great pals shooting the breeze and having a grand old time. But a while later, when I pulled out the hip flask—getting really fucked up felt like an excellent idea, and whatever the booze-and-meds cocktail ended up doing to me, I was fine with it—it looked ridiculous, its cocky silver curves ludicrously out of place amid all the uncompromising functionality and institutional hospital colors. It looked like a joke, a sneer straight in my face for actually thinking—stupid, pathetic—that all it would take was a few slugs of booze and ta-da! everything would be totally back to normal! The sour reek of the whisky turned my stomach, and I put it away again.
* * *
A few days later they let me go home. They had taken a staple remover to my head, leaving behind a long red scar surrounded by red dots where the staples had gone in, and disconnected me from my painkiller IV—I had been a bit nervous about that, but the pills they had given me instead were working OK, and anyway my ribs and my tailbone were a lot better and even the headache wasn’t constant any more. I had had a visit from a physiotherapist, who had given me a bunch of exercises that I had promptly forgotten and a card with an appointment time for some clinic somewhere, which I had promptly lost. I had also had a visit from a social worker or a counselor or something, a scrawny woman with enormous glasses and a gooey smile who had given me a huge sheaf of brochures about Brain Injury And You (very very simple block-figure covers in bright monochrome, diagrams of a block figure putting things into his Memory Filing Cabinet and taking them out again, explanations of why I should eat plenty of colorful vegetables, “At first I didn’t want to take naps after lunch, but they really help. I still get tired but I feel much better”—James from Cork, plus lots of helpful planners—Important Things to Do Today; Things That Went Well Today) and suggested that if I felt anger I should hang a towel from my washing line and whack it with a stick.
I had also had another visit from the shitbird neurologist, which had been fun. All my questions (When can I go back to work? when can I go for a few pints? have sex? go to the gym?) had been either ignored completely or met with the same offhand, infuriating “When you feel ready,” which of course was exactly what I was asking to begin with: when was I going to feel ready? The exception was When can I drive? which it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask: the neurologist (pasty chins tucked down, eyebrows raised forbiddingly over his glasses, he just stopped short of wagging a finger in my face) had informed me that I was absolutely not allowed behind the wheel of a car, in case of seizures. After six months, if the seizures hadn’t materialized, I could come to him for a check-up and ask nicely if please sir I could have my license back. I was trying very hard not to think about the possibility of seizures, but at that moment my entire remaining brainpower had been concentrated on how passionately I wanted to kick the neurologist in the nads, so I had made it through the conversation without spiraling into horror (Things That Went Well Today!).
My mother was due to come pick me up in an hour and I was wandering uselessly around my room, trying to make up my mind what the hell to do with the accumulation of stuff heaped on every surface. I didn’t think I wanted any of it (where had a blue plush rabbit even come from?) but maybe some of the food would look more appetizing when I was home and didn’t feel like going to the shops, and surely I would be up to reading some of this stuff at some point, and my mother’s flowers were in vases that she might want back . . . Two weeks earlier I would have cheerfully dumped the whole lot in the bin, told my mother I had no idea where her vases had gone, and bought her new ones.
I was staring helplessly at the plush rabbit in my hands (would Melissa really have brought me this thing? would she expect me to keep it?) when there was a tap at the door and Detective Martin