When She Was Bad

2

“Good evening, Mr. Maxwell-and how’s my strong silent type this evening?” Swingshift nurse, fat, cheerful, sloppy in white. Max, paralyzed from the neck down, followed her with his eyes, mentally gagging and hog-tying her.

“Ooo-if looks could kill,” she said forbearingly. “Look here, I’ve brought your dinner. Let me see now, we have…sirloin steak, medium rare, peas, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, Caesar salad, hold the anchovies….”

All nonsense, of course. Max received his nutrition through a nasogastric feeding tube. He tried to stop her from talking by the sheer force of his loathing, but all she had to do was move out of his direct line of sight and she would disappear. Max could no more have turned his head than he could have tap-danced his way out of the state-run shit hole to which he’d been confined since his extradition to Oregon, pending a dozen trials that were now unlikely to ever take place.

For one thing, Max’s lawyers could now legitimately argue that he was unable to aid in his own defense-the doctors were split on whether his continued mutism, even when the feeding tube was removed, was physical, voluntary, or psychosomatic. For another, not many prosecutors were all that keen on trying a man who’d have to be wheeled into the courtroom tied to his wheelchair, with urine dripping into a baggie at his side and his respirator, plugged into a permanent tracheostomy hole, going hiss-suck! hiss-suck! every five and a half seconds.

So the view from the antique, horizontally rotating Stryker frame never really changed. It only shifted between the discolored, water-stained, off-white ceiling tiles and the one-foot-square, black-and-white floor tiles whenever the staff got around to clamping a canvas stretcher on top of him and spinning him around like a pig on a spit. There was a window somewhere off to one side, but all he could see of it was the waxing and waning of daylight.

As if being sentenced to life without parole in his own body weren’t punishment enough (only the State was debarred from cruel and unusual punishment: nature practiced it on a regular basis), every so often Max would be stricken by a headache. For the able-bodied, even the able-bodied migraine sufferer, it’s hard to fathom the effects of a headache on someone who only has sensation from the neck up-let’s just say that old cliche about being in a world of pain had never been more applicable.

And there was another factor that exacerbated his suffering: Max had skated through most of his existence without having to endure even prolonged discomfort-that, after all, had always been Lyssy’s job. From youthful boredom to third-degree burns, from gas pains to gunshot wounds, from aches to amputations, the system had always had Lyssy as its scapegoat.

But Max could no longer summon Lyssy at will. He’d tried, those first few months, fucking Jesus how he’d tried. Raging, cajoling, threatening, promising-nothing worked. Even worse (dear God and all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell, how many layers of “even worse” were there in this stinking onion of existence), Max himself had been unable to retreat to the dark place-it was as if Lyssy had somehow locked the door behind him. The door in the wall that didn’t exist.

Sleep was the only refuge left to Max-but with sleep came dreams even less bearable than his waking hell. He could never fully recall them when awake, but they must have been pretty awful if he could wake up to all this with even a transitory sense of relief.

There were only two things that kept Max going, or rather, that kept him from letting go of his tenuous hold on sanity. One was that it couldn’t last forever: when he’d first arrived, he’d overheard a doctor telling the nurse that on the life expectancy charts, a C-3 quadriplegic fell somewhere between a hamster and a house cat.

The other thing standing between Max and the Big Scream was that he still hadn’t given up on Lyssy. The little bastard was in there, all right, and Max remained convinced that sooner or later he’d come up with a way to get him out, to swap places. A few minutes ago, in fact, he’d come up with what felt like a very promising approach, but one that would require his complete concentration.

So he waited for the nurse to leave before closing his eyes. Lyssy! he called. Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble-I need your help.

And again: Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble-I need your help.

And again and again and again, without a hint of a response. Unable even to sigh unless he timed it to the hiss-suck! of the respirator, Max opened his eyes again and settled in for another long night in hell.