Free Please Undo This Hurt by Seth Dickinson Page B

a beard! You have a great chin! But we’re busy gardening, rooting around in galvanized tubs full of okra and zucchini and purple hull peas. Hot peppers, since the sweet breeds won’t take. The autumn light down here isn’t so thin as in New York. I am bare-handed, turning up the soil around the roots, grit up under my fingers and in the web of my hands. I am making life.
    But down in the zucchini roots I find a knot of maggots, balled up squirming like they’ve wormed a portal up from maggot hell and come pouring out blind and silent. And I think: I am only growing homes for maggots. Everything is this way. In the end we are only making more homes, better homes, for maggots.
    Jacob smiles at me and says, like he did: “I’m just not ready for your life. It’s too hard. Too many people get hurt.”
    I wake up groaning, hangover clotted in my sinuses. Staring up at the vent above my mattress I realize there’s no heat. It’s broken again.
    The cold is sharp, though. Sterile. It makes me go. I get to the hospital on time and Mary’s waiting for me, smiling, my favorite partner armed with coffee and danishes and an egg sandwich from the enigmatic food truck only she can find. For my hangover, of course. Mary, bless her, knows my schedule.
    Later that day we save a man’s life.
    He swam out into the river to die. We’re first on the scene and I am stupid, so stupid: I jump in to save him. The water’s late-autumn cold, the kind of chill I am afraid will get into my marrow and crystallize there, so that later in life, curled up in the summer sun with a lover, I’ll feel a pang and know that a bead of ice came out of my bone and stuck in my heart. I used to get that kind of chest pain growing up, see. I thought they were ice crystals that formed when we went to see ex-Dad in Colorado, where the world felt high and thin, everything offered up on an altar to the truth behind the indifferent cloth of stars.
    I’m thinking all this as I haul the drowning man back in. I feel so cold and so aware. My mind goes everywhere. Goes to Jacob, of course.
    Offered up on an altar. We used to play a sex game like that, Jacob and I. You know, a sexy sacrifice—isn’t that the alchemy of sex games? You take something appalling and you make it part of your appetites. Jesus, I used to think it was cute, and now describing it I’m furiously embarrassed. Jacob was into all kinds of nerd shit. For him I think the fantasy was always kind of Greco-Roman, Andromeda on the rocks, but I always wondered if he dared imagine me as some kind of Aztec princess, which would be too complicatedly racist for him to suggest. He’s dating a white girl now. It doesn’t bother me but Mom just won’t let it go. She’s sharp about it, too: she has a theory that Jacob feels he’s now Certified Decent, having passed his qualifying exam, and now he’ll go on to be a regular shithead.
    And Mary’s pulling me up onto the pier, and I’m pulling the suicide.
    He nearly dies in the ambulance. We swaddle him in heat packs and blankets and Mary, too, swaddles him, smiling and flirting, it’s okay, what a day for a swim, does he know that in extreme situations rescuers are advised to provide skin-to-skin contact?
    See, Mary’s saying, see, it’s not so bad here, not so cold. You’ll meet good people. You’ll go on.
    Huddled in my own blankets I meet the swimmer’s warm brown eyes and just then the ambulance slams across a pothole. He fibrillates. Alarms shriek. I see him start to go, receding, calm, warm, surrounded by people trying to save him, and I think that if he went now, before his family found out, before he had to go back to whatever drove him into the river, it’d be best.
    Oh, God, the hurt can’t be undone. It’d be best.
    His eyes open. They peel back like membranes. I see a thin screen, thinner than Colorado sky, and in the vast