by Gayle Forman
He wheels his stool in Freya’s direction, stopping just short of her bare feet.
“Whoa!” he says, as if he just noticed her feet had been amputated and she was walking on bloody nubs. “What happened?”
“To my feet? They just got dirty,” Freya says.
“How?” he asks.
“From dirt,” the Lurker mutters under his breath, and Freya almost smiles.
The doctor turns toward the Lurker. “Are you the one she fell on?”
“No,” he answers. “I’m Harun. I am a bystander.”
“A Samaritan, really. Harun helped me get Nathaniel here,” Freya says, relieved to have learned Harun’s name in such a non-awkward way. She was taught always to use people’s names. It makes them feel important. If she uses his name, maybe he won’t turn the internet against her.
“Who’s Nathaniel?” the doctor asks.
She points to the corner, where, for someone as tall as Nathaniel is, he’s doing a pretty good job of disappearing.
The doctor finally tears his gaze away from Freya and looks at the chart. “Nathaniel Haley,” he reads.
“Yeah,” Nathaniel says in a voice as wispy as fog.
“So you were fallen on by this one?” He gestures to Freya.
“Yeah, I guess,” he says.
“Not the worst way to get knocked out,” the doctor says, aiming a conspiratorial glance in Freya’s direction. She looks down, thinking: Stop. Just stop.
“It factor,” Hayden had called it. “Y’know, that invisible thing some people got that makes others wanna get closer. You can’t fake it. You either got it or you don’t.” Freya had it, Hayden said. Sabrina did not, Hayden said.
“And you blacked out?” the doctor asks.
Nathaniel shrugs.
“Yes, he did,” Freya replies.
“I need to hear it from the patient.”
Nathaniel doesn’t answer. Freya begins to wonder if he really is brain damaged.
“Yes,” Harun says. “He did. She fell onto him. He blacked out.”
“I’d appreciate it,” the doctor says in an unpleasant tone, “if you allowed me to interview the patient.”
“But how can he tell you what happened when it happened to him?” Harun says. “I was there. I saw.”
* * *
— — —
I saw.
Harun has no way of knowing at this moment that these words are more healing to Nathaniel than anything the doctor might do. Someone saw.
“So you lost consciousness?” the doctor asks Nathaniel again.
Nathaniel looks at Freya, at Harun, who both nod.
“Yes,” he says.
“And he vomited,” Harun adds. “On her shoes.”
“So that’s why you’re barefoot!” the doctor says to Freya. “You shouldn’t walk through the city like that. I’ll see if we can get you some shoes from the lost and found.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says.
“You might step on glass.”
“No, really. It’s all good,” she says, glancing at Nathaniel with a look, like it’s a private joke she’s tossing at him. But he doesn’t catch it. (He used to be a really good catcher, back when he played first base.) Not because he cannot but because he dares not.
This has already gone way too far. There’s really no need for this.
But the doctor has pulled out a penlight and is examining Nathaniel’s eyes.
“Heterochromia,” he declares.
“Is that like a hematoma?” Harun asks.
“No. It’s when you have different-colored eyes. Though the left pupil here is really fixed.”
“You mean the pupil in my prosthetic eye?” Nathaniel asks.
“Right. Of course. You threw me with the different colors. But I like it. Is it a kind of David Bowie homage?”
“Can we get on with the exam?” Freya asks impatiently. “We don’t have all day.”
The doctor rolls his stool over to the computer. “Okay, Nate. I’m going to ask about symptoms, and you answer on a scale of zero to six, zero being not a problem, three being moderate, six being severe. Got it?”
“I think so,” Nathaniel replies.
“Headache?”
“Yes.”
“Zero to six?”
It’s a four, but he doesn’t want anyone to worry. “Maybe a two.”
“Pressure in the head?”
“Yeah. Maybe three.”
“Blurred vision?”
“It’s all good now.”
“A number.”
“Zero, maybe one.”
The doctor goes through the list: neck pain, balance problems. Nathaniel answers in a monotone: two, three, two.
“How about sadness?” the doctor asks.
“Sadness?”
“Yeah, sadness.”
“You want me to rate sadness?”
“Yep,” the doctor says. “Zero to six, please, Nate.”
* * *
— — —
Freya is over it. Over doctors who pretend to know everything, who act like they can fix her, who ask what’s wrong without reading a chart, who ask people to sing “Happy Birthday” or to measure sadness on a scale of zero to six.
“His name is Nathaniel!” she snarls with an irritated confidence she has no right to. For all she knows, he goes by Nate.
* * *
— — —
He does not. Though his father calls him Nat.
* * *
— — —
“And what does it have to do with a concussion?” Harun asks. Is this doctor even a doctor? He scans the walls for a medical school diploma.
“Hey, I don’t write the checklist,” the doctor says, fully out of patience. “So how about you give me a number so I can get you out of here. Sadness, zero to six?”
“No, he can’t give you a number,” Harun says.
“You can’t measure sadness in numbers,” Freya agrees.
“So how would you measure it?” the doctor asks. “Please do tell, so I can refer it to the American Academy of Neurology.”
* * *
— — —
The question is asked in a most scathingly sarcastic tone, but Freya, Harun, and Nathaniel all ponder it seriously.
* * *
— — —
Freya thinks of music, and then silence, and being totally alone.
* * *
— — —
Harun thinks of love, and family, and Get the fuck out my life.
* * *
— — —
Nathaniel thinks of his father, and Sam and Frodo, and a house being swallowed up by the forest.
* * *
— — —
They may be complete strangers, with different lives and different problems, but there in that examination room they are measuring sadness the same way. They are measuring it in loss.
THE ORDER OF LOSS
PART IV
NATHANIEL
“Nat, you gotta come see this,” Dad called the minute I walked in the door.
I took a breath and pushed back against the irritation. I was sweaty from baseball practice, and I needed to shower and do Dad’s breakfast and lunch dishes and get dinner going, and I needed to go online to register for a free SAT prep course.
The day before, my mother had called me, wanting to know if I’d started thinking about college. “You’re going to be a junior. Has your father even started this process?”
I assured her he had, fumbling some lie about arranging to visit schools together, which is something I knew a couple of kids had done with their parents. Mom didn’t press. The woman who’d once said she couldn’t live with two children now had two new children and her hands were full, so I knew she wouldn’t fol
low up. Still, I’d made an appointment with a guidance counselor and had seen her earlier that day.
“Nat, hurry up!” Dad called from the living room.
Sometimes if I ignored him, he got distracted. Most of the time, he only got more insistent, and it became that much harder to calm him down. It was better to see what had gotten him all riled up, talk to him a bit, and maybe I could get on the computer.
The guidance counselor had been surprised I hadn’t been to see her before. “Your grades are pretty good, and a sophomore on the varsity baseball team is very impressive,” she said. We’d made it all the way to the division finals and we’d had a few scouts come to our games. “With your grades, you could get into a fine school,” she’d said. “Maybe even a partial scholarship if you play baseball. Not a division one school, but somewhere smaller—if you do well on the SATs. Let’s get you set up for a course.”
“Nat!”
I went into the living room. The TV was on, as it usually was since Dad had stopped working. I’d learned to gauge his mood not from how he was acting but from what he was watching. Cartoons, CNN, Real Housewives meant he was checked out. Documentaries meant he was good. Dad loved documentaries, not because of what they told you but because of what they suggested.
I squinted at the TV. Some guy was riding a bicycle.
“Yeah?” I said.
“The guy riding the bike is blind.” Dad smiled triumphantly. But I knew there was more. There was always more. “Hear that sound?”
It was faint but unmistakable, like a woodpecker.
“He’s clicking,” Dad said. “Like a bat.”
“Echo-locating,” I said.
Dad snapped his fingers. “Exactly! He’s been doing that since he was little, when he lost both his eyes to cancer. He does not have eyes, but he can see—literally see.”
“You can’t literally see if you don’t have eyes.”
“Can’t you?” Dad asked with that glimmer in his own eyes, and I sighed because I knew what that meant.
“It got me thinking,” Dad continued. And then he was off to the races, his latest theory he wanted to try out. If a blind man could see with other parts of his brain, what else might we be able to do? “We put up roadblocks in our mind that limit us. But we can remove those blocks too. What was it William Blake said? ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’”
His speech started to pick up speed, as it did when he really went on a tear. Soon he would be breathless, the thoughts coming too fast for him to keep up. “Do you see? Do you see?” he asked. “What if we could unlock, if we could just set our minds free?” He stopped to knock himself on his temple, not softly, to make a point, but with intensity, like he wanted to punch his brain.
I gently grabbed his hand and held it in my lap until he calmed down.
“Don’t you see?” Dad’s voice was a reverent whisper. “What it means is that the only limitation on how we live our lives is up here.” His touched my temple this time, gently. He reached for two strips of heavy cotton, cut, I saw, from one of the few sets of intact bedsheets we still had.
“Let’s go into the forest,” Dad said. “Let’s go see if we can’t expand our consciousness.”
I didn’t want to expand anything. I had homework to do. An SAT prep course to register for. The day’s dishes were still sitting on the table, and dinner needed to be started. But I knew if I didn’t go, Dad would go without me.
He wanted to walk deep into the woods, but I managed to steer him toward a clearing not that far away, a place clear of obstacles, cliffs, large boulders. It was where, four years earlier, we had scattered Grandma Mary’s ashes.
“I’ll do you first,” Dad said.
“Okay.” I had no intention of staying blindfolded, of echo-locating. I was here to make sure Dad didn’t fall off a cliff.
I let Dad put the blindfold on me. He tied it tight, and the darkness was sudden and absolute. I carefully sat down on a fallen log, so Dad, who wasn’t dumb, would think I was participating in this activity and not just humoring him.
At first, I felt the familiar, itchy crawl of impatience. How long would this go on? But as I sat there in the darkness, something strange began to happen. It was like someone turned up the volume of the forest. I could hear the sound of a leaf falling to the earth, of it degrading to mulch. I could hear the beavers pushing stones into the river. And then I was hearing past the forest. In the darkness, I heard a bell ringing in a far-off church. I heard an airplane flying at forty thousand feet. I heard the sound of a girl singing. And then the other senses kicked in. I smelled dates, as if the seeds Grandma Mary and I had planted had borne fruit. I tasted flavors I could not describe.
That was the maddening thing about my father. Just when you wanted to write him off as a nut job or a Peter Pan, he would make you go traipsing blindfolded through the forest and you would touch the hem of something mysterious.
“God damn it!” Dad yelped. “Shit!”
I yanked off my mask and light returned, and the secrets the forest had been ready to tell quieted themselves.
There was Dad, clicking wildly, flailing his hands, teetering toward a ditch.
“Dad!” I took off running. “Dad, wait!” I caught up with him a few feet before the ravine, but he kept going, wildly windmilling his arms around. “Dad, stop!” I reached out to yank him back, but he jerked forward, snapping a green tree branch that ricocheted back with the force of a whip.
I didn’t feel pain. It was only when I felt the blood, warm and trickling down my cheek, that I knew something had happened.
“Dad,” I called. “I think I’m hurt.”
He didn’t turn around. “You’re fine,” he said.
The blood was running into my mouth now, the vision in my left eye going murky.
“I’m bleeding.”
“If a blind man can see, you can handle a little blood.”
It was more than a little, but I knew when he was too far gone.
“Put some leaves on it,” Dad said. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll have antibacterial properties like the tree frog.” He’d watched a documentary about that years ago.
“Dad!”
“You can’t discover things if you don’t take risks. You’ll be fine.”
“Dad.”
“Imagine if Frodo and Sam gave up every time they hit a hiccup. Imagine that.”
I knew better than to argue with him when he got like this. My choice was either to go back home and take care of it or to wait out here with him.
I waited out there in the woods for at least another hour, as my father expanded his consciousness and I bled into soggy leaves. By the time we got back to the house, my eye had swollen shut. I went into the bathroom and cleaned up the cut as best I could.
When I came out, Dad was in the kitchen, cleaning up the dishes and running the garbage disposal, something he never did.
“That was life-changing, wasn’t it?” he said. He glanced at me, finally noticing the wound. “You should put some ice on that.”
Except there was no ice in the freezer, and it was late and I had to start dinner. So I put a washcloth on it, figuring it would get better. It had stopped hurting and was beginning to itch.
I stayed home from school the next day because I’d slept badly and I looked awful. The eye was puffy and swollen shut. I briefly thought about going to the doctor, except we didn’t have a doctor aside from the one Dad went to at the free clinic in town to get his meds. I thought of going to the ER but worried about how much it would cost and what would happen if it got back to Mom. I was getting too old for custody battles, but I couldn’t be too careful.
Dad stayed locked in his room, scribbling in his notebooks. He would be like this until the fever broke, and then he’d be on to the next documentary—about serial ki
llers, about mountain gorillas, about salt, about suicide tourism—that would click an idea in his brain and send him running again.
When I woke up the following morning, my eye was on fire, an ooze of bloody pus trickling down my cheek. I went to the nurse’s office at school and was immediately sent to the ER, and it was there that the doctors said the entire socket was infected and the eyeball itself had been deprived of blood for so long the tissue was probably dead. The eyeball would likely have to be removed.
The surgery was delayed because we needed parental consent and Dad was not answering his phone. I made up a story about how he was a writer and turned off his phone when he was working. It wasn’t that far from the truth.
“What about your mother?” they asked me.
My mother could not find out about this. I’d see to that just as I’d made sure she’d never found out about the week we’d gone without electricity or the time Dad had left me in the forest all night.
(Don’t tell your mother.)
“My mom’s dead,” I told the doctors.
They eventually got hold of Dad and I was rushed into surgery. I woke up alone, in a dark room, and knew my eye was gone. As I lay there, groggy, my head throbbing, I wanted someone to wrap their arms around me, to kiss my forehead, to tell me things would be okay. But nobody did. Tentatively, I touched the gauze packing around my eye, and realized, with equal parts terror and relief, this secret would be impossible to conceal from my mother. Because she would see, and she would know, and if she knew, she wouldn’t let me stay here. Would she?
My father came into the room, and when he saw me awake, he began to weep. “Oh, Nat. Oh, buddy,” he said. “Look at you.”
At the sight of my father doubled over, sobbing, I understood that I would not tell my mother. The decision had already been made long ago. And with that, the lie I’d told the doctors about her being dead suddenly became true. To keep this secret from her, I’d have to keep myself from her. The realization sent a bolt of fury through me, shaking off the remaining sedation. In that terrible, tiny moment, I didn’t just hate my father, I wished he were dead.