Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Catherine had done the unpacking and unwrapping over the weekend and pulled the items from their cardboard boxes and clear plastic sarcophagi. This work demanded two hands, one of which more times than not was using a pair of scissors or slashing strapping tape with a kitchen knife. He had done nothing as each device was unveiled other than watch the two family cats paw delightedly through the papers and climb inside the now empty shipping cartons.

In any case, as soon as Spencer heard the front door to their apartment glide shut Tuesday morning, he swung his legs over the side of the mattress and used his one good arm to push himself to his feet. Even getting out of bed had become a chore, because he had three-plus decades of muscle memory using both hands for leverage. Now he had only his left. He still slept with his right arm held to his chest with his shoulder immobilizer, a sling with a strap that wound around his rib cage, and so he knew intellectually that his fingers and his hand would tingle like they had gone to sleep if there had been any functioning nerves remaining. There weren’t, and so he felt nothing. His shoulder, of course, was stinging fiercely because it was only a few minutes ago that he had swallowed his first Percocet and his first three Advils of the day-a Percocet and Advil cocktail didn’t quash completely the hot branding iron he felt every waking moment in what remained of his shoulder, but at least it made the pain bearable-and the pills hadn’t kicked in yet.

His plan was to endure the agony that came with removing the sling so he could shower, dry himself as best he could, climb back into the sling and run an electric razor over his face (never before his injury had he even contemplated using an electric razor to try to mow down the stubble that covered his cheeks and his neck like shards of steel wool), and then brush his teeth. If he accomplished this without falling back onto the bed in the torturous pain he had endured in his shoulder only yesterday when he’d forgotten that his arm would flap the moment he first removed it from the sling-he was much better off when he rested it on his lap while he pulled apart the Velcro clasps with the fingers on his left hand-he would get dressed and make breakfast on his own.

AND HE DID INDEED manage to shower (though, as always, he was almost completely incapable of an undertaking as simple as drying his left underarm) and shave and brush his teeth-this last task proving particularly difficult because he had to hold the handle of the brush with his teeth like it was a cigar so he could apply the aquamarine gel with his one functioning hand. When he was done he gave himself license to leave the cap off (he vowed the next toothpaste they bought would have a flip top), because he figured if he held the tube in his teeth the way he’d just held the brush he would send a stream of gel spurting out onto the bathroom counter. Abruptly one of the cats, Emma, appeared on the Formica out of nowhere, saw the cap as a toy and swiped at it with her paw. Much to her apparent amazement she sent it hurtling into the wastepaper basket. Spencer knew that even if bending over weren’t an exercise in excruciating torment, he wouldn’t have bothered to retrieve it. Toothpaste caps were a luxury that was now beyond him.

He didn’t floss, but he made a mental note to ask Nick about ordering a device that would allow him to floss with one hand. A few times Catherine had tried to floss for him, but not only had the experience been demeaning, it had been physically unpleasant: The amount of blood Spencer spat into the sink when she was through and the way his gums felt like they’d just been worked over with the tip of a box cutter were testimony to the reality that it took genuine skill to floss someone else’s teeth, and they should have more respect for the dental hygienists who did it daily.

For a moment before getting dressed he stared at his shoulder in the mirror. He was long past squeamishness at the sight of the injury, and the tissue was actually healing quite nicely. Dr. Palmer, the self-proclaimed “upholstery guy” back in Hanover, had done a wonderful job and the wound-both the chasm where the bullet had entered his shoulder and done its dirty work, and the ravine made by the surgeons when they had climbed inside him to try to return a semblance of order to the shattered bone and twitching muscular slush-itself no longer repulsed him. Certainly it had in the second and third week in August, when he was back in Sugar Hill and that portly home health nurse who always smelled slightly of onion was changing his dressings twice a day. The first couple of times he’d showered with his sling off (Just get the soap and water right in there, don’t worry, Palmer had told him), he’d practically vomited in the stall.

Now it was starting to look like the glossy, hairless skin of a burn victim. Though his shoulder would never heal to the point where you couldn’t tell it had once suffered a colossal assault-there would always be scarring-eventually it would appear as if it had endured a trauma no worse than, say, rotator cuff surgery. Maybe rotator cuff surgery with complications that had been manageable. In any case, it wouldn’t be grotesque.

What would be grotesque was the subluxation that would occur over the next year or so. It was inevitable. Because there was no bone linking his arm to his torso-and no reason to bother with a metal shoulder because there were no working nerves-it would be largely scar tissue fusing the appendage to his body. As a result, the joint would slowly come apart. It wouldn’t be violent like a dislocation; it would be a slow, steady, inexorable separation so that a year from now there would in all likelihood be a two-finger-width indentation-a pothole, one doctor had called it-between his shoulder and the uppermost bone in his perpetually dangling right arm. The very idea left Spencer sickened, and no amount of physical therapy could prevent the subluxation from occurring.

Too bad they couldn’t share that hideous deformity with the world at the press conference Paige was planning for the week after next. No, he thought, maybe that wasn’t too bad. At some point people would have to see how scarred and disabled he was, but he wasn’t prepared to reveal that just yet. Even for deer. Especially for deer.

He realized that he didn’t particularly like the animal. Deer and lobsters. He loathed them both, he decided, and for the briefest moment he wondered if he was in the right business. The notion passed quickly, however, and he started a litany in his mind of all the animals in the world that were abused and that he did love. He tried telling himself that if he’d been shot because people went monkey hunting in the fall, he’d be downright excited by all of Paige’s plans, but he didn’t quite believe it.

Still naked (he was no longer capable of cinching a towel around his waist the way he once could), he wandered back into his and Catherine’s bedroom and surveyed the tools he had lined up the night before along the top of his bureau. There they were, the Good Grips Button Hook he would use to grasp his shirt buttons with the end of a dolphin-nosed wire and pull them through the thin slats in the fabric, and the generic dressing stick with the C hook at the end he would loop through a belt loop to pull his pants over the strangely unconquerable ledge that was his right hip. Gently he fingered the rubber handle on the crowbar-long shoehorn and then gazed down at his brand-new loafers. He hadn’t worn loafers since college, but he would be wearing them when he went to the office today. They were black and they were ugly, because he refused to wear the brown calfskin ones his mother-in-law had ordered for him as a get-well gift from Brooks Brothers. He had to admit, the ones Mrs. Seton had sent him were softer than any shoe he’d slipped onto his foot in the last decade and change… but he still wasn’t going to wear them.