by Keith Rosson
His throat seemed to close up a little, his legs already thrumming with adrenaline, when one of them stepped back and took a little bouncing step and kicked the passenger door. It buckled inward with an awful metallic pong. Then the driver opened his door and stepped out, yelling. Older guy, brown-skinned, a tight cap of white hair, white mustache. A grandfather. Slacks and a blue T-shirt. He was yelling in Arabic, pointing over the roof of the car at all of them. How old were these guys? Midtwenties? They looked like anyone. They looked like random assholes. Two had fashy haircuts, the consummate tonsorial decision of the white nationalist, but the other two were bearded and sloppy-looking dudes like him. They all had this casual air about them, like they were on their way to Drill to pick up on women and had just randomly decided to harass this old man on the way there. Fear rooted Brian to the ground, squared his feet to earth. He took his phone out of his pocket and started filming.
The driver slammed the door shut and stepped into the headlights himself, still pointing, still yelling. He started toward the guy who had kicked the door when another one of them blocked his way with a hand on his chest, kind of leaned his face into the man’s field of view. “You’re in the wrong country, Habib. You’re not welcome. The fuck out of here.”
Another said, “No Muslims allowed, my man. You’re not welcome. Go home. Go home.”
The one who kicked the door—or the one next to him? They were all roving around, sharks in the water—said, “Head back to the cave. Take your people back to the dunes.” It was almost jovial, which made it all the more terrifying. Brian’s legs were trembling so hard he pictured how those newborn foals came fresh out of the womb, tumbling out and testing gravity on the wobbling stilts of their legs, flung hard into the world and trying to get their shit together fast.
The driver stepped back and cleared his throat and said, “Fuck you” very clearly. He kept his chin high. There was a moment of silence and then someone kicked one of the headlights in with a boot heel, this plastic-sounding crunch, and oh fuck, someone punched the old man in the face. He sagged against the hood, his hands curling over his head.
“Hey,” Brian called out sharply. The word tumbled out of his mouth, surprising him as much as anyone. They all turned. Everything was jittery and grainy on his phone, the near-lightless night.
“Hey, drop that bitch,” someone said. “Drop that fat little bitch.”
Almost happily, one of them said, “He’s filming us? Holy shit.”
Everything took on the cadence of a whirlwind. Brian, saturated with nerves, asshole puckered in animal terror, took a step back as two of the guys strode up to him. He kept filming. A Ford Explorer drove down the street, threading its way past the Toyota. It didn’t stop. The other two guys had the old man against the hood and they were hitting him. Brian could hear his grunts, could see their fists arcing above the lights and coming back down, fast and vicious. The two in front of Brian were grinning, standing in the gutter, bouncing on their toes and looking up at him.
“So,” said Brian, his throat clicking and impossibly dry, his phone held out before the pair of them, “just out harassing brown guys, huh?”
“Oh, he’s filming. He thinks he’s a journalist,” said one.
“He thinks he’s antifa,” said the other.
“I see what you’re doing over there,” Brian yelled.
The old man had sagged to the ground by now. No one was doing shit about it. The world, the whole loud world was just right over there, right down the street where the light was, with the cars and the noise and the people. Here, there were just these young, emboldened boys and the man curled against the bumper of his car, his arms wrapped around his head.
He told himself to hit them, hit them back for the old man, but he knew he didn’t have it in him.
The guy on Brian’s left reached out, tried to snag his phone. Brian turned, kept filming. Someone grabbed his collar, fingernails raking his neck, and the rest happened fast.
The first few punches to his mouth blurred his sense of gravity—he was standing and then he was adrift—and then he felt the scrape of cement beneath his palms. He was down, covering his face, curling up. Kicking out until someone grabbed his leg and he turtled. The two of them worked hard above him, panting, but a lot of the punches glanced off, hit his shoulders, bounced off the hard bark of his head. At one point it felt like his ear was nearly torn off, that flare of pain almost the exact opposite of his headaches: a sudden searing heat, like a match being lit. He bellowed. A punch to his cheek bounced his head against the pavement, and after that things took on a loose, watery quality; something slightly painful was happening, but in another room somewhere.
He lay there some indeterminable amount of time. The clarity of cement against his cheek the only irrefutable thing. That and the heat in his ear. Things swelled inside him, thrummed symphonically, and next the world imploded, grew leached of its color. fell to something pinhole small, and then was gone.
•
Hands next. Hands on him.
Hands touching him, and he scrabbled to fight back and barked like a dog through that napalm throb inside his head, through the grasping fog of the napalm grays, and there was a black man in latex gloves above him, in latex gloves and a blue shirt, and he was saying, “Hold on, man. You’re injured. Hold on. Don’t move.” His voice was calm, sonorous, patient, and Brian crab-walked away from him until he hit a wall, the grit of pavement beneath his palms. Knowledge in his head like being born again: a vast empty chamber, just the pain and the stuttering, fractured memory of the men hurting him. And then the paramedic was reaching down, reaching toward him with those gloved hands.
Once again the night dimmed and grew dark.
•
The susurration of a vehicle, the sway. The wail of an ambulance somewhere. Shit. It was here, that sound. Inside here.
He was inside the ambulance. Strapped in.
Brian’s first thought: No way in hell I can afford this.
He could see the frosted delineation of the ambulance’s six-pointed star in the vehicle’s window, and the ghostly, muffled wail of the siren cocooned around them. Antiseptic smell. He tried to move his head, but they had his neck locked in something. One eye was tightening shut. Everything inside him felt hot and shattered.
“Relax, my friend,” said the EMT. He had a little gold nametag pinned above his left pocket that said Hamms, like the beer, and Brian noted with a kind of detached wonderment the minute spattering of blood across the man’s shirtfront. Nearly ink black on the blue fabric. “Looks like you got in a tussle, yeah?” he said. Still that calm, deep voice.
“These guys.” Brian’s voice sounded funny. Slurry.
“Yeah? Gonna shine this in your eyes for a sec. Just look straight ahead.” He bounced a penlight from one of Brian’s pupils to the other. “You got jumped by some guys?”
“They were messing with this old guy in his car. Four guys.” The napalm throbbed; he wanted to close both eyes, sleep forever.
“Yeah?” Hamms pushed against the bottom of Brian’s foot with his fingertips. “Can you feel that?”
“Yeah.”
He pulled on Brian’s ankle. “That?”
“Yes. They kicked his . . . his . . .”
Hamms smiled. “Ass?”
“No, what’s the word. Lamplight. Not lamplight, the thing in front of your car.” All of a sudden the words were right behind some doorway, obscured but almost visible. Answers spied through gauze. He could picture it but couldn’t find the sounds to match it.
“A headlight?”
Brian nodded. “The headlight. They kicked his headlight in. Kicked his door. Kicked his ass, too, I guess. Bad.”
“What’s your name, my friend?”
Brian told him.
“Someone called 911 on you, Brian. It was just you lying there when we rolled up.”
Brian closed his eyes. “He was like a Muslim guy. Or they thought he was. These white nationalist guys. Nazis.”
“Well, it was just you when we got there. Somebody got you real good, though.” They hit a pothole and Hamms swayed a little above him. Brian heard the crinkle of the paper crisply wrapped over his gurney.
“Is my ear still on?”
Hamms peered down, nodded. “Probably need some stitches though.” Brian caught a trace of something, his aftershave or deodorant. Cinnamon, maybe.
“There’s no way my insurance covers this. I’m so fucked. This is like a million dollars, right? I can’t even really feel anything.”
“I’m thinking you’re in shock, bud. We’ll get you checked out just to be sure. You took some hits. Better safe than sorry.”
“Oh shit. My phone. Did you grab my phone?”
Hamms winced. “Sorry. Didn’t see a phone.”
Brian closed his eyes and Hamms urged him to keep them open. He asked Brian the year. The month. The day. Brian named them all. Kept thinking of the febrile crunch of the headlight, the way that man had curled up so small against the bumper of his car, so childlike. And had it really only been an hour ago, the argument with Brooke? Less? It felt like it had happened in another life. He’d just had pizza with his mother! Served by a morose high-schooler in a pizza-slice hat! His dissertation was growing a fur of dust in his bedroom. This was some other world, this ambulance, some dark, errant fork in the road.
It was time for the IV, and Hamms effortlessly connected the needle with the bag of saline solution next to Brian’s head and then connected both to his arm. “Gonna be a pinch.” He kept asking questions. Who the President was. Vice President. What city they were in. County.
When they arrived at the hospital, Brian tried to stand but Hamms insisted he be pushed into the ER while still on the gurney. He pushed him through the emergency entrance and down a hall, left him flush against a wall by the nurse’s station, bid him goodbye with a wink and a pat on the arm. Brian lay there, immobile. He could see the lobby of the emergency room and felt embarrassed to be lying down. Each person in the emergency room sat in their little orbit of anguish or discomfort. A disheveled, assumedly homeless man sat in one of the plastic bucket seats with a black garbage bag tied around his sleeveless bicep, muttering furiously at the muted television screen in the corner of the room, as if it had personally wronged him. Blood lay in dried rusty threads down his forearm to his palm. A bent and white-haired couple, small and wizened, sat huddled next to each other, the woman’s hand curled around the man’s arm as she silently wept and pressed a tissue to her nose. A little boy sat with his mother, who nursed a cup of soda nearly as big as her head. She stared at her phone while the boy, with a galaxy of dried snot around his nostrils, chanted, “Fart. Butt. Fart. Butt,” and kicked his heels against his chair legs with each word. Brian turned his head and stared up at the ceiling.
“Fart. Butt. Fart. Butthole.”
Without looking up from her phone, the mother said, “Joel, shush it.”
“Fart, fart, butthole. Fart, fart, butthole.”
“Shush it now, for reals.”
A nurse came by. Ponytailed, grim, ageless, and entirely well versed—he could tell by the way she looked down at him, both there and not there—at stemming the tide of her little pocket of chaos. She said, “Can you write?”
“Sure,” Brian said, and she handed him a clipboard and a pen. He thought about calling Brooke, thought about basking in that sweet moment where she’d feel terrible about the way she’d spoken to him, when he told her he had an IV drip, that he was bloodied and shoved against a wall in the ER. But he decided against it; feeling bad wasn’t really part of Brooke’s lexicon. Besides, oh yeah, no phone.
“Fart. Butt. Fart. Butt. Fart up a butthole, fart up around it.”
“Joel! You shush it now! Don’t make momma smack you.”
He put Ellis as his emergency contact, his phone number rising phantom-like in Brian’s mind. Under Symptoms You Are Currently Experiencing, he started with Face smashed in by Nazis, then crossed it out and wrote Face trauma. He thought of other symptoms as well, considered writing them down: torpor, lack of motivation, heart-seizing flurries of encroaching mortality, saber-sharp insecurity, a wickedly diminished desire to fuck. Overweight. Afraid. He put Consistent headache for years instead. The nurse came by and smiled this time when she took his clipboard. “A doctor will be by in just a minute,” she said. “We’ll get you all taken care of.”
“Fart. Mouth. Fart. Mouth. Fartmouth! Mouthfart!”
“That is it, mister man!”
There was a moment of silence, a harsh, ragged intake of breath, and then the little boy’s yowls filled the room. Brian lay there and listened as little Joel was reminded—as they all were—how it was that life really worked.
3
He was eventually wheeled into a kind of large staging area, a long room sectioned off with a series of standing blue curtains where all the people on gurneys apparently went before they were sent to their final destination—to surgery, a hospital room, some other realm. His gurney was slotted into a space by another nurse who then left him alone, the curtain pulled mostly shut. The open wedge showed an occasional staff member zipping by, or, once, an owlish old man with a walker who caught Brian’s eye and scowled at him through the fabric as if Brian was personally responsible for his woes. He caught an eyeful of the man’s leathery, drooping ass through the back of his hospital gown before the old man was intercepted and lead back to his own bed.
When Dr. Bajeer entered his little cloister and introduced himself, it was clear that here was a man who had never doubted himself, at least not while working the ER floor. A man much more accustomed to Brooke’s way of being, her laser focus, her unwavering confidence. He was a short, calm man, and he frowned at Brian’s chart as if he could discern the fate of the world from it. He looked to be Brian’s age, give or take, though he had a severe demarcation of white hair right above his ears, little racing stripes. After what seemed like a long time but probably was not, the doctor looked up at him, seemed to finally take in his battered face, the blood on his shirt.
“Mr. Schutt, how are we feeling?”
“Um. We’re not feeling so hot.”
Dr. Bajeer nodded, offered the quickest ghost of a smile. “I understand, yes. What I would like, with your permission, is to ask you some questions.”
“I’ve been getting a lot of that.”
“Yes. We want to see if there’s, ah, any brain trauma, you know?”
“Sure.”
The same cavalcade of questions: What year, month, day was it?
Did he know where he was?
Could he follow Dr. Bajeer’s finger?
Could he hear in each ear?
Could he feel Dr. Bajeer tug on his finger?
Did he have sensations in both sides of his face?
Could he shrug his shoulders?
“Is it okay if I do that?” said Brian. He lifted his arm, gestured at the neck brace he was locked into.
“Sure,” said Dr. Bajeer.
Brian shrugged.
“Okay,” Dr. Bajeer said, clicking his pen a few times, scribbling a note. “Now just some questions. This is called a Mini-Mental Status Examination. It’s just to check on, like I said, head trauma, possible brain injury. And then we can get a nurse in here and get you stitched up, looks like you need a few in your lip there.”
“And my ear.”
“And your ear, okay. You ready?”
“Sure,” Brian said. Compliant as dough, growing tired. What other choice did he have?
Could he name these two objects Dr. Bajeer was holding? This wristwatch and this pen?
He could.
Could he repeat the phrase No ifs, ands, or buts?
He could. “I don’
t know if this is super important,” he said.
Could he count backward by sevens from one hundred?
“One hundred,” Brian said. “Ninety-three.” He stopped. “Eighty-something. I don’t know. I couldn’t do that on a good day, probably.” Knowing even as he said it that it was a lie. He thought of the ambulance ride. Saying the word lamplight when he meant headlight.
Another wry, patient smile from Dr. Bajeer, the scratching of his pen on Brian’s chart.
“I’ve got a concussion, don’t I? Shit.”
Could he make up a sentence? It can be about anything, but it must contain a noun and a verb. Tell me which word is the noun and which is the verb, please.
Brian, truly no slouch in the sentence-designing department, given his long-running tenure as an academic man-baby, opened his mouth to speak: I bet the Nazis beat the shit out of that old man and he drove away. But then he got hung up on the words noun and verb. One, he remembered from childhood incantations, was a person, place or thing. The other showed movement of some kind, action.
But he couldn’t remember which was which. It was right there, maddeningly out of reach.
Headlight. Lamplight.
“Are you having problems with this one, Mr. Schutt? It’s perfectly fine. There’s no way to answer incorrectly.”
Brian let out a little snort of derisive laughter. “It’s just . . . I can’t remember which one is which. Noun and verb. You know? This is a trip.”
Dr. Bajeer nodded.
Dr. Bajeer’s pen scribbled like mad.
Dr. Bajeer looked down at Brian on his gurney, moored there upon the crinkling, blood-spotted paper. Someone a few curtains over, maybe the old man, lowed. It sounded very much like a cow mooing. It was a mournful and terrible sound, so strange and out of place, and something tightened in Brian’s throat. He grinned, honestly scared now, and said, “That man is outstanding in his field. Get it? Out standing in his field? That’s a little, uh, a little bovine joke for you, Doctor.”