ghost took this opportunity to thumb him hard in the eye.
“Hellfire!”
Morgan let go. Bill swabbed my throat with alcohol and cut deep with the X-Acto knife he’d taken from the sterile package. A thin stream of air reached my lungs. Morgan swore again. Bill was still working, feeding a length of narrow tubing into my throat. Another breath, easier this time. And another.
Morgan floated near me, scowling deeply, tearing from one eye. My ghost had disappeared. I was going to live.
I smiled and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was in a hospital bed with a headache the size of Lake Erie.
ME DOING A LITTLE BETTER
CHAPTER 18
I tried to speak. Couldn’t. My throat felt like sandpaper. I tried to say, Where am I? and it came out like,
Wahmmaaaam
. No one answered.
The light in my eyes made my headache worse. I tried to say, Put out the light, and it came out like,
Pahlaaaaa
. No one did anything.
I turned away. No I didn’t. Red hot spikes in the back of my head stopped me from moving.
I fell asleep.
Next time I woke up things started coming into focus. I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by bloops and gurgles and whooshing noises. A nurse stood by my bed. “Good morning, Jim,” she said loudly.
Light in my eyes again. My nurse moved it around. I followed it with my eyes. “Very good,” she said.
My hands were tied to my sides. I started to wonder why and then fell asleep.
Next time I woke up, an old lady was sitting next to me, squeezing my tied hand.
“Jim,” she said. “Oh, Jim.”
“Ma,” I said. My lips felt like balloons. My throat burned.
My tied left hand hurt when she squeezed it.
“Ouch. Let go,” I said.
“Oh, Jim,” she said again. She couldn’t understand me. It was her, all right. Smoke-gruff voice, face like a crumpled fender. Ma. I was happy to see her.
“What happened?” I asked. “How’d I get here?”
“Oh, Jim,” she said.
I went back to sleep.
A doctor shook me awake and asked me questions. Name, address, how many fingers. I told her.
“Good,” she said.
Her name was Dr. Driver. She untied me.
My throat still hurt. I reached up, but the doc grabbed my arm in midair.
“No, Jim,” she said. “Let your throat alone. You had a tube sticking out of there, but it’s gone. Now you have to let the wound heal.”
She asked me to make a fist, touch my fingers together. I did them easy enough, except that there was a needle and a tube coming out of my right wrist and they got in the way.
“Good,” she said again.
There was another bag below the bed, with a tube attached to my dick. Pretty gross.
The doc was real old, maybe like fifty. She had a white coat, glasses, and her gray hair in a ponytail. Her lips were a thin line. She took a microphone from her pocket and started asking me about the last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital.
“What about the accident?” she asked. “Do you remember that?”
“I remember a car,” I said.
“Go on.”
“Big white car. A Lincoln.”
“I don’t know about the car that hit you.”
“Raf was with me. It was dark.”
She frowned. I shut up. Just in time I remembered that we were inside the Lincoln, boosting it. I wasn’t going to talk into a microphone about that.
“What do you remember after the Lincoln?”
“I went home.” The doc nodded encouragement. “I was wearing a new shirt.”
“New shirt. Good. Go on, Jim.”
But I couldn’t. I tried, but my memory was a pocket with a hole in it. There was nothing there after the Lincoln.
I caught myself trying to touch my throat. “Did I really have a tube sticking out here?” I asked. You know, that would look kind of cool, walking down the street with a tube out your throat. Hold a cigarette up to it, take a drag, let the smoke out.
All right, maybe not too cool. But interesting.
“You started to choke in the ambulance, and the paramedic stuck a tube in so you could breathe,” said Dr. Driver. “Do you remember that?”
It