Spasms II

You would think that the author of the celebrated article "IPC: Hard Facts about Software," would stride into work. His stride might be neurologically undersupplied. It could be technically downgraded to a limp. But a stride is still a stride. When you've got one, that's how you take things: in stride.

There was some celebrating when my article appeared in the autumn, 1995, issue of Industrial Process Control Quarterly, under the CEO's byline. But time moves swiftly in Silicon Valley. By 1996 no one was celebrating. I was missing deadlines, missing meetings, missing the point. Dottie probably assumed, as did the other women around the office, that I was still missing the wife. But I wasn't. A year had gone by. My divorce was no longer souring the way the lights fluoresced, the partitions partitioned and the cursors blinked. The way the boss bossed, that was a different matter.

Dottie had hired me. She ran Technical Marketing, once consisting of nine cubicles but since the layoffs, amounting to five. When Dottie leaned against my partition edge and began talking, her words dug at me like fingernails, brittle and insistent. On a particular morning she was fresh from a meeting with Sales, had picked up the latest marketing drivel and was sharing, as we say in California. Listening to her, my jaw advanced and locked.

Dottie folded her arms, glanced down at the carpet and said she was wondering about the Partners in Productivity brochure. I briefly wondered about Dottie's neck and how it would be to nuzzle. We both stared at the carpet as though the missing brochure copy might appear there. Now I was wondering about something else. Like how I had spent my childhood with a woman towering over me, and why the same thing was happening in my adulthood.

Only a few years before I was still walking everywhere with a crutch. I limped my way upstairs, downstairs, on and off subway trains. And when I needed to stand, I stood. I stood up. I stood my ground. I stood for something. But since my mid-40s, I had stood for very little. My balance had mysteriously disappeared, and walking had all but stopped. Now I was in a wheelchair, pushing 51, and not even pushing the wheelchair. It was battery-powered. Oh, I still had the crutch. It stood proud, like a soldier's old rifle, in the corner of my cubicle. I used it once a day to hobble to the men's room, under orders from my physical therapist. After crutching back to the cubicle, I dropped, a little too relieved, into the power wheelchair.

Dottie was leaning over me now and leaning on me. Where was the brochure copy? I stared up at her, lies and deadline-missing excuses forming in my head. I didn't know where the copy was. Except that it was in my head, some part of my head that was shut down tighter and darker than a coal miners' strike. I didn't have to justify myself. I wasn't going to stand for it. I was going to sit for it.

The rest of the world experienced such moments on their feet, toe to toe, mano a mano. But things between Dottie and me were all skewed. Her breasts were above me, and I wanted them below me. I wanted height and alpha-male posture. I slid forward in my wheelchair and pushed up with the left arm. Within seconds I was standing, more or less straight, bearing my body weight on the nonparalyzed left leg. Facing Dottie at her altitude, I smiled with the secret knowledge of homo erectus. I might just deliver the Partners in Productivity brochure sometime soon.

I gave my torso a straightening and extended the lower back. Crossed neuromuscular signals erupted in all directions, goading my spastic extremities. My paralyzed right arm and leg involuntarily shot out, flexed and shook. Dottie watched. She had seen plenty of my neurology before. A second or two of limbs flexing crazily, dead fingers flailing in spastic staccato, and this would stop. But today the spasms weren't stopping. My fingers kept twitching, the arm shaking. I pressed the right hand against my thigh to calm the spasms. Dr. Strangelove trying to stop his own hand.

I wanted to say that Partners in Productivity might be ready the next day. But the grotesquerie of my hand was getting to me. It was scooping out my insides like melon balls. And my real balls? They had ascended halfway up my chest. They were hanging off my lungs, making it hard to pull in a breath through my not-too-paralyzed diaphragm.

I need that brochure now, Dottie said. She slipped away, all hurry and revulsion. I dropped down hard in the wheelchair. Turning to face the screen, my footrests knocked over the waste paper basket. I leaned over and righted it. Fear and confusion swirled about my cubicle. I knew better than to assert myself with physical capabilities I no longer had. Like punching yourself in the stomach. Dottie's disgust clung to me like a mist. A 50-year-old man who let women crush him like a five-year-old, who let a cripple's hard-won career decompose?. That man should be placed on a 24-hour suicide watch.

I hit the wheelchair joystick and rolled into the hallway. There was nothing out here. There was nowhere to go, except the men's room. Or the coffee alcove. Which, I decided, would do. When you can't get strong, get caffeinated.