• Previous part (2)

The SEAT Ibiza is silver in the documents and the color of wet cement everywhere else. My right hand is holding keys. One of them ought to open the car.

I pull the handle. The rubber seal gives all at once, and the cabin exhales at me: paper dust, the boot liner’s rubber, that mineral damp. The kind of familiar that should reassure me and instead sits a half-step to the left of itself. I get in.

A carton rests on the passenger seat. Primary-school workbooks for the shop, the order that came in wrong twice. The belt is pulled across it and drawn tight enough that one side of the cardboard has bowed inward, the corner pressing a crease where the buckle bites. I belted it in myself. I square the manga and Rain at the Crossing on the flat top of the carton, edge to edge, spines aligned.

Beeping. Something complaining at fixed intervals, a small electronic conscience somewhere I can’t place. The carton is belted in properly. I checked.

The engine catches immediately, the little three-cylinder settling into itself. One small tremor passes through the gear lever and stops beneath my hand, palm to the worn place on the knob. I push the lever left. It doesn’t move.

I lift my hand off it. The numbers are still on the gear lever’s knob. One, two, three, four, five. R. They designate positions. I know this like you can know a word’s spelling while it stops meaning anything. They are positions and the positions connect to something: the clutch, the left foot, the road, the drive. I can’t reconstruct the line between my hand and any of it. I need one of the numbers. Which one is supposed to enter it? What would it mean to enter it? What is it?

I’m lying on the back of my head. My shoulder blades are touching something. My heels feel flat and far away. Points of me pressed into a surface I didn’t lie down on. I can’t close my mouth. Hard plastic rests behind my tongue, over it. Tape pulls at one cheek, at the corner of my mouth, a small constant drag. My tongue is dry past dry, my lips cracked into the dryness. I begin to swallow and the swallow doesn’t finish, snagged somewhere on the plastic, abandoned halfway.

A breath happens before I choose it, fills me without my asking.

A voice. Close. “Squeeze my hand. Squeeze and let go.”

I squeeze. I think I squeeze. I was told to do so. There’s the idea of fingers against mine, and I send the command down the long dark corridor toward my hand. I can’t tell if anything moved. Whether I’m holding fingers, or they are holding me, or letting go is something my body knows how to do.

“Good,” the voice says. “Again.”

Again means there was a first time.

The tape goes first. A strip of my cheek is suddenly cold where the rest of my face isn’t, as if that one rectangle had been left outside in the wrong weather. Then the thing in my throat moves before it leaves, hauling a gag up through me, and the long shape draws back and out and is gone, leaving the space scraped along its whole length, a hallway with the paint dragged off the walls.

Something clear settles over my nose and mouth. Plastic again, lighter. Cupped.

A young woman beside the bed. I find the shape of her in the blur and hold to it.

“Where am I,” I ask.

My mouth makes the words correctly, the lips and tongue arranging into the right order. I’m almost sure. But only breath comes back to me. Air going over the ruined hallway. I don’t know if the failure is in my throat, in my ears, or in whether she’s even attending to me.

She bends toward the machine, or toward me, and a badge swings out from her chest on its cord and turns its blank back to me, white, faceless. A strand of her hair has come loose and touches the corner of her mouth and stays there as if glued. Her hands are busy, so she can’t move the strand from her mouth.

She’s saying something. The shape of a question, rising at the end.

“What year is it?”

A year has four numbers. I know that much. I hold onto it like I’d hold onto a railing in the dark. I should be able to produce four numbers. My eyes go around the room for help. A number lit on something to my left. Green. Ninety-seven. A label. Eighty-one. Sixteen, smaller, in a corner. None of them is long enough. They’re pieces of other things, and they don’t add up to the answer.

Donostia. My mother’s voice. Behind it, a moment late, the smell of her hand cream. Her face, near, tips and rights itself, and each time that it drifts out of the small circle I can hold in focus, she brings it back, slides herself into the narrow place where I can keep her, like you’d move a print under a lamp.

“We’re in Donostia.” Her voice goes on low and careful. “You were coming to us. There was an accident with the car. But you’re here now. You’re awake, and we’re here, your dad and me, we’re both here.”

An accident with the car. I reach for a part I can hold. I find one. Rear left. The pale paint caught in the stippled plastic. I cleaned it until the cloth stopped coming away white. The bumper gave under my thumb and came back. It wasn’t cracked. The pillar by the loading bay, the bookstore, the low concrete and the long pale smear, and I never paid to have it fixed because there was no need, the plastic was sound.

“Not cracked,” I tell her.

She leans in close to the clear plastic over my mouth. I watch her listen. She draws back a little and her hand comes to my hair.

“Don’t strain your throat. Don’t talk. You don’t have to talk.”

The ceiling moves. A panel slides past, then a fluorescent fixture arrives directly over my eyes and blooms white, then drains away behind my head, going somewhere I can’t follow. Another panel. Another light.

We turn. The ceiling goes sideways but my stomach keeps going straight. The blanket has been pulled hard around my toes on one side, a fierce knot of pressure that I can locate with precision while the rest of me stays vague, a body reported secondhand. I want to free the toes.

A forehead comes into frame. Then eyes, close. Someone leans nearer and the chin is gone, off the bottom edge, and they’re speaking. Then they’re gone before I have finished building them.

The sound closes in around us, the corridor’s openness folding down to something tight and boxed, and my body becomes briefly lighter, then resettles as if heavier than it was. I think of the word “lift” and then I’m out of it and the ceiling is wide again.

A voice somewhere over me is counting. I only catch the end.

“—three.”

On three, the sheet beneath me draws tight, and I move sideways all at once, the length of me carried over. They place me on a hard surface. Shoulder blades, the base of my spine, my heels, the back of my skull; each one presses up, announcing itself.

Hands settle my head into a shallow cradle. Something firm pushes against one temple, then the other, packing me in so I can’t turn. A piece comes down over my face without touching it, a curve of plastic close above, and a single bar splits what little room is left into two. A rubber bulb ends up in my right hand, and my fingers are folded around it. A voice says it stops everything. If I squeeze it, it stops. They ask me if I understand. I hold the small, soft weight, and try to hold on to that fact.

They put something in my ears. The voices thin out, go far and muffled. Then pads press my outer ears flat against my skull. The table moves and I go feetfirst, or headfirst, I can’t tell, into a narrow white curve. I can’t see the opening anymore, only the smooth pale ceiling inches from my nose.

A male voice, distant through the plugs: don’t move.

An itch under the cradle at the back of my head, exactly where I can’t reach and I must not shift to scratch. My jaw wants to tremble. My throat, scraped raw, wants to cough. I hold it all in.

Noise begins. Eight blunt blows, flat and hard. A pause. Eight again. I lie still under them. A rapid buzzing lays itself over a lower hum, two textures stacked, and then a long single tone that pulses without stopping. The hammering returns, violent, fast, and quits mid-pattern as if something gave up. In the gap I can hear a fan, and my own breathing, loud and close inside the curve. The sounds move into the table, into the cradle under my skull, until they stop coming from any direction and simply happen inside the bones of my face.

I try to put together the pieces: the count, the sheet, the hard table, the hammering. I try to read off them what happened, what brought me here, what’s broken. But every clue comes apart before it joins the next.

Out of the noise, words: Rain at the Crossing. They arrive whole like nothing else has. A surface I could climb to, if I could find my hands. I hold those words above the hammering. Is it a title. It has the shape of a title. It feels like a coastline I stood on once and can no longer locate, a shore that was there and now is only water.

The noise stops. In the quiet, the male voice comes back, far away through the packing in my ears.

“That one is finished. You’re doing well.” A pause. “Two more minutes. Don’t move.”

Alcohol first. The sharp kind that means a swab, something being cleaned. When the sharpness thins, under it, my mother’s smell: hand cream. The top of her head, the reading glasses pushed up into the gray, two small lenses catching the fluorescent light. She’s turned away from me, toward the deeper voice.

“What’s normal for him?” the voice says.

“The pause is normal,” my mother says. “He does that. He stops while he chooses the word. But he keeps looking at you while he does it. That’s the difference. He didn’t lose the question just now.”

What question? I try to keep looking at her and the head goes blurry at the edges.

White. A nurse, half-turned toward the door, a shape leaving while it speaks.

“Any pain?”

Before I’ve consulted anything, my mouth says I’m fine, like a reflex tripped by the door opening. My knee doesn’t agree. There’s a band around my ribs. My left shoulder exists wrong. But I’ve already said it.

“Ask him while you’re still facing him,” my mother says to the nurse, not unkind. “If he thinks he’s keeping you, he’ll say he’s fine. He always says he’s fine when someone’s got their hand on the door.”

The mask is gone. I notice it as air on my upper lip. Someone put a tray near my right hand. Steam, or the memory of steam. The color of food.

“He’ll tell you he isn’t hungry before he tells you swallowing hurts,” my mother says. “Ask him which one it is. Before you write that he refused.”

My mother tells them who I am. I listen because I don’t know.

“He works in a bookshop.” My mother has moved; her voice comes from the left side of the room. “He’s a comic artist as well. Published. That’s work. I don’t want it written down as a hobby.”

To my right, lower, my father’s voice. I’d recognize it in any dark.

“Right-handed.”

“I’ll put it in the occupational therapy referral,” the nurse says.

My mother tells them I draw. The hand they mean is lying open on the sheet. A red light clipped to one finger, glowing through the nail. The hand isn’t holding a pen.

Dark. A back ahead of me. A woman’s back, a coat, walking. An underpass, the tiled cold of one, her getting smaller. Maialen. I’m behind. I’ve failed at something I made, something I drew, and the failure pulls me down inside my body. It’s the same as whatever broke in me. I can’t pull them apart.

A crackle of plastic beside me. My father’s hands: the hair across their backs, the creases gone dark around the nails, the two pale scars. He’s holding a clear bag with a white sticker, and on the sticker my own name in printed letters.

He works through it against a paper he keeps glancing at.

“Wallet.” Set aside. “Phone.” Set aside. “Shoe.” A pause while he finds the other, turns it. “Other shoe.” Both whole, paired, laces still tied.

My father lifts the shirt. It falls open from cuff to collar along two clean straight lines, cut, scissors, someone in a hurry. He brings the two halves together anyway, matches them, smooths it once with the flat of his hand, and folds the ruined thing as if it were going back in a drawer.

Then the jacket. He turns it in the light. A stain across it, stiffened, dried down to near brown, near black.

The guilt arrives ahead of the sentence that would hold it. My breath answers first, shortening, climbing high in the chest where the ribs don’t want it. I did something. I can’t find the shape of it, but it’s pressing the way a bruise tells you about itself before you remember the corner you walked into.

I’m holding a hand, or it’s holding mine. My fingers close down on it harder. Skin, warm. My mother’s.

The sound, a small electronic complaint at fixed distances, has been easy to set aside with the coughs and the chatter and the wheels somewhere. Now the distances are closing. Note. Note. Note. The gaps between them shrink, and the sound swells until it becomes the largest thing in the room, larger than the ceiling I don’t recognize, larger than the fluorescent light.

A man sits to my right. A shoulder, a bent head, a pen moving carefully on a small page. My father. Writing something down.

“Did I hurt anyone?”

It comes out of my mouth thin, scraped.

The pen stops.

“No. You were alone in the car. No other vehicle was involved. Nobody else was hurt.”

My mother’s grip shifts in mine, and her voice comes softer from above.

“A man stopped, almost right away. He stayed with you. He stayed until the ambulance came.”

The high breath drops a little lower. My fingers give by degrees as if letting go of something they had been gripping in sleep. The notes spread until the sound shrinks down again to background behind the chatter, complaining at its fixed intervals about nothing in particular.

The dark resolves into a face above me, looking down, calm. My father. More stubble; the line has gone gray and unminded. On his chest, a sticker is curling up at one corner, a visitor’s badge losing its hold.

“Did I hurt anyone?”

My voice comes out steadier, sitting in my throat instead of leaking out.

“No. You’re in Donostia Hospital. You were in a car crash. You were alone in the car. Nobody else was hurt. You can sleep.”

There’s no one beside the bed. The chairs are empty. By the water cup, propped against it, a card: a piece of folded paper, my father’s block capitals pressed hard enough to read at this distance.

HOSPITAL – DONOSTIA
YOU WERE IN A CAR CRASH
YOU WERE ALONE IN THE CAR
NO OTHER VEHICLE WAS INVOLVED
NO ONE ELSE WAS HURT
YOUR PARENTS KNOW WHERE YOU ARE

By the time I reach the bottom, the top has gone soft, the first line loosening its grip, and I go back up to hold it again. The second time, my eyes find the fifth line first, before the place name, before the reference to my parents. NO ONE ELSE WAS HURT.

The physiotherapist taps the bed’s brake with the toe of her shoe. The rail comes down, then the bed sinks a notch under me. Another. She’s saying where each of my parents should stand, mother on this side, father at the shoulder, as if arranging furniture that might fall.

“Where do you want my hand?” my father asks.

When my feet come over the edge, the room tilts toward the window. My head is the heaviest part of me, a sandbag at the top of a thin pole, and the mattress edge cuts a hard line across the backs of my thighs. One heel finds the floor before I have seen it arrive. The physiotherapist’s hand guides my other heel down beside it. The rubber dots on the hospital socks grip and let go against tile. My feet are hot, swarming with pins.

The doorframe starts sliding sideways. The voices thin out, go small and far, and my own pulse climbs up into my ear and gets louder than all of them.

“Are you dizzy?” the woman asks.

“I’m fine.”

The words are out before I can check.

“He’s not fine,” the woman says. “Hold him there. Both of you. Until it passes.”

When the physiotherapist says it’s time to stand, I discover that standing has come apart into pieces that used to happen on their own and now want instructions. My quadriceps shake before they’ve agreed to carry me. I try to fix the shaking by locking my knees.

“Soften them,” the woman says. “Don’t lock.”

When I take some of my weight off the hands that hold me, to prove I can, I only slide off the line that was keeping me upright. The painful ribs make every breath a bargain: I can balance, or I can breathe in. Gravity now wants me to administer it by hand, each second.

The hands turn me, lower me, and the wheelchair takes me at the backs of the knees.

The fan in the bathroom ceiling holds one note under everybody’s breathing. One fluorescent strip above, its twin laid in the mirror. The rail is cold steel under my palm. Soap, disinfectant, the wet-cardboard smell of used towels.

The mirror gives me a face. A shaved strip cut through the hairline. Staples pulling the skin into small puckers, evenly spaced. Antiseptic dried yellow-brown into stiff hair. A bruise whose middle is one color and whose edges are another. Hollows under the cheekbones, at the temples.

The image moves when I move, with no delay. I could draw it. I can see the construction: the line that establishes the swelling, the beard rendered as shadow instead of mass, the staples giving the skull its little rhythm, the split lower lip, the eyes.

I raise a hand. The hand in the glass raises. I touch the swelling on my cheek and feel my own stubble and the hot tight skin under it. What I can’t find is the part where it’s mine. The face shows what happens. It doesn’t contain the man who drove that car. I arrange my mouth into expressions I think I own, to see if one of them fits, like you’d try keys.

“That doesn’t look like me,” I say.

“It does,” my mother says behind me, “when you stop trying to arrange your mouth.”

“You lost weight,” my father says. “The left side’s still swollen. They said it’ll go down. You can put the weight back on.”

I’m not asking about the weight or the swelling. I’m asking about the man who chose to drive, whom I can’t find anywhere in this body, and whether he’s the same one looking back out of the glass.

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead, and “Janela bat” by Gorka Urbizu.