Down there on a(n extended) visit

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 Down there on a(n extended) visit

“Uncle Albert has come to visit.” (January 8th) He’s still here. (January 23)

It’s fine. I don’t always enjoy visiting him, because he’s often a selfish host. But he’s an unselfish guest. Plus, he’s here, as I understand it, for my sake – as he put it, “to keep an eye on me” while Roz is at work . . . and I am not.

     I thought – we all thought, I think – that I would go back to work on Friday; then, Uncle Albert could go home. But I am on a leave of absence until April 3rd. In the meantime, I am supposed to be resting – that’s what I understand; I am supposed to be resting my body, my mind, and my spirit.

Well, “Fuck that!” I want to say; or, I would say if I used that kind of language. (“Fornifreculate that!” Uncle Albert might put it.)

     My body is resting – the medicine makes it slug-like: I get out of bed slower; I take a longer shower; it takes me longer to shave, to shit, to get dressed, to get down to and to eat breakfast. I’ve done three things, and the morning is over. It takes longer to fix lunch. I read at the third-grade level, sounding out the sentences word by word.

Uncle Albert looks on. He sits in the chair he’s appropriated, reading, dozing, reading, craning his neck looking for me, dozing. Occasionally, he checks the news on CNN. He shakes his head, mutters under his breath, writes something in his notebook. I’ll ask what he’s writing. Usually he says, “Nothing that pertains to you.” But sometimes he’ll read it: “‘Let me honest with you’ often indicates that artifice will follow.”

     “What’s that mean?” I ask.

     “It’s too cryptic, isn’t it?” he says. “It means that often when someone says that - ‘I need to be honest with you’ – he is about to give a speech he has rehearsed carefully.

     “How would you put it?” he asks.

     I shrug my shoulders, I don’t know. My mind is slug-like as well. My spirit is the inert stone the body-slug and the mind-slug are inching across.

01.23.17