He thought of all the minutes stacked up ahead, like coins in a slot five miles high, and the blackest depression he had ever known swept over him in a smooth solid wave and carried him down. They were going to torture him to death. Operations on his elbows, thighs, his neck. Therapy. Walkers, wheelchairs, canes.
You’re going to have pain … stick with it.
No, you stick with it, Johnny thought. Just leave me alone. Don’t come near me again with your butchers’ knives. If this is your idea of helping, I want no part of it.
Steady throbbing pain, digging into the meat of him.
Warmth on his belly, trickling.
He had wet himself.
Johnny Smith turned his face toward the wall and cried.
6.
Ten days after that first operation and two weeks before the next one was scheduled, Johnny looked up from the book he was reading – Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men – and saw Sarah standing in the doorway, looking at him hesitantly.
‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’
She let out her breath shakily. ‘Yes. It’s me, Johnny.’
He put the book down and looked at her. She was smartly dressed in a light-green linen dress, and she held a small, brown clutch bag in front of her like a shield. She had put a streak in her hair and it looked good. It also made him feel a sharp and twisting stab of jealousy -had it been her idea, or that of the man she lived and slept with? She was beautiful.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Come in and sit down.’
She crossed the room and suddenly he saw himself as she must see him – too thin, his body slumped a little to one side in the chair by the window, his legs stuck out straight on the hassock, dressed in a johnny and a cheap hospital bathrobe.
‘As you can see, I put on my tux,’ he said.
‘You look fine.’ She kissed his cheek and a hundred memories shuffled brightly through his mind like a doubled pack of cards. She sat in the other chair, crossed her legs, and tugged at the hem of her dress.
They looked at each other without saying anything.
He saw that she was very nervous. If someone were to touch her on the shoulder, she would probably spring right out of her seat.
‘I didn’t know if I should come,’ she said, ‘but I really wanted to.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
Like strangers on a bus, he thought dismally. It’s got to be more than this, doesn’t it?
‘So how’re you doing?’ she asked.
He smiled. ‘I’ve been in the war. Want to see my battle scars?’ He raised his gown over his knees, showing the S-shaped incisions that were now beginning to heal. They were still red and hashmarked with stitches.
‘Oh, my Lord, what are they doing to you?’
‘They’re trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,’ Johnny said. ‘All the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the king’s doctors. So I guess.. ‘And then he stopped, because she was crying.
‘Don’t say it like that. Johnny,’ she said. ‘Please don’t say it like that.’
‘I’m sorry. It was just … I was trying to joke about it.’ Was that it? Had he been trying to laugh it off or had it been a way of saying, Thanks for coming to see me, they’re cutting me to pieces?
‘Can you? Can you joke about it?’ She had gotten a Kleenex from the clutch bag and was wiping her eyes with it.
‘Not very often. I guess seeing you again … the defenses go up, Sarah.’
‘Are they going to let you out of here?’
‘Eventually. It’s like running the gauntlet in the old days, did you ever read about that? If I’m still alive after every Indian in the tribe has had a swing at me with his tomahawk, I get to go free.’
‘This summer?’
‘No, I… I don’t think so.’
‘I’m so sorry it happened,’ she said, so low he could barely hear her. ‘I try to figure out why… or how things could have changed -,. and it just robs me of sleep. if I hadn’t eaten that bad hot dog … if you had stayed instead of going back…’ She shook her head and looked at him, her eyes red. ‘It seems sometimes there’s no percentage.