My last option was to do a break-fall, something I’d learned in judo as a kid—land on my feet, tip backward onto my back, and then slap my arms out straight and let the force ride out my bone structure, out my shoulders, humerus, radius, and ulna, and blow out through the constellation of wrist bones, and finally the fine bones of my hands and digits. That was the only way to stop from smashing my head like a watermelon. Every other scenario ended with brain trauma.
It was my only chance.
When my feet hit the ground, I leaned back. A wave of pressure fired down my arms, followed by two loud cracks that sounded like shotguns. I rolled on the arc of my spine and saw my feet jut above me, and the back of my head lightly hit the sidewalk.
Tink.
The wind knocked completely out of me. I wasn’t in pain but tried to scream. Nothing came out. I looked at my hands—they were folded in upon my forearms. I tried to wiggle my fingers. They didn’t move. I held up both legs and saw my right heel was in the middle of my shin and my right foot pointed backward. The other foot and my skull were fine.
Scar was looking out the window. He howled.
I managed to pull in a lungful of air and yelled. “Help! Help! I’ve fallen.”
No one came.
I yelled three more times—crickets. I shifted my strategy.
“Fire! There’s a fire!”
From every direction people came, in seconds flat. I asked one guy to call my brother and tell him that I needed help.
Moments later, Jerry was downstairs.
“Jerry, I broke my leg and wrists. I need you to call an ambulance.”
Jerry just scratched his head, disappeared, and then reappeared with an old set of crutches he had. “Here.” He threw the crutches at me. “I don’t need this shit. I have work in the morning.” He turned and walked away.
In shock, I managed to get up using the crutches and hobbled up three flights of stairs into the apartment. I never wished more that Jerry’s building had an elevator. I was still not in any pain, somehow. Samantha came out of our room.
“What’s going on?” she said, half asleep, shielding her eyes from the light. She grumbled and swore, I heard the word “asshole,” and then she went back to bed.
I grabbed the phone, my hands flopping about, and tapped 911 with the meat of my palm.
The paramedics were confounded that I’d survived. “This isn’t Hollywood. Thirty-five feet spells death most times.”
The pain was finally hitting, like molten nails driven into my leg, over and over again.
They laid me on the floor and told me not to move because I likely had internal bleeding. “You should have stayed where you fell. You probably have a broken back or neck.”
One of them turned to Jerry, who stood watching from the bathroom, and asked, “How did he get up here?”
Jerry was silent.
“I used the crutches,” I yelped.
They turned to me, mouths open. They jabbed something in my leg, strapped me to a plank-like stretcher, and carried me down to the ambulance, where they placed me on another softer stretcher.
On the way to the hospital, one guy kept cracking jokes to me even though I was so tired, I just wanted to go to sleep, and then said, “When you get out, you should leave those people. They aren’t good.”
I felt a slap on my face and saw tubes sticking in my arms and hands. The lights returned to normal, and I felt a sudden warm rush, a fuzzy feeling—I knew it was some kind of opioid. I felt safe.
A doctor appeared by my side as they ran with me down a hall.
“Whaddya call a guy who fell out a building and survived?” He cracked a smile.
“I dunno.”
“You. You call him ‘you.’ ”
I laughed, but my back and neck hurt. My foot and wrists pulsed with such sharp pain that the dull ache radiating from my forearms and shins was manageable. The doctor flashed a light in my eyes. I could feel someone cutting my clothes off, and then I was rolled onto my side, and a cold, wet sensation slammed into my asshole. It bloody hurt, sharp with immense pressure like a jagged chili fart scraping my lower intestine.
“You aren’t even gonna buy me flowers?” I remarked, as high as Lou Reed in 1967.
The doctor laughed and said he’d take me to dinner when I recovered.
“I like steak.”
“You’re in good spirits. Just hang in there.” He moved the object around inside my anus, then said something to the others around me. There were flashing lights, a giant white machine rotated up and down my body and over my head, and then blackness.
I drifted upon a cloud afterward. Doctors and nurses came in, filled me with fluids, told me I was “lucky” and to “cool it on the morphine drip,” got me to sign forms, and then, before I knew it, I was rushed into surgery.
When I awoke in the recovery room, Samantha and Jerry were by my side, apologizing that they hadn’t known how serious the fall was. Samantha cried. I yelled at first, but then forgave them. They didn’t know. I was the idiot who’d gone all strung-out-and-drunk Spiderman.
The doctors told me that my fall had shattered my right heel, destroyed my right upper ankle joint, broke my left wrist, and sprained my right wrist. I was told to keep my leg elevated.
The surgeons decided it was best to leave my wrists exposed so I’d be able to walk with crutches. They said they’d fixed my right heel and ankle with a ninety-degree incision on the outside of my right foot—it rode six inches along the back of my ankle and heel, and another six inches along the side of my foot. Two pins protruded out the back of my heel, holding my heel and ankle together.
They sent me home after three days—scabs hadn’t even formed.
WESTERN DOOR
SCAR SAT BESIDE ME, NUDGING my arm every few minutes. He was my primary caregiver, along with Samantha. I lay in bed with my leg elevated, just like the doctor had told me to do. World War I documentaries rotated across the black-and-white TV, remnants of Remembrance Day programming. The horrendous 1916 battle at Verdun, with its massive craters and fractured trees, lacerated trenches and knotted barbed wire was the current feature.
This has got to be the worst battle in history per square foot, I thought as the narrator described the sheer number of deaths. It sounded worse than the Somme, and I wondered why we’d focused so much on the latter in grade school.
I gazed down at the tips of my toes. They were red, and the cast on my foot grew tighter and tighter. A strange itching had gnawed at my shin these past few days—I couldn’t get to it, not even if I stuck a pencil down the cast. Almost like the itch was several layers below my skin, in the marrow of my leg. A throbbing dull pain radiated up into my buttocks, too, and even the Tylenol 4s I was prescribed couldn’t stop it. When Samantha turned me over to clean me, she said that the back of my leg was turning a weird kind of grey, green almost, and was starting to emit an odd sweet smell.
All I could keep down was chicken broth, the nausea was so bad. I thought it was the medication. I’d stopped shitting five days before and was sure I was bunged up from it; I found no relief from the chamomile and senna tea the doctor said would loosen my bowels. Only weed and hash seemed to make me regular and helped with my appetite, but even that wasn’t working anymore. The pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray beside me loomed ominously—I wasn’t supposed to smoke, the doctor had warned—it’d impede blood flow and increased the chances of infection. But I just couldn’t stop cold turkey—I needed something to occupy the time.
I took a handful of T4s before bed. I wanted to sleep all night for once. Scar and Samantha were beside me and I knew Jerry would check up on me every few hours. It felt good to have my older brother watching out for me, despite our growing animosity. I entered the dead zone about thirty minutes after.
My dreams came, as always.
Bombs exploded near my head as I moved down the trench to deliver a vital message, warning our men not to advance. A concussion knocked me into a puddle, and I dro
pped the letter as soldiers ran past to their deaths. I reached up toward their jackboots to stop them, but my fingers slid off their ankles. One young man looked down at me and startled me. He had dark features, a long braid, and bronze skin. He was an Indian, and looked like me, but different—older, wiser—and I knew somehow he was already dead. He turned and disappeared into an explosion as he went over the top.
The chatter of World War I artillery gave way to the slower, more powerful reports of a nineteenth-century Gatling gun. But the hulking gun sounded more menacing, more real, there were houses burning all around, and children and women were screaming and running into the bush for cover. They were all Native, like me. A handful of Indian men lay beside me in shallow pits dug into the ground, long rifles in hand. We’d pop up periodically and fire down a large prairie slope at redcoat soldiers near the banks of a large river. Our enemies stood in ordered columns and outnumbered us. The man beside me said something to me in a language I’d never heard before but understood, then reached over and took my last bullets. He cocked his rifle and returned our enemies’ fire. He looked familiar, like the young man in the trench, and I could tell he was a half-breed like me. He, too, was dead; I somehow knew this.
I looked back out of the pit and suddenly saw myself on the bed at Jerry’s apartment. My body was broken, my leg propped up on pillows, Samantha, Jerry, and Scar weren’t there anymore. I floated higher above the battle and saw a white church get smaller and smaller on the horizon of the plains, and I knew I was part of this long-ago battle—it was real. I saw my grandparents’ house in Brampton, and the house number—eight—appear above the church. The number turned sideways and formed into an infinity symbol on a blue flag. I heard voices on the wind; they told me it was my destiny to be raised under that symbol.
Just then, a great shaft of light from the west broke through the clouds. It was dusk, and the orange light of twilight was fading fast. The guns and cannons fell silent. I saw a vast field before me with mesas and buttes off in the distance, and from the brightest spot of the setting sun a vast herd of horses emerged and ran toward me. I watched their muscles ripple with power, their manes float on the wind as their heads bounded with each stride, and their hooves kicked up a cloud of dust so big it enveloped the whole earth.
A tug, soft at first, then stronger and stronger, pulled me along with the herd as they ran by me and then back again. I was galloping with them, but I was not yet a hooved creature like them. I stared back and saw my broken body on the bed get smaller and smaller, until I could hardly see it. A great sadness came over me. I knew they were taking me home, but that I hadn’t yet done what I was destined to do. I tried pulling away, to return to myself, to my body, but the force of the herd was too powerful. I pleaded and cried, and still they pulled me with them.
Just as I was about to cross into the brightest spot of the setting sun, through that western door, I cried out one last time.
“I will do my work, I will change, I will finish it.”
Without a sound, the herd pivoted and released me. I watched as they turned into the light, their hooves thundering, then fell behind the great façade of the western door.
As soon as they were gone, my eyes opened. I was with Samantha on the bed. Scar tilted his head, and Jerry burst into the room.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked, his voice shaking. “You were screaming, ‘Help, help.’ ”
“I don’t know what happened—I think I have a fever,” I said as I looked down and saw my body was covered in sweat.
Samantha slept through it all.
CAST OF HORRORS
WHEN THE DOCTOR’S ASSISTANT CUT away the orange-and-black cast, she gasped. The smell was horrid: like Toronto during a summer garbage strike.
“Excuse me one moment, Mr. Thistle . . . I have to get the doctor,” she said and rushed out.
My toes had turned a bluish grey-green and the back of my cast was leaking a swampy crimson, so I’d pushed my post-surgery checkup ahead and was lucky to get a spot. It had been many weeks since my fall. The surgery should have worked. But I couldn’t listen to the doctors. It’s not like I didn’t try to follow their orders. I did. But I was an addict. More important, I didn’t have anywhere to live.
I’d been at Jerry’s, but after one of my friends stole a neighbour’s vintage bicycle, he’d kicked me and Samantha out. He had to do what he had to do. If he’d kept us, he’d have been evicted, and we all would’ve been homeless. But I figure his place was probably where I caught the infection I likely had—it was full of cat shit and dog piss and hadn’t been cleaned properly in years. It was a veritable cesspool.
Samantha and I moved into her parents’ house. She got a good job. She was trying to fly straight, but I’d never really been welcome there, as we weren’t married and for a bunch of other reasons, so I took off on my own. I thought she could do better without me cramping her style.
When the nurse came back in with the doctor, they both had masks on their faces. My stomach dropped. Their hands were full of instruments, including one that looked like wire cutters, lots of gauze, a kidney-shaped tray, and medical tape. When I finally got the courage to look down at my exposed leg I nearly fainted. There was a black puss-filled blister on the front of my ankle that resembled a giant, deformed pierogi. My foot and lower leg were swollen, green, red, and greyish yellow. When the doctor took the staples out of the incision, the edges of the skin peeled back, exposing fat, muscle, bone, and metallic hardware.
“Not good at all,” the doctor said. “The surgery has been a complete failure. Your leg is infected and gangrene is setting in. I’ll clean it, cut away the necrotic skin, and trim the bone, but you’re at serious risk of losing your leg if you don’t take care of yourself.”
He gave me something to freeze the area and set to work. Even with the numbing, when his full weight bore down on my leg and I heard a sharp wet pop from the bone clipper, I bellowed, and tears began to stream down my face. As it went on, my field of vision narrowed to pinpoints, and my hearing dulled, with the voices around me becoming distant, then inaudible. I vomited, then passed out.
When I woke up my leg was again in a cast. I had on someone else’s clothes and a numbness everywhere that smothered my arms and made my legs flop about.
The nurse came in and told me I was free to go but I had to speak to the doctor before I left. She had a prescription for antibiotics, and a suction-pump machine to attach to my leg to improve its circulation, as well as a schedule for an aftercare nurse who was to come and change my wound dressings twice a day. The doctor came in and asked me where I was staying. When I told him I was staying at the shelter, I could see his expression change. I knew it was a shithole of a place to recover in. I’d always been able to hold my own on the streets and in the shelter system, but I had to admit things weren’t like before. And I knew I couldn’t stay at the hospital.
When the doctor and nurse left me alone a moment, I grabbed the pump and scrip and hobbled out, getting in a cab. The driver kicked me out halfway to my destination when he found out I didn’t have the fare.
The first night at the shelter, the pump disappeared. By the third and fourth nights, my prescription was stolen. A week into my stay, the infection was back. Not surprisingly, the nurse never came. When I had the pump and my meds, I could at least feel hopeful, I could at least dream of keeping my leg and walking on my own again. Now I had nothing. I wanted to forget everything. I gave up.
The Personal Needs Allowance (PNA) I got every day at the shelter bought me my morning wake-and-bake hit of crack. That killed the pain in my leg long enough for me to make my way to the nearby drugstore, where I could steal some mouthwash and razors—it was surprising how much crack you could get for a pack of triple razor blades and how stupefied a bottle of mouthwash could make you.
Other homeless people I knew tried to help me. Some gave me free tokes of crack when the pain was unbearable, others shared their liquor. Outreach people who knew
me came by and gave me bus tickets, cigarettes, and clean pairs of socks. After they left, I broke down and cried. I couldn’t even wear both socks.
After about a week, I realized that I couldn’t feel my toes. They were cold and they had changed from greyish blue to waxy black—I hadn’t noticed because I’d been too busy feeling sorry for myself. My toenails started to fall away at the slightest tug and the skin sloughed off when I scraped it with my finger.
It was happening: my foot was dying just like the doctor said would happen.
I rushed myself to the hospital again.
The doctor was furious.
“Do you know how sick you’ve made yourself?” he yelled. The nurse rammed a thermometer in my ear.
I knew I was sick. My upper leg and torso felt like they were on fire and my head had been spinning for over a week.
The doctor told me he didn’t even have to cut the cast off, he could smell the damage I’d done to myself. “Mr. Thistle, based on your condition during your past visit and your condition today, I regret to inform you that we might have to amputate your leg. The infection is severe, and if it spreads to your brain or heart it will kill you.”
His words thundered into my brain. “Like fuck you are!” The words came from somewhere deep within me. They were a knee-jerk reaction to an impossible proposition. They left the room to attend to someone else, and I frantically stumbled off the bed, mounted my crutches, and see-sawed down the hospital corridor, tossing myself out the back door. Before I knew it I was in the dorm room at the shelter. Not wasting any time, I packed what clothes I owned into a plastic bag, collected my PNA, and fled.
I got to the subway and jumped on a train. The ride to the northern part of the city felt like an eternity. I clutched my Pyrex stem the whole way. It was loaded with crack I’d bought before I left the shelter with the hoard of bus tickets I’d got from the outreach workers and my $3.75 PNA. I had about a fifty-piece. I promised myself I wouldn’t smoke it until I got to Brampton. I needed to get as far away from the hospital and the threat of my leg being amputated as I could. Where I grew up seemed a safe and logical choice.
From the Ashes Page 20