The One-Eyed Man Page 5

  I never asked what he did with the bag, and he never told me.

  None of this, incidentally, has anything to do with why I felt responsible for Sarah’s death. That die was cast well before the night she died—before, in fact, either of us had any idea that she was sick.

  5

  FIFTEEN MINUTES

  Hospitals aren’t as bad as people make them out to be, so long as you’re not in mind-erasing pain and have a private room and a nurse who’s willing to let you eat your fill of ice cream. I’d hit the jackpot in all three regards. My pain was sufficiently blunted by a Dilaudid drip. I had a private room, owing ostensibly to the quality of my job’s HMO plan, but moreover to my new status as a local hero. And I had the most solicitous nurse I’d ever met in my life, maybe the nicest person to ever grace the halls of an intensive care ward. She was shaped like a Bartlett pear, and treated me with a grandmotherly indulgence that was pleasant rather than oppressive.

  I didn’t have to ask for the ice cream. It just showed up, one three-ounce cup after another, its satiny sweetness rendered all the more delicious by the Dilaudid buzz. I tasted every bite in a way I hadn’t tasted anything in a long time. The only problem was all they had were cups of Neapolitan, so I had to excavate the chocolate and vanilla from around the stripe of strawberry, which was not anything resembling easy with only one useful hand. But the nurse was far too kind for me to complain about such a trifling thing, so I made do.

  I was in the ICU because the bullet had ricocheted off my collarbone and nicked my subclavian artery. By the time I hit the table in the emergency room I’d lost a quarter of the blood in my body, and I lost another quarter of it before they got the artery repaired.

  “You were very lucky,” both the surgeon and the nurse told me.

  The pear-shaped nurse was more excited at my good fortune than anyone else. I just smiled and nodded, because she was so nice and I didn’t want to do anything to disappoint her.

  It was different with the surgeon.

  “This doesn’t feel lucky,” I told him.

  “I know it hurts,” he said, meaning my broken collarbone, “but really, a quarter of an inch further down and you would have bled to death in the street.”

  “I guess my point,” I said, “is that the man with the gun wasn’t aiming at me, or really aiming at all—he just turned in my direction and pulled the trigger when I startled him. The bullet could have gone anywhere. That it ended up in my shoulder, given the odds, doesn’t feel lucky. It feels bad-lucky.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” the surgeon said while he hen-pecked at a tablet computer.

  “Lucky,” I went on, “would have been something like, for example, he fires the gun and the bullet misses me altogether but hits the ATM across the street, causing it to malfunction and spit out thousands of dollars, which I then could have collected before the police showed up.”

  “Right,” said the surgeon.

  “That would have been lucky.”

  The surgeon typed some more. His fingertips made faint little padding noises on the tablet screen.

  “I’ve never understood why when bad things happen people fall all over themselves to tell the victims how lucky they are,” I said. “‘You’re lucky they caught the cancer early and all they had to do was cut your colon out.’”

  The surgeon finished typing and placed the tablet screen-up on his lap. “Do you have any other questions?” he asked brightly.

  “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” I told him.

  “Okay then,” he said, standing to go. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow afternoon.”

  • • •

  Aside from the doctors and the matronly nurse, I had plenty of other visitors.

  First came the police, two uniformed cops and one detective in pleated khakis and a red oxford with a badge clipped to his waistband. They arrived not long after surgery on my artery had concluded. It was now early evening, and I’d come out of sedation just enough to begin speaking something that resembled English. The detective asked the questions. The guys in uniform stood silent and stone-faced the entire time; for all I knew, they might have been the world’s only mute cop partners. I’d never been interviewed by the police before, and had imagined that it would be a less pleasant experience. But I had enough narcotics in my system that thumbscrews would have seemed only moderately uncomfortable, and besides, the detective turned out to be almost as kind and solicitous as my nurse. He thanked me several times, for being at the coffee shop the night before, and for my willingness to talk so soon after such a harrowing experience. He said that he planned to recommend me, with vigorous insistence, for something called the Citizen’s Valor Award. He said, in parting, that he hoped his son grew up to be half as brave as I was. On his way out he put a hand on my good shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  Tony and Art showed up the next day, carrying a miniature wooden palette box with the words MAN CRATE stenciled on the side in a blocky, masculine font.

  “It’s like a gift basket,” Tony said as he pried the lid off with a miniature novelty crowbar. “Only, you know, for a guy. Got some jerky in here, some corn nuts.”

  “I don’t know if I’m allowed jerky or corn nuts,” I said. “You’ll have to clear it with the nurse. She’s very nice.”

  “This was Alice’s idea, by the way,” Tony said. “I’ve been trying for years to figure how to get out of the doghouse with her. Turns out all you need to do is get shot.”

  “She’s not mad at me anymore?” I asked.

  “She’s still mad,” Tony said.

  Art nodded confirmation of this fact.

  “She’s just more worried than mad, at the moment,” Tony said. “But if you want to stay in her good graces, you’re probably going to have to up the ante and die in the next couple days.”

  “I’m not a physician,” I said, “but that seems unlikely, at this point.”

  “Then take it from me,” Tony said, handing over a plastic sack of jerky, “enjoy the reprieve while it lasts.”

  Art helped himself to some trail mix. “So tell us,” he said around a mouthful of peanuts and Craisins, “what in the actual fuck happened?”

  I pushed a button to raise myself to a sitting position. “I got shot,” I said.

  “Clearly,” Art said. “But how?”

  “I intervened in a robbery,” I said.

  “K., we read the newspaper,” Tony said. “What he’s asking is, did you wade in there like a boss? Karate chop the guy in the neck?”

  “I knocked on the window to get his attention,” I said.

  They stared.

  “Then he shot me,” I said. “It was pretty low on the heroism scale.”

  Tony shook his head. “Seriously, K.,” he said, “the more time goes by, the more I think Alice is right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “That you’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

  “What would you have done?” I said.

  “Me?” Art asked.

  “Either of you,” I said.

  “I would have hidden in the bushes like a little bitch,” Art said. He tossed back another handful of trail mix.

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of 9-1-1?” Tony said.

  “Of course I’ve heard of 9-1-1,” I said.

  “Did you think to dial it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And then you just strolled over and knocked on the window,” Tony said.

  “I didn’t really have many options,” I said.

  “You had the option to hide like a little bitch,” Art said.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Well crazy or not, you’re a better man than I am,” Tony said. “Because I gotta be honest, I wouldn’t have the stones to do what you did.”

  I motioned for Tony to hand me the cup of water on my bedside tray. “It had nothing to do with stones,” I told him.

  “I don’t mean literal rocks, ya mook,” Tony said. He lifted the cup and placed it in my good hand.<
br />
  “I know,” I said. “You mean testicles. As a metaphor for courage.”

  “Very good,” Tony said.

  “It would have been a different calculus for you,” I told him. “You’ve got Alice. You’ve got the kids.”

  Tony tilted his head from side to side, not entirely convinced. “Still,” he said.

  “Besides which,” I said, “I can tell you that this wasn’t courage. At least not the way I understand the word. It was more like being a robot. Or a golem.”

  I raised the cup to my lips. The water, having sat on the table for several hours, had gone utterly inert except for a slight chlorine bouquet.

  “Plus,” I said, handing the cup back to Tony, “there’s that other thing.”

  Tony pointed an admonishing finger at me. “The thing of which we will not speak,” he said.

  “That thing,” I confirmed.

  “Which thing?” Art asked, digging around in the trail mix bag for the last few peanuts.

  “The utterly batshit thing of which we will not speak,” Tony said to him. “You’re out of the loop. And trust me, you want to stay out of the loop.”

  “Actually, now that you mention it, I know about that thing,” Art said, looking to Tony. “I knew about it before you did.”

  “Both of you,” Tony said. “Zip it.”

  • • •

  The girl from the coffee shop, whose name was Felicia, showed up a few hours after Tony and Art left. The extremely nice nurse announced her arrival, and then Felicia walked into my room slowly, hands clasped in front of her waist. For a few moments she stood just inside the doorway, staring at me. Tears brimmed in her big dark eyes, shimmering in the light from the overhead fluorescents. She was, to all outward appearances, unharmed by her encounter with the man who had semiaccidentally shot me. Behind Felicia stood a kid with satellite dish ears and a blond crew cut, presumably her boyfriend. The boyfriend held a bouquet of roses and daisies. Instead of a vase, the bouquet was jammed into a large mug painted to resemble a can of Campbell’s chicken soup. FEEL BETTER SOON, the mug read.

  “Hello,” I said to Felicia.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  Felicia didn’t answer. Instead, she started to cry. She put her hands to her face—much as she had in the coffee shop when the man pointed the gun at her—and crossed the distance between the doorway and my bed with quick, shuffling steps. She threw herself against me, causing my shoulder to launch a flare of pain through the cool fog of narcotics. I put my good arm around her and kept quiet while her body hitched with sobs.

  The boyfriend remained in the doorway, still holding the bouquet and shifting from foot to foot. I motioned with the hand slung over Felicia’s back for him to put the flowers on the nightstand.

  Felicia eventually cried herself out, and then, still clinging to me, she spoke in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it despite the proximity of her lips to my ear. “You saved my life,” she said.

  Until now I hadn’t really thought about this, so I took a second to respond. “We don’t know that for sure,” I told her.

  Felicia pushed herself up from the bed and looked at me. “He was going to kill me,” she said. “I saw it on his face. I can’t stop seeing it.”

  “Maybe after a while, if you’re lucky, the memory will fade.”

  “Never,” she said. “It’ll never go away. I see his face, and then I see you falling.”

  “Still, even if he had shot you,” I said, “it’s not a foregone conclusion that you would have died.”

  The fingers of Felicia’s left hand, which rested on my good shoulder, tightened slowly, bunching the thin cotton of my hospital johnny. “You saved my life. I want you to say it.”

  I thought for a moment. “I suppose,” I said, “if I hadn’t finally crossed the street and knocked on the window, it’s at least likely you would have died.”

  “What do you mean, ‘finally’?” Felicia asked.

  “I’d been standing on the corner for hours, trying to get to the coffee shop for my Americano. You probably know me as the Americano guy.”

  She blinked several times. “Lots of people get Americanos.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, the cross signal was broken. It just kept saying DON’T WALK. So I didn’t walk. Until I heard you scream. That sort of broke the spell.”

  She furrowed her brow. “You were out there all afternoon?”

  “Yes. A good portion of the morning, as well.”

  “So wait. If not for the broken cross signal, you would have come and gone hours before I got held up.”

  I considered this. “I suppose so, yes,” I said.

  Felicia smiled warmly, and her fingers released the johnny. “It was fate. You were meant to be there,” she said. “You’re a hero.”

  • • •

  The first reporter, a thin guy who looked like he’d graduated from college five or ten minutes before arriving at my hospital room, came in later that same afternoon. He worked for the local CBS affiliate, and looked the part: cheap shirt and tie, cheaper haircut. For a television personality he was, at first, surprisingly taciturn. His cameraman took ten minutes to set up, during which time the reporter said almost nothing to me and barely looked up from the screen of his smartphone. As soon as the camera began recording, though, the reporter transformed utterly. His face, previously stony and bloodless, came to startling life, filled with color and fellow feeling. His eyebrows undulated like caterpillars, and he leaned toward me as he spoke, punctuating his words with swipes of the silver pen in his right hand. While I talked, he listened with the intensity of a supplicant straining to hear the voice of God. He nodded vigorously at every other word out of my mouth. He had several set expressions that he could assume in an instant. There was The Pensive: eyes squinted in concentration, hand on chin, index finger nestled in the hollow beneath his bottom lip. There was The Aghast: hands clasped before his chest in a pantomime of nervous anticipation, mouth ajar and eyebrows raised so high they nearly collided with his hairline. There was The Agreeable: nodding and smiling, his face cheerfully vacant, as though he were chatting with an ethnically balanced group of friends in a beer commercial.

  Like most performances it seemed garish in person, but likely would be quite affecting once filtered through the cheesecloth of television.

  “But so let’s go back a moment,” the reporter said, his pen slicing the air. “Because what I want to know is, at what point did you realize you were the one who had to save the girl? What was that moment like?”

  “Well there was no moment when I realized I had to save her,” I told him. “That wasn’t how it went, really, at all.”

  The reporter seemed not to hear this. “Were you frightened but determined? Or were you perhaps angry that this was happening here in your safe, quiet neighborhood, where people should be able to go out at night without worrying that they’ll be robbed?”

  “Neither of those things,” I said.

  “So you were just blank, then. Pure id. Full of purpose.”

  “Um. Yes. That’s probably more accurate.”

  “You saw what you needed to do, and you did it.”

  I considered. “Yes,” I said finally. “That’s fair.”

  “Amazing,” the reporter said. “Just amazing. But so tell me, how did you happen to be there at the critical time?”

  I pointed to the tray of food next to my bed, which the very nice nurse had brought in just before the interview started. “Do you mind if I eat a little? I haven’t had much of an appetite for months, and suddenly I’m famished.”

  “It won’t look great on TV,” the reporter said. “But you’re a hero, and you’re convalescing. People won’t begrudge you a little food.”

  “I’m really quite hungry.”

  The reporter gestured toward the tray: go ahead. “So. How you came to be there at the moment the girl was being robbed.”

  “Actually
,” I said, lifting a forkful of something that bore a vague resemblance to stroganoff, “I’d been there all afternoon.”

  “At the coffee shop? Wait one minute. My understanding was that you were outside.”

  “I was,” I told him. “I’d been outside most of the day.”

  For a moment, genuine bewilderment pierced the reporter’s tidy façade of professional interest. “I’m sorry. Can you explain?”

  The stroganoff was cold and tasted like a mud puddle, so I set it down and reached for a small plate of strawberries. “I was on the other side of the street, waiting for the crossing signal to change.”

  “For the entire afternoon.”

  “It was broken,” I explained.

  He paused. “But why not, uh, just cross the street, once you realized it was broken?”

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve never liked strawberries out of season. They’re too tart.”

  An innocuous enough thing for a person to say, you might think. But as soon as the words left my mouth, that shuddering panic I’d experienced days earlier at Tony’s and Big Buy Total Foods descended again. Sweat sprung up on my brow, and I was suddenly sick with self-loathing. This feeling was immediately intolerable, in the same way I imagine being burned alive would be intolerable.

  “Can you tell me,” I asked the reporter, “how many people in the United States don’t have enough to eat?”

  He looked at me. “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “Please,” I said. “Just look it up, if you would? On that phone of yours?”

  “Mike,” the cameraman said, “what the hell, man. This is supposed to be a puff piece. Come on.”

  Ignoring him, the reporter stood and pulled the phone from his pocket. The cameraman sighed and rolled his eyes skyward. The very nice nurse poked her head in the doorway; I smiled and tried to look well so her tacit inquiry would end there.