All of the other professors have turned in their plans for next year’s courses. McTavish emailed me and said he hasn’t decided whether I can come back next year. He also said he’d heard all about my exam stunt and that it’s not doing me any favours. I told him that if he doesn’t let me come back I’ll drag him and the department before a human rights tribunal. It’s one thing to put me on administrative leave based on my behaviour; it’s another to keep me away because of my condition.
Rereading the article now. My colleague from the States is begging for it after I told him I’m nearly done. More than any other piece I’ve written, this article will cement my reputation as a pioneer in disability studies. My colleagues will no doubt attack me for my arrogance and lack of critical engagement, but there is no critical theory in disability studies that supports what I have to say, and to borrow from other theoretical systems—colonial thought, sociology, Michel fucking Foucault—would undermine the purity of Dexterity. So screw my colleagues.
I don’t know if anything’s changed between Maggie and me. The hot air’s cleared away; we no longer see each other through an angry simmer. We continue to tolerate one another. Sit civilly at the dinner table. Make small conversation. Help Randal with his homework. If anything has changed, it’s that we’re more aware of each other, of our limits, where we stand. Maybe that’s enough.
Randal wants to go to Europe in July. He badly wants me to go with him. I told him I’d think about it. I have a conference in California to attend in the middle of the month.
My breathing’s becoming more stunted. My lungs clack and crinkle. My airway whirrs. My voice, already hampered by my slackening mouth, is an old toad’s. The lecture last week sapped me. I preserve my breath for the evening, when Maggie and Randal are home. An easy-enough task. I do nothing during the day. I talk to no one except myself.
I’m not worried about teaching in the future. Teaching will give me the energy to sustain my voice. It’ll be something to look forward to.
Just in case though, I might look into treatment. Just for my lungs. Nothing else.
This late at night, around 1 am:
Just finished masturbating. Watched one of the Freaky videos. Kept replaying this one part from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Breast when the female mental patient shoves the male attendant against the wall of the padded room and locks him into her. Her need got me going. Her vulnerability. For some reason, vulnerability arouses me enormously.
But there was something else. As I squeezed myself, with my tremors again adding surprise to the proceedings, I felt myself slow down. My semen lurched out rather than shot, delaying my orgasm. It refused to meet the urgency of the moment. As though my body’s entire rhythm has slowed to conform to my condition. I wiped myself off and stopped the video and stared at the blank screen. I thought I controlled that part—not the progress of the condition, but my body’s rhythm. I thought I had more control over how urgently I move and react. I don’t want to have just one speed. I want many. I want my body to conform to my emotions and thoughts instead of the other way around.