Her bed, a white-sheeted machine that contorted into any shape, was her foxhole. A remote control twined over the silver side rails hovered near her right hand. If she wanted to sit higher, she pushed the top right button. To rotate the entire machine, she pushed the third button from the bottom. She learned the sequence for how to sit up. First, second button on the left until the bed stopped. This button brought the bed down close to the ground. Then, the third button on the left until the bed stopped. This rotated the bed up until she was practically sliding out of it. She played with the first on the right and fourth on the left throughout, adjusting the head- and footrests, then sat, sweating, heart beating, sutures weeping, until she gathered the energy to grasp the side rails, spread her legs apart, and heave herself upright.
Pre-op, the anesthesiologist, Dr. Phelz, had asked questions to determine her overall hardiness. “You seem to have a strong constitution. You might heal without this procedure,” he said, as if questioning her decision to have the surgery.
The car accident had turned her easy life topsy-turvy. She could skip the surgery, and maybe continue a downward spiral that she was convinced would lead her straight down the pit into death. Or she could take the risk.
She hated having to make the choice. She wanted to revenge herself on the cause of all this agony. She had made no threat, she had spoken no words in anger, but a plan grew with her pain, and with the impending operation. She must not only punish, but punish with impunity. That was not easy, considering the state of her health after the accident. She counted on more strength and her unshakable resolve to see her through the aftermath.
“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,” she had thought, gazing up at the anesthesiologist's handsome face. It was a nursery rhyme she used to read to her children. “The reasons why, I cannot tell,” her mind ran on as he spoke, reassuring her, attempting a bedside manner. “But this I know and know full well. I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.” The rhyme rose and fell behind his words like a tank rolling over hills.
It was obvious to her he did not like her, either. Possibly, he, too, did not know why. He visited her the first day or so after surgery and she thanked him very genuinely because, like her or no, he gave her a moment of heaven in the midst of sheer hell, and he managed to keep her alive. Later, the surgeon said that he was quite an “interesting guy.” Since she respected the surgeon, she reconsidered. Dr. Phelz was whole and fit. She was lying on the table, a disorderly blob, about to be gutted. No doubt the contrast had affected her judgment.
She did not fear death by anesthesia or heart failure. She did not even fear pain. She had given birth to four children without medication. She imagined she knew all that pain had to offer. She was ignorant, but her ignorance made her calm and strong and helped her survive the battles ahead. This same mysterious thing inside people sent young people to war with a secret in their hearts, a yearning for adventure and glory.
She was just being human, denying the facts that stared her in the face. She did not climb mountains too high to ascend or march off to meet enemies who wanted to kill her. She walked into a hospital where sharp knives waited, sterilized upon a table.
The day before the operation, she spent hours completing a battery of tests. Questions, many questions, but never the right ones. Why had she walked in front of the car? They did not ask. Why had the young man who hit her been without insurance?
Why that split-second mistake? Why all that pain? During the months of her recovery she thought of little else, except holding him accountable for ruining her life. She was a teacher. He needed a lesson he could never forget.
A few forms, to hold everyone else harmless. Then they needed her blood. “It's very hard to find a good spot on me,” she warned them. They patted, then slapped the inside crook of her elbow. They put a heating pad around it. They called in an expert. The phlebotomist, a young woman with scraggly black hair, took six tubes of her blood out of one thin vein, chattering, trying to keep her placid as the red fluid oozed slowly up the plastic piping.
The third day after the operation turned out to be a terrible day. Where the IV entered her hand a bruise had formed, and her hand was bloated. They had once again called the meager-haired woman, who had moved the needle into her arm. Now her arm had bloated, too, and a foot-long red trail under her skin ran from her wrist to her elbow. She had cellulitus, and required more medicine.
She passed much of that day watching the red establish itself under the wan white of her skin. After lunch, which she didn't eat, she eyed her stack of books, wondering if they held enough power to distract her from the heat of the needle and the lead rock in her stomach. When her mind cleared enough, she could think of nothing but the purity of vengeance. She pictured his death. She thought of the story, the one where the one bent on revenge walled another one up alive.
She would like to do that. She would listen for the scream that never came, the jingling of the bells, and mortar the last brick into place anyway.
For months before the operation, while making up her mind to go for it, she had read stories about mountain climbers, trying to read between the lines to find what drove them to take such insane risks. Was it courage? A vain hope for life without pain, without the terrible outcome of a very bad moment?
For her hospital stay, knowing she might have trouble concentrating, she had instead stocked up on best sellers. She picked up one from the bedstand, read a page, and put it down. The downfall and redemption of this character unfolded in her thoughts like a Hollywood movie, so tight. So unreal.
The third evening, still groggy from the abundant course of treatment she had self-prescribed, a man with pocked skin was on duty: the attendant.
Most of the hospital personnel were women. The nurses were typical American types, with the exception of the nurse on graveyard, a large East Indian woman named Mercy, who embodied the night perfectly, muttering incantations as she checked the IV, replacing the bag of fluids and the vial of medication. The orderlies and aides were female immigrants from South America and Thailand, sweet people willing to wipe dirty bottoms and powder flesh that had seen better days.
The exception was Mike.
He came in to check her blood pressure. His reading was different than any other she had had-which she mentioned. He didn't laugh when she joked about it. He slowly pulled out the cuff, fumbling with her arm, and tried again. And again. And then he entered figures she knew to be wrong into his log. That evening, she needed help in the bathroom. He helped her and she didn't care that he scared her a little with his moodiness and the unusual seriousness of his temperament. She didn't care that he was male and black and she was female and white. She needed him and he helped her.
The next evening, she made her husband come earlier so that she would not feel so helpless, and so that she would not have to depend on Mike. Mike came in very quickly, took her blood pressure, and left. She remembered the car coming and the look on the boy's face as his car came forward as if powered by the stars, a machine bent on devastation.
“What did the doctor say when he came out to tell you about the surgery?” she asked her husband. “When you were out there in the lobby, waiting for me?”
“He said you were in recovery.”
“Did he say I was okay?”
He looked confused. “I guess he must have.”
“What else?”
“I asked if there were any surprises.”
“And?”
“He said, and this was strange. Just last week, he had been reading about people with an unusual anatomical feature, an anomaly. He was wondering why, after doing this operation on thousands of patients, he had never come across it. And then you came along, boom.”
“What was it?”
“I don't know. A long name.”
“I want to know.”
“You can ask him later. I was thinking about other things…”
“Should I be scared?”
“No. It's gone now. He took it out. Something vestigial. A leftover from when we were apes that's useless to humans.” He laughed at the thought. “Like too much hair.”
After he left, she drifted into a haze, locked on the idea of a piece of herself, now missing. She had something in her body that had performed an ancient function but was no longer considered useful. There were other body parts like that, she knew. The appendix, of course. The coccyx.
Maybe they still performed an essential role. Medical science wasn't smart enough to know everything. The body was a mysterious thing. All these inbred instincts, behaviors, things that seemed ill-suited to contemporary people, maybe they were needed, somehow. Maybe, by defining them as useless and removing them, humans ran the risk of making themselves less human. Sometimes she suspected that a piece of her had already gone missing when she landed against that curb so very, very hard.
Friday, the surgeon tiptoed around the idea of her leaving by Sunday, an idea she instantly vetoed. She was terribly injured. She couldn't possibly return home, back to the life she remembered from the past, maimed as she was. Why, she couldn't even bend down to tie her shoes yet or reach up for toothpaste in the bathroom cabinet. She needed more time to adjust. She felt so abnormal, practically crippled. She didn't want to see anyone or be seen. Plus, although she did not say this, there was a day of reckoning ahead and she wasn't quite ready.
She knew where he lived, the boy who had hurt her.
The doctor nodded. He would not force her to leave until she was ready.
Something vestigial should have told her she did not want to kill anyone.
But they had removed that, right?
That same day, they removed her IV. The nurses were amazed that one so drug-friendly could switch readily to milder oral medications, but she had breezed through the transition. She had her wits about her for the first time in days. She took note of the room, a large room with a blue sofa underneath a picture window that spread out a view all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. Her husband had sat on that sofa nightly exclaiming with pleasure at the view. All her visitors also exclaimed at the view. She couldn't see the bridge from her bed, but she could see a wall-sized array of stars at night, and streets dotted with red and white lights rising into hills.
Her battles with pain were receding. Medicated, she verged on comfortable for the first time since the accident.
She had spent many a night imagining the damage she would do to the boy who hit her. She would teach him what it meant to be less than utterly responsible. She would hit him in the night, on a dark street-she imagined the crunch as his bones disintegrated. She had the whole thing worked out. She could not wall him up, but she could wreck him.
She flipped on the television, not for the first time, but for the first time since she had become coherent again. She found nothing very exciting. On the public station, a show ran about World War II that included formerly secret Allied and Axis films, and she watched it with half an eye, watched a former German U-boat captain saying, “We were young. We didn't think about what we were doing. We didn't think about the consequences of our actions. We couldn't think of anything more fun than going out and sinking ships.”
Mike came into the room, wheeling his faulty blood pressure machinery in front of him.
He stopped in his tracks, eyes riveted on the show. “That reminds me of my dad.” He watched for a few seconds. “I was just a kid. Nineteen fifty-five, we got our first TV.”
Funny, she wanted to say. We also got our first TV around then. Or was it a year later, on Ceres Street in Whittier? They must be about the same age. She wanted to tell him, share this coincidence, but Mike seemed absorbed in the flickering images on the screen above them and she did not want to interrupt.
A German boat submerged. Cut to the men inside, lowering a periscope.
“Friday night on Potrero Hill. See, that was payday,” Mike said, one hand on his hip, more animated than she had ever seen him. “He'd go out and buy himself a few beers… get a few beers in him.” He stood between her and the television, concentrating on the screen as he spoke. “We had the five hamburgers for a dollar.
“Yeah, he'd get a few beers in him. Those were his favorite shows.
Mike began to pace in front of the television, slapping his knee. His voice, an emotionless, unaccented one, changed to a Southern dialect and rose in pitch. “See up there,” he said, parading,
