When She Was Bad

by Jonathan Nasaw

  All nonsense, of course. Max received his nutrition through a nasogastric feeding tube. He tried to stop her from talking by the sheer force of his loathing, but all she had to do was move out of his direct line of sight and she would disappear. Max could no more have turned his head than he could have tap-danced his way out of the state-run shit hole to which he’d been confined since his extradition to Oregon, pending a dozen trials that were now unlikely to ever take place.

  For one thing, Max’s lawyers could now legitimately argue that he was unable to aid in his own defense—the doctors were split on whether his continued mutism, even when the feeding tube was removed, was physical, voluntary, or psychosomatic. For another, not many prosecutors were all that keen on trying a man who’d have to be wheeled into the courtroom tied to his wheelchair, with urine dripping into a baggie at his side and his respirator, plugged into a permanent tracheostomy hole, going hiss-suck!, hiss-suck! every five and a half seconds.

  So the view from the antique, horizontally rotating Stryker frame never really changed. It only shifted between the discolored, water-stained, off-white ceiling tiles and the one-foot-square, black-and-white floor tiles whenever the staff got around to clamping a canvas stretcher on top of him and spinning him around like a pig on a spit. There was a window somewhere off to one side, but all he could see of it was the waxing and waning of daylight.

  As if being sentenced to life without parole in his own body weren’t punishment enough (only the State was debarred from cruel and unusual punishment: nature practiced it on a regular basis), every so often Max would be stricken by a headache. For the able-bodied, even the able-bodied migraine sufferer, it’s hard to fathom the effects of a headache on someone who only has sensation from the neck up—let’s just say that old cliche about being in a world of pain had never been more applicable.

  And there was another factor that exacerbated his suffering: Max had skated through most of his existence without having to endure even prolonged discomfort—that, after all, had always been Lyssy’s job. From youthful boredom to third-degree burns, from gas pains to gunshot wounds, from aches to amputations, the system had always had Lyssy as its scapegoat.

  But Max could no longer summon Lyssy at will. He’d tried, those first few months, fucking Jesus how he’d tried. Raging, cajoling, threatening, promising—nothing worked. Even worse (dear God and all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell, how many layers of “even worse” were there in this stinking onion of existence), Max himself had been unable to retreat to the dark place—it was as if Lyssy had somehow locked the door behind him. The door in the wall that didn’t exist.

  Sleep was the only refuge left to Max—but with sleep came dreams even less bearable than his waking hell. He could never fully recall them when awake, but they must have been pretty awful if he could wake up to all this with even a transitory sense of relief.

  There were only two things that kept Max going, or rather, that kept him from letting go of his tenuous hold on sanity. One was that it couldn’t last forever: when he’d first arrived, he’d overheard a doctor telling the nurse that on the life expectancy charts, a C-3 quadriplegic fell somewhere between a hamster and a house cat.

  The other thing standing between Max and the Big Scream was that he still hadn’t given up on Lyssy. The little bastard was in there, all right, and Max remained convinced that sooner or later he’d come up with a way to get him out, to swap places. A few minutes ago, in fact, he’d come up with what felt like a very promising approach, but one that would require his complete concentration.

  So he waited for the nurse to leave before closing his eyes. Lyssy! he called. Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

  And again: Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

  And again and again and again, without a hint of a response. Unable even to sigh unless he timed it to the hiss-suck! of the respirator, Max opened his eyes again and settled in for another long night in hell.

  3

  Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

  Utter darkness. Lyssy was afraid for a moment—then he heard the creek burbling and remembered where he was. He opened his eyes. It must have been around sunset—the inside of the cabin was all lit up with a rosy, comforting glow.

  “Lyssy, it’s Lil.” He couldn’t see her—her voice was coming from the porch.

  “So who else vould it be?” A credible imitation of the querulous old man played by Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride.

  She laughed. “I need your help.”

  He hopped out of bed, crossed the room without a trace of a limp, on an artifical leg so natural he could hardly even remember which leg it was, and opened the door. Lil (that’s what she wanted to be called, to signify the consolidation of her two identities) was standing there with both arms so full of kindling she couldn’t manage the door latch.

  Lyssy stepped back, ushered her in with a gallant sweep of his arm, then stepped out onto the porch. The clearing too was bathed in a roseate light. “You feel like going down to the rock?”

  She joined him, brushing leaves and twigs from the front of her sweater. She was wearing that soft brown cashmere number—without a bra, Lyssy couldn’t help but notice as they negotiated the rocky path around the side of the cabin and down to the flat rock overhanging the creek.

  But he wasn’t in a sexy mood—just mellow. Mellow as the sunset as he followed Lil onto the rock. She took off her sandals and dangled her legs over the side, her bare toes idly stirring the silvery clear, slow-moving current. Lyssy stood over her, looking down into the water. “See those waterbugs there, right on the surface?” she said, pointing to a few tiny, nearly transparent insects with two wide round paddles, larger than their bodies, for feet. “You know why they have those big feet? It’s so when fish look up, they think, ‘Duh-uh, those must belong to some really humongous bug, no way I could swallow that.’”

  Lyssy laughed. “Maybe that’s what Bigfoot is—some monkey three or four feet high, with really big feet.” He lowered himself easily, even gracefully—his new leg was amazing, it felt like it was becoming part of him—and stretched out athwart the sun-warmed rock with his head in her lap. You couldn’t actually see the sun from here, but the sky was a melting rainbow of colors and the creek a fiery red-gold ribbon. “I probably asked you this before, but I can’t remember. How long did you say we get to stay here?”

  “Forever,” she said without hesitation.

  “And is it…real?”

  She smiled down at him, her face in shadow, curtained by her dark brown hair. “You can have forever, or you can have real,” she told him, “but honey, you can’t have ’em both.”

  Lyssy smiled back at her. “Forever,” he said dreamily. “I’ll take forever.”