Out in the hall I could hear the nurse and the tech waiting for the doctor, complaining that five minutes was up. Amy’s rib cage raised and lowered softly. I could feel it, in waves, coming over her. Every once in a while she tipped her head back and yawned. I yawned, too. I didn’t want to leave. Everything out there was a mess.
A cop went down the hall, past the crash cart, in sunglasses, telling the nurse at full volume about an arrest he’d made the night before, unpaid bar tab, the drunk daring the cop to cuff him.
“Hey, guess what,” she said. “I talked to someone.”
“About what?”
“I thought I was going nuts.”
“Oh.”
“She seemed to think it was fascinating, but I got bored hearing myself complain.”
“You mean you went once?” She shrugged. “What did you think would happen after one visit to a shrink?”
“I was trying to figure out what to do with you.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
She said my name, nicely. It seemed to emanate from her, without shame.
“You remember my name.”
“I say it all the time. You’re the only person I talk to.”
“Like in your head?”
She didn’t look at all embarrassed.
“What do we talk about?”
She shrugged as though I wouldn’t understand. I thought she was a fucking lunatic.
“Aren’t you afraid God will hear?”
“No.” She looked stoned and windblown, with fuzzy, staring eyes. The nurse strode back in. With this injury came a new honesty—a layer of defense had been breached—and, beneath it, a new vulnerability. Beneath that, though, was another unreadable layer of defense. The tech tapped at the keyboard of her machine. The bright light of this place exposed blue veins in Amy’s temples, they were raised and greenish, but it also lit her eyes, blue gray with gold flecks. I touched her knee. She had soft, smooth legs. “I’m sorry about everything, and I’m sorry you broke your arm.” I opened the velvet bag and took out the bracelet. Giving it to Robin would’ve been worse than throwing it in the gutter.
“I bought this for you.” I put it on her uninjured wrist and tore off the price tag. There was a way of fitting it to her, pulling the ends through the knot. She looked at it, then back at me.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m aware of that.”
She didn’t care about the bracelet at all. “They’re after us, no matter where we go.”
“We’ll move to New Zealand.”
“They’ll get us.”
“We’ll raise sheep and have blond babies.”
“Can I get a bike with black fenders?”
“Yes,” I said, “and we’ll make sheep yogurt.”
“Can I put a bell on the handlebars?”
I said yes. It was better to pretend. She looked at the bracelet again and thanked me.
He wore a loud apron, neon blue, to protect him from the X-rays. The nurse went behind Amy, taking hold of her upper arm with both hands, telling her to buy cast bags at Lowell Drug. Umbrella bags worked too, they were cheaper, you could get them at Costco. In this way Amy could keep her arm dry, as she looked ahead to showering, as if the business at hand was almost done. The doctor’s hat and gloves were blue, and he took the stool I’d been using and held her wrist in his lap. I stood behind them, at the edge of the curtain. The doctor pressed with his thumbs, facing the nurse, walking them calmly down her arm toward the deformed place as the nurse held her upper arm steady. He bent her broken arm. The nurse seemed to brace herself as Amy’s eyes opened wide; he bent it farther, as if flexing an ankle, and all the air went out of her. He yanked it toward himself with a sudden snap, and she groaned.
He pulled it across the drum beside him, a portable X-ray machine with a dark glass surface. The tech kept her white-sneakered foot on the base of the machine, as if pressing down on a gas pedal, watching the monitor on the wall, not lifting her eyes from it. The bones overlapped by half an inch. She told him, “medial,” “proximal,” and cues down to the millimeter. The doctor seemed lost, mushing Amy’s arm, kneading it like bread dough, the blind thumbs looking for the broken ends to mesh. Amy sucked in air, hissing through bared teeth. The lidocaine obviously did work, since her body remained flat and motionless, but something must’ve leaked through, some synapses must’ve blown.
The nurse braced Amy’s elbow as the doctor stood, lifting from the balls of his feet, grimacing, throwing his weight up to the ceiling, the way you would if you were trying to yank a fence post out of a hole, gloves streaked white against his knuckles, the black hair on his knuckles showing through the latex, blue hat going crooked. Amy made a growling noise that shocked me, then suddenly flung herself against the gurney, ripping off the paper sheet. I thought she’d knocked herself unconscious. She said she was light-headed and thought she might pass out. The nurse said, “BREATHE,” and she did, eyes peeled. I saw her silver fillings, black in bright light, her tongue pressed against the gloss inside her mouth.
Sweat ran down my armpits. The doctor checked the screen again. Still not right. My arm started to throb. I felt it twisting and tearing as an imaginary ice-cold hypodermic needle went into my forearm and scraped the bones.
We’d bonded over the shock at how our lives had turned out. One of us had peaked too early and failed to live up to his potential, and the other one was trapped and enslaved and felt prickly hatred upon her skin whenever her husband walked into the room. We filled our emails with every complaint, trying to make our lives sound more tragic, and idealized and taunted and swore to the other, and promised an escape, sometimes hourly, and went ahead causing more pain.
The doctor stood again. My eyes moved from the eyebrows of the nurse, to the purple eyelids of the tech, to the tip of the doctor’s tongue, to the floor. He’d never get it right. I wanted to rip his filthy hands off her. I didn’t really love her, I wasn’t even sure I liked her, although maybe I liked her. But did I like her because I was lonely and she was hot and rich? Or was it because I didn’t get any sleep and had brain damage from speaking baby language? Or because Robin’s booty had snapped back into shape but touching it was still a no-no?
I spaced out and saw myself watching the scene. I thought about the events of this afternoon, and with some satisfaction I began to note sensations and the placement of people and things, for later use: the equipment, the doctor’s canted hat, Amy’s hideous moans, stuff I could play with in the narrative of my forthcoming work. I’d have to massage the dialogue to show vulnerability, humanity, the intensity of the lovers’ bond.