Skinned

  But still, I smiled, and my smile was real. He was back.

  “I was so—” I stopped myself. He didn’t need to hear how I’d been torturing myself in the waiting room, worrying. This wasn’t about me, I reminded myself. It was about him. “You look like crap,” I said, trying to laugh. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  It figured. They had pretty good drugs these days, and he was no doubt getting the best.

  “So, I guess we’ve got something in common now,” I said. “We’ve both been technically dead, and come back to life.” Was it inappropriate to joke? Would it make him feel better, or would it make him think I didn’t care? “Better be careful, or the Faithers will start worshipping us or something.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Okay. Too soon to joke.

  “I saw your father in the waiting room. He was really worried about you. I guess he cares more than you…Well. Anyway. He was worried.”

  “Yeah.”

  It probably hurt him to talk.

  “Not that he has to be worried, because you’re going to be fine. Doctors can do anything these days, right? Just look at me.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  Everything I said was the wrong thing to say.

  I rubbed my palm lightly across his, wishing that he would grasp my hand, squeeze my fingers, do something to indicate that he wanted me there. But he didn’t. I held on anyway. His skin was warm, proof that he was still alive.

  “You were amazing, you know that?” I said. “When you jumped in to rescue me? They said the water was so cold you shouldn’t even have been able to—” I stopped. Neither of us needed the reminder. “It was really heroic. To save me.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “No, Auden….”

  He didn’t speak again, just stared at the ceiling.

  “You’re tired,” I said. “I should probably go, let you sleep—”

  “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 stran
gle. 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.”

  “It sucks,” I said. “I know that. But you’re not alone. You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here, just like you were there for me.” I remembered the day I froze in the quad, the way he knew exactly what to say and what to do, even though he didn’t know me at all. And now no one knew me except for him. “We’ll do this together.”

  “Together.” He snorted. “Right. And maybe you’ll finally fall deeply in love with me and make all my dreams come true. We’ll live happily ever after. As long as they can rig me up with some kind of hydraulic system. Not like I ever got to do it the normal way, so I guess I won’t even notice the difference.”

  “Auden, don’t—”

  “Don’t what? Tell you all about how my penis may get ‘moderate sensation’ back, and if I respond well to the electrical-impulse therapy—which, let me tell you, my penis and I are really looking forward to—I might, might be able to get the fucking thing up, up for some fucking, I mean, but—”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, am I grossing you out with all the medical details? Or is it the thought of having sex with me that disgusts you?”

  He wanted me to fight with him. I wasn’t going to do it. Not now. Not here. “I thought my life was over when I woke up like this,” I said. “But you’re the one who told me that I could handle it. That I could start fresh.”

  “This is different.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No!” The beeping started again. “You don’t know. This isn’t what you went through. This isn’t what you understand. This is me, my life. This is the way it’s going to be forever: shit.” He closed his eyes, sucking in heavy gulps of air.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, silently pleading with him to stay calm. “Just tell me what you want from me. What can I do?”

  “You can get out.”

  I stood up. “You’re right. You should try to sleep. I’ll come back later.”

  “No. You should get out and not come back. Ever.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is your fault,” he said in a low voice. “What happened…It’s your fault.”

  “It was an accident. You were just trying to…save me.” When I didn’t need saving.

  “Seems like I’ve been doing that a lot,” he said. “You do something stupid, you do something reckless, and I fix it. You treat me like crap, and I save you again. Because I’m stupid. Was stupid.”

  I closed my eyes. “You’re my best friend.”

  He went on like he hadn’t heard. Or didn’t want to. “You’re probably happy, aren’t you? Why should anyone else get to be healthy and normal if you’ve got to walk around like some kind of mechanical freak, right?”

  He’s just trying to hurt me, I told myself. And I had to let him do it if that’s what he needed. I had to do whatever he needed.

  This is not my fault.

  “Maybe this was the plan all along. Is that it? Is that why you kept dragging me along with you, making me take all those stupid risks? You were trying to get me killed—Excuse me, I mean, get me broken?”

  “Of course not! This was an accident.”

  “This was inevitable. And if you didn’t see that, you’re as stupid as I was.”

  “Auden, come on. I…I love you.”

  “But not in that way, right?”

  I would have happily lied if I’d thought there was even a chance he would believe me. “No. But—”

  “But I’m supposed to grovel at your feet, thankful for whatever I can get from you, right? Sorry, not in the mood today. I’m not feeling too well.”

  “Tell me how to make this better. Please.”

  “I already did: Get out. The only reason I’m talking to you now is that I wanted you to hear it from me. What you did. Now you know. So we’re done.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Obviously I can’t force you,” he said. “I’m just going to close my eyes and pretend you’re not here. And hopefully when I open them, you won’t be. You want to do something for me? Do that. Help me pretend I still have some fucking control over something.”

  He closed his eyes.

  I left.

  But I didn’t leave the hospital. Because he was right: He didn’t have control over anything anymore. Including me.

  I went back to the waiting room. I watched his father return. I watched the doctors and nurses pass through on the way from one crisis to another.

  I waited.

  I waited until late that night, after his father had fallen asleep and the few remaining doctors and nurses were too busy watching the clock to watch me. And once outside his doorway, I waited again, watching, making sure Auden was asleep.

  Then I crept inside. I lifted the chair and placed it at the foot of his bed where, even if he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to see me. He obviously wouldn’t hear me breathing. And he wouldn’t feel my hands resting on the lumpy blanket, cradling his useless feet.

  BETTER OFF

  “None of us are volunteers.”

  H e’s not dead, I told myself, standing outside the hospital, wondering what to do next. That’s what counts. He won’t die, not for a long time—and not because of this.

  It should have felt like good news.

  He doesn’t want to die, I told myself. He may have said it. But only because he didn’t yet understand that some things are bearable, even when you’re sure that they’re not.

  I understand, I told myself. I can help him.

  But the second part of that was a lie. And maybe he was right, and the first part was too.

  I told myself: This is not your fault.

  I told myself the anger would pass, and he would forgive.

  Denial bleeds into anger, I told myself. Then would come bargaining and depression, and then, finally, always, acceptance. He would grieve the loss of the life he had wanted. He would accept my help.

  I told myself I would find a way to get by without his.

  I lied.

  It was a cold day. It was always a cold day. And, as always, it didn’t matter to me.

  Who was I supposed to go to with this? Auden was the person I w
ent to. Auden was the one who understood. He was supposed to be the solution, not the problem. So who was I supposed to talk to about losing the only person I could talk to? Who was supposed to cure my loneliness if I was alone?

  I was alone.

  And maybe it was my fault.

  Or maybe not, I thought suddenly. Auden would never have been hurt if I hadn’t gone to the waterfall, but I would never have gone to the waterfall if Jude hadn’t shown me the way. If he hadn’t practically dared me to jump, turned it into some huge symbolic statement of my identity instead of what it was: a dumb stunt. Crazy, like Auden had said. Not that I had bothered to listen.

  I need to see you, now, I texted Jude, and he sent me an address without asking why. Maybe he just assumed I’d always needed him and was only now realizing it. He was just enough of an ass to think that way.

  This is not my fault, I told myself again, and there was more force behind it this time. It’s his.

  It was a different house than before. More of an estate, really; almost a feudal village, complete with outlying buildings dotting the grounds and, atop the highest hill, a turreted Gothic monstrosity that looked like a fairy-tale castle if the fairy tale was Sleeping Beauty, where the princess’s home was decrepit, covered with thorns and forgotten. Jude met me outside.

  “You live here?”

  “It’s Quinn’s,” Jude said. “She’s invited some of us to stay…for a while.”

  “She barely knows you.”

  His lips curled up. “I guess she knows enough.” He guided us down an overgrown path, headed toward a giant greenhouse. There was nothing inside but a thicket of dead plants. Most of the windowpanes were empty; the ground crunched with shattered glass. “So, you come here to chat about real estate?”

  “It’s Auden,” I said, suddenly sorry I had come. It felt wrong to say his name out loud, here. To Jude. “He’s hurt.”

  Jude nodded. “He’s an org. I hear it happens from time to time.”

  I couldn’t believe him. “You don’t even care? You’re not even going to ask how bad?”

  “He’s not my friend, as he’s always been so quick to point out. Why should I care?”

  “Bad,” I informed him, whether he cared or not. “Thanks to you.”