By the end of the day, Gina was treating me like an incompetent infant. She took me to the bathroom and sat me in the bathtub and bathed me as if I was a toddler. When I saw the tub full of water, I was overjoyed. There, finally, was my opportunity to commit suicide by drowning myself. I was all smiles as she sat me in the lukewarm water. Surely she would leave me for the few minutes necessary to beat my head senseless against the porcelainized steel walls of the tub. Then I could slip into the water and drown without a word. But my hopes for self destruction were all for nought. She didn’t leave me for a minute. I guess my accident in the kitchen had sunk into her thick-witted brain and made her more cautious. She cleansed my tiny body with a washcloth, then rinsed and dried me before taking me to the nursery and diapering me for bed.
My reverie ended as I finished reviewing the events of the past two weeks. There was nothing in what had happened that gave me a clue to the solution to my problem. The swelling on my tongue had gone down enough for me to talk, but something had happened in the interim that had damaged the speech centers in my brain. I could understand simple vocabulary well enough, but my ability to enunciate words was profoundly affected. My disability gave me a lisping vocabulary of about fifty words and my unbalanced emotional state made me cry whenever I was wet or hungry.