Beth, by not just a few years the oldest of the three nurses, massaged me in the afternoon. She was too thin and too serious about everything. Her hair was curly, at times even slightly unruly, but you could tell that she would never let it get away from her. Perhaps it was from too many years working burn units, but she refused to become even the slightest bit personal in her dealings.
Maddy, of the night shift, looked like she’d rather be in a bar teasing a horny frat boy. Not necessarily satisfying, but definitely teasing. Even while tending to us burn victims, she made certain that her hips moved suggestively under her white skirt. She had what I’d always called a lemming ass—that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of a cliff. She was a naughty, naughty girl and it crossed my mind that she might’ve become a nurse simply so she would have that whole bad-girl-in-nurse’s-outfit look working for her. She caught me staring at her once and said, “You were a real bastard before the accident, weren’t you?” It was more a statement than a question and she didn’t seem angry, just amused.
♦ ♦ ♦
Thérèse’s mother came by later in the week to pick up her daughter’s effects. She told me about the funeral; apparently the mayor had sent a “magnificent bouquet of lilies” and everyone sang prayers “with their voices raised to Heaven.” Then she lost her train of thought and looked longingly out the window at the park down the block, from which the voices of children playing baseball drifted up. She suddenly looked a dozen years older than the moment before, and when her trance broke she became terribly self-conscious that I’d seen it.
“Did Thé—” she started. “I understand that my daughter died in your bed. Did she …?”
“No,” I answered, “she didn’t suffer.”
“Why did she go … to you?”
“I don’t know. She told me God thinks I’m beautiful.”
The mother nodded, then burst into a sob that she tried to shove back into her mouth. “She was such a good girl. She deserved so much—”
The mother couldn’t finish her sentence. She turned her back to me and the more she tried to remain still, the more her shoulders lurched. When she was finally able to look at me again, she said, “The Good Lord never gives us anything that we can’t handle. You’ll be all right.”
She walked towards the door, then stopped. “‘Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?’” She straightened her back. “That’s Zechariah 3:2. The world is good.”
Then she tucked the plastic flowers under her arm and left.
♦ ♦ ♦
Anyone who’s spent a long period in the hospital knows that one’s nose loses its discernment in the atmosphere of ammonia. During one débridement session with Nan I asked, “What do I smell like?”
She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her white sleeve and I could tell that she was making the decision between telling me the truth or attempting something more pleasant. I knew her by this point: she’d choose the truth. She always did.
“Not as bad as you might think. It—I mean, you—your smell is musty and old. Like a house that everyone has left and no windows have been opened in a long time.”
Then she went back to work, scraping and refurbishing this house that the owner had deserted. I wanted to tell her not to bother, but I knew that Nan would just turn down the corners of her mouth and continue her work.
♦ ♦ ♦
Unable to tend yourself in a hospital, strangers plague you: strangers who skin you alive; strangers who cannot possibly slather you in enough Eucerin to keep your itching in check; strangers who insist on calling you honey or darlin’ when the last thing in the world that you are is a honey or a darlin’; strangers who presume that plastering a smile like drywall across their obnoxious faces will bring you cheer; strangers who talk at you as if your brain were more fried than your body; strangers who are trying to feel good about themselves by “doing something for the less fortunate”; strangers who weep simply because they have eyes that see; and strangers who want to weep but can’t, and thus become more afraid of themselves than of burnt you.
When I could stand no more television, I counted the holes of the perforated ceiling. I counted again to verify my findings. I memorized the stealth movement of the setting sun’s shadows crawling down the walls. I learned to tell whether each nurse was having a good or bad day by the click of her steps. Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets. The snake kept kissing the base of my skull, the bitch. I AM COMING. I was overwhelmed by whiteness and choking on antiseptic. I wanted to crawl through my urinary tube and drown in my piss.
As bad as it was, it became worse when Nan explained that at the end of my hospital stay—which would not come for many more months—I’d be placed in a halfway house for “reintegration” into society. Eventually, she said, I’d be able to look after most of my own needs and live on my own.
Seventeen years after release from one government home, I would find my way back into a different one—but at least when I was a penniless child, I had had my life ahead of me. At thirty-five I was a spent, struck match.
So I listened to the doctors and I nodded yeses when they told me about upcoming surgeries, but they might as well have been telling me about my upcoming trip to the city at the bottom of the sea. I signed consent forms; I signed away my house and all my personal possessions. A burn such as mine can easily cost half a million dollars to treat, and without much more effort can climb its way to more than a million.
My lawyer came to visit, uncomfortable in his gown. Unlike the other visitors, he had also decided to wear a surgical mask; it would be charitable to think this was for my protection, but it was more likely his own paranoia that he might catch something. In any case, I thought it appropriate: I could not look upon his masked face without thinking of a thief come to rob me.
He said a few words about how sorry he was about my accident; then, this formality dispensed with, he launched into an explanation of the serious trouble that my production company was experiencing. At the root, the problem was nonfulfillment of contracts to deliver new content to sales outlets; filming had ceased the moment I wasn’t around to run operations, but delivery commitments had already been signed. He ran through a number of options, but because I had never trained anyone to fulfill my duties if I was incapacitated, only one scenario was truly viable: bankruptcy. He didn’t want to bother me continually in my “difficult time,” he explained, so he had already prepared the documents enabling my creditors to seize and liquidate my assets. Of course, he had ensured that the bankruptcy filing fees would be paid up front.
I just signed everything he placed in front of me, in order to get him out of the room quicker. The irony was not lost upon me that after making all my money in the skin trade, I was now trading all my money for skin. The deed done and my company instantly folded, the lawyer didn’t know what to do other than say he was sorry one more time and exit the ward as quickly as possible.
And so my life went. When the doctors told me that I was improving, I did my best imitation of a smile. The nurses were proud of me as I squeezed the therapy ball with my burnt hand. They thought I was doing it to improve my strength, but I only wanted to shut them up. I was tired of Maddy’s teasing, Beth’s seriousness, and Connie’s optimism.
I lay patiently during the Eucerin rubs, each one a tour of duty. I would pray, in the foxhole of my mind, for the opportunity to desert. At one point, Nan nonchalantly stated that my wounds were a “classic challenge” for a doctor such as herself. I pointed out that I was not a problem to be solved. She stammered. “That’s not what I meant, I—I, uh … You’re right. I was out of line, and I’m truly sorry.”
I felt a brief sense of victory, but the funny thing was that I agreed with her completely: I was a problem to be solved, although we saw it from opposing angles. She saw my bandages as a larval cocoon from which I would emerge, while I saw them as a funeral