The Survivor

Chapter 4

When Nate entered the emergency room, flanked by cops like an escaped convict, the TV in the lobby was already rolling footage from outside the First Union Bank of Southern California. Despite the bandages, blood trickled down his arm, drying across the backs of his fingers like an ill-advised fashion statement. The letter opener, removed from his trapezius and encased in an evidence bag, was handed off to a venerable triage nurse, who looked from it to Nate with an impressive lack of curiosity. She led him through a miasma of familiar hospital smells to Radiology, then deposited him in a room the size of a walk-in closet.

The doctor came in, scanning Nate’s chart as Nate crinkled on the paper sheet of the exam table. “So you got stabbed with a letter opener.”

“It sounds so unimpressive when you say it that way.”

She hoisted her lovely eyebrows.

“Sorry,” Nate said. “I just joke so people don’t notice my low self-esteem.”

“It’s not working.”

“It’s a long-term plan.” He exhaled shakily. The adrenaline had washed out of him, leaving him unsteady and vaguely drunk. Beneath the dull throb of a headache, a jumble of images reigned-a burst of red mist from a hooded head, patches of black mesh in place of eyes, the blood-sodden blouse of the bank teller whose hand he had clasped as she’d died. He was rattled, all right, but given what he’d just been through, he was surprised he didn’t feel worse.

A page fluttered up. The doctor’s pen tapped the chart. “Your liver enzymes are elevated. Taking any meds?”

“Riluzole.”

She looked at him fully for the first time, her gaze sharpening behind John Lennon glasses. “So that’s…?”

The familiar image flickered through his mind-Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man on the face of the earth, against the packed grandstands of Yankee Stadium, his head bowed, cap clutched in both hands to rest against his thighs. “Yes,” Nate said.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“And so you’re … acquainted with your prognosis.”

His prognosis. Yeah. He was acquainted. He knew he would soon have trouble gripping, say, a pen. Then one day he wouldn’t be able to pick it up at all. He knew that his tongue would start to feel thick. Some slurring on and off, at first merely troubling, and then he wouldn’t be able to communicate. Or swallow. He knew that he would in due course require a feeding tube. That his tear ducts would start to go, that he’d need eyedrops and eventually someone else to apply them. He knew that he would feel some general fatigue, at first inconvenient, then debilitating. That he wouldn’t be able to get a full breath. At some point he’d need a CPAP mask at night. And then he’d go on a ventilator. He knew that the cause of the disease was unknown but that there was a significantly increased risk among veterans. There were no answers, and certainly no good ones.

“I am.”

“Where are you in the course of illness?” the doctor asked.

“I was told I could expect six months to a year of good health.”

“When?”

“About nine months ago.” He couldn’t help a dry smile-it so resembled a punch line.

“Any symptoms?”

“A little weakness in my hand. It goes in and out. The symptoms are intermittent. Until they’re not.”

She touched his forearm gently, a technique he employed now and again in his own job. “There are some experimental treatments.”

“Don’t.”

“Okay.” She moistened her lips. “I won’t say anything comforting.”

“Much appreciated.”

She slotted the chart into an acrylic wall rack above a torn-loose People cover sporting an elegiac portrait of Elizabeth Taylor and wormed her pale hands into paler latex gloves. After poking and prodding at the edges of the stab wound, she slotted an X-ray into the light box and regarded it, chewing her lip. “You’re lucky. The point bounced off your scapula instead of punching through to your lung. Mostly muscle damage. You current with tetanus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then just antibiotics and Vicodin, you’ll be back to form in a week”-she caught herself. “On this front, I mean.” Chagrin colored her face, and she busied herself opening a suture packet. “Should we stitch you up now?”

Nate smiled wanly. “We could just let me bleed out on the table, save us all the aggravation.”

“L.A.,” she said, threading the needle. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

He sat quietly, enduring the pinpricks of the local anesthetic, then the tug of his numb skin.

“Everyone’s talking about you,” she said. “The bank. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“The army.”

“You don’t seem the soldier type to me.”

“I’m not. Just signed up for ROTC to pay for college. It was 1994. I was never gonna get called up to active duty.”

She made a faint noise of amusement. A metallic snip as she cut the last stitch. “How’d that work out for you?”

“Not so hot,” he said.