Chris Lynch

I never loved anybody, before a Saturday in June. Actually it would have been Sunday, since all the stuff that happened happened mostly after the dateline, after midnight, which I figure is when most of the real things in life happen. I usually sleep through them.

Love, though. Never really, anyway, love. As far as I know. As far as I can tell, I never loved anybody, except for possibly my mother, before Saturday. Or Sunday. It wasn’t by choice. Not a decision I made, or something I controlled. It was just not what I did with people. With people? To people? At them, around them? What is it you do with love, anyway? Not important. The thing is, it was just not my thing, and it was not my fault. It just was.

“Well, certainly, it’s hot. Sure, it’s hot. We all feel the heat, and we’re free to move around. We are free to go outside, and to have a smoke, and to drink a couple of icy-cold Diet Cokes, if we so desire. For you, in this . . . thing, god, it has to be ten times worse with the heat.”

It, this thing, would be my bed.

The Stryker bed. Sounds dynamic, no?

No.

Here’s what the Stryker bed does. It makes a sandwich out of you, and then it makes a rotisserie chicken out of you, and if I’m leaning a little heavy on the food comparisons, then that’s fair enough because the other thing the Stryker bed does to me is it makes me want to tell everybody to just eat me.

Sorry. But what it is, it’s like a cot type of bed and every two hours when I’ll be just lying on my back—you know my back, the broken one—being a brave young soldier indeed, the team comes in and clamps a whole other cot right down on top of me. There’s a little hole cut for my face so I can do things like see and breathe and probably I look like the carnival attraction where you try to bop the clown with a baseball. Maybe we’ll play it, eventually.

There’s no need for more entertainment yet, though, because the best part is next. That’s when my handlers all get together and heave-ho, here we go. They crank a handle and shove me over until the world does a quick gainer with a half twist and I come to a stop with a thump that leaves my spine feeling like it’s tearing off in two directions. I’m staring at the speckled, screaming-white tiled floor through my Stryker cot face-hole, adding more screaming and speckling to the floor because I am crying my guts out all over it.

Every two hours, pretty much the same scene.

I am very sorry about that. Because I know what I look like when I cry. That is why I stopped crying when I was five. Caught a glimpse of my yogurt cheeks, my brown-spotted forehead, my copperwiring hair matting down along throbbing, veiny temples, and I scared myself completely and permanently straight. I looked like Raggedy Ann, if she were sitting on the tip of a flaming spear. So the crying thing just couldn’t happen.

And didn’t. For twelve tight-ass years. Until a Saturday in June. Sunday.

Here’s what I did, on Saturday night. It is a thing I do. Not the breaking-my-back thing, which was kind of a special-occasion deal, but the rest of it. I drive out almost every Saturday night unless I have another engagement—which is another way of saying I drive out every Saturday night—to the airport.

I don’t have any business there, I just go. I do like other people; I watch planes take off and land, I have something to eat. I try to get around to all the different restaurants in all the different terminals, for variety, and have a little meal there. I’m compiling a little book of reviews that I’m clipping together for I’m not sure what. Maybe somebody will like it. Maybe it will be useful sometime even though the restaurants all look and taste the same.

After I eat, I walk, because that is good for digestion. It is also good for looking at people. I stare at people. I try not to stare, but I know I am doing it because of the bug-eyed, mind-your-business look I get when I am caught. I don’t stop, though. I watch all the couples and the families and the rowdy-guys groups. I like to watch especially at the big airport moments, when lots of people are just slamming back together after somebody’s trip, and lots more are yanking apart because the airline is making them say good-bye right this minute. Airports are all about tears and giggles, and you really can’t help but feel somehow like you are part of it, especially if you go regularly like I do and so are a natural part of the scenery.

Sometimes I go to a greeting area, like outside of customs at the international terminal, and I wait there for a long time, just as if I were there to pick somebody up. But toward the end, when most people have been picked up, the only ones left are the raggedy stragglers who look half dead and wholly alone because nobody is there for them. When they come, I go, because they kind of spoil it.

But none of all this broke my back, did it? No, what broke my back was that I was driving way too fast, far too fast, late Saturday night to get away from that airport. I don’t drive fast; I know better. I stopped driving fast when earlier in the year, at the start of my senior year, our headmaster addressed us all in the auditorium, pointed his finger out over the crowd, and insisted, “Two to four of you people will not be here for graduation. That is what happens every year. And we will probably lose you in an automobile. Try and make it to graduation, kids.” And that was it; he left the stage.

Pretty effective speech, as far as these things go. It worked on me, anyway. I wanted to live, and I wanted to graduate. Not entirely sure why, but there I was.

And I was a safe driver before a Saturday night in June. Before I felt a need to speed away from the airport and flew through the airport tunnel probably faster than the planes above it, and flew out of the tunnel far too fast for anybody who seriously wanted to make the sharp right turn up the upramp to the expressway.

And so, violence. I have millions of flaws, more flaws than almost anybody, more flaws on my anemic face alone than you probably have in your whole soul. Except that the main flaw I always did not have was violence. I was never in any way a violent guy, and never once did I deliberately hurt another body’s outsides.

But now it comes in bunches. Day and night, but especially night, the violence, the visions, the scenes come in monster waves. Me fighting. Me driving fast, faster, aiming for a crash. Blood, and speed, and shattering bones, and stuff that before a Saturday night in June was never, ever a part of my life is suddenly very central to my nightly life. In nearly every scene, my skull winds up mashed like rotten fruit.

Morphine, I think, has something to do with it. They give me, apparently, as much as they are allowed, because I am broken pretty good, and my genius surgeon who is busy but worth the wait is keeping me waiting, keeping me broken, for a week before operating. It kind of hurts a lot when we are nearing time for my next morphine. But then, right after, other things take over.

“You know, Nursey-Nurse, I’m one of those guys who lives life too close to the edge. That’s what got me in this situation.”

“No, I think it’s riding too close to the guardrail that got you in this situation.”

I hate that she is funny. I especially hate that she is funnier than me.

“Are you a redhead?” I say. “God, I would just hate it if you were a redhead. That’s the only thing, if you were a redhead. We can get along fine no matter what other problems you have.”

My nickname my entire school life was Red Rover. Or, if they had a little extra time, Red Rover, Red Rover. Or, if things were especially slow, Red Rover, Red Rover, Send Ass-Face Right Over. And so on. But I’m not in school anymore. I just graduated.

“Because. You see, my mother was a redhead. I could kill her. No, she is alive. I could kill her, though. Red. She’s red. And I will never forgive her for that. And even now, when it’s fading and her hair is turning an almost-hair-color-normal-for-humans, what do you suppose she does? She gets some stuff and she starts dyeing it back. After she’s recovered. After she’s been cured, she starts giving herself the disease again. I mean, could you kill her? I could kill her. I love her, but I could kill her. You’re not a redhead, are you, Nursey-Nurse?”

“I am not Nursey-Nurse, thank you.” You had to hear the perfect note on the second nurse. Banged it like a gong. Hilarious. Very good, very funny, like a pro. I hate it. “You can call me Nurse Knightly, like I told you before.”

Nurse Knightly is doing stuff behind me, what stuff I have no idea. That is how it is every time because Nurse Knightly only ever shows up in the middle of the night and only after I have been spun over onto my face. We have met several times, but we’ve never actually seen each other. Nurse Knightly is a presence; a pair of busy, efficient, strong-gentle hands; and a voice. A deep, rich, sure voice. Deeper than mine, higher than my mother’s. That is all I know of my midnight nurse, and I keep it this way by keeping my face pressed firmly toward the floor. I could see with mirrors. They said I can have mirrors if I want. I don’t want.

“Nurse Knightly,” I say in a very nice, obedient, schoolboy voice, “are you a guy or a gal?”

There’s a snort, a bull snort that shoots in my direction. I may even hear a hoof pawing the floor.

“I am not a gal.”

“Hah! I knew I—”

“I am not a gal, because nobody is a gal in this universe, in this century, you sad little cowboy.”

I laugh, but mostly on the inside. Laughing on the outside hurts my spine so much that I have to distribute my laughter evenly in a smooth howl-growl dial-tone noise that really cracks up Nurse Knightly, which then gets me going and I wind up killing myself with the hard, choppy guffaws I was trying to avoid in the first place.

“Shall I rephrase the question, then?” I ask chirpily. This is not the first phrasing of this question between us, actually. And they have all been just this fun for me.

“You can rephrase it into Serbo-Croatian if you like, but you’ll get the same nothing out of me.”

I love Nurse Knightly.

“I love you, Nurse Knightly.” Damn-god-damn I cannot believe I let that out. Fortunately, Nurse Knightly knows me intimately and reorders things.

“Hmm, you may love me, but I suspect you love morphine just a little bit more.”

“It is so hot.” I moan almost involuntarily because it hits me now just how stifling they keep a hospital room that should be making the likes of me a little more comfortable.

“I know,” says Nurse Knightly calmly.

They wake me up every couple of hours no matter what, to make sure I keep. Healthy. No skin sores and all that, keep my blood moving around my body and all. And keep that stupid spine and all its horrible little splinters locked in place until genius surgeon, who is also very tall and not redheaded and probably has his own airplane, can get in there and stick in the steel rods that will make me more rigid than the wet stick of gum that I am now. I know all the why of why they have to do it. But hell. Hell. I’d have rather just stayed asleep, if anybody asked me. I’d have taken the sores, and the risks, actually, if anybody asked me.

But nobody asked me.

Except.

“What can I do for you to make you feel better?” is what I hear, every night, at about zero in the morning, when I am lying facedown, in the Stryker bed, in some discomfort, and when I can see not one sign of life.

At first I could not believe this was legitimate. I thought it had to be a gag. A rotten gag.

“What can you do for me? Are you joking?”

“No. I’m not joking, actually. Are you feeling all right? That is my purpose, after all, to help you feel better. Call it job satisfaction, I guess. But it does matter to me whether or not you feel better. If you don’t, I’ll go home and feel terrible for the rest of the night. I mean that. That’s the way I am.”

“Get out of town, because that is not the way you are. That’s not the way anybody is. Nobody is that good. Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry. You’re right, nobody is that good. But for now, would you like me to give you a little alcohol rub, which will help you feel cooler and a lot more comfortable?”

It is more than fair to say that I’ve had very little experience with fielding an offer like that. But even instincts as miserable as mine say not to go all quivery with excitement.

“Um, sure, I guess you could do that.”

“Great. It’s a date.”

A date. Yikes, a date.

“Yikes, a date.”

Nurse Knightly laughs—a barrelly, rugged, kneeslapper laugh.

“You are so funny. I didn’t think anybody really said ‘yikes.’ But there you go.”

“There I go. But I didn’t mean to go there. I wasn’t supposed to say the ‘yikes, a date’ thing for you to hear it. Wasn’t even entirely sure I did, until right there when you told me and laughed at me.”

“Oh gee, I didn’t laugh at you, like that. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry. In fact, if you’ll laugh just that way once more, I’ll say it all over again.”

I don’t even have to say it over again.

“That’s a great laugh, you know. Makes a guy want to be funny just to hear it.”

“Well, there you go. Everybody wins.”

I certainly do. Nurse Knightly proceeds to politely undo the back of my humiliating hospital-boy outfit, then spritzes the finest mist of alcohol across my shoulder blades, carefully out to my sides, moving down but staying safely away from the spine. Then, the spine.

I could holler with joy, if I could even talk. I could not have guessed this feeling of relief, of coolness, yes, but more of total tingly bliss, as the alcohol touches me all over my back, all over where nothing and nobody has been able to touch me since a June Saturday night or Sunday. Then, with careful fingers, applied just barely heavier than the alcohol mist, Nurse Knightly rubs and feather-strokes my sides, my shoulder blades, my neck, and I don’t know if it is the alcohol or the application of it, but I swear I can feel it seeping under the skin, into my body, cooling my surface and setting fire to my insides.

I close my eyes. I squeeze them extra-tight because inexplicably, like an imbecile, I am about to cry again. If I do, I swear I will slap myself. There is no pain here, so there is no excuse here. I can cry in another hour, when they flip me over, but not now. I’m going to blow the whole thing, and Nurse Knightly will stop rubbing me and then never show up in my room again, I just know it.

“How is that, then? Is that all right? You feeling any better?”

I am not sure if a sound comes out of me. I can only hope it was yes-like.

So I haven’t blown it anyway. In fact, it gets better. Nurse Knightly leans over a bit closer. I can feel features there, can almost feel nose and lips against my back, at the most dangerous, do-not-touch, shattered area of my middle spine. And then, just then, just so, Nurse Knightly’s breath goes where the fingers cannot, a swinging, slow, side-to-side, then up-and-down motion, as if a team of little wings are aligned for the sole purpose of making me feel better.

And that is just what they do, and just what I feel. Better. Better than before. Better than you. Better than anyone anywhere at this moment. My back may have even healed, I feel so much better. So much better, I suddenly panic, afraid that I am going to embarrass myself. I feel myself breathing faster, in those safe, shallow breaths they taught me so I wouldn’t get any more hurt.

Nurse Knightly is perfect.

We have a silence now that I am too aware of. We don’t have silences much once we get going, me and Nurse Knightly, and I don’t like them when we do. They are big, fat blobs in the middle of our fine, clean space, and I don’t like them at all. My back rub has ended, and I need to say something about it. I have to, I should, I want to. I want to say it all, and I will never be able to say enough.

But sometimes I think, and nothing comes out. I realize it’s more the morphine, but it’s a terror anyway, like I’m in a trap in my own head.

God, how I do wish that silence would shut up now. It is a fright to me.

Nurse Knightly must have hit a glitch too, because this should have stopped already. And when finally it does, it’s as if the conversation has skipped backward.

“ ‘Yikes, a date,’ you say?”

I am politely rebuttoned. My nurse is up and about the room again doing stuff. Rubbing alcohol is now my favorite scent.

“Argh,” I say.

The laugh. Throaty. Meaty. “You also say ‘argh’? Where did you go to school, Marvel Comics?”

“Listen, pretend I didn’t say ‘yikes, a date.’ It was the morphine talking.”

“OK, I’ll try and pretend. But don’t get your hopes up.”

Again the blob of silence descends, and again I hate it. But this time the morphine does its other trick, ending the silence. Go, Morph.

“Yikes, it was the morphine talking. Want to hear it talk again?”

God, no. I can almost actually hear this inside, the good region of my mind cringing and begging the other part to stop.

“OK, here goes.” It’s not listening to anyone now. “I want you to know that that back rub was the finest thing that ever happened to me. The best moment of my life.”

I think I registered with that one.

“Whoa!”

“And hear that? Now I know who it is. Lucille Ball. There was a show, back in the Stone Age, probably the first television show, I Love Lucy. And my mother used to force everybody to watch it whenever it was on. You would have to sit there right in front of the TV like a zombie, like a cult brainwashing indoctrination. My mother always loved her. Lucy was a mad redhead, you see. Even though she was in black and white, she wasn’t fooling anybody. We could tell.”

I believe I have Nurse Knightly pretty well spellbound by now.

“I am familiar with Lucy. Is there a reason why we’re talking about her?”

“Oh. Sorry, it’s the voice. That’s who your voice sounds like. She had a deep, unusual voice. And especially later, when she had another show—in color, unfortunately—and she was older and had smoked millions more cigarettes that made it even deeper . . . that, right there, is the voice.”

There is a bit of a pause where I find myself weirdly sort of congratulating myself for something here. I don’t know what I thought this Lucy connection would mean. People can be funny sometimes, about being compared.

“Thanks,” Nurse Knightly says in exactly that voice. Amazing, really.

“My mother would love you,” I say. “She would really love you, my mother.”

That one just stays there in the air, uncollected, as I hear Nurse Knightly clanking things and clicking things and doing the nurse job just for me. I think I need to say thank you for that, and it is on my lips when I hear my nurse swoosh out the door.

To go and do it for somebody else, I suppose. I suppose that’s only fair. I suppose that is the way it has to work, and that I knew that.

When my nurse returns some time later—minutes probably, but it passed like a whole lonely summer—I am twitching with more pain and discomfort than if it was my morphine running late.

“I haven’t had very many dates,” I say.

“ ’Scuse? Were you talking all the time I was out of the room and now I’m off the pace?”

“No, it’s me. The ‘yikes’ thing. ‘Yikes, a date,’ remember? I thought I would, sort of, explain that now. I have had very few dates.”

“I find that strange and nearly impossible to believe.”

“No, you don’t, but thank you. The front of my head is even more a mess than the back. The front has got details.”

“I won’t listen anymore if it’s going to go like this.”

“And of those pathetic few dates, almost all of them were with this girl named Cherry, who was right up my alley because she had a face like a shoe and was homeschooled her entire life all the way until she was sixteen and her parents split up spectacularly and there was no home to be schooled in anymore. So Cherry was plopped like a six-foot-tall infant into the middle of our junior year of high school with absolutely nothing for social skills and, as I said, a face like a shoe.

“And, get ready now, even with all that going for her, the first seven times I asked her out she said no!”

“Ah, but you stuck with it, and the important thing is you won her over in the end. Lucky number eight.”

“Lucky nothing, she thought I was somebody else. I eventually wrote her a note, signed it from the second ugliest guy in the school, and she jumped at it like a marlin. I asked her to meet me at this Chinese restaurant near the school, not the greatest Chinese restaurant but just within my budget and quality requirements, because I was going to do it right and pay for everything and encourage her to get more than she wanted and dessert and everything. And thanks only to her E.T.-level of social experience did she not think this was a setup. Cherry actually came to the restaurant expecting a romantic date rather than, say, a bunch of seniors jumping out from behind the hundred-gallon fish tank to pelt her with wontons until she cried and capturing it all on film. I would have expected something like that. I think most normal people who knew some things and had met the world before would have expected something was up. Not Cherry. Only Cherry. Very Cherry.

“But what she got was me. She may not have considered that a brilliant consolation, but we did get together. She saw me there, looked around hopefully for a better explanation, then figured it out after a few minutes. Then she sighed in a very tired way and spoke those romantic words which will live in my heart forever: ‘I suppose.’

“I was kind of scared and depressed from that very first minute we got together, and she looked like she felt exactly the same. She looked tired when I felt tired. She looked suicidal when I felt suicidal. It was less like two people and more like one monkey not understanding his reflection in a mirror. Eventually I realized that I had put all this effort into dating . . . myself. And I had hoped to do better than that. We were different enough, but really, we were the same. You could rearrange our features and trade them around like Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, but still, in there, we would see each other. It made me angry when I would see myself in there. Angrier every time.

“And I felt sorry. For her. ’Cause you know what? I really liked her. And you know what? In those moments when I could stop seeing me where she was supposed to be? Cherry was really pretty. Even though her face was shaped just a little like the sole of a shoe, it didn’t spoil it. It suited her.

“Until I saw me there again, and not her.

“By the time we did actually manage to have sex, which we managed exactly two times, it was more like a dare than anything else. A challenge, a joust. A punishment. We probably didn’t do it any worse than most people do the first times. But it was worse, because we were there. And we would not let each other forget that.

“Want to hear it some more, Nurse Knightly? Ready to hear more from Morph?”

She blobs me with more silence. She knows what she is doing, but it will not work.

“Here it is, then. You know how I got through sex with Cherry? Both times? I fantasized of course. What did I fantasize about? I fantasized about masturbating. What do you think, Nurse? As a professional human bodyist, do you think I might have the arrangement a little backwards?”

“I am not an expert in the field, I’m afraid.”

“Well, I am, now. I found it very relaxing. Because then I stopped feeling like I had to apologize to anybody else. Worked like a charm.”

“Are you trying to scare me away now? Do I really sound easy to scare to you? You could just ask me to go, if you wanted me to go.”

“And now, when I masturbate, want to know what I fantasize about? Go ahead, guess.”

“No, thank you.”

“When I masturbate, I fantasize about—ta-da—masturbating. The circle is finally unbroken. Neat little system, huh? Perfection.”

“My shift is ending.”

I know when shifts are ending, because I have gotten good at that, a sense of things, of time, of coming and going, that I didn’t used to have. I am thinking about possibly asking Nurse Knightly to hold on just a few minutes for my next rotation so I can finally get a look as he or she leaves and doesn’t ever come back. It is up to me, I know. I don’t know.

I really did love my airport trip. I loved it a lot, and thought about it all week until the day. Now I can’t even go. And I would be dressed nice, too, in very nice clothes like there was always something special on. Everybody in the airport is so beautiful. Everyone. Isn’t that amazing?

Well, that time I went, one Saturday night in June, I had no idea I would see Cherry and her mother and father.

No idea I would ever see them together again anywhere, never mind at the airport. Which is why the sure and bitter taste of unrightness came up on me so fast, right when I saw them. You know when you just know? Especially when you so wish you didn’t?

Can I say that of a whole airport full of pretty people, Cherry was the prettiest thing? Can I tell you she looked more lovely than the entire place? Lovelier than ten terminals put together. They all did, the reunited family—looked sparkling, as they stood in line getting ready to fly into some fresh, spotless new everything.

That’s the airport for you, isn’t it?

They didn’t see me, of course, which was why Cherry didn’t wave good-bye to me. It’s one thing to pretend strangers are really your friends or family or lovers, but to intrude on real people you actually do know, the moment they’re starting over again, that just wouldn’t be right. So I just went away very, very quickly so as not to disturb or upset anybody.

I’m not telling the truth, completely.

I upset myself when I went away from that airport very, very quickly. I upset myself a whole lot, because I really did want for Cherry to see me there in the airport, in my airport look. I was dressed awfully nice. I did a good job getting ready that Saturday night in June. Cherry would have liked how I looked when I was in the airport, in my duds, in my airport mood.

I should have let her see me.

“Would you like me to stay with you for a while longer?” Nurse Knightly asks in an unnecessary whisper that makes me worry about myself. “I don’t mind a bit.”

“Were you reading my mind?”

“Good nurses can do that.”

“I don’t think I would recommend any more of it.”

“Can’t be any worse than what you actually say out loud.”

“I apologize, Nurse, for attempting to be grotesque to you.”

“Very good. So, I’ll stay for a while.”

“No.”

“What? You don’t want me?”

“Don’t tease, please. You are dealing with an invalid, you know. Of course I want you. But I don’t mind you leaving. As long as I feel sure you’re coming back.”

“Sure, I am coming back. As long as you don’t talk dirty anymore.”

“OK. But can I make you my fantasy?”

I can hear Nurse Knightly sliding away as the team shuffles in to turn me over and make me cry. She stops in the doorway.

“I believe you may have mentioned you already had one.”

“I would very much like to replace it with something nicer.”

Words fight over a straining low laugh. “You going to need to have a look at me, then, to make this thing work?”

“Absolutely not. Absolutely no. Anyhow, I’ve got you already.”

Nurse opens the door to my room once more just as the team is snapping the Stryker bed tightly over me and the checklist starts. Clip number three, tight, four locked . . .

“So,” Nurse asks with a big, thick Lucy laugh, “how am I?”

I want to make a joke.

I want to make several.

But I have another glitch moment, and only real stuff comes out.

“Nurse, you are so beautiful, I’m blinded. You are the most gorgeous thing I have ever never seen.”

The door to the room has already closed, but there is no missing the big voice bouncing around the corridor.

“Ha,” says Nurse, “you must have been sneaking peeks all along.”

I start laughing the wrong way, and it hurts like mad. The team jerks me over at just that moment, slams me to an awkward, excruciating stop, and the pain is immense.

But this time, I do not cry.

That’s a lie. I cry like a brat.

But it’s OK. It’s only pain. And soon I am moaning a small, safe laugh. Right, then I’m crying again.

But after a while everything settles down. It’s quiet, and I can lie back and think about truly lovely things.

Like being able to walk again.