|
|
(back to previous page)
Something is wrong, all right, but it's physical. Believe me, I'm not a hypochondriac. By the time I visit a doctor voluntarily, it's a toss-up whether he or the mortician will get my business. Extreme jocks tend to develop a rapport with what's going on inside them, and they know if there's a physical change. When I'm in shape, I'm like that. I take a breath and feel it in my toes.
I was in shape before I lost my kids. Then I fell off the deep end. Divorce wasn't that big a deal, a couple of strangers coming together, then becoming strangers again, but when society steps between you and your natural-born flesh and blood–well, for me it rendered my contract with civilization null and void. No stranger with a gavel was going to hear a few minutes of frantic pleading and then decide that my major role of fatherhood would snuggle right in there between lunch and dinner for a few hours every other weekend.
I couldn't handle it. Self-destructive between visitations, yeah. Jack or Jim from the bottle before noon; prescriptions and aliases off the Web. The first time I didn't bring my kids back from a parental visitation, I got the benefit of the doubt and probation, but the second time was totally unambiguous. Airline tickets in my pocket, alcohol and drugs still in my blood from the in-between days when I was forbidden parental rights, the kids in the backseat. I was two hours away from becoming one of those quasi-kidnappers on a milk carton whose last name happens to match the kidnappees. So that's why Dolores is afraid. They could have put me away solid. They should have put me away solid. But it would've killed me. Some people absolutely cannot live without freedom, and I'm one of them. I think everyone recognized that–even Dolores. So, that was when I understood that the stranger with the gavel was going to get between me and my kids, and I promised not to defy a new court order. I got off with three months' jail time and more probation.
Jail focused me. The only way I was going to have contact with Jessica and Danny was to get clean and in shape again. Not that hard, if you want to know the truth. The hard part is convincing the judicial system that the little aberration they saw was just a blip reaction to what the court did in the first place. So, I got in shape. I've never been in better shape than I was on November tenth. And since I've gotten the rapport with my body back, I know unfailingly when something is wrong inside me.
I try not to stare at the mirror in the bathroom now, and I shave with the door open. This morning I filled the sink with hot water without looking up. I tried to concentrate on the shaving gel, but already I sensed the expansion in the glass. I made myself into Santa Claus before I looked up, but instead of comic relief, the white beard just made the red gash in my forehead look like a bullet hole.
"You're a fraud," I said to the image. Or the image said to me.
We raised our silver-handled Gillettes to our sideburns, observing mirror protocols–my left, his right. A thin mist came between us. Whose breath? Steam began to close in from the corners.
I leaned back. Dangled the razor in the water. Not possible there could be that much steam from just the sink and my breath. It would take a roomful of breathers to make the mirror look like that, like a daguerreotype photo, all grainy and imprecise. The shaving foam blended with the steam, so that all I saw was the gash that won't heal. Ugly. Red. The mark of Cain on my double.
I was getting as fuzzy as the room, but don't tell me the face in the glass was just an obedient doppelganger. I saw the asymmetry. And it wasn't just a mirror anymore; it was a separate and distant universe. On my side I had steam–thin as a waterfall. On the other side it was dust and fire. The festering redness on my forehead was the only connection. Only, in the mirror, it looked like something raging in hellish exile a million parsecs away. A buoy. A beacon in a nether ocean.
The door reverberated as I bumped into it, but I couldn't turn my back on the mirror. Fumbling, I raked the jamb across my shoulder. I don't know, maybe in my terror I was somehow marching in place, but I couldn't seem to leave the bathroom. It was as if the walls were made of distance, and I didn't find myself in the outer room until the steam dissipated and innocence rose up the glass.
A doctor once told me that the reason men sometimes get dizzy when they shave is because the way they move their neck can shut off the blood supply to the brain. That's the rock I've been clinging to all day.
CHAPTER THREE
Finally, a few more sheets of paper. The orderly brought them to shut me up. I keep asking why everyone is acting funny, but he won't say. No one will tell me what happened. They want to know about the IV. Did I put something in the plastic bag? Did I fool with the drip rate? I tell them I didn't, and I get reassuring pats. They think I'm incompetent. Incompetent or not, my hearing is so acute since the accident that I pick up scraps of conversation from the hall.
"He must have had a flashback," one of the nurses said.
The person she was talking to answered: "Either that or he thinks he's Jack Frost. Lucky if he doesn't come down with pneumonia."
(continued on the next page)
If you’re enjoying this excerpt and you’d like to sample other books, join our Online Book Clubs.
|
|
|
