Black Mad Wheel. Josh Malerman

       1

      The patient is awake. A song he wrote is fading out, as if, as he slept, it played on a loop, the soundtrack of his unbelievable slumber.

      He remembers every detail of the desert.

      The first thing he sees is a person. That person is the doctor. Wearing khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt, he doesn’t dress like a doctor, but the bright science in his eyes gives him away.

      “You’ve been hurt very badly.” His voice is confidence. His voice is control. “It’s an unparalleled injury, Private Tonka. To live through something so …” He makes fists about chest high, as though catching a falling word. “… unfair.”

      Philip recognizes more than medicine in the man who stands a foot from the end of his cot. The strong, lean physique. The unnaturally perfect hair, the skin as unwrinkled as a desert dune.

      This doctor is military.

      “Now,” the doctor says, “let me tell you why this is such an incredibly difficult thing to do.” Philip hasn’t fully processed the room he is in. The borders of his vision are blurred. How long has he been here? Where is here? But the doctor isn’t answering unasked questions like these. “Had you broken only your wrists and your elbows, we might surmise that you fell, hit the ground in just such a way. But you’ve broken your humeri, radii, and ulnae, too; your radial tuberosities; coracoid processes, trochleas, and each of the twenty-seven bones in your hands.” He smiles. His smile says Philip ought to share in the astonishment. “I don’t expect you to know the names of every bone in the human body, Philip, but what I’m telling you is that you didn’t just break your wrists and elbows. You broke almost everything.”

      Sudden whispers from somewhere Philip can’t see. Maybe voices in a hall. Philip tries to turn his head to look.

      He can’t. He can’t move his neck at all.

      He opens his mouth to say something, to say he can’t move, but his throat is dry as summer sand.

      He closes his eyes. He sees hoofprints in that sand.

      “Now, had you broken only both hands and arms, I might dream up an accident you were involved in; the victim of a press, say, a vise of some sort; possibly both your arms were on a table when a heavy weight fell upon them. But, of course, it was not only your hands and arms that were broken. The femurs, tibiae, and fibulae on both legs were cracked, too, as were the patellae, medial epicondyles, every transverse axis (which ought to have been enough to cause a coma itself), as well as most of the twenty-six bones in each of your feet.” The doctor speaks with such freedom, moves with such health that Philip feels parodied by comparison. “I suppose one might reenact the scene, place you on a cliff’s edge, arms and legs hanging over that chasm, as something so cruelly shaped, just wrong enough to connect with each of the aforementioned bones, fell from the sky, delivering you the most violent community of fractures I’ve ever observed. But no. Your woes do not stop there.”

      Behind the doctor, where the beige wall meets the powder-blue ceiling, Philip sees an African desert at midday.

      He thinks of the Danes.

      “Your pubis, ilium, sacrum … crushed. The pubic symphysis, anterior longitudinal … ruptured. Your ribs, Philip, each and every one … along with every intervertebral disc, the sternum, manubrium, clavicles, up through the neck, to the mandible, zygomatics, temporals, frontal, and … even some teeth.” The doctor smiles, showing his own. “Now, one might hypothesize such a result befalling a man who had been lying down upon a stone slab, unaware that a second stone slab would drop from a height, crushing him entirely, all at once. Such a theory might be of interest had each of the fractures been close to the same distance from the surface of your body. But, of course, this isn’t the case. The fracture in your anterior longitudinal is a full inch disparate from the one suffered by your mandible. In fact, there isn’t a single uniform break in your body; no pattern to divine an object, a cause, a picture of what hurt you. In other words, Philip … this wasn’t