When Things Weren't Looking Good For The Last Time

It hadn’t been good for quite some time, but it was time for them to admit to themselves and to each other that now it really wasn’t good, and wasn’t going to get any better. Neither of them liked the doctor, a young Indian. He was a man who’d built too much science around himself, and he seemed to look upon them as if they were images on a satellite map. Almost a year they’d known him, and they’d never seen him smile.

What kind of a life did he have, for heaven’s sake, a man like that? Richard would sprawl there in the dark some nights trying to imagine what it was the doctor went home to each night. He tried with no success to imagine him in swim trunks, swimming laps at the YMCA, singing in the shower, or laughing with friends over dinner, but it was not possible.

How ridiculous to put your fate in the hands of someone so thoroughly, so reprehensibly competent.

They’d made a mess of Richard, and they weren’t going to fix him now.

“I’m afraid we are done with you now, more or less,” the doctor had said that afternoon. An unfortunate choice of words, Jan had complained later, but Richard was by now used to the man’s often infuriating English, which somehow managed to be both clumsy and precise at the same time.

Richard was trying to feel terrible in other ways than the ways in which he was recently accustomed to feeling terrible, but he didn’t have much room left for that sort of thing. He’d gone under pretty much for good several months earlier, but he’d had a brief rally that had given them a glimmer of something that was not quite hope. He was trying now to recognize the full and terrifying pity he felt for his wife, trying finally to imagine what her life might one day be.

He pulled himself up from the edge of the bed and eased himself a few feet to a chair by the windowsill. Jan had left him in the dark a few moments earlier, alone with all his machinery. She’d looked so tired, so resigned. That was the most discouraging part of the whole deal, her obvious resignation, which had been apparent now for the last couple weeks. Richard realized that he could no more imagine the life she was going home to right this moment than he could imagine his doctor as anything but the grim and impassive character who’d earlier that day washed his hands of him.

Richard saw his wife there on the street below him, hunched in the oddly granular twilight, waiting at a traffic signal, her arms full of things –his things– she was taking back to a home he would likely never again see. He watched her as she finally crossed the empty street, moving so slowly. She’d stood there at the red light for at least a minute, despite the fact that there had been no traffic that would have precluded her crossing at any time. That was so like her, Richard thought, so careful, so damned law abiding. He sat there at the window and watched his wife until she was folded into the darkness of a side street and disappeared entirely from view.