Eric Puchner - Model Home

The little bald girl in the next booth was still staring at Dustin. Without warning, he whipped off his sunglasses and growled satanically at her, his teeth bared like a tiger’s. The little girl burst into tears.

“What did you do?” Dustin asked the mother. “Krazy Glue that fucking bow on?”

“Dust, Jesus,” Lyle said under her breath.

He turned back to his Coke. “One of our major pastimes around here. Scare the children.”

On the way home, they didn’t talk. Lyle squinted into the sun as she drove. They passed a Carl’s Jr. on the outskirts of Lancaster, the last outpost of civilization; Dustin grimaced as if from a punch. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d insisted on going to Taco Bell out of fear, that the smell of broiled hamburgers was somehow distressing. She remembered when Dustin was in the hospital, that first week, the thick, Fourth of July smell of charred flesh seeping into her clothes. Zonked on morphine, he’d lain there in the sweltering room under a spiderweb of tubes. What she remembered most was how gigantic he looked: he’d blown up like the Michelin Man, bandaged from the waist up, his skinny legs sticking out as if he’d been crushed by a boulder. The nurse was worried about hypothermia and kept turning up the thermostat. Despite the nurse’s warning, Lyle insisted on staying while she unwrapped Dustin’s arm, stained black with chemicals. The stench was unspeakable. After washing his arm with sterile water, the nurse moistened a gauzy sponge and began to debride him, scrubbing his arm to loosen the skin, focusing on one spot at a time as though she were polishing a dresser, occasionally reaching down and picking some dead skin off with her fingers or using a scissors to snip it free before tossing everything — skin and sponge — into the hamper. It was something you could watch only by turning off your brain.

Near their house again, Lyle looked at the sun-choked buttes in the distance, which from this direction seemed to be covered in orange flowers. The poppy preserve. The blandness of the desert made the flowers stand out like a dream. Lyle was sure they hadn’t been there a month ago. A strong wind buffeted the Renault; a minute later the whole hill seemed to stir, a great ripple of orange, like an insuck of breath.

“Has it been raining?” she asked Dustin, who was staring at the road.

“Beats me,” he said.

Dustin liked working at the video store, because he enjoyed the way people responded to his face. It gave him an excuse to hate them. Not that he needed an excuse: Lancaster was filled with people clamoring for his hatred. They had wraparound sunglasses and wore T-shirts that said TGIF: THANK GOD I’M FREE! or JESusaVES or I’M ALL FOR GUN CONTROL… I USE BOTH HANDS. Most of the T-shirts had eagles on them. Dustin had begun asking these customers if they were bird-watchers. It was then that they’d get a clear look at his face. A sort of helpless double take, then a vague gastric wince they weren’t aware of, then a polite glance away to pretend they hadn’t seen anything. It was the glance away that made Dustin the maddest. Why didn’t they have the fucking honesty to gawk?

“Rats, you just missed it,” Dustin would say when someone asked why Rambo: First Blood Part II was still rented out.

He’d always wanted not to give a shit if people liked him. It was easy now, a reason to get up in the morning.

Dustin unzipped a sleeve of his Jobst shirt, scratching the itch that seemed to live inside his skin. It was deep and relentless. Beneath the welts from his nails, he could see the ghost of the skin they’d grafted on, a faint mesh stretching up his forearm, like fishnet. He preferred not to look at it. Since it was a slow Friday, there wasn’t much to do but succumb to the itch and watch action movies on the mounted TV until his brain rotted. This afternoon, for a change, he was watching Jaws. Dustin liked that Brody wanted to blow up a shark with a scuba tank. It seemed creatively unsporting. Just as Brody was climbing the sinking ship’s mast, preparing to take aim with his rifle, the phone rang.

“Do you have any adult films with little people in them?” a man’s voice asked. It was hoarse and sniffly, as though he had a cold. Dustin hated it when people called pornos “films”; they were the only customers who didn’t say “movie.”

“Do you mean dwarves?”

“Yes. Adult films. With dwarves.”

Dustin paused, and the man coughed. “What are you?” Dustin said. “Some kind of sicko?”

“Actually, I’m a dwarf,” the man said indignantly before hanging up.

Dustin put the receiver back on its cradle, ashamed. The shame was mixed with a gratitude that dwarves existed. There were people more conspicuously out of whack than he was. He felt the same way when he went to outpatient rehab, glancing at people who’d lost their noses or had to have their jaws bolted through so they wouldn’t melt into their necks. He tried not to think of the hospital, but the memory of those two awful months was there all the time, circling him like the unwearied shark in Jaws . Movies distracted him, but only for a while: sooner or later the memory returned, preying on his thoughts.

Luckily, he didn’t remember anything from the first couple weeks. Just the nightmares, a parade of ghastly tortures: trapped in a burning leaf pile, skinned alive by demons. Then it was like a nightmare but he was awake, or at least conscious — floating on morphine. He’d pull in and out of sleep like a wave. When they told him he’d been burned, his first thought was World War III. The Russians must have attacked. He didn’t remember the accident, but when they told him about it — the cigarette, the house exploding into flames — it seemed too ludicrous to be true.

It was Lyle who finally convinced him the human race was okay. She brought him an Egg McMuffin as proof: the ingenious hockey puck of egg and bed of yellow cheese, dog-eared over the side of the muffin. He couldn’t do anything with it — he was still eating through a tube — but its perfection was indisputable.

Looking back, it was hard to believe how clueless he was. Dustin knew nothing about burn victims; aside from Freddy Krueger, he’d never even seen one. Those first weeks, before the nerve endings had grown back, he couldn’t understand why they were keeping him there. He was upset about missing band practice. Mummified in bandages, his right arm suspended in a splint — but incredibly this was his biggest worry. Toxic Shock had a gig that weekend at a party in Redondo. (So he believed: actually, the gig was two weeks past.) He didn’t understand that his life had ended.

When he tried to explain about the gig to his family, to the nurses and doctors— I’ve got to go home and practice! — they nodded kindly and smiled, as though he’d told them he had a date with Jesus Christ.

Finally, in despair, he yanked out all his tubes and made a break for the door, his splinted arm bouncing beside him like a wing. He knew his legs weren’t burned, so it didn’t surprise him at all that he could run. What surprised him was that a nurse no bigger than his grandmother could stop him at the door: she grabbed his arm, to catch him, and the pain was so bad, so spine-shriveling, that he shit in his hospital gown. Actually crapped down his leg. The same puny nurse had been holding his dick when he peed, but for some reason it took shitting himself from pain to drive home his helplessness.

Dustin remembered trying to escape only once. Apparently, though, he was a major tube puller. One day he woke up, paralyzed, his arms and legs strapped to the bed frame with plastic cable ties. He started to wail and curse. They were detaining him against his will, his father would sue them back to the Stone Age as soon as he found out. He’d call 60 Minutes; the entire hospital would get shut down. Amazingly, though, when his dad saw Dustin tied up like a war prisoner, he did not offer to call the police. Instead he brought a mirror into the ward so Dustin could look at himself. Dustin had yet to see his face. He’d seen his arms, of course, but the silver nitrate stained them so brown it was hard to tell what they were like underneath. There were no mirrors in the ward, not even in the bathroom; it hadn’t occurred to him before then that this was intentional.