Page 93 of Brain Damage

“Try them on,” Dr. Singh urges me.

I bite back my distaste. So what if they’re ugly? Who cares what I look like anymore? Vanity is the least of my problems.

I pull the glasses out of the case with my right hand and slide them up my nose. I feel like a schoolmarm. I look up at Dr. Singh’s round face. I don’t notice any difference whatsoever.

“Well?” he asks me.

I shrug. “I’m not sure if they’re helping.”

I’m being nice. They’re not helping.

“Well, give them a try today,” Dr. Singh says. “They might help you functionally, even if you don’t notice a difference.”

I shrug again.

I mostly forget about the glasses until later in the morning, when I’m having a physical therapy session with Natalie. I’m sitting in my wheelchair, and she whips them out of her pocket.

“Those don’t help,” I tell her.

“Just give them a chance, Charly,” she says.

This time, she slides them onto my face herself. Nothing becomes any clearer with the lenses on. Just like everything else, the glasses are a big disappointment.

“Okay,” Natalie says. “Let’s work on wheeling down the hallway.”

“What about walking?” I ask.

“We’re not going to focus on that anymore,” Natalie says firmly. “I talked to your husband about it, and he definitely makes some good points. You’re mostly going to be using the wheelchair when you get home, so you need to be able to control it better. You don’t want to have to depend on someone else to wheel you around, do you?”

“No,” I say.

She’s right, of course. It’s bad enough that I can’t walk, but the fact that I can’t even push my own chair is even more of a liability. I don’t want to have to rely on Clark just to be able to get from the bedroom to the living room without bashing into ten things along the way.

And forget about wheeling around in public. That would be dangerous. If I tried to push myself down the sidewalk, I’d probably wheel right into traffic.

“Alright,” Natalie says. “Put your hands on the wheels and go down the hallway.”

I have to admit, I was a little bit skeptical about the glasses, but for the first time in all the times I’ve been doing this, I make it down the entire hallway without slamming into the wall on the left side. I’ve never ever managed to do that before. I feel ridiculously proud of myself.

“I did it!” I say.

Natalie is looking at me with a strange expression on her face.

“What?” I say, feeling suddenly nervous. “I thought I did a good job. I didn’t hit anything. Did I?”

Oh God, did I hit something and not even realize it? That would definitely be a step back.

“No,” Natalie says, “you didn’t hit anything.”

I just look at her.

“Charly,” she says. “Do you realize that you were using your left hand to help wheel the chair?”

I look down at the left wheel of my chair and I see a hand on it. My hand.

“I don’t usually do that?”

“Sometimes you’ll put it on the wheel for a second or two,” Natalie recalls. “But this time you had it on the wheel for the entire time. I’ve never seen you do that before.”