What happened instead was an explosion of pain from the peak of his dislocated shoulder to the tips of his mangled fingers. His scream seemed to pass straight through the oxygen mask and rattle every loose object in the room.
Falling back to the floor, Emilio began softly sobbing. Although he had always been sensitive, he wasn’t much of a crier. He believed this was the result of years of harsh conditioning by a stepfather who loathed the sight of children grieving — his or anyone else’s. Even now the instinct to suppress any outward manifestation of despair was strong, but his suffering was stronger.
Even as he wept, he tried to think of other options, like lying flat and pushing his lower body upward in the hope that the cellphone would slide out under the influence of gravity.
There’s only one way, and you know it.
“No… dear God, no.”
His throat bobbed as he swallowed. He noticed that his right hand and left foot had begun to twitch. Involuntary tremors; the nervous system is breaking down. The seizures wouldn’t be far behind. His body was rebelling against the foreign elements invading it, and the body had about as much chance of emerging victorious as a unicyclist in a NASCAR race.
You have to get the phone.
You have to.
You’re running out of time.
He knew all this, even through the fog of disorder and misery.
He knew perfectly well what he had to do.
Emilio lay still for a time, gazing upward without really seeing anything, his thoughts moving about like a swarm of lazy fireflies. Breathing slowly and steadily, he made a conscious effort to attain a state of restfulness. He would need to summon all the energy he had left, all strength and resilience. He’d always had a high pain threshold, but he’d never really experienced torment like this before. During a soccer game in eighth grade, he’d sprained an ankle, and that had hurt like a mad bastard. But once the assistant coach rubbed some stuff on it and packed it with ice, the discomfort faded, and the next morning he’d barely felt a thing. He knew he wouldn’t be so lucky this time around.
He willed his left forefinger to move, just a twitch, a tiny up-and-down motion as if he’d just had the digit installed and was testing it out. The movement sent a bolt of heat shooting through him; the rest of his body quivered in response.
Jesus…
“Go slow,” he said into the darkness. It would hurt like hell either way, but if he went gradually, he would probably be able to handle it. This is not like a Band-Aid, where you rip it away in one stroke. At least that was the working theory, but who really knew? If one of his patients had tried to move a fractured wrist or a dislocated shoulder, he would’ve put them under sedation. And from that thought came the wish, more sincere than any before it, that he had a syringe loaded with morphine sulfate at his disposal. A barrelful of that stuff and he’d be doing one-handed push-ups on that side while the broken bones jutted through the skin like spear points.
As he lifted his left arm, arrows of pain began firing in all directions. Clenching his teeth, he moaned like an old ghost. The hand dangled downward on the flaccid hinge of the shattered wrist, and when the fingers finally lifted off the concrete and gravity stepped in, the sound in Emilio’s throat was remarkably similar to that of meat being fed through an industrial grinder.
He got the hand up to, and then onto, his hip, but could go no farther without a hiatus. His heart was buffeting at a psychotic pace. Tears and perspiration soaked him from the neck up. There was another lighthearted bing! This is hell, Emilio thought. If it exists, this is it.
In one swift movement, running against all the logic and strategy he’d so carefully considered, he worked the fingers of his left hand into the top of his pants pocket and used his right hand to shove it farther in. The resulting screams came from the very bottom of his soul. Gnashing his teeth, Emilio spun out a string of profanity that would’ve flushed the cheeks of an old whore. Nevertheless, he managed to seize the iPhone between thumb and forefinger and drag it free. Both the arm and the phone dropped to the floor.
It was time to breathe again.
The numbness was spreading fast. He no longer had sensation in his legs and hips, and felt nothing in the back of his head, where before the unyielding concrete had been a source of considerable discomfort. The rambling incongruity of his thoughts was also advancing, making it increasingly difficult to hang on to any rational notion. I have to do this now… NOW.
He stretched his good arm as far as it would go, and, in what had to be the only lucky break of the last few hours, found the phone with no particular difficulty. He brought it to his chest, stood it up, and thumbed the button on top. The screen came to life and two smiling faces appeared behind the bank of icons. It was a black-and-white photo he and Sarah had taken in a booth during a visit to the Jersey Shore. He’d scanned the image he liked best — the two of them perfectly equal in height and depth, which he always interpreted as a metaphor for the perfect equality they had fostered in their relationship, and grinning in a supremely contented way as if to tell the world, As long as I got him/her, I don’t need anything else.
For an instant, he felt the elation that always spread through his system when he saw her face. Then it was smothered by sheer horror when he realized he was having trouble seeing clearly. The image was blurring into unrecognizability, as was that of the icons, the phone itself, and the hand that held it. His immediate thought was that the tears from all that wussy-boy crying was responsible. But when he set the phone down flat, wiped both eyes thoroughly, and brought the phone up again, there was no improvement. If anything, it was worse.
Another round of tears threatened to break out, but he forced it back.
The message. Just send the message.
He was having trouble remembering the program. Notes? Notepad? No, that was on the other computer. The one in… In where? There’s another computer somewhere. Is it here? Maybe it’s…
No. Stop.
He looked over the icons, sure that one of them would spark the right memory. There was a blue one with a lowercase f. Facepack, he thought, knew it was wrong, then discarded it from his mind. There was a gray one with what looked kind of like a ship’s wheel. Settings. One was sky blue with the silhouetted profile of a little bird. Tweety, or Twitty; something like that. Others didn’t look familiar at all. And then, in the upper left, a green one with an empty word balloon, like in the comic strips.
“That’s it,” he said.
He tried to thumb it open but missed the first two times, opened two other apps whose purpose was not immediately obvious, and had to feel his way to the circular home button at the bottom in order to start again. When the messaging program finally launched and a blank text message zoomed up, he knew through pure intuition that he was in the right place.
Oh, God… those tiny letters…
It was the keyboard, he knew that much. Or keypad; one of those.
Now what do I say?
He gave it a moment’s thought, decided the shorter the better, then moved his shaking thumb to the first letter: i.