Thursday, 07 August 2003 | Scenario

She doesn't like it when I crush the drug into a rocky powder and stir it in her food, a process which involves a knife and basic finger-avoiding precision. Nor does she enjoy when I wrap her in a blanket, shove my fingers into the hinge connecting her jaw, and push a sour pill down her throat. In scenario A, she doesn't ingest the medicine that's supposed to make her kidney infection disappear. In scenario B, she claws and bites and hates. As for the daily urine analyses, I've resorted to setting her down in front of her litter box and uselessly making requests in English.

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We spoke German almost exclusively during the first half of the evening, which felt something like trying to exercise after months of being sedentary. It was slow to travel from my brain to my mouth, but eventually I was able to slip behind the German curtain, finding myself inclined to respond to the Indian waiter in a language that was neither Indian nor English (though stopping myself before it actually happened). Sometimes, on my own, I'll decide to "think" in German, or somewhat forcefully compose thoughts in full sentences, but I tend to recycle the same vocabulary bank that drifts around in the accessible part of my head. It's good to hear the genuine thing, to listen and fatten the bank.

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I've been observing, "helping" Corey film a documentary, pinning microphones on lapels, and taking still photographs, images which may possibly be incorporated in the final product. On Monday I was drafted to be in the play that is the subject of the documentary, in the non-speaking part of "photographer." My main function, besides being a body pointing a camera, was to bleach the actors with my flash, an apparatus which naturally chose to die on stage exactly when it was supposed to perform. Fortunately it offered a few death gasps before it completely faded (it worked about one out of every four tries), which I'm pretty sure means I didn't completely botch the role. And I was careful to slap and struggle and curse the flash as inconspicuously as possible, since I don't think those things were part of my assignment.