Amp'd (16 page)

“I thought you could take my old car. Weber knows a guy in town who can retrofit it for…” He trails off, not wanting to form the sounds
one-armed driving,
and I let him off the hook.

“You were just sick of driving me back and forth to work.”

“It was a giant pain in the ass,” he lies.

“Thank you.”

“Take better care of it than the last one I gave you,” he casually reminds me of the used 1985 Ford Laser I drove without adding oil until its engine seized—admittedly a low bar, but I've done nothing if not set low bars for myself.

The prosthetic tricking-out is rather simple: the wheel is fitted with a steering ball or “spinner,” which for practicality cannot interfere with the air bag, and should not, when swung to the bottom position, tear into the driver's groin. Another gizmo transfers hand controls from the left of the steering column (directional signals, wipers) to the right. I'm reminded once more how “lucky” I am to have my right arm to shift the automatic transmission, manipulate the radio and weather controls, use the cup holder and ashtray; but never again all at once like I did in high school: drinking, shifting gears, smoking pot, blasting the Cure, and caressing a date simultaneously with the proficiency of a test pilot.

It's a thoughtful and generous gift Dad's given me, the boon of personal freedom, although neither one of us is prepared for this moment: my first time behind a wheel since the accident, that car T-boned and the world spun in a shower of shattered glass, the rending of metal, the smell of fuel and an ineffectual face full of air bag gas, blood spurting and warm piss seeping, an explosion of sound relegated to hollow ringing as I sat there, a crowd gathering, then, and now a crowd of one, Dad peering in the passenger-side window while the sweat pumps. He pulls open the door and gets inside.

“Take your time,” is all he says, and we sit there until the ringing stops.

Dad actually
yelps
once or twice as I try to teach myself the very basic skill of how to drive without crashing—another low bar I'll try to clear. Soon I'm capable of driving alone, and eventually ready to fail two road tests (surprisingly, the drug cocktail that enabled me to excel at fish counting has proven less effective at the space and time management required to operate a motor vehicle). I barely pass the third and liberate myself from dependence on Dad. Equally surprising: I soon miss our mornings together at the Four Corners while I instead grab gas station coffee and a shrink-wrapped muffin on the way to work I never wanted.

*   *   *

I've missed a week of work while in the hospital and recovering at home, but one of the nice things about working for the government is they don't seem to care (and in fact barely seem to have noticed). I'm enough off my game that at the end of the day my count is short of both Lilith's and Percy's matching numbers. Percy is overjoyed to have his groove back while Lilith seems to be wondering, like so many others before her, why she slept with me in the first place.

The counting of fish will take a hiatus during the winter, and while I'm grateful to avoid the looming freezing temperatures I know will refrigerate my underground workstation, I have mixed feelings about returning to the attic to hibernate. (By “mixed” I mean I'm really looking forward to it but know I shouldn't.) Instead I'm offered a clerical job at the Ick Ick office, and take unkind pleasure in the fact that Percy is not. Lilith too is hired, and it's unspoken between us but understood that as responsible coworkers, we'll be fine as long as she doesn't wear her fish T-shirt to the office.

After weeks in the largely unsupervised subterranean freedom of fish counting, this first morning in the office is jarring. I imagine this is what a rescued stray cat feels like: however warm and cozy and look there's a plate of food and a bowl of water and I can't wait to scratch the covering off that couch but fuck, what's with these walls, God I'm trapped inside let me out let me out let me
OUT
!
I avoid clawing at anyone on my way to my cubicle—in contrast to my underground fish counting station, alarmingly public and somehow smaller on the inside. I sit unmoving for at least twenty minutes in what must appear outwardly to be a quietly meditative state, while inside is the accelerating turmoil of a man hurtling into a future where he dies at this desk of a heart attack that took far too long to get here.

There's a knock on my cubicle wall (an odd formality for a space without a door) and leaning just outside is Will, hired like Lilith and myself to help file data and generate the necessary river of paperwork to keep our government grant afloat. It isn't until I reach to shake his hand that he steps fully into view to reveal
he's missing his right arm
. This is the man I spotted first in reflection and then across the river from me—a munitions expert and veteran, as it turns out—a mirror image of myself: left-armed instead of right, and brave where I am not.

“You serve?” he asks, nodding at my arm.

“Not unless you count Applebee's. Did a tour during college.”

“Lost mine to an IED in Lebanon.”

“I lost mine to three letters too: SUV.”

“Well, both probably belonged to assholes.”

And just like that, I've encountered the first person who knows all the things I know: the frustrations, the struggles, the shame of incompleteness. I'd met another amputee back at ITCH but like to think we shared very little because he was crazy enough to have forced the removal of his own leg. He suffered something called body integrity identity disorder—which in his case had led him to believe his own leg to be a foreign body he needed to expunge. Incapable of doing it himself, he tied a tourniquet around it in order to prevent blood from flowing, knowing that starving it of blood would ruin the leg. By the time he allowed himself to be taken to the hospital, doctors had no choice but to rid him of the offending limb. A happy ending, until he began to think of his remaining leg as another imposter. It made me realize that of all the parts of us we might lose, sanity was the one to which we should cling most tightly.

“These numbers are shitty,” Will continues, and it takes me a moment to catch up to the shift of attention from our shared affliction to the tally from our weeks by the river.

We'd counted several hundred blue paddle snouts, which seems like a lot for an endangered fish. Yet the Wabash once teemed with them in numbers exceeding tens of thousands, which is what it takes to ensure their survival. Sturgeon “broadcast spawn,” meaning they reproduce externally: females scatter their eggs while males release sperm, and the fertilized eggs sink to the bottom where they hatch in about a week. I imagine if the human sex act consisted of a woman expelling eggs from her body while men ejaculated all around them, we'd be extinct in a single generation (except for fetishists who might find that exciting, and those probably aren't the likeliest Darwinian genes for propagating a species). But up until and even shortly after they hatch, the next generation of
Acipenser pseudoboscis
is just fast food for river life looking for a meal on their way downstream. It takes millions of eggs to enable thousands of paddle snout to survive long enough for hundreds of them to do it all over again the next mating season, and the present numbers make that unlikely.

The problem, as Will sees it, is “the goddamn dam.” Built in the sixties for irrigation, it largely blocks the sturgeon from returning to its spawning ground.

“What about the fish ladders?”

“Fish aren't built to climb ladders.”

“Right,” I immediately get it. “I'm remarkably fishlike that way.”

“For a fish to get up those ladders, it has to engage in burst swimming: sudden, high speeds that use more oxygen and energy, and can trigger cardiac arrest.”

“So if the dam doesn't kill them, the race to procreate at the top of the stairs will. It's unnatural. It's why old guys don't put their mistresses in upstairs apartments without an elevator.”

“The dam's also bad for fishing and boating, fucks up the natural environment, and is a goddamn eyesore,” he adds. “
They should blow that shit up,
” is Will's final assessment, and he holds my gaze long enough as if to probe what I might think of that idea, but then excuses himself before I can glean whether this professional exploder of things is joking or not.

 

KINDRED

Work is an enervating slog, a deathless purgatory, an endless, hopeless eternity. My day is spent filling out and filing papers, which is harder than you think one-handed so I tend to use my teeth to compensate but notice some frowning when I'm caught doing so, mostly by Lilith. (She'll find cause to frown again when she comes across those bite-marked files in the weeks to come.) Getting good and stoned is also more difficult here than in my underground hole with a view, and even though I'm legally entitled to my medical marijuana breaks, I'm pretty sure that would inspire more frowning. So I double up on Vicodin and snack liberally on marijuana goldfish, and the day seems incredibly long, an endless road to nowhere stretching out in front of me—until it's over, and then it's nearly forgotten, vanished in the rearview mirror.

But none of that matters because I have a new best friend! Where Joel was the nerdy kid I could feel superior to and Artie was the popular kid who talked me into bold adventures in firecrackers, both managed to make me feel cooler than I was. And now so does Will, completely undaunted by the singularity of his armness … which means
I can be too.
Will doesn't even attract the same stares that I do, possessing an incongruent swagger that lends the illusion of being able-bodied. I've been so energized by the magnitude of his presence that I've dialed back the pot and pills and resumed my morning jog. I also taught myself to shuffle cards one-handed, a trick I refined after repeated viewings of a YouTube tutorial.

“Pretty nifty,” Will graciously pretends to be impressed, although I'm pretty sure he can still take apart and reassemble a rifle with one hand.

He asks if I want to grab dinner and further impresses me by ordering a
fucking steak,
holding it in place by leaning on his fork with his stump and then cutting it into pieces with his left hand.

“How's that steak?” the waitress asks.

“Hot on the outside and tender in the middle, just like some of my favorite people,” he flirts, and she smiles back.

“And your ravioli?”

“Soft and cheesy. As a person, it would leave something to be desired.”

I receive no smile, and she flees the table.

“How do you do that, flirt with a woman while stump-forking your food?”

“Because it is what it is, and I don't care,” Will shrugs. “If you don't care, they don't care. When it bothers you so much, everyone around you is uncomfortable.”

Everyone around you is uncomfortable
is a dead-on description of what bothers me so much. One of us has this backward, and I can't help but think it isn't the one who's effortlessly manipulating a pepper mill with one hand.

In the days that follow we become a homoerotic music-video montage of romantic clichés, hunkered down closely over fish spreadsheets at work and sharing lunch; laughing at DVDs in my attic at night (I imagine us sharing a Snuggie), and baring our nubs (he laughs long and hard at my sea serpent tattoo!); we crash bicycles, inept as we are at hand brakes (but land, laughing), and skip stones by the river, where I suggest how much fun it would be to let firecrackers explode in our good hands.

“There's only one thing here I can see that needs exploding,” his mood hardens, and his next stone careens off the dam.

It's the tiny flaw in the otherwise-perfect diamond that is Will, this occasional vague reference to the dam. He does it in a way that's incomplete, saying just enough to put the idea back on me like an undercover cop posing as a hooker attempting to trap a horny john. I resist the attempt at entrapment with a blazing five-skipped stone and the challenge, “Beat that, you one-armed fucker!” And of course he does, with seven.

It will be a while before the dam comes up again, although it will hang between us like mosquito netting through which we could no longer quite see each other.

 

VISITOR

“We have a visitor,” Dad calls from downstairs.

The last time I heard Dad use that phrase the visitor was sixteen-year-old Pam Jaffe, who had inexplicably come over to head up to my room and press her mouth into mine but wouldn't let me feel her up. I mentally race through an unlikely list of possibilities that includes Lilith, a just-awakened Ariana, my ex-wife, grown-up Pam Jaffe, and even Sunny Lee. What I don't expect to see is our eleven-year-old cancer patient friend from the hospital on a guided tour of the family photos in our hallway as if sightseeing the dullest museum ever.

“That's my father's father,” Dad pokes at an old black-and-white eight-by-ten of a man behind a desk behind a man behind a desk surrounded by men behind desks. “He worked at General Motors for forty-nine years.”

“Did he make motors?”

“I don't know what the hell he did.”

“How did you find us?”

“I Googled you!” he announces cheerily, oblivious to the drawbacks of growing up in a world where anyone who wants to find you can, including ex-girlfriends and Mafia henchmen.

“And here we are,” Dad assesses our place in the universe. And oddly, does not leave the room. “This is Aunt Thelma,” he continues the tour. “I've never seen a picture of her without a cigarette.”

“Who's the guy with the big gun?”

I've passed this hallway every day for weeks now, and these photos have become wallpaper to me, beneath notice, until now. Dad is indeed the man with the big gun, in snow-covered Innsbruck.