“It’s your decision,” the doctor says.
“Do you think I should have the operation?”
“It’s your decision,” the doctor says again.
The woman in green is still waiting there with the paper. She puts it down for István to sign, and he takes the pen with his left hand, and then turns to the doctor with a look that says, What am I supposed to do?
“Just make some sort of mark,” the doctor tells him. “How is it?” he asks, meaning the hand he injected.
“I can’t really feel it,” István says, using his left hand to put an illiterate-looking scrawl on the paper.
“Can you feel it?”
“Not really.”
“Can you feel this?” the doctor asks, prodding it with the pen that István has just handed back to him.
“No,” István says.
The doctor says he’s going to try and put the bones back as they should be.
“Okay,” István says.
“This will probably still hurt,” the doctor warns.
“All right,” István says.
The doctor takes the hand and starts to tug and shove at the smallest two fingers and immediately out of the numbness a dull pain comes.
He can only imagine what the agony would be like if it wasn’t for the anesthetic. For the last few hours the slightest brush of anything on the hugely swollen hand has made him flinch with pain and now this doctor is sort of wrestling with it.
The pain starts to get worse and he has an impulse to pull the hand away. He feels something like fear. He wants to tell the doctor to stop. He inhales through his nose.
There’s sweat on the doctor’s smooth young forehead.
The woman in green watches, looking slightly worried.
The doctor stops. “Okay,” he says. “That should do it.” He shapes the hand into a particular position—all four fingers bent about halfway into a fist, with the thumb free at the side—and says, “Hold it like that for me please.”
István does and the doctor starts to wrap a bandage around it. He wraps it until the bandage entirely covers the hand, except for the tips of the fingers and the free thumb, as well as István’s wrist and part of his forearm. Then, after putting on latex gloves, the doctor takes a roll of heavier-looking material that the woman in green has prepared for him by soaking it in a stainless-steel basin of water. The doctor unrolls some of this wet material, which looks like white slimy cloth, and starts to wrap it around István’s arm and hand, on top of the bandage that’s already there. “Can I ask you a question?” he says, as he does that.
“Yes,” István says.
“Where did you go to school?”
“Where did I go to school?” István says, and as he says it he understands why the doctor looks so familiar to him.
“I thought so,” the doctor says, when István tells him. “I was there too.”
“Oh yeah?” István says.
“We were in the same year, I think,” the doctor says.
“Maybe,” István says.
“How are you doing?” the doctor asks him, smiling again now in his narrow beard.
“How am I doing?”
“Yeah.” The doctor is still winding the slimy material around his wrist and hand, and the separate layers of material have started to merge into one another, forming a single white mass, which the doctor smooths and molds.
“I’m okay,” István says.
“What do you do?” the doctor asks. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No,” István says. “I don’t mind. I was in the army.”
“Okay,” the doctor says.
He takes a second roll of dripping-wet material from the woman and starts to apply it over the first one.
“Yeah,” István says.
“Okay,” the doctor says again, his primary focus still on what he’s doing.
“Until a few months ago.”
“And now?” the doctor asks.
“Not sure,” István says.
“Fair enough,” the doctor says.
He doesn’t ask any more questions, and István doesn’t ask him anything about what he’s doing. He’s obviously a doctor.
That’s what he’s done with the last decade or whatever—turned himself into a doctor.
Ten years ago he and this doctor were the same, István thinks.
They were the same.
And now the doctor’s a doctor and he’s… whatever he is.
From the same starting point, this enormous space has opened up between them, is how it feels.
They seem to be on opposite sides of some fundamental divide now.
The plaster is already starting to dry, at least on the surface.
It looks chalkily matte in places.
It feels solid, fixed.
His hand feels trapped in it.
His mother is waiting for him downstairs.
“How is it?” she asks.
He shrugs.
They walk out to her car. It’s evening now. The sun is setting beyond the Aldi car park. He must have been in the hospital for five hours or more.
“What happened?” his mother asks him.
“I told you,” he says.
“You punched a door?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
The next morning she says to him, “There’s someone I want you to talk to.”
“Who?”
She tells him that a friend of hers knows someone at the hospital, in the psychiatric department, who can arrange a meeting with a therapist for him.
He’s sitting in the kitchen while she makes his coffee.
“I want you to do that,” she says.
He has his first meeting with the therapist a few weeks later. She’s a woman of about his mother’s age. She asks him to tell her about his time in Iraq. He tells her something about it. The sort of thing he usually says.
She asks him if he knows what post-traumatic stress disorder is.
“Sort of,” he says.
He sees the therapist for an hour or two every week and they talk about some of the things that happened there, especially the incident in which Riki was killed.
She asks him about it in detail.
He tells her in detail what happened. That they were taking water to the Ukrainians. That was the sort of thing they did, when they did anything, he tells her—take water to the Ukrainians. There were the white tankers of water, and also some armored personnel carriers to protect them. Riki was on the machine gun of the first armored personnel carrier, which was the lead vehicle of the convoy. István was on the second, with two or three water tankers between them. He tells her that they were nearing a place called Al-Suwaira, which was where the Ukrainians were, when the explosion happened. The road had been swept for explosive devices earlier in the morning but they must have missed that one. If you’re near it, he tells her, not near enough to get hit by the shrapnel but still near it, an explosion isn’t just sound. It’s pressure as well. It knocks you over, you feel like you’ve been physically hit. It fucks up your ears. “Sorry,” he says—the swear word just slipped out. The therapist nods, acknowledging his apology. He lights another cigarette. You can’t hear anything, he tells her. You don’t even hear the explosion really. You experience it as pressure, not as sound. And then there’s all this smoke everywhere. You can’t see anything either. The sense of confusion is hard to describe. The convoy stopped moving. You weren’t supposed to do that. You were supposed to keep moving but the lead vehicle had been hit and the road was blocked and there was all this smoke so that the drivers of the other vehicles couldn’t see where they were going. Some of the APCs started firing back, he tells her, in the general direction of the incoming fire, or where they thought that was. That was when he realized his ears were fucked—when he couldn’t really hear the machine guns, only see their muzzle flashes in the smoke. Anyway, he went through the smoke and helped Riki down from the turret of the lead vehicle and sat on the asphalt with him. For a while Riki was still conscious. He told him that it was going to be okay, even though it probably wasn’t and he knew it probably wasn’t. He also knew that after that he’d never believe anyone telling him it was going to be okay. Or maybe he would believe them. Maybe he’d want to believe them so much that he would, in the way that Riki may have believed him as they sat there on the asphalt. When Riki lost consciousness he wasn’t sure if he’d died or what.