Charlotte hates being stoned, but she says it quiets the inside of her. “A strong breeze, hissy and buffeting, like a microphone in the wind.” I ask, “Windy like a whistle through window screens, or windy like the rattle of storm shutters?” Windy is better than hail or lightning or, God forbid, flooding, which is the sensation she felt when her lungs were just starting to work again. I light it for her and hold it to her lips. In the silver dish by her voice remote is a half-smoked joint. Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light. I rise and go to her, but she’s not listening to Nirvana yet-she tends to save it for when she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle. And then there’s the way she stares at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer Lift, which swings her in and out of bed.īut my wife doesn’t need an exotic exit strategy, not when she’s exacted a promise from me to help her do it when the time comes. As the bed powered up, she’d be choked in seconds. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, “incline” is all she’d have to say. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down.
My sleep problem is this: when I close my eyes, I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one. I know the whispering sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the president, because we often talk in whispers. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help.
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