Experiment in Springtime

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In April, Charles almost died. His wife, Martha, nursed him assiduously and with a certain grim efficiency that Charles, in his moments of clarity, found amusing. Even on the point of death, he knew he bored her.

Perhaps it might have been different if there had been anything heroic about his illness — if he had leaped glamorously off a high building or had plunged into the lake to save a child. But the fact was that he had simply come home from the office with a bad headache and had accepted the two headache tablets given to him by his wife, Martha. It was not, of course, Martha’s fault that he was allergic to so many things and that the headache tablets turned out to be aspirin. Aspirin, as the doctor pointed out and as Charles later had good reason to believe, was sheer poison to him.

The doctor, a man called MacNeil, seemed very interested in the case and anxious to substantiate his own diagnosis. Nearly every time he came, he brought with him old medical journals and newspaper clippings in which he read about an old man in Manchester who had died of taking one aspirin and a young boy in Kansas who became ill when he touched one. Charles listened vaguely. Manchester and Kansas seemed equally remote. His own world had narrowed to four walls, and there were only two people living in it, himself and Martha. Other people drifted in and out, other sounds penetrated the walls, and the clock ticked away the minutes here as inexorably as in the outer world, but time and space had become more intimately related. Space was this room, and time could be measured by the increasing boredom on Martha’s face.

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