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think there’s a McDonald’s coming up.”
    At the McDonald’s, my mother pulls up to the side entrance. On bad days, she gets the wheelchair out of the trunk. On good days, she holds the door while I crutch the seven steps inside. There, I sink into the closest seat to rest while she goes back out to park the car. It’s another ten or so steps to the bathroom and, once inside, another five steps to the closest stall. Then another fifteen-odd steps back to the table, where I wait while my mother gets herself a cup of coffee. I’ve come to love McDonald’s, its regulated access, its reliable terrain. McDonald’s, an oasis of certainty, where there’s never a step to get inside, where I know the rest room doors will be wide enough for a wheelchair to pass, the stall big enough so I don’t have to pee with the door open wide to accommodate the chair.
    Today is a postcortisone day, a good day, and so I decide to crutch in. While my mother goes around the corner to place her order, I continue my Frankenstein lurch toward the nearest open table, telling myself not to be paranoid, nobody is staring, and so what if they are, so you’re on crutches, so who cares? The stares are less furtive than the ones I get when I’m in the wheelchair, when people run their gaze over my legs, then quickly glance away.
    Scoping for parts , my brother calls it.
    â€œMy goodness, what happened to you?” A woman with three young children sits in a nearby booth. “Were you in an accident or something?”
    I shake my head, keep going. These are the questions I’ve grown to hate, even without suspecting, yet, that they’ll follow me for the rest of my life like a complicated name, an alias I must live by. What’s wrong with you, what happened to you, what’s the matter ? Sometimes they’re prefaced with, Do you mind if I ask you a personal question ? Often they’re followed by a long account of another person’s health complaint: an accident, a bout of cancer, a recent diagnosis.
    I take another step, another. The children stare, following their mother’s example.
    â€œWhat happened?” she repeats. “Did you break your legs?”
    I sit down facing the opposite direction, expressionless, pretending I haven’t heard. There are two kinds of pain: the kind that can be protected—the lump in the breast, the loved one’s death, the broken heart—and the other kind, the visible kind, the kind that, in my case, is the first thing people see. It’s right there, out in the open, where anyone might choose to poke at it, probe it, satisfy their grim curiosity.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that lady?” one of the children asks.
    â€œNothing a smile wouldn’t cure,” the woman says, in a voice I am meant to hear.
    Â 
    Hope is Dickinson’s “thing with feathers,” that transcendent little bird. It is also, as a doctor once pointed out to me, the very last thing in Pandora’s box.
    Immediately after every appointment, after each new round of injections, I get an emotional second wind. I decide I am going to get well, right now, no more messing around. I give myself pep talks. So my doctor believes I have systematic tendinitis caused by an overaggressive immune system? Well, cortisone suppresses the immune system; therefore, it is logical, it is inevitable , that the cortisone shots will work. I begin each day with positive affirmations. My doctor has described my tendinitis as a raging fire that must be contained, and so I imagine tall flames doused with cool water, sputtering out. I visualize myself healthy again, jogging on a beach, hiking down a wooded trail. Instead of watching TV, I discipline myself, make tapes of my school assignments, dictate papers to my mother. I write awful, earnest haiku with titles like “The Moon.” I listen to Spanish language tapes, review my high school German. I phone the