The wedding: the nickel helmet, the pans and drains, the cleric's question

pivotal · UNDATED (after the rescue)

• When: UNDATED — between the rescue and the YDAU present; Marathe dates nothing except that he tried and failed to leave her "at the commencement"
• What: Marathe first tried to wheel away from "the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m'épouse au future" and into his new life of chosen battle — and traveled "no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil" before the old moribund despair rose again; "Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife." He faced that he had chosen, and that the choice was the love — "I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing" — and married her. The wedding as he tells it: her wedding helmet "of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest Switzerland"; both bride and groom rolled down the aisle "in special conveyings", hers fitted "with special pans and drains, for the fluids"; her hand a hook, which Marathe held tenderly; and, when the cleric asked did he choose this woman, "a long time of silence" before his whole being "came to a knifelike point." He calls it "the happiest day ever for me, since the train" — and says in the same breath that he has known "since the wedding night her death was coming." Kate Gompert's on-the-spot verdict — "that's not love: that's low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades" — is the only counter-reading the text supplies, and the scene adjudicates neither. [Attribution note: Marathe's account; Kate's rebuttal in the same conversation.]