by Max Barry
I saw my phone. I had spent so long imagining it that for a second I wasn’t sure it was really there. But it was. It was on top of the spectrograph. So obvious. I had worked late and when checking my pockets for a pen had realized I still had my phone, which wasn’t allowed, and none of that mattered because here it was. I went to get it. My outstretched fingers were about to close on it when my thighs brushed metal. I looked down. I had walked into the Clamp. The plates were touching me. They were actually closer than I had meant to bring them. I should have hit STOP a few seconds ago. I heard the klaxon and noticed the swirling orange light as if for the first time. I began to back out. I wasn’t in real danger. The plates moved too slowly. Although that was deceptive. The gap shrank linearly but in relative terms it accelerated. My thighs jammed. I turned sideways and shuffled. My left shoe caught. I freed that but then the right did. I hadn’t accounted for a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the plates increasingly obstructing movement. I had left insufficient margin for error. I lunged for freedom and fell face-first onto the floor. I pulled one leg free but my right shoe caught. I grabbed my thigh and pulled. Above the clamp, through the green glass, Elaine and Katherine gaped. Between them and me sat my phone, untouched.
I felt unbearable pressure. My intestines tried to squeeze out of my ears. I didn’t hear the noise. The klaxon covered that. But I saw the spray. In the orange light, it looked black.
During Clamp operation, the lab autolocked, for safety. I had to tear my shirt into strips to stem the bleeding. I had to flop across the floor until I could reach the controls. I’ll be honest. There was a lot of screaming. I got my hands on the STOP button. The klaxon died. The orange light faded. I closed my eyes. I was going to vomit, or pass out, or one then the other. The door opened and Jason said, “Oh fuck, fuck.” I felt very sad, because that seemed to confirm it.
A ROOM formed around me. It didn’t happen all at once. It wove itself out of nothing by degrees. Not really. It was just how it seemed, under medication. It was a while before I felt confident it wouldn’t blow away again—the bleached sheets, the beige walls, the furniture that was all on wheels—to reveal I was still in Lab 4, bleeding to death.
A surgeon visited, a tall woman with dark frizzy hair and impatient eyes. Usually I appreciate impatience in a person. It indicates an appreciation of efficiency. But my head was full of bees and she talked too fast to follow.
“The debridement went very well. Often in the case of traumatic injury there’s a great deal of bone fragment and destroyed tissue, but yours was remarkably clean. You’re lucky. I had to take your femur up about six inches but that’s really nothing. Very little smoothing of the bone was required. I did a closed amputation, stitching the skin closed during the operation, and that’s extremely rare in a trauma case. Normally we’d have to leave the skin flaps open, to make it easier to clean any infected tissue. But as I said, it was a remarkably clean site.”
“What was a site?” My voice was thick. I wasn’t sure what I was asking. I just needed her to slow down.
My surgeon raised a clipboard and scanned it. Her name tag said DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN. That sounded familiar. She might have visited me earlier, when I was less conscious. Dr. Angelica Austin flipped a page. “We might look at scaling back your pain meds.”
That sounded like a terrible idea. I tried to sit up. I caught sight of my leg. I had a thigh. A thigh in a stocking. Three or four tubes emerged from areas that were patched with dressing, looping to hanging plastic bags. Between these were glimpses of something pink and black and shiny that did not look like skin but was. I was short. That was the shocking part. It wasn’t the stump so much. The stump was bad. But what was terrible was the air. The space. I had half a thigh. My knee was gone. My calf. I had no foot. I was missing an entire foot. I had kicked things with that foot and now I didn’t have it. These were things that were wrong.
“You …” said Dr. Angelica Austin. “We went through the stump yesterday. I showed you.”
“I don’t remember.”
Dr. Angelica Austin wrote something on her clipboard. She was lowering my dosage. Before I could object, she put her hand on my shoulder. It felt awkward, for both of us. “I’ll come back when you’re rested. This is the darkest point, Mr. Neumann. It all gets better from here.”
MY ROOM had windows. I could see all the way across the Gardens. At dusk, the skyscrapers flared orange. It was very quiet, this hospital. It was like I was the only person there.
I HAD four nurses: Katie, Chelsea, Veronica, and Mike. Mike was the one who bathed me. That struck me as unfair. All I’d gone through and a man sponged me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just another disappointment. Nurse Mike was friendly. This is nothing against Nurse Mike. He taught me how to unwind the bandages without pulling out a draining tube, which was something I did once and never wanted to again. He showed me how to fasten them so they wouldn’t unwind in the night. My dressings needed changing every four hours. That’s how much I was leaking, even before you counted what came out of the tubes. It was an alarming idea. Presumably if I disconnected the saline drip, I would deflate to a husk. I was a junior high physics problem. If Charles Neumann is a human being with volume 80 liters, oozing bodily fluid at the rate of 0.5 liters per minute, how often must we replace his 400-milliliter saline bags? I felt I should have been more sophisticated than that.
The nurses were very familiar with my stump. They seized any opportunity to whip back the sheet and probe my flesh. “It’s looking fantastic,” they said. Especially Nurse Veronica. Nurse Veronica could not love my stump more. She smiled and opened my curtains and changed my bags and said it wouldn’t be long before I pulled on my dancing shoes. I knew what they were doing. They were teaching me not to be ashamed. It was a good hospital. But I was still ashamed.
THEN CAME the physical therapist. The second he bounced in I realized I was back in gym class. He was fit and tan and wore a hospital polo shirt small enough that his biceps strained the seams. Tucked beneath one was a clipboard. The only thing missing was a whistle. “Charles Neumann!” He stopped beside my bed and folded his arms. I had been watching TV, and felt guilty. “Is it Charles? Charlie? Chuck?”
“Charles.”
“I’m Dave.” He rolled aside a hat stand of fluid bags. “I’m here to get you out of that bed.”
I looked at my bed. It had warm sheets. A few magazines near my feet. Foot. My phone nearby. I didn’t see the problem with the bed.
Dave’s eyes shone. He drank a lot of fruit juice, I could tell. He made me feel listless. “We’re gonna work hard together, Charles. I have to warn you. Sometimes you may not like me very much.”
He dragged over a chair. He stood there and grinned. I looked at the chair. I looked at him. “What?”
“Get into it.”
It seemed a long way away. It was a meter lower than the bed. What if I fell? Dave waited. His grin was permanent. I placed my phone on my bedside table and folded up my magazines. I rolled back the sheet. I leaned forward to check my dressing, the tubes.
“Don’t worry about all that. Just get your butt into this chair.”
You just get your butt into this chair, I thought. But I edged forward. My stump scraped across the sheets. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t good. I felt itchy. I was thirsty. I looked around for a glass of water.
“Come on, Charles.”
I gripped the edge of the bed and swung my good leg over it. Then my stump. It made me want to cry, that little movement. It was so pathetic. Once entire limbs had jumped at my command. Now this.
“Almost there.”
I slid off the bed and fell into the chair. The shock of impact traveled up my stump and jangled the nerves there. My surgeon, Dr. Angelica Austin, had folded them up inside my body. I had learned this from a nurse. They were places they were never meant to be, wondering what was going on. Something dripped into my eyes.
“Yes! Great! Great!” Dave dropped to his haunches and slapped my arm. “
You made it!” He laughed like we were friends. But we were not. We were not.
THE NEXT day Dave turned up in a steel wheelchair. It was pretty flash. I mean for what it was. The wheels gleamed. The seat, back, and armrests were green leather. Dave parked beside my bed and climbed out. “Hi-ho, Silver!”
“What?”
“Time to mount your steed, my lord.” He slapped the chair. “It’ll be great.”
It would not be great. We both knew that. It would be struggling and shaking and landing in the chair like a wet fish. And then what? Maybe Dave would push me around the hospital. Maybe he would make me wheel myself. Either would be difficult and humiliating. I chewed the inside of my mouth, because I am not good at getting mad with people.
“Let’s do this,” said Dave.
“I have to finish reading this.” I showed him my phone. He plucked it from my fingers and set it on the bedside table. I didn’t stop him, because I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Dave didn’t understand the intimacy of the phone. He couldn’t have.
“Mount up.”
He was trying to antagonize me so I would strive to prove him wrong. He saw I responded well to a challenge. He would needle me mercilessly and then, on the day I was released, tell me how he’d always known I could do it.
“Let’s go, big guy.” He drummed his hands on the chair. “Let’s tear this place up.”
That was how they justified it. Gym teachers. Personal trainers. Runners. Looking down on you, despising you, it was okay, because it was for your own good.
“Don’t make me come over there,” said Dave. “Ha, ha.”
I DREAMED I was back at Better Future and couldn’t find my leg. I hopped around the lab, searching. I spied it on top of the spectrograph. I filled with relief because now I could reattach it, then woke and realized no.
“TAKE IT in,” said Dave. “Ri-i-i-ight in. Feel your chest expanding. Hold it. Hold it. Now out.”
I exhaled. The sun came out from behind a cloud. I squinted and shifted in my wheelchair. We were outside. I was not happy about that.
“Three more. I want you to let the relaxation in, Charles. Let it in.”
“I’m hot.”
“No you’re not.” Hospital people walked by, entered the lobby doors. Dave sucked in breath. “Three more.”
“This isn’t helping.”
“It’s not helping because you won’t let it help.”
“It’s because I’m missing a leg. Breathing doesn’t help with that. It doesn’t help at all.”
Dave’s eyes held no pity. “Feeling sorry for yourself?”
Dave was wearing shorts. I had been trying not to let that bother me, but he was wearing shorts, with two fit, tan legs bursting out and running down to socks and sneakers, and wasn’t that a little unfair to a guy in a wheelchair with a bloated, mutant, itching stump? I didn’t want to be that guy. That angry cripple guy. But I was a cripple and Dave’s legs were making me angry.
“Just another chapter, buddy,” said Dave. “A new chapter in your life waiting to be written.”
“It’s not a chapter. It’s a loss. It’s a regression.”
“All in how you see it.”
“It’s not. It’s objectively verifiable. I’m less.”
Dave squatted. He put a hand on my left wheel. “Let me tell you about a guy who came through here about five years ago. He’d had an industrial accident just like you. Lost both legs. Right up to the hip. Used to be a water skier. Professionally. But day one, when he came out of surgery, he decided, That was my old life. He said, Now I start my new life. I told him to write the next chapter, man, and he did. You know what he’s doing now?”
I pushed Dave’s hand off my wheel, got my hands on the grips, and shoved myself away. People stood aside to let me wheel by, one furious revolution at a time.
“He’s winning medals!” Dave shouted. “In the Paralympics!”
I WOKE from an afternoon nap to find a woman in a chair beside my bed. The chair hadn’t been there before. She had brought it. She had a large black case, like a portfolio. She was neat and corporate. Her facial bones were prominent and symmetrical. She was blond. “Hey, you.” Her lips twisted sympathetically. “How are you?”
“What?”
“I’m Cassandra Cautery. From the company.” Her head tilted. “We miss you, Charlie. I hope they’re taking good care of you. Are they? Your comfort is my priority.”
“Um,” I said.
“Good.” She smiled. She was very attractive to be giving me this much eye contact. I felt strange, as if I had been mistaken for someone else. She handed me a business card. It said, CASSANDRA CAUTERY. Crisis Manager.
I said, “It was my fault. The accident.”
“Would you mind signing a statement to that effect?” She flipped open her portfolio and handed me a paper. It was a letter, from me. “I’m sorry. This may feel abrupt. It’s just … well, as you say, it was your fault.” She popped a pen and offered it to me.
I wondered if I should get a lawyer. It felt like that kind of situation. But the letter was true. I raised the knee I still had, positioned the paper, and signed.
“Thank you.” She made it disappear into her portfolio. “I appreciate that. Now let’s talk about you. About what you need to get back on your feet.” Her smile wavered. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“That slipped out.”
“It’s …” I shrugged.
“Ramps. Leave. We’ll make it happen. We’re that kind of company.”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure everything here is perfect? There’s nothing at all?”
“No,” I said. “Well. I don’t like my physical therapist.”
I NEVER saw Dave again. That afternoon I was visited by Nurse Veronica, who fiddled with the flowers by my bed. “Would you … what would you like to do this afternoon, Charlie?”
“Stay here,” I said.
“In bed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said.
I DIDN’T get up for two days. I’m not counting bathroom visits. I did have to leave the bed for those. I had to shuffle into my wheelchair, steer onto the tiles, and drag myself onto the toilet. Then there was nothing to do but look at my stump. The stocking was off and the draining tubes removed. I no longer leaked. I was nothing but pink skin and black stitches. I didn’t like the bathroom visits because I didn’t like the stump.
But in bed, things were okay. I had my phone. I had wi-fi. I logged on to my work account and wrote notes. I streamed movies. I got addicted to a game. I won’t say I was happy. Every now and again I reached to scratch my right leg and realized it wasn’t there. Or I shifted my weight and found it unexpectedly easy. But I could see this might not be the end of everything.
DR. ANGELICA Austin returned. It had been a week. I lay back and closed my eyes while she prodded at the disaster site.
“Very good.” She flipped back the sheet. “I couldn’t ask for a better result.”
I said nothing. I didn’t want to disrespect Dr. Angelica Austin. But I found it hard to believe she could be proud of this. Maybe I was being unfair, because she worked with living tissue and I worked with machine-fabricated metals. But if I ever produced something that ugly, I would be embarrassed.
“Have you felt sensation in the missing limb?”
“What?”
“Following an amputation, many patients report phantom sensation.”
“Uh,” I said. “No.” I had heard of phantom pain. I just never thought I’d hear it from a doctor. I thought it belonged in the same category as ghosts and auras.
“Don’t be ashamed to mention it.”
“I haven’t felt anything.”
Dr. Angelica eyed me.
“I feel what’s there. What’s there is itchy.”
“Painful?”
“Yes. It aches.” I waited for Dr. Angelica to pick up the clipboard, the one for writing down pain medication doses.
She didn’t. “A lot.”
“That’s because you’re not moving it. I heard you stopped physical therapy.”
“Yes.”
“Therapy is essential to your recovery. Why did you stop?”
“I didn’t like Dave.”
“You didn’t have to like him. You just had to do what he said.”
Dr. Angelica frowned. She wore glittery earrings. They were a little extravagance in an otherwise austere outfit. She would have to remove those for surgery. You couldn’t have tiny jewels dropping into someone’s chest cavity. They were counterfunctional, which implied Dr. Angelica cared more about looking good than doing her job. I was possibly being unfair again. Maybe she didn’t have surgery today.
“It’s time you saw the prosthetist.”
For a second I thought she said prostitute. “Prosthetics?”
“Yes.” Dr. Angelica eyeballed me, as if I should count myself lucky I was getting a prosthetist at all. I got the feeling she did not think I had really deserved her surgery. “She’s very good.”
“I don’t need a prosthesis.” I was thinking about what that would mean: more gym class. Gripping wooden rails, struggling to coordinate parts of my body. “I can use the chair. I sit down all day at work. I sit down at home. I don’t play sports.”
“Do you drive? Does your house have steps? Do you ever catch an escalator? How many times a day do you stand?”
I said nothing.
“You’re not useless,” said Dr. Angelica. “You haven’t broken. You have a minor disability and you can learn to overcome it.”
I WAS sickly as a child. I guess that comes as no surprise. I was that kid who spent a whole summer inside, curtains drawn against the hoots and laughter of kids in the street outside. Glandular fever. Then complications in the lungs. When I got back to school, in gym class I handed the teacher the note that allowed me to be excused to the library. He made me show him that note every time, even though it said for the duration of the year. He was waiting for me to decide I was ready for gym class, and forget what my note said. That day never came. In the library, I read about trains and DNA and how they built the Hoover Dam. Walking home, I watched a boom gate descend across a railroad crossing and knew it did so because the wheels of an approaching train had dipped the track’s inductance below its preprogrammed level.