Will & I by Clay Byars Page B

less monotone. The lesson that day started with my holding the word sing over seven notes. The exercise started low and ended as high as I could go. With a remembered fluidity, I could feel my larynx “sitting down,” as Dewin would say. We had to stop after every few patterns to let me clear my throat of the mucus my vocal cords were shaking off.
    Dewin told me about his work in the past with a young boy who had a diagnosis of aproxia, a mental disorder that among other things creates choppy and inconsistent flow of speech. He was attempting to strengthen the boy’s underdeveloped speaking skills. “I would ask for him to chop the H and stall the vocal cords against the contained air that the abrupt H creates.” He said it was like a quarterback saying, “Hut!” or James Brown saying, “He’p me!” The boy’s parents brought his speech therapist with them to one lesson, and afterward she told them that basically Dewin didn’t know what he was talking about. She said the way to make an H was to imitate fogging a mirror. Dewin was pleased when my own experience corroborated his theory. We tried Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha just by itself, without the piano. I’d never been able to voluntarily do this before. My muscles hadn’t been strong enough.
    A Russian woman, a massage therapist whom I’d met in passing at Dewin’s, came in right after we started this exercise, and my self-consciousness kicked in. It wasn’t as strong as if she’d been a stranger, but making noise in front of anyone relatively new was still embarrassing. I’d actually been studying Russian on Rosetta Stone since we’d last seen each other. I wanted to greet her in Russian the next time, as I walked out. I thought it would surprise her, and I’d come to enjoy surprising people that way. They met me and assumed I was a village idiot, basically. I liked to keep them guessing.
    Dewin handed that day’s CD to me, and I started for the door. The woman and I smiled at each other in acknowledgment, but just as I began to speak, Dewin said something to her. I should have just continued on my way, but then Dewin registered that I’d also been about to speak. He stopped and said, “Sorry. You were going to say something?” My face got hot. I couldn’t think of anything else in the moment. I tensed up and weakly said to the woman, “Dö-brey dyen” (Good day).
    She laughed and said, “Oh, yeah.”

 
    10
    Telling the story now, it sounds overly hasty, but they moved me out of the hospital and into therapy almost as soon as I started moving my thumb. The people at the hospital said there was nothing else they could do, and the therapists would be best now at seeing how far this recovered motion could be extended, how many parts of my body could be brought back online. My father contacted the rehab clinic, the same place where I had gone as an outpatient after the wreck. This time, though, I would not be going to the main campus but to a separate facility at another hospital, and I’d be arriving on a stretcher with an oxygen tube in my throat.
    The ride across downtown was my first exposure to the world outside the hospital since my stroke. I was truly outside only for the seconds it took to transfer my gurney into the ambulance, but I remember the sudden feeling of the sun on my face, and I remember the change in pressure of the summer air. It should have been an uplifting moment, but for me an uneasy hopelessness shrouded the whole event. There was a sense of something eternal about it. Something about being exposed to the enormity of the outside shocked me from the microscopic focus I’d maintained in the hospital—back in leg-and-thumb world—and into the actual situation I faced. I was fucking paralyzed. The ambulance felt like a hearse.
    My therapists—as well as a woman dressed in street clothes, who I assumed was an