27
Luis
THE ATTENDANT LEFT THE
manila envelope on the table next to my bed. It was part of my physical therapy to spend some time in the courtyard every day and to make it to and from my sessions on my own. Some days, that takes a while.
I recognized the logo on the envelope right away—Orson Hulet Elementary School—but Bashkim had never sent me anything this large before. And it wasn’t his handwriting on the label. This label was typed.
I didn’t open it right away. For one thing, I was wiped out from dragging my crippled ass to the courtyard. I set my cane next to the table and tried to get myself into the bed in a comfortable way. I’m always slouched too far down or sitting up so high that the bed bends beneath my thighs, so getting myself into the bed in a reasonable way is one of my big daily events. My room is right outside the nurse’s station. It’s there so they can keep an eye on me, but I really hate to have people watching me try to do this bed maneuver thing.
“How you doing in there, Luis?” someone calls.
“Fine. I’m fine.”
“Fucking fine,” I whisper.
“Do you need a hand?”
“No. I’m good.”
Good like hell, anyway.
I’m not supposed to get a hand with anything. I’ve been here longer than a lot of patients, so everyone has gotten more relaxed about the rules. But I’m leaving soon, and as much as I owe everyone here, I can hardly stand to be noticed. The Army is flying me home, to my abuela’s, but I wish that I could go somewhere completely alone. I’ve had enough of being a patient. I love my abuela, but I’m not looking forward to going to her house either. I’m a man. And I’ve had about all I can take of being so fucking dependent.
I keep to myself as much as I can when I’m not in therapy. It’s not that I don’t like the people here. I’m grateful. How hard they work. How hard they’ve made me work. A rehab center is an amazing place. I wonder what my mother’s life would have been like if there had been a rehab hospital for her. If there had been people working with her, hour after hour, day after day, teaching her brain to work differently. Wouldn’t it be possible for anyone to change? For anyone to be different?
I keep to myself because I don’t want to talk about how I got here. I don’t know who knows. I don’t know what goes in a medical file. I don’t know how much anyone gets to read. Or what they say to each other.
This floor is all brain injuries. But I figure I’m the only one that injured my own brain. I mean these guys here—some of them with other injuries, some of them blind, missing an arm or a leg, deformed—they got whacked by the enemy. They’re heroes. I’m the fucking coward.
I don’t want to talk about how I got here, and I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a hero, either. I’m afraid someone’s visiting kid will ask me what happened. I’ve promised myself I won’t lie, but there are some things I’m never going to say.
I’m in the bed now, too damn low as usual. I fumble with the lever on the side and try to scrunch myself farther up as the back gets more vertical. I sort of succeed, but now the sheets are tangled beneath me, and I’m cocked a bit to the left, and this is how it is every damn day. I’ve got occupational therapy in forty minutes, so I think I will just close my eyes and try to forget about it.
As soon as my eyes are shut, I remember the envelope.
Should I open it?
I could really use a rest before another session, but I’m curious too. Maybe Bashkim sent me some of his schoolwork.
I don’t want to admit it, but the letters from that kid mean a lot to me. My abuela’s visits help, and Dr. Ghosh still comes by once or twice a week, but what really makes me feel good these days is that I fixed what I did to Bashkim. That might be the smallest sin against me, but one thing I’m learning from my physical therapy, every step forward counts, every step forward makes the next one easier. I hang on to that. Especially at night, when things get really bad.
I lie there with my eyes closed another couple of minutes, and then I decide to open the envelope after all. It’s been a few weeks since I got a letter, and I was hoping he hadn’t quit writing.
At first I’m pleased with myself. I open the little metal clasp at the back like there’s nothing wrong with me at all, and though I tear off a good section of the top of the envelope trying to get the flap unsealed, I still feel pretty good about my small motor control. Inside there’s a typed letter on school stationery, a couple of newspaper clippings, and several letters on lined school paper from Bashkim. I don’t even look at the rest of the stuff. I go right to his letters and carefully put them in order by date. He’s funny that way. He dates every letter.
He’s written me seven letters. Which is more than he has ever sent. Some of the pages are wrinkled, like he wadded them up, or they got wet. I notice right away that his handwriting is different too, not as neat as usual.
February 26, 2009
Dear Luis—
How are you? Are you out of the hospital? I am playing a lot of soccer, and my team almost always wins. My baba is really proud of me.
I might be moving out of Las Vegas soon, so I don’t think I can see you when you get here.
Thanks for writing to me,
Bashkim
February 27, 2009
Dear Luis—
Since I won’t be seeing you, I thought I would write another letter.
Did I ever tell you that my sister Tirana sings baby songs? She sings them all day long. And she doesn’t know about not kissing people at school, so when she comes to pick me up, she kisses me in front of everyone. And if I tell her not to do it, she just says that she loves me.
She’s really little is why.
Bye,
Bashkim
March 1, 2009
Dear Luis—
If this was a leap year, today would be February 29. If a person is born on February 29, he only has a birthday every four years.
My birthday is in April, but I don’t care about birthdays anymore.
I hope your hospital is going okay.
It would be nice to see you in Las Vegas, but I am not going to live here anymore.
Bashkim
March 4, 2009
Dear Luis—
My baba has decided to stop playing soccer. I think I will quit too.
You never told me why you were in the hospital. Did you get hit by a bomb? Did someone shoot you?
You never told me about that boy you shot, either.
I am kind of thinking about those things now.
Bashkim
I read slowly, because I have some field-of-vision issues. When my hand shakes, I can’t read. I can’t follow the letters if the page moves at all. So I stop here because I can’t keep reading, and I don’t want to anyway. There are three more letters from Bashkim, but I lie back, and the wrinkled pages spill across my stomach.
It’s really lonely here. Sometimes I think I’m going to make it. I have a lot of therapy, and it keeps me busy, and I have to work really hard to do certain things, and sometimes that makes all the rest of it go away. I feel like I am Luis again. And I get a bit hopeful. Maybe things will work out. Maybe I’ll be able to make up for some of the stuff I’ve done.
But it was naïve to think I was making anything up to Bashkim. He never forgot what I wrote to him. He’s still afraid of me. And he should be.
“Luis, you ready to work?”
It’s Terence, one of the therapists.
I keep my eyes closed, as if I am asleep.
“Hey, Luis, what are you doing? It’s time to get going.”
Terence is a big, gray-headed guy with a tattoo of a gravestone on his right arm and another of a rose on his left. He wears his hair in a thin ponytail at the back of his neck. Most days, I am glad if Terence is on duty. He fought in ’Nam. He never asks me how I got here, we never talk about being soldiers at all, but I feel good around him anyway. He just gives off a sense that he knows. He knows what pain is like.
I keep my eyes closed. In rehab, this is akin to disobeying the order of a commanding officer. The whole place operates on mutual effort, and the therapists make it clear that if I don’t want to work, I don’t belong here. And I’m not trying to make a scene. I definitely don’t want any more attention.
But Bashkim’s letter, that “you never told me about the boy you shot” in his eight-year-old handwriting, is burned on my eyelids. I can’t open my eyes. I can’t move. I can’t speak. Why didn’t I die? Who bolos his own suicide?
“Luis.” Terence’s voice is a little bit quieter. Slower. “Luis, you okay, man? Something going on?”
I am holding myself rigid in an effort not to let Terence see anything on my face, and when I feel his hand on my shoulder, I practically elevate off the bed. I still can’t trust my voice, and I can’t open my eyes, so I just lie there, cocked even more to the left, almost falling off the side, and just pray he will go away.
He doesn’t. But he doesn’t say anything, either. And he doesn’t touch me. And we sit like that, motionless, quiet, for a while.
I think I should say something or do something, but I don’t want to get started. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. I know what he will have to say. Dr. Ghosh has been saying it to me for months. And even my abuela, now that she knows a little about what happened. Not everything. But some of it.
Sometimes it’s not that you don’t want help. It’s that you can’t bear to be offered help that just keeps turning out not to be enough after all.
I shouldn’t be in this rehab. The Army shouldn’t be spending all this money fixing me. I didn’t get shot at. I’m not a war hero. I shouldn’t be here with these soldiers. And I shouldn’t have a bed that some real soldier needs. And I’ve tried to explain this. I have tried to make it clear that even though I botched my own suicide, it wasn’t because I wanted to live. It wasn’t because I should live. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was just another fuckup.
I hear Terence standing up then. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t even try. And he doesn’t touch me. He takes the letters from my stomach, from the floor where some have fallen, and I hear him shuffle them together. Quick enough that he’s not reading them.
He sets the letters on my table. I feel him standing there looking at me. I feel a little foolish, still not opening my eyes, but I can’t. I fucking can’t. He stands there a moment longer. And then he pulls the blanket over the bottom half of my body, and he shuts the door most of the way as he goes out. And I am alone. And nobody can see me from the nurse’s desk. And I have my eyes open, and I’m still falling half out of the bed, and I am wondering where I go from here.
DR. GHOSH SHOWS UP ABOUT
an hour later. I thought they might send him, and I don’t know if I have been waiting for him or dreading the thought of seeing him.
“Hi, Luis,” he says in that slight Indian accent.
“Hi, Dr. Ghosh.” It’s the first time I have used my voice, and it sounds fine, sounds normal.
“I got a call from Terence.”
I nod my head.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I shake my head.
He waits. Then he gestures toward the letters, still piled on the table where Terence left them.
“Something in those letters?” he asks.
I look away. I can’t even trust myself to nod.
“May I read them?”
I nod, without looking at him. I hear him shuffling through the letters, then opening the manila envelope, pulling out the pages I didn’t look at, shuffling through those. It takes a long time, and finally I roll my head back around and look at him.
The expression on his face surprises me. Dr. Ghosh looks shocked, or like he is ill. His mouth is very slightly agape, and he takes a sort of ragged breath.
“Did you read all these?”
I’m curious now, because this isn’t what I was expecting.
“No,” I say. “I just read the first couple of Bashkim’s letters. I . . . I don’t know. I got upset when he asked about what I had told him. I stopped reading.”
Dr. Ghosh nods. Then stops. Keeps looking at the pages in front of him. I see that there are several news clippings from the Las Vegas paper, and the typed letter on school stationery, and for the first time, I wonder what that letter says. Why did Bashkim’s letters come in a bunch? What was in that packet?
“So you just read these first letters from Bashkim,” Dr. Ghosh says.
“Yes.”
He takes a breath.
“I can see why Bashkim’s comment upset you.”
Something about the way he is sitting, about the measured way he says this, tells me that he is just operating out of habit, that his training is taking over, and that he is not thinking about my response to that letter at all.
Just like that, I forget about what I was thinking. About all the crazy thoughts in my head for the last hour, and I want to know what else is in that envelope—what Dr. Ghosh knows that I don’t.
“Dr. Ghosh. I can see that there was something in that envelope. There was more than what I read. What happened?”
He doesn’t answer me right away. I suppose he is thinking about it—thinking about how strong my reaction was to the letters I read—wondering if I am strong enough for whatever else is in there.
“Dr. Ghosh. I’m okay. I’m okay now. Please tell me what else is in that envelope.”
He nods.
“Let’s read Bashkim’s letters together first. Here they are, in order.”
I take the seven letters and skim through the first four before starting into the rest.
March 6, 2009
Dear Luis—
You don’t have to tell me about that boy. And I don’t want to know how you got hurt.
I don’t want to think about war. I don’t want to think about anything bad. I’m really tired of bad things. I’m tired of thinking.
My nene told me that some men shouldn’t go to war. I don’t want to go to war, and I don’t want to be a soldier.