The branch, the room, the woman

4

........................The visit

The morning of the fourth day was just like all the other mornings except for the excitement that subverted his insides. It had been very hard, over the intervening time, to keep his eyes away from the wall where, presumably, the branch's shadow appeared and strengthened, stretched and faded as daylight came and went behind the tree outside. He had fixed his eyes on other things, either the right wall or the ceiling above; the leopard crack; the window handle; the bricks. The woman's visits were better than usual because they provided distraction for his eyes. He could follow her around while she stayed on the right-hand side of the room. This was the first time he noticed that she almost never worked on his left side, except to straighten sheets there. Always, when she fed or bathed him or gave him medicine, she worked to his right. Over the three days in which he avoided the far left corner this meant he could follow her movements naturally, knowing that his eyes would not by accident fall upon the shadow of the branch where it tended strongly or weakly toward that angle where the walls met. The thought of seeing the branch by accident was difficult to bear. He could feel his eyes trying to slide there and when he pulled them back to safer regions the muscles of his retinas jerked. When deliberately he blurred their focus, the tendons around his eyeballs cracked with the strain. If he tried to change his thoughts to something else the thought of looking-left seemed to grow inside his brain until it was too big for his skull. The pressure felt like it would crack that cave of bone so the thought could get out and do what it wanted to do, which was fly like a hummingbird straight to the corner. He pulled his eyes up, filling his head with randomness. If he spotted that branch by accident it would destroy the estimate of distance his eye was set to attempt. No longer would he be able to refer to the last eye-memory of that distance between the wall corner and the branch's tip. The memory would become confused, its precision tainted with the fresher recall of where the branch stood when he accidentally saw it. He developed a headache. He shut his eyes to keep the anxiety under control. He couldn't look at the flowers. They were too close to the left side of the room. If he looked at them he might easily see, in his peripheral vision, the faint line of branch drawn by light against the crackled paint. He missed those flowers. He couldn't remember anymore if they were the light airy kind she brought when the days got short, or the slick, muscled variety of other seasons. This was something else the branch could tell him -- what the flowers were. He realized now he was not so certain that the shadow had been to the left of the corner before he noticed it. The proximity to the crease was what had captured his attention. While it had seemed to him, at first, that the shadow must have just crossed the angle, heading right -- lengthening -- he now understood that it was equally likely to have been moving left, shrinking, to the point where he noticed that it finished almost exactly where the wall did. The permutations of this were complex. It occurred to him also that this experiment was predicated on the woman. It depended on her showing up for the last visit on this day at exactly the same time as she had showed up for the last visit four days ago. He was sure, although nothing in this room could either prove or deny his certainty, that all rhythms ascribed to space were based on an exact measurement of time, and that the opposite was true as well. Anyway, the precision was the point. If she was off by only a beat in the rhythm of her day, his efforts would be useless. If her rhythms were out of balance, then his reason for being here was gone. He knew this made no real sense because he had not needed a reason for being here before four days ago when he thought of measuring the branch's shadow. He had decided to measure it, however, and there was no turning back now. So he watched the woman calmly as she performed her duties during the first two visits of the fourth day. When she was gone he shut his eyes so he couldn't see anything at all. For some reason he knew in the center of his being that the woman opened the door for the last visit at exactly the same minute in the same hour of every day. His faith in this supposition was as boundless as his evidence for it was nonexistent. The thought of such precision gave him comfort because the anticipation was hard. Just as it would be hard, when the time came, to gauge in the first flash of vision exactly what he was seeing, and retrieve at the same time from his aching brain an exact perception of what he'd seen before. He would do it, though. He believed he would do it right. In this he could not fail himself; in this he would meet his own expectations as, at last, he had met the woman's. It was not his fault, nor was it hers, that this constancy he had achieved was built on an absolute, and the absolute was his inability to do anything at all differently. He would not fail his expectations because he could not be otherwise than true. There was no shame or defeat in this situation. It was a situation only, as the shadow pinned by light against the wall was a situation, as his position now was a situation, lying on his back, listening for the woman. Waiting for the squeak of the door handle, the jangle of the enameled food trays against the stainless shelves of the trolley; the last visit, when he would open his eyes, and look at the length of shadow where the branch had crossed the room's far left-hand corner; and know, beyond a doubt, that the shadow truly had moved by a quarter or half a finger, and the days were moving slowly toward a different season.

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Table of Contents

Tension

January 1997

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