Page 8 of Puck My Pain Away

I should take it off immediately. A doctor removes a patient’s hand from his wrist without thinking about it, the same as he’d move a limb out of the path of a door, no event in it at all. I know exactly how to do that. My hands have done it ten thousand times. And I crouch there and I don’t do it. I feel the heat of his palm, the quick tap of his pulse against the thin skin over the bones. I am aware of my own pulse answering it, picking up, a thing I have not let happen at a bedside in years. My own hand stays where it is on his knee, perfectly still, doing nothing, which is its own kind of answer and I know it. His thumb moves once against the inside of my wrist. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. I know. I catalogue it the same as I catalog everything about him, the held breath, the unconscious thumb, his whole body angled toward mine on the bench without his permission, and the cataloging is the only thing keeping me on the clinician’s side of this, the habit of turning want into data so I never have to act on the want itself.

I let it stay.

That’s the line I cross tonight, and it’s a small one, and small is how all of mine have been. I let his hand stay on my wrist a second past where I should. In that second, I feel the whole future of this arrange itself like iron filings on a magnet, clean and inevitable. I let myself feel it, the warmth of being held onto by someone who has started to need me, the thing I have wanted my entire life and dressed up as professional duty so I would never have to call it by its name.

Then I take his hand off my wrist. I peel it away by the fingers, set it back on his own knee, and I stand, putting the height and the cold back between us where it belongs.

“That’s enough for tonight,” I say. “Ice it twenty minutes when you get home. Not longer.” My voice is even. It costs me nothing to keep it even; keeping the outside of me still while the inside does whatever it wants is the oldest trick I own. “Go home, Roman.”

And then I do the thing I never do, the small tell that I’m already not in control of this like I’m telling myself I am: I leave first. I gather my things and I walk out of my own facility ahead of my patient, because if I stay in that room one more minute I am not certain what register my voice keeps, and a man who’s never unsure of his own voice does not like learning that he can be.

—

At home, I write him a note about his knee, and I write it four times.

It’s nothing. A check-in, the kind I send athletes, instructions for the icing and a line about tomorrow. I type it on my phone standing in my kitchen with a drink I haven’t touched, and the first version says more than it should. It asks how he’s sleeping. It says the work today was good, real progress, that he should be proud, because I sat in the dark last night and watched his face go peaceful and want to put that peace there again with a sentence. I read it back. I delete it.

The second version is shorter and still wrong, still warmer than a doctor is to a patient, a get some rest with a weight under it that he’d feel even without knowing where it came from. I delete that one too.

The third time I strip it down to the bone. Ice twenty minutes. No more. We start at the late slot tomorrow; do the morning mobility work before you come in. Nothing else. No warmth, no question, no opening. I read it over and it’s perfect, which is to say it’s a wall, which is to say it gives him nothing and therefore makes him reach. Because I learned a long time ago that the surest way to make a starving man fix on you is to feed him by hand, then withhold. I didn’t invent that. I just stopped being able to tell whether I’m doing it on purpose.

I send the cold one.

Then I stand in my kitchen and look at the drink I’m not drinking. I think about Caleb, who I also fed and withheld, managed and monitored, all of it dressed as love, right up to the morning I couldn’t wake him. I think to myself that this is different. I’m in control of this one. I have the pen, the schedule, years of practice. I will not let it go where the last one went.

I believe it. That’s the worst part, that I believe it, standing there with the cold note already sent and the second slot already held and his pulse still warm on the memory of my wrist. I believe I’m the one driving.

My phone lights on the nightstand a few minutes later. His reply to the cold note, and I don’t open it, I let it sit there glowing in the dark, because not answering is the next instruction, the next withholding, the next small tightening of the line, and because I want to open it so badly that the wanting itself is information I’d rather not have. A man in control of a thing does not lie still in the dark refusing to read one text from his patient. I lie still and refuse to read it. I tell myself that’s discipline. I rinse the glass. I go to bed. Tomorrow there’s a late session no one can see, and I fall asleep telling myself it’s for his knee.

5

ROMAN

Iwake at noon with my face stuck to the couch cushion and no memory of moving from the bed.

The light’s all wrong, high and white and accusing, the light that means the morning happened without me. My mouth tastes like the inside of the whiskey bottle and there’s a crust of something at the corner of my eye and my phone’s somewhere under me, digging into my hip, dead again. I lie there a second taking inventory of the wreck. Knee—throbbing, dull, the night’s pills worn off. Head—splitting. A water glass tipped over on the floor by the couch that I don’t remember pouring, a dark stain spread into the rug beside it. The framed jersey on the wall looking down at me like a thing in a museum about a guy who died.

The kitchen’s worse than I left it. The sink’s full, four days of it now, going on five, plates with food cemented to them and glasses ringed brown, and there’s a smell I’m choosing not to identify. I stand in the middle of all of it in yesterday’s clothes, and I can’t make myself care enough to run the water. That’s the part that should scare me—if I had the room left to be scared. I used to be a guy who made his bed in a hotel before housekeeping came. Now I’m a guy who lives in four hundred square feet of a house he’s letting rot around him.

I charge the phone enough to wake it and the notifications stack up the same as every day. Theo, twice. You alive? Come to dinner, the kids ask about you. And the rookie, Niko Berg, the twenty-year-old they called up when they put me on IR, who has decided for reasons I cannot fathom that we’re friends. Hey Roman!! Was hoping I could pick ur brain about the forecheck sometime if ur up for it, no worries if not!! Two exclamation points on everything, a kid wearing my number’s energy if not my number, his whole life still in front of him and his knees still his own, and I can’t look at it. I can’t look at any of it. He’s what I was at twenty and doesn’t know yet that it ends with you stuck to a couch at noon.

I pour whiskey into last night’s glass without washing it. I shake two pills into my palm and take them together, standing at the rotten sink, at noon, and I don’t even pretend to myself that the knee’s the reason this time. The knee’s just the excuse I keep in my pocket. I take them because the day is a thing I cannot do sober and there’s a skating test this afternoon that I already know how it will go.

The pills take hold and the warm hand comes over my chest and the kitchen stops being a thing I have to feel bad about. That’s the trick of it, the thing nobody tells you. It doesn’t make anything better. It just moves all of it one room over, behind a wall, where I can still see it but I don’t have to touch it, the dishes and the silence and the framed dead man on the wall, all of it filed away on the other side of the warmth. Twenty minutes and I can almost stand myself. I check the clock and I do the math on the next one before I’ve finished this one, which is a thing I’ve stopped pretending not to notice. There are two clocks in me now. The comeback clock everyone keeps asking about, and this other one, the small private one counting down to relief, and only one of them is still running on schedule.

—

It goes how I know it goes.

They’ve got me out on the practice sheet for an assessment: me, a clipboard, Gus Renner’s assistant, Blake, a couple of the training staff standing along the boards with that careful nothing on their faces. And Elias. Elias is there too, off to the side in his good coat with his arms folded, not writing anything down, just watching. And I hate that he’s there. I skate worse because he is, and I can’t tell if I’m skating worse to punish him or to make him do something.

Niko’s out there too, at the far end, supposedly running his own drills but really just orbiting, sneaking looks, the kid who grew up with my poster on his wall watching his hero get tested like a lab animal and not knowing he should look away. I told the staff I didn’t want an audience. Nobody told the rookie, or the rookie didn’t have the sense, and every time I catch the flop of his pale hair in the corner of my eye it’s another set of teeth in me.

The thing is, on the ice, for about ninety seconds, I’m fine. Straight lines, easy glide. My body remembers what it is, and my chest opens up for the first time in weeks, because this, this was the one place I was ever whole. The cold air in my lungs, the hiss of steel on fresh sheet, the little sounds of a rink that I’ve heard since before I could read. For ninety seconds I’m not a wreck on a couch, I’m Roman Vane, and I could weep with how good it is to be him again. Then they have me cut hard on the edge. A real hockey stop, weight down into the knee, the thing I’ve done ten thousand times without a thought.

The knee doesn’t hold.

It’s not even pain, not at first, it’s absence, the joint just isn’t there when I ask for it, the leg folding under me like a tent pole pulled. I go down on the fresh ice in front of all of them, sprawled, my stick clattering away. And the sound the building doesn’t make is the worst sound in the world, because I’ve heard the other version of it, I’ve heard eighteen thousand people, and now it’s six people on a practice rink pretending they didn’t see.