It’s come undone.
This is the thought carried over from the sweet side of sleep into the half-broken dawn. This idea that things are unraveling in nonspecific but significant ways. The weather-sprung square of linoleum in his entryway implies consciousness. He has slept on his back. He feels for his legs beneath the sheets, finds and straightens them, elbows himself up into a sit.
Easy now. Careful out of the gate.
He has left the television on again and the talking heads inside of it are sounding out the previous day’s violences in appropriately sober tones. The Draft-Dodger-in-Chief has invaded Haiti. On the bedside table are a pack of Marlboro Reds and a Zippo lighter, three Louis L’Amour paperbacks, two different egg timers, and a box of suppositories. He unwraps an ass bullet and slides the slug home. Bull’s-eye. Dial four hours on one timer and twelve minutes on the other. Untangle from the quilt, scoot to the edge of the bed, swing down into the wheelchair waiting there.
A talking head says “moral imperative.”
He sleeps on a king-size mattress set flush against the partition wall dividing his living room from the little galley kitchen opposite. Wheel in and wash the hands and get the coffee brewing. A quick breakfast of buttered toast and the alarm is ringing time for morning ablutions.
On the television set an armored tank bulldozes through a building, crumpling wall siding as if it was construction paper. Someone says “police state.”
Dawn brings a whole checklist of somatic subroutines, the dirty and probing hygienics that keep him clear of the hospital bed. Twelve minutes until the suppository kicks in. Twenty-eight more and the enema has flushed his bowels. Another thirteen-or-so hosing down in the shower then he’s back in the chair, toweling dry before an array of ointments and vanity lights and Anglepoise makeup mirrors fit to flush a beauty queen green with envy.
He drapes his shanks in the towel and sips his coffee. Not quite naked before the full-length mirror like this you could almost believe he was whole. Everything above the ninth thoracic vertebrae still fit as a fiddle. He’s proud of his working parts, sticks to a strict diet and dumbbell regimen to keep the parabelly at bay. Under the towel his dead dick rests like a spent balloon between the corpse-thin limbs. He studies his skin for signs of trauma with one of several custom-built hand mirrors, the type of telescopic, articulating tool a SWAT team might use to defuse a car bomb. He begins with the feet, proceeds upward from there as the spiritual dictates, foot bone to leg bone to knee bone and so. No cavity is left unexamined.
He hears an announcer say “angry boys with guns.”
He has to become a kind of deductive gumshoe in this room. Skincare is life-or-death business. At the first hint of pressure sore Cecil smears antiseptic cream around the suspicious area. The location of the rough patch or hot spot or induration is recorded in a little notebook. If you cared to listen he could rattle off more about your pores than an internal medicine resident. A seeping wound can lead to traction, toxic shock, death. Worse. Gooseflesh on his right side might hint at a stage two fissure in his limp left foot. A sudden case of flop sweat could mean an impacted bowel below the injury. This phenomenon is called autonomic dysreflexia and it has made Cecil a skeptic regarding the possibility of free will.
When he can feel fingertips spidering up his abdomen Cecil knows he’s done. On his way into the bedroom his tires catch on a raveled seam of carpeting in the hallway. He makes a mental note to get this fixed and dresses himself with care in the wheelchair. Wiggle slowly into his diaper, blue jeans, and T-shirt. Slip the condom catheter on. Snake the leg bag into the Wranglers. Now the cowboy boots. He chooses from a dozen-and-a-half pair of shop-mades custom-tooled to suit any occasion: square-toed stockmans in honeyed caiman crocodile, snub-nosed ropers in distressed goat hide, filigreed exotics in cream-colored calfskin. On game days he wears full-quill ostrich Tony Lamas stitched with the orange-and-black frown of OSU’s mascot, good old Pistol Pete himself.
His property sits at the dead end of a dirt-top lane leading into town, a four-room rambler that Mother willed to him when she died, on three flat acres of pecan and drooping dogwood. The rooms are stacked with literature, swaybacked Britannicas and novels and VHS movies and sleeved LPs and National Geographics, a whole microhistory of Western culture compiled in the decades since the accident. His walls seem to bow beneath the weight of all these words.
Cecil refills his coffee and accelerates down the garage ramp, zooming past sawhorses and power tools and the black velvet curtain draping his workspace. Momentum brings him up the opposite ramp and out onto the wraparound porch.
Getting dressed has taken longer than he would have liked. Seems his whole body is aching for a cigarette, even the petrified parts. Doc says the lung darts are pure poison but Cecil doesn’t put much stock in the man’s opinion. When they first predicted he wouldn’t live to see twenty Cecil said if anyone was taking wagers he wanted in on the action.
He’s been swallowing twelve pills a day for forty-six years now.
He lights a Marlboro and blows a blue plume out into the yard. The sky has blushed past pink to a chalky yellow that leaks through the leaves. Cigarette smoke drifts amongst the tree trunks, scaring up peekaboo shafts of slanted morning light. His pickup truck is parked on a slab of poured concrete that doubled as a basketball court when Ben’s kids used to stay over. A rust-blackened backboard is nailed to the light pole there, but it’s been a long time since he’s tried shooting anything at that hoop.
The four-hour timer will be sounding soon, reminding him to get horizontal for two more hours of bedrest. But first he’s going to sit and smoke in this slow breeze. Listen to the pip-squeaking scissortails and rustling leaves and crackling cigarette ash and buzz-bombing horseflies and the stammering television. All of it sounding at cross-purposes or maybe the same purpose if you listen long enough. He anticipates the brief bridges of small talk the talking heads will use to introduce the next hearsay, sipping his coffee and mouthing the meaningless phrases and blowing concentric smoke-rings which melt away in the gathering day.
He hears “leave-me-alone coalition.”
A crop-duster drones slow chandelles out above the far-flung fields.
He hears “new world order.”