blank TV screen. We were lacking the kind of direction my mother would have provided if she were alive. She would have been sobbing or interrogating a nurse or tugging me by the sleeve to the hospital chapel. My mother had been the only religious one in the family. She died when I was ten, and I was pretty sure that no one had been praying for us since.
•
Every day for three weeks, a baby-faced doctor came into Amit’s hospital room and tested his limbs with an instrument that appeared to be half of a long Q-tip. The doctor had Amit close his eyes. “Hard or soft?” the doctor would say, after pressing the cottony end of the Q-tip into Amit’s thigh. With every press, Amit shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know. Nothing.” When it was over, he’d stare at his thigh, as if willing it to tell him something.
While Amit spent those weeks in the rehab center, my dad and I prepared the house for his return. My dad shuffled his patients around and sought coverage from colleagues so he could take the next month off from work. He and I carried the living room couch to the basement and set up a twin bed in its place. He hired Diego, a longtime patient, to install grab bars in the bathroom down the hall. Beyond the price of materials and a midday beer, Diego shook his head at payment.
Once Amit came home, my dad hardly left his side. He assisted Amit in shifting between the bed and the wheelchair, using a board that Amit could scoot himself across, setting aside each loose limb as he went. He also helped Amit get situated in the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what went on in there exactly, but I had an idea from the accessories along the sink: a box of latex gloves, a dented tube of lubricant. I tried not to think about it.
I’d read somewhere that pets lower blood pressure, so I went to my brother’s apartment and brought back the ten-gallon tank he’d had for years, filled with fake ferns and a presiding toad named Moses. I installed the tank along one wall of the living room. Twice a week, I dangled a doomed earthworm in front of Moses’s mouth, sometimes tapping his lips as if knocking at a door, before he awoke and clamped down on the head with a savagery that made me jump back.
For the most part, Amit lay in bed or sat in his rocking recliner, as motionless as Moses. He kept the TV on, the shades drawn, suffusing the room in dim blue. Sometimes his leg bounced in place, like it had a mind of its own. On his second day, a back spasm slammed him hard enough to topple his rocker; he went so stiff with pain it hurt him to weep, even to breathe. My dad increased his Baclofen dosage, and we replaced the rocker with a heavy leather armchair.
Once, while I was trying to feed Moses, I dropped the worm on his head. It lay there like a coiled little turban, just above Moses’s catatonic gaze. I looked at Amit, who had cracked a smile, the first I’d seen on his face in a long time, and for a moment, my heart rose and I forgot all about Moses. “Well?” Amit said. “Go in and get it, dumbass.”
“Moses is the dumbass.” I lowered my hand into the tank. “Who even has a tank anymore?”
“Do it, Moses. Eat his whole hand off.”
While my brother heckled, I airlifted the worm and swung it into Moses’s mouth. The ordeal was disgusting and entirely worth it, just to be ourselves again, for a little while.
There was one night when Amit fell asleep earlier than usual, at 9:00, and I went upstairs, determined to work. Or check my e-mail. Nothing special, aside from a number of lefty groups urging me to sign their petitions. I spent five minutes studying the plight of honeybees. I spent another five minutes perfecting a message to Stefan Baziak, the director of the Prague program, saying I would have to put my confirmation on hold due to a family emergency.
I scrolled through my novel and weeded out a few errant semicolons. I stuffed plugs in my ears and listened to the magnified rush of my own breathing. I fell asleep on my arm, woke up at 11:11. I made a useless wish. I went to bed.
•
In those days, Amit