Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Are you all right?” his father asked, breathless.

Jonas looked at the mud. His family waited for an answer, as though they could help.

Dustin got off the elevator and walked through the doors of the burn unit, wondering at what point the smell of charred flesh had ceased to be remarkable. It had become just another thing, like the picture — hanging in the nurses’ lounge, part of a before-and-after sequence — of an Afghani girl’s cheeks melted into her shoulders. He remembered the shock he’d felt when he first saw it, as though something had unzipped his brain and stepped out of it. Now, staring at the picture from the hall, the coniferous shape of the girl’s face, he felt only mild revulsion. It amazed him that you could pretty much adapt to anything. He walked past the ICU rooms, the thick, porky smell filling his nostrils. Once, during rehab, one of the other outpatients had told him that the word for human among cannibals in the Pacific Islands was “long pig.” He’d said this not as a joke but as a way of introducing himself.

Just last week Dustin had gone to Carl’s Jr. and eaten a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, his first since the accident. It had tasted ghastly and delicious.

The support group had already begun. Dustin sat down at the conference table without speaking, embarrassed by the smallness of the group. In the middle of the table, partly blocking his view, was a tray of bologna sandwiches stacked into a Mayan pyramid. Dustin wasn’t sure who all these sandwiches were intended for. Aside from the two burn counselors, he was one of only five people who’d shown up.

“I’m surprised to see you,” said the counselor he recognized. Jane, Janice, something like that. “How long has it been?”

Dustin shrugged. He was as surprised as she was. “I don’t know.”

“A year at least. Maybe more. I remember seeing you a couple times in rehab.”

Dustin nodded. He squinted at the woman’s name tag: JAMIE. A burn victim herself. She was missing both forearms and navigated the world with prosthetic hooks, which tended to give her the edge in the self-pity department. Her face, too, was worse off than Dustin’s, a mask of barklike skin caked with cosmetics. She used to bug him all the time in the ward, trying to get him to come to meetings, insisting how important it was to talk to fellow “burn survivors.” The insistence on “survivor” had made him laugh. The last thing he’d wanted was to hang out with a bunch of pathetic freaks talking about how grateful they were to be alive. Now here he was, confronting a tray of sandwiches. Jamie introduced the woman beside her, a pretty counselor-in-training named Angela; the girl glanced at her lap, ashamed perhaps that she wasn’t disfigured.

They went around in a circle, introducing their burns to the group. A guy with one arm, Dustin’s age, who’d been charred to cinders when someone threw a firebomb into his bedroom; a man with 65 percent burns who’d put gasoline on his carpet to eat away the glue, intending to strip it; a woman in a plastic mask whose face had caught fire at a restaurant, ignited by a flaming drink. Walter, a burly guy in a wheelchair, talked about the destruction of his legs after his motorcycle exploded on the freeway. When the nurses unwrapped him for the first time, he’d seen something crawling from his leg, a gleaming white snake; he’d screamed for the nurses to get it off, but it had turned out to be a tendon.

Dustin had the rare feeling he’d gotten off lucky. There were two planets: the one where unburned people lived, filled with music and light and strolls on the beach, and the other one, where tendons fell out of your leg and people’s faces caught fire during dinner. For the first time, it made sense to Dustin to want to hang out with people from the same planet. What would he possibly have to say to anyone else?

“Is there a reason you’ve decided to visit us now?” Jamie asked him, after he’d introduced himself. For some reason, Dustin found her face less startling than the watch strapped to her prosthetic arm.

He shrugged. “It’s my day off work.”

“Did you have a Z-plasty?”

She was looking at his face. Did she remember what he’d looked like? “Two months ago,” Dustin said quietly.

“And a graft, too, looks like.”

He nodded, embarrassed.

“Looks terrific,” the pretty counselor-in-training said.

The others chimed in, too, a chorus of compliments. A year or even six months ago, he would have told them all to fuck off. Now, barraged by their compliments, Dustin realized that he’d driven all the way out here — fifty miles — to show off his new face. To have some perfect strangers lie to him. He felt queasy, partly because the lies made him feel better.

“And your hand,” Jamie said, nodding at it, “does it hurt?”

“When it’s cold,” he said.

“You’re exercising it — to help the banding?”

Dustin nodded. He didn’t tell her he had to keep his thumb stretched up like Fonzie when he drove; otherwise, he’d lose the movement in it altogether and it would stay bent into a hook for the rest of the day. Down the hall, a boy was screaming at the top of his lungs, upset about getting his dressings changed. It sounded like he was being savaged by bears. Even for a burn unit, the screams were impressive.

“Eight years old,” Jamie explained, “and hasn’t had a single visitor in a month. His mother calls once a week and says she’s coming over, but never shows up.”

“What happened to him?” Walter asked.

“Do you want the official story? The official story’s some kids threw gasoline on his legs and lit him on fire. This is in Jordan Downs, mind you. The projects. Of course, it’s the father who brought him in and told us the story.” The anger in her voice, so incongruous with the clown-thick makeup on her face, startled Dustin. “His whole family came to see him once, after he was admitted, and stole a VCR from the waiting room. Everyone but the mom’s been barred from the hospital.”

They went on with the meeting, trying to ignore the unholy screams. Dustin’s heart seemed to curl up like a pill bug, poked into a ball. It was news to him that there was anything much to poke. Angela, the counselor-in-training, must have seen something in his face, because she leaned over to him while they were eating sandwiches. “Would you like to stop by the boy’s room? I’m going to visit him after the meeting.”

“For some reason, I’m scary,” Jamie explained, raising her metal hooks.

After the meeting, Dustin found himself trailing Angela down the hall. The boy had stopped screaming a while ago, but the silence, after such an unearthly racket, made Dustin nervous. He followed Angela inside the room and stopped at the foot of the bed. The boy, burned from the waist down, seemed to be asleep, legs and feet bandaged into elephant-sized stumps. There was nothing extraordinary about his burns — percentage-wise, he was fairly well-off — but something about the room, its complete lack of cards and flowers and proof of visitors, took Dustin off guard. He remembered the way his family had visited him constantly on the ward, those first weeks when he was out of it on morphine, confused and miserable and assaulted by nightmares, devil men with long, fiddlehead noses trying to skin him alive or set him on fire — how his dad had written the day of the week on a big sheet of paper and hung it in front of him, taped to the heat shield, so that Dustin would see it whenever he woke up and know what day it was. His mother had held his foot like a hand, squeezing it gently to say hello. Looking at the abandoned boy in his room, Dustin felt petty and ridiculous, ashamed for taking his misery out on his family.