War Museum

In an old Monty Python skit, a Superman-like figure arrives in cape and tights proclaiming that he is 'Bicycle Repair Man.' Even in its day, the joke was only a mild one. Now, there is no joke at all. That's because 'Wheelchair Repair Man' arrived in his white van from Cam, Gloucestershire, with even more irony and, above all, much more impact. This man took a look at my airline-bludgeoned wheelchair, did not so much as bat an eye, plugged a laptop computer into the control and decided that someone had been bashing the brakes. Actually, the brake cable had been briefly disconnected, tripping an emergency shut off. That's all there was to it. There is progress in our world. I may think of my wheelchair as an enhanced forklift, all brawn and batteries, but that is because I'm old. It's digital, like everything else. And now it's running.

I went running up to the Todenham pub with my cousins for dinner. Somehow, I even squeezed the wheelchair into the table by the bar. And the next day, when the 12:13 rolled into the nearby rail station, I was aboard. London. A familiar cab ride, clinging to the yellow safety bar for dear life, and then I was there, in a new, anonymous, antiseptic hotel in Westminster near the Thames Embankment, overlooking the Tate Gallery. The view was indescribably pretty. What followed wasn't.

Everything was difficult. The room was small. I was old. My temper was short. Time was short. I needed to get set up in my room and out the door to my date with a friend at the English National Opera. A tough life. And yet it was tough, for my wheelchair-adapted room had a marvelous roll in shower, but a roll-nowhere layout. All the spaces were too tight, and when it came to reaching for this or that, I was too stiff. My Internet connection wouldn't work. I carefully followed the hotel's instructions, but no line. I needed to check my e-mail or thought I did. I kept dropping things. I couldn't get through the door of the bathroom without banging the door frame. Turning on the water in the sink, I kept reaching my left hand around to the slick modern control on the right, and with the faucet on, water cascaded through the gooseneck fixture and onto my wrist. No problem with that, except that the water kept hitting my very non-waterproof Seiko. And, after repeating this mistake a time or two, already in a heightened state of annoyance bordering on rage, damned if the unbelievable didn't occur. My watch stopped.

Now I couldn't get my suitcase open, I didn't know what time it was, God knew who was trying to reach me from California via e-mail, my wheelchair had slammed into every wall in the room, and I might or might not make it to St. Martin's Lane by 5:30 p.m. Occasionally, I would try to cool out, slow down and try to make sense of my enraged frenzy. But there was nothing rational about it. I had been thrown backwards into some stage of limited mobility and responded in the only way I knew: fight or flight. Actually, I had seen this coming for days. Waking up at my cousin's home in Gloucestershire, it seemed all I could manage to get out of bed. With my wheelchair broken, the walk, all of a few meters, to the toilet seemed onerous, more than a human being could bear. I don't like being reminded of my occasional retreats into diminished mobility. I don't like diminished mobility. I don't like diminished anything.

Naturally, post-opera I was back in my hotel room worrying about the Internet. When some all-night engineer finally talked me through the steps, the e-mail was what e-mail usually is, a bunch of messages, none urgent, most inconsequential. What wasn't inconsequential was the hour, 1:30 a.m. when I finally went to sleep. I had an appointment for next morning with my cousins James and Barbara at the Tate, and damned if the next morning wasn't like the previous night. The wheelchair too big, the room too small, dressing and washing taking too long. Still, this was London and there was no way I wasn't going to have a little sidewalk breakfast somewhere. And there it was, a friendly little café with tables in Vauxhall Bridge Road, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern guys welcoming me inside. And feeling hungry and fierce and not yet late, noting the level threshold, I burst through the door. Bam. I slammed downward. Just inside the door was a step, a steep one, that in my anger and fatigue had escaped my attention. But I had escaped no one's. I was the cripple in the wheelchair who had just burst through the doorway like Elliot Ness. If I had told people they were under arrest, 20 hands would have shot up. Instead, I sheepishly eyed my situation, asked the Mediterranean guys to hold up my front wheels, and burst back out to the street. There, morning traffic humming, I had my cappuccino. Life.

A good thing my cousin Barbara had me take a good look at this famous Epstein sculpture at the Tate. Jacob Wrestling the Angel is the general theme, maybe even the correct title. In any case, it is a work of supreme power, beauty and ambiguity. It is impossible to tell if one is witnessing a struggle or an embrace. I know the feeling. I stared at the statue for a long time. Later that same evening, I stared at London, looking straight down on the Houses of Parliament thanks to my cousin Sandy. This is the sort of aerial view one gets from the London Eye, the huge Ferris wheel that sits by the Thames at Westminster Bridge. When the gondolas reach the top, one can actually see beyond London, past the rise at Barnet and on. The city and its vastness and its richness and its openness seemed overwhelming. An Indian family, as middle-class as could be, asked my cousin Sandy to take a photo. No, actually, Sandy volunteered. This is the most wonderful thing about modern British society, the tolerance, the acceptance and a prevailing sanity regarding homeland security.

And to feel even more secure, I spent much of the next day at the Imperial War Museum. It was only a short run down Lambeth Road. There was something reassuring about getting close to the physical armaments that characterized the war my parents knew. On the way, I rolled into a small café in Horseferry Road. No one paid any attention to me at the counter, which was too high anyway, so I rolled out. I was in no mood to make do. And right at the other end of Lambeth Road, impossibly inaccessible behind a flood barrier, was this charming cappuccino operation. A waitress saw me, seated me at an outdoor table and brought me an English breakfast wrap, along with a cappuccino. It was about to rain. The sky was achieving that familiar English charcoal color. I didn't care. I was on my way to the Imperial War Museum, and I was in a fighting mood.