Black Mad Wheel. Josh Malerman
Philip was first brought in, the nurses ogled the X-rays that showed fractures in so many bones of his body, as if someone had intentionally set out to hurt him, premeditating the unbelievable construct of jagged lines, the chaos of fissures, a lack of logic, of plausibility, of survival.
And yet, Ellen is no stranger to the weird. Almost every patient who arrives at Macy Mercy is in an anomalous condition. And as long as Ellen’s been employed here she’s had to juggle the sensibility of a modern woman of 1957 with the understanding that those who run the military hospital know more than she does. It’s part of her occupation, keeping questions to herself. And like most employees the country over, Ellen wouldn’t be here were it not for the money. Living alone in an apartment on Carter Street, she needs this job. And she likes the work. And sometimes, but not always, she even finds herself trying to solve these mysteries that come through the front door of the hospital.
Like this man. Philip Tonka. The one she watches now through the glass of the nurses’ station. The sight of Philip’s X-rays will never be removed from her memory, and it’s difficult, even now, to observe him without thinking of those broken lines, some small, most not, knowing that they exist in some form beneath the incredibly bruised and discolored flesh.
Christ, it’s like watching an episode of that television show Science Fiction Theatre.
Philip blinks.
The skin around his eyes is especially badly bruised, but not too much more so than the rest of his body. Barring a quantum leap in cosmetic surgery, his features are forever distorted. His face is dented, his chest asymmetrical, and yet … there is a kind of cohesiveness to him. Ellen wonders if it’s because there’s no one else in the world quite this … color.
As she takes notes, minor scribbles marking the blinks, his tongue across his lips, she can’t help but wonder what he once looked like.
Which side of his crooked face is the real him? Is either?
Ellen uses lined paper; a white that rivals her uniform, gives her a sense of illumination here in this nurses’ station furnished with gray filing cabinets, brown drawers, and black desks. Behind her, Nurse Francine is preparing medicine for Philip. She’ll administer it, as she and Delores always do, twice a day. It’s Ellen’s job to mark the physical progress of the freshly woken patient. After an injury such as his, even a blink counts.
But aside from his eyelids and his lips, he hasn’t moved yet. He hardly speaks at all, and when he does it sounds like his throat is sandpaper dry, whether or not she’s just given him water to help.
“Amazing,” Francine says, looking through the glass with Ellen.
“Yes,” Ellen says. “Didn’t think we’d be tracking movement with this one, did we?”
“No, ma’am,” Francine says, her nose less than inch from the window. Ellen sees the older nurse reflected, her black-rimmed glasses superimposed over the heavy wrinkles of her wide face. “Not a chance in hell.”
Then they’re silent. No jokes from Ellen. No hypotheses from Francine. They don’t guess as to what happened to Philip because they’ve already done that, six months of it, leading up to yesterday’s surprise awakening. Some of those speculations were too incredible to fathom, and yet something incredible must have occurred. Delores wondered if it was the work of one man; the patient’s injuries, it seemed, had to be intentional, designed. Francine thought a fall from a cliff could’ve done it. The orderlies, Carl and Jerry, talked about bomb blasts. But Philip’s body is devoid of shrapnel. And there isn’t a surface abrasion on him.
The bruises, the endless spread of purple and orange, mud brown and yellow, are from the injuries within.
Philip lies on his back, stares to the ceiling, his chest, arms, and hands exposed.
For Ellen, the answer lies somewhere in that skin. Sometimes, when forced to touch it, removing or applying the IV, she’s felt a certain falseness there, a rubbery replacement. As though Philip’s skin had been exposed to something powerful enough to change it. Ellen didn’t think it would ever fit right again. The word she didn’t want to use was the same one all the nurses had avoided for six months running.
Nuclear.
In this day and age? Who knew. It was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine, on the mind of every man and woman in America.
Just last week, Ellen woke from a nightmare, an image of Philip removing his skin, a costume, allowing it to fall in folds to the floor.
I’m radioactive, he’d said. Touch me, he’d said.
Now, in the light of the observation room overheads, Philip’s skin looks phonier than ever.
“But life goes on,” Francine says. “For this one.”
The soft click of the door opening and closing behind her lets Ellen know she’s alone in the station. Francine will administer Philip’s shot, then leave to tell Dr. Szands in the office.
Ellen tries not to think about the mysteries here. The host of Science Fiction Theatre was Truman Bradley, a former war correspondent long before he started introducing the pseudoscientific episodes. He was an actor, too. A good-looking one, if Ellen remembers him right.
Did Philip once look like Truman Bradley?
Maybe it’s the way he looks at the ceiling, as though questioning something himself.
Maybe it’s because he’s the first to answer her silent nonreligious prayers.
Philip blinks.
Ellen notes.
As a girl, Ellen saw herself one day walking the streets of New York City, shopping with friends, meeting at ethnic restaurants with complicated names, eating lunch on the benches in the parks.
But then, love … a brief, tragic motherhood … and here her life has led up to this moment …
… nursing.
It’s not lost on her that her profession could be seen as a way of atoning for the loss of her daughter, a need to heal, a need to ward off those black fingers in the halls of Macy Mercy, arriving herself at the doors before they do, perhaps this time with the right dosage of medicine, or a miracle joke to make.
Even here, forty miles outside of Des Moines, Ellen has friends who act as armchair psychiatrists.
You should get away from the hospital, some say. You should get away from sadness, others.
Ellen thinks they’re right, of course, all of them. And yet she can’t bring herself to go. Can’t bring herself to walk away from men like Philip Tonka, who was most certainly left in a basket at death’s door, and now blinks in rhythm with a beating heart.
As Francine gives him his shot, Ellen spins in the seat of the office chair and rolls to the small cooler kept in the corner. She takes a can of soda, wheels back.
She likes her job. She does. She takes pride in the fact that she’s helping others, even if most of those others aren’t conscious of her help. She’d rather be here, marking the progress of a man who has life yet inside him, than spilling cocktails with friends in the big city.
Yes? Isn’t this true?
Ellen shouldn’t ask herself questions like these.
She looks to the clock on the wall.
She notes the time on the paper.
When she looks up, Philip is looking back at her.
Ellen, middrink, gasps, spills some of the grape soda onto the front of her white uniform.
Philip is looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
And he’s moving the tips of his fingers.
“Oh my God,” Ellen says, standing up, then sitting down. She wipes the soda from her uniform, starts to make a note, writes messily,