Mama Fish

by Rio Youers

  I ordered a large whiskey and sipped it slowly. My taste buds cried out for beer—clear and refreshing, with frothy chips of ice floating in the glass—but I denied myself; I wasn’t wearing a leg bag and didn’t want to catheterize every ten minutes. The whiskey was good, though, and it would help me sleep.

  The Celtics game was on TV. I caught glimpses of it, but spent most of the time watching the people around me. I wondered if the middle-aged couple were married or, more particularly, if they were married to each other. The businessman appeared flustered, shuffling his papers, tapping his laptop. His BlackBerry buzzed across the table like an insect and he snatched it up and pressed it to his ear. I could see the laptop’s screen reflected in the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “It’s done, Karen,” he spoke into the mouthpiece of the BlackBerry, using his napkin to dab the sweat from his forehead. “It’ll be on your desk first thing tomorrow morning. No problem.”

  I decided that, in a way, he was as dependent as me; the laptop was his wheelchair and the BlackBerry his medication. Take them away and he wouldn’t be able to function.

  I ordered another whiskey, watched fifteen seconds of the game, and then directed my attention at Captain Hollywood and his stunning entourage. His features were perfect, the classic hero look: high cheekbones and a strong jaw. He had brilliant green eyes, and his hair fell to the collar of his expensive shirt in blond waves. When he grinned, which was often, I saw that his teeth were white and even. A thin gold chain glimmered around his neck. His skin was radiant.

  The women could not stop touching him—his arm, his hair, his thigh. They giggled and pouted, checking their reflection in every shiny surface. They moved around him, swaying, like seaweed around a rock.

  He saw me looking (it was hard not to look, to be fair) and gave me a nod. I returned a tight-lipped smile and glanced away, back at the Celtics game, as if I had been watching it all along. I started to feel self-conscious (something I haven’t felt since coming out of rehab), and rolled my chair under the table, trying to hide my wheels.

  The middle-aged couple left before I had finished my second whiskey, and the businessman was not far behind. He gathered his work in a haphazard bundle and shuffled away, Blackberry buzzing. It was time for me to leave, too. It had been a long, emotional day, and the whiskey was moving to my brain. I had a buzz going, which was good; I would sleep, waking only to turn my legs.

  I finished my second whiskey and was preparing to leave when another glass appeared on the table before me. I looked at the waitress.

  “I didn’t …”

  “Compliments of the gentleman at the bar,” she explained.

  “Oh … thank you.” I raised the glass and looked at him, acknowledging the gesture. It happens from time to time—someone sees the wheelchair and takes pity on you. He nodded and raised his glass in return. Mineral water with a slice of lime, his body too pure to be spoiled by alcohol. I imagined him at the gym at four A.M., bench pressing ridiculous free weights, guzzling protein shakes between reps. I imagined myself, giddy on three whiskeys, struggling for the coordination needed to take off my shoes or go through my bowel program. We were direct opposites, I realized. He was everything I ached to be—how I would create myself, given the clay to work with—and I was everything he feared.

  I sipped the whiskey, anyway. I knew it would go directly to my head and fuck with one of the few organs in my body that was still working, but it tasted like gold. Without Darlene beside me, I needed something.

  My eyes continued to flick from the game to the three beautiful people at the bar. I caught fragments of their conversation: the women were in town visiting a friend who had moved to the area, and they were meeting her later at Club Scarlet. They asked if he wanted to go with them, and he declined … said he needed to work. They asked if he was staying at the hotel, and he said no … he lived in Harlequin, but he frequented the bar at the Adam’s Mark because he always met interesting people. The women giggled and swayed. They took pictures with their cell phones and a digital camera. Hollywood smiled handsomely, flashing his fantastic green eyes, occasionally looking at me.

  “It’s time to boogie, sister,” one of the women said, indicating the time on the screen of her cell phone. “We’re already forty-five minutes late.”

  “Don’t let me hold you up,” Hollywood said with an all-American grin. “Ladies, it’s been a slice.”

  Another ten minutes passed while they hugged and kissed goodbye. The women gushed and swayed and wrote down their contact information.

  “This is my cell, this is my work number—call me anytime.” She did the thumb and pinky hand gesture. “I’m also on MySpace and Facebook.”

  “This is my e-mail,” the other woman explained. “Underscore, not hyphen. This is my cell, and this is my PIN.”

  Hollywood nodded and the women left, barely giving me a glance, giggling and wiggling. I grinned and looked at the object of their desire. He sat cool and comfortable at the bar, his gold chain flickering against his tan skin. I was impressed—no use denying it. I raised my glass to him again.

  “Whatever you’ve got,” I said, “you should bottle and sell it.”

  “You think?” he said, smiling. “Now there’s an idea. Mind if I join you?”

  I was about to head out myself; whiskey number three was almost done and my head was swimming (I haven’t been able to drink worth a damn since the accident—blame it on the meds), but I found myself nodding and gesturing at the seat beside me.

  He was tall, easily six-four, and he walked like a cowboy. He dropped into the seat beside me and I studied him for a second or two, trying to find an imperfection. There were no blemishes on his skin, and no shadows beneath his eyes. His hair was full, no gray, and his teeth were clean and straight. You’d think he’d been airbrushed, like a photograph of a celebrity.

  He held out his hand and I shook it—felt his firm grip: a strong hand, clipped fingernails. His toned body pressed through the fabric of his clean white shirt. I saw the ridge of every muscle.

  “I know you,” he said. “I’m sure I do.”

  I shook my head. It was possible he recognized me from Harlequin High, but I didn’t think so; the graying, balding man in the wheelchair bore no resemblance to the boy who had once stolen six bases in a game for the Rockets (and still sat alone on the bus ride home). Twenty years had ravaged almost everything, including my soul. He might have pressed—asked enough questions to make the connection, if there was one—but I was tired and emotional. I had seen enough ghosts for one day.

  “I’m from out of town,” I said.

  He frowned in his beautiful way (he sensed, I think, that I was telling only half the truth), but he didn’t push. I sipped my whiskey and for a moment the only sound was the commercials on TV: Miller Lite, Geico, Verizon Wireless, Cialis. Hollywood allowed his brilliant, yet heavy gaze to weigh on me a moment longer, then glanced around the empty bar.

  “There used to be a hospital here,” he said. “They tore it down seven years ago. I guess it was getting a little ragged around the edges, more a danger to your health than a benefit.”

  I said nothing. He looked at me for a long time and I felt my wheelchair tighten and choke me, and then become me: an unnatural mesh of flesh and metal, the wheels projecting from my back like wings.

  “Can you imagine what this tiny patch of land has seen through all the years?” he continued, finally glancing away. “The soil beneath us is rich with hope and pain, joy and fear, life and death. A place of miracles.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles,” I said. The words jumped from me with an acidic edge. I jerked my shoulders and felt my wheels twitch. I wanted to fly away.

  “Anything is possible,” he said.

  “I used to believe that,” I said. “But not anymore.”

  “Something has shaken your faith.”

  I lowered my head, not wanting him to see my faded eyes, my bitter smile. “Are you going to tell me how much
God loves me?”

  He uttered a slight, dry laugh and I looked at him. His smile was impossible. “I’m not a man of God,” he said. “But I still believe in faith, and hope, and that even man is capable of miracles. I say again … anything is possible.”

  “I don’t agree,” I said, grasping my useless legs and shaking them, trying to loosen them from the clenched-fist sensation of the chair.

  “So what’s your story?” Hollywood asked. He relaxed in his seat and a bead of light reflected off his gold chain. Everything about him was bright, throwing me into shadow.

  “I’m here on business,” I said. “I work for a company that sells—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said, and pointed at my wheelchair. “Were you involved in an accident?”

  My thoughts were flakes of charred paper. I nodded.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. His green eyes lost some of their brilliance, and I could tell that he really was sorry. I’d seen enough feigned pity to know the difference.

  “It happened four years ago,” I said—reaching for him, wanting to feel just a moment of his light. “And it begins with a dead man’s switch. Do you know what that is?”

  “Sure,” he said. “They use them on lawnmowers and jet-skis. They cut the power to the engine, right?”

  I nodded. “They use them on trains, too. They’re wired into the control system so that the emergency brakes are applied if anything happens to the driver.”

  Hollywood sipped his water. His eyes flashed, his gold chain flashed. He was like a quartz vein in granite.

  “Okay, now you have to consider Newton’s First Law of Motion,” I continued. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi …” Hollywood trailed off and grinned when he saw the amazed expression on my face. “English, right? Okay, it basically means that an object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion … until acted upon by an external force.”

  I nodded. My mouth opened to say something, but no sound came out.

  “I’m not just a pretty face,” Hollywood said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know how else to respond.

  “You were saying …” Hollywood folded his arms. His biceps bulged.

  I gave my head a little shake and sipped my whiskey. “Right … okay … so anyway, the dead man’s switch and Newton’s First Law of Motion collaborate, and one unlucky son of a bitch—that’s me—ends up with a broken back.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Explain how.”

  “I was traveling to Fresno for a business lunch. Not a meeting. I didn’t even have to go, for God’s sake.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead as I remembered how Darlene had tried to talk me out of it. Four hours on a train for filet mignon with the boss, she had said. Sounds like an ass-smooching move to me, Beauchamp. “My wife told me it was a long way to go to kiss the boss’s ass, and she was right, but I decided to go, anyway. I never got the opportunity to pucker up, though; an hour or so into the journey I decided to get a piece of gum from my jacket pocket—something else I could have done without. Isn’t it amazing how the smallest decisions can have such a massive impact on our lives?”

  Hollywood nodded. His gaze flicked from my face to my wheels, back and forth, as if he were trying to collate improbable data … two mismatched pieces of a puzzle that had been pushed together, made to fit.

  “My jacket was on the overhead rack. I stepped into the aisle to grab it, and at that exact moment, the driver of the train had a heart attack. He fell away from the controls, triggering the dead man’s switch. The emergency brakes did their job. The train jolted and began to slow. My body obeyed Newton’s First Law of Motion and kept moving. I was thrown down the aisle, and the external force that stopped me was the door into the next car. I hit it hard enough to shatter my eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebra. I am now classed as paraplegic T12 complete. The ‘complete’ part means that I have absolutely no feeling below the point of injury … and never will have.

  “I spent two weeks in ICU. I had surgeries to remove my spleen and part of my colon. My spine has been stabilized with titanium rods and screws, and fused with allograft bone harvested from a cadaver.”

  Hollywood let out a long, trembling breath. His eyes were dim once again. He was silent for a long time, and then he excused himself to order another glass of water. My gaze drifted to the TV. More commercials: Burger King, Sprint, Lipitor, Toyota. I watched them, but my hazy mind was recalling the way Hollywood’s eyes had flicked from my face to my wheels. I wasn’t sure if it was disconcerting, or reassuring. I finished my whiskey and looked at the empty glass. The room started to sway and I gripped the edge of the table to keep from rolling away. I thought I should call Darlene once more before I went to sleep. She would say the things I needed to hear. She always did.

  Hollywood returned and put a glass of water in front of me. A wedge of lime, just like his. Our only similarity. I took two big gulps. It was cold and refreshing. I felt it cascade down my throat and into my chest, and then it died.

  “Are you married?” Hollywood asked. “Family?”

  I nodded. “Married with two sons. They’re my universe. They’re infinite.”

  “Does that make it harder, or easier?”

  The question caused me to falter, because it was as if he had glimpsed inside my mind and discovered something about me that no one else knew.

  “Easier,” I replied, my voice trembling. “They give me all the love and support I need.”

  “There’s your Hallmark answer.” His forefinger made circles around the rim of his glass. His green eyes never flinched. “Now tell me why it’s harder.”

  Because I despise them, the dark part of my heart answered. I despise their energy, the freedom of their bodies, and the way they use them in front of me.

  “Why is it harder to care? To love? Because I want to give them everything,” I said, which was the truth, despite the way my angst at the world thrashed inside me. “They deserve everything, because they’re infinite. Believe me, cold-heartedness would be convenient for my condition.”

  “You’d rather not love?”

  “Only in my selfish, maudlin moments.”

  “Then your soul would be paralyzed, too.”

  “Bliss,” I said with a smile. “But that’s not the case, because I love with every vibrant fiber of my being. It’s how I’m made. My heart is lifted every day, and broken, too—a perpetual sequence, like Prometheus’s liver being eaten by the eagle.”

  I took a sip of water and looked at the wedge of lime bumping against the inside of the glass, flavor leaking from it, like the emotions leaking from my soul … flavoring this stranger’s evening. He sat, perfect in every way, half-smiling, his dazzling eyes switching from my face to my wheels. I had to turn away. I looked around the empty bar and saw tiny wings of light beating on every reflective surface, intensified by the alcohol, so that when I closed my eyes I still saw them, in afterimage, like burning windows in the dark.

  I also saw the faces of my children, equally bright, and I pulled them to my chest so that they would feel my vigorous heartbeat… and in my mind, I was standing.

  “Every child should believe their father is the epitome of strength and security,” I continued, words pouring from the citric wedge of my soul. “Every father should strive to set examples they would be proud to have their children follow. I want to give that to my sons, but all they have seen is a man who wept through eight miserable weeks of rehabilitation. They have seen me fall when I was learning to transfer from a bed to a wheelchair, and have found me on the bathroom floor, covered in piss and shit because I didn’t make it to the toilet in time. They look at me and see a man who gobbles ridiculous amounts of medication to help ease the pain that burns his body, or the spasticity that can cause his legs to jerk so powerfully that he can kick himself right out of his chair.”

  “So … what do you want?”
r />   “I want my children to look at me and see strength. I want them to be proud.”

  “And you don’t think they are?” Hollywood asked. “You don’t think they see the strength in every breath you take?”

  I shook my head and closed my eyes again. I suddenly felt extremely tired. “It’s been a long day,” I said. “And I appreciate your company, but I’m not sure I can do the whole Dr. Phil routine right now.”

  Hollywood laughed, throwing back his head and holding his ribs. The sound was both divine and cruel, like a tree falling, or ice breaking. I winced and grasped my hand rims to wheel myself away, but the laughter stopped in an instant and he pounced on me, clutching my forearm with his strong hand. I felt the life flowing through him. He leaned close. His lips were almost touching my face.

  “Let me help you,” he whispered.

  I tried to pull away. My arms are strong (lifting and wheeling your bodyweight around for four years will do that), but I couldn’t move. Not one inch.

  “I want to help you.”

  “What?”

  His breath puffed against my skin. It was warm and fragrant. “Do you want to walk again?”

  I stared at him … dumbfounded, offended, and frightened.

  “I can help you,” he whispered.

  “This isn’t funny,” I said.

  He shook his head and let go of my arm. I jerked backward, bumping the table and causing the glasses to wobble. I wanted to keep rolling—race away from him and back to my room, where I could call Darlene and hear the honesty in her words. But I remained where I was, and the working half of my body trembled, my heart seemingly twice the size.

  I wanted to believe him. A huge tear moved hesitantly down the lines on my face.

  “I can help you,” he said again.

  “What do you mean?” The waver in my voice showed more hope than any words could. “Are you talking about electrical stimulation, or—?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that tomorrow’s world exists today?” he cut in, and his green eyes blazed once again. I imagined his heart to be a hub dynamo, running alternately fast and slow. “Our collective conscience is held together by vast chasms of silence, because to hear—to know—would mean catastrophe. Where does it end? With wireless cell phones that you plug into your ear? With the cloning of sheep and monkeys? With plastic surgeons that can give you the face of a superstar? These are the things we know, but have you ever wondered what they keep behind closed doors?”