Cyrus lost control, and the Cadillac spun from the road into an old oak tree, upon whose branches an earlier Dwight had, in 1894, impaled himself the day before his mors curae, leaving a rabbit named Excelsior happy and free in a nearby field.
Five miles from home.
41
I woke to painful brightness, to brilliant sheet lightning stretched across the sky, turning liquid, filling every crack and corner, leaking beneath my eyelids.
I tried to move my head. Sharp, angry edges cut my brain.
“Jessica?” a voice asked.
“Jessica Morton,” I said. The name was an anchor. It was mine.
“Excellent,” the voice said. “Do you know what year it is?”
“Fuck.” This was a bad question to be asked—a worse one to have trouble answering.
Long seconds later, the year came to me, and who the president was, and counting backward from twenty was easy enough, except for eleven, which sounded wrong. It felt as if the conversation had happened before.
“Are you in pain?”
“Yes.”
“Let me give you something.”
I shook my head—I knew how to deal with pain. Uncle Cyrus had started my training when I was five. We had a song about his classes.
Butterfly clips on your fingertips. Cayenne water in the eyes.
The sparking lamp, forty milliamps—it clarifies.
Turn it off like a faucet, push it under your feet.
YOU’RE JUST MEAT.
“There’s no need to suffer,” the voice said.
I tried to switch the pain off, to push it down, but it was too bright.
Uncle Cyrus’s tricks hadn’t always worked.
“Sure,” I said.
My arm felt a twinge, and I opened one eye against the shredding light.
A blue plastic gadget was staked to my forearm, a white bandage holding it in place. A transparent tube led from it into the bright, unbearable sky.
Fingers turned a valve on the gadget, this new aperture between me and the excruciating world. Then a syringe went in, and soon the pain edged away.
My brain started to reassemble itself. There was something people were supposed to ask in situations like this.
“What happened?”
“You were in a car accident. Your uncle is okay.”
Which uncle?
“You’ve suffered a concussion. Possibly a seizure.”
