spoke: Jesus. He’s . . . Yeah, he is. The poor bastard.
Physically, I was getting better, at least to some extent. My face went back to normal—except for the chipped tooth, which I knew I should get fixed at some stage—and my ribs and my tailbone healed up OK, although I still got the odd twinge. I didn’t have any seizures, as far as I could tell, which was nice, although the neurologist had informed me smugly that they could start months or even a year or two after the injury. Sometimes I went four or five hours painkiller-free before the headache kicked in again; I liked life a lot better on the pills, which blurred the edges till things were just about bearable, but I was going easy on them in case—I didn’t even want to think too hard about this possibility—the doctors refused to renew the prescription once I ran out.
The mental stuff was a different story. I had a good all-round selection of the symptoms from the social worker’s helpful brochures: my Memory Filing Cabinet appeared to be well and truly fucked (standing blank-headed in the shower trying to remember whether I had already washed my hair or not, in mid-conversation with Melissa groping for the word instant), I was constantly exhausted just like James from Cork, and my organizational skills were shot to the point where making breakfast was a major and incredibly frustrating challenge. In practical terms all this was less of a problem than it might have been, I suppose, given that I wasn’t even trying to do anything complex like work or socialize, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
Overall, being home was worse than being in the hospital. At least in that cockeyed, dislocated limbo my symptoms hadn’t seemed out of place, while here in the real world they were glaringly, repellently wrong, they were obscenities that should never have been allowed to exist: grown man standing slack-jawed in his kitchen trying to figure out duhhh how me make fried egg, on the phone with the credit-card company fumbling for his date of birth, drooling moron, defective, freakshow, disgusting— And down again into that all-consuming vortex, only it had deepened, it was spreading: not just fear any more, now it was roiling fury and loathing and it was a depth and breadth of loss that I had never imagined. Only a few weeks ago I had been a normal guy, just a guy, tossing his jacket on in the morning, humming the Coronas through a slice of toast caught between his teeth, deciding where he was going to take his girlfriend for dinner; now every second was part of an inexorable tide drawing me farther and farther from that guy whom I had every right to be and who was gone for good, left behind on the other side of that unbreakable sheet of glass. And whereas in the hospital I had been able to tell myself that things would be better once I was home, now that that had turned out not to be true, I couldn’t find any reason to think that anything would get better ever.
It wasn’t only myself I raged at, of course. My mind churned out epic, elaborate fantasies in which I tracked down the two burglars (recognized a voice in the street, a pair of eyes across a pub, kept my cool with awe-inspiring self-control as I stalked them through their seedy haunts) and destroyed them in Tarantino-esque ways much too embarrassing to recount. I lived those scenarios over and over, amplifying and refining each time, till I knew each step and twist of them far better than I knew the details of the actual event. Even at the time, though, I knew exactly how feeble and pathetic they were (zit-ridden asthmatic loser locked in his bedroom furiously fantasizing, under his collection of scantily clad anime posters, about kung-fu-kicking the school bullies into next week) and in the end the rage always turned back on myself: mutilated, useless, physically and mentally incapable of a trip to Tesco never mind action-hero revenge, a fucking joke.
Calls from my mother, who—since Melissa had managed to convince her that I didn’t need a poodle—had switched back to suggesting, with infuriating persistence, that what I really needed was a few weeks at home. “You’d be amazed what it can do for you, a different setting— We promise to stay out of your way, you’ll barely know we’re there—”