I was thrown back again, this time into the foyer. I heard the pan drop and hit the floor, another weapon used and discarded. The next few seconds were a blur of bulging eyes, gritted teeth, ringless knuckles. She punched, kicked, elbowed, and pushed, backing me toward the front door. Throughout the attack she huffed and yipped like a redheaded ninja.
Although her blows were not as painful as the bottle or pan, she was much too quick for me and seemed to anticipate every defense I attempted. When I parried low, she head-butted high. When I blocked high, she kneed low. She took my polo-shirt collar in both fists and pogo-sticked me down the tight foyer, up and over the boxes, my head crashing into the chandelier, which sent about a dozen glass hangings smashing down in our violent wake. She snatched the doorknob and then kicked open the door. She yanked and pulled me across the threshold by my shirt. I almost tumbled over, but she reined back and kept me upright as I floundered across the porch. Finally, using the momentum of my attempt to flee, she sent me airborne diagonally over the steps and the hedge. I landed directly on a patch of hard, grassless dirt.
But before I struck the ground, while I was hurtling through the air, a strange thing happened. Everything slowed, as if I had been plunged underwater. There was even an underwater glow to the early evening light. And I realized at that moment that I had never — in a long life of visiting shady bars the world over — been in a bar fight. I had certainly never been thrown from a bar. I had been asked to leave once while stationed in Turkey, after a friend and I got into an altercation with some Dutch airmen on joint military maneuvers. But there had been no blows, no international incident to answer for. We were insulted, but also outnumbered and still sober enough to be easily persuaded.
Now, as I whispered through the air toward the hardest part of my new neighbor’s lawn, my eyes catching the unmoving POW flag, I thought, This is what it’s like. This is what it’s like to get your ass kicked in a bar fight and then thrown ingloriously out into the street.
I had been lucky until this day. But I would soon look back — to the moment right before she knocked on my door — and realize just how lucky I had truly been.
At the emergency room, business was booming. I hoped they’d see me right away, but once I stepped through the automatic sliding glass doors that opened with a whoosh and into the grip of the room, I knew it was hopeless. The place reeked of sickness and injury, and I was right in the middle of it, just another victim. Take a number; have a seat. The oddest thing was the hush of the crowded waiting room. Nothing but muted shuffles and whispers, the faint ringing of phones, and an occasional mewl of pain.
Despite the assortment of faces everywhere, no one seemed to be looking at anyone else, as if doing so would only confirm a dark prognosis. There was one exception, a small boy in a Florida Marlins baseball cap, who sat across from me. He gawked relentlessly at my face with all the wide-eyed, slack-jawed fascination of his first peek at a centerfold. I can’t say I blamed him. I was pressing a dripping baggie of ice onto my swollen jaw. Down the front of my shirt was a smattering of fresh blood. I must have looked like a roughed-up zombie.
“What are you in for?” I mumbled to the boy, trying to be humorous but probably only managing to be terrifying.
The boy turned away and yawned.
Harold hustled over from the reception area, deftly sidestepping a gurney being wheeled recklessly past him. He was holding a clipboard and, after taking a seat beside me, began to scribble in my name and address.
“Did they say how long?” I asked him.
He answered by smacking his lips and shrugging. “There was some kind of accident involving a bus, so it could be a while. Good thing you’re not so bad off.” This more or less matched his medical assessment from the moment he had collected me off the lawn and stuffed me into Vlad’s Fiat Strada, which was the only car in the cul-de-sac not disabled and which Vlad enthusiastically suggested we take because, as he said, “I am not to be involved.”
All the way to the hospital, Harold alternated between complaints about the battered car — “I guess this passes for luxury in Russia” — and a near obsessive insistence that I was going to be okay. His efforts to calm me only added to my concern. The more he said, “Really, you’re going to be fine,” the more I became convinced that I was as good as dead.
I removed the icepack from the side of my head and gestured toward the boy, whose eyes had migrated back to me. “I have a feeling he doesn’t think I’m going to be okay.”
Harold concentrated on the form. “You’re almost certainly not as bad as you feel.”
“Really? Because I feel like shit. Like every-bone-in-my-face-is-broken shit.”
“I’m really sorry. I should have expected some resentment on her part, but violence? Very strange.”
“I take it none of your homesick students assaulted anyone after moving onto campus.”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve seen many difficult patients in my day. In fact, the difficult ones were my specialty. There are several cases I’m consulting on now that—”
“Seriously, I think my jaw might be broken.”
He laughed. “You wouldn’t be talking if it were.”
I patted my pockets and realized I had lost my phone during the attack. “Did you call the police yet?”
“Let’s wait until the doctor sees you. My guess is you’re not as bad as you feel.”
“You’ve said that twenty times already.”
“You know—”
A woman screamed. The sound burst mournfully through the whooshing emergency room entrance and was loud enough that everyone in the waiting room collectively jumped. A gurney carrying a small child was wheeled through by two attendants. Running alongside was a woman in shorts, a bikini top, and flip-flops, who appeared to be limping slightly. “Please, someone, please!” she shouted. She was waving her arms and pointing, as if trying to direct the two attendants. All of them were swallowed up by another set of double doors. The waiting room resumed its hushed suffering.
It was the same everywhere, I thought. One of the starkest memories I had of Iraq occurred while I was attached to the medical group at the theater hospital. During a lull in American and British casualties, the local clinic transferred to us a girl of about ten who had been caught in crossfire and had suffered a mortal head wound. The doctors who patched her up said she wouldn’t live through the night. But she hung on for more than a week. Each day her mother was escorted in under guard and had to be told repeatedly that outbursts of any kind were forbidden. Yet whenever she laid her eyes on her daughter, she would scream and chant and pound the mattress for the child to wake.
I remember one night, late in the evening, as I made my rounds through the area, gathering up soiled sheets and scrubs, I paused beside the little girl’s bed. Around her head lay a halo of about a dozen stuffed animals, which a few nurses had left behind. I remember being flooded with yearning. I had never been married and had only dated one woman seriously and for only about six months. I never wanted children and even got a vasectomy when I was twenty-one. This act, I was later convinced, had greatly limited my ability to attract the opposite sex. Even when I stopped telling women about the elective operation, they still weren’t interested in any long-term relationship. The one woman I wanted to be free of, the one whom I had dated seriously for six months, shrugged when I told her I was unable to procreate the species and then asked me to pass the salt.