He had changed his nephew’s diaper once and only once. His legs had moved and jerked themselves into frenzy. He imagined his nephew a cricket and the beautiful friction his legs would produce the sound at once menacing and masterful. He gripped the boy’s ankles and lifted his legs. He heard quiet laughter in the background as the shit rolled its way onto the carpet. He pressed it into the carpet fibers as he tried to clean it up still struggling to hold the ankles in place. His neck prickled with heat and his pores opened wide. That’s what he remembered about changing diapers as he changed his wife’s.
He had hoped for children. Soon after he and M. were married she suffered a ________ and could not reproduce. She had lost most function of her left side and all of her bottom half. It was frightening to look at as he gripped her ankles and made every effort to wipe clean yesterday’s meal. He had gotten used to it, he had. But the smell and the wizened parts made his stomach turn at every wipe and at every breath. He thought of how a newborn might look as it made its way along the rough edges of what barely resembled her part—scraped and burned from the dry and cracked skin. Thankful for the impossibility of it. He looked at M. and smiled. She hadn’t noticed. He wondered what she thought about as she had her diaper changed as an adult by an adult. He figured she imagined herself changing her own child’s diaper or walking again or remembering what laughter sounded like. They had both forgotten how to laugh. Before that they had lost the dignity of what had made them a whole. Now they were a half of a whole made brittle by the indignation of life. They believed life had not just been unfair but had treated them unfairly on purpose. They believed that since the beginning of time the universe was surreptitious in its affairs and had schemed its way along all trajectories of space and time to land itself full force upon their once significant lives. Of course they had fictionalized this account. They had forgotten the place when they first began telling the “truths” of the situation and when embellishment of the minutiae of their lives became commonplace. No one else forgot though. It is unfortunate as they were presented with this insurmountable fact when company rang. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance that had run wild and mad and they were on the wrong side of the harmony they thought they achieved. But they never really got along that well. Changing one’s diapers at thirty-five will do that to someone. But the spaces between them had already begun to show themselves much earlier. A ten-minute trip for a package of cigarettes somehow took one hour. An hour trip to the grocery took three hours. And M. had always seemed slightly jarred; she seemed lost at a juncture in her body. He reasoned that it was something akin to when those dying leave their bodies and they float above or below or side-to-side. Something anchored M. to their relationship but it wasn’t him and something powerful pulled M. to-and-fro at his every rejection of it.
My God, did her love her. He felt tremendous guilt though too, a pairing which never resolved itself. Their first year of college had been… glorious. Yes that’s the appropriate word. He had promised himself that when he dumped whatever-her-name-was in high school he would just date in college and get laid—a lot. He was about experiencing life. (He now reasoned that the universe had steered him clear of that too.) But no regrets when he met her.
He walked to the trashcan to dispose of the diaper. The framed photo of M. standing if removed exposed the hole in the drywall. He moved it back ashamed to be reminded of it. She had yelled something about pain and he had yelled that she was a pain. The situation forced them to relinquish and maintain self-control simultaneously at all times. As often as they hated, they also forgave. But the hate drove forgiveness inward and captured it. His anger had built itself into a frenetic state.
