Camilla Niloufar Prescott-Behzadi paused her audiobook, closed her eyes, rolled her head, left shoulder to right shoulder, and then quickly back to the left, flicking a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. She eased back into her seat, exhaled long and slow, and back in. Feeling new resolve, she eased her eyes back open, gazing down at first, gradually looking up and up, degree-by-degree, until she was looking straight on towards the mirror.
She contemplated the startlingly truncated figure before her, and wondered why she was contemplating her body today, of all days. She was seeing the same body she saw every day, the one she'd begrudgingly grown accustomed to over the past five years.
Of course, Camilla knew why she was doing this. "Why?" was purely a rhetorical question. It was because of her trip to the art museum yesterday, she thought, then chided herself for the evasive imprecision. It was Marnie d'Entremont, the brown-haired docent she met at the Kandinsky exhibit. In Camilla's mind, the hour-and-a-half spent talking was a kaleidoscopic panorama of disparate impressions, as if her memory were a gemstone, refracting sundry angles in arbitrary configurations: Chestnut brown hair, perky breasts, the smell of a wool sweater, swirl of ankle-length tartan, crystalline ringing laugh, gray eyes with a gentle, probing curiosity, her surname belying a Newfoundland brogue. Camilla had been swept downstream in the breadth and depth of the conversation, forgotten herself, what others saw; for ninety blessed minutes, she just was.
But, others, Camilla sourly thought, wouldn't forget what the mirror now showed with its blunt, un-opinionated, instrumental cruelty. A quadruple amputee in her late twenties, strapped into an electric wheelchair by a four-point harness over her shoulders and under her breasts. Her limbs were truncated stumps, her legs barely four inches long (the harness owing to the relative lack of stability afforded by the residual limbs), while her ten-inch arm stumps afforded her some blessed semblance of independence. She could manipulate a simple joystick and nudge the occasional loose object, but not with any particular dexterity or precision.
Those disabilities alone, she firmly believed, were enough to irrevocably color other people's perceptions, her body and the obvious utility of the harness a strobing red neon sign flashing '
cripple!
' into the night. Her therapist had visibly cringed at that word, but Camilla saw it in the pitying and quickly-averted eyes of others every time she went out into public.
Camilla was wearing her usual Friday evening loungewear: conceptually a simple outfit, a blue T-shirt and underpants, the staple of untold millions of women settling in to relax with an audiobook or podcast.
How many women, though
, she thought,
unwind in a clean adult diaper?
The bacterial meningitis that had so cruelly taken her limbs had also left her with residual neurological damage, primarily muscle coordination issues in her lower body (Camilla contemplated the bitter irony of this largely being masked by her utter and complete lack of useful legs with which to make grossly uncoordinated movements). This had also left her with complete urinary incontinence (and to her unceasing gratitude, only urinary incontinence).
She looked closer, mentally forcing herself to assimilate the image anew, a twenty-seven-year-old woman wearing nothing but a shirt and a bulky plastic diaper. As she shifted in her seat, the shiny white plastic crinkled, and she gazed, coolly noting how it visually announced its fundamental diaper-ness in that steamroller-subtle, brutally utilitarian way that only mass-produced clinical products can. All together, the wetness indicator stripe, the wings snugly fastened to the front with what were obviously heavy-duty built-in tapes, and the shiny, slightly crumpled-looking plastic exterior were completely impossible to miss. Nobody would ever confuse them with white panties, particularly given how the whole garment clearly ended somewhere around belly-button-level, underneath her t-shirt.
Camilla sighed, wondering what Marnie, grace and eloquence embodied, would think if she knew that Camilla was so helpless that she relied on others for a twice-daily diaper change. (Were Marnie to know, she would not care, contrary to Camilla's fervent belief to the contrary). Even if Marnie could handle it, could she truly regard a woman like Camilla with physical attraction, given what Camilla believed to be the cruelest blow dealt by her catastrophic case of meningitis?
The cruelest blow by far
, Camilla thought, contemplating her face. The sepsis that had ravaged her system and the aggressive course of vasoconstrictors given to contain the fulminant gangrene had cost her most of her lips, the tip of her nose, and the front two thirds of her tongue. The cascading soft-tissue failures had left her requiring a permanent tracheostomy - her breath now a turbulent hiss in and out of the plastic tube in her neck.
Prior to her illness, her voice had been velvety and husky - bedroom talk alone had nearly been enough to drive her then-boyfriend to the point of orgasm. Post-illness, two years with a speech-language-pathologist had given Camilla what she and Thanh affectionately referred to as 'Camillish.' Camillish was a breathy whispered English consisting largely of broad, hissing vowels and glottal consonants.
Case-in-point, twenty minutes ago, Camilla had turned to Thanh and said "hek haifuh" -
wet diaper
. Thanh knew Camilla as well as her own sisters, and understood immediately, even without the pointed glance down. In public, Thanh generally had to act as interpreter, though Marnie had caught on with an unusual quickness (Yesterday, Marnie, intrigued and drawn by the fierce intelligence in Camilla's large brown eyes, made a concerted effort to build an inventory of Camilla's speech sounds, afraid of missing any of the sharp wit she was quickly growing acquainted with).
Camilla, though not vain, was confident, and had considered herself a reasonably attractive woman beforehand. Admittedly, the nose prosthetic did an astounding job of capturing that characteristically Persian arc of the nose handed down from her father. However, Camilla had never been impressed with the prospects for cosmetic surgery as explained by her specialist. Though some careful and clever grafting had given her something of a mouth back, her resting expression was what she considered a rough approximation of overbite-y grin, owed to the absence of enough residual skin to cover all the way down her front teeth. Camilla was quite happy with those teeth, again registering gratitude for Thanh's deft touch with the toothbrush. Camilla imagined Marnie's slender, agile hands -
was she a pianist?
- and wondered how Marne would fare at that evening ritual.
