The Dream Life of Astronauts by Patrick Ryan

Randall—had told him several times that it wasn’t the eye itself he was feeling; it was the ligaments, specifically the lateral palpebral ligament. “You’ve been traumatized,” Dr. Loudon had said. “You can’t shake the house without upsetting the china.” Some doctors believed patients drew solace from having their medical conditions expressed in everyday terms, but Leo wasn’t one of those patients. Dr. Loudon would sit on the edge of his desk with his hands folded in his lap and listen to whatever Leo had to tell him—smiling all the while, as if he were hearing a child describe a day at the zoo—then ask if Leo liked to play Yahtzee. “Think of yourself as a cup filled with Yahtzee cubes. You got shaken up and tossed out. Things aren’t going to be exactly like they were before the stroke.” Then he’d reach into his blazer pocket, pull out that goddamn stick with the little red ball on it, and ask Leo to follow it with his eyes.
    There was a palsy, too. Dr. Loudon had said that would probably go away with time, but it had been two months since the stroke and the left side of Leo’s face still sagged. When he braved the mirror each morning, he saw a man who looked like he was trying not to laugh at something he found only half-funny. Combine that with the flutter in his eye and the pulsing of his lower lid, and he looked like a candidate for the nuthouse.
    “Think of yourself as a car,” Dr. Loudon had said. “Something got knocked loose and kept the gas from reaching the engine for a little while. It might never happen again.”
    Cold comfort. Dr. Loudon had encouraged Leo to get back to his normal routine as soon as possible, so Leo had pushed through the doors of Technicolor just a week later. He’d also resumed his part-time job at the hardware store, his deaconing at the church, his Scout meetings. But it wasn’t the same as before. He tried to hold the left side of his mouth just slightly higher than the right, and to squint his eyelid just enough to suppress the flutter, but he wasn’t successful. When people talked to him now, they talked to his left eye. And when they listened to him, which no one really did anymore, they focused on the downward sag of his mouth.
    “If the pulse and the palsy are bothering you that much,” Dr. Loudon had said, “just think of yourself as a trusty old appliance. A Westinghouse. You might have a few new rattles, but you’re still running.”
    Leo wouldn’t have minded punching Dr. Loudon in the stomach.
    He also wouldn’t have minded screaming into the faces of the people in his life who used to respect him and who now only saw him as weak. His coworkers at Technicolor. The customers at the hardware store. The congregation at First Baptist.
    His wife.
    His two boys.
    Just a couple of blasts from his whistle used to bring Mitch and Howie home for dinner; now Leo had to stand at the foot of his driveway and blow his lungs out: three blasts, then three more, then three more after that. The boys weren’t afraid of him anymore; they tuned out the whistle just as they tuned out his voice. And they looked at him differently. If they weren’t focused on his eye or his drooping mouth, they were looking at his hair, which had turned half-white over the past eight weeks. They were obstinate, but they weren’t idiots: they worked it to their advantage. They pissed and moaned now about having to do their chores. They complained about having to go to church, having to wear Toughskins instead of Levi’s, having crew cuts. They’d begged for puppies last year—one for each of them—and Leo had brought home a pair of six-week-old springer spaniels on the condition that they take care of them, walk them, train them. But the dogs went largely ignored and slabbered around the backyard like wolves.
    For godsake, he wanted to tell his boys, life is
short.
Shut the hell up and appreciate what you have. But they were too busy griping. They were too busy punching stop