The thing that tortured us was that we could see she was tortured. At first, we all played word games. She would watch television. She seemed especially to enjoy local commercials where the proprietor displays the product and explains why you need it. There was also a period–a respite, a plateau–when she wrote words in a notebook. Of course we encouraged her efforts, even as her printing got too big and didn’t stay within lines.
She could still receive visitors and converse with a brittle scaffolding of prepared comments. “Here’s ice water,” she would say; “Would you like a glass? Would you like water in the glass? Would you like an ice cube in the glass?”
Gradually, her prepared speeches and rituals fell away and smashed, crushed into a kind of powder that seemed to irritate like grit in her shoes. One day she said something was missing, and we didn’t know if it was the shoe or the foot. She made a whooshing sound as if she were in a wind tunnel of departing things. Not that she had the words for tunnel or wind or grit or bird. We thought she was the thing receding, whimpering like a pet when the family drives away.
We imagined things around her must appear to be shrouded in sheets. Shapes like knees and sounds like irregular chunks rolling past. Random flashes of light and figures soldiering into the future without faces.
Sometimes we can calm her by stroking. Touch seems to sink through her skull and smooth her, soothe her. We say: the sooner the smoother the better. There will come a time, we repeat reassuringly to each other, when agitation will fade, anxiety dissolve. Disorder go as well as order and the yearning for order. Infinite smoothness then.
With weary anticipation we look forward to the surcease.
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