Successful Motions
by Simply Beautiful, My Dear
Have you ever noticed,” Eduard Barnswipe said to the class, “that failures abound in this country, and that failure, in fact, is rewarded?” His students did not respond immediately, and then they violently cheered and surged up to attention giving him their unrestrained approbation. Since his question came a minute after the official end of classes for that day, Eduard began packing his leather bag as a sign that they were dismissed. A minute later the room was empty but for a young lad in a wheelchair who now moved towards him from the back of the room, and to whom Barnswipe barked out a “What do you want, Sir?” The student stuttered something indecipherable but kept moving closer until he came to a halt at Barnswipe’s feet.
Unexpectedly and without answering him, that worthy, physically-challenged one grabbed the professor by the lapels and hoisted himself therewith upward before him, looking him squarely in the eyes and then, swiftly turning him about with a shift of his weight and leaning away, bent him precipitously backwards over his wheelchair handles so that the older gentleman soon felt all feeling going out of his arms and legs. A minute more, and with a final violent exertion of his muscular upper body, that worthy snapped Barnswipe in two and finished him off.
Eduard lay from that day for many a month in a bed, unable even to move his head, or to speak a single word. “Failure is rewarded” constituted the second last words he ever spoke aloud. He did think to himself, though, of the profound import of these words. He had been rewarded, despite his grand efforts as a teacher, with failure, and not with any treasure other than failure. He had been rewarded, in other words, with vengeance in his soul. He vowed, within himself eventually to get even with his attacker. That day came sooner than he had expected. One day, into the very hospital room where he lay, lumbered the worthy who had finished him off. The man before Eduard was now no longer in a wheelchair, but walked standing tall, if not firmly, on his own two feet. He was an orderly and he’d come to empty Eduard’s piss pot. For good reason less perceptive now than he used to be when life had been a disaster for him, he knew not that the man before him was none other than the former teacher he had so viciously misused.
The orderly came from the Abruzzi district of Italy and had arrived to this country some 20 years earlier with his ageing parents. His father (from a fine old Italian family with the last name of Spread), a ship’s Carpenter who had received a head injury in the hold of one of his own ships, banging it with great velocity on a beam too low off the floor and so deranging himself in an instant, lived here on social assistance. His mother, a fine woman of tolerable education and disposition, toiled each day at breadmaking to support the family, now that Spread senior was no longer in a condition to do so. She toiled daily at baking and then saved her evenings for television. She especially loved the Westerns, namely The Rifleman, and Have Gun Will Travel. And she fancied herself princessy enough of countenance and figure to deserve to have one of those maverick heroes come to her and lift her on his horse and ride her away from her difficulties. Once, when she did ride a horse, on a farm some miles out of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, she immediately on mounting fell forward over its mane to such an extent that the guide had to rein in his steed and reach his hand to her to aid her back upright. She felt ever afterward a kinship with this gentleman, and often wrote him letters which he did not answer, out of safety concerns, fearful as he was that the husband would have something to say about the matter should a secrecy between them be discovered. Spread junior’s mother kept him in clothes and food while he was a youngster, but when one day he visited the ship where his father had been injured, and he banged his own head also by accident on the same beam that had done his father in, he fell prorate to the floor and others had to assist him out of there to a hospital where doctors announced him to be in a state of grave dislocation of movement. He received from the hospital a wheelchair for the modest sum of eight dollars monthly, and this machine gave him the movement and dexterity over distance that he longed for.
Until the events in the classroom with his brusque teacher. Now, some years after the classroom debacle, he had almost recovered from the emotions of that day, when another group of emotions, as mentioned earlier, accumulated, which further upset his balance and decentered him.
It began thusly. The former invalid bent over Edward, spoke some kind words to him, because he felt unusual sympathy for non ambulant persons, and reached under the sheets to extract the bedpan. As he bent close to him Edward suddenly lifted his head, the only part of him that initially retained any movement, except his anus, (which he could flex and move about, and which by now he had taught to talk and to perform all kinds of secret little fine motor movements), and in a flash had that tall man by the nose with his teeth. He bit him so hard that blood filled his mouth in an instant. Barnswipe hung on, even though the tall man roared. In a moment, this Eduard grabbed the miscreant by the legs (since his upper body had gained a great deal of strength through two years of relentless callisthenics), lifted him bodily off the floor, and smashed his head into the wall, repeatedly, with more vigor and momentum each time, until the room rang with the impacts. Then, instantly he took Spread by his head and, looping his feet and legs over the high back of the bed, struck him numerous blows to the side of his face. After which he lifted him by both arms and legs and rammed him repeatedly onto a pointy bedpost of brass till the unfortunate orderly, impaled sitting up, stuck on the end of it and wobbled there. The attacker fell back to his bed exhausted but mollified. He left Spread junior to get down from his perch as best he could and to recover as best he might.
Despite Spread’s marginal brain damage and the broken and ruined joints of his arms and legs (remembering with what ferocity the teacher had flung Spread about), the teacher sustained a still worse condition (having been too vigorous, too unwisely exuberant, in the beating of his former student, and thus incurring numerous and various injuries upon his own person as a result) that seemed to his now feeble thoughts the most terrible of his new injuries. He could no longer use his anus for anything. He discharged into a colostomy bag and found himself, despite his best efforts, unable to make his rectum either to speak or to move in the heretofore way. He felt so lonely and bereft, that he wished to commit suicide, but he lacked the means to achieve that happiness. And he felt unable to ask anyone to aid him. He taught himself by hook or by crook to do this or that with his tongue, but that artefact never gave him, in its ambulation, the same satisfaction that he had gleaned from all his earlier successful motions.
