“Don’t you want to know?”
“What?”
“What the doctors said.” His lips turned up at the corners, but it wasn’t a real smile, and not just because the bandages held most of his skin in place. “The prognosis. All the thrilling details.”
“Of course I want to know.” I didn’t.
Especially when he started reciting it in a dry, clinical tone, words out of a medical text that didn’t seem to have any connection to him, his body, his wounds. Punctured lung. Internal bleeding. Bruised kidney. Lacerations. Fractures. The heart muscle weakened by multiple arrests. A cloned liver standing by for transplant, if necessary. They would wait and see. “And the grand finale,” he said, his voice like ice. He sounded like his father. “Severed spinal cord. At C5.”
I didn’t understand how so much damage could have been done so quickly, in thirty seconds… and thirty feet. Don’t forget the eighty thousand gallons of water, I thought. And yet I was just fine.
“Auden, I’m so… I’m so sorry.” I threaded my hand through the metal cage and brushed my fingers against his cheek.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. “Don’t.”
I yanked my hand away. But my left hand still rested on his. Out of his sight line, I realized. I squeezed his fingers, tight, waiting for him to tell me to let go.
He didn’t.
“What?” he asked, sounding irritated.
I stared at his fingers, the fingers that hadn’t moved since I came into the room. The fingers that he was letting me touch, even though he didn’t want me touching him.
“Does it hurt?” I asked again, for a different reason this time.
“Nothing hurts.” He sounded like a robot. He sounded like I sounded before I got control of my voice again, when I had to communicate through an electronic box.
“What does it mean? What’s going to happen?”
“C5. That’s C for cervical, five for the fifth vertebra down,” he said. “They’ve got it all mapped out. C5 means I keep head and neck motion. Shoulders, too. Eventually. It means right now I can’t feel anything beneath my neck. It means I’m fucked for life.”
“Not anymore,” I protested. “They can fix that now. Can’t they?”
“They fuse the cord back together. Yeah. And then nerve regeneration. You get some feeling back. You get some motion. They call it ‘limited mobility.’ It means you can walk, like, a little. A couple hours a day. And apparently if I practice, I might be able to piss for myself again.”
“So that sounds…” It sounded like a life sentence to hell. “Hopeful.”
“Yeah. As in, they hope it won’t hurt so much I spend the rest of my life doped up, but they’re not sure. As in, they hope they can put me back together enough that I don’t die in ten years, but they’re not sure. Fucking high hopes, right?”
There had always been something sweet to Auden, something carefully hidden beneath the cynicism and the conspiracy theories and the family baggage, as if he was afraid to reveal his secret reservoir of hope. But that was gone now. There was nothing beneath the bitter but more bitter. It’s temporary, I told myself.
Things change.
“If it’s that bad, why don’t you… take the other option?” I asked.
“And exactly what might you be referring to?”
I hesitated. “Nothing.” So that was it. He didn’t want to be like me, no matter what he may have said. He’d rather be miserable, debilitated, in pain, than be like me. Maybe I couldn’t blame him.
“Say it.”
“Nothing.”
“Say it!” Something beeped, and he took a deep, gasping breath. “Better listen to me,” he said, panting. “I’m not supposed to get agitated.”
“Why don’t you download?” I said quickly, remembering something else I’d hated when I was the one trapped in a bed. The way everyone suddenly got so scared of nouns, as if vague mentions of “what happened” and “your circumstances” would make me forget what was actually going on. As if by not saying it out loud, they were helping anyone but themselves.
“Brain scans.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—What?”
“They took brains scans,” he said, haltingly. “And there was an anomaly.”
I still didn’t understand.
“I’m disqualified,” he said. “Structural abnormalities. Predisposition for mental disorder and/or decay. Unlikely but possible. So just in case—automatic disqualification. They don’t want me living forever if I’m going to go crazy, right?” He laughed. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Yeah, no one else seems to think so either,” he said. “Maybe I’m crazy already.”
“They can’t fix it?” I asked softly. “Whatever it is?”
“They could have. Before I was born. If they’d known about it, if my mother had let them screen for that kind of thing. But she thought it was superfluous. She only wanted the basics.” He laughed again. It was a weirdly tinny, mechanical sound, since his body was immobilized and his lungs were barely pumping any air. “Thanks, Mom.”
“There’s got to be something you can do, if you paid enough, some way to change their minds?”
“Nothing. No brand-new body for me. I’m stuck with this one. For life.” He paused. “As long as that lasts.”
I squeezed his hand again. Not that he felt it.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “They can make a fake body from scratch, but they can’t fix a real one. Guess there’s only so much you can do when you’re stuck with damaged goods.” He didn’t laugh. “No, I guess that’s not very funny either.”
“I can help,” I told him. “I know how it feels, lying there, thinking your life is over. I understand.”
“You understand nothing,” he spat out. “That’s what you always used to tell me, right? ‘You can’t understand, not unless you’ve been there.’ You’ve never been here.”
“You’re alive,” I said, aware that I was sounding like call-me-Ben, like Sascha, like every medical cheerleader I’d ever wanted to strangle. And now I finally got why they’d said all that. They needed to believe it. You couldn’t look at someone so broken and not believe they could, somehow, be fixed. “That’s something.”
“Something I don’t want. Not like this.”
So I said what all those cheerleaders never had. The truth. “Neither would I. And… it’s never going to be like it was before. Never. That will never be okay. But you will.”
He snorted.
“I know you don’t believe it,” I said desperately. “I know it all sounds like greeting-card bullshit that doesn’t apply to you, but it does. Maybe I can’t understand everything, but I understand that. The way you feel? I honestly don’t know if that goes away. But people—you—can get used to things, even if it seems impossible now. You can make it work.”
“Oh really?” he said, bitterness chewing the edges of the false cheer. “Thanks so much for the insight. So I can get used to a machine telling me when it’s time to pee, and when it’s time to shit, and then helping me do it—and that’s after all the regeneration surgery’s done. Until then, I just get a diaper. You think you could get used to changing it for me? I can get used to internal electrodes that spark my muscles into action and let me walk around and pretend I’m normal until it hurts so much that I fall down and have to get someone to cart me away? They tell me that part’s the medical miracle. Twenty years ago I might have been a lump in this fucking bed for the rest of my life, with people feeding me and turning me and wiping my ass. So you think I can get used to people telling me how fucking grateful I should be? And I can get used to my lungs working at half capacity, if I’m lucky, and feeling like I’ve got an elephant stomping on my chest—at least until the fluid builds up, and while I wait around for them to come suck it out, it just feels like I’m drowning? Not that you would know anything about that.”