Pain takes us to places we cannot anticipate, to events we have managed to completely forget, returns us to worlds we hadn’t known we ever visited. Pain bends our attention to what we would ignore. Hanson used to smile and say that pain was his friend.
He lay there after the black rabbit had gone, studying the pattern of cracks in the plaster ceiling. It was hot, and he was naked on top of the sheets. Still alive, saved this time by a New Year’s Eve hallucination that wouldn’t be ignored or dismissed. The black rabbit had awakened him from the coma dream that would have killed him if he’d slept any longer.
His head was pounding, and he knew it was going to get worse. The last time something had hit him hard enough to knock him out for more than a few seconds, he’d been drunk, driving home from the Portland police club at 3 a.m. in a snowstorm, almost home, when he hit black ice and drove his VW van into a phone pole—it had gotten a lot worse the next day. Assaulted that time by a known phone pole, though, no question about it.
Whoever he was, the man who’d run out from under his own hat had scheduled Hanson for an appointment with pain. It was already in the house, just looking around, he supposed, to see how Hanson had changed since the last time, reckoning who he was now so it would know the answers to the questions it would be asking him.
He should have gotten some pills from the emergency room doctor, but it was too late for that now. He didn’t have anyone to call, and anyway, the phone was way out in the kitchen. He hoped it wouldn’t ring. He hated the phone.
His eyes followed the cracks in the plaster above the bed, tracing the rivers and tributaries and deltas across the ceiling, imagining himself on his way out to sea, the water changing color beneath him from brown to green and finally to a blue as pale and clear as the sky, doing his best not to think of what would be coming soon to see him, sailing into the horizon. He eased a pillow beneath his head and went to sleep.
The house was dark when the pain woke him up and began punching him behind his eyes. The questions were easy at first, the pain exploratory, tentative, patient. Hanson denied everything: What? How should he know? No. He wasn’t there.
Soon though, the interrogation began in earnest, questions coming faster, one after the other, and the punishment for each evasion, denial, or excuse was worse each time, in different, surprising ways until Hanson had to recite to himself the tricks he’d learned:
Stay relaxed, like you do at the dentist, think of it like that, for as long as you can. Don’t anticipate the drill. Just let it happen.
Answer a question with a question—but not smart-ass. Try that a couple of times, two or three times, but spread them out. Don’t be disrespectful, but don’t show fear or weakness. Interrupt them while you still can. Ask them to repeat the question.
“Wait!” Tell them you’re not the person they want. As if it just occurred to you that a mistake, an honest mistake, has been made. Who knows how. No one’s fault, it’s built into the system somewhere.
Sincerity will buy time. When that stops working, move on to bewilderment. It’s going to be a long night, so accept it.
As it gets worse, visualize yourself on another planet—a different self, the real you, on a dark planet light years into the future, watching the false you being questioned. Say to yourself, softly, “I’m not me. Again, I’m not me, I’m not me…”
Relax your eyes and imagine the future. Pretend that it looks hopeful.
If you can make yourself sleep…No. They’ll wake you up and make you pay for that. Disregard. Forget that one. Do not try sleep unless it’s worked for you in the past.
Never get angry, and do not deceive yourself into believing you can win. You deserve whatever you get. You’re guilty. Confess and apologize for trying to deny it.
Do not think you can make friends with the pain. If you do, it will be perceived as the desperate, stupid trick that it is. Do not attempt to be clever or ironic, and never, ever patronize the pain.
Dawn is on the way. Do not shoot yourself in the head. Don’t allow yourself to think about the gun, don’t look at it and do not touch it.
Consider the situation from other perspectives.
He was better at dawn. He thought the phone had been ringing during the night, but since most of the phone calls he received were prerecorded messages, he usually ignored the phone anyway, the mindless ringing.
By afternoon he was half-asleep, trying not to think about the night coming up because the pain was already bad. The bird feeder was empty, the birdbath dried up by now. So what? Fuck the fuckin’ birds. No. That’s wrong thinking and it will come back on you. You’ll pay for that. The birds are good. He wished them well and accepted his guilt for the empty feeder.
The doorbell rang. He thought it had, but no one ever came to the house. It rang again, ding-dong…ding-dong, and he knew it wasn’t just a burglar or a Seventh Day Adventist. It was someone who’d found out where he lived, who wouldn’t go away, waiting for him to open the door.
He sat up, his head gonging, slowly pulled on his jeans, and stood up. The Hi Power was cocked and locked on the floor, a round in the chamber and the safety on. He was sure there was a round in the chamber but decided that he didn’t care because he wasn’t going to take it with him. It would hurt too much to lower his head far enough to pick it up. Whoever was at the door could kill him, and that would be fine.
He walked slowly and as softly as he could, his head down, eyes on the floor three feet ahead, a posture that seemed to hurt the least. His downcast eyes got a glimpse of a spoked bicycle wheel—that’s what it looked like—behind the lace curtain over the beveled green glass. When he got to the door he turned the dead bolt, pulled the door open, and carefully raised his head.
“Hi, Officer Hanson. I hope I didn’t wake you up. And I hope it’s okay for me to come by your house like this. I haven’t seen you for a while so…But maybe I should just go. Are you okay?”
“Weegee,” Hanson said, the pain loosening its grip, letting go, stepping back. “Weegee,” Hanson said, smiling at him, “come in.”
“Is it okay if I bring my bike in too?”
“You bet,” Hanson said, the pain walking away, gone, waiting till next time. “Let me put on a shirt.”
Weegee leaned the bike against the wall in the living room, and they walked back to the kitchen.
“Good to see you, Weegee,” Hanson said, opening the refrigerator door. “I don’t…I’ve got water. Got ice water. How about some ice water?”
“Thank you,” Weegee said. “You okay?”
“Sure,” Hanson said, busting open a plastic tray of ice cubes. “Never better,” he said, laughing at that, filling the glass. “Let’s go out on the porch.”
“Birds,” Weegee said. There were still a few seeds left in the feeder and scattered on the ground beneath it.
“Here,” Hanson said, putting the glass of ice water on the little table on the back porch. “I’d better get them some water too,” he said, filling a pot with water from the faucet, enjoying the way the sound changed as the water got deeper, fuller, as the pot filled. “Bring that bag there,” he told Weegee, “and follow me.”
They went out the side door, walked down past the collapsed garage to the grass and trees on the slope beneath the screened-in porch. Hanson took down the feeder and filled it, let Weegee fill the birdbath. Went back in the house.
“Birds,” Weegee said, finishing off a second glass of ice water, holding it up to the light and clinking the ice cubes against the side of the glass. “You know where The Ville is?” Weegee asked.
“San Antonio Village?”
Weegee nodded. “You ever go there?”
“Just once.”
A neon-orange blur appeared—as if out of nowhere—just beyond the porch screen, buzzing, juking side to side.
“What kind of hummingbird is that?” Weegee said.
“Rufous.”
“I never seen one of them before.”
“They don’t live here all year round. They migrate from Mexico, up the Pacific Coast, they raise their babies, then the whole family flies back down the other side of the Sierra Nevada to Mexico.”
“My auntie has a book about the Aztecs. There’s pictures of them with war helmets shaped like hummingbirds.”
Hanson thought how it would have been nice if Libya had visited him, along with Weegee. They could sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds.