to Conservation first thing
tomorrow.
In my dream I am running. Everything is fine. I run along the lake, from Oak
Street Beach, heading north. I feel my heart pumping, my lungs smoothly rising
and falling. I am moving right along. What a relief, I think. I was afraid I'd never
run again, but here I am, running. It's great.
But things begin to go wrong. Parts of my body are falling off. First my left
arm goes. I stop and pick it up off the sand and brush it off and put it back on,
but it isn't very securely attached and it comes off again after only half a mile. So I
carry it in my other arm, thinking maybe when I get it back home I can attach it
more tightly. But then the other arm goes, and I have no arms at all to even pick
up the arms I've lost. So I continue running. It's not too bad; it doesn't hurt. Soon I
realize that my cock has dislodged and fallen into the right leg of my sweatpants,
where it is banging around in an annoying manner, trapped by the elastic at the
bottom. But I can't do anything about it, so I ignore it. And then I can feel that my
feet are all broken up like pavement inside my shoes, and then both of my feet
break off at the ankles and I fall face-first onto the path. I know that if I stay there I
will be trampled by other runners, so I begin to roll. I roll and roll until I roll into
the lake, and the waves roll me under, and I wake up gasping.
I dream that I am in a ballet. I am the star ballerina, I am in my dressing room
being swathed in pink tulle by Barbara, who was my mom's dresser. Barbara is a
tough cookie, so even though my feet hurt like hell I don't complain as she
tenderly encases the stumps in long pink satin toe shoes. When she finishes I
stagger up from my chair and cry out. "Don't be a sissy," says Barbara, but then
she relents and gives me a shot of morphine. Uncle Ish appears at the door of the
dressing room and we hurry down endless backstage hallways. I know that my
feet hurt even though I cannot see them or feel them. We rush on, and suddenly I
am in the wings and looking onto the stage I realize that the ballet is The
Nutcracker, and I am the Sugar Plum Fairy. For some reason this really bugs me.
This isn't what I was expecting. But someone gives me a little shove, and I totter
on stage. And I dance. I am blinded by the lights, I dance without thinking,
without knowing the steps, in an ecstasy of pain. Finally I fall to my knees,
sobbing, and the audience rises to their feet, and applauds.
Friday, November 3, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)
Clare: Henry holds up an onion and looks at me gravely and says, " This...is an
onion."
I nod. "Yes. I've read about them."
He raises one eyebrow. "Very good. Now, to peel an onion, you take a sharp
knife, lay the aforementioned onion sideways on a cutting board, and remove
each end, like so. Then you can peel the onion, like so. Okay. Now, slice it into
cross-sections. If you're making onion rings, you just pull apart each slice, but if
you're making soup or spaghetti sauce or something you dice it, like this.."
Henry h