She came down to Pauls room. "She was sitting on the edge of his bed — Paul was sitting across the room in the wheelchair.
And where were the keys? When he tried to bend it into a fist, it felt as though long rods of metal had been pushed through it at random. ""The second time I just wanted to get something to eat, and make sure I had some extra supplies in here in case you were gone a long time,he went on, ignoring her. For the first time in weeks — it felt like years — he was able to look at a geography different from that of his room with its unchanging verities — blue wallpaper, picture of the Arc de Triomphe, the long, long month of February symbolized by the boy sliding downhill on his sled (he thought that his mind would turn to that boys face and stocking cap each time January became February, even if he lived to see that change of months another fifty times).
He kept telling himself not to think about it, knowing all the while that it was there, like a bone in his throat. Everything else is a blank.
And if we looked at the nursesregister for March 1969, would we find the name WILKES? I bitched about the typewriter, he thought, looking at it now and listening to the drone of the mower.