ALL HAIL KING MORPHINE, OR whatever the injection was. After the doctor pokes the inside of Miles’s right arm, the pain in his ankle recedes. Leg grows longer and longer—carries his ankle away with it. Ten, twenty, fifty feet long—one amazing leg that stretches off the bed, down the hall, and through the door outside, where it disappears into the falling snow.
He’s suddenly warm all over. Warm from the inside out. Floaty. He hears snatches of songs, trippy psychedelic bands from the 1960s … great time to have been alive … annoyed that he missed it. But he’d be like, a hundred years old right now. No, not one hundred. More like … He can’t do the math. Concentrates, but he can’t make the numbers stay still. Can’t make them stay in columns that he can add and subtract. The numbers float around like lazy black flies—he grabs at them.
“Try to stay still,” a woman’s voice says; her hands press his arms back down to the blankets.
“Headache,” he mumbles.
“I would think,” she says. “You cracked your helmet. You need to buy a better one next time.”
“Where am I?” Miles asks.
“The hospital. You had a snowmobile crash.”
He squints from side to side. Something about the room—maybe it’s the smell—reminds him of Mr. Kurz’s little room at Buena Vista Convalescent Home. The nurse leans over him and shines a penlight in his eyes. “Can you follow the little light for me one more time?”
“Sure,” Miles says, as if it’s no big deal; but it takes all his energy to keep up with the slowly moving light. So easy to lose interest. Think of other things. He tries to focus and jerks his eyeballs back to the light.
“Concussed for sure,” the nurse murmurs to someone else.
“Let’s get some more X-rays,” a man’s voice says.
Miles can’t see much of anything after the light beam clicks off; he closes his eyes. Floats in the warm bath of the painkiller. He can smell himself—he’s overheated and suddenly wringing wet under the blanket. The same odor as Mr. Kurz’s overly warm room at Buena Vista: old wool, sweat, woodsmoke.
“Hi again,” a cheerful voice says above Miles, and the spotlight shines in his eyes. “Could you tell me your name and date of birth?”
He shakes his head to clear it, but the fog doesn’t go away. He works his lips to bring up the right words. “Name and birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Miles Kurz. February 29, 1920.”