Maybe they still performed an essential role. Medical science wasn't smart enough to know everything. The body was a mysterious thing. All these inbred instincts, behaviors, things that seemed ill-suited to contemporary people, maybe they were needed, somehow. Maybe, by defining them as useless and removing them, humans ran the risk of making themselves less human. Sometimes she suspected that a piece of her had already gone missing when she landed against that curb so very, very hard.
Friday, the surgeon tiptoed around the idea of her leaving by Sunday, an idea she instantly vetoed. She was terribly injured. She couldn't possibly return home, back to the life she remembered from the past, maimed as she was. Why, she couldn't even bend down to tie her shoes yet or reach up for toothpaste in the bathroom cabinet. She needed more time to adjust. She felt so abnormal, practically crippled. She didn't want to see anyone or be seen. Plus, although she did not say this, there was a day of reckoning ahead and she wasn't quite ready.
She knew where he lived, the boy who had hurt her.
The doctor nodded. He would not force her to leave until she was ready.
Something vestigial should have told her she did not want to kill anyone.
But they had removed that, right?
That same day, they removed her IV. The nurses were amazed that one so drug-friendly could switch readily to milder oral medications, but she had breezed through the transition. She had her wits about her for the first time in days. She took note of the room, a large room with a blue sofa underneath a picture window that spread out a view all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. Her husband had sat on that sofa nightly exclaiming with pleasure at the view. All her visitors also exclaimed at the view. She couldn't see the bridge from her bed, but she could see a wall-sized array of stars at night, and streets dotted with red and white lights rising into hills.
Her battles with pain were receding. Medicated, she verged on comfortable for the first time since the accident.
She had spent many a night imagining the damage she would do to the boy who hit her. She would teach him what it meant to be less than utterly responsible. She would hit him in the night, on a dark street-she imagined the crunch as his bones disintegrated. She had the whole thing worked out. She could not wall him up, but she could wreck him.
She flipped on the television, not for the first time, but for the first time since she had become coherent again. She found nothing very exciting. On the public station, a show ran about World War II that included formerly secret Allied and Axis films, and she watched it with half an eye, watched a former German U-boat captain saying, “We were young. We didn't think about what we were doing. We didn't think about the consequences of our actions. We couldn't think of anything more fun than going out and sinking ships.”
Mike came into the room, wheeling his faulty blood pressure machinery in front of him.
He stopped in his tracks, eyes riveted on the show. “That reminds me of my dad.” He watched for a few seconds. “I was just a kid. Nineteen fifty-five, we got our first TV.”
Funny, she wanted to say. We also got our first TV around then. Or was it a year later, on Ceres Street in Whittier? They must be about the same age. She wanted to tell him, share this coincidence, but Mike seemed absorbed in the flickering images on the screen above them and she did not want to interrupt.
A German boat submerged. Cut to the men inside, lowering a periscope.
“Friday night on Potrero Hill. See, that was payday,” Mike said, one hand on his hip, more animated than she had ever seen him. “He'd go out and buy himself a few beers… get a few beers in him.” He stood between her and the television, concentrating on the screen as he spoke. “We had the five hamburgers for a dollar.
“Yeah, he'd get a few beers in him. Those were his favorite shows. Victory at Sea, you know? Black and white. All that old war stuff. He was Army. Friday night, that's when all of us gathered around the new TV.”
Mike began to pace in front of the television, slapping his knee. His voice, an emotionless, unaccented one, changed to a Southern dialect and rose in pitch. “See up there,” he said, parading, prancing back and forth, and she could see his father forty years ago, proud of some remembered or imagined glory. Mike lifted an arm straight up and pointed to the set, still talking in his father's voice. “See, kids? That there's Guadalcanal…”
“Mike, where are you?” said a voice over the loudspeaker.
He startled, putting his hands to his sides as if standing at attention.
“I'm taking Ms. Watkins's vital signs,” he called out.
“Could we borrow your muscle for a minute?” the voice said. There was affection in the words.
“Sure thing.” He walked out the door.
While he was gone, she noticed the pile of best sellers on the refrigerator. She didn't want to make an extra trip back to clear them out when the time came to leave. She had her toiletries, the flowers… too much to carry in one load, even with her husband helping. Once she left that room, she never wanted to return. Maybe she could give them away.
Mike returned almost immediately and started toward her with the cuff. As he adjusted it around her upper arm she said, “You a reader?”
He stepped back from the bed and fiddled with his machine. “Oh, I sure used to be,” he said. “As a kid, I read everything. History and science were my favorites.” He flipped a switch, punched a few buttons.
“Because I wondered if…” she began, but Mike was still talking.
“But I don't much anymore. Got bad eyes,” he said.
She was thinking, how strange. They were so alike, and she had thought them so different. Her dad bought steak on payday and the kids ate take-out burgers for a treat when she was a kid, and now she had two pairs of glasses, one for distance, and one for close-up. Neither one seemed to work worth a damn.
“I was in Vietnam,” he said.
The mumbling of visitors in the rooms nearby grew louder, and the bright stars outside looked brighter. Her mouth was open, but she closed it without speaking.
Mike was lost in thought. Suddenly, he turned his back to her and reached behind his head. “See this?” He pointed up at the back of his skull to a lumpy scar, significant-looking. About six inches long, it curved like a long evil smile above his neck underneath his nubby hair.
“Yes.”
“I spent eighteen years in the hospital,” he said. “There was shrapnel stuck back there and they couldn't take it out. Looked like I had a second head. Couldn't go anywhere, anyway. Looked like a freak.”
He turned sideways for a moment, long enough for her to imagine behind him, his second head.
He put the cuff on her arm, puffed it up, and watched the red numbers on his machine going down.
“Had me on psychotropic drugs. Everything. Because sometimes, I'd feel bad about what I missed.”
The highest reading ever. He noted it on a piece of paper.
“Then they found a way to take it off.”
He pushed the machine toward her door. “Sometimes I think about life,” he said, passing under the television, “how much I missed.”
She would leave the thrillers behind, she decided, find something better to read now that her mind had awakened, something like the books she had read in the summer. She had learned in those books what made mountain climbers climb and people go to war. Not courage, she had finally decided. A mysterious force drove them on. That same mysterious force had motivated her to go under the knife-something beyond survival, some greedy spirit full of valor, something vestigial like her anomaly, something as outlandish as Mike's second head.