Chapter Seven
The curtain had been closed at my request because I didn’t want to look at the man who had caused so much irreparable harm. It didn’t help much because I still knew he was there and I kept thinking about him, about the first time I’d run into him or rather the first time he’d almost run into me. Part of me hoped he’d never come out of his little nap and that he’d quietly slip away in the night when nobody was looking and that this world would be quits with him.
It was a startling thought. I’d never really wished somebody would die, never felt that kind of hatred toward another human being. But it was definitely there for this guy. I tried diverting my thoughts to other things. Katie was the distraction of choice but even she couldn’t fully tear my attention away from the present reality a few feet away. It was the doctor that saved me from my smoldering thoughts.
He came into the room shortly after Eddie left but waited enough time for me to stew in dangerous thoughts about my roommate. I heard the door open and close followed by the sound of him setting something down on the other side of the room. He appeared from behind the curtain like a late night talk show host, all smiles. He was short, trim and balding but cheerful.
“Hello Mr. Nicholas. I’m Dr. Williams. Eddie tells me you’re feeling well and asking about walking.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I was just wondering how long it was going to be before I could get around. Just got a new job and I need to be able to stand and walk for it.” This was true, but not all of the truth. I had other things I wanted to do and getting around without trouble played a key role. Plus some instinctual part of me wanted to be able to run at a moments’ notice.
“Glad to hear you’re motivated. That’s going to help you a lot. A lot of patients are fearful of taking steps after something like what happened to you. It’s the pain they’re afraid of. Natural, of course, but it also slows people down unnecessarily. Your ankle is sprained, not broken, and I don’t think it’s very badly sprained at that. You’re really lucky, Mr. Nicholas.” He sounded genuinely impressed at this last part.
“It’s Steve, please. My dad is Mr. Nicholas. What do you mean ‘really lucky’?”
“Well, you were basically at the center of a high speed car accident. Most people don’t walk away from that kind of thing very easily. But you will, today, I think, with some minor assistance.” He held up a finger, forestalling any further inquiry for the moment and disappeared behind the curtain again. He reappeared quickly with a set of crutches and said, “ta-da!”
“Crutches,” I said uncertainly. “How long will I have to use them?”
“Oh, not long. I’d say at least the better part of this week. Just be careful with it and it shouldn’t bother you too much. You’re also going to be really sore all over for a while. Expect it to feel worse tomorrow, but then to get better as the week goes by. I can write a note for your work explaining all of this if you’d like.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve already called them and we’ve worked out what we need to. My first day is going to be the middle of next week.”
“Perfect,” he said nodding his head. “That should be absolutely perfect.” Before I knew it I was becoming upbeat. I knew it was his cheerfulness. It was somehow contagious. As I reflected upon this later I saw how it had made me forget about the drunk driver, the accident and even Katie for a short while. It was like my little psychic transceiver was picking up his signals and running them over and over again in my head until that’s all there was.
“Is there anything else I need to know about my ankle?”
“Not really. But I would like to do an examination if you don’t mind.”
I gave him permission and he sat down on a stool at the foot of the bed, gently taking my left ankle in his hands and applying minor pressure a few times. I winced in pain when he did and he apologized absentmindedly, completely absorbed in his work. He turned it gingerly to the left and the right. Finally he set it back down on the bed.
“Alright, Steve, here’s the plan. I’m going to wrap your ankle in tape for the swelling and inflammation but no more than that. I was going to get you an air cast but it’s honestly not that bad. You’ll use the crutches for about a week, like I said before, and you should be ready to do your normal routine again and your new job as long as you don’t put any serious strain on it. Also try to keep it elevated when you go to bed. Just put a few pillows under it.
“I’ll send Eddie in to wrap it up for you. Oh! But before I do that there’s a police officer out in the hall waiting to talk to you about the accident. After that you’ll get wrapped up and you’ll be good to go.” He stood to leave and then sat back down remembering one more thing he wanted to talk about.
“I almost forgot,” he said with concern, “you’re car was totaled. Do you have another way of getting home? Can we call you a cab or something?”
“No,” I responded, “My parents are going to be here in a few minutes and they’re lending me a car for a while until I can get another.” Then another question came to mind. “My old car was an automatic, but I think the one they’re dropping off is a stick. Will I be able to drive with a sprained ankle?” He seemed to ponder this a moment.
“Do you think you could operate the clutch with your right foot?”
“No,” I said after thinking for a second, “I think that would be too much for me.”
Then he asked, “There isn’t someone who could do your driving for you for the next week, is there?”
I thought about that for a second. I thought about Katie and then quickly dismissed the thought. We hardly knew each other and I couldn’t ask someone like that to be my chauffer. If we’d known each other a lot longer, maybe, but we didn’t. I realized the only reason I’d thought of her in the first place was that I wanted to be closer to her. That was for another time and another purpose. And there was no one else.
“No,” I said at last.
“Okay, just be careful then. I wouldn’t sweat it if I were you. You should be able to operate the clutch if you don’t try to move your ankle too much. Use the ball of your foot as much as possible and push with your leg, don’t pivot your ankle. It’ll be good exercise. You might want to find an empty parking lot somewhere to practice, but by the time you get that figured out you’ll probably be ready to go back to the old way again. I’ll go tell the police officer he can come in. When I come back a little later I’ll teach you a few exercises you’re going to want to do on a daily basis to help strengthen the ankle and prevent any future sprains. Sound good?”
“Sounds fine. I’ll do what I need to.”
The doctor went out of the room. I heard him say a few things to someone outside. Although I couldn’t discern exactly what it was he said I knew basically what it was he said and to whom he was speaking. Shortly after that a big cop walked in. He was at least six feet, seven inches tall which would have been intimidating enough without the uniform and the gun strapped to his right hip. He sat on the stool the doctor had used only minutes before and made it look like it belonged to child’s play equipment.
An awkward shape bulged from beneath his uniform shirt, making him look thicker than he probably was. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a bullet proof vest. I supposed such things came as a standard part of the uniform these days. Underneath one arm was a file folder. He pulled this out and opened it. He then pulled a pen out of a pocket on the front of his shirt and began to write on the papers inside the folder.
“Steve, I’m Officer Erickson. I need to ask you a few questions about the accident. Can you do that for me?” In contrast to Dr. Williams, the officer before me was devoid of all humor, tragically born without a funny bone I thought. He looked like he hadn’t smiled in roughly a decade and his eyes told me a story that was all business and no pleasure. I wondered if he was the kind of person who took his job a little too seriously. Then, looking again at the vest beneath his uniform shirt, I wondered if any cop could ever take his job
too seriously. The sense of ease I’d had with the doctor was gone without a trace.
“Yes, I should be able to do that. Go ahead.”
“Alright. The first thing I need you to do is to tell me what you remember about the accident, starting with what you recall about anything right before it happened.”
I took a deep breath and recounted everything I could remember in the closest thing resembling a chronological order as I could. I had to backtrack a few times and insert something I’d forgotten and I avoided embroidering the story with some of the details I’d learned from Eddie the nurse, knowing the narrative he’d woven for me would have itself been something like Frankenstein’s monster: It would have had been put together piecemeal from bits he’d unearthed from police, doctors and a few of the other nurses gossiping closely together at a desk down the hall from my room. I knew it would be best to keep my story clear of other people’s details.
All the while Erickson sat silent, listening to my tale and taking notes. He never once interrupted me and asked me to wait while his note taking could catch up to something I’d said or asked me to repeat anything. When I’d finished he started asking his questions.
“Do you know how fast you were going when the accident occurred?” I could read nothing behind his stoic mask. I could not tell if the question was routine or if there was something behind it, angling for an answer to a question the police had not been able to answer. But there was no use second guessing the man. He was doing his job and I was relieved by that somehow rather than intimidated.
“I don’t really know. I usually try to hover right around the speed limit, maybe doing five over. I don’t even know if I knew then what speed I was doing. I’m a little hazy.” That was as forthcoming as I could be. I had black spots in my head where there should have been memories, as if sections of a movie’s film negative had been burned through with a lighter. Try as I might to see into those parts it was like they simply weren’t there. There was something from right before the accident that seemed really important, not about the accident itself, but about something else, something hot that I was having problems remembering. It wasn’t until my trial walk, when I saw the thing that I remembered and all my problems came crashing down around me, again that I recalled it.
“That’s fine,” the officer was saying. The interview went on like this for another fifteen minutes or so. Mostly routine sounding questions followed by mostly routine sounding answers. We avoided the subject of drunk driving altogether as well as mustang driving maniacs I just happened to run into a few days before the accident. Right about the time we were finishing up, Erickson asked a very simple question. It shouldn’t have disturbed me but it did.
“Anything else you’re just burning to tell me?” As a student of the English language I have a tendency to notice how people use it and misuse it, including myself. The man had used no similes or metaphors during the whole conversation. Now at the end this one sprang out of nowhere like a viper.
“Burning?” The word panicked me. Then, without knowing why I said under my breath, “It was a pleasure to burn.”
“What was that?” The officer looked at me like an impressionist painting he didn’t understand. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t understand it or why I had said it myself.
“Sorry, it’s nothing. It’s just a line from an old book, a favorite of mine. Uh, no there’s nothing else I can think of. Sorry.”
He looked a little skeptical, then stood up and said, “If you remember anything else give us a call.” He pulled a business card out of the same pocket he’d retrieved the pen from earlier and put it on the nightstand next to the bed.
“Sure thing,” I responded.
He exited the room. Not long after that Dr. Williams came back into the room smiling and with a roll of medical tape held in his hand.
“Eddie’s busy so I thought I’d just do this part myself. After this I’d like you to take a bit of a walk and just see how you do.” He slowly began to wrap the ankle and stopped at a few points to explain what he was doing and how to do it in case I needed to repeat it by myself later on. When he finished he placed his hands on his knees and said, “Okay, I think that should about do it. Feel up to a walk?”
“I think so,” I said. I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready. I wanted to get up and move and I wanted to get out of the room and away from the comatose James Price as soon as possible. But I wanted to ask Dr. Williams something first, something that had troubled me since I woke up in the hospital.
“I want to ask you something first. I’m having trouble remembering a few things about the accident. But it’s not just the accident. There’s something else and I feel like it is really important, but I can’t make it come to me. Something happened to me a few days ago, I just know it but when I try to recall it, it’s like there’s a big black spot, almost like it’s been burned out of my head. Is that…,” I hesitated, fearing the answer. But I had committed myself and had to carry out the rest of the question.
“Is that normal,” I finished.
“Sure. Lots of accident victims repress memories associated with the stress of it. It’s sort of like a defense mechanism of your mind.”
That part of the answer was a relief. The next part of the question was what had me worried. But I had to finish it.
“Will I remember? Will it come back to me?”
This time the doctor took a long time to answer me, no doubt weighing what to tell me and how. The upbeat doctor who had put my mind at ease was now replaced by a man who looked like he’d gone through a war and came out the other side a very different man.
“I don’t know,” he answered solemnly. “Some people do get back what they lost and some don’t. My father was in a pretty bad wreck about twenty years ago. He was in really good shape before the accident and his body healed quickly afterward. But his mind…” He stopped. I could tell he didn’t want to go on with the story. There were deep wounds in this doctor. It made me think of Thornton Wilder’s physician in his one-act play The Angel That Troubled the Waters.
In the play a doctor comes to a pool for a supernatural healing, but the Angel who stirs the waters of the pool which allow the first person in to be healed bars his way. When the doctor demands to know why he isn’t allowed to be healed the Angel explains that the physician’s ability to heal is derived from his own wounds. “In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve” is the line that stood out to me as I listened while Dr. Williams narrated his difficult story so that I might be helped. He continued.
“He was confused because he was missing great sections of his life. He knew he had a mother, he remembered her face and her name, but not who she was nor what she was like and how she cared for him and loved him when he was little and gravely ill. But he remembered his abusive father. He remembered in pristine detail the things that man put him through, like when my father was twelve and my grandfather put him through a second story window.
“He remembered an old High School sweetheart like it was yesterday. But he didn’t remember my mother whom he’d been married to for twenty years. I don’t think I need to tell you how much strain that caused my family.” A tear rolled down the doctor’s cheek. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking through me, like I wasn’t there. It was as if behind me there was a movie screen upon which was shown a silent film of his life and he was compelled to recite the details of what played out there.
I found myself helpless under the power of the story. It was no longer just about whether I would get back missing bits of my memory. It was about the tremendous fragility of humanity and the great price we sometimes pay for those connected to us. By the end of the conversation I would come to know this fundamental and bedrock truth of the human experience: We are never ever truly alone. All the choices we make branch out to touch the people around us. The reality of that lesson came home to me with the next thing Williams told me.
“We tried to make it work. But it became too m
uch; too much for us, too much for him. He may have lost pieces of what made him the man he used to be but he knew things were terribly wrong and he was somehow at the center of it. I knew he thought about leaving. He even talked with me about it once, but he came to the conclusion that it would leave too much unresolved if he did. He chose a more final solution.” The silence that followed this last statement was nearly too much to bear. I thought I knew what was coming, and in a sense I did, but I could not foresee the full horror of it.
“It was a warm summer day, too nice a day to spend inside, my mother said. We were going to the beach and my mother asked my father if he wanted to come. They had grown steadily apart for a year and he had learned to find excuses to avoid us. We heard one that day and thought nothing of it. We went to the beach, we swam and soaked ourselves in the Sun. it seemed like one of the best days of my life, like a foretaste of freedom. I was seventeen and looking forward to my last year of High School.
“My mother found the note when we came home a few hours later. I was the one who found him. He had gone out to our fire pit in the backyard. I found him sprawled out on a pyre he’d built for himself. He must have doused himself in gasoline, lit the fire and shot himself in the head. The fire was mostly out when I’d found him and he was blackened and hardly there. But it was him.” The doctor took a deep, slow and cleansing breath. He shuddered when he exhaled it. Then he saw me again, noticed I was there. I could see the present flood back in on him.
“Why did I tell you all that,” he asked genuinely surprised at himself.
“I don’t know.” It was all I could muster to say.
“I don’t think I meant to. I haven’t told many people that story, not even some of my closest friends. But I don’t even know you. Why would I do that?”
“Well, I don’t know why you did but I thank you.” In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve, I thought again. This was followed by that other line. It was a pleasure to burn. My mind’s eye saw the doctor’s father marching to a shed filled with wood, grim intent on his face. I saw him build the pyre and follow through with his unspeakable act. I saw this in great detail, too much perhaps. I could see the man resembling the son before me but a bit thicker with muscle. I willed the images away. But the idea of the fire stayed with me, looking for a place to camp in my soul. I would know it again. My bones whispered this secret to me.
Dr. Williams wiped tears away from his face and composed himself. The happy façade I’d met before was back and I believed I understood a little bit more why he was this way. It was medicine against the madness.
“Alright,” he said trying to move us back to something like a regular doctor-patient relationship. “What do you say we try to get you up to take a walk?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Let’s do that.”
A Ghost of Fire Page 12