Chapter 5
I re-read her accounting of our meeting the previous night, shaking my head. “It’s a little disconcerting reading your descriptions. I’m supposed to be the writer, you’re supposed to be the subject.” I was sitting comfortably in her hospital room that next morning, waiting for them to move her downstairs.
“You watch me, I watch you,” she replied, a bit distractedly. She sat up, turned a bit to her right, and began scooting to the edge of her bed.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting out of bed.”
I restrained myself from offering to help. If she wanted it, she’d ask. There was obviously no point in trying to talk her out of anything.
“These journals,” I asked. “How long have you been keeping them?”
“About 170 years,” she said offhandedly as she turned further to her right, and hooked her leg over the edge.
I laughed. I loved the deadpan way she said things like that. She was clearly a flake, but the most entertaining flake I’d ever met. She flicked a look at me, smiled, and then concentrated again on her leg. I didn’t know where this relationship was going, but there was no doubt that it would be interesting.
“Well, I can already see how parts of the project might be done,” I said. “I think I can use some of your journal entries directly. Not all of them, since you ramble a bit, but I can definitely see how with a little work and careful editing we can lift parts of your journals straight into the book, maybe weave it in with some of our interview transcripts. Could be tricky, but might work. Do you write these every day?”
She scooted some more, grabbed the rail, and put her foot to the ground. She scratched absently at the stump of her left leg.
“You’d know better than I, but that sounds workable,” she said. “And no, not every day, but frequently, whenever something I deem significant happens, or when something’s troubling me.” She was flexing her toes, testing the floor, wincing slightly at its cold temperature.
“They’re remarkably detailed. Do you have an eidetic memory?”
She shook her head. “No. But I’ve got a good one. Writing helps me remember things, keep my thoughts ordered.” She was rocking back and forth sideways, testing her balance.
“So where are the rest of them?” I asked.
Before answering, she startled me by standing straight up on her one leg, facing away from me. I noticed then just how very thin and tiny she seemed. She couldn’t have been much more than 5’3”, which astonished me because she had such a large presence about her. She didn’t seem to care at all that I could see her backside through the open back of the hospital gown. She looked like she had almost no fat at all on her, which looked very unhealthy. With her back to me like that, I could almost believe her missing forearm was simply bent forward out of my vision, but the left leg was still obviously, tragically, almost completely gone.
She then startled me again by leaning backwards like a ballerina and slowly bending her back into a “U” shape. I could hear it crinkle and pop a little, and then she was staring at me upside-down.
She said, “I have some that I wrote some time ago in a steamer trunk. The rest I mostly destroyed. Except for the web site, which I’m still thinking about doing away with.”
“Okay, that’s three questions I have to ask all at once.”
“Go,” she said, straightening up, the back of her head to me again. Her hand was still on to the bedrail.
“Well, why do you write them if you plan to destroy most of them?”
“Because I write them for me, not for anybody else, and I already told you why I write them: to help me organize my thoughts and memories. Once I’ve done it I don’t need them anymore, most of the time. Besides, most of them are trash, just rambles. Some would be dangerous if someone found them.”
She bent at the knee very deeply, almost touching it to the floor, then lost control and spun around, almost losing her grip. She sat there on the floor in an awkward, strained position facing me, her right arm and shoulder twisted severely. I jumped up, but she shot an angry look my way and I stopped. She was shaking a little, trying to pull herself up. Then her eyes relented.
“All right, this is very uncomfortable. I suppose I could use a hand.” She was sweating, and panting hard.
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Methuselah's Daughter, A Novel
