| OCR Text |
Show you would bring him only the smaller, everyday ones. But he seems to understand, although his mind moves only slowly to greet it: "Yes," he says. It alarms you to think you had almost forgotten. You see how your thinking-parts have begun to subside, and that you are beginning to merely respond: sometimes to the words of others, to the television, to your sons when they visit or the nurses who help you bathe, with responses that are acceptable, polite, even affectionate, but almost wholly automatic. You are not sure where you learned them; they have been there for years, but it is only now that you have ceased to think along with them. Almost forgotten! The thought strikes you as an emergency of the most urgent sort, and you survey again your hands, your arms, the gnarled protrusions of your fingers, to see if you are equal to the task. It will not be easy; you have let it slip too long, and they will all be eager to thwart you. "She must be watched," they will say, "do not leave her alone." "John," you say, urgently. "Do you remember?" "Yes," he answers, and you watch him rise from the old flowered-brocade armchair, lift himself up on his gaunt forearms, propel himself in cautious steps across the floor. He makes his way to the bureau that stands in the hallway. He opens one drawer, feels inside with his hand, then opens another drawer, feels inside, moves away, leaving both drawers open; then he turns toward you in the room, simply standing, his back partly bent and his eyes staring vacantly ahead. "There's nothing in there," you tell him. Your mind drifts back to an |
