I’ve always been tall, same as Tex. Once we started growing, we didn’t stop. Now I can’t see the parking lot through the window, only the sky. The floor, which I haven’t thought about once since arriving, is suddenly right there, scuffed linoleum and the wheels of the IV stand. Everything is lower. The room that I’ve been staring at for days looks like a different place from down here.
“How does that feel?” Eddie asks.
“It’s fine. Very comfortable. I’ll rate it five stars.”
Eddie doesn’t buy it. He’s been doing this for years and he’s heard every version of bravado a broken man can produce.
“Are you ready to do some work?” he asks.
“You bet.” I perk up at the thought of finally being able to do something productive for a change.
He has me put my hands on the wheels, shows me how they move, how the brakes lock, but I don’t actually go anywhere. Just a small push forward, a correction back. More demonstration than movement.
I’m already tired. Sitting here feels like work I didn’t sign up for, like my body’s spending energy just staying upright.
“Alright, that’s enough for today,” Eddie says after what can’t be more than ten minutes.
The second he says it, I realize I’m lightheaded. Not bad, just enough that I don’t argue.
The transfer back to bed is just as bad. Eddie and Angela lift me, swing my legs, arrange my body, tuck the blanket around me. I glance at the door three times during the process.
Benji, please don’t knock on that door.
He didn’t say what time he’s coming today. He’ll probably be here tonight. But the fear of that door opening during the twenty seconds when I’m suspended between the chair and the bed, legs hanging, arms gripping Eddie’s shoulders, nothing but dead weight, that fear is real.
I can never let him see that. I care and I don’t know why. Why the fuck do I care? It doesn’t make sense. All I know is that I do.
After the session, Angela takes the chair back to the wall and they leave. I lie there and stare at it while my brain starts running every scenario to its worst possible end.
I think about my little house with the screened-in porch. Two steps up to the front door. Two concrete steps that I’ve walked up and down four thousand times without a single thought.
In a wheelchair, those two steps might as well be a cliff. I’d need a ramp built over the steps to my own front door to get into my house. The bathroom is too narrow for a wheelchair. The shower has a step-in tub. The kitchen counter is the right height for a man standing and the wrong height for a man sitting. I wouldn’t even be able to reach my coffee maker or my sink faucet.
My house that I’ve always loved would need to be rebuilt for me to live in it. Or I’d have to sell it and buy one that fits a wheelchair. Or maybe I won’t need any of that. Nobody knows yet. That’s the worst part.
Then there’s my job. My badge is in a plastic bag in the closet of this room with the rest of my personal effects. Sure, there are desk jobs and administrative roles. All cops know about these the same way we all know about the disability benefits and the department chaplain who calls after a critical incident. You know these things exist and you never think they’ll apply to you.
Desk duty is for other cops. Wheelchairs are for other people. I’ve been Officer Weaver since I was twenty-three. Every part of that job needed my legs. The foot chases, the twelve-hour shifts on concrete, the stance you take when you knock on a door and don’t know what’s behind it. Without my legs, I’m a badge in a drawer.
And then there’s the rest of it. The part I don’t want to say out loud. I’m wearing a catheter. I have a tube in my dick. I can’t feel anything down there. Not pressure, not temperature, nothing. My dick might as well be dead too. That’s what it feels like right now. That’s the blunt, ugly truth of it.
I’m thirty-two years old, healthy everywhere else, strong arms, clear head, and my dick doesn’t work. Can’t get hard. Can’t feel a hand on my thigh or my own hand on myself.
No more sex.
I cut the thought off before it can get any bigger. I’ve had a sex life. Not a spectacular one, or a consistent one, but I had one. Men came and went. A week here, a weekend there. Nobody stayed and I never asked them to because staying was never the point and I wasn’t ready for it to be.
That was fine when I had a body to offer. A week with a fun cop in a beach town was enough for most guys even if it wasn’t enough to build on. I was part of their vacation. The fun story they told their friends back in Atlanta or Nashville. And I was fine being that.
Except now I’m not even the vacation anymore. Who’s going to swipe right on a cop in a wheelchair? Who’s going to fly to Panama City and hook up with a guy who can’t feel hisown legs and needs help getting into a chair and currently has a catheter bag strapped to the side of his bed?
The answer is nobody.
My phone rings. I reach for it, grateful for anything that pulls me out of where my head is going.
It’s Tex.
“Is your stalker coming today?” he says, no hello, just Tex.
