8

“I need you to lift your arm a little higher,” Ed, my physical therapist said, as I sweated and strained to lift my right arm in the same way I used to struggle to shoulder press two hundred pounds.

“No,” Ed said. “Don’t tilt at your waist. That doesn’t count. Lift your arm away from your side.”

Gasping, I let the arm drop and fell to my bed. “I can’t.”

“You have to—”

“No, I don’t have to, because I fucking can’t.” I hugged my right arm to my body with my left, kneading the tissue beneath my arm pit.

“I’m going to advise that they cut that scar, but you have to fight anyway. If you don’t, no amount of surgery will save you. You’ve got maybe a year before that tissue sets up, and whatever mobility you have at the end of that is the mobility you’ll have for life. I’ve seen people with burns just as bad regain full mobility.”

I wiggled my finger nubs at him. “Full mobility?”

“Well, obviously your fingers won’t grow back.”

“Then who fucking cares if the arm fucking works? I can’t fucking do anything with it anyway.” These people, they wanted heroic effort for heroic effort’s sake. They wanted super-human determination not because it would do any good, but because as a super human I’d become magically happier. For some reason, the adversity of being burnt to a crisp had brought out the best in a lot of people, and everyone seemed to expect the same of me. They wanted some made-for-TV movie Cody, and they weren’t going to get it.

Ed sat back and looked at me with a look of infinite professional patience that I wanted to slap off his face. “It’s your choice, but you need to really consider how you’re going to feel in the future, because this is your only shot.” He waved through the air, erasing the conversation. “Enough of that. Have they discussed the possibility of putting a bladder beneath that arm?”

“Yeah. Sounds delightful.” Because the scar tissue beneath my arm pit was locking my right arm against the side of my body and growing tighter all the time, the doctors talked about inserting a bladder under the tissue, then slowly inflating it over days and weeks, forcing the scar tissue to stretch. It sounded horrendous, like a huge blister in my armpit that would torment me for weeks, inflating bigger just as the ache of straining scar tissue began to fade, my arm levitating out from my body. All to get mobility in a useless limb. “I’m not sure I’m going to sign off on that. I’m getting tired of surgery.” I’d been through dozens, each one resulting in pain I had to work through in physical therapy and a tiny positive result. And as far as my face went, it seemed they could carve me up all they wanted, but a carved cooked ham doesn’t look much more like a face than an uncarved one. Anyway, I had my mask.

Ed shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He turned my computer chair from my desk and sat in it, leaning forward so that we sat face-to-mask only a couple of feet apart, a couple of men talking mano-a-mano. “You need to really think. You’re depressed, and you have every right to be, but you have to think about your future self. Eventually, you’re going to want more out of life than lying in bed in your parents’ house.”

“And what if I don’t ever get more? Should I keep fighting against my reality? Is that really the path to happiness? A couple of billion Christians, Jews, Hindis and Buddhists would argue that point with you.”

Ed tossed his head back and let loose an exasperated laugh as he stood. “You’re smart, Cody. You’re too damn smart. Just make sure you don’t end up outsmarting yourself while you outsmart all us dopes. Okay?”

Hidden behind my mask, I didn’t feel the need to reply to rhetorical questions. I just followed him with my eye as he left the room. But I listened, too, and I knew he didn’t leave the house immediately. A low rumble of voices meant he and my dad were talking. My dad had switched to second shift so that someone could always be home with me, which was goddamn ridiculous. I could take care of myself. Sure, I hurt all the time, but he couldn’t help with that. It’s not like I needed to be monitored in case I wandered out into the street. Maybe they thought I’d proved that I couldn’t be trusted with a hot stove.

I sat in front of my laptop and opened it. It powered up to display my email, the only thing that really interested me anymore, because I still had letters from Madison to dole out to myself. Reading them was all I looked forward to doing, though they hurt, because they reminded me of what I had and couldn’t get back. My mind worked endlessly over my physical pain and disfigurement, and the emails gave me something else of equal intensity to obsess over. I couldn’t pay attention to the news. Movies no longer held my interest. I’d once been obsessed with sports stats, but now nothing could seem more stupid than trying to memorize a bunch of numbers that abstractly represented guys performing actions that seemed stupid even in the concrete. After months of chewing on the same few terrible seconds not only every waking moment, but even in my dreams, the attraction of something else that could grip my attention was powerful, even if the thing itself was horrible. The feelings of sorrow, anger and jealousy were preferable only for not being the same thoughts that had burned trench-deep neural pathways through my brain.

Madison was slipping. No, she’d already slipped, because I was reading emails she’d written weeks ago.

She’d moved on from alcohol, gotten back in touch with the Dorset brothers, her drug hookup from high school when she’d had a pill problem that had gotten her sent to rehab for two months. She’d started doing Oxy again, and she’d started doing it wherever she’d scored it, not even able to make herself wait until she got home. If she took too much—and she was tiny without a tolerance anymore—she would pass out wherever she was. Not in crackhouses. The homes of the affluent overflowed with pills. But honestly, I didn’t know which was more dangerous.

But why was she telling me about this? Why would she tell me about waking up sprawled on a leather couch, the rising sun falling directly across her face, and feeling at her panties to find them definitely askew, pulled aside?

I thought she was tormenting me, but then I realized that she saw every bit of degradation as recompense. She was working off her sins, and by telling me, she was letting me know that the scales of justice were being balanced. She was letting me see that she wouldn’t allow herself to escape unburned by the fire she felt she’d set. She’d stood outside it, watching the building go up with me inside until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then she’d thrown herself on the pyre so that we could burn together.

But unlike mine, her wounds weren’t visible, so she described them to me.

Some part of her hoped it would make me feel better, but I felt terrible. I felt angry with her for ruining her life. I felt rage at the thought of the people taking advantage of her desperate sadness. But something kept me reading. I had her permission to stop. I’d received numerous commands that I delete the emails, that she hadn’t been in the right frame of mind when she’d sent them. But I kept reading them. Why? Consciously, I didn’t think she deserved this, but somewhere down deep…All I can say is that I kept reading, and that I parceled them out sparingly, counting and recounting like a junkie checks his stash.

Sitting there, looking over my inbox so intently, I jumped at the knock at my door, and clapped the lid shut so clumsily that I almost knocked my laptop off my desk.

“Yeah?” I said, trying to force my heart to slow.

My dad opened the door as if I’d given him permission to enter.

“Ed says that you could be doing better. I explained to him that you’d never half-assed anything in your whole life, that you’d always worked harder than anyone at everything that you did. He didn’t buy it.”

“I’m trying,” I said, not looking up at him. The scar tissue on my chest and the front of my neck was thick from my polyester shirt burning against the tender skin there before Brandon dumped the bin of flour on me. It hurt to try to look up, and that was a convenient excuse.

My dad sat on the bed. “I know you are. You’ve been fighting like hell for months now, harder than any of us could. But the thing is, you might be getting tired and not even know it. But right now, you need to work as hard as you can. Harder than you can.”

“I am.”

He sighed. He wouldn’t snap at me. He’d never had a problem doing so when I was a kid, but he wouldn’t do it now. But he was getting closer. I’d gotten my temper from him. At first, he’d had nothing but sympathy. But the temper was starting to smolder beneath. I didn’t care. I welcomed it. I wanted to cut loose, too. The sullen child act didn’t feel right anymore. I was a decade past that. They thought that they were getting fed up? They felt ready to explode? I was waiting, just waiting for them to slip up so that I could share just a bit of what was clawing its way through my brains and guts every day.

Instead, he patted a stack of books I hadn’t noticed he’d brought in.

“I ordered these. They’re autobiographies. I guess they’re calling them memoirs these days. Of people who were burned and recovered. I thought it might help to see what’s possible.” He stood up, leaving the books on my bed. He didn’t try to hand them to me. I don’t know what would have happened if he had. A bit stunned, I stared at the small stack as he left the room.

My dad wasn’t one for self-help nonsense. He was a bootstrapper. You didn’t get anywhere by moaning and bellyaching. You put your head down and pushed forward, and you kept doing that until you either keeled over dead or retired and had a few years to look up and see how far you’d gotten.

The door closed. My dad had left. I stared at the books, my right arm clenched tightly to my side.

* * *

They put forth more effort than they thought possible. They found new depths of strength and heights of hope and faith. They found their inner beauty, and challenged anyone to say it was of less value than their outer beauty had been. They fought and never relented, because they knew it was God himself who had a plan for them and they weren’t going to buckle under his gaze.

I hated them. I hated them so much.

Reading those stories was the opposite of motivational. I knew that I couldn’t be like those spunky, vivacious, inspiring burn victims. The fire hadn’t burned away my brittle sense of entitlement and complacency, leaving me with a diamond-hard sense of urgency and resolve to live my life to the fullest, so that my prior state should be considered more handicapped than my scarred one. If one of these people had been a little bitter, a little angry, a little crushed…If their frustrations hadn’t all been overcome, their every disadvantage turned into an advantage, maybe I could have taken from their stories other than a now concrete understanding of my own shortcomings. I had previously suspected my pathetic nature, but I had no true point of comparison. I could try to convince myself that no one could withstand what I went through and emerge from the ashes a phoenix rather than more ash. Now I knew. These people didn’t just get back to their pre-burned state. They became better. They were tempered in their flames.

Fuck them, and fuck me.

I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. And I didn’t think I should feel guilty about it. Because guilt wasn’t just one more negative emotion to add to the pile, along with despair, frustration, anger, sorrow, mourning, and simple, mind-destroying pain. It would be bad enough just adding guilt to that list. But guilt was an amplifier. Guilt told me that all of those feelings were my fault. Those books implied that I chose those feelings, that I chose to allow my scar tissue, my lost fingers, and my nightmarish face to control me. Those things were real. They weren’t figments of my imagination. The people in these books were positively solipsistic, a word Madison taught me when I went on one of my ego trips.

If I had total control over those things, it was in the way the existentialists described. I chose this life because I chose to live it. There was always a way out. No one had to live in a world of atrocity. We chose our world. One bullet, one pill and vodka cocktail, and we could reject it.

So if I was responsible for my pathetic existence, it was because I was too scared to off myself. I’d rather haunt my parents’ house, a specter of what I’d been, a living reminder of my dead future, bringing sorrow to us all. No one can live with the dead without living as the dead.

So fuck those Pollyanna freaks and their uplifting messages that ground me further into the ash bin. Fuck them.

But it was good. I laid the books out where I could see them, where I could see the smiling, shiny, patchwork faces of the heroic authors staring out at me, challenging me to be heroic. It was good to know who I really was, to lose the last of those illusions, to be able to let go and sink and sink and maybe find bottom, now that I saw how deep I already was.

I laid back on my bed and stared at the row of book covers, then pulled out my phone.

I feel shitty.

It’s a shitty world, Madison replied.

What are you doing?

Disappearing.

I wish I could.

You have pills. Take one. Take two.

Then I wouldn’t have any later. They’re strict.

So responsible. Let me take them then.

Would you?

No. Not yet.

Where are you?

Some bad place or another.

That could be anywhere.

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

As far as she’d slipped, she was still miles above everyone else. An ache suddenly wracked every cell in my body. They all screamed to be near her.

Come back to me. It’s not your fault. I love you, I typed. I stared at the words, the truest ones I’d ever thought, and then I watched them disappear a letter at a time as I hit the delete key.

My last illusion was that she might come back if I asked. I knew she wouldn’t. I knew it deep down in the same place that made me stare at the people on the covers of those motivational memoirs, the place that knew I deserved all of this. But I couldn’t hear her say it.