My skin and bones smacked the floor with a kind of wet sound, and the pain shot through my cheekbone and knees and all the air inside my body escaped in a percussive puff. Bleeding does not alarm us until we see the blood. There is the famous story of a roofer who had accidentally shot an eight-penny nail into his brain with a nail gun. He did not go to the emergency room for several days until he began to suffer from severe headaches, but once there, doctors discovered the embedded projectile by taking an x-ray picture, whereupon he promptly fainted. Once the nail was extracted by surgical means, the headaches disappeared, as if nothing had ever happened. We must be shown evidence of our pain in order to feel the concomitant sorrow, but our joy comes and goes as it pleases.
By instinct, I reached for a towel to staunch the mess, but could not move. Not one millimeter. Not one grasping fingertip or one twisting toe. I could not even blink my one open eye. Given that I was facedown on the cold floor, even the expansion and deflation of my chest in the act of breathing had to be taken on faith. I believed I continued to breathe. My imagination, however, could readily float above my body, able to see the figure on the stone-cold floor and chalk an outline around the naked form. The thought occurred that someone might discover me there in the bathroom, and I would be embarrassed to death.
Just as that mortification set in, a noise in the room alerted me to another living presence. A little cough, not much more than the clearing of a throat, an ahem that changed everything. The existence of another soul in the room produced a strange sensation in my mind. I forgot about the wound, and all at once, the bleeding stopped. I could open and shut my free eye, and feeling returned to my extremities. Conscious of the elastic restoration of my body, I sat up, perhaps too quickly. My skull ached worse than any hangover, so I pressed my hands against the temples in order to steady myself. The cougher coughed again, this time from the vicinity of the bathtub.
He sat on the porcelain edge, clad in a terrycloth bathrobe, a pair of sandals keeping his bare feet from direct contact with the red puddle on the floor. His posture ramrod straight, the old man stared right through me. His thin bare legs hung like two pipe cleaners beneath the blue hem at his knees. In his lap, he clasped his hands together like a supplicant or a holy ascetic, and when the next cough worked its way from his lungs to his mouth, he lifted one bony fist to his lips. Jutting out from the collar, the rope of his neck strained to hold up his long head, and his face looked austere, like something by Giacometti, all severe angles, skin tight on bone, a hawklike nose holding up round rimless glasses, his eyes darkly colored of an uncertain hue but expressing a relentless sense of blinkless surprise. Atop his skull, a shock of silver hair brushed carelessly straight up and back, which added to his startled-in-repose appearance, and his ears stuck out like the handles on a ewer. When he coughed, small feathers escaped from the corners of his mouth and through the lattice of clenched fingers. Yellow pinfeathers wheeled in the air, then began to float like ashes to the tiles. A wan smile creased the lower half of his ruined mug for an instant, as if the cat apologized for swallowing the canary.
His face was like one of those I carried in daily memory, and I had known a younger version of it for many years. I could not be sure absolutely of his identity, and if he was who I thought, his physical presence and existence threw rational thought through the window. That his arrival did not surprise me can be attributed to the other startling events of the day, or perhaps he was not there at all, but rather some hallucination brought on by the concussion I had suffered the moment before. Because of the haze in my head, I put it as a question to the figure perched on the bathtub.
“Dad?”
He went into paroxysms again, that dry cough rattling up from his core, and clamped his hand over his mouth. Tiny yellow feathers popped out of both ears. “Excuse me, Sonny, but I have a powerful thirst.”
Aware of the deleterious effects of moving too quickly, I eased up to my feet and held on to the sink for balance. I removed my toothbrush from the rinsing cup and turned on the tap, letting the water chill before filling the glass. The fanlight overhead played on the liquid surface, and some opaque sediment swirled and settled in the bottom of the clear cup, another reminder that a general cleaning of the room was in order. I turned and handed the glass to the old man, who had remained motionless throughout the whole procedure. He considered the contents for a moment and then passed back the water with a look of disdain.
“I never drink from anything in the bathroom.” He motioned over to the toilet, indicating by dumb show some symbiotic connection via the plumbing. “Do you have anything else besides this swill from the sink?” His voice had an unbecoming plaintive quality. From historical antecedents, I inferred a preference for something alcoholic, and when asked, he nodded vigorously, a delicate smile pursing his cracked lips.
“I may have a beer in the fridge. Or a bottle of whiskey somewhere.”