Numb (22 page)

She said, “How are you doing?”

I resisted an instinct that told me to say,
I'm okay
. Instead I told her how grateful I was that she was there. “I don't deserve your help.”

Hiko said, “You may, or you may not. I haven't decided.” She poked at my arm as she said this, letting me know it was as much the truth as it was a tease.

The man finished cleaning the floor and threw the towels into a bin. He stood, almost as tall as me, his face covered with exhaustion and three days of beard, and said, “Okay, sorry about that. What can I do for you?” At his neck hung an ID tag with large red letters:
MD
. He looked about nineteen years old.

Speechless for so long that Hiko reached for me, asked if I had passed out, I said, “You're the doctor?”

“Yep, that's me.” He held up the ID. It could have been a high school yearbook photo. “So, what's up?”

“I'm sorry.” I felt dizzy. “You were just cleaning the floor.”

Hiko had missed that, of course. “He was cleaning what?”

The doctor turned to her. “And you are? Are you a spouse? Only spouses can be here.”

I almost blurted out that she was my wife. Instead, Hiko calmly said, “Please, doctor. Please let me stay.” She didn't press it as hard as she might have if she'd fully forgiven me, but her asking to stay felt like a small offering.

The doctor considered her a moment, semiprofessionally looking at her face, maybe only then realizing she was blind. “Yeah, sure, what the hell.”

No one spoke while he examined me. As he prepared to remove the glass, I took Hiko's hand and said, “Can we—” I took a deep breath as I discovered I didn't know how to end that sentence.

Hiko nodded, removed her glasses. Her eyes fell on me, a happy accident. I saw my reflection in them, smiling at me. “Okay,” she said. “We can talk. But first, let's just get this done.”

The doctor prepared a suture kit. I looked at the tray, needles packed in a clear plastic case and individual sutures in a row in a folded cardboard backing. “After I remove this we'll have to close it up quickly and you'll probably have to go to surgery for more work. It doesn't seem too bad, but we may find it goes deeper than it looks.” He pulled out a needle and a bottle of Novocain.

“I don't need that,” I said.

“You sure? This is gonna hurt.” The bags under his eyes made his eyes seem older than the rest of his face. I decided that maybe he wasn't so young after all.

“I'm sure.”

He held the syringe and bottle of painkiller a moment, looking at the glass in my arm and then at me, uncertain what to do. He didn't know who I was. I wanted to warn him he might end up in a movie for this.

“You're sure?” He had trouble putting that syringe down.

“I don't need it.”

He went to a cupboard and pulled out more gauze. As he did so, Hiko said, “Why did you break in? Why couldn't you wait?”

“I had to see you. I had to do something.”

“Even if it was stupid,” she added.

I concentrated on my arm. Betadine poured from elbow to wrist turned my arm a deep orange-brown. The glass poked up brightly, shining under the surgical light. I felt a tingle along the edge of the glass where it entered my arm.

“Stupid is better than nothing,” I said.

She tilted her head toward me. “Maybe it is.”

“The doctor agrees,” the doctor said. “Now hold still.” With a firm grip on either side of the three-inch triangle he pulled. The glass made a sucking sound similar to nails as they are removed, but deeper, more substantial. Hiko squeezed my other hand as she listened. Another mysterious tingle ran through the cut as the doctor pulled the glass free. Blood quickly pooled in the gap the glass left behind and spilled over, ran down my arm.

Hiko said, “May I have the glass?”

The doctor looked at her, then me, eyes asking if crazy ran in her family. I asked her why.

“I was thinking I might use it in a new piece.”

I nodded. To the doctor I said, “She's an artist.” He only raised his eyebrows in response, certain now that we were both insane. He brought out the needles and sutures to begin closing my arm.

The glass lay on the counter behind the doctor. It proved to be two inches longer than it had looked, the missing length having been in my arm. It rested on a pile of gauze, soaked in my blood. I asked Hiko, “What will you do with it?”

“I don't know. I'll let you know when I decide.”

My attention pulled back to my arm as the doctor tugged the needle through the skin, reminding me of all the nails that had gone through me. But beneath the tugging there was another sensation, something hinting that it would get stronger. It grew—sharp, glaring, and persistent. Then the needle left my skin, pulling the suture behind, and the sensation left with it. I squeezed Hiko's hand with my free one as the doctor brought the second suture in.

“I can't believe you can't feel this,” he said, and he pushed the needle through. Again, beneath the tug burned that other feeling, something I wanted to retreat from if it grew much larger, which it did. My arm twitched.

The doctor saw. “You sure you don't want something for the pain?”

I lost my breath for a moment, then smiled at him. “No. Nothing for the pain. Thanks.”

He prepared the third suture and I lifted Hiko's hand up as if to kiss it, then realized I needed to move slowly, give her time and give myself time too. I watched the needle hang over my arm; the open wound tingled again, longer than before, and then the tip of the needle, the infinitely small point, came against my skin. In that moment before it punched through I had hope that with that one needle, or the next, or the next, I would hurt. I watched as it came so close to breaking the skin. Unable to wait any longer, I began to lift my arm, just barely, hoping that if I could only meet it halfway, I might find my lost sensation and my fear of pain and, in finding it, move beyond it for good.

SEAN FERRELL
's story “Building an Elephant” won the Fulton Prize from
The Adirondack Review
; his short stories have appeared in
Bossa Nova Ink, WORDS, Uber,
and
The Cafe Irreal
. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.
Numb
is his first novel.

www.byseanferrell.com

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