The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  I looked up and saw that she was crying, and we hugged again, and I kissed her tears and turned for the train.

  “Thailand!” I shouted as I turned for a last look.

  * * *

  THAILAND, IN ANOTHER SWEET COINCIDENCE, meant a reunion with David, who was doing his own year on the road. He’d become almost like a member of my family over the years, and through the course of dinners, hikes, and parties had met and fallen in love with my stepsister Lili and was traveling through Asia with her. But she’d peeled off for a side trip with other friends, and so David and I had decided to meet up in Thailand to goof and party for a couple weeks. Whenever I was around him, I felt as if there was a lot to celebrate, especially our years of friendship stretching back to high school, when we’d bonded over soccer, beers sneaked from parents’ fridges, and our roots on Portland’s eastside.

  We’d ended up at a scruffy, $10-a-night diving resort on the island of Koh Tao, in the gulf of Thailand, intending to get scuba certified, but mostly just being twenty-two, and being together.

  The beach resort, though that’s probably too grand a name for it, served food at tables that sat out on the sand, and the rice noodles we ate that night were spicy to the point of being barely edible.

  In the flood of memory that washed through me as I knelt on the ice, pawing through my sled in panic looking for the spilled gas can, I could taste those noodles again, feel the cheap wooden chopsticks in my hand, and see the waitress carrying plates across the sand to our little table.

  Every detail of those moments before everything changed was ingrained into me. There were brightly colored Christmas lights strung out from the café, and the waitress had emerged through the lights, a dark silhouette lit from behind by a kind of rainbow that shimmered through the edges of her coal-black hair, frizzed up around her head in a tight bun. The two Thai beers she’d thunked down in front of us on the flimsy table were sweating in the steamy night. David and I clinked our bottles, enjoying the moment and our first sips.

  The details are vivid because of what came after. Searing memories force the mind to reach back and look for patterns, ways that a thing could’ve been avoided, signs that were missed. Like searching the ripples of a rock thrown into a pond, you have to look for the source moment, the place where things began.

  That café was just down the beach from where we were staying. As David and I sat there on our cheap plastic chairs, listening to the sound of the surf behind us, we saw that they were setting up for the hotel’s evening entertainment. A small crowd was gathering and two big torches on stakes had been jammed down into the sand. The torches flickered in the breeze as two men squatted over a long rope, soaking it with fuel.

  David grabbed my elbow and nodded toward the scene.

  “Fire jump ropes again,” he said.

  We’d seen the fire ropes from a distance every night through the five days that we’d been on the island, and I’d deliberately ignored the ritual every time. I pictured a cheesy Hawaiian luau sort of scene, with jugglers and dancers. The rope would be lit on fire, and the rope guys would whirl it around like a jump rope.

  Staying right where we were seemed great to me. The idea of another Thai beer or two was attractive. We’d had only a single one each with dinner, and the thought of a bucketful of those sweaty cold bottles arriving at the table delivered by our waitress sounded like a fine plan.

  “Should we do the fire ropes?” David said. “We’re heading out of here soon. Might never be back. Last chance.”

  Being twenty-two that night, with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with it, I saw no danger, not even the possibility of it. Adventure was one more intoxicant, and David’s logic, in the footloose way we’d both been traveling, was compelling. Hey, something we haven’t done! That means we should do it!

  So we dropped some tip money on the table and headed toward the torches. The crowd mostly looked like us—young people doing Asia on the cheap—Americans, Europeans, and Australians for the most part—and a few scruffy older hippie couples who looked like they’d arrived on that beach around 1980 and never left.

  The rope men, both in their twenties, in ratty shorts and T-shirts, had doused the rope with fuel, lit it, and stepped back by the time we got there. They stood about twenty feet from each other and with a practiced, even rhythm began swinging the rope in great, swirling, mesmerizingly beautiful loops of flaming rope that went up in a huge arc, and then brushed against the white sand and back around. It was hypnotic to watch.

  Two girls were jumping as we walked up, both giggling like crazy and, I guessed, probably drunk or high on one thing or another, or just excited. And when they were done and had jumped out, falling in hysterics onto the sand, there seemed to be an opportunity and David leaped in.

  I watched his first couple of jumps, the burning rope brushing the sand beneath him as he leaped, then going high over his head, his face a radiant grin that I’d known so well and seen so many times since that first day in the ninth grade when we met. We’d both felt like outsiders back then, kids from the eastside with something to prove, and bond over. And now here on this beach together, thousands of miles from home, his friendship felt just as important and powerful.

  I watched the timing of the rope, which was long and steady—the rope guys were practiced and smooth—and waited for my moment.

  Then I jumped in, and decided David had been right. It was intoxicating and beautiful, and through the first few rotations, I found myself grinning back at him, and at the crowd.

  Then it happened. I mistimed a jump and the rope tripped me, wrapping around my legs and feet. In a tangle of fire and sand and shouts, I fell, and the sudden twisting of the rope tripped David as well. I saw him going down, rolling safely out and to the side. But I wasn’t as lucky, or as fast on my feet. My body slammed onto the kerosene-soaked rope. I could feel the thick oiliness of it, and smell it there suddenly in my face, as the impact sprayed fuel all over me, soaking my shorts and T-shirt. In a single horrifying instant, I was on fire to my neck.

  I was also still tangled in the rope, which added its own horror, the feeling of being trapped. I had to escape, and I had to put out the flames. I knew that much. So out of some survival instinct, I grabbed with my bare right hand the very thing that was burning me, the flaming rope itself. With my surging adrenaline I didn’t feel it burning my hand as I threw it off me. Rising up from the sand with no thought but survival, my body engulfed in flames, I ran directly toward the ocean and dove. The water was warm, bath-like and calm. It tricked me into thinking I’d simply had a bad scare.

  When I came out, still not having looked down at my legs, David was there on the sand looking confused. Things had unfolded so fast for both of us—him rolling out, me untangling myself and sprinting to the water—that he wasn’t even sure what had happened until I emerged from the ocean.

  Now he stared at the charred and dead skin that hung off my legs as the salt water dripped off me, and I followed his gaze down to see it all for the first time myself. The flickering light from the torches reflected back from every surface, making everything, including the beads of water that clung to my burned skin, stand out in stark contrasts of black and white. The crowd of onlookers, so exuberant and happy a few minutes before, had fallen dead silent, staring at me in a circle. No one, clearly, had any idea what to do. But I knew I needed immediate medical help, as I stood there dripping, woozy, and becoming more aware of the pain every second.

  “David, I’m going into shock,” I said. “Help… please… do something.”

  David sprang into action, running up toward the café and finding a guy about to head out on his moped.

  “Hospital!” David shouted and gestured to me down on the sand.

  “Hospital,” the driver repeated—maybe one on the few words of English he knew—gesturing to the bike. Carefully, David lifted me up and put me behind the driver, then climbed on behind me. I had no choice but to wrap my legs, with skin hanging
off them, around the driver’s lap, soaking his clothes in blood and salt water. And that awkward angle forced my face into his back. His T-shirt smelled like the sea, like rotting fish and salt water. Or maybe I was just smelling myself. But the reality was starting to hit either way: I’m in Thailand, in the middle of nowhere, on a beach, on an island. And now I’m on a moped, riding down a dirt path with God knows who to God knows where. I’d gone off to see the world, but now I was really far from home.

  * * *

  I’D THOUGHT OF THAT NIGHT and relived it in memory many times over the years, but never so vividly as I did hunched over the sled in Antarctica, pulling item after item up to my face to sniff for gas fumes before throwing it aside onto the ice. And each sniff seemed to trigger another wave of memory, in recalling—and really almost smelling again—the stench of burned flesh, general anesthetic, and sweat. I sniffed one food bag and recalled the odor of bleach, washed into coarse white hospital sheets. I grabbed another and remembered the smell of ancient dried, crumbling paint that came off in pieces on the corridor walls outside the operating room.

  The “hospital” turned out to be more of a makeshift one-room clinic, squat and grim, plunked down next to a vacant lot, filled with garbage and abandoned appliances. As the moped pulled up and David and our moped driver each took one of my shoulders to help get me in, I saw old refrigerators, tilted to crazy angles with their doors gaping open. Cans and broken glass seemed to be everywhere. It did not inspire confidence.

  Everything seemed surreal and strange as they laid me down on the steel exam table. The fluorescent lights buzzed loudly overhead. The nurse, when she came in, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, looked way too young, not much more than a child, it seemed to me as I lay there. And the pain, which hadn’t seemed so bad on the beach, and through the moped ride—maybe because I’d gone into shock—suddenly hit with brutal force.

  It radiated up from my legs in a wave and didn’t stop. I felt my stomach clench and my chest tighten with it. The burned skin was screaming.

  But they had morphine, which the child-nurse immediately pumped into me, and after that I mainly looked at David’s face, scanning his reactions to see how scared I should be myself. I saw him flinch when the nurse grabbed a pair of scissors to cut off my burned clothes, and his whole body stiffened, jaw clenched, as she began cutting off pieces of loose and charred skin.

  I was afraid to look down, afraid to look anywhere, and David looked like he was going to faint. So I grabbed his hand, and in my fear and pain, I’m surprised I didn’t break it. “David, I need you to be strong for me,” I said.

  And then I saw a ray of hope cross his face when she cut off my shirt and everyone realized I’d only been burned from the legs down. My sprint to the ocean had probably saved my life, putting out the flames before they penetrated through my shorts and shirt to the skin.

  But I really knew nothing for sure, and the language barrier didn’t help. Despite the nurse’s kindness, the only certainty we’d gotten out of her was that I needed to get to a larger hospital on another island, that the next ferryboat going there wouldn’t leave until the following morning, and that David and I would be on our own to somehow make all of that happen.

  “More hospital,” the nurse said several times emphatically, though I wasn’t sure whether that meant “better hospital,” on the next island, or “more hospital treatment,” or all of those things, or none of them.

  But in her broken English, she got the point across that a ferryboat was needed, but that it wouldn’t come until the morning. Then she left the room, me still lying on the table.

  David and I were both scared—both of us, I think, feeling like lost little boys, alone on the other side of the world. He stood there for a minute, blinking back his own tears, hands jammed into his pockets. And he did the only thing he could think of: He climbed onto the table with me, about the size of a twin bed, and held me in his arms for the long hours of the night, telling me we’d somehow find a way through.

  The pressure was on David the next morning, just as it had been the night before. Through the heaviness of the morphine, I wasn’t much use for anything. But he made it work, with muscle and love. I leaned on his shoulder as he got me out of the clinic and into the back of a pickup truck, which was crusted on every surface with red dirt, and then to the ferry dock. He wrestled me up the ramp onto the boat and laid me gently down on an empty patch of floor where I could stretch my bandaged legs out flat. Then he leaned up against a wall next to me for the two-hour ride, as tourists and locals walked by, staring at me, or trying not to.

  By the time we finally docked and David had wrestled me into a taxi, the pain meds had long since worn off, but he did his best—and his best was pretty good—to keep up my spirits. Through the jolting taxi ride as I kept my teeth clenched and my eyes clamped shut, trying to think about anything but the pain, David ran through a monologue of the sights as we passed, making up total nonsense in trying to sound like a know-it-all tourist-bus operator. And when we pulled up to the hospital and I saw what looked like another tired and run-down building, he even managed to make me laugh.

  “Hey, it’s bigger at least,” he said, jabbing me in the arm. “More hospital!”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAYS AND NIGHTS were blurred by morphine and uncertainty.

  Sometimes I found myself just staring at the walls of the little room between visits from David, unsure even where I was, looking down to find my legs completely bandaged and feeling a wave of shock as though seeing them for the first time. What have I done? I thought.

  One night I woke up in the hospital’s makeshift ICU, sick from anesthesia, after one of the eight surgical sessions of debriding my wounds to remove damaged tissue, and found a cat running across my chest and around my bed, hammering home the fact that nothing here was probably sanitary or safe and that just lying here was probably dangerous. I knew enough about burns to fear infection. The searing pain was unimaginable, but the morphine they kept giving me made it feel as if there were insects crawling over my skin. I couldn’t tell which was worse.

  And then the day came, four days after the fire, that made all of that seem utterly unimportant. A doctor walked in. He was skinny and unhealthy looking himself, with a bad complexion and thinning hair—not one of the usual doctors, which made me think he was a specialist or something.

  Maybe now I’ll know when I can get out of here, I thought hopefully. I imagined going on with my trip, or at least sitting by a pool with a beer. Anything beyond this hospital would be an improvement.

  Without saying anything, the doctor unwrapped my legs. He grabbed my feet and moved them, which sent a jolt of pain running up through me despite the morphine. He prodded and poked around my knees with the same pain-surge effect.

  Okay, I told myself, this is normal. Healing from burns hurts. I know he’ll have something positive to say when he’s done hurting me.

  But then he straightened back up and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “You’ll probably never walk again normally,” he said in Thai-accented English. He then ran through my damage as though it were a shopping list. The ligaments, knee joints, and ankle joints were all “affected,” he said.

  Then without another word or any attempt at bedside manner, he abruptly turned and left the room, leaving me feeling more alone than I’d ever been in my life. The physical pain suddenly seemed like nothing compared to the spiral of emotional darkness his words had thrown me into. My life was over. It was the end of everything, the end of the world as I’d known it.

  * * *

  MY MOM ARRIVED ON THE fifth day of this ordeal, not knowing how bad things were, or how deep I’d gone into despair, but only that I needed her.

  I learned later that she regularly cried in the hallways at the hospital, pleading with the Thai doctors for good news. I can only imagine how scary it was for a mother to see her child so broken and helpless. But she never showed me that fear, and instead came
into my hospital room every day with a smile on her face and an air of positivity. She saved me just as much as David had, and her arrival marked a handoff in my care. She wrapped David up with a hug of gratitude and encouraged him to continue on his travels.

  “Colin, what do you want to do when you get out of here? Let’s set a goal!” she said that first day after David and I had said our tearful goodbyes.

  “Mom, are you kidding me? My life is over,” I said, looking up at her from the bed. All I could see at that point was darkness, and hear the echoing words of that doctor: “You’ll probably never walk again normally.”

  She leaned in. Behind her, I could see paint chips peeling from the cinder-block walls of the room. “Do me a favor,” Mom said. “Close your eyes.”

  I shrugged and played along. Better to close my eyes than look at the crummy hospital room and its peeling paint. “I want you to set a goal for after you get out of here, Colin,” she said. “Visualize it, picture yourself doing it. Grab onto it.” And in that moment, for whatever reason, but mostly, I think, because athletic goals have always been how I function, I saw myself completing a triathlon, something I’d never done before. She could have easily looked down at my bandaged legs and told me to set a more “realistic” goal, but instead she wrapped me in her arms and said, “I can already see you crossing the finish line.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME we got to the even bigger, modern-looking hospital in Bangkok, via a medical airlift on the eighth day after the fire, the idea of a triathlon was starting to feel like something from a morphine-induced dream. And through the next month at that hospital, as I lay there incapable of taking a single step, things felt as if they were sliding even more. The power of those first moments of Mom’s infectious energy, when she bounded into my room, demanding a goal, was fading.