Machine Man Read Free Page B

Something dripped into my eyes.
    “Yes! Great! Great!” Dave dropped to his haunches and slapped my arm. “You made it!” He laughed like we were friends. But we were not. We were not.
    THE NEXT day Dave turned up in a steel wheelchair. It was pretty flash. I mean for what it was. The wheels gleamed. The seat, back, and armrests were green leather. Dave parked beside my bed and climbed out. “Hi-ho, Silver!”
    “What?”
    “Time to mount your steed, my lord.” He slapped the chair. “It’ll be great.”
    It would not be great. We both knew that. It would be struggling and shaking and landing in the chair like a wet fish. And then what? Maybe Dave would push me around the hospital. Maybe he would make me wheel myself. Either would be difficult and humiliating. I chewed the inside of my mouth, because I am not good at getting mad with people.
    “Let’s do this,” said Dave.
    “I have to finish reading this.” I showed him my phone. He plucked it from my fingers and set it on the bedside table. I didn’t stop him, because I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Dave didn’t understand the intimacy of the phone. He couldn’t have.
    “Mount up.”
    He was trying to antagonize me so I would strive to prove him wrong. He saw I responded well to a challenge.He would needle me mercilessly and then, on the day I was released, tell me how he’d always known I could do it.
    “Let’s go, big guy.” He drummed his hands on the chair. “Let’s tear this place up.”
    That was how they justified it. Gym teachers. Personal trainers. Runners. Looking down on you, despising you, it was okay, because it was for your own good.
    “Don’t make me come over there,” said Dave. “Ha, ha.”
    I DREAMED I was back at Better Future and couldn’t find my leg. I hopped around the lab, searching. I spied it on top of the spectrograph. I filled with relief because now I could reattach it, then woke and realized no.
    “TAKE IT in,” said Dave. “Ri-i-i-ight in. Feel your chest expanding. Hold it. Hold it. Now out.”
    I exhaled. The sun came out from behind a cloud. I squinted and shifted in my wheelchair. We were outside. I was not happy about that.
    “Three more. I want you to let the relaxation in, Charles. Let it in.”
    “I’m hot.”
    “No you’re not.” Hospital people walked by, entered the lobby doors. Dave sucked in breath. “Three more.”
    “This isn’t helping.”
    “It’s not helping because you won’t let it help.”
    “It’s because I’m missing a leg. Breathing doesn’t help with that. It doesn’t help at all.”
    Dave’s eyes held no pity. “Feeling sorry for yourself?”
    Dave was wearing shorts. I had been trying not to let that bother me, but he was wearing shorts, with two fit, tan legs bursting out and running down to socks and sneakers,and wasn’t that a little unfair to a guy in a wheelchair with a bloated, mutant, itching stump? I didn’t want to be that guy. That angry cripple guy. But I was a cripple and Dave’s legs were making me angry.
    “Just another chapter, buddy,” said Dave. “A new chapter in your life waiting to be written.”
    “It’s not a chapter. It’s a loss. It’s a regression.”
    “All in how you see it.”
    “It’s not. It’s objectively verifiable. I’m
less.
”
    Dave squatted. He put a hand on my left wheel. “Let me tell you about a guy who came through here about five years ago. He’d had an industrial accident just like you. Lost both legs. Right up to the hip. Used to be a water skier. Professionally. But day one, when he came out of surgery, he decided,
That was my old life
. He said,
Now I start my new life
. I told him to write the next chapter, man, and he did. You know what he’s doing now?”
    I pushed Dave’s hand off my wheel, got my hands on the grips, and shoved myself away. People stood aside to let me wheel by, one furious revolution at a time.
    “He’s winning medals!” Dave shouted. “In the Paralympics!”
    I WOKE