Frozen

19. NUMB

At the hospital someone gave me something to wear.

Someone else brought bandages, patched up the gashes the rocks had torn in my skin. Even though there was no need. Nothing was gushing or dripping. Nothing hurt. Nothing had penetrated the hard shell around the neural cortex and—or so it seemed from the fact that I could still walk and talk—none of the complicated wiring beneath the surface had been shaken loose. I was fine. But I let them patch the skin. I nodded when they told me I needed to get myself checked out—somewhere else, of course, where they knew what to do with things like me. I would have agreed to anything as long as they let me stay.

Auden was gone, swept away behind a set of white double doors, and I sat on a blue padded chair, staring at nothing, waiting.

This isn’t happening, I thought, then cut myself off.

No denial. No rage, no bargaining, no acceptance. I wasn’t getting sucked into any of that five-stages-of-grieving shit, because he was still alive. Ergo, no grief. No denial.

This is happening.

I had wanted to feel. Now I wanted to stop. I wanted to be all those things people were afraid of. I wanted to be cold and heartless, like a computer, like a refrigerator, like a toaster. I wanted to turn myself off.

That, at least, I could do.

I didn’t.

The white doors swung open, and a doctor pushed through. He sat down next to me.

Not good, I thought. If it was good news, he would stay on his feet, he would spit it out quickly, so we could all sigh and laugh and go home. But bad news, he’d want to deliver that face-to-face. He’d want to be close enough that he could pat me on the shoulder. Or catch me if I passed out. Even though, as a doctor, he would know that was an impossibility.

“Has someone contacted his parents?” the doctor asked.

I nodded. “There’s just his father.” It was hard to get words out. Every time I spoke—every time I sent a blast of air through my throat, past my larynx, into and then out of my mouth, I remembered doing it for him, breathing for him, and I wondered if my air had been good enough, if I had been good enough or—

No. I am a machine, I thought. I could control myself. I could control my emotions. They weren’t real anyway, right? Whatever happened, I could handle it. I would handle it.

“He’s on his way,” I said in my pathetic little voice. I didn’t know that for sure, because I’d had to leave the message for him, bad enough, since how do you leave that kind of message? Hi, your son might be dead and if he is, it’s probably my fault. Have a nice day!

The doctor sighed. He had two thin scars in front of his ears and another set framing his nose, telltale signs that he’d just finished his latest lift-tuck. It looked good. I hated myself for noticing. “I should really wait for his guardian to arrive before I go into the specifics of his situation, but—”

“You have to tell me something,” I pleaded. “Please.”

“But, as I was about to say, I don’t think it would hurt to give you a general update.” He paused, and gave me a searching look like he was trying to figure out if I was prone to noisy and embarrassing breakdowns. I wondered if there was a private little room somewhere that they used for conversations like this, a walled-in space where you could shriek and throw things without inconveniencing all those people whose lives hadn’t just fallen apart.

But the waiting room was empty. We stayed where we were.

“Your boyfriend’s heart stopped.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said automatically.

I have never hated myself more than I did in that silent moment after the words were out. There was nothing I could do to take them back.

“Okay, well…” In that pause, I could tell. The doctor hated me too. “Your friend’s heart stopped. He was technically dead for about two hours.”

Was. I held tight to the verb tense.

“But we were lucky that the body temperature was already so low….” The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know how he managed to last as long as he did in water that cold, but it’s made our job a bit easier.”

The water was too cold, I thought.

My fault, I thought.

No one forced him to jump in after me, I told myself. No one forced him to stay.

But I knew better.

“We’ll keep his temp down to slow his metabolism, and keep reperfusion as gradual as possible—resume oxygen supply too quickly and brain cells start dying, but if we do it slowly, we should be able to preserve a substantial amount of brain function.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Substantial.”

“It means we’ll know more when he wakes up.”

“But he will wake up? When?”

“That’s still to be determined,” the doctor said slowly. “But, yes, in cases like this, we’re optimistic for a cognitive recovery.”

“You mean he’ll be okay,” I said eagerly.

The doctor looked uncomfortable.

“You said recovery,” I reminded him. “You said optimistic.”

“I said cognitive recovery. We have every reason to hope that his brain might emerge from this intact. But his body… I’m told you were there, so you must know. The weight of the water crashing down on him, at the speed it was falling, and the rocks… There are impact injuries, crush injuries. He took quite a beating.” The doctor shook his head. “The extent of the damage…”

“You can fix it,” I said. “He has plenty of credit, enough for anything. You have to fix it.”

“There are a lot of things we can fix,” he agreed. “And in cases like this, there are of course”—he paused, then looked pointedly at me. No, not at me. At the body—“other options.”

“Oh.” I looked at the floor. “It’s that bad?”

“It’s bad,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t go into more detail until his father arrives. You’re not family, so…”

“Of course. I understand.”

I understood. I wasn’t his family. I wasn’t his girlfriend. I was nothing.

M. Heller arrived an hour or so later, sans wife number two. He blew past me, pushed aside the nurse who tried to stop him from going through the white double doors, and disappeared behind them. When he emerged, a few minutes later, he looked different. He looked old. He slumped down on the closest chair and let himself fall forward, his head toppled over his knees. He was shaking.

But when he looked up to see me standing over him, his eyes were dry.

“M. Heller, I just wanted to say, I don’t know if they told you that I was with Auden when—Well, anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and I hope—”

“Get out,” he said flatly.

“What?”

“I don’t want you here. Get out.”

“M. Heller, look, I’m not trying to upset you, but your son and I—”

“What?” he said fiercely, like he was daring me to keep going. “My son and you what?”

“Nothing,” I said quietly. I didn’t have any words.

“He’s my son,” M. Heller’s voice trembled on the word. “And they’re telling me he might—” His face went very still for a moment. “I can’t look at you right now. Please go.”

He didn’t have to explain. I got it. They were telling him his son might die—or worse. Might become like me.

And didn’t I know? That kind of thing could ruin a father’s life.

I backed away. But I didn’t leave. I just sat down on the other side of the waiting room. M. Heller didn’t object. He acted like he didn’t notice. So he sat on one side of the room, staring at the floor. I sat on the other side, staring at the wall. And we did what the room was meant for.

We waited.

A couple hours later they let M. Heller see him. No one said anything to me.

The day passed. I left my parents a message, the obligatory assurance I was still alive. They didn’t need to know any more than that. M. Heller disappeared behind the white doors for hours. Still no one told me anything. No one on the staff would speak to me. Until finally the doctor I recognized appeared again. I grabbed him as he passed. “What’s happening? Is he awake? Can I see him?”

The doctor rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, but the patient’s father has insisted that he not have any visitors.”

At least I knew he was still alive.

“Can you at least tell me how he’s doing?”

“M. Heller has also…” The doctor sighed and shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to give out any more information about the patient’s status.”

“Not to anyone?” I asked, already suspecting the answer. “Or…?”

“Not to you.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to break something. Like M. Heller’s neck. Or even the doctor’s, since he was closer at hand. But instead I just sat down again, like a good little girl, following the rules.

I waited.

I waited for M. Heller to change his mind. It didn’t happen. So then I changed my strategy. I waited for him to leave or fall asleep or eat. Because he would have to do one of them eventually. He had needs.

I didn’t.

A day passed, and a night, and it was nearly dawn again when a nurse escorted M. Heller back into the waiting room. She stayed close, as if expecting him to stumble or to lose the ability to hold himself up. Lean on me, she projected, shoulders sturdy and ready to carry the burden. But he stayed upright. Separate and unruffled, like nothing could touch him. His eyes skimmed over me as if I wasn’t there.

“I’ll be back with his things,” I heard him say, hesitating in the doorway. “You’re sure it’s—”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “Go home and get a little sleep. Save your strength. He’s going to need it.”

M. Heller nodded. It took him a moment too long to raise his head again. “And you’ll let me know if anything… changes.”

“Immediately,” she said. “Go.”

He left. Which meant I just had to choose my moment. Wait until no one was watching. Then slip through the white doors. Find Auden’s room. Find Auden. See for myself, whatever it was. Even if it was something I didn’t want to see.

I waited.

He was asleep.

At least, he looked like he was asleep. His eyes were closed. That was almost all I could see of his face: his eyes. The rest was covered with bandages. It didn’t look like Auden. It barely looked like a human being, not with all the tubes feeding in and out of every orifice and the regenerative shielding stretching across his torso and definitely not with the metal scaffolding encasing his head like a birdcage. Four rigid metal rods sprouted from a padded leather halter that stretched around his shoulders and collarbone. They connected to a thin metal band that circled his skull. Slim silver bits dug into his forehead at evenly spaced points, pinching the skin and holding the contraption in place. A bloody smear spread over his left eyebrow, and I tried not to imagine someone drilling the metal bit into his skull. I wondered if he’d been awake, if it had hurt; if it still hurt. I didn’t want to know what it was for.

There was a metal folding chair to the left of his bed. I sat down. His right arm was in a cast. His legs were covered by a thin blue blanket. But his left arm lay exposed and, except for a few small bandages and the IV needle jabbed into his wrist, feeding some clear fluid into his bloodstream, the arm looked normal. Healthy. So, very gently, careful not to jar any of the delicately assembled machinery that surrounded his body, I rested my hand on top of his.

I wondered where his glasses were, in case he needed them. No—when he needed them. Then I remembered they were probably floating downstream somewhere, miles away. Maybe they’d made it to the ocean. I didn’t even know if the river hit the ocean. But everything does eventually, right?

He opened his eyes.

“Hi!” No, that was too loud, too fakely cheery. He’d see through it. “Hey,” I said, softer.

Nothing.

“Auden? Can you hear me?” I leaned over him, so that he could see me, even with his head pinned in place by the metal cage. “It’s me. Lia.”

I wondered if he could understand what I was saying.

Substantial amount of brain function, the doctor had said without ever clarifying what “substantial” meant. Something more than none; something less than all.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said, just like I’d said on the way to the hospital, just as uselessly. I remembered, then, how much I’d hated it when people had said it to me. How ridiculous, how unacceptable it had sounded coming from people who were whole and healthy. Nothing would be okay, I’d thought after the accident. And I’d hated them for lying. “The doctor says you’ll be fine.”

“You must be talking to a different doctor,” he said. Wheezed, more like. His words were slow and raspy, like he hadn’t used his throat in a long time. And like they hurt coming out.

But still, I smiled, and my smile was real. He was back.

“I was so—” I stopped myself. He didn’t need to hear how I’d been torturing myself in the waiting room, worrying. This wasn’t about me, I reminded myself. It was about him. “You look like crap,” I said, trying to laugh. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

It figured. They had pretty good drugs these days, and he was no doubt getting the best.

“So, I guess we’ve got something in common now,” I said. “We’ve both been technically dead, and come back to life.” Was it inappropriate to joke? Would it make him feel better, or would it make him think I didn’t care? “Better be careful, or the Faithers will start worshipping us or something.”

“Uh-huh.”

Okay. Too soon to joke.

“I saw your father in the waiting room. He was really worried about you. I guess he cares more than you… Well. Anyway. He was worried.”

“Yeah.”

It probably hurt him to talk.

“Not that he has to be worried, because you’re going to be fine. Doctors can do anything these days, right? Just look at me.”

Wrong thing to say.

Everything I said was the wrong thing to say.

I rubbed my palm lightly across his, wishing that he would grasp my hand, squeeze my fingers, do something to indicate that he wanted me there. But he didn’t. I held on anyway. His skin was warm, proof that he was still alive.

“You were amazing, you know that?” I said. “When you jumped in to rescue me? They said the water was so cold you shouldn’t even have been able to—” I stopped. Neither of us needed the reminder. “It was really heroic. To save me.”

“It was stupid.”

“No, Auden….”

He didn’t speak again, just stared at the ceiling.

“You’re tired,” I said. “I should probably go, let you sleep—”

“Don’t you want to know?”

“What?”

“What the doctors said.” His lips turned up at the corners, but it wasn’t a real smile, and not just because the bandages held most of his skin in place. “The prognosis. All the thrilling details.”

“Of course I want to know.” I didn’t.

Especially when he started reciting it in a dry, clinical tone, words out of a medical text that didn’t seem to have any connection to him, his body, his wounds. Punctured lung. Internal bleeding. Bruised kidney. Lacerations. Fractures. The heart muscle weakened by multiple arrests. A cloned liver standing by for transplant, if necessary. They would wait and see. “And the grand finale,” he said, his voice like ice. He sounded like his father. “Severed spinal cord. At C5.”

I didn’t understand how so much damage could have been done so quickly, in thirty seconds… and thirty feet. Don’t forget the eighty thousand gallons of water, I thought. And yet I was just fine.

“Auden, I’m so… I’m so sorry.” I threaded my hand through the metal cage and brushed my fingers against his cheek.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “Don’t.”

I yanked my hand away. But my left hand still rested on his. Out of his sight line, I realized. I squeezed his fingers, tight, waiting for him to tell me to let go.

He didn’t.

“What?” he asked, sounding irritated.

I stared at his fingers, the fingers that hadn’t moved since I came into the room. The fingers that he was letting me touch, even though he didn’t want me touching him.

“Does it hurt?” I asked again, for a different reason this time.

“Nothing hurts.” He sounded like a robot. He sounded like I sounded before I got control of my voice again, when I had to communicate through an electronic box.

“What does it mean? What’s going to happen?”

“C5. That’s C for cervical, five for the fifth vertebra down,” he said. “They’ve got it all mapped out. C5 means I keep head and neck motion. Shoulders, too. Eventually. It means right now I can’t feel anything beneath my neck. It means I’m fucked for life.”

“Not anymore,” I protested. “They can fix that now. Can’t they?”

“They fuse the cord back together. Yeah. And then nerve regeneration. You get some feeling back. You get some motion. They call it ‘limited mobility.’ It means you can walk, like, a little. A couple hours a day. And apparently if I practice, I might be able to piss for myself again.”

“So that sounds…” It sounded like a life sentence to hell. “Hopeful.”

“Yeah. As in, they hope it won’t hurt so much I spend the rest of my life doped up, but they’re not sure. As in, they hope they can put me back together enough that I don’t die in ten years, but they’re not sure. Fucking high hopes, right?”

There had always been something sweet to Auden, something carefully hidden beneath the cynicism and the conspiracy theories and the family baggage, as if he was afraid to reveal his secret reservoir of hope. But that was gone now. There was nothing beneath the bitter but more bitter. It’s temporary, I told myself.

Things change.

“If it’s that bad, why don’t you… take the other option?” I asked.

“And exactly what might you be referring to?”

I hesitated. “Nothing.” So that was it. He didn’t want to be like me, no matter what he may have said. He’d rather be miserable, debilitated, in pain, than be like me. Maybe I couldn’t blame him.

“Say it.”

“Nothing.”

“Say it!” Something beeped, and he took a deep, gasping breath. “Better listen to me,” he said, panting. “I’m not supposed to get agitated.”

“Why don’t you download?” I said quickly, remembering something else I’d hated when I was the one trapped in a bed. The way everyone suddenly got so scared of nouns, as if vague mentions of “what happened” and “your circumstances” would make me forget what was actually going on. As if by not saying it out loud, they were helping anyone but themselves.

“Brain scans.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—What?”

“They took brains scans,” he said, haltingly. “And there was an anomaly.”

I still didn’t understand.

“I’m disqualified,” he said. “Structural abnormalities. Predisposition for mental disorder and/or decay. Unlikely but possible. So just in case—automatic disqualification. They don’t want me living forever if I’m going to go crazy, right?” He laughed. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

I pressed my lips together.

“Yeah, no one else seems to think so either,” he said. “Maybe I’m crazy already.”

“They can’t fix it?” I asked softly. “Whatever it is?”

“They could have. Before I was born. If they’d known about it, if my mother had let them screen for that kind of thing. But she thought it was superfluous. She only wanted the basics.” He laughed again. It was a weirdly tinny, mechanical sound, since his body was immobilized and his lungs were barely pumping any air. “Thanks, Mom.”

“There’s got to be something you can do, if you paid enough, some way to change their minds?”

“Nothing. No brand-new body for me. I’m stuck with this one. For life.” He paused. “As long as that lasts.”

I squeezed his hand again. Not that he felt it.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “They can make a fake body from scratch, but they can’t fix a real one. Guess there’s only so much you can do when you’re stuck with damaged goods.” He didn’t laugh. “No, I guess that’s not very funny either.”

“I can help,” I told him. “I know how it feels, lying there, thinking your life is over. I understand.”

“You understand nothing,” he spat out. “That’s what you always used to tell me, right? ‘You can’t understand, not unless you’ve been there.’ You’ve never been here.”

“You’re alive,” I said, aware that I was sounding like call-me-Ben, like Sascha, like every medical cheerleader I’d ever wanted to strangle. And now I finally got why they’d said all that. They needed to believe it. You couldn’t look at someone so broken and not believe they could, somehow, be fixed. “That’s something.”

“Something I don’t want. Not like this.”

So I said what all those cheerleaders never had. The truth. “Neither would I. And… it’s never going to be like it was before. Never. That will never be okay. But you will.”

He snorted.

“I know you don’t believe it,” I said desperately. “I know it all sounds like greeting-card bullshit that doesn’t apply to you, but it does. Maybe I can’t understand everything, but I understand that. The way you feel? I honestly don’t know if that goes away. But people—you—can get used to things, even if it seems impossible now. You can make it work.”

“Oh really?” he said, bitterness chewing the edges of the false cheer. “Thanks so much for the insight. So I can get used to a machine telling me when it’s time to pee, and when it’s time to shit, and then helping me do it—and that’s after all the regeneration surgery’s done. Until then, I just get a diaper. You think you could get used to changing it for me? I can get used to internal electrodes that spark my muscles into action and let me walk around and pretend I’m normal until it hurts so much that I fall down and have to get someone to cart me away? They tell me that part’s the medical miracle. Twenty years ago I might have been a lump in this fucking bed for the rest of my life, with people feeding me and turning me and wiping my ass. So you think I can get used to people telling me how fucking grateful I should be? And I can get used to my lungs working at half capacity, if I’m lucky, and feeling like I’ve got an elephant stomping on my chest—at least until the fluid builds up, and while I wait around for them to come suck it out, it just feels like I’m drowning? Not that you would know anything about that.”

“It sucks,” I said. “I know that. But you’re not alone. You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here, just like you were there for me.” I remembered the day I froze in the quad, the way he knew exactly what to say and what to do, even though he didn’t know me at all. And now no one knew me except for him. “We’ll do this together.”

“Together.” He snorted. “Right. And maybe you’ll finally fall deeply in love with me and make all my dreams come true. We’ll live happily ever after. As long as they can rig me up with some kind of hydraulic system. Not like I ever got to do it the normal way, so I guess I won’t even notice the difference.”

“Auden, don’t—”

“Don’t what? Tell you all about how my penis may get ‘moderate sensation’ back, and if I respond well to the electrical-impulse therapy—which, let me tell you, my penis and I are really looking forward to—I might, might be able to get the fucking thing up, up for some fucking, I mean, but—”

“Please don’t.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I grossing you out with all the medical details? Or is it the thought of having sex with me that disgusts you?”

He wanted me to fight with him. I wasn’t going to do it. Not now. Not here. “I thought my life was over when I woke up like this,” I said. “But you’re the one who told me that I could handle it. That I could start fresh.”

“This is different.”

“I know, but—”

“No!” The beeping started again. “You don’t know. This isn’t what you went through. This isn’t what you understand. This is me, my life. This is the way it’s going to be forever: shit.” He closed his eyes, sucking in heavy gulps of air.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, silently pleading with him to stay calm. “Just tell me what you want from me. What can I do?”

“You can get out.”

I stood up. “You’re right. You should try to sleep. I’ll come back later.”

“No. You should get out and not come back. Ever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is your fault,” he said in a low voice. “What happened… It’s your fault.”

“It was an accident. You were just trying to… save me.” When I didn’t need saving.

“Seems like I’ve been doing that a lot,” he said. “You do something stupid, you do something reckless, and I fix it. You treat me like crap, and I save you again. Because I’m stupid. Was stupid.”

I closed my eyes. “You’re my best friend.”

He went on like he hadn’t heard. Or didn’t want to. “You’re probably happy, aren’t you? Why should anyone else get to be healthy and normal if you’ve got to walk around like some kind of mechanical freak, right?”

He’s just trying to hurt me, I told myself. And I had to let him do it if that’s what he needed. I had to do whatever he needed.

This is not my fault.

“Maybe this was the plan all along. Is that it? Is that why you kept dragging me along with you, making me take all those stupid risks? You were trying to get me killed—Excuse me, I mean, get me broken?”

“Of course not! This was an accident.”

“This was inevitable. And if you didn’t see that, you’re as stupid as I was.”

“Auden, come on. I… I love you.”

“But not in that way, right?”

I would have happily lied if I’d thought there was even a chance he would believe me. “No. But—”

“But I’m supposed to grovel at your feet, thankful for whatever I can get from you, right? Sorry, not in the mood today. I’m not feeling too well.”

“Tell me how to make this better. Please.”

“I already did: Get out. The only reason I’m talking to you now is that I wanted you to hear it from me. What you did. Now you know. So we’re done.”

I didn’t move.

“Obviously I can’t force you,” he said. “I’m just going to close my eyes and pretend you’re not here. And hopefully when I open them, you won’t be. You want to do something for me? Do that. Help me pretend I still have some fucking control over something.”

He closed his eyes.

I left.

But I didn’t leave the hospital. Because he was right: He didn’t have control over anything anymore. Including me.

I went back to the waiting room. I watched his father return. I watched the doctors and nurses pass through on the way from one crisis to another.

I waited.

I waited until late that night, after his father had fallen asleep and the few remaining doctors and nurses were too busy watching the clock to watch me. And once outside his doorway, I waited again, watching, making sure Auden was asleep.

Then I crept inside. I lifted the chair and placed it at the foot of his bed where, even if he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to see me. He obviously wouldn’t hear me breathing. And he wouldn’t feel my hands resting on the lumpy blanket, cradling his useless feet.