His mother, who had only a vague idea what the internet was, had no answer for this.
“I’ve explained this,” he said with infinite patience. “I get some crap job at Stop & Shop, I lose my Disability.”
He’d been collecting for fourteen years: longer than he spent in school, longer than he’d done anything in his entire life. In the deadbeat Olympics, he had won the gold medal: permanent and total incapacity. All because of a single moment on a Tuesday afternoon, in a South Boston tunnel pit.
His monthly check was modest—sixty-six percent of what he’d earned at Mancini Construction, plus an annual cost-of-living adjustment—but it beat Stop & Shop money, frozen foods money. Broken down to an hourly wage, it was even more impressive. He spent zero hours earning his monthly nut. He got paid just for staying alive.
THE PARTICULARS OF THE ACCIDENT WEREN’T REAL TO HIM, they lived in the realm of rumor and conjecture. According to witnesses, an unsecured beam had made contact with Anthony’s hard hat. The force was great enough to knock him out cold. On the Glasgow Coma Scale, he was rated a nine. (Loss of consciousness for less than thirty minutes, cognitive impairments that may or may not resolve.)
At a certain point the hospital discharged him. Anthony was hazy on the details. The state was involved, workers’ comp, the union maybe. Claims were processed. He was assigned a caseworker whose name he forgot immediately.
He sat in a dark room holding his head.
In that year, 2002, he lived nowhere. He lived only in his body, a troubled neighborhood rapidly going to seed. Ringing in his ears, a sickening vertigo. He sat very still and listened to his interior weather, his organs slipping and sliding against one another like a bag of dying fish.
The body in all its exigencies, its variegated symptoms, its colorful complaints.
His mother hired an attorney who advertised on TV, in between reruns of Law & Order. A caseworker whose name he couldn’t remember gave him advice he couldn’t remember.
“Total permanent. I can’t imagine they’d refuse you,” she said, looking him up and down, and in spite of himself he was offended because she didn’t look that great herself.
His head was examined by every means possible. He lay in a metal tube that made otherworldly noises. After an hour or a month, who could tell, he was excreted through the tube. His vitals were taken—blood pressure, resting pulse. The numbers were a kind of code, elegant, inscrutable. Anthony added them together to discern their meaning, the unreported stories of the body contained therein.
He was given a PET scan and a CAT scan but curiously, no dog scan.
By every means possible, short of cutting his skull in half.
He sat in a dark room holding his head. Upstairs his mother watched Law & Order. In between scenes came the chinking noise he could hear through the floorboards, like the door of a prison cell being closed.
His brain didn’t work the way it once had. Reading made his head ache. He had trouble matching names and faces. An Indian doctor with a musical accent peppered him with questions. Were these new deficiencies? Was his memory better before the accident?
“I don’t remember,” Anthony said.
His traumatic brain injury was classified as moderate. There had been some impairment of his executive functions. To Anthony, who wasn’t aware of possessing any to begin with, it was confusing news.
He listened for the chinking noise.
Each doctor referred him to another doctor. The acupuncturist, the inner-ear specialist. He swallowed capsules and was palpated. A psychologist asked questions about his childhood. He lay on a table listening to soothing music while a Chinese woman stuck needles into his neck.
When he was advised to resume his normal activities, it was like being told to burst into flames.
Head injuries were unpredictable. On this point only, the doctors agreed. A mild concussion could cause symptoms for years afterward. A massive, bell-ringing concussion basically doomed you for life—according to the Traumatic Brain Injury message board, which Anthony checked daily. The posts were like dispatches from another planet—a bleak, ruined planet inhabited by dizzy, nauseated, clinically depressed people who’d lost all interest in living.
On the message board they shared useless information. Melatonin, B vitamins, a drink containing electrolytes. Plastic bands around the wrists to prevent seasickness.
Days got longer, shorter, longer. Warmer, colder, warmer. In this way, years passed.
Unpredictable was the sole point of agreement. The doctors were happy to take his money. Several times a week he rode the Care Van, a free shuttle that made regular stops in Grantham—to ferry decrepit elders to their medical appointments, multiple stops on their journeys to the grave.
On one of these trips, the driver—a friendly old hippie whose name he couldn’t remember—gave him a hand-rolled cigarette.
His brain didn’t work the way it once had. He felt, always, that he was moving at half speed. Smoking weed didn’t make him any quicker, but it quelled his seasickness, the gyroscope spinning inside his head.
He smoked the joint at bedtime and slept deeply. The next morning he went for a walk.
On the bus driver’s advice, he called Tim Flynn.
Each day he walked a little farther. One morning he made it as far as St. Dymphna’s. The church was warm and smelled of candle wax, birthday candles, the best moments of childhood. Gradually the pews filled; the morning Mass happened around him.
He sat in a back pew holding his head.
At Mass he was the kid in the room, the object of geriatric cooing. At Christmas Mrs. Paone knitted him a muffler. Mrs. Morrison baked him a pie. It may not have been accurate to say that faith saved him. If he’d gone through the motions of daily Mass without actually believing, it might have worked just as well.
Each morning he set out walking. He took off his hat so the salt breeze could aerate his brain.
WHEN HE RETURNED TO HIS COMPUTER, AN ALERT WAS FLASHING on his screen, an instant message from Excelsior11—after Tim Flynn, his second-best friend.
Excelsior11: How was turnout?
Not bad, Anthony wrote. Maybe 30, give or take.
Excelsior11: Pix?
Anthony wrote, Uploading them now.
THEY HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR SIX MONTHS, IN THE PECULIAR way strangers know each other online: screen name, alleged age and gender and whatever else the other chose to reveal or embellish or outright fabricate about himself. Excelsior11 lived in a log cabin in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. A Vietnam vet and former long-haul trucker, he now devoted himself, full-time, to the defense of the unborn. These facts were, of course, unverifiable, but Anthony accepted them at face value. It wasn’t the sort of biography anyone would bother to invent.
Excelsior11 was not Catholic. His insistence on this point was, at first, disquieting.