Walker
Sex. I miss it. Or rather, I miss closeness. I miss touch. I don’t miss Miranda per se, but I miss making love. Was it ever that, though, with her? I don’t know. Maybe it was just sex and I was kidding myself all along.
I think back to the last time with Miranda, six months ago, even though dredging the memory up is like necking a bottle of tequila: an exhilarating rush of fire flows instantly through my veins, making me feel alert and alive, but I know that if I keep going – keep remembering – I’m going to regret it in the morning. Like an alcoholic, though, I can’t stop myself from reaching for the bottle.
She flew out to California to see me before I shipped out. We spent the whole weekend locked in a hotel room.
I push the memory away. I don’t want to think about Miranda. When I think about her, about sex, I remember that I’m never going to be with a woman ever again. Who’s going to want a blind cripple?
I remind myself what Doctor Monroe said about not allowing negative thoughts to take hold, but trying to stop them is like trying to stop an avalanche with a feather duster. The fact is as obvious to me as the darkness I’m shrouded in. No one is ever going to want me again. I’m on my own from here on in.
I take a deep, shuddering breath and slam my fist into the mattress. The goddamn darkness. I can’t get away from it. It’s like being slowly buried alive. Every day another shovelful of dirt gets thrown on top of me.
The corridors are silent, apart from the odd echoing footstep when the medic on duty does his rounds and the muffled sound of a radio playing at the nurse’s station down the hall. It’s nighttime. The only difference for me between night and day is that at night I hear the sobs coming from the room at the end of the hallway – a guy called Dodds who had his legs blown off in Fallujah. He gets nightmares too, apparently. No shit.
I think about fumbling for the button on the bed that summons the nurse and begging a sleeping pill, but the pills seem to amplify the dreams, so I don’t. I can’t deal with the dreams right now.
So instead I zone out to the sound of the radio – it’s José on duty, pulling a night shift for the extra money – and for something to focus on, other than the images in my head, I start counting down the number of times I’ve been touched in the last six months.
After Miranda, there was my mom and my dad, both hugging me goodbye at the unit’s send-off. There’s a picture my dad took of me with my arm around my mom. I shook the hand of Colonel Kingsley that day too. My mom probably has a photo of the occasion framed on the wall at home. There won’t be any more photos like that.
Then there were the four months in Afghanistan living in a tent with twelve guys passing wind and jerking off all around me, no physical contact with anything except my rifle and body armour. After that it was Sanchez. I can still remember the dead weight of him in my arms, the stabbing pain in my shoulder and the sheering agony in my knee as I stumbled blindly for what felt like miles, trying to get away from the blast zone and the flames and the bullets. I needed to save one person. At least one. That was all that was going through my mind.
I did, I remind myself angrily. I saved Sanchez. But does he thank me for it? Would he rather I’d just left him to bleed out in the dirt? I haven’t asked him. But I know that if it was me, I’d rather have been left to die.
The memories are muddled after that – jumbled and in pieces. I remember the doctors and the nurses at the combat hospital at Camp Dwyer holding me down, forcing needles into my arms; the reassuringly deft touch of a nurse who squeezed my hand as the anaesthetic crept like ice through my veins; the chaplain visiting me as I lay recovering in my bed, taking my hand for a brief moment before I snatched it away and told him where to stick his prayers; Major Foster patting me on the shoulder after coming to my room to tell me about the medal for bravery they were awarding me, not a scratch of sarcasm in his voice; the C130 pilot strapping me into my seat for the journey back to base; the orthopaedic surgeons here at Pendleton examining my leg; the opthalmologist peeling the bandage off my eyes and running a battery of tests; José helping me to the bathroom and off with my clothes so I could shower that first week when I was little more than a zombie; my mom, smelling of breath mints and perfume, hugging me when they came to visit; my father’s contrasting dry, formal handshake.
A scream jolts me suddenly upright in the bed. My heart rams into my ribs with the force of a pickaxe slamming into rock, and in an instant I’m back there. Back in Helmand on that dusty road, bullets flying overhead, staring at Bailey clutching his leg, writhing in agony and screaming, the sound piercing straight through metal, straight through bone, rattling around my head like a dummy bullet.
The scream cuts out and becomes a hacking sob – and I flop backwards against the pillows, breathing hard, remembering where I am.
It’s just Dodds. I’m in the hospital. Or rather, ‘The Centre for Hope and Care’. An ironic name if ever there was one. There should be a sign over the door saying Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
My heart rate takes a few minutes to settle back to normal. I listen to the sound of José’s voice stretching along the corridor. He’s talking gently to Dodds, sounding like a father soothing an upset toddler back to sleep.
I fumble blindly on the nightstand until my hand closes around the TV remote and I smack a few buttons on it until the TV blasts on. Fox News. I can’t figure out how to change the channel, so I’m stuck with it. A story is playing about an eleven-year-old girl who’s fighting her school over a Chapstick ban. I settle back and listen. Anything to keep the nightmares at bay.