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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
14 Imaginary Pain
Consciousness returned to me slowly. Someone was shaking me awake without calling my name. I opened my eyes to look into a puffy, fat face that was far too old and wrinkled to be cherubic. A very large woman in a very large lab coat leaned over me. She shook my shoulder like she wanted it for herself.
"Mister Lawrence Edwards," the fat face said, "I'm doctor Ethel Meyerson from the psychiatric department. I want you to tell me what happened."
I felt dopey. The morphine fog was lifting, but it was doing it reluctantly. I heard the full version of my first name but was too dull to bristle at the sound. I sat up and tried to speak. My mouth was dry as a desert. I drank from a glass on my bedside table. When my throat was lubricated, I tried to answer the fat face's question. "I hit my head and passed out. I don't think I rattled anything hard enough to need a shrink."
The woman winced her fat face when I said `shrink.' She pulled the visitor's chair closer to my bed and wedged her ample hips between the arms. She read from a metal clipboard which she had clamped in her fat hands. "Mister Edwards, I've spoken to Doctor Thompson. He's given me your background. I want you to tell me what happened."
Thompson was my regular guy. He was as old as dirt and treated everyone like they were a pain in his ass. I liked him because he didn't like anyone. He knew what I was and what I'd been through. He never preached to me about anything, he just took care of me when I was sick. That's all I thought a doctor had a right to. This woman was the other kind. She was the doctor who wants to help even if you don't want it.
I stuck to my initial explanation to get her to leave me alone. "I fell and hit my head." I insisted. "That's all there is."
The Meyerson woman wouldn't be that easily satisfied. She pressed me with some information she must have gotten from the ambulance crew. "You found a dead boy. Were you under stress when you found him?"
I thought the question was almost too dumb to answer. I answered it with a lie because I didn't want to think about what happened, much less explain it to an overly-interested third party. "No, I wasn't stressed by what I saw. I was in the war, the last one. I saw a lot of guys that young in far worse shape. What's your point?"
Meyerson put a pair of glasses on. She flipped the pages of her clipboard, contemplated me, then flipped some more pages. She gave me an unasked-for recap of my medical history. "Doctor Thompson tells me that you were wounded in the war by the skeletal fragments of another soldier. You were in hospitals for nine months, had several surgeries, sepsis, blood poisoning, extensive recovery, and significant reconstructive surgery. He informed me that you were given a clean bill of health but you continue to suffer from debilitating muscle cramps and digestive issues."
I rubbed my face to give myself a moment to decide how I was going to respond to the insistent woman. By then, the morphine fog was clearing faster, but I still wasn't myself. I told the woman some truth because my lie hadn't bought me anything. "Peter." I explained. "My friend who was destroyed by a German shrapnel shell. His name was Peter."
Meyerson looked at me over her glasses. "I don't see how the man's name is relevant."
I bristled at her dismissal of the name of the man who'd been my friend. At least he'd been my friend until I told him what I was. I was angry that she would treat his name with so little respect. I was angry that she seemed contemptuous that I'd even mentioned the name of the man I had loved and had tried to get to love me back.
"You mean you don't think it matters." I growled at her and threw the covers back away from my body. I turned to sit on the edge of the bed, facing her. "The name of the thoughtful, sweet man, who was the only bright spot in the black outrage that was that war, his name doesn't matter?" I challenged her.
"Not for our purposes." Doctor Meyerson insisted as she tapped her clipboard with an impatient index finger.
The woman was wrong, dead wrong. I wanted to prove to her how wrong she was. I decided a demonstration was in order. I unbuttoned my shirt, pulled the tail from my pants, and opened it to reveal the fleshy map of no-man's-land that was my chest and stomach. Doctor Meyerson gasped audibly as I ran my hand over the thick, rubbery scars. My fingers traced the tracks and puckered craters of my healed wounds, of wounds that still burned with green fire whenever my insides heaved and crawled.
"This is what's left of him." I told the preemptive doctor. "There was a barrage, shells falling. Peter was standing in the middle of the trench, so scared he couldn't move. We'd had an argument and I wasn't with him. I ran to get back, to protect him. I was running when it happened.
"I planned to run through him, to tumble us both down together, to get him to cover. Just as we were about to collide, a shell landed behind him. The blast shattered his body like a crystal glass hit with a ball bat. His skeleton ripped through his flesh and impaled me in more than forty places. He was completely destroyed. They couldn't even send him home, there wasn't enough of him left. I had tried to save him, but he wound up saving me. His body took the brunt of the blast. If not for Peter, I would have been destroyed instead of him."
Meyerson ignored the point of my story. She harped on me with the single mindedness of a religious zealot. "You need treatment, Mister Edwards. If you submit to an intensive course of analysis, we can relieve your imaginary pain."
I ran my hands over the scars once more and tried to make her understand. "These scars are his only monument, and the pain is his memory. Both are real, and both belong to me."
I looked at Meyerson and saw that my words hadn't moved her at all. I gave up and started to button my shirt. "This is the proof that I was there, and he was there. This is the proof that we meant something to each other, whatever that something was. This is what happens when someone is where they shouldn't be, when someone tries to live where they don't belong."
I finished with my shirt and leaned back to tuck the tail into my pants. The motion and the act of sitting-up helped me to feel like myself. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get back to the case. I wanted to make sure Bea was alright. I tried to cut through the crap with the doctor, so I could get back to doing my job. "Did my X-ray come back? Am I physically alright?"
Meyerson flipped her pages some more and read the answer from them. "Yes, it did. There is no fracture. You have a mild concussion and a contusion."
That was good enough for me. "Then fuck you, lady. Sign me out."
Meyerson huffed angrily at me. She struggled out of the visitor's chair, struck her large stomach with the clipboard, and left the room.
I checked my pockets, made sure everything was still in place, lit a cigar, and looked in the mirror. My head was wrapped in yards of gauze. I looked like I was wearing a turban. I unwound the gauze to find a large bruise and small cut near the hairline on my forehead. I tossed the gauze in the trash. I gingerly touched the tender bruise to make sure the skull underneath it was as solid as Meyerson said it was.
"Doctors!" I huffed my disgust to the room. "Doctors in a hospital, butchers in an abattoir." I waited and filled the small room with smoke until a nurse came with her own clipboard and the sign-out papers. I made short work of the forms and left.