his forearms looking like paired pieces of driftwood. His elbows flare out in swollen knots. It takes all his strength to lever himself into a seated position. His shoulders shake, and he squeezes past that moment when he always threatens to flop back onto the bed. He rocks for a while, to tilt his torso forward enough to fling both arms behind him and buttress himself upright. Step one. Of fifty-two or so, depending on how you count.
His sweatpants are down around his knees in the ready position, where he keeps them when the cath is in. He leans as far as he can, bends almost double, so that the weight of his head and shoulders stays put long enough for him to plant his hands forward near his butt. His right arm slips under his left thigh. There’s precious little meat left there as well—none, really—but it testifies to the baggage of his legs that they’re still anchor enough to brace against and keep his shriveled torso upright.
He grapples at the sweats and falls back onto his left elbow. Up swings the limp drawbridge of the leg. His butt lifts enough for him to fumble the seat of the pants over himself. Success is a while in coming. The leg drops, he falls back on his protruding shoulder blades, and he’s prostrate all over again. Craning himself up once more with the bar-hung stirrup, he repeats the process on his right until the sweats are drawn tight squarely over his waist. Smoothing out the leggings on both sides takes time, but time, in the middle of the night, is an ample resource. Then a grab of the overhead bar, and, stabilized again, reaching out to one of the many hanging hooks filled with gear, he snags the U-shaped canvas sling and, in a hundred small increments, spreads it out on the bed around his body’s upright stem. Each leg gets wrapped underneath in a strap pulled up through the middle.
He stabs out again and spears the head of the winch, drags it across its own horizontal brace beam until it’s positioned directly above. All four sling loops go over the winch’s latches, two per side. He pops the remote in his mouth and, holding the straps in place, bites down on the power button until the winch lifts him upright. He affixes the remote to the sling and detaches the catheter’s urine sack from the side of the bed. Holding the hose in his teeth to free both hands, he attaches the bag to the satchel he has wrapped himself in. Then he presses the winch button again, holds on, and goes airborne.
There’s always that moment, as he scooches sideways through the air from bed to waiting chair, when the whole precarious system wavers. He has shifted wrong before and come down hard, smacking metal struts and crashing to the floor in pain and urine. Tonight’s ride, though, is error-free. The seat of the wheelchair must be adjusted, the wheels repositioned, but he sticks the landing. There, in the chair, he reverses all the steps, detaches the winch, hangs the bag, and like Houdini, slips free of the sling underneath him without ever lifting. Donning the cassock is easy. The shoes, though slip-on and big as a clown’s, are less so. But he’s mobile now, zipping about by joystick and throttle as easily as doing Immelmanns in a flight simulator. The whole ordeal has taken only a little over thirty minutes.
Another ten, and he’s out by the van, waiting for the hydraulic floor of the lift to lower to the ground. He rolls his chair onto the steel square and rides it up. He rolls through the open hull into the emptied-out cabin. The lift retracts, the doors slide shut, and he positions his chair in front of a console where pedal and brake are levers at waist level that even wasted arms can operate.
Several dozen more commands in this algorithm of liberty, and he parks the van, exits, and rolls into the Stanford inner quad. He spins 360, surveying, surrounded again by those otherworldly life-forms the way he was six years earlier. All those creatures from another galaxy, far, far away: dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor, flame, empress, kurrajong, red mulberry. He remembers how they whispered to him about a game he was destined to make—a game played by countless people worldwide, a game that puts the players smack in the middle of a living, breathing jungle