Never mind.
How did I begin…Jesus Christ.
Well,
1
I woke up in the morning with a shell on my back.
I didn’t notice it at first, it being on my back, out of the way. I felt good, well-rested. Healthy. The wound in my shoulder was so perfectly healed I could almost imagine I had dreamt the whole thing. Just almost, though, because my blood-soaked tee-shirt was still draped over the back of my desk chair.
I fingered the hole in the fabric and felt a little sick. My flesh felt fine, unmarred and loose, but my shirt was still damp with my blood, and there was a hole the size of a poker chip to the right of the neck. My fingers came away red-brown and slick. I stood perfectly still for a moment, devoid of thought, and then wadded the shirt into a tight ball and threw it in the trash.
I’d been horribly wounded. Now I wasn’t. Those were the facts I knew in that moment. There were no others.
The sound of clattering pans and running water reached me from the kitchen on the far side of the house. At least one of my roommates was up. After a moment I heard the coffee pot start to bubble, and my stomach growled. I rolled my shoulder and looked at the bloody mess in the trash and covered it with some crumpled papers. Hungry was a good sign. I’d survived something strange, but now it was over. I just had to get past it.
I did some pull-ups on a bar I’d mounted across the top of my closet for just that purpose. The effort, the slow ascent and calm recovery, helped to calm me down. I’ve been able to pull my own weight since I was seven, thanks to my dad the fitness freak. He was a marine, before he met my mom.
Actually, he probably would have said he was still a marine. Marines were like that.
There was a mirror on the back wall of the closet, so when I bent over to grab a pair of pants I couldn’t help but notice the big black thing clinging to my back. I froze. My immediate thought was that a tick had gotten me. Foolish, I know, the shell covered most of my back, but I hate ticks. When I was twelve I got one stuck in my armpit during one of our periodic camping trips, and a lifelong phobia was born. I hate ticks. They were awful.
I remember, I didn’t make a sound, there in the closet. Not a peep.
I’ve always been proud of that.
Stop.
What? What’s wrong?
Start from the beginning.
This is the beginning.
Start from the beginning.
Tell me how you were created.
Well, my mother and father had been married for about a year, and then nature took its course.
That’s not what I mean.
I know that’s not what you mean.
Christ.
It happened like it always happened!
Which, I suppose, means nothing to you.
Tell me how you began.
Yeah.
Fine.
After this, shut up, all right? Let me talk. You wanna get me started, that’s on you. Don’t interrupt. Cool?
Cool?
Good.
Explain cool.
Shaddup, ___________.
How did it happen. Ok.
Let’s see.
Oh yeah. I remember,
If I had to listen to Pomp and Circumstance one more time, I was going to hit someone. This was the ninth time in five days. Five high school bands droning the same plodding melody over and over, entrance and exit, day in, day out. The cymbals were always a hair off time, and the horns were always discordant. It was awful. Edward Elgar, that’s who wrote Pomp and Circumstance. God, what an insipid song.
It was late June, ninety degrees and humid. The forecast called for rain, so we were set up in the gym, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Just that same flat hazy heat-amplifying humidity that made the air feel like somebody had microwaved a wet blanket.
Elgar’s monstrosity ground to a close, and someone started talking. The principal, maybe. I turned on my tablet and tried to take notes, but there wasn’t any point. A trained ape could write graduation notices. Just the same four hundred word blurb with different names: Dryden High School Produced Four Hundred Citizens This Year. Good Job Dryden. It was like writing factory bulletins. Ball Bearing Production Exceeds Quarterly Projections.
Graduations sucked to begin with, and having to be there when I didn’t know anyone graduating made the whole thing as pleasant as a pimple on my ass. I hated writing graduation pieces, but my editor gave me seventy-five bucks apiece for them, and I was living too close to the poverty line to turn up my nose at the extra work. I was twenty-eight years old, working as a journalist in Ithaca, New York, making about twenty-two grand a year. Money wasn’t the most important thing in life, but even so I had more and more the sense that I had hitched my wagon to a dead horse. Newspapers weren’t exactly the fast track in twenty fourteen.
The valedictorian began her speech. Prom factored heavily, so I tuned her out and checked my email, thinking for the fifth time in five days that the valedictorian speechwriting process should be adult-supervised. For the most part, the formative experiences of a child capable of earning valedictorian in a graduating class of more than three hundred are pretty inane. What kind of fun can an eighteen-year-old with a four point three grade point average get up to, anyway?
Look, it’s not that I took the occasion lightly; I just didn’t want any part of it. Graduation is a lot of kids’ first real adult accomplishment, their first concrete victory in life. It’s a milestone. But if the ceremony were any more boring, people would have been passing out in the bleachers. I would rather have kicked a rabid raccoon than sit through another high school graduation. But like I said, I needed the money.
I folded my arms and let my mind wander. The last kid in line, Christopher Zybznmski, was so busy pumping his fists at the crowd he barely looked at the man who gave him his diploma. In my experience there is no one more undeservedly arrogant than a freshly graduated high school senior.
I remember being that old, the way life stretched out so far ahead of me I couldn’t comprehend the possibility of being humbled. I’d done something real for the first time in my life. I could do anything.
The band coalesced and picked up their instruments, and I steeled myself for Samson vs. Elgar: Round Ten. Dryden High School bucked tradition, though, and went with a saccharine cover of In My Life for their outro. Appalling in its own right, to be sure, but a definite improvement over Pomp and Circumstance.
I scooted for the exit. I’d arrived early and gotten the few quotes I needed, so I had no reason to stick around. In deference to past experience, I’d parked on the far side of the science building, away from the crowds, so I wouldn’t have to contend with traffic. If I hurried, and caught all green lights, I could be home and drinking a beer in less than twenty minutes.
Once I had my tie off, it was a beautiful day. I unbuttoned my nice shirt and stuffed it in my bag. Wrinkles be damned.
I was cutting through the field next to the gym when something hit me in the right shoulder and smashed me down onto the ground, on my left side. The impact carried me through a few feet of piss-poor grass and dead dry dirt. The ground churned up around my head. Then gravity too hold and I flopped over on my stomach, slowly. My left arm was pinned under my chest, and my head was twisted around to the right. There was dirt in my mouth.
Something was lodged in my heart. It felt very strange, and not at all pleasant.
Numbness radiated from the wound so quickly that it seemed my body disappeared. I tried to move and couldn’t. With numbness had come paralysis. I could smell the blood streaming out of the wound in my shoulder, overwhelming the smell of dying grass and spent topsoil with the stench of copper and salt. There were two sides to that particular coin: on the one hand, if I was bleeding, that meant my heart was still beating. On the other hand, the only way I would have recognized the smell of blood was if there was an awful lot of it, and I knew I didn’t have an awful lot to spare.
So there I was, plowed into a field by god knows what, bleeding out, paralyzed, and yet somehow, I wasn’t terribly concerned. I’m tough, all right, although I should probably give a little credit to blood loss and shock.
Time passed, and I didn’t die. This was puzzling. There was a lot of blood, and while I was no scientist, I was still fairly certain that I needed blood to survive. At the very least I should have lost consciousness, but as the minutes passed I felt no diminishing clarity. If I could have raised a quizzical eyebrow, I would have. Then again, if I had really been able to move I probably would have called an ambulance. There really was an awful lot of blood.
A thought wormed its way into my head. I would be all right. Whatever had hit me was keeping my brain alive while it repaired the damage done to my body. I shouldn’t worry.
It wasn’t my thought. I thought about that, but didn’t get anywhere.
I was bleeding less. Either I was getting better, or I was running out of blood. One or the other. The coppery smell faded, and the aroma of parched dirt made a comeback, along with the barest hint of grass. If I survived whatever was happening to me, I would come back some weekend with a hose and some seed. Do my part for the betterment of the American education system.
The sun continued its slow, impossibly close arc across the sky; my face was probably burnt to hell.
I examined my choice of parking space more closely. I should have