“Wound” by Sammy Stevens
After the car accident the titanium rod they put in my leg got infected. The infection went into the bone. Osteomyelitis. There were twelve surgeries, multiple hospital stays. I lost my job, broke up with my boyfriend, moved back to Texas to live with my brother Jason. I’d just turned thirty-seven, and Jason was forty-two. He’d moved out of our parents’ house after they died, three years ago, Mom of pneumonia and Dad of a heart attack.
I was glad they never had to see me like this. It would have disturbed them, their daughter adrift. They would have wanted to take me in. I probably would have let them. Of course, if they hadn’t died, Jason would still be living with them, so it would have been the four of us together again, surrounded by framed pictures of us as much younger people.
Every Monday and Friday, I rode the bus downtown to the wound clinic of the county hospital, the only place in Austin that would treat people without insurance. There was a wound technician assigned to me named Luka. “Does it hurt?” he asked, kneeling before me as I sat on a chrome chair.
I’d taken my pain pills. I said, “Not too bad.”
When he leaned over me, Luka’s scrubs were loose enough that I could see his chest, which was mostly smooth, only a weedy patch of black hair bridging his pecs. He unwrapped my leg, then fired what looked like a clear water gun with a rubber dish at the tip. It was like a high-pressure car wash. The gun spit and sucked at the same time, through two different barrels. “Look,” said Luka. “That’s granulation tissue. Your wound is healing.”
Was there a tiny, hopeful island of pink in the dark gash of my wound? Maybe so. Maybe not. My brain was blurred by insomnia, my senses blunted. I felt half dead on my best days. I had dark rings under my eyes, bony arms, flabby muscles. The antibiotics loosened my bowels. My periods were long and heavy. Everything tasted sour. I smelled like old banana peels, like wet trash. “Healing” seemed like fantasy-talk, like a fake word.
“You’ll be back on the dance floor in no time,” he said.
I smiled at his little joke.
My wound was red and weepy after the wash-and-dry. “We’ll go for the silver nitrate,” Luka said, rubbing his hands together. He was peppy that way. I could tell he had a robust personality, a strong engine. He wore blue high tops. His biceps flexed as he maneuvered cotton-tipped applicators. His body seemed overengineered for such a detailed and fussy profession. I pictured him working on a dock somewhere, lashing giant metal contraptions together.
After the silver nitrate, he wrapped my leg in medicated patches and gauze. His hands were warm. I closed my eyes and saw purple and red shapes bloom and fold into themselves. Like cigarettes, Luka’s hands kept me going.
I’d read that a severe injury with a prolonged recovery might cause hypnagogic hallucinations—odd sounds, bizarre associations, or, in my case, expansive and shifting images when I closed my eyes. But when Luka touched me, the images changed in a way I can’t explain. Instead of holding me apart, the shapes pulled me toward them, until I became, for long moments, vividly part of them.
Dr. Peters, the rehab doctor who oversaw the wound clinic, walked through the privacy curtain. She had the pale, yellow complexion of a grub worm. She grasped my knee and rotated my hip in its socket, perhaps in order to save herself from having to squat. The way she handled me with her fat fingers made me think of my leg and myself as distinct entities, the former requiring attention and assessment, the latter—the me attached to my leg—superfluous. “Fine,” she said, then swept the curtain aside, left us alone.
Luka looked over his shoulder, adjusted the collar of his scrubs. “I know hospital insurance only covers two visits a week. Three visits would be ideal for this kind of wound. If you want, I could come by in-between.”
“Come by where?” I asked.
“Your place.” Luka clicked a pen and handed me a gauze wrapper. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
I have no idea what my facial expression must have communicated.
“I like to help people,” he said.
I felt a little pang at being lumped in with “people,” though he’d given me no reason to suspect I was dear to him.
I wrote down my number and gave the wrapper back to him. He slid it into his breast pocket. I had a sudden sense of being swallowed by that pocket, which was deep and directionless, an ocean. The baby blue material of his scrubs was so thin and pliable, I thought I could see it shudder with each beat of his twenty-something heart.
We said goodbye, and I limped toward the exit on my crutches. Behind me, Luka greeted a mute obese man in an electric wheelchair. The man grunted. He was a regular, with a fungal infection that turned the skin of his calves to bark. “Incurable,” Luka had once told me, his face boyish and bright, the face of a star pupil.
“Here? He’s coming here?” Jason asked. We sat on my bed, his living room couch in the daytime. In his ratty basketball shorts and yellowed undershirt, his thin hair swept up over his forehead and temples, Jason looked like a blond, washed-up Elvis. Wild gray hairs on his Adam’s apple caught the light from two windows that looked over a small park where a lady with pink hair sometimes cursed at me.
I told Jason that Luka probably felt sorry for me. A normal brother might have taken the opportunity to ask questions about my treatment, how I was doing.
“How old is he?” Jason asked. He had a tendency to fixate on age.
I shrugged. “Young. Twenties?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Sounds like cougar activity,” he said.
“Have you seen my crotchless panties?” I asked, trying not to let him get under my skin.
“That’s disgusting, Maureen.”
“That’s what cougars wear,” I said. “Crotchless everything. No crotches allowed.”
Jason scowled. “Stop saying crotch.”
I rolled my eyes. If I had likened myself to an animal, it would’ve been something less aggressive, more cerebral. Like a praying mantis. The quizzical stare, the bad posture, the pointy elbows.
“I don’t know,” Jason said, as if it were his decision.
“It’s not up to you,” I said.
“This is my apartment.”
I pretended to take this as a threat, though I knew he would never kick me out. “Maybe I’ll leave,” I said.
“You can’t leave, Maureen. Why do you say things like that?”
I felt no shame in threatening Jason. If anything, his anxiety at the idea of my leaving amused me. I was a child.
“Then it’s not up to you,” I said again.
“What you’re telling me is concerning.”
“He’s coming to clean my leg. It’ll take thirty minutes.” I was hoping for more like an hour, but it had been so long since I’d been touched outside the wound clinic, I’d take whatever I could get.
“Where is he getting the supplies?”
“Maybe from the hospital?”
“If he’s stealing them, you’re implicating me in illegal activities by using this apartment.” Jason lived in fear of the law, though I don’t think he’d ever broken it.
“The only way you’d be implicated is if you’re gaining something through the transaction,” I said. “But I’m completely freeloading off you.” I hoped abasing myself would guilt Jason into capitulating, though, of course, what I said was true; in addition to free room and board, Jason gave me a weekly allowance. Usually around one hundred dollars.
“Well, that’s true,” he said. “But what exactly is the transaction?”
“He cleans my leg. That’s it. I’m not paying him.”
“A transaction is a give and take. What does he get?”
“I don’t know,” I said, pretending not to understand.
“What does he want?”
I laughed nervously, surprising myself. “What do you mean? Maybe he just likes to help people.”
“What if he has an expectation, Maureen?” Jason sounded genuinely anxious. I wondered if he’d ever had anyone else in his apartment besides me. Probably not. I’d bought and stashed some new white towels because his had crusty, yellow patches that reminded me of eczema. The toilet hissed day and night. Half the electrical outlets refused to charge my phone.
“Expectation?” I asked. “That’s impossible. Have you looked at me lately?” I spread my arms and tried to rotate on my working leg, picturing a ballerina in a snow globe, but after a quarter-turn, I was completely exhausted. “And anyway, you’re here to protect me.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Kick some ass. Whatever older brothers do.” I smothered a laugh at the thought of Jason protecting anyone.
“This is ridiculous.” Jason got up and went to his room, paused in the threshold for a moment, as though balanced between his world and mine. Behind him, there were piles of poker books stacked nearly floor to ceiling. Three large computer monitors glowed. Pokémon, ninja turtle, and K-pop paraphernalia lined the walls. A life-size model of Beetlejuice stood by the bedside, with a hairstyle very similar to Jason’s; Jason had draped a pair of underwear over its outstretched fingers.
The door clicked behind him.
I had the same feeling watching him disappear that I’d had as a little girl in our childhood home. After all these years, his room was still his sacred place, a replica of the room he’d lived in with our parents for nearly four decades. Why didn’t he ever invite me in?
Luka called on Wednesday, and we agreed on five-thirty. I watched him exit his red coupe from our third-story window. He loped around to the driver’s side to pick up a lumpy bag. I hustled to finish my cigarette, then sprayed air freshener around the room and took a swish of mouthwash. I waited for him to knock before opening the door.
“Hey,” he said, flashing a smile and walking inside. The smell of the wound clinic followed him. He was in his scrubs. I wondered if I’d get to see that patch of chest hair. “Nice apartment,” he said with intimidating ease.
“It’s my brother’s. He’s in his room. Thank you for . . . ” I motioned to the bag.
As he hoisted it onto the hallway table, his sleeves rode up, and I caught the briefest glimpse of those biceps. “They throw out the expired stuff, but it’s still good,” he said, “and I brought the portable suction machine from the storeroom.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught? I mean, if you do this regularly?” I asked, hoping he’d reveal that he’d never actually done a home visit before, that I would be his first.
“It’s a county hospital,” he said.
“Right.” I nodded, though I didn’t understand what he meant. Something about poverty, or waste. The moral underpinnings of social programs, etcetera. His politics didn’t interest me at all. I smiled. “I guess I should change?” I asked.
Luka produced a stack of hospital gowns from the bag. “I’ll set up in the bathroom and you can come in whenever you’re ready.”
I pointed him to the bathroom, and Luka went in and closed the door. There were four gowns, an auspicious number, suggesting multiple visits. I found myself remembering the moment I’d received a promise ring, pink with tiny plastic diamonds in the shape of a heart, from a middle-school crush.
I draped a gown over my shoulders, snapped three buttons, then stepped out of my sweats. I wore my newest underwear, faintly lilac and shimmery. I’d checked to make sure there were no stains. It felt important to keep this part of myself wrapped neatly, almost like a gift.
It was petty, but it felt nice to bring them back and then let them die again.
Jason turned up his music, the same way he had as a kid whenever I’d had friends over, or when our parents were trying to come to terms with each other. I could almost hear them now, yelling about my “defiance” or Jason’s “social problems.”
Sometimes I indulged the strange belief that they had died expressly to forget me and that by reliving some difficult part of our relationship, I could wake them from death, if only long enough for them to acknowledge me. It was petty, but it felt nice to bring them back and then let them die again. I liked that I could still be a daughter whenever I wanted.
I opened the bathroom door. Luka had set up the suction machine and attached the water gun. “Sit on the toilet,” Luka said. I admired the way he was wielding his authority: firm, but with a light touch.
He kneeled on the floor and unwrapped my leg. I’d hoped he’d do it more slowly without the pressure of a full day of patients, but he moved as efficiently as always. Perhaps he couldn’t shake the feeling of Dr. Peters supervising over his shoulder.
“Things are looking good,” he said. “I think the new tissue is a little shinier than last time. Can you see that?” He glanced up at me, full of juvenile enthusiasm. I shrugged. Somewhere down the line my leg had stopped feeling like my own.
I closed my eyes and felt his hands poking, patting, caressing. I willed time to slow down, to move with the same torpid pulse as the shapes that unfolded behind my lids. The whir and slosh of the gun. The crinkle of gauze wrappers. Luka’s breath, low and even. His soles squeaked once or twice as he shifted position. Even Jason’s music couldn’t break my reverie. My mind calmed. I wondered if by cleaning my leg in my bathroom, Luka was in fact claiming me. I opened my eyes in time to see him apply the adhesive tape.
My leg throbbed under its new wrapping. Womp-womp-womp, it went, echoing my heart. I had forgotten my pre-cleaning pain pills, but so what? Not even pain could interfere with this moment.
After bagging up all the trash and equipment, Luka turned and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll drop this in the dumpster on the way,” he said.
With no forethought, I sprung up on my crutches, lurched after him, and grabbed his shoulder. He seemed startled and spun around. It wasn’t something I would normally do, but maybe the pain made it seem like an acceptable act. I pressed myself against him and nestled my head under his chin. His neck was hot. Had I licked him, I was sure he would have tasted wonderful. I clasped my hands behind his back, pushed my face into his chest, and took a deep breath. He smelled like raw biscuit dough and lime zest. I wanted to clean him like a newborn kitten.
He dropped the bag, which hissed, releasing the scent of my used bandages.
Jason’s door opened and he appeared in wrinkled chinos and a button down, his hair combed and parted on the side. I’d never seen him like that. “Everything okay out here?” he asked.
I backed away from Luka. I felt ashamed, then furious at myself. Was I not allowed to experience desire? “Jason, what are you wearing?” I asked.
Jason’s face turned red. “Regular clothes,” he said. We stood there in uncomfortable silence.
“Jason, this is Luka, from the wound clinic,” I finally said.
Jason stuck out his hand and Luka pumped it a few times. Their bodies making contact disturbed me, as though Jason might leave some kind of disgusting residue on Luka. “It’s so kind of you to help Maureen,” Jason said.
Luka pointed toward Jason’s room. “Hey, is that Beetlejuice?”
The underwear was gone. How odd. Beetlejuice’s naked hand looked like a tree that had lost its leaves. Jason made a weird expression with his eyebrows, like a crime scene investigator in a movie, someone who ponders unforgivable mistakes, coldly stitching them together using bloody clues as thread. “I invest in collectibles,” he said. “I’m a Tim Burton fan, hence Beetlejuice over there. This is my home office.”
Home office? Hence? How long had he rehearsed this speech? And why?
“What a coincidence,” Luka said. “I’m a huge Tim Burton fan. I’ve always had a thing for the Corpse Bride.” Jason snorted, then they both looked at me at the same time, and for a reason I couldn’t quite parse, I felt out of place. Jason’s stare had a particular intensity.
Luka held up the bag of trash. “I guess I’ll head out.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked. He didn’t seem to hear me. I glared at Jason, who followed me with his eyes. At the front door, Luka and I waved at each other, and then he turned awkwardly away. Before I knew it, he’d disappeared down the stairwell.
I closed the door and turned on Jason.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what? I’m just standing here,” he said. “I was trying to be nice.”
“I can’t believe you would just jump out of your room like that, dressed like that. It feels like I’m in high school and Dad just busted in.”
“Well, to be honest Maureen, it looked like something was going on out here. It looked like you were . . . .”
“Nothing happened.” I located my pill bottle in the abandoned sweats lying crumpled on the floor and shook some out, then swallowed them dry.
“I’m pretty sure something happened,” Jason said.
“Forget it. Stop. Why are you wearing that?”
“Do you have a problem with my clothes?”
“You look just like Dad.” It was meant to be an insult, but Jason seemed oddly immune. Or maybe that been his intention, to look like Dad. The thought made me want to scream.
“I thought you’d like me to meet your friend in some clean clothes,” he said. “Was I wrong?”
“Stop being a meddling dick head!” I shouted. The volume made me feel slightly better.
Jason spread his hands. “What’s going on here? Do you have a problem?”
“Do I have a problem?”
“You’re hurting my ears.” He actually covered them.
“Stop, Jason. Stop being weird. A fucking weirdo.”
“Whatever, Maureen.”
Sensing a slight quaver in his voice, I felt inspired to hurt him even more. “Are you going to cry? Why don’t you cry right in front of me?”
He spun back into his room, slammed the door, and shouted, “Next time forget about me checking up on you! You and your friend can do whatever you want! In my apartment!”
“I know that,” I yelled back.
It was good that we were yelling again. We still had plenty of things to yell about. Since I’d come to live with him, I realized, we’d been pretending to be adults. Maybe now that we were finally yelling again, we could start being normal with each other.
“Sorry about what happened,” I told Luka at our next clinic visit.
“Don’t be,” he said. I waited for more, but he seemed absorbed by my leg. The damn leg always upstaged me. Or maybe he was afraid of being overheard. I strained to listen for the sounds of someone on the other side of the curtain; Dr. Peters usually announced herself with mouth breathing.
“Living arrangements are tricky in times of transition,” I said, hoping to draw his attention toward the rest of me.
“Makes sense,” he said, looking up briefly.
Something about his response and demeanor told me I should give him a little space, but I wasn’t about to heed this sort of intuition now when I had never heeded it before in my life. No, I was going to press Luka, compel him to react. Forcing a negative outcome would at least circumvent the nightmare of uncertainty.
“My brother came out of his room at exactly the wrong time,” I said.
Luka laughed and seemed to concentrate harder on his handiwork, rolling out moist pink gauze that he tightened around my calf in even, overlapping spirals.
What exactly did I want from him at this moment? Humor? Acknowledgement? I felt ravenous for emotional connection of any kind. “Things were just getting interesting,” I said.
He ignored me and instead looked very seriously at my leg. “Let’s talk about your leg,” he said.
“My leg.” Of course. What else would we talk about?
“Are you smoking?”
“No.” Smokers were always being forced into these situations where they had to come clean, but I wasn’t going to buy into all that.
“Are you eating a healthy diet? The one on the nutrition papers we gave you?”
Crackers. Half a can of beans sometimes. Coffee. Some stale candy corn from the laundromat. Were any of these staples allowed in the exclusive company of the four food groups? Probably not, but my stomach hadn’t been able to handle anything else. “More or less,” I said.
“The tissue doesn’t look healthy today. It’s grayer than we like. It feels like we’re backsliding. And if you’re not smoking, and you’re eating a good diet, we need to know what’s causing this.”
He left and came back with Dr. Peters. “We’ll need x-rays and some new lab work,” she said. “Lucky for you, your charity insurance pays for it.” She depressed my eyelid with her thumb, then lifted my hand and pressed my nail. When I yelped in pain, she smiled. “You’re anemic. You might need a transfusion. Transfusions carry risk.” She seemed to have decided to teach me a lesson. “And if you can’t stop smoking,” she continued, “we can’t guarantee your treatment at this clinic. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“I’m going to need you to tell me you understand.”
Furious, I blinked away tears. “If I don’t get treatment my leg will rot off, and I’ll die,” I said.
“Is that what you want?”
I tried to empty my face of anything resembling emotion. “To clarify, you’re asking if I want to die?”
Her mouth twisted and she straightened her back. “Is this a joke to you? Are you a teenager? Look around. Everything here costs money. Do you get it?”
I imagined stabbing Dr. Peters in the stomach with a scalpel, sewing her lips together, smothering her with saline-soaked gauze.
He needed to understand just how messy I was. Not just my leg, the whole me.
“I’ll talk to her, Dr. Peters,” Luka said. He sounded like a child redirecting an angry parent.
“I’ve heard a lot of talking in here, Luka,” she snapped. “Too much talking.”
She left. Luka handed me a tissue. I let the tears coat my cheeks, the snot congeal between my lips. It was good for Luka to see me like this. He needed to understand just how messy I was. Not just my leg, the whole me.
“I’m sorry,” he said, smiling weakly.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
On Wednesday evening I took a shower and sat on the corner of the couch, watching the street. No red coupe. No knock on the door. Jason came out in his chinos and button down and stood there like an idiot—saying nothing, thank God—then went back in his room. I chain-smoked half a pack, dumped the rest into the garbage disposal, and flipped the switch. But the disposal only hummed. I’d forgotten it was broken. I found a green rubber glove and extracted the cigarettes, then squeezed them into a clump and threw it in the trash. I heard the thunk as it hit the bottom.
When I lay down for bed, Luka texted.
“I’m downstairs. Do you mind if I come up?”
I jumped up and limped into the bathroom to assess my appearance.
“I’m not really dressed,” I wrote, then erased it. “Sure. Give me five minutes.” I downed a couple pills, splashed water on my face, rubbed my armpits and crotch with a soapy washrag, and brushed my teeth. He knocked. For some reason, I wanted to cry, so I slapped my face a few times until the urge passed, put on a bathrobe, and went to answer the door.
Luka stood there with a little bouquet of blue flowers held together with a twist tie. “Dr. Peters found out I took the portable suction machine and I almost got fired. It’s locked in her office. I drove around to the medical supply stores but I couldn’t find the right kind.”
It had been a while since anyone gave me flowers. They were wilted, but so beautiful, with silky petals, bright yellow stamens. “I stopped smoking for real this time.”
“That’s great,” he said.
“I mean, I think I stopped. I smoked half a pack earlier, actually, but I put the rest down the garbage disposal.”
“Stopping smoking is one of the hardest things anyone can do.” He sounded like an honor roll student parroting some Reagan-era D.A.R.E. commercial, but I supposed it was true enough. I had stopped smoking hundreds of times.
“Do you want to come in?” The flowers seemed like a good sign, but I felt like I needed confirmation. My heart paused as I asked the question. He nodded. It restarted.
In the apartment, I put the flowers in a glass of water and took it with me to the bathroom. Maybe it was sentimental, but as I sat next to them on the toilet, those flowers made everything around them prettier.
As Luka cleaned my leg, I remembered that I used to think I had nice legs, a long time ago. Now even the good one didn’t look great, its muscle gone to fat. And yet, what did it matter what I thought of myself? I closed my eyes. What did it matter?
“Can you slow down a little?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. His voice sounded round and deep in the cramped room.
“Even a little slower?”
He slowed.
The temperature in the bathroom rose. The humidity skyrocketed. It felt like a sauna. My pits and crotch were all wet.
Then, right outside the door, Jason cleared his throat. I imagined what he would think of the expression on my face if he opened the door, and I kept my eyes closed, hoping he would disappear.
“Come in,” Luka said.
The door handle rattled and the cool air from the hall touched my face. “Hello,” Jason said. “I was wondering if Luka would like to stop by my room for a few minutes.”
I opened my eyes. Jason had that ridiculous side-part again, a smug look on his face. “Go away,” I told him.
“I’d be happy to visit,” Luka said, putting the finishing touches on my new bandage.
“Only if I can come too,” I said.
Jason pursed his lips and then, in a tone suggesting I lacked the grown-up capacity to reason, said, “This is more of a guys-only hang out, Maureen.”
“Oh? What are you guys going to do in there?”
Jason ignored me. I picked up the trash, and we all walked to Jason’s room. They went inside and Jason closed the door, leaving me standing there holding the trash bag. “Hurry up in there,” I said. In a moment I could make out Luka exclaiming over something. Who knew what Jason had shown him.
I opened the trash bag and sniffed—a whiff of dry sweat and death. I put my face inside it, sealing the edges with my fingers so fresh air wouldn’t interrupt whatever it was I thought I wanted. What did I want? I didn’t really know. The smell seemed to want something from me. I breathed deeply until there was no difference between the air in my lungs and the air in the bag. Perspiration, blood, rot, loneliness, and shame: everything equilibrated. I took the elevator downstairs, hobbled outside on my crutches, and arced the bag over the dented lip of the dumpster.
Luka’s coupe was parked nearby. It was so small and red that it looked like a toy. What was it with men and toys? I tried the handle. It opened. I dropped my crutches, bent down, and collapsed into the passenger seat. I closed the door and listened to the sound of my breathing, which seemed too fast. I opened the center console, turned around to survey the backseat. I tried to see everything, memorize it. I closed my eyes, felt the pull of the revolving, the collapsing, the dilating. I felt tired, but I resisted sleep. I would never fall asleep in a car again, I told myself, if only to hold it over the head of the self who had fallen asleep in a car once before. I’d been driving home after a waitressing shift. I had no memory of the accident. I’d ended up in a ditch, apparently, upside down, bleeding from a lacerated liver, ruptured spleen, shattered tibia.
I opened the door, but I didn’t get out of the car. “Fucking bitch,” someone yelled. I jumped. It was the pink-haired lady sitting on a bench across the street. I flipped her off. She seemed surprised to be acknowledged. Maybe she’d thought her voice existed only inside her head. I felt a horrible impulse to cross the street, but then she smiled, and I was afraid that she might see me as a friend.
I sighed and let my head fall back against the headrest.
“Hey,” Luka said. He was kneeling beside the car.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Maureen,” Luka said. “It’s me.”
“What is it?” I repeated. I was still half-asleep. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight?”
I sat up.
“I haven’t played video games in years,” he said, looking back at the apartment. “I wanted to come out, but I could tell he really wanted me there. What are you doing down here?”
I shrugged. “Looking for a cigarette,” I said. “It’s all I can think about.” It wasn’t really a lie. I was always looking for a cigarette.
“Stopping smoking—”
“Is one of the hardest things anyone can do.” I mimed sucking a cigarette, blowing air in his face.
“That’s right,” he said. “And you were looking in my car?”
“It was unlocked.”
“Did you find any?”
“Not yet. But I haven’t checked the backseat.” A silence passed between us. I let my eyes and shoulders relax completely. I forced myself to keep looking at him. He gulped, held out his hand, and helped me up. He popped the front seat, revealing a tiny compartment, hardly big enough for us both. I followed him in and closed the door. I let him put his hands wherever he wanted. His tongue was hard. Our skin stuck together.
“Hey,” I said. “This isn’t serious.” It was a pathetic reflex, this declaration of non-seriousness, but he didn’t even seem to hear me. He pulled off my clothes, my bandages.
“Is this okay?” he said. He was in a kind of trance. Was it okay? Of course it was. He owned this leg.
“Yes,” I said.
He had so much energy, a sprinter at the starting line. His sweat dripped into my eyes, my mouth. I wondered if he could crush me. How would that feel? Out of nowhere, I made a noise like a dying cow: guttural, unattractive. I couldn’t remember ever having used my vocal cords so honestly. Was this my mating call? When it ended, Luka had stilled. He palmed my face on both sides and smashed his nose against mine. His eyelashes poked the fleshy corners of my eyes. “Can you pretend you’re dead?” he asked.
I could have asked: what? Or maybe: why? What came out of my mouth was: “How?”
He traced a scar on my side with his index finger. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just want you to pretend.”
For the first time, I remembered the accident—really remembered it, not just as a thing that happened, but as a thing that happened to me. I remembered the sound. A roar. I rolled my eyes back, opened my mouth. My body felt very light. Waves of electricity moved down my inner arms to my wrist and the tips of my fingers.
“That’s good,” he panted. “But not just dead—undead.”
Undead. What did he mean? I scratched his chest, yanked his little black patch, hissed and growled. “Like this?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Drool ran down my cheek as my head hit the door rhythmically. I forced my eyes to stay open. I didn’t want to think at all.
Afterwards, we tried to find our clothes. Everything was slimy and smelled like half-price produce. I could barely move. “Can you pull up my underwear?” I asked, weakly lifting my pelvis. With one hand he stabilized my hips in the air, with the other he worked my underwear up my legs, carefully untwisting the material.
We crawled out of the car, and I stood up slowly, trying to straighten myself. Luka handed me my crutches. He seemed to be searching my face for clues.
Back upstairs, I sat on the couch and he rewrapped my leg. He looked uneasy. “That wasn’t too weird, was it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I felt protective of him. “People are weird,” I said, raising his chin with my finger. I thought maybe I’d say something else, but that was it, all I had, the full extent of my wisdom.
He leaned forward and kissed my knee, turned his cheek and rested it there.
From the window, I watched his taillights blink on and off down the road.
I limped to the kitchen, got on my knees, and reached down into the bottom of the trash, past the coffee grounds and banana peels, and pulled up a dense, damp clump the size of a fist. I only wanted a smoke, but there on the kitchen floor, I held the decomposing heart of a zombie woman. My heart.
I pulled it apart, separating out the wet cigarettes, ordering them from most to least disgusting. I chose the last one, heated it in the microwave until it was dry, then lit it. I inhaled until my lungs hurt, opened the window, stuck my head out, and blew the smoke as far as it would go.
When I woke, Jason was making pancakes. I pulled up a stool. He dropped bits of fruit into each cake as it sizzled on the pan. He sprinkled powdered sugar on a healthy stack and handed me the plate.
“So, I guess you had a lot of fun with Luka last night,” I said.
“It was fine,” Jason said. He flipped a pancake. His tone seemed to indicate he had something more to say.
“Did you like him?”
“We were mostly playing video games.”
“What did you think?”
“I could tell he knows I have a lot to teach him.”
“About what?”
“Life,” Jason said, gesturing to his room.
“He’s not going to come over and hang out with you all the time.”
“You’re not his parents.”
“You’re not his brother.”
He shook his head. “I need to get to work.” He went to his room and shut the door.
He’d left a white envelope in the same place he always put it. I picked it up, opened the flap, and counted the money. I needed a haircut. I needed to go to the laundromat. Maybe I’d buy some new jeans. Some new shoes. Something nice.
I caught the 10:20 bus downtown. The pink-haired lady was on it, and I walked past her and sat a couple rows back. As the bus started again, she turned and said, “Hello.” Her voice sounded completely normal. I thought about whether or not to say hi back, and we looked at each other for too long, as though we had some sort of actual relationship. Finally, I looked away.
A group of girls in school uniforms walking on the other side of the street caught my attention. They were swinging their arms, laughing, dancing. Suddenly, one of them tripped and stumbled toward the curb. I felt sure she would fall into traffic. She would be killed. Her parents’ lives would be ruined. It seemed horrible that I would be the person with this last glimpse of their child.
But just in time, the girl caught herself, and stood perfectly still, her arms spread behind her with their fingers splayed, her toes jutting past the lip of concrete. Then the bus moved forward, and I lost sight of her.
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