That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Regent took a gasping breath. He was always groggy after coming back, and he shook his head to clear the fog.
And then he felt it. He could almost hear it. Like a skin-shriek, an agony-wail from his skull to his shins.
Pain.
Every time he hitched, he could almost forget.
Almost.
He bit down hard. It hurt.
He was back in the hospital. The lights in his room were off. When he left, he had been in the hall outside “Jeff’s” room. Someone must have thought he was asleep and wheeled him back. The shades were drawn. Sunlight peered in from a crack in the curtains and made a long triangle on the floor. Monitors blinked in faint colors. Everything else was gray: the bare narrow walls; the wheeled bed, part stretcher, part cage; the closed drawers full of plastics and cotton; the empty closet; the mirror on the back of the extra-wide bathroom door. And then the familiar smell, like bleached sickness.
John looked at his reflection. He was a wreck. He wasn’t human. Not anymore. He was the shattered remains of a once-potent man, a soldier. But that man was gone, replaced by something else. The taut-skinned burns that covered a third of his body, including half his head, didn’t just give him a slight speech impediment and pull his limbs into odd gestures when he slept. They gnawed. They stabbed. They writhed. They gave him phantom limbs he’d never had. Inhuman limbs. Grasping, angular, insect-like appendages that came and went and were never the same again.
He looked down at his left hand, shriveled from the burns and atrophied from the nerve damage. The skin looked like demon flesh, mottled and stretched, lighter than the rest.
It was eating him alive. Or that’s how it seemed.
John reached for the bracing bar that hung from the ceiling and pulled his six-foot-two frame out of his chair with one bulging arm. He crawled into the long, white bed with a grunt, dragging limp, near-lifeless legs.
He had been left-handed. Before. Now it was his right or nothing. In fact, his right arm was just about the only thing in his body that worked the way it was supposed to. It fed him. It operated his motorized chair. It dressed him. It flipped the cap to the morphine button up and down. Up and down.
John laid his head on the starched white pillows and tried to sleep. Hitching wore him out. Wrangling the heavy bull of the subconscious required a strong grip, an all-consuming concentration. He had to be close to hitch, had to be able to reach out for it. And if he lost it, he’d slip away and leave a body unconscious in the street. There was no way back.
A tingle of pain, like a massage ball covered in razor wire, rolled across John’s chest up to his neck. He shivered and tossed in the bed.
His doctors urged him to use the pain killers. He could have as much as he wanted, they said. But when he took enough drugs to do any good, they blunted his mind, made it just like the rest of his body. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t meditate, couldn’t hitch. Medication made him helpless, trapped him in a hazy prison where pain poked through the fog like a wandering searchlight and half-forgotten memories of caves and torture bubbled up from the ground.
It was the same place that Gabe was hiding. You can’t stay there. No one can.
An hour after his return, John had done little more than doze, snatched from sleep each time by tooth-clenching pain. His burnt skin crawled like it was trying to get off him.
Noises echoed from down the hall. Doctors and nurses argued about the strange return of a coma patient no one had known was missing. Apparently the man had been shot. Apparently he’d busted a drug house. Saved a baby. Or some shit.
Somebody used the word “hero.”
Regent snorted. Heroes don’t take other people for a joyride. They don’t implicate them in an assault. They don’t almost get them killed.
As he lay listening to faint echoes of increasingly fanciful tales, John’s conviction only grew. He couldn’t stay.
He didn’t know what “Jeff’s” real name was. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to think about how he’d just changed the man’s life forever.
Regent gritted his teeth under a wave of needle-jabs. It triggered an involuntary sneer. He took a deep breath and sat up.
There was no getting around it. He had to leave. But the only place John could go was the last place in the world he wanted to be. He’d almost rather be dead. He looked down at his clenched, atrophied left hand.
Almost.
John liked to think he wasn’t afraid of anything, but it wasn’t always true. He had made the call that morning. It was a condition of the deal he made with himself. He could have one more trip. One more hitch. If he called first.
Happy to have him at the house, his dad had said. Of course he could stay. As long as he wanted. They’d pick him up Monday. Be there around 2:00.
After that, what little freedom John had left would disappear under his stepmother’s burning gaze.
There was a soft knock on the door. Nurse Brand poked his head through the gap and saw Regent was awake.
“I hear you were looking for me.”
John grabbed the bracing bar and pulled himself up as a ruckus erupted from the nurse’s station at the end of the hall. “What’s going on out there?”
“News crew.” Ethan Brand stepped into the room. He was thin with neat blond hair laced in barely noticeable gray. His face narrowed at the chin, and he had a gathering set of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. His fingernails were manicured. He wore dark blue scrubs.
“News?” Regent did his best to feign ignorance.
Ethan walked across the room to check the morphine drip hanging from the back of John’s chair. Unused. Pulled out. The needle trailed the chair like a tail. Ethan wasn’t surprised. “You didn’t hear? There was big a commotion today.”
“I made the call.” John wanted to change the subject.
“Time to take your stats.” So did Ethan. He turned to open the shades.
“Already?”
The nurse stood by the window as light poured in. “I suppose that means you want me to put in a discharge request.”
John nodded and squinted from the sun.
Ethan stepped to the wall near the bed and removed the blood pressure cuff from its holster. He wrapped it around John’s good arm. “I wish you would stay.”
“It’s time.” John had been at the hospital for months. It was the only place he’d been since his return.
Ethan held Regent’s hand as the cuff inflated. It wasn’t necessary, but the nurse held it firm.
John nodded. He was going to miss his friend. He thought he better say that. Out loud. He liked to think he wasn’t afraid of anything, but it wasn’t always true.
“I’ll miss you guys.”
The pair had met John’s first day at the hospital. That was five months ago. John was mean back then, but Ethan met the anger with compassion. Everyone always wanted to rush in. They were just trying to be nice, helpful, and it pissed John off. He’d been hurt plenty of times. He knew how to handle it. If he needed help, he’d fucking ask.
But Ethan was different. He let John try things first. After his shifts were over, Ethan would often stay and listen with the other patients as John told stories from his missions overseas.
John realized he might not see his friend again. He didn’t know Ethan’s schedule. That meant it was now or never. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything.” Ethan ripped the Velcro and replaced the cuff on the wall.
“Why here?”
“What do you mean?” Ethan reached down to check John’s colostomy bag. It was a testament to the men’s trust that he didn’t need to ask.
John lifted his shirt and leaned out of the way. “I mean, why soldiers? You’re good. You could work lots of places. Why here?”
It was a special hospital, a joint program between the Veteran’s Administration and the U.S. Department of Health, a halfway house for returning soldiers with major trauma or a home for anyone having real difficulty adjusting to civilian life. There were sister complexes, equally new and high-tech, in St. Louis and Sacramento. Attendance was voluntary, but for some strongly encouraged.
“Ohhh . . .” Ethan nodded. “So it’s my turn to tell a story?”
John shrugged with his good arm as his nurse checked his pulse. “Don’t wanna pry.”
“No, it’s okay.” Ethan walked around the bed to the wall-mounted computer near the door. He touched it and the screen lit up. “When I was a kid—twelve I think—I got beat up by some neighbor boys for carrying dolls.”
“Carrying?”
“I was bringing them to my sisters. From a family friend’s house. I think I was looking at them or whatever, probably imagining too. I suppose that counts as playing. But I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t like dolls any more than the other boys. I played video games. Soccer. I just didn’t think dolls had cooties.” He entered John’s stats into the machine with taps of his finger.
John understood. They’d never spoken about it, but he understood. “Were you hurt bad?”
Ethan shook his head. “It was the shock and embarrassment more than anything.”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t the last time something like that happened.”
“Oh of course not. But I know people who had it a lot worse than me. In nursing school I dated a boy who hadn’t come out yet. He got beat up pretty bad one night. He wouldn’t tell me why. He was always so angry.” He sighed. “It wasn’t like it was my life’s goal to work with soldiers or anything, but I did jump at the chance.”
“How come?”
Ethan stopped. He leaned against the wall. “You’ll probably think it’s corny . . .”
“Naw.”
“Yes, you will.” Ethan smiled. “But that’s okay. That’s sorta the point.”
“What is?”
“I thought to myself, if I was serious about helping people, if that’s what I was doing with my life, then shouldn’t I go straight to the top?”
“Plenty of civilians need help.”
“True. But it’s not the same.” He paused. “Gay people can be patriots, too.”
John nodded. It was the first time Ethan had used the word, with Regent anyway. “You take good care of us.”
“Your turn.” Ethan looked at his watch and then sat down in the chair under the TV. “One more story. For old times’ sake.” He looked sad, like he didn’t want to think about it.
“All right.” John nodded. He thought for a moment. He wanted it to be a good one, something special for his friend. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to see my granddad in Atlanta?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My dad was born down there. He moved up to Philly after Mom graduated. She was going to school down at Spelman when they met. After she died, Dad remarried, and we didn’t get to see Granddad much, but when I was a kid, I got to stay with him in Atlanta for a few days. He was real excited about it. He never liked that Dad left. He took me to this packing house one day, all brick and everything. It had been remodeled. It’s an office building now. Urban gentrification and everything, right?”
“Right.”
“Before we went, he talked about it for days. Not all the time, but enough that I could tell it was important to him. He said it was an important part of my past. Couldn’t miss it. Had to see. I thought he was gonna show me where he met Grandma or something like that.
“But when we got there, the nice folks let us in and he took me to this brick wall in a hallway that ran between the old loading dock—which is walled off now and full of conference rooms—and the old offices. He pointed to the wall next to a drinking fountain and said, ‘Look there.’ I looked. I didn’t see anything.
“But he urged me. ‘Go on.’ I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I stepped up and looked real hard. But it was just a bunch of old brick. Some of it looked like it had been patched up a long time ago.
“‘I worked here for twenty years,’ he said. ‘I’d haul in produce or paper or all kinds of stuff and here they would pack it up and ship it all over the state. We carried a lot of heavy boxes, loading and unloading. We didn’t have those big lifting machines, and no workplace safety either. So we’d get tired. I’d come up here to get a drink. And right there, that’s where the ‘Colored’ fountain was, all dirty and cracked, next to the one for the white folks.’”
Regent looked at his bed covers and smiled.
“How old were you?”
“Maybe eight or nine. I had no idea what the old man was talking about. I mean, I knew the history. We learned about that stuff in school. But it didn’t really mean anything to me, just stuff in books. Still, I could tell it was real important to him that I see it. So I nodded and all.
“It wasn’t until I got older that I understood what he was trying to show me. He was a good man, my granddad.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, he died a long time ago. Heart attack, I think. I wanted to go to his funeral down in Atlanta. I could tell my dad did, too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Regent thought about his stepmother. He would be living with her again. Monday. For the first time in a quarter century. He could already see the rage behind her eyes. He’d be stuck in his chair, dependent on her and his aging father for help. “Just didn’t work out, I guess.”
“Well, I’m going to miss your stories, Captain. Especially the one about the dead cat.”
“Oh, you liked that one?” They both smiled. It was a dirty story. And mostly true. “Truth is, I’ll miss this place. Talking really helps.”
“With the pain?”
John nodded.
“Will you have anyone there, where you’re going? To talk to?” Ethan was hesitant. He had a hunch.
Regent turned the corners of his mouth down. His burnt half barely moved. “Naw. Not really.”
Nurse Brand didn’t say anything for a moment. “You could stay.”
John just shook his head. No. He couldn’t. There was an innocent man downstairs with a bullet in his leg that proved it.
Ethan stood. “I’ll put in the discharge request. BUT . . . I won’t like it.” He walked to the door.
John smirked.
“Try to get some rest.”
Regent nodded. But he knew he wouldn’t. In two days, he would again be a prisoner.