When he wakes from his nightmare, the silence is so complete that he's afraid he's gone deaf in the night, that the echo of the explosion has finished the damage it started almost two years ago. No traffic, no hum of distant televisions in neighboring apartments, no whirr and clunk from the refrigerator in the kitchen as it deposits ice into the icemaker he seldom uses. He can't even hear the rush of blood in his ears, and that's the worst of all. He shudders and flounders in the sheets, and some distant, sleep-drugged part of his mind whispers that he should be careful not to wake Anna, and then he's sitting upright with his pillow wedged beneath his ass and his heart hammering inside his chest and sweat cool and sour on his skin.
His ears pop at the sudden shift in position, and he can hear again. His breathing is loud and ragged in the dark, and the sheets rustle as he throws them aside. He blinks stupidly at the single, pale leg that lies against the mattress, and his heart stutters in painful confusion.
Two, his mind screams at him. There should be two. And for a moment there are as his mind struggles to correct the wrong it so clearly sees. A swell of relief as five toes become ten, but when he blinks and rubs his eyes to clear them of sleep and nettlesome grit, ten becomes five again, and he remembers. Not all of it, not nearly as much as he needs to according to the shrinks and neurologists who pick at his brain three times a week and leave him exhausted and battered and raw, but enough to know that he is broken, bent and fractured and grossly incomplete. He'd had two legs once, and they had carried him through ballgames and academy training and fishing trips with his old man, but now he has one. The other had been vaporized by the incendiary that had embedded itself just above his left calf. It exists only in his bitter dreams now, and in those twilight moments before reality sweeps in and re-establishes its remorseless grip.
He tries to defy it by wiggling the toes his nerve endings insist are there. The muscles of his thigh and quadricep ripple and contract beneath his skin, and in the empty space where his left leg should be, he feels the curl of phantom toes. But his burning eyes see only the rumple of the empty sheet and the limp fabric of his boxers over the ugly pucker of his stump. The toes on his right foot twitch and curl in sympathy, and a sour, disgusted laugh bubbles out of him. At least parts of him are still with the goddamn program.
They gave him a leg, his self-appointed rescuers. A doctor carried it into his hospital room a few days after he woke up to the beep of a cardiac monitor and the smell of astringent and plastic tubing. He'd mistaken it for a parcel at first, a get-well gift from the department tucked under the doctor's arm like a box of long-stemmed roses. He'd been surprised and absurdly touched that any of them had cared after seventeen months, and then the doctor had pulled up a stool and let the package drop from beneath his arm, and he had understood. It had stood at his bedside like a hunk of marble statuary, bloodless and cadaverous, and bile had risen in his throat.
I want to show you something, John, the doctor had said, a salesman launching into an enthusiastic spiel, and Jon had cut it short by leaning over the bedrail and vomiting onto his shoes.
An orderly had mopped up the vomit, and the doctor had retreated with his tail between his legs and his cherished monstrosity tucked beneath his arm, and he had collapsed against his pillows and sworn that that would be the last he'd see of it. No doctor or shrink would convince him to use it, and he would never accept its unnatural, flabby caress against his skin.
He'd meant it, too, had told them so with fervid conviction when the same doctor had returned a few days later with it in tow, a spurned suitor come for a second sally. But all the determination in the world couldn't regrow his leg or fill the empty hours spent sitting in the narrow bed until his ass went numb and the walls closed in and the monotonous metronome of the cardiac monitors became the shrill, keening whistle of an incoming incendiary. Nor could it numb the pulverizing ache in his chest whenever he looked at the empty chair where he expected his Anna to be.
He had tried a wheelchair, but no sooner had he sat in it than he realized that to stay there would be to put a bullet into his brain or a knife into his carotid. The perspective had been skewed, a drunken Liliputian marooned in a land of giants. Tables were too low and counters were too high and nurses who should have come up to his chest had loomed over him, grave and authoritarian and smugly condescending. What to his wondering, horrified eyes should appear but bellybuttons and assholes instead of noses and mouths, and when he had been fortunate enough to meet someone's gaze, he had found only pity and the twinkling contempt of doctors and therapists who clapped him heartily on the shoulder and told him that reactions like his were perfectly understandable give his recent trauma, and who left him to his confusion and whispered among themselves like furtive grackles of diagnoses beyond his comprehension.
The sense of spatial dislocation the wheelchair had created had broken him in the end. It had been one change too many in a world already warped at the edges. So the doctor and his pet leg had returned on a wave of bad cologne and ill-concealed triumph.
I knew you'd come around, the doctor had announced, and set the leg on the floor with a jaunty slap. Most people do.
He would come to find out what most people like him would do in the fullness of time, how far they would go to pretend that everything was all right when the hours in the therapy room at the rehab hospital dragged like molasses and the mats smelled like piss and shit and desperation. But then he had known only that he couldn't live if he had to spend the rest of his days looking at the world from waist-level, so he had swallowed the impulse to tip over the leg and tell Dr. Sunshine to go fuck himself and had listened to him extol the virtues of life with a synthetic prosthesis.
Integration is the word he remembers most from that obnoxious, interminable lecture. It had been the term that had dogged his every step after that. The exuberant Dr. Sunshine had called it "this model's most desirable feature," and the therapists who'd been appointed to acclimate him to life with a fake leg had repeated it ad nauseam in the early, uneasy days of his therapy, when biological synthesis had failed more often than not and he'd found himself clutching the parallel bars or sprawled pathetically on the mat with the taste of vinyl on his lips and the smell of cheap sneakers in his nostrils.
You need to stop fighting the leg, John, they had clucked reprovingly at him, and shaken their heads in paternal disappointment as they watched him huff and flounder at their feet. Stop fighting and let it help you. Once it fully integrates, it'll be as natural as your own leg.
Christ almighty, he'd wanted to scream the first time he'd slipped his scarred stump into the suction socket, and he'd known that none of them had ever tried one for themselves. If they had, they never would have been able to lie with such earnestness.
If it had looked like a fragment of statuary when it had stood beside his hospital bed, it had felt like corpse flesh when he'd first tugged the suction socket over his stump. Heavy and numb and unresponsive, and the suction cup that cradled his stump had reminded him of the rubbery, puckered maw of a sex doll, toothless and snug and coldly inhuman despite the manufacturer's best attempts at imbuing it with the with the pretense of sultry, libidinous humanity.
Can you imagine being desperate enough to bone one of these things? Pelham had asked once when a raid on an illegal brothel had turned up a cache of them. Man, I'd rather tap my grandmother. He'd prodded the silicone flesh with his index finger before letting it drop into the box with a grimace.
The thought of Pelham stirs nausea in his gut and inspires a flare of pain in his stump, sudden and sharp as Greek fire. Phantom pain, the doctors had called it, just another fabulous door prize handed out when you joined the ranks of the permanently mutilated. It had been bad in the early days, so bad that he'd once screamed at them to open up the fucking stump again because it was filled with glass and fire. They hadn't opened his newly-formed stump, but they had sedated him, and when he'd next come to the world, the doctor had greeted his return to grudging consciousness with a scowl and a tut and a scrip for Alprazolam. It would help the anxiety he was so obviously manifesting, he said. Maybe it had, but it hadn't done a damn thing for the pain, which had throbbed and sizzled along nerve endings that no longer existed.
Sometimes, Pelham's weight would settle suddenly against his shoulder while he watched television or watched his piss stain the toilet water an obscenely cheerful yellow, and the breath would leave him in a ragged rush as he closed his eyes against a dizzying wave of fragmented memories. Pelham' weight on his shoulder and his arm around his neck, intimate and familiar as a lover's embrace. Hot breath in his ear and the trickle of sweat down his cheek. The labored, unsteady scrape of feet over asphalt and broken pavement. The smell of sweat and smoke and fresh blood. The easy rhythm of the MX's stride as it ran point, unencumbered by the weight of the dying.
He wasn't dying, he thinks fiercely. We could've made it out if that damn MX hadn't deserted us.
You sure about that, John? Or is that just what you need to believe? asks a voice inside his head, and it sounds so much like the smug departmental shrink he sees three times a week that he wants to scream. It's bad enough that he has to let that dry, punctilious little prick root around in his head in the cold comfort of daylight in an office with all the charm of a mortician's parlor. He has no right to be here in his bedroom, poking his soft fingers into all his undefended wounds.
Go fuck yourself, he hisses. The voice says nothing, unfazed by his flailing pique. I know what I know, and I know I could've saved him if that chickenshit MX hadn't abandoned us.
But he hadn't saved him. Pelham had been blown to pieces by the same incendiary that had claimed his leg, and when they'd buried him a few days later, the casket had been empty. The explosion and fire had reduced him to so many flecks of bone and ash, and he'd gone home to his wife and kid in a tasteful urn. Or so he had heard through the fecund law-enforcement grapevine that had its lush roots at McQuaid's, the bar he had frequented often before the lights had gone out and the world had changed, and to which he had returned almost as soon as they'd released him from the hospital with a fistful of scrips and follow-up appointments and a plastic bag filled with his watch and his wallet and his scuffed and pitted badge. He'd had no desire to return to the job or face the scrutiny of his fellow cops, but he'd longed for the familiarity of the bar and its muted lighting and smells of yeast and greasy pub food and old, gleaming lacquer. He'd found out what he hadn't wanted to know from the chatty barkeep who'd poured stale sympathy over him like bourbon and sawdust and from the wary appraising eyes of the fellow officers who seldom met his gaze, and then he'd hunkered on the stool and pretended not to feel the curious, contemptuous eyes at his back.
He should see Maria and Marty Jr., he knows; Pelham would be ashamed and disgusted that he hasn't, but each time he thinks of it, his stomach cramps and his head swims and he locks himself in the apartment instead, nursing a bottle of Hennessy and thumbing through pictures of his academy days, when he'd been young and whole and just dumb enough to think he could change the world with a badge and a gun and a heart full of good intentions. Sometimes that's enough, and he falls asleep on the couch with his stump jutting from the edge of the cushion like an accusatory finger. Sometimes it's not, and he ends up in front of the toilet with one knee on the cold tile and his stump hovering in helpless suspension while the whiskey churns and burns its way back up his throat. Those nights he spends in the bathroom, head lolling against the wall and heart thudding dully in his aching chest.
He can't face them now, can't turn up on their doorstep with nothing to offer but belated condolences and useless apologies. He can't sit in their cheerful kitchen where he'd shared so many delicious meals and beg pardon from a woman to whom he had offered no comfort, could not drink the coffee she would doubtlessly set before him and tell her that her husband never came home because he hadn't been smart enough to see the ambush coming or fast enough to flee when it mattered. He couldn't tell her that her world had been shattered because he'd been too damn slow and too damn stupid to come through when it counted.
And what could he tell Marty, who had been all eyes and chubby legs and cawing exuberance when last he'd seen him, two years old and toddling across the living room carpet with a slobbery graham cracker in his chubby fist? Sorry, kid, Daddy never made it home because Uncle John was too blind and too cocky to smell the trap until it was too late. First, he took one in the leg that used to double as a horsie and a rocket and zoom you across the universe, and then, he vaporized like the Sandman when I couldn't carry him fast enough. I was the guy your old man trusted with his life, and he paid for it. Your turn. Sorry he won't be at your ballgames or your soccer matches or be there to give you advice before your first date, but hey, at least I can give you a handful of snapshots of what might have been if I had been a little faster on the retreat.
Christ if he can do it, and oh, God, it hurts to think of Pelham and of Maria and his boy rattling around in that house. It's as vicious and unrelenting as the phantom pain in his severed leg, and it's easier to think of his artificial leg, that unwanted, monstrous partner foisted upon him by the hospital gatekeepers, and so he does. It lies in its charging station, a fleshless, macabre outline in the dark.
It's coming to get you, John, he thinks morosely, and wishes he could hurl it out the bedroom window.
It already got you, the departmental shrink points out with prim, infuriating equanimity. It got you the minute you put it on for the first time. Ownership starts with a touch, Mr. Kennex, and there are few touches more proprietary than the cool embrace of the rubber suction socket against your skin. It was shocking and perversely intimate, like the first time a girl slipped her hand beneath your shirt or into your boxers. It was knowing and lewd, and your flesh crawled even as the oblivious Dr. Sunshine crowed about the fit. You wanted to wrench it off and hurl it across the the room, but the giddy and oh-so-helpful doctor was already reaching for the cybernetic coupling, and so you could only curl your fingers around the edge of the hospital bed and ride it out.
Sometimes you wonder what it would've been like if Pelham had been there when you woke up to a sea of white light and peering, unfamiliar faces and disembodied hands that shone lights into your eyes. If he had been there during your first rehab sessions, when even the simple act of lifting your leg had left you trembling and exhausted and fighting a greasy, slaloming nausea in your gut. The food would have been better, you know that. Maria was an amazing cook, and Pelham would have smuggled it in and kept a lookout while you scarfed it from a Styrofoam container still warm with sizzling grease. The doctors and therapists would have disapproved, but fuck them; they disapproved of most things you did these days. The food would have been a taste of home, and more nutritious than the unappealing, congealed swill that the duty nurse wheeled in every few hours. Baby food at first, as a concession to your wasted stomach, but then they'd upgraded you to allegedly solid food. The difference had been negligible, and no matter what they called it when they plopped it in front of you, it had tasted of soot and blood and metal shavings.
There had been no taste of home, of course. Pelham was so much ash and dust on the wind, and Anna was MIA, an empty chair that twisted his restless, sour stomach whenever he looked at it. His old man was ten years in the ground, and his mother was fighting the demons of her deteriorating mind in a nursing home just over the county line in Alameda. So he had been alone while he'd staggered through the parallel bars and wobbled around rooms and down hallways, his sweaty, breathless progress recorded by nurses in crepe-soled shoes and therapists who squinted and clucked and pretended not to see his scrawny ass through the back of his hospital gown. No one had come to celebrate his pathetic milestones or encourage him through the agony of the blisters that formed on his stump cap and wept blood and fluid into his mesh med sock, and when the rehab hospital had discharged him onto the street with the remnants of his former life in a plastic bag, it had been a taxi that had ferried him to his empty apartment.
And that was the worst of it, wasn't it, John? The empty apartment. You should have expected it given the empty chair at the hospital that was never occupied no matter how hard you wished for it. You must have suspected in the hard, pragmatic section of your brain that made you the consummate cop, but in the heart that you seldom let the world see, you hoped with the desperate, dogged simplicity of a child. Her absence had an explanation, one simple and perhaps ugly. Perhaps it was as simple as her not wanting to see you laid up in a hospital bed, held together by gauze and dissolving sutures. When you thumbed the biolock and pushed open the door, she would be there to enfold you and lead you inside. You would feel her warmth and smell her skin, and with every breath and soft caress, the nightmare would finally begin to recede.
But hopes are as fragile as gossamer, and when you nudged open the door, they shattered in the gloom that greeted you. There was no light, no smell of comfort food simmering on the stove. No soft music drifted from the living room where Anna liked to play her Coltrane and Holiday low and slow and insidious as greenbark smoke. You waited on the threshold with her name on your lips but there were no footfalls on the faux hardwood, nor did the exuberant caw of her pet cockatoo greet your arrival. She never appeared in the hallway, disbelieving and sobbing with relief and reaching out with trembling hands.
Part of you knew then, but you were--and are, if I may be so plain, Mr. Kennex--a stubborn bastard, and so you crept inside and closed the door behind you, and then you went through the rooms one by one like a good officer should, senses straining for any sign of her--perfume on the air or the soft hum of her voice as she swayed in time to the mournful wail of Coltrane's sax with a glass of pink chablis in one lovely, long-fingered hand. Your hand itched for the heft of a piece you no longer carried, and your lips twitched with the impulse to call for backup, but you never said a word as you passed from the vestibule to the kitchen to the living room and into the bedroom. Count, turn, assess. Count turn, assess. Each room was emptier and more desolate than the last, and when you finished sweeping the bathroom and looking for the prodigal love of your life on the metal towel rack above the toilet tank, you returned to the living room in a daze, heart lodged in your belly like a hard, hot stone and manmade leg warning you of imminent failure. The leg God gave you wasn't much steadier, and you turned and collapsed onto the sofa before it could join its cohort in betrayal and send you pitching to the floor like a drunk.
You felt drunk, logy and stupid and queerly numb, as though a doctor had crept up on you unawares and injected you with an anesthetizing paralytic. You couldn't feel your lips, and only the overstuffed couch cushions kept you upright. You lifted a hand, couldn't recall why, and let it drop to your lap again. The leg you no longer had cramped hard enough to curl toes and charlie horse your calf, but you were indifferent to the bolt of anguish that pierced your sole and rose into the coupling of your prosthesis to settle like a diseased, simmering heat. You still don't remember yanking off your leg with a savage twist of your wrist, but you know that you did, because you certainly do remember watching shadows cover it like a shroud when afternoon slid into evening and the sun slipped beneath the horizon. You'd found sunsets beautiful once upon a time, had secretly thought of them as lingering farewell kisses, but then, with the light ebbing from the sky and seeping from the living room and the outline of your discarded leg growing long and thin as a severed spider leg on the imitation Persian area rug Anna had found at an outdoor market, it had reminded you of the cold, smothering rush of frigid lake water as it closed over your head and pulled you, down, down, down with icy, covetous fingers. Your lungs burned, and you eyes stung and watered, and your bladder was a miserable, shrunken knot between legs that couldn't carry you to the bathroom if you asked them to, but no strong hand plunged into the depths to pull you out. You just sat on the couch and blinked at snapshots of a life you couldn't clearly recall.
There were signs, now that you took the time to look for them. The tacky little tchotchkes in which Anna took such great delight were gone, replaced by a fine layer of dust, and her college diploma no longer hung on the wall. The air was thinner and colder and smelled of dust and cobwebs and old bleach. It was the smell of disuse and abandonment and long time gone, the smell of rest homes and vacant warehouses and rehab hospital corridors, of obsolescence and of no further use. You were fairly sure the rest of the house would smell that way, too, but you were in no hurry to find out, and so you turned on the television and bathed in its cold, lusterless light, and when your eyes could no longer stay open, you slept on the floor beside your leg, a wino curled possessively around his dwindling bottle of hooch. You bought some real hooch the next day and drank it while holding court over your deserted kingdom, and it was enough to keep you warm and blur Anna's face into blessed unrecognizability when you tried to look at her pictures. It wasn't enough to muffle her voice on the only message you had left from her, sent the morning of your ill-fated raid, and you listened to it on an endless loop while the booze warmed your blood and blunted the pang in your heart and the throbbing in your dearly-departed leg.
You couldn't stay in the living room forever, and when you finally ventured into the bedroom nearly a week after your inauspicious homecoming, it was as bad as you'd feared. She had made the bed before she'd taken her final leave, and you could only stare at the smooth crease in the downturn of the coverlet and imagine her hands smoothing the fabric with practiced efficiency. The dust that had supplanted her tchotchkes on the shelves in the living room had found its way in there, too, and the face of the bedside clock had gaped at you in bleary, idiot surprise as you forced yourself to cross to the bed and stand beside it
Fancy seeing you here, it seemed to say, and offered up a minute as gesture of belated, fumbling courtesy, a hostess offering a canape to an unexpected guest. You reached out as though to accept, and then you let your hand fall to your side.
The room was wrong, stale and dreary and bare without Anna's lotions and perfumes arrayed on the dresser and her clothes peering from the hamper. Her watch no longer lay on the bedside table where she usually left it when she showered or readied for bed, and there were no ankle socks wadded beside the bed on her side. There were only dust motes swirling in the heavy air and a floor in desperate need of polishing. A bachelor's room, or a widower's. The prospect of sleeping in there made your stomach clench and your spittle go sour, and you turned on your heel and fled to the relative safety of the living room, where you could thwart the silence with the inane jabber of the television in all its Technicolor glory. You told yourself you weren't coming back in, that you'd sleep on the couch forever if it came to it, but when midnight drew down and CNN was covering the story of the Windsor paternity scandal for the fiftieth time, you stoppered your companion for the evening and listed back into the bedroom.
It was easier in the dark. In the absence of light, you couldn't see the spaces where she had been. If you narrowed your bloodshot eyes, you could pretend that her clothes still hung in the closet. You could tell yourself that her favorite watch was there after all, merely hidden behind the touch lamp you were careful not to touch, lest light spill from beneath its shade and show you for a fool. You put your leg in its charging station with a grimace of disgust and hopped to your side. You groped for the edge of the coverlet and threw it back, and when you had climbed into bed and pulled the covers over yourself, you tucked your arms against your side and kept your gaze fixed on the ceiling. If you held yourself perfectly still, you see, you could pretend that you were still whole and hale beneath the sheets, and that Anna was merely working the late shift at the emergency clinic.
It worked, for a while. When you awoke in the night a few hours later, you found that you had rolled to face her side of the bed, and for an instant, you thought you saw her, a warm, pliant shape beneath the sheets. You reached out to draw your fingers over the sweet, smooth flesh of her shoulders, and your dry lips ached with the need to trail open-mouthed kisses along her arms and the knobs of her spine. You stretched for her, content and drowsy and limp with relief, but your fingers met only air and moonlight, and your belly found only the cool press of the sheets. The betrayal was so acute that you gasped. Your outstretched fingers curled into a sudden fist, and then you swore and tore the sheets from the mattress with a savage yank.
Goddammit, you snarled furiously. Godfuckingdammit. You pounded the mattress with your fists and narrowly suppressed the impulse to kick your feet like an impotently-furious toddler on the cusp of a bellowing tantrum. You seized the corner of the mattress and tugged until it yawed upward, and when that yielded neither Anna nor satisfaction for the white-hot fury roiling biliously in your belly, you let it drop and turned your wrath upon the hapless pillows on her side of the bed. You jerked them from their pillowcases and hurled them across the room to strike the blinds with the furtive, rustling skitter of dead leaves. Then you balled the pillowcases in your fists and squeezed until your hands trembled. But it wasn't enough, would never be enough, so you tossed them to the floor and sat up in a puddle of thin cotton and sour sweat, and when your head stopped swimming from the abrupt shift in position, you got out of bed and went to the safe haven of the living room, dragging the bedsheets behind you. You retrieved your bottle of bourbon from between the couch cushions, and then you finished it off to Sportscenter reruns and fell asleep with Anna's last message on loop. Hi, honey. It's early in the morning here. You're right; your father would've loved this place. Hi, honey. It's early in the morning here. You're right...
Your father is who kept you from crawling into the bottle and never coming back out. You couldn't stand the thought of him seeing you that way, a broken-down souse with more regrets than use to the world. He spent his life being an example of what a man should be, busting his hump on endless tours to keep you and your mom fed and clothed and with a roof over your heads. He did it honest, too, no grift, no kickbacks, and no prostituting his principles for the convenience of the suits at city hall. When he wasn't putting in the hours as a cop, he was putting in his hours as a man, doing his best to teach you right from wrong. One of the things he pounded into your head was that a man didn't lie down and die, not while he was still breathing, and not when there was still something he could do for the world.
You knew very well what he would say if he could see you then, drunk off your ass and mooning over a woman who didn't have the guts to stand with you when things went bad. He would be disappointed in you, his only boy gone soft and rotten in self-pity. You could imagine the disgust in his eyes as he took in your dirty clothes and your filthy apartment with its dust and its scattering of old takeout cartons, and you could hear the scorn in his voice as he demanded to know just who the hell you'd become in the years since a bullet had put him under the earth instead of striding over it with the confidence you had always envied and told you to pull your head out of your ass and take a shower before someone mistook you for a goddamned hobo.
So you pulled yourself together. You stopped making trips to the liquor store and made a few more to the noodle shops in Chinatown. You took a shower with water hot enough to scald and enough soap to scrub an entire precinct. You took your clothes to the basement laundry and spent three days scouring your apartment from top to bottom, purging the refrigerator of mummified and moldering food and cleaning out the junk drawer. You allowed yourself a six-pack for the task of going through the handful of possessions Anna had left behind in her flight. You sat on the living room floor, nettled by the urge to cross a leg that wasn't there, and sorted through old photos and scraps of receipt with her handwriting on them. There was a button from her favorite blouse and an orphaned earring, and at the back of the junk drawer, you found the necklace you gave her when you moved in together. You were so surprised to see it there, cast to the back like a bit of broken stylus or a dead battery, that you thought you were hallucinating. It was a possibility, or so the neurosurgeons had said; parts of your brain had atrophied during your long coma, and while most of the damage could be reversed with medication, therapy, and time, there would likely be episodes of confusion while your brain struggled to reinvent itself.
A hallucination, you told yourself as you stared at the glittering circle of gold in your palm. It has to be. Anna would never leave this here. She never took it off, not even when we made love. This is just a misfire, a mistake from my fucked-up head. I'm going to close my eyes, and when I open them again, this will be what it's supposed to be--a replica penny from the old currency system or another button.
But when you closed your eyes and opened them again, it was still a golden necklace with her first initial engraved on the back, cruel in its delicate beauty and precious in its familiarity. You curled your fingers around it and brought it to your lips, and then you rocked back and forth while its gold burned your flesh. There was no more sorting that night, just the cold comfort of the entire six-pack and a bitter yearning for something stronger. You still couldn't bring yourself to sleep in the bed, so you slept on the bedroom floor, clutching the necklace and dreaming of rowing Anna across the lake where you'd taken all those childhood camping trips with your prosthetic. The sun shimmered in her hair, and blood dripped from the ends of your Teflon toes. You woke up with a scream lodged in your throat, and the sight of your leg looming over you like a warning from a displeased god sent you scrambling to the toilet with sour beer in your mouth.
Fear of your father's disapproval was stronger than your muddled terror of remote gods who delivered judgment in the middle of the night, so you pulled yourself together. You brushed your teeth and combed your hair, and tossed the empty cans into the recycler and finished what you started. A lot of your former life joined the empties in the insatiable gullet of the recycler, but you couldn't part with everything. You kept the necklace so improbably discarded. You carried it to your car and hung it from the rearview mirror, and now and then when you're driving down the freeway on your way to yet another useless appointment with some prick who wants to poke your wounds to see how loudly you'll scream, you see the flash of gold on the periphery of your vision and miss Anna so fiercely that your chest hurts, the deep, strangling throb of a heart attack. Most of the time, you can suppress it, breathe through it until it passes and the world rushes in to fill the void, but on the bad days, on the days when I have probed your hurts too deeply with my soft, officious fingers and the ache of it has spread to the truncated bone of your stump, you look at that token of your affections so inexplicably rejected and wish the incendiary had finished its work.
And what, you wonder, would your father say about that?
"Shut up," he says dully, and scrubs his face with his hands. His stump prickles with a ferocious, insistent itch, and he slips his hand beneath the covers to knead the puckered flesh.
It's not Anna's unobserved flight that has stirred him from his slumber. It's the dream, with its half-remembered sights and sounds, the memories he can't quite resolve. Sometimes he thinks he sees them through the murk of hazy recollection, but when he reaches for them with desperate, straining fingers, they dissolve like smoke. The dream is a frequent visitor, and so familiar that he can recite its jumbled, bewildering sequence by rote, and yet its never exactly the same. There are always subtle differences, like those spot the differences pages in the children's books he sees now and then in the windows of antique shops.
Pelham leaning on his shoulder and the smell of blood hot and sticky in his nose. The slap of his boots on the asphalt, so steady and symmetrical as his left leg took those last fateful steps. Dust and cordite in the air, and Pelham' labored breathing in his ear. In the dream, he knows it's futile, knows that he and Pelham will never make it out of this ravaged block. There's too much weight on his shoulder and too much blood soaking the fabric of Pelham' pants. He knows what's waiting for them around the next corner, but his body moves of its own accord, determined to make this terrible appointed round. One foot in front of the other, and then there's no foot at all, only the sudden lightness and the exquisite pain. The moment of perfect, soundless clarity before the blackness had engulfed him when he had lifted his head, blinking dust and the threat of unconsciousness from his eyes and seen...what?
Shadows in the mist, his mind whispers, but that's not quite right. That much he knows. It's also all he knows, and that infuriates him. There's something important in that instant, a detail that could bring everything into focus. It's they key, the cornerstone moment on which the rest of the case is built, as his father would call it. He's pursued it with single-minded tenacity during his sessions with the department shrink, who would much rather obsess over the minutiae of his daily routine and ask him if he's made any progress with "more current interpersonal relationships." Thus far, the pursuit has left him empty-handed and frustrated and the proud bearer of a reputation as a difficult patient, but he doesn't care. He has to know, has to make sense of the horror glimpsed so briefly in the mist, the shifting shadow that had left him mute and grasping at the asphalt with bloody fingers in the instant before awareness had bled from him in time with the blood from his ragged, charred stump.
His heart seizes at the flicker of recollection, and he knows that he's done all the sleeping he's going to do in this bed tonight. He can't stay here, entangled in these fractured memories and surrounded by a life interrupted. He throws back the covers and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His body, expecting more weight, pitches forward, and he bows his spine and yaws wildly to keep from sprawling on the floor in a mass of flailing limbs.
"Son of a bitch," he snarls, and plants his foot firmly on the floor to steady himself.
This wouldn't be a problem if you'd sleep in your leg, says a prosaic voice inside his head.
That'll be a cold day in hell, he thinks stubbornly. It's bad enough I gotta wear it during the day.
You could at least keep it closer to the bed.
He spares the leg in question a gelid glance. It's spare and inhuman in the dark, and filled with the sickly, orange glow of the arc sodium lights on the parking garage across the street. It's diseased, corrupted, and though he knows better, he thinks that if he were to touch it, it would be soft and rotten beneath his fingers, decomposing flesh and overripe fruit.
No, he thinks, and swallows spittle that is suddenly too thick. It stays where it is.
Well, if you're going to get out of here, you're going to have to put it on. You can't go hopping down the street on one leg. Some do-gooder is liable to call you in as a possible 1050 or a drunk and disorderly, and you'll get to spend a fabulous night on the psych ward with the screamers and the padded cell Picassos whose preferred medium is shit. And won't your shrinks and social workers love that little development? I bet that officious little prick, Wentzler, would pop a nut.
His lip curls in disgust, but the voice is right. Going out sans leg is out of the question; even if he doesn't get picked up, he doesn't have the stamina to hop down the streets like some deranged human pogo stick. Besides, the orthopedic surgeons had warned him that stressing his remaining knee and ankle joints was dangerous. If he weren't careful, he could find himself sporting two synthetic joints and a permanent limp. If that happened, then there would be no chance of returning to the job, of picking up the pieces and becoming something more than a sad statistic and a cautionary tale for bright-eyed rookies fresh out of the academy.
So he sighs and pushes the pang of loathing aside and levers himself off the bed. He stands still until his equilibrium settles into the sole of his foot, and then he hops to the charging station. The leg is waiting for him, blank in the face of his helpless revulsion, and it's cool dead weight in his hand when he picks it up and positions it beneath his stump. He's forgotten his mesh med sock, and the rubber is cool and tacky against his skin, but he can't be bothered to fetch one from the dresser drawer. He'll pay for it later, when the skin chafes and smarts and the blisters rise to the surface like plague pox, but he doesn't care. He needs air that's clean and fresh and that doesn't smell of dust and the ghost of Anna's perfume. He needs shadows that don't form the contours of familiar faces.
The leg is numb and leaden on the end of his stump, but it restores his equilibrium, and he dresses in the dark with the facility of long practice. Anna used to tease him about it, muzzy and affectionate as she watched him answer a predawn call to duty. Too bad I can't get you out of those clothes that fast, she'd say as he stepped into his pants and reached for his cellphone with his badge clamped between his tightly-clenched lips, and slip an encircling arm around his chest. He'd always been so tempted to stay, to burrow beneath the covers with her and lose himself in her comforting solidity, but the persistent tug of duty was always stronger, and he left her with a kiss and a murmured admonition to go back to sleep. She always did, and by the time he slipped from the bedroom with his gun in its holster and sleep musty and yellow on his breath, she was dead to the world and snoring softly into the pillow.
She's dead to the world now, sneers a bitter voice inside his head. Well, to your world, anyway.
No service weapon or badge now, just his wallet, which he scoops from the dresser and stuffs into the front pocket of his jeans. He leaves the room before he can feel Anna at his back, watching him in the darkness with small, glittering eyes that are too bright and too silver and too full of a malicious cunning the woman of his memories had never possessed. He crosses the living room without turning on the light and leaves the apartment, closing the door and thumbing the biometric lock behind him.
The sudden illumination from the lights in the hallway makes him squint, and his eyes water at the unexpected brightness. He blinks away the tears, and when his eyes adjust and his vision clears, he sees her. She's small and blonde and watching him with eyes that are too alert for the middle of the night. Her hair is in a haphazard topknot atop head, and she's all but swallowed up by a baggy t-shirt and a pair of grey sweats.
At least she's in her PJs,, he thinks. But why in the hell is she sitting in a chair in the hallway in the middle of the night?
Why are you out here in the middle of the night? needles the ever-curious Dr. Wentzler. It's a question he duly ignores.
"Morning," she says.
It's the middle of the night, he thinks peevishly, but he's too exhausted and fidgety to get into a squabble with a neighbor, so he merely grunts in taciturn acknowledgment and trudges down the hall without a backward glance.
There's no one in the lobby to accost him as he flees the building, and the sidewalk is just as deserted when he steps outside. He's not surprised given the hour, but he is perversely, pathetically grateful. He turns his face skyward and relishes the breeze that dances over his skin. It's choked with the grit and dirt and oily reek of eighteen million people, and it smells like gasoline and rubber and oildrum fires kindled with old shoes and yellowing newspapers, but it's so much cleaner than the dead, oppressive air in his stifling apartment that he opens his mouth and drinks it in. He can breathe out here, can think without wanting to bite his tongue until it bleeds to keep the ghosts at bay.
He crosses the street to the parking garage, ignoring the nettling pinch and rub of the rubber socket against his stump. The garage, too, is deserted in the predawn hours, and silent save for his footfalls as he passes the shadowy rows of parked cars. His car is parked near the end of the row on the first level, neatly wedged between a snub-nosed minivan and a tiny Prius that cowers in the shadow of his Dodge Charger. Four hundred horsepower of sleek, black muscle, and he runs an idle, admiring hand over the hood as he rounds the front to the driver's side.
He keys in the code and opens the door, and then he slips into the driver's seat. The imitation leather is cool and cradling, and he lets his head loll against the headrest. He should close the door and start the car; it's what he came for, after all, but now that he's here with the city at his disposal, he can't think of anywhere to go. San Francisco boasts a bustling nightlife, neon and nightclubs and seedy bars, but even it sleeps, and now it's deep in slumber. McQuaid's sent out last call hours ago, and even the nightclubs have gone dark, their crowded, seething dance floors deserted and radiating stale booze and cheap perfume like the stink of exhaust and oil that rises from the asphalt when the sun sinks below the horizon. He could go to Chinatown, he supposes, could look for a late-night noodle shop or an after-hours nightclub where they sell blow and pussy along with the liquor. Maybe he could find a massage parlor with the light still burning in an upstairs window and a dead-eyed woman to slip her dispassionate hand into his pants.
His cock twitches at the prospect, but his mind recoils. He needs contact, longs for it, but he won't beg it from a woman made willing only by the promise of payment or the fear of reprisal, nor will he buy it from a girl too old for her years who sees him as just another slick on her mindlessly pumping hand. He's told himself a hundred times that he'll go out soon, will install himself at a stool at McQuaid's and nurse a drink and return the hesitant smile of a woman at the end of the bar, but he never does. The thought of exposing his scars to a stranger paralyzes him. What would these smiling, eager women say if they undressed their tantalizing prize, only to find it short a leg? What if they didn't say anything at all, but simply shrank from him with wide eyes and twisting lips and guilty, flushed faces and left him with nothing but unfulfilled need pulsing dumbly between his thighs and shame burning in his belly like an ulcer?
You could leave it on, suggests the voice of practicality. They'd never know if you didn't say anything.
No, they wouldn't, but he would, when those long, spiderwalking fingers wearied of toying with the buttons of his shirt and slithered across his crotch to caress his thigh and knee. The delicate, heady sensation would die abruptly just past mid-thigh, replaced by a distant sense of pressure, as if his leg had been injected with lidocaine. The synthetic skin would lie inert beneath her industrious fingertips, and the projected image of a healthy limb would waver as the track of her fingers disrupted the microtransmitters. If he were lucky, she wouldn't notice, too intent upon seduction, but maybe she would. Maybe she would see the illusion dissolve from the corner of her eye as she mouthed his collarbone, or maybe her fingers would probe too deeply and find the hard, molded silicone beneath. She would freeze at the sudden, alien intrusion, and the illusion and fragile hope of the moment would be shattered, or worse yet, turned into a pity fuck, noisome and awkward and humiliating. There would be no amiable afterglow and no cordial, morning-after parting after polite offers of coffee or a quick breakfast Just apologies muttered to the floor and clothes gathered while he watched and pretended the obvious buyer's remorse didn't cut him to the quick.
The thought snuffs his nascent arousal. He should be grateful given his lack of opportunities for relief, but the hollowness it leaves in its wake inspires a helpless fury. He wants to kick and to snap and to bite, to pummel the world with his fists until the knot of aimless, impotent rage loosens inside his chest, but he suspects its wellspring is bottomless and eternal and all he'll have to show for it is bloody, raw knuckles and a damaged car, so he leaves his hands on his lap and stares vacantly through the windshield.
Anna's necklace glitters as it dangles from the rearview mirror. It's a point of light in the sullen darkness, and it stirs fragments of memory that are sweet as honey and galling as lye. The man who'd bought that necklace had been an optimist beneath his veneer of craggy cynicism, had believed in happily ever after and entertained visions of bridal lace and white picket fences and a pair of rugrats that he'd take to the lake in Minnesota where his old man had taught him to fish. He'd keep the Charger, of course--you didn't just trade in that many horses, and besides, he needed the speed for the job--but there'd be a minivan like the one to his left, and try as they might to keep it clean, it would sport finger smudges on the windows and ice cream smears on the sensible, vinyl upholstery and accumulate a drift of band-aids and crumpled napkins and mummified french fries. There'd be a bigger place, a cozy house in the suburbs with three beds and two baths and a dog that left fur everywhere. The kids would go to good schools and play sports, and twice a year, they'd go to PTA meetings and drink watery punch and nibble stale cookies while they listened to a teacher praise their daughter for her excellence in math and admonish their son for cracking jokes during history. Braces and field trips and oh, my God, Daddy, I have to go to prom, you don't understand. Retirement and a full pension at fifty, and then he and Anna would send the kids off to college and buy that dream house in Cabo.
But those dreams had ended up in the back of the junk drawer, and the man who looks at that precious jot of gold wishes he had left them there. The dust and darkness would have preserved them, kept them whole and vital and away from his jaundiced eyes and the cold, cruel light of reality. He and the Anna of Might Have Been might've raised those kids after all and attended high school graduation in an auditorium that smelled faintly of nickel-cadmium batteries and damp dishtowels, and they might have found their way to a Cabo where the ocean outside their bedroom window sounded like the hum of the food recycler under the kitchen sink. They might have lived and died without ever knowing that they were so much dreaming dust collected on a disk of gold, but then his blundering fingers had dragged them into the light and hung them on the rearview mirror like corpses left to rot on a gibbet.
You shouldn't be surprised that things turned out this way, says a dour voice inside his head. You've seen enough to know that that precious happy ending is as rare as winning the lottery. You saw it as a kid, when your dad would come off a shift with dust on his boots and flecks of plaster in his hair and dark stains on his Kevlar. Those were the days when he ruffled your hair with an absent stroke of his hand and poured himself a shot before he unsnapped his holster and unlaced his boots and stumped into the kitchen to kiss your mother hello. Those were the days he ate without talking, grimly shoveling the contents of his plate into his mouth and washing them down with tea spiked with bourbon. Those were the nights he listened to music too loud and sent you to bed early and he and your mother talked for half the night, the lulling drone of their voices drifting up through the floor in an atonal, disjointed lullaby. Those were the bad days, and they outnumbered the good ones by a wide margin.
Those were the nights when the shield wasn't enough, when the bad guys won despite his best efforts. Those were the nights rescue came too late and he kicked down the door to find dead grandmothers and teenage hookers with their eyes swollen shut and their broken teeth lodged in throats ringed by fingerprint bruises. Those were the nights little girls who dreamed of Santa Claus found the bogeyman instead, a monster of teeth and claws and leering intent who carried them away from sugarplums and Christmas joy and left them in reservoirs and filthy basements with their holiday best over their battered faces and blood drying in their golden curls. Those were the nights mothers screamed their anguish into his face and fathers split their knuckles on his lips for getting there too late to save their little princess.
Even if you didn't know it then, protected as you were by your father's silence and the insulated innocence of childhood, you should have known better by the time you took up your own beat fresh out of the academy. How many hookers with battered faces and missing teeth did you see that first month, sagging against lampposts with blood running from their flattened noses while your training partner frisked them for needles and knives and ampoules of dope? How many old ladies did you scrape off the pavement after some punk wrenched their wattled old arms out of the socket in pursuit of their wallet? How many did you pack off to the county hospital to stew for hours in the crowded hall because most of the diagnostic holograms were on the fritz and the hospital gave priority to those who could pay? How many domestic disputes did you respond to, only to find that like your father before you, you'd arrived too late to do anything but secure the scene and corral the screaming kids and pray they hadn't seen anything that the mercy of time couldn't erase? How many dead hobos have you hauled to the coroner for identification, only to find out that they were a homeless vet who'd lost his job in the collapse of '08, lost his veterans' benefits in '13, and spent the next fifteen years sleeping in junked-out cars on the waterfront and scrounging food from the dumpsters behind the noodle shops in Chinatown? How many kids have you seen scuttling in the alleys and underpasses like rats, scrawny and sharp-eyed and feral, smoking filched cigarettes and playing penny-ante crap games in the dirt?
Too many on all counts, more than should be in a fair world, and plenty enough to know that the life you wished for and the life you ended up with were often two different things. You had no right to be surprised when you woke from your long and dreamless sleep to find that your resurrection had come, not from true love's kiss, but from a cerebral defibrillator religiously applied by an optimistic and dogged young doctor, but you were. You were surprised and hurt and angry, plain old country pissed, as your father would have said with a note of bemused admiration, shaking his head and exhaling frigid winter air like smoke as he reached for another minnow from the bait cup between his feet. Your father was gone, and so was Pelham, but you had other friends on the force, or at least you thought you did. They should have been there, shuffling into your hospital room with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their pants and offering stale but well-meant platitudes and assurances that you looked good for a guy who'd been taking an upgraded dirt nap for almost two years. There should have been cards on your tray table and cheesy balloons hovering sedately above the staid I.V. poles that held bags of electrolytes and saline solution and nutrient paste. There should have been phone calls from people too busy or too cowardly to pay a call in person. There should have been an exhausted, relieved Anna to hold your hand and kiss the side of your pasty, flaking mouth.
None of that ever happened. The only people who passed through your door were doctors and nurses and therapists and perky candy stripers who smelled like nail polish and hand lotion and peppermint lipgloss, and who asked how you were doing today without ever listening to the answer. The tray table remained bare save for food indistinguishable from the tray that carried it. The tangle of I.V. lines never gained any more colorful companions, and the phone never rang with greetings from afar.
And Anna's chair remained forever empty.
It was all wrong. It was cold and sterile and often so lonely that it stole your breath, and goddammit, it wasn't fair. You didn't expect a medal or a ticker-tape parade, but after you'd left your leg and the ruin of your best friend on the smoking, cratered asphalt and lost two years of your life to a smothering, dreamless darkness, you thought it wasn't too much to hope for to have the touch of a familiar hand to lead you out of the fog and help you figure out just where in the hell you were supposed to go from here. Even the old geezer across the hall had someone to stroke his hair and read passages from his favorite book while he slipped from the world one rattling, phlegmatic wheeze at a time, but you were alone, a resource broken and discarded by a city that no longer needed you and replaced by an MX who would never need sick leave or a pension or time in a rehab hospital to make peace with a balky synthetic leg that creaked and wobbled when it walked.
Maybe it's your parents' fault, that wounded, childish hope. There were the bad nights, yes, but there were also a lot of good ones, too, and good mornings, when you came downstairs to the smell of bacon and eggs frying on the stove and the aroma of the coffee your father took straight and black as it would come. There were family breakfasts around the table, with Saturday sunshine streaming through the window and your mother humming happily as she slid flapjacks onto waiting plates. There were baseball and football games on the big screen in the living room and the rare and precious family barbecues uninterrupted by a stranger's desperate anguish. Burgers and wings on the grill and redolent with the spices in your father's secret rub. Paper plates wilting in your buttressing fingers and hot grease on your chin. The shade of an oak tree overhead and the tickle of grass on your bare feet. Music crackling from your father's antique radio and the family collie panhandling for juicy tidbits and snuffling hopefully at coolers and empty baskets. Your father coming up behind your mother as she fussed over dishing out slices of cobbler and pressing sly kisses to the back of her neck while the dog danced and yipped at their feet. Date nights to which you were not invited and from which they returned giggling and whispering amongst themselves like giddy teenagers. Fishing trips with just you and him and a couple of poles. It wasn't perfect, and there were times when the ties that bound cut and chafed and strangled, but it was family, and it was what you wanted for yourself when the time came.
Maybe I'm giving your parents too much credit, or too much blame. Maybe it's your own arrogance. You wouldn't be the first human being to assume the rules didn't apply to you. In fact, it's a hallmark of the human condition. Bad things happen to other people, to the stupid and reckless and petty. You've seen the bloody, ugly wreckage of a thousand lives, and you can guarantee that none of them ever saw it coming. They never saw themselves the star of a squalid little show with their skull caved in and their brains drying on the refrigerator door, nor did they imagine themselves a widower at twenty-seven with a three-year-old clinging to one numb leg. If someone had warned you that you'd wind up facedown on the street with your mouth full of grit and blood and your severed leg twitching feebly a few yards away, you would have laughed in their face, and if it had happened to another cop, you would have contributed to the inevitable fund when they passed the hat and thanked the heavens you otherwise so blithely ignored that it wasn't you. You would have been the one too ashamed at your guilty relief to put in a duty visit at your comrade's bedside and too busy to send a card for his tray table.
Maybe you thought it was a perk of the job, like playing the hero to a busload of awestruck kids on a school field trip or taking your pick of the eager badge bunnies who crowded McQuaid's most nights of the week. Maybe you thought that virtue was its own reward, that it would shield you from the bullets and the bombs and the evil to which you exposed yourself every day. After all, the good guys never died in the movies, and Superman never went down to a drugged-out mugger with a Saturday night special. Being willing to die for someone else meant you'd only have to do it when it mattered. You'd go down in a blaze of glory and live on forever as an honored memory, not bleed to death facedown on the asphalt and be forgotten by the time they squeegeed your blood off the sidewalk. The good guys won, even when they lost.
He snorts and absently kneads the coupling of his prosthesis. "Look where that little article of faith got me," he croaks. "Shit."
He sighs and rubs his face with his hands, and then he gets out of the car and slams door behind him. There is nowhere to go, and even if there were, the idea has lost its magic. He codes the lock and trudges out of the parking lot, dimly aware of the low, ugly throb in his stump, the penance for his failure to put on the befrigged med sock. There'll be a bruise there in the morning to complement the blisters his midnight jaunt has surely earned him. If he's lucky, a liberal application of ointment will keep it from getting worse; if he's not, he can look forward to sitting on an examination table with butcher paper stuck to his ass while some snot-nosed intern peers at his weeping sores and clucks that he should have taken better care, didn't anyone explain this to him in post-op?
Stop whining. You're the one who didn't put on your med sock, says the voice of unsympathetic practicality. You knew what you were getting into when you hobbled off without it.
He can't argue with the truth, and so he hunches his shoulders against it and trudges inside. The lobby is still deserted, though he can hear the dreamy murmur of the television in the maintenance room at the end of the hall. The rest of the building might be deep in dreams of sex and sun and lives lived only behind shuttered eyelids, but the cleaning crew are up and about, doubtlessly slurping scorched coffee from flimsy Styrofoam cups and inhaling the steam to cleanse their nostrils of the cloying, piquant stink of Clorox and Windex and the graphite and sawdust of cheap paper towels. He envies them their purpose as he heads for his apartment. The protests from his stump are more urgent now and he curses under his breath as he limps toward the door.
She's still there, blonde head bent to the book on her lap. She looks up at the sound of his uneven, calipering approach. Her lips thin and her eyes narrow, and he can see the wheels turning in her head as she assesses him.
Ten bucks says she thinks I'm a drunk who just shit his pants. He offers a tight smile that clearly does nothing to ease that impression, a nauseated drunk feigning sobriety with pitiful earnestness.
"Morning," she says again, and watches him from behind long, thin eyelashes.
He offers another noncommittal grunt and turns to open the door, and his prosthesis chooses that moment to suffer neural synthesis failure. Synthesis failed, it announces to the muffling fabric of his pants with toneless indifference, and the coupling releases with an efficient click. His leg wobbles and then buckles altogether, and he pitches forward to slam against his front door.
"Fuck," he snarls, and gropes blindly for the hinge, face pressed against the door. There's silence behind him, but he can feel her gaze in the small of his back. Stop gawking, you bitch, he thinks savagely as his prosthesis yaws beneath him and bulges grotesquely outward, a compound fracture grinding beneath restraining flesh.
"Are you all right?" she asks softly.
He twists painfully at the torso, one elbow braced against the door to keep himself from kissing it. He expects to see her at his hip, a vulture come for a clearer view of the carnage, but he's surprised to find that she hasn't moved. She's still in her chair with her book propped on her lap and her fingers curled loosely over the tops of the pages. Her delicate eyebrows arch into her hairline, and her eyes are alert inside her face, but there is neither pity nor vulpine curiosity in her expression.
Do I look all right to you? he wants to shout, but he can only manage a terse, "I'm fine." His body lists to the left, and he knows that if he doesn't fix his leg soon, he's going to wind up on the floor with his dignity in tatters. His fingers claw and scrabble over the abetting fabric of his jeans and slip off the dislodged coupling, which protrudes from the joint like herniated disk. "C'mon, you stupid-," he seethes. The shoulder of his bracing arm begins to cramp, and the prodigal prosthesis shies from his grasp.
"Is there anything that I can do?"
"No!" It's loud and far harsher than he intended, and he'd apologize if he weren't so busy trying not to crash to the floor like a feeble invalid. He rises on his toes to lift his weight from the prosthesis and shifts it to the right. The coupling hesitates for a moment, and then it slides home. The hectoring voice of the systems monitor falls mercifully silent, and he sags bonelessly against the door in exhausted relief.
He takes a few tentative steps to ensure the link will hold, and then he turns to face the woman. She's no longer looking at him. Her head is bent to her book again, and her fingers curl languidly over the tops of the pages. It's a calm and unruffled posture, but there is a tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there when he'd taken an errant step and lurched gracelessly into an out-of-body experience.
Way to makes friends and get back out there, he chides himself.
He opens his mouth, but he doesn't speak. Instead, he studies her with a curious, critical eye. She's smaller than he thought on first, preoccupied pass, with narrow shoulders and slender hands. As he watches, she turns the page of her book, and her fingers tremble and splay as they move to their purpose. It's uncoordinated and blundering, and his brow furrows in confusion.
Maybe she's drunk, he muses, but dismisses idea. Her eyes had been clear when she'd met his gaze, and there'd been no telltale slur when she'd spoken.
His gaze sweeps over her shoulders and past the book to her knees, and there comprehension dawns. It's not a kitchen chair she's sitting in; it's a wheelchair. The wheels are translucent and narrow and close to the equally-transparent body, though the bottoms flare outward for stability. The chair is all but invisible beneath its occupant and the billow of her baggy sweatpants over the seat, and yet he can't stop staring. It's rude, not to mention hypocritical in the face of his own previous pique, but he can't help it. He hasn't seen a wheelchair outside of a hospital in years. Most disabilities these days are treated with neurosurgery and microchip implantation or the use of exoskeletons. Those with injuries or impairments too severe for standard treatment opt for holographic projections and the assistance of mech aides. Wheelchairs are stopgap measures at best, and even the ones in the clinics and hospitals are mostly squealing, squeaking, shabby relics of a bygone era, pressed into service for want of a better alternative. After his brief, hellish sojourn in one at the hospital, he knows why.
Good job, Kennex. Screaming at a woman too damn broke for modern medical care, sneers the voice of recrimination inside his head.
"Listen," he offers hesitantly to the top of her head, "I'm sorry."
"It's fine." She doesn't look up. A long, pale finger drifts out to turn the page.
Made a friend, I see, the voice needles.
He ignores it and fights the urge to fidget. He's mortified, and all he wants to do is turn and flee into the familiar solitude of his apartment, but he clears he throat and says, "No, it isn't. You were just trying to help, and I shouldn't have snapped like that."
She finally tears her gaze from her book. "You didn't want help. No crime in that. Besides, it's not like I could hold you up." Her expression is inscrutable, but her eyes are shrewd inside her face, a fox assessing the encroaching shadow for signs of threat.
"Still, I'm sorry for being a jackass."
"Would you still be apologizing if I didn't have wheels under my ass?" she asks baldly, and closes her book around a marking finger. There is no unsteadiness now, just unblinking scrutiny.
The question is unexpected in its candor, and he blinks at her in surprise. "No," he retorts in wounded indignation. "No. My mother just raised me not to be a dick. Or a coward who won't apologize for it when he is."
It's her turn to blink. "Fair enough," she concedes, and shifts in her chair. Then her face softens. "Like I said, there's no reason to apologize. Sometimes keeping your ass out of public view trumps the social niceties." She shifts again and offers him a lopsided grin.
His own lips twitch. "That's one way of putting it." He wipes his palms on the sides of his pants. "If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing out here at this time of night?"
"I could ask you the same thing."
He rolls his shoulders in an awkward shrug. "Couldn't sleep."
"Been there."
I bet you have. Try as he might, his gaze drops to those unexpected wheels, and when he looks up again, the soft, uneven grin has become wry and knowing.
"It's not-I don't mean-" he stammers lamely. She stares at him with careful, blank politeness, so he lapses into floundering silence. "Listen," he says because he's never known when to let well enough alone, "I'm just a jackass who's had a shit day--a shit couple of weeks, actually--and I've forgotten what it's like to behave like a normal human being. I'm just going to turn around and go into my apartment before I dig myself in deeper. I'm sorry you happened to be out here when I couldn't stand to be in my apartment for one more second."
His hand is on the door when she says, "No rule that says we can't share the hallway. No rule that says we have to talk, either." And with that, she returns to her book.
He lets out a soundless huff, nonplussed. The conversation here is clearly over, and yet, he can't bring himself to open the door and let the loneliness inside swallow him up. He sidles and idly swings his arms for the sake of motion. His nameless companion's only response is to thrust out a socked foot and curl her toes.
"I don't suppose you have more of those?" He gestures at her book.
She raises her head slowly, a turtle emerging from its shell. "I might. What do you read?"
"I usually don't, but it beats standing here like an idiot." And I don't want to go home yet.
She snorts. "You're honest, I guess." He's not sure that's a compliment. She closes her book and lays it across her lap, and then she peers at him, her lips puckered in a contemplative moue. "Come with me," she says at last, and whirls her chair so swiftly and sharply that he steps back to avoid being clipped by her front wheels.
She presses her thumb to the bioscanner on her front door, and the lock opens with the metallic click of a retreating tumbler. She nudges the door open with a tap of her footplates and rolls into a living room illuminated by warm, yellow light. "Come in," she calls over her shoulder. "I have a dog, but he won't do much as long as you don't make any sudden moves."
He follows her inside and closes the door, and then he stands uncertainly just inside the threshold. His nameless host has rolled into the kitchen, wheels gliding effortlessly over the gleaming hardwood floor. She swings around the breakfast bar with the ease of long practice and heads for the refrigerator. "Would you like something to drink? I have tea, water, some juice. I wouldn't trust the milk."
"No, thanks." He rocks back on the balls of his feet, and the capricious coupling gives an ominous creak. "You wouldn't happen to have anything stronger?"
"I do. It's normally for emergencies only. Is this an emergency?"
"I'll let you decide," he answers. He's not about to ruin this sudden change of attitude by being a demanding guest.
That earns him another long, speculative look, heavy-lidded and unhurried. "There's a small alcove to your left." She points a bony finger over his shoulder. "There's scotch, and there's tequila, depending on the severity of your emergency. If you don't want to drink it straight from the bottle--and I'd prefer that you didn't--you'll need a glass."
"Glass, please." He turns to his left and sees the small alcove she'd indicated. It's little more than a side table shoved into a convenient cranny, but it has the promised bottles. He wishes there were bourbon, too, but beggars can't be choosers, and he's far past pride. He picks up the bottle of scotch.
"Ice?" she calls from behind the breakfast nook.
He shakes his head. "Straight's fine."
She sets a tumbler on the edge of the breakfast nook. "Help yourself."
Before he can move to accept her invitation, he hears the amiable clack of claws on hardwood, and a moment later, a German Shepherd emerges from the bedroom. It looks at his mistress with an expression of soppy adoration. Its tail begins to swing like a metronome, and its tongue lolls jauntily from the side of its mouth. At the sight of him, however, the dog freezes. Its tail droops and flattens, and its eyes grow hard and alert. It licks its muzzle, a quick, nervous flick of tongue, and a low growl rumbles inside its chest.
"Lincoln, stop that," she commands. "Besides, you're a day late and a dollar short. If he was going to kill me," he'd've done it by now." She turns her gaze on him. "You're not going to kill me, are you?
"If I was, it's not like I'd tell you," he points out.
She shrugs in concession of the point. "If you do, I can go with the knowledge that my faithful dog tried to take a chunk out of your ass after he finished licking his."
He utters a bark of startled laughter.
"And if you do, for God's sake, make it quick. At least my death should be painless."
The laughter dies abruptly, a bubble pierced by a needle, and he goes to the breakfast nook before Lincoln changes his mind and lunges despite his mistress' command. The dog follows close at his heels, claws clacking and tags jingling. It passes him as he reaches for the empty tumbler, its shoulder grazing his ass as he lopes to his person. The tongue reappears, and he looks at her with mingled affection and hope.
She reaches out to scratch behind an ear. "Nice try, but no jerky for you, you loaf. Maybe after your walk." At the mention of a walk, Lincoln prances happily and spins in an exuberant circle. "Not yet. It's too damn early. Sunrise, bud."
Lincoln deflates. With a last, doleful look at his merciless mistress, he slinks into the kitchen and settles himself beneath the table. He rests his head on his paws and his eyes on him, and John suppresses the nervous impulse to wave.
"I've seen less bathos from an Oscar grab," she says drily. She pivots to the counter behind her and pulls a mug from the rack mounted on the backsplash. She slides it along the counter until it reaches the coffee maker and pours herself a cup. "Books are over there," she says, and jerks her head in the direction of the far living room wall, where a teak bookcase holds four neat rows of books.
He unscrews the bottle of scotch and pours himself a fingerful, and then he replaces the cap and sets the bottle on the nook. In truth, the tumbler is two fingers short for his liking, but he's got a date with the shrink at ten and one with the rehab goblin at one. Wentzler would have a field day if he showed up with booze on his breath, and the prospect of heaving his guts onto his shoes while the personal trainer looms over him like a pathologically-perky golem and eyed him with contemptuous pity holds no appeal. So a single finger it is. He takes a sip and savors the cool, slow burn on his tongue and down his throat.
He's not much of a reader, truth be told. When he was a kid, he'd been more interested in sports and cars and girls, and after that, he'd been too busy chasing perps and hunching blearily over wiretaps to read much beyond case files and incident reports and rap sheets. He'd listened to an audiobook or two on the long drive to the lake with his old man, but he remembers them now only as pleasant white noise in the dim recesses of his memory.
He wanders over to the shelves anyway, for the sake of politeness and the want of anything else to do. The contents are alphabetized by author, he realizes after a cursory glance. Mysteries and histories, mostly, with a smattering of classic literature--Hemingway and Steinbeck and Waugh. The spines are unbroken, almost pristine, and the cynical, ever-present cop in his brain wonders if she's read any of them. He takes a sip of scotch and reaches out to skim the tip of his index finger over the tops of the book. No dust, only the hiss of rifled paper. "Quite the collection," he muses. "You don't see many paper books these days."
"I like the feel of them," she says, and he nearly jumps out of his skin because she's right there, sitting placidly at his hip.
Jesus, she's like a cat in that thing. He nods and takes a sip to steady his nerves.
"Besides, I've got thousands more on my tablet. These are for when I'm tired of staring at a damn screen. They give me a headache if I look for too long." She sips her coffee, the steaming mug cradled in both hands.
He grunts in sympathy. "Like a hot poker behind the eyes."
"Bingo." She tips her mug in agreement and takes another slow, slurping sip. "Having trouble choosing?"
He shuffles awkwardly and scratches the tip of his nose. "Actually, I'm not much of a reader."
She greets this pronouncement with a marked lack of surprise. "Well, you asked for a book, so a book you shall have." She sets her coffee cup into a rigid, black cup holder that he's sure wasn't there the last time he looked and rolls closer to the shelf. "Let's see," she murmurs more to herself than to him. She reaches out as though to select a book, drops her hand, then raises it again. Suddenly, she leans forward so far that her breasts press against her knees and her ass rises from the seat. Fingers and spine stretch, and he's sure she's going to faceplant on the floor. He wants to help, to forestall the disaster unfurling before him, but he's not sure how. His free hands shoots out to catch her fall and then hovers stupidly above her oblivious head as she peruses the lowermost shelf in search of her quarry.
It's still hovering when she heaves herself upright, flushed and triumphant and with her hair in her face like a golden veil.
"This ought to do," she announces, and holds out the book clutched in one wavering, spasmodic hand.
He releases a breath unwittingly held and lowers his hand to accept the proffered volume. How to Win Friends and Influence People. He lets out a strangled titter.
"You all right?" she asks, guileless and curious in her chair.
"Yeah," he manages. "Yeah." I just thought you were about to crack your skull on the living room floor.
"Even if you don't really read it, it might distract you from the noise in your head."
"Thanks." He sidles to and fro and turns the book in his hands.
"There's coffee in the pot, cream and sugar in the sideboard." She spins and rolls toward the kitchen.
"Hey," he calls, and she stops and pivots, hands braced on the handrims of her chair. "Why did you let me in?"
She regards him with that cool, assessing gaze. "I don't know," she says at last. "You looked like you needed a place to go."
What could he say to that? "I'm John."
"I'm Rhea." Her lips curl in the faintest hint of a smile, and with that she turns and glides to the kitchen table, where she sets her coffee and promptly resumes her long-interrupted book.
He takes his own book and joins her at the table. He looks at pages he doesn't read, and she never says a word, and that suits him just fine. It's quiet and unfamiliar and not his place, and that's okay, too, more than fine, in fact, because there are no ghosts to crowd him out of his own head. He turns the pages of his borrowed book and savors the rare and precious silence.
The waiting room smells like new industrial carpet and plastic flowers. It's smelled like that for as long as he's been coming here, and it makes his nose prickle and his eyes narrow. So does the cheerless, milkglass light that shines from the wall scones and recessed lights tucked discreetly into the ceiling. If he didn't know better, he'd say it was another consequence of a morning-after hangover, but the only taste on his tongue this afternoon is that of coffee so dark and bitter that it's almost scorched. He'd considered stopping off at a favored taco truck for a quick lunch, but the thought of letting the doctor rummage in his damaged head had made his stomach roil greasily, and so he'd stood at his breakfast nook and quaffed scalding coffee and called it good. Maybe when today's little reluctant tete a tete was over, he'd ease the gnawing in his gut with some sushi or a platter of greasy bar food at McQuaid's and wash it down with a beer or a shot of bourbon, the good stuff Johnny kept under the counter for special occasions or dire emergencies.
Like when eleven cops get blown to shit on a botched raid? suggests a needling voice at the base of his brain. I bet good old Johnny would've lined 'em up on the bar for you then, one for every guy who fell in the line in a hail of bullets and a haze of dust. Eleven little soldier boys all in a row, with space for one more. For the one who got away.
He can see the image clearly, and bile rises from his clenching stomach. It's so vivid that for a moment, he can smell the wood polish that wafts from the gleaming, well-oiled bar. Normally, the familiar scent would be a welcome respite from the plastic-and-solvent stink of this dismal waiting room, but now it's a nauseating torment, and he clutches the arms of his chair and breathes through his mouth until it passes. When he's sure he's not going to spew on his shoes, he wills his fingers to relinquish their white-knuckled grip and casts a furtive, sidelong glance at the receptionist who presides over the room from her desk. Fortunately for him, her eyes are fixed on her terminal, and behind her headset, lips the color of sour wine move with words he cannot hear. If she had seen him just now, she would have carried that juicy little tidbit to the ever-open ears of the good doctor, and he could have looked forward to an hour of having that wound poked and prodded by his soft, probing fingers.
Fuck you and fuck off, he snarls, and it's a near thing that he doesn't spit it aloud, and wouldn't that have been fun?
No can do, I'm afraid, the voice answers with false, saccharine sympathy. The truth can't be chased away by booze and a clenched fist. You can't get rid of me that easily. If you could, you wouldn't be here.
He shifts in his chair and resists the mounting urge to dig his fingers into the armrests again. He doesn't want to be here. If he thought he could get away with it, he'd get up and walk out the door and never come back, but he doesn't know what to be if not a cop, and so he has no choice but to sit in the chair and swallow the bile and wait for the reception to call his name and press the button that unlocks the door to the doctor's inner sanctum. The stringent smell of industrial carpet has grown stronger and sharpened into the acrid stink of smoke and burning rubber, and he counts to ten and prays for it to dissipate. Eventually, it does, and he sends up a silent prayer of thanks to the stuttering, bewildered control center of his brain and pretends to be interested in the endless parade of ads playing on the opposite wall.
There's a thin, bald man sitting in the chair a few seats over, scrolling nervously through the magazines on offer on the public com pad that serves as reading material, and he idly wonders what he's there for. Most of Dr. Wentzler's patients are on the job--cops or firemen or soldier boys who came back from the war with their minds in fraying tatters--but not all. The occasional Joe or Jane Average slips in, a lamb among battle-scarred wolves. Maybe this guy is one of those, an accountant who can't figure out why he's suddenly seized with the urge to hit the gas and ram his Audi into the East Wall at one-twenty, or a lawyer trying to figure out why he popped a hardon at his psychotic client's lingering and loving description of dismembering a prostitute and fucking the limbless torso before dumping it into the sewer.
What demons are rattling around in your head, buddy? he wonders as the man turns the page with an impatient jab and flick of his finger. The subdued light gleams on his smooth, glossy head.
As though drawn by his thoughts, the man looks up to reveal a haggard, narrow, rodentine face. His eyes are wide and exhausted inside bruised, puffy sockets that hint of sleepless nights and empty spaces, and oh, doesn't he know about those? The familiarity unnerves him, and he would drop his gaze or shift it to the more appealing curve of the receptionist's neck as she bends her head to a phone call, but a lifetime of training has taught him that to drop his gaze is to submit, to expose yourself to the danger of a blow or a lethal bullet, and so he forces himself to hold it. The man blinks and purses dry, cracked lips as though to speak, but he thinks better of it, and the last thing John sees before the stranger's head droops is the thin, flaking crust of dried saliva and dead skin in the corners of his mouth. Over the man's hunched, vulpine head, the ads for makeup and prophylactic sprays guaranteed to enhance sexual pleasure give way to a pair of giddily-cheerful talking heads who promise the dish on the latest celebrity scandals.
All the training and vigilance in the world didn't keep you from getting your leg blown off or getting eleven good men killed, points out the voice inside his head with needling, poisonous pragmatism. Your eyes were wide open when that MX left you and Pelham behind that car, and they were just as wide when that incendiary round slammed into your calf and turned your partner into hamburger and everything below your thigh into a wet, red memory. They might've done you some good if they'd been in the back of your head, but all the training in the world can't thwart the limitations of human biology. The hunk of silicone you're sporting should tell you that.
And hey, I'm sure the fact that you kept your head up until the world went black was a great consolation to the families the guys on your squad left behind. I'm sure that when the kindly funeral director in a tailored grey suit murmured his condolences and handed them a box with their loved one's ashes, their first thought was of gratitude for the training and unstinting vigilance of John Kennex.
He thinks of Maria Pelham, small and spare and swallowed up by her mourning clothes and widow's veil, and of Marty, Jr., a small, restless toddler squirming on her lap and tugging at the thin lace with a curious, chubby, saliva-slicked fist, and his stomach, which had been temporarily numbed by the litany of ads and mindless patter from the TV hosts, twists.
There's a muffled click from the door to his right, and it swings open to reveal the man of the hour and a tall, slender woman with lank, blonde hair and hollow blue eyes and wrists so sharp his lips twitch in an unconscious, sympathetic wince. She spares him a listless glance as she passes, and the pang of recognition comes again, fierce and unwanted and as stupefying as the blinding glint of sunlight on twisted metal.
She's haunted, too. I bet she dreams, and not just at night. I bet there's times she's standing in line at the grocery store or the coffee shop, and the next thing she knows, she's knee-deep in her worst nightmare, holding the thing that used to be her bag of bread and nonfat milk but has somehow become something infinitely more terrible, something she never wanted to see again. I bet she has to bite the inside of her cheek until it bleeds to keep from screaming. And I bet that when she blinks and the world snaps back into focus like a photograph thrust into her bewildered line of sight, everyone else in line is staring at her, their carts and baskets placed between her and them like makeshift breastplates and halberds held at half-mast, and she has no idea why, a frightened and sloe-eyed time-traveler who can't remember why she came there in the first place.
He suspects she's staggered outside without her purchases more than once, the abandoned orange rolling forlornly between the feet of befuddled customers or her broken eggs splattering across the floor in a vivid, yellow starburst that hurts her eyes and prompts the clerk to squawk in plaintive outrage. He also suspects she's found herself clinging to a lightpole or an ad pole and waiting for her knees to come off strike and hold her up. Sometimes--most of the time--they do, and she lurches down the sidewalk with her hands fisted so tightly that her nails dig stinging crescents into her palm, and sour bile in her mouth, soot and rancid citrus and sugared arsenic.
He bets she's got scuffs and scrapes on her knees, maybe even a few tiny scars. Because sometimes her knees just fail to report for duty and she ends up on her knees in the middle of the sidewalk while her head spins and her heart pounds and she shakes so hard that her teeth rattle. She scrabbles at the pavement with fingers she can't feel while the world spins around her and sound recedes into white noise, tinny and remote, like music heard underwater. She tucks her chin to her chest and squeezes her eyes shut and prays that when she opens them again, the world will make sense and be steady under her uncertain feet. And all the while, cement digs into the skin of her knees and the feet of strangers narrowly miss her splayed fingers. No one stops to ask if she's all right or help her to her feet. They just sweep around her without a backward glance. She's invisible, just another junkie or bum on a drunk, and that's all right by her because as much as she resents their assumptions and callous indifference, she's sure that if they touched her, she'd scream like a wounded animal and twist their prying fingers until they snapped.
And he bets that whatever she left at the checkout counter in a puddle of broken eggs is waiting for her when she gets home, crouched in the nooks and crannies and the corners where the light can't reach.
"We'll see you next week," Wentzler says as she turns to the reception desk and keys in her insurance number and patient ID on the provided keypad. "I think we're making good progress."
The woman is decidedly unimpressed by this pronouncement, and John can't blame her. Wentzler says the same thing to him at the end of every session, a dentist offering a lollipop to every docile, obedient child, and he can't help but think it's so much soothsaying and quackery. He feels no different now than he did when he first sat down in the doctor's office with a pamphlet clutched in one head and a headache nestled in his temples like a pair of hot coals. He feels worse, truth be told, restless and uneasy and raw inside his skin, as though his nerve endings have moved to the outside of his body. The nightmares have gotten more frequent and more vivid, the fragmented images dredged from his subconscious by Wentzler's curious fingers and given finer shape by his deceptively-idle musings. Where once he had dreamed in splashes of hazy red and drifting grey, now he sees the blood and the slabs of pitted, buckling concrete and feels the shuddering vibration of the explosions in the soles of his feet as he runs from a threat that he cannot see, blind with dust and terror and dizzy with adrenaline.
Just another little gift from modern medicine, he thinks dourly. Like my state-of-the-art leg.
Dr. Wentzler turns, datapad in hand. "Morning, John," he says with an effervescent cheeriness that makes him want to punch him. "I'll be with you in just a second."
"What about that guy?" He jerks his head in the direction of the bald man with the tablet.
Dr. Wentzler's gaze follows the nod of his head. "His appointment isn't for some time." His brow furrows. "Some people just need time to gather themselves." His tone is light, but his eyes are assessing, and he leans down to murmur in the receptionist's ear.
Bump in the road, doc? He's still a cop, never mind that his badge is temporarily suspended and his gun is lying a precinct gun locker, and he knows unease when he sees it. The receptionist nods brusquely, and her eyes flick to the man in the chair. His head is bowed and tucked, and his fingers are trembling.
If he goes postal in here, you're shit out of luck, notes a wry, pragmatic voice inside his head. No gun, and one leg worth a damn. I wonder if the receptionist would let you cower in her alcove when the bullets started flying, or if she'd shut the door in your face and tell herself she was just finishing what God started.
Before he can pursue that grim line of thought, Dr. Wentzler straightens, smile firmly in place. "Shall we?" he asks with sunny enthusiasm, and gestures for John to follow him.
John rises stiffly from his chair and winces when the hinge on his prosthesis gives a strident, indecorous creak. His stump, still irritated from his rash decision not to wear his med sock, chafes and prickles beneath a layer of medicated salve and protective nylon. His eyes are gritty for want of sleep, and his head feels like a bag of wet sand atop his neck. He stifles a yawn and hobbles after the doctor, who strides briskly down a narrow, gloomy hall whose walls are lined with bleary, astigmatic watercolors in faded pastels and plastic plants whose leaves droop disconsolately from their wicker baskets.
"How are we feeling today, John?" the doctor calls, eager to begin his inquisition.
Synthetic integration failed, the muffled voice of his leg answers from beneath his pant leg, and he wobbles precariously as the hinge gives another ominous creak.
"Shit," he hisses, and braces himself against the wall, palm pressed flat against the cool plaster and elbow poking rudely into the cheap, brass frame of a picture.
Dr. Wentzler pauses in his trek and turns to watch the spectacle with an impression of solicitous inquiry, hands clasped behind his back. He does not offer to help, thank God, nor does he offer any critique, but his calm scrutiny is avid and cold on the nape of John's neck, the skittering, tenebrous caress of a spider's legs, and John knows he's recording everything in his tidy mental catalogue of the shortcomings, failings, flaws, and foibles of one Kennex, John, patient number 5454326. Just another black mark on a record already damaged beyond salvation.
I hope you drop your goddamn datapad, he fumes with stupid, childish petulance. No such luck there. The doctor just watches on his stable legs of flesh and bone, serene as you please while he flounders and paws at the walls like an idiot drunk. He'd punch the bastard if he didn't need both hands to hold himself up, but he can only grit his teeth and yaw and pray that the connection reestablishes itself before he ends up facedown on the floor.
Not like you haven't be there before, whispers a malignant voice inside his head, and for an instant, he's back in the alley in a cloud of concrete dust, blinking blood from his eyes and kissing the filthy pavement. His wavering leg screams with the memory of tortured nerve endings exposed to the drifting grit and smoke, and he's sure that he's going to follow suit, that he's going to open his mouth and scream and scream until the nurse comes running with a syringe full of sedative and the doctor hurries into his office to call for the men in the white coats. Then the connection reengages, dancing over the skin of his thigh like a burst of static electricity, and he lets go of the wall and finds his capricious center of gravity.
"Still having trouble with the leg?" Wentzler asks with deceptive cheer.
"I think there's a problem with the coupling."
Wentzler frowns. "I thought it was a relatively new leg."
"It is."
"Mmm. Maybe you should see about having it adjusted."
And maybe you should go fuck yourself, he thinks savagely, but he only says, "Yeah," and stalks toward the waiting office.
The office is furnished in 1970s funeral-home chic, with oak-paneled walls covered in gold-framed degrees, awards, and beribboned certificates, and overstuffed chairs with matching leather upholstery. There's a couch on the far wall and a coffee table artfully arranged with fake flowers and a shifting kaleidescope of images designed to foster a sense of safety and serenity. A cloudless blue sky above lush, rolling plains of green. The gently-rolling surf of the Pacific. A golden retriever puppy with a lolling, pink tongue. A toothlessly-grinning baby in a diaper, surrounded by bunnies and ducklings who wander around its chubbiness with sunny bewilderment. The doctor's desk is a gleaming monstrosity of antique mahogany that sits in front of the bay window in a display of discreet ostentation.
"You can use the sofa," the doctor suggests hopefully as he follows him inside, but John only grunts and assumes his customary seat in the overstuffed chair nearest the door.
The doctor closes the door behind him and stops to fiddle with the cuffs of his button-down shirt. "Nice day today," he remarks as he rolls up his sleeves to just past the artificially-bronzed spars of his wrists.
"Mmm," is all John says. There's no lie in the doctor's conversational gambit; the sky outside the window is a pale, cloudless blue that reminds him of frigid, early-winter mornings with his father in Minnesota, the air so cold that it burned his lungs and scalded his ears, but he's been at this long enough to know that there are no freebies in this room.
Wentzler loosens his tie as he flops into the other chair with practiced nonchalance. "You got any plans for the day?"
He shrugs. "Thought I might stop at a taco truck later. Deciding if I want to deal with the potential fallout."
Wentzler laughs. "I practically lived off those during my undergraduate days. Gut bombs, we called them. They could be amazing, but man, sometimes you were taking your life in your hands."
"I've got some experience with that." His prosthesis twitches.
"I bet you have," Wentzler says thoughtfully. "Part and parcel of being a police officer, isn't it?"
He rolls his eyes. "You know it is. It's not like I'm the only cop on your headcase roster."
"No," he agrees with maddening equanimity. "But I've found that everyone is unique, everyone processes experiences differently. And the people I treat aren't headcases, John," he chides gently. "They're just people with problems they need to work out, like you."
Work out. Like they can all be fixed with some navel-gazing and a few dozen miles around the oval. Can you fix my leg, doc? 'Cause God knows the others couldn't, the useless assholes. Too much tissue damage, they said. The leg had been severed too long by the time the med drones carried me out of the hot zone. They just gave me this hunk of silicone and told me it was just as good, even better in terms of strength and durability. I'd get used to it in no time, they said, and patted me on the shoulder while I sat on some examination table with my stump exposed. They can grow organs and limbs in laboratories, but that was too good for me, according to the department pencil pusher, too great of an expense for someone who was of no further use to them. So sorry for your loss Mr. Kennex(and it was Mr., didn't miss that), but there are other factors to consider. Thank you for your commendable service, and best of luck in your future endeavors. The leg was a parting gift as far the department was concerned, and I should be happy to get it. After all, most murderers get to rot in the isocubes until the corrections officer on duty finds them stiff in their cell, hanging from the bedsheets or cold on the cot, victim of too much isolation or too much sitting.
What about Ana? Can you bring her back? Maybe she'd turn up if I just took a few laps around the track and showed how handicapable I am. If I sit here and spill my guts under the sunny gazes of fat babies and fluffy bunnies, will she be there when I get home, eyes sparkling and arms wide open while Coltrane drifts from the speakers of the sound system, smoke and ambergris. Will it erase the empty chair beside the bed that was my first vision of my new life? Will it make her be there when I open my eyes and turn my head, a tube up my nose and another in my prick and one leg so much shorter than the other. Will it make my skin stop crawling with grit and dust that isn't there and crying out for the touch of a hand that isn't mine? Will it make me stop riding on the streetcars and ell-trains just so I can feel the presence of other people and snatch scraps of human contact from the incidental scrape of a swaying back or swinging arm?
And what about my mother, while we're at it? If I let you see my wounds in all their gaudy glory, will she suddenly remember who I am? Will the Alzheimer's release its strangling grasp and let her recognize me? Will she stop thinking I'm my father or the heating repairman or a Jehovah's witness come to sell her Jesus and a timeshare in Heaven while the TV drones in the background and her delirious roommate stews in her own piss, or that it's 2019 and I'm twelve years old and just noticing girls? If I admit that there are a helluva lot of days where I wish the med drones had never gotten me out and Pelham and I had gone into the ground together, or that sometimes I'm so lonely I can't breathe, will the fog lift from her eyes and her hand come up to pat my cheek the way it used to do when I'd been disappointed by an unforeseen bump in the road or had my heart broken by a girl who had her sights set on bigger quarry than the son of an underpaid cop who wanted to follow in his footsteps and dodge bullets for a living? Will she gather me up and take me home and give me a place to hide until I can stretch my skin over these exposed nerves?
Or hey, how about my old man? Can you raise him from the dead? If I tell you that I have to convince myself to get out of bed and do something other lie on the floor with a bottle of bourbon cradled to my chest, will you gouge the bullets from his back and breathe life into the rotted ruins of his lungs? If I confess my weakness, will he come through that door and call me son and tell me everything is going to be all right? I'd tell you anything if you could give me that, doc, but I don't think you can.
"Whatever you've got to tell yourself to do the job, doc," he grunts, and suppresses the urge to tap his feet.
"Is that how you cope, John? With whatever gets you through?" Translation: Are you on drugs or otherwise self-medicating, John?
He shrugs. "Doesn't everybody? You see it all the time. The construction worker with the chronic cough tells himself he can still dodge cancer if he cuts down from three packs a day to one. The housewife tells herself she can still lose the baby weight that's been sitting on her hips for the past fifteen years if she really wants to. Maybe that gym membership she got as a New Year's resolution will come in handy. She'll dig it out of the junk folder on her com. Someday. The guy who's just pounded his mistress' skull into jelly with that damn modern art sculpture she loved so much isn't really a dirtbag. He's just a guy in a tough spot. She was going to tell his wife and ruin his marriage, and he was never going to see his kids again, and anyway, it was her damn fault for getting pregnant in the first place.
Pathetic bastards who think they can still be cops even with their leg blown off, because if they can't, then the only thing left for them to do is eat their Glock and let the coroner clean up the sorry mess they leave behind, adds the mocking voice of self-loathing.
"Lies are how people keep their heads above the shit," he finishes.
Wentzler lifts one loafered foot and crosses it over his knee, and John envies the easy fluidity of his movements. He'd moved that way once upon a time, with effortless grace. He'd been the star running back, leaving opponents in the dust and basking in the adoration of the screaming crowds and the promissory admiration of the cheerleaders on the sideline. White Cheetah, they'd called him, and he'd felt weightless and invisible and immortal as he'd sprinted across the field on legs made strong by years of discipline and training and the luck of being a healthy teenage boy.
Those same legs had once entangled with the legs of his lovers in beds and the backseats of cars and on sofas beside glasses of half-finished wine. Teenage girls and college coeds and long-legged women met in bars or at the gym. They'd held him up while he kissed them against bedroom walls and supported him as he'd settled himself behind the curve of their buttocks on his knees with his straining cock in his hand. They'd given him the leverage to fuck them or love them, whichever the case might be, to coax pleasure from them with every buck and roll of his hips. They'd help him love Anna deep in his bed, and had danced with her in the living room while his silly little head had dreamed of white picket fences and a pair of rugrats with his name.
Now there's a hunk of silicone hanging from his thigh that he can't trust. He feels nothing from it when he walks down the street except the shift of the med sock beneath his stump cap and the indifferent, remote pressure of solidity beneath his foot, a tooth prodded by an anesthetized tongue. No pain when he steps on a tack, no heat or cold or patter of rain. No warm, pleasant stretch of muscle as he takes a step, no brush of denim or khaki against his skin. Just movement registered only by his eyes and the fact of his continued motion. He suspects it of treason with every step, waits for it to to fail and spill him to the floor with his dick flapping from his pants as he collapses into a urinal. So far, it hasn't let him down. He can't imagine running or jumping or climbing on it, let alone trusting it to balance him while he holds a woman in his arms and buries himself between her thighs. And the thought of trying without it fills him with a dull, humiliated panic. Even jerking off feels wrong, skewed and fumbling and arrhythmic, as though his body has forgotten a rhythm it has known all its life. He never looks at himself when he does it these days. He doesn't want to see the surreal asymmetry that begins at the end of his thighs, to see the stump cap bouncing idiotically against the mattress in a perverse parody of copulation. He just closes his eyes and turns his face to the ceiling and tugs until sticky warmth splashes on his belly, and then he cleans himself up with half-hearted swipes of a tissue and lies on the bed until he can bring himself to hop into the bathroom and do a better job of it.
Wentzler drums his fingers on his ankles. The nails are manicured and shiny, almost glossed, and John wonders if he's the type to enjoy a mani-pedi, if his feet have been rubbed smooth with a pumice stone and perfumed with rosewater.
Maybe he visits those massage parlors in Chinatown, the same ones you think about visiting now and then, suggests a sly voice inside his head, and his imagination helpfully supplies an image of the good doctor lying on one of the tables with his stubby prick in an Asian woman's oiled fist.
That's an image he could gladly do without, and he's almost grateful when Wentzler says, "What about your life, John? Are lies what's getting you through right now?"
"I told you, everyone bullshits themselves. It's part of the human experience."
"Fair enough," Wentzler answers with oily placidity. "But some people might need more help getting through than others. Would you agree with that?"
"I suppose so," he agrees warily.
A small, pleased smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "And even people who ordinarily need very little help might need more on occasion. Particularly after a severe trauma."
Ah, there's the trap. Nope. He's not taking that bait like a good little rabbit. "If you say so," he grunts, and studies the grinning baby from the corner of his eye.
The doctor lapses into strategic silence, no doubt hoping to coax him into further confession, but he's bound to be sorely disappointed. He's used the same technique against perps to goad them into spilling their slimy guts all over the interrogation-room table with every flap of their diseased gums. He's not about to fall for it now. Frankly, he's surprised that anyone does. He idly wonders how fucked up the other patients must be to expose their bellies to this soft-handed egghead and let him rifle through their most painful secrets.
Well, he's not getting mine, he vows with grim resolve. Beside him, the baby and its gaggle of wide-eyed ducklings dissolve, devoured by the Pacific tides.
"Your experience with the job came earlier than most, didn't it?" Wentzler says quietly, and his fingers rise and fall as though he were threading an unseen stylus between them. "Your father was on the job, too, wasn't he?"
"Almost thirty years," he answers, and pride flares in his heart.
"So you must've been exposed to the realities of the job pretty early on, no?"
"He never hid what he did. He came home smelling like coffee and gunpowder. I knew he was a cop who caught bad guys. I knew the bad guys wanted to hurt him. Sometimes he came home with a black eye or a swollen face, and Mom would have to clean him up, but other than that, he tried not to bring the job home. At least not with me. My dad wasn't a sicko."
"But the risk was always there."
"I wasn't stupid. I saw things when I got older. Once he made detective, the cases got hotter, the stakes higher. Sometimes things were normal, and other times, he'd catch a big case and be gone for days at a time on stakeouts, sleeping at the stationhouse and calling my mom to bring him fresh clothes. I could always tell me something big was up because my mom wouldn't sleep. She'd sit up at night with a pot of coffee and watch the door while she listened to the police scanner. When it was really bad, she'd be so distracted that she'd burn dinner and scream at me if I turned up the TV. This one drug bust he was working, he was gone for almost a week. By the fifth night, she was so stressed out that she was screaming at the TV. I'd never seen her like that. Normally, she was all smiles and everything is fine, but that night, she was just...frayed, I guess, like she couldn't keep up the pretense." He studies his palms and picks idly at the heel of the left. There'd been a callus there before, but now it's smooth, unblemished by the butt of a service Glock, and if he doesn't stop, he'll draw blood. He doesn't care. He picks and watches the pale flesh redden. "Anyway, her nervousness started to rub off, so I started screwing around in the house--pacing, drumming on door lintels, practicing my Harlem Globetrotter routine--and I knocked the scanner off its shelf."
"My mother came flying out of the kitchen in her apron, potholder in one hand. My family was big on discipline, always talked about doing the right thing and actions having consequences, but they never hit. It was always extra chores or grounding or getting my ass dragged out of bed on Sundays to run the track until I puked. So when my mother hit me in the mouth, I thought I was dreaming until I tasted the blood. She hit me again, just flailed at me with the potholder, screaming at me for being so clumsy and selfish and what the fuck was wrong with me? That was a shock, too, almost a bigger shock than her hitting me. Until then, I'd only heard her curse when she slopped her coffee down the front of her shirt just before work.
"I don't know how long she hit me--thirty seconds or so. Anyway, she stopped when she saw my fat, bloody lip. She got quiet, and then she burst into tears and started telling me how sorry she was and trying to mop my face with the hem of her apron. I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do. I wasn't Dad. So I just hugged her and told her it was all right and didn't put up a fight when she chivvied me into a chair and disinfected my split lip. I remember she fed me until I wanted to hurl. Her way of trying to make up, I guess. She kept touching my hair while I was trying to eat, too. She let me stay up a little later that night, but after I went to bed, I could hear her puttering around downstairs. I heard the scanner, too, but it sounded warped, like the audio card had cracked or something. I thought she'd turn it off once she figured out it was broken, but she left it on all night. I remember I fell asleep to Cookie Monster narrating the bulletins from the third watch. She got another scanner by the time I got home the school the next day."
"Why do you think you chose to tell me that, John?"
He scoffs. "Make up your mind, dammit. You wanted me to talk, didn't you?"
"But why choose to tell me that? It must be significant in some way."
"You wanted to know what the job was like to me back then. That was the job to me. Dad left, and Dad come home, and my mom kept the ship running."
"What happened after that?"
"Dad came home two days later. He looked like shit and smelled like ass, but Mom pretty much tackled him the second he came through the door. Ran herself in circles making his favorite supper. We had dinner together, and then I got sent to my room early."
"Why?"
"My parents weren't into live porn, either," he says drily.
"Ah." Wentzler lapses into pained silence, and John savors his small victory.
"That was the raid that led to the big IAB investigation."
"The one that brought down the rest of his team?"
"Mm. He was gone a lot after that, to hearings and interrogations. For a couple months, the only time I really saw him was when Mom and I went to the hearings."
"That must have been hard."
A noncommittal grunt, and he scrapes his thumbnail beneath the nail of his ring finger. "Dad said that was the price of the job."
"Doesn't seem to leave much room for a life," Wentzler notes.
"He did what he could," he counters defensively. "He came to my ballgames when he could and helped me train. We went fishing and camping whenever he could get the time."
"He might've had more time if he'd chosen another profession," the doctor notes with the tenacity of a terrier.
John scoffs. "You might as well have asked him to stop breathing. He was a cop to the bone."
"Eventually, he did. Stop breathing, I mean."
It's as sudden and ruthless as an unexpected slap, and for a moment, he's twelve years old and plunging into icy lake water, swallowing it in heaving, panicked mouthfuls while his paralyzed lungs burn with the crushing cold.
"You son of a bitch."
"All I'm saying, John," he says hastily, palms held out in a gesture of mollification, "is that his job ultimately cost him his life. It very nearly cost you yours. Can you still say it's worth the price?"
John says nothing. The water has pulled him under, closed over his head like a shroud, and he's trapped, not in a frozen lake in Minnesota, but in his squad car as he races to the scene of his father's shooting. Tires squealing on the wet asphalt as the car skids to a stop in a wash of red strobe light. Feet slapping the pavement so hard that he nearly slips despite two good legs. Sprinting toward the covered body lying behind the wavering, scrolling police tape and flailing blindly against the restraining arms of the patrol officer on the scene, a kid so fresh out of the academy that his ears are still wet. Voices in his ear, telling him that he can't go in there, can't compromise the scene, and while the cop understands them, the son doesn't care. One of his father's arms is uncovered and sprawls slackly on the asphalt. There's blood on the sheet, so much blood, and the rain washes it into the gutters and runs between his fingers. Cover him up, he wants to scream. For God's sake, you bastards, get my father out of the rain! But the only sound he can produce is a strangled, whuffing grunt, and then the rain is in his eyes and strange hands are dragging him away and depositing him into the driver's seat of his patrol car, and he can only sit and stare between his feet while the rain soaks his pant legs and the boots he'd shined just that morning.
Standing in the green-tiled corridor outside the morgue in his sopping dress pants and wishing he had his uniform cap to occupy his restless hands. His fingers open and close, and he shuffles foot to foot, his pants clinging to his legs, and he's numb, so numb, and yet, the pain is a yawning, leviathan thing inside his chest, burning like phosphorous beneath the numbness and spreading serrated tendrils into his guts. Then the coroner raps on the opaque window to the viewing room with a latexed hand, and her voice drifts through the speaker on the nearby wall. Are you ready, John? she says, and the pity in her voice makes the pain sing, steel wool drawn over raw flesh.
I want to see him, he says, a child bargaining with an unyielding parent, and his restless fingers open and close.
You know you can't, John. I'm sorry. Are you ready?
Nodding before he remembers she can't see him. Yeah.
It's the last coherent thing he says, because that blessedly blank opaque window clears to reveal his father on that cold, steel slab, and then his fingers snap closed so tightly that a knuckle pops. The coroner has been kind and pulled the medical draping to his chin to spare him the worst of it, and if he were a civilian, it might've worked. But he's a cop, and he sees what she's tried so hard not to show, knows that the broad chest he used to snuggle against as a kid when he was sick with the flu and burning up in his PJs is blown wide under those staid, green sheets, perforated by two exits wounds that reduced his chest cavity to jelly.
My father! he thinks. My father! And then he's spinning on his heel and lurching away from the window and the nightmare it holds. He can't breathe, and he's sure he's going to puke, blow chunks all over the linoleum like a green-gilled rookie, and a dim, febrile part of his brain hopes that he chokes on it. If he dies, he won't have to live through this, won't have to listen to his mother's scream when he tells her that Dad is dead, brought down by some two-bit thug during a bodega robbery.
Finding himself in the restroom with no idea how he got there. Standing in the middle of the room with wet pants clinging to his legs and blinking at the urinals as though he's never seen them before. He should probably go into one of the two stalls at the back and spew his guts, cling to the porcelain and wait for the goddamn world to stop spinning, but he can't move, can't breathe, can't do anything but stare at the fluorescent lights and hope they burn away the image of his father lying dead in the street, shot down like a dog while his own colleagues crawl over the scene like maggots.
Staggering to the sink on wooden, uncoordinated legs and not recognizing the face he sees in the smudged mirror, pinched and lost and teetering on the verge of hysteria. A voice is his head saying he should wash his hands, but he can't think why, and anyway, he can't remember how to turn on the faucet. Blinking at it in dumb incomprehension, swaying, while the water from his pant legs drips onto the floor. Watching in the mirror as his lips peel back from his teeth. His lungs finally work again, but all he can do is make that strangled whuffing sound. Whuff. Whuff. Whuff. Not enough air. Not enough.
Sinking to the floor in the middle of a filthy HQ bathroom, forehead on tiles that smell like bleached piss. Ass in the air and face on the floor, and he doesn't even have the strength to get up when the door swings open behind him. He can't even raise his head. Whuff. Whuff. Whuff, and oh, God, the numbness is deserting him, punctured by those awful, serrated tendrils. He hurts, hurts so badly that he's sure the perps who gunned down his father have gotten him, too, that his chest is just as ruined beneath his uniform shirt. Whuff. Whuff. Whuff, and his nostrils are full of bleached piss.
Footsteps beside his head, and he braces for a stranger's hand on his shoulder, but when it comes, it's Pelham, and the relief is so profound that he shudders and scrabbles blindly for his partner's ankles. He expects Marty to recoil, to rock back on his heels and beyond the reach of his hands, but instead, he plops onto the floor and gathers him up, and they sit there in a tangle of limbs.
Whuff. Whuff. Whuff. He turns his head, and for one panicked instant, he thinks he's gone blind, because there's nothing but blackness before his eyes, but then he realizes that it's just the fabric of Pelham's uniform shirt. Whuff. Whuff. Whuff, and his fingers are tangling in the fabric of that shirt. It's the only way he can hold himself up.
I gotcha. I gotcha. It's the voice he uses with domestic abuse victims and terrified children who don't understand why their world has so suddenly and rudely upended. I came as soon as I got the call.
He doesn't know how he knows. Maybe it came in over the scanner, or maybe one of the uniforms working the scene gave him a heads-up. He doesn't care. It's enough that he's there, holding him up because he's misplaced his bones along with his ability to breathe.
This is what dying feels like, he thinks wildly, and whuff whuff whuffs into Pelham's shirt until he hauls him to his feet and slings his arm over his shoulder.
All right, let's get you outta here, hmm? he says, and steers him toward the door.
Whuff, whuff, whuffing his way down the hall, leaning on Pelham's shoulder. Pelham's arm around his shoulders, the only warmth in a world gone cold. He clings to him the way he'd clung to his father when he was small and thought he was the world's greatest superhero, reveling in the solidity beneath his cheek.
Well, someone sure found his kryptonite, didn't they? sneers a voice inside his head, and he'd fold to the floor if Pelham weren't holding him up.
I want my father! he thinks desperately, thirty going on four, but he cannot go back, cannot resist the arm guiding him from the hospital. He can only slump against his buttressing shoulder and let himself be led out of the light and into the damp of the parking lot.
Whuff. Whuff. Whuff, and he can only slump against the passenger side of Pelham's car like a broken doll while Madonna warbles at him from the oldies station Marty likes.
I want my father, he thinks as he sits in the chair, clutching the arms in a white-knuckled grip, but there is no father, not anymore, and no Pelham. They're both dust now. He's not even all here these days. Part of him preceded him into the hereafter with the press of a cremationist's button. There's only Wentzler, the needling little peckerhead, and he'll be damned if he gives him a damn thing. So he sits and watches the kaleidoscope of soothing images from the corner of his eye.
"John?" Wentzler's voice, an insectile buzz in his ear. "John?"
John gazes at him with blank politeness, but his lips remain sealed.
"What about your life?" Wentzler prods, eager to find safer ground. "Have you made any new connections, thought about where you want to go from here?"
He thinks of the morning with Rhea, sitting on her sofa and pretending to read a book while she sat at the table and sipped her coffee and her dog padded around the living room. The latter had ambled over and snuffled curiously at his prosthesis, tail wagging slowly. Wet nose had inspected him from ankle to the top of the knee, and then the dog had sat, doe-eyed and winsome. He'd tried to resist by burying his nose in his book, but the dog had had the patience of Job, and soon enough, he'd found himself scratching him behind the ears while his tail flogged the floor in gratitude.
The only words that had passed between them until he'd taken his leave an hour or so later had been an offer of a second cup of coffee, but it had been safe and comforting, and there had been no painful memories swirling in the corner like dust. Just the click of canine claws on hardwood and the unhurried slurp of coffee from ceramic mugs. The whetstone hiss of palms on hand rims as Rhea pottered in the kitchen in accordance with the morning routine upon which he had so rudely intruded. He'd lingered as long as he could, until she'd begun to inch meaningfully toward her bedroom, and when he'd left, his nod and murmured, "thanks," had seemed painfully inadequate, but by the time he'd thought of something else, the door had closed in his face.
His first taste of human connection since an incendiary had blown off his leg and robbed him of the only family he had left, and he'll be damned if he'll surrender it for this blowhard to pore over, a big-game hunter examining the spoor of his wounded prey. He sits and clenches his leg against the urge to tap his foot and counts to twenty in his head with the scraps of Spanish that have remained to him from high school.
Wentzler breaks first. "I know opening up is often painful and frightening, especially for someone accustomed to self-reliance," he says, and John would happily punch him in the face if it wouldn't mean a one-way ticket to life on skid row with the bums, hookers, and hobos. "I'm here to help you, John. You'll move forward a lot faster if you accept and trust that."
You can't help me, he thinks as his high-school Spanish teacher begins her count again. You can't give me my leg or my girlfriend, or bring back my partner or the eleven other guys I got killed in that raid. And all your persnickety fiddling wouldn't even begin to mend my mother's ruined mind. Won't bring back my father, either. You can't make the other cops down at McQuaid's either ignore me or look at me with a mixture of pity and disgust, like they can't quite figure out how or why a piece of shit like me is still breathing while so many good men with wives and children went up in smoke. I'm just a modern-day Humpty Dumpty, doc, and no one will ever put me together again.
Wentzler sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "I understand your reticence, John, I really do, but I can't help you if you don't let me in." When John's only response is a taciturn grunt, he sighs again and says, "I don't think we're going to accomplish anything further today, so why don't we end the session here?"
"And they said there were no more miracles," he mutters, and takes dour delight in yet another long-suffering sigh from the shrink.
"Thursday, then?" he says bleakly, as though he were setting the date for his execution.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," John says brightly, and springs from his chair with a glimmer of his former cocksure ebullience. He's halfway to the door before the words finish their exit from his mouth.
He expects the doctor to follow him out as he'd done with the previous patient, but he doesn't. He remains in his seat and scrubs his face with his palms. He looks so frazzled and defeated that John could almost pity him. His momentary pang of compassion doesn't stop him from bolting, though, and he's out the door and down the corridor and making a beeline for the door that leads to the waiting room and freedom.
The hunched, vulpine man is still there when he crosses the waiting room, still hunkered in his seat and still rubbing the electronic pages of the complimentary outdated magazines like worrystones. He looks up as John passes, hangdog and ravaged, and the pouched bruises beneath his eyes are so deep and entrenched that John winces. The man sees, and his lips twitch in a thin, mirthless grin.
As I am, so shall you be, his haggard eyes say, and follow him to the door, and John drops his gaze, arms rippling with gooseflesh.
Do I look like that? he wonders uneasily as he steps onto the sidewalk and squints against the sudden sunlight. Do I sound like that, like empty rooms and a throat gone raw from screaming? Is that why people can't stand to look at me, why no one but Maldonado has called me on the com since I cheated the cremationist? Is it because I'm a dead man walking?
He doesn't stop at the taco truck. He stops at a noodle truck instead for an order of spicy noodles and a handful of fortune cookies. He considers sitting to his meal on one of the nearby wrought-iron benches, but the benches are the purview of bums, nodders, and snot-nosed punks with track mark on their arms and cheap studs oxidizing in their tongues and noses. They're the land of the lost, and he has no desire to join their ranks. So he carries his food to the solitary familiarity of his car and eats while he watches the ebb and flow of pedestrians.
You met Anna this way, says the voice of recollection. You were eating then, too, a cruller that time. You had a mouthful of it when she approached the car with that graceful swagger that turned your head and made your heart stutter inside your chest. When she bent and rested her arms on the open driver's side window, you couldn't help but follow the sinuous line of her back and appreciate the fall of her hair over one smooth shoulder. She smelled good, too, clean and subtly sweet, like warm honey. You were so taken by her that you momentarily forgot how to swallow, so you sat there with a hunk of cruller lodged between your cheek and gum and blinked at her like an imbecile while she swept her hair from her face with those lovely, long fingers with which you would become so intimately familiar and offered you a shy smile. You were halfway to gone for her right then, though you tried to play it cool. You got points for not spraying crumbs into her face, and you couldn't believe your luck when she asked for your number. You were so giddy that you even sang along to Elton John when he came on the radio on the drive back to the stationhouse. You'd always prided yourself on being a rational pragmatist, but that first encounter with Anna at a stoplight made you believe in love at first sight and happily ever after.
He grimaces around a mouthful of noodles. He doesn't want to think about Anna. It hurts too much, tightens a cruel fist around his guts that threatens to send the few mouthfuls he's managed right back up, but from the corner of his eye, he sees Anna's necklace. It's beautiful in the sunlight, as lovely and delicate as she was when she'd curled up in the passenger seat and exhorted him to drive, John, just drive, while she turned her face to the sun and her long, dark hair fluttered in the window.
Where are you, Anna? he wonders, and the longing is a hot knife lodged in the center of his chest. Why weren't you there when the nurse wiped seventeen months of sleep from my gummy eyes with a wet cloth? Were you mad at me before, pissed at me because I was buried in the job and gone most of the time and too preoccupied with everyone else that I didn't treat you the way you deserved? Or was it really that you couldn't stand the sight of me, stump wrapped in gauze and tubes jammed into every hole? Either way, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I got it wrong. I'm sorry I let you down.
He has no appetite anymore; the noodles are so much seasoned cellophane in his mouth, but he needs the energy for his upcoming rehab session, and so he forces them down against the protests of his clenching stomach. He chews until his jaws hurt and swallows the tasteless lumps and steadfastly ignores the prickling behind his eyes. He refuses to look at the necklace.
You and Pelham used to eat like this, too, the voice reminds him relentlessly as he chews doggedly and stabs his chopsticks blindly into the container. Used to eat this shit by the cartonful and crack jokes about digging your grave a mouthful at a time, getting soft around the middle and wide in the ass and developing high cholesterol and high blood pressure and having the big one at forty. He had the big one, all right. It was just a little messier than he anticipated.
He gags on a mouthful of noodles and drops his chopsticks into the carton, and then he sets it haphazardly in the center console. Sticky wetness down the leg of his uniform pants. and a warm, lolling weight against his shoulder. He swallows the congealed lump in his mouth because if he doesn't, he'll choke in it, and then he leans forward and curls his fingers around the steering wheel.
I'm sorry, he thinks again, and rests his head on the steering wheel. I'm sorry I couldn't hold you up like you did for me. I'm sorry I couldn't get you out.
Whuff, whuff, whuff, and he squeezes the steering wheel until his joints ache.
He stays like that until his head stops spinning, until he can't feel the specter of dust and blood on the side of his face. When he's sure he's not going to vomit or scream until his vocal cords rupture, he sits up and scrubs his face with a trembling hand. He should go, but he doesn't trust himself to drive, so he closes his eyes, keenly aware of the leg that isn't his beneath the fabric of his pants, the empty, ugly, dead weight of it.
When he opens his eyes, it's to the sight of the handful of fortune cookies. He plucks one from the bottom of the paper bag and takes an experimental nibble. Crisp and sweet and too much for his mutinous stomach. He spits it out, but doesn't drop it into the bag. He cracks it in half and stares at the fortune nestled inside. He'd loved them once, in the time of Before, when the world hadn't tasted of ash. Now the slip of paper looks like a maggot burrowed into dead flesh. He drops it into the bag, untouched, and spits after it to rid his mouth of the taste. His face is wet, and he doesn't know why or when that happened. Whuff. Whuff. He starts the car and turns on the radio to drown out the rising, inarticulate howl inside his head, and then he pulls into traffic and drives to the PT building because he has no place else to go.
The PT goes as well as the therapy session. The therapist chides him for his form and scolds him like a child for the blisters on his stump and treats him to a refresher course on proper stump care and coupling maintenance. He pushes him hard, works him to the point of muscle exhaustion, and every time, his lips kiss the mat, he tastes the asphalt in the alley and squints against the sting of smoke and dust and sees a flash of his severed leg lying in the street like a hunk of meat abandoned by an overzealous stray. By the time the therapist releases him, he's sore and exhausted and helpless against the images that assail him. Anna ducking her head into the open window of his car as he waited at a stoplight. Pelham picking him up from the floor of a filthy public restroom and guiding him from the coroner's office to the safety of his car. His father's limp arm lying on the wet asphalt while his former colleagues buzzed around him like flies.
It's his father's arm that occupies his mind as he limps toward his building, dragging his flagging prosthesis. It's pale and lifeless as it protrudes from beneath the blood-stained sheet in the rain, and so vivid that it blots out his surroundings. He barely registers the flash of gold on the periphery of his vision, or the voice that penetrates the roaring white noise in his head.
"-Ohn?" it says faintly.
He turns to see his neighbor, sitting in her chair with her dog on a leash coiled around her hand.
Rhea, he thinks listlessly. Her name is Rhea. What's she doing at my dad's murder scene?
He should say something, return the kindness she had shown him when she let him sit on her couch and bask in the silence of her apartment. If nothing else, he should nod and pet the dog, who's gazing up at him in amiable greeting, prancing with excitement. But all he can see is his father's arm poking from beneath that bloodstained sheet, and all he can hear is the echo of gunfire and the grinding roar of crumbling masonry in the instant before awareness fled. She's a ghost flitting at the edge of his awareness, an illusion he cannot trust, and so he passes her without reply and doesn't stop until he's inside his apartment with all the locks engaged. He sits in the dark and grits his teeth against the throbbing of her stump, and as night falls, he pours himself a tumbler of bourbon and watches Anna's last message on an endless loop. Hi, honey, it's me. Hi, honey, it's me. Hi, honey...
Almost Human Big Bang @ Livejournal