‘Like one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the way?’
‘She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck — identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move, like one of the many moose of Switzerland transfixed by the headlights of one of the many logging-trucks of Switzerland. The sunlight is reflecting madly on her metal hat as she is shaking her head in terror and she is clutching her — pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of her would explode from the terror.’
‘And you think, Oh fuck me, just great, another horrible thing I’m going to have stand here and witness and then go feel pain over.’
‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Auto-route into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’
‘Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.’
‘We rolled and tumbled down the embanking on the Autoroute’s distant side, causing my chair to tip and injuring a stump of me, and knocking away her thick metal hat.’
‘You saved somebody’s freaking life, Ramy. I’d give my left nut for a chance to pull myself out of the shadow of the wing that way, Ramy.’
‘You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau.’
‘Because suddenly you gazed at the girl without her metal hat and felt a rush of passion and fell madly in love enough to get married and roll together off into the s—’
‘She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’
‘But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and humility and acceptance and that kind of quiet dignity really horribly handic— birth-defected people usually have.’
‘It was not mad. I had already chosen. The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute — this was the love. I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self.’
‘And she looked at your missing limbs and didn’t even see them and chose you right back — result: passionate love.’
‘There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing. Without the containing helmet all energies in her were committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves. The special hat had found itself dented in upon one side, and I had not the ability to shape my wife’s head into a shape that I could stuff the sac of her head into the hat, and I chose to carry her over my shoulders in a high-speed rolling to the nearest Swiss hôpital specializing in deformities of grave nature. It was there I learned of the other troubles.’
‘I think I’d like a couple more Kahlua and milks.’
‘There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma. She had wandered away from a public institution of Swiss charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.’
‘And but your passionate love for each other dried up her cerebro-spinal drool and ended the seizures and there were certain hats she looked so good in it just about drove you mad with love? Is that it?’
‘Garçon!’
‘Is the madly-in-love part coming up?’
‘Katherine, I had too believed there was no love without passion. Pleasure. This was part of the pain of the no legs, this fear that for me there would be no passion. The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain, n’est ce —?’
‘Ramy I don’t think I’m like thinking this is a feel-better story at all.’
‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’
‘You’re saying this is love? This isn’t love. I’ll know when it’s love because of the way it’ll feel. It won’t be about spinal fluid and despair believe you me, Bucko. It’ll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that second forward you know you’re not going to be alone and in hell. You’re not half the guy I started to think you might have been, Ray.’
‘I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.’
‘This is love? It’s like you were chained to her. It’s like if you tried to get on with your own life the pain of the clinical depression came back. It’s like the clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle. Was there a wedding aisle? Could she even get down a wedding aisle?’
‘My wife’s wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It was the happiest day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I choose this woman. There was a long time of silence. My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, Katharine, my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife.’