wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his
legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of
the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the
fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself
pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed
and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding
among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling,
falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn't wake
up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but
never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of
the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling,
falling .
After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General,
Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh
of June.
Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve
damage.
Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.
His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile
floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of
bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the
window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn
image.
The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the
first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well
equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than
like a gym, which wasn't bad. And perhaps because he had at least an
idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a
gym than like a torture chamber.
His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet
four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was
in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black
hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by
the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers,
white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant
apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to
deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, 'No pain, no
gain.'
'Doesn't sound like advice, the way you say it,' Jack told him.
'Oh?'
'Sounds like a threat.'
'You'll cry like a baby after the first several sessions.'
'If that's what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can
both go home.'
'You'll fear the pain to start with.'
'I've had some therapy at Westside General.'
'That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I'm going
to put you through.'
'You're so comforting.'
Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. 'You've got to have no illusions
