Two kids came sailing up on bikes. I tried to tell them I needed help, but the only thing to come out of my swollen mouth was a dry
I turned to the right (my swollen knee made going left seem like the world’s worst idea) and began to stagger down the sidewalk. My vision continued to close in; now I seemed to be peering out of a gunslit, or from the mouth of a tunnel. For a moment that made me think of the fallen smokestack at the Kitchener Ironworks, back in Derry.
But was I going toward Haines, or away from it? I couldn’t remember. The visible world was down to a single sharp circle about six inches in diameter. My head was splitting; there was a forest fire in my guts. When I fell, it seemed to be in slow motion, and the sidewalk felt as soft as a feather-pillow.
Before I could pass out, something prodded me. A hard, metallic something. A rusty voice eight or ten miles above me said, “You!
I turned over. It took the last of my strength, but I managed. Towering above me was the elderly woman who’d called me a coward when I refused to step in between Lee and Marina on The Day of the Zipper. It might have
“Ohmydeargod,” she said. “Who has beaten you?”
That was a long story, and I couldn’t tell it. The dark was closing in, and I was glad because the pain in my head was killing me.
Not if I could help it.
Gathering all my strength, I spoke to the face far above me, the only bright thing left in the encroaching darkness. “Call… nine-one-one.”
“What’s
Of course she didn’t know. Nine-one-one hadn’t been invented yet. I held on long enough to try one more time. “Ambulance.”
I think I might have repeated it, but I’m not sure. That was when the darkness swallowed me.
I have wondered since if it was kids who stole my car, or Roth’s goons. And when it happened. At any rate, the thieves didn’t trash it or crash it; Deke Simmons picked it up in the DPD impound lot a week later. It was in far better shape than I was.
Time-travel is full of ironies.
During the next eleven weeks I once more lived two lives. There was the one I hardly knew about — the outside life — and the one I knew all too well. That was the one inside, where I often dreamed of the Yellow Card Man.
In the outside life, the walker-lady (Alberta Hitchinson; Sadie sought her out and brought her a bouquet of flowers) stood over me on the sidewalk and hollered until a neighbor came out, saw the situation, and called the ambulance that took me to Parkland. The doctor who treated me there was Malcolm Perry, who would later treat both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald as they lay dying. With me he had better luck, although it was a close thing.
I had sustained broken teeth, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a fractured left knee, a broken left arm, dislocated fingers, and abdominal injuries. I had also suffered a brain injury, which was what concerned Perry the most.
I was told I woke up and howled when my belly was palpated, but I have no memory of it. I was catheterized and immediately began pissing what boxing announcers would have called “the claret.” My vitals were at first stable, then began sliding. I was typed, cross-matched, and given four units of whole blood… which, Sadie told me later, the residents of Jodie made up a hundred times over at a community blood drive in late September. She had to tell me several times, because I kept forgetting. I was prepped for abdominal surgery, but first a neurology consult and a spinal tap — there’s no such thing as CT scans or MRIs in the Land of Ago.
I’m also told I had a conversation with two of the nurses prepping me for the tap. I told them that my wife had a drinking problem. One of them said that was too bad and asked me what her name was. I told them she was a fish called Wanda and laughed quite heartily. Then I passed out again.
My spleen was trashed. They removed it.
While I was still conked out and my spleen was going wherever no longer useful but not absolutely vital organs go, I was turned over to Orthopedics. There my broken arm was put in a splint and my broken leg in a plaster cast. Many people signed it over the following weeks. Sometimes I knew the names; usually I didn’t.
