Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

A few days after the surgery, Dr. Tehrani showed us a series of X-rays. The rods that had been planted in Amit’s back looked like railroad tracks, blazing white against the ghostly outlines of his bones. “It’s too early to know what functions you’ll regain,” Dr. Tehrani said. “We’ll have to keep up with the physical therapy, take it one day at a time.” In the silence after his statement, I remembered how I knew Dr. Tehrani — from my parents’ dinner parties, his pouchy eyes perpetually apologetic, even when asking me, a little boy, where he should discard his paper plate.

I half-expected my dad to argue with him, as if the fact that they were both doctors could lead them to bargain down the verdict. But no one spoke. Dr. Tehrani left. My brother, my dad, and I stayed very still.

“Neel, hand me my phone,” Amit said. Before long, he was deep into a game of poker. My dad stared at the 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 had one standing order: if anyone was to call or visit, he was napping. His friends took the hint and stayed away. His coworkers at Blue Grass Realty sent a potted bamboo, the stalks deformed into the shape of a heart. Only Ivy, his girlfriend, continued to call. I’d almost forgotten the stuffed-up sound of her voice, the nasal quality that made a stuttering idiot out of me. “Seems like his narcolepsy kicks in every time I call,” she said.

I laughed a little too loudly. I told her he’d call her back.

“I can’t believe you’re still doing that,” Amit said, after I hung up. “Christ.”

“Doing what?”

“Your voice, when you know it’s her. Your James Earl Jones impression.” He lodged a cheese puff, like a tumor, in his cheek. “You sound like a serial killer.”

Amit and Ivy had been dating since high school. At first, my dad didn’t approve because her parents were Chinese, and he’d long held the notion that all Chinese people were calculating and aggressive, as evidenced by some decades-old invasion of India that continued to work him up. As the years went by and Ivy stuck around, she and my dad moved toward a cool détente, though it still pained him to report when an Indian person we knew had married outside the tribe. His tone would be like that of a newscaster reporting casualties — another woman lost, another man down.

I’d been sweet on Ivy since the day she asked Amit to the senior prom; that she’d done the asking suggested an alluring form of Chinese aggression. She even picked him up in her dirty white Saab, wearing a pink satin pouf that made no secret of her cleavage. “I got it at a thrift store,” she said to me, doing a twirl. “Isn’t it hideous?” Before I could answer, Amit thundered down the stairs in his tux, and her face tilted up, filling with light.

I watched them speed off, thinking, Him? Really? I attributed her mistake to the fact that she was a transplant from San Francisco and didn’t know any better. Here was a girl who could surf as well as her brothers, who sang at the talent show a sultry cover of “Oh! Darling” while strumming her own acoustic guitar. Not that I deserved her either. Ivy seemed to be on another plane of special altogether, destined for a life of big cities and backstage passes. Amit, I assumed, was a youthful detour.

A week passed, and things began to improve after I ordered a copy of Planes, Trains & Automobiles , a movie that Amit and I had watched so many times as kids that we knew whole scenes by heart. I usually played Steve Martin, the hapless traveler forced to cross the country with John Candy, a boisterous shower-ring salesman. Watching it again, so many years later, brought a strange sense of relief. Most of the time, I was laughing because Amit was laughing.

After the first screening was over, I wheeled Amit to the bathroom and left him in there. He visited the bathroom only two or three times a day, usually for an hour each time. It took that long for his bladder and bowels to function. I kept his bathroom stocked with issues of Rolling Stone and Time , books of crossword puzzles and Sudoku.