Bloody River Blues

put both feet on the floor.
    “Doctor—”
    “Ah . . .” She cocked an eyebrow.
    “Wendy,” he corrected. “It seemed so real.”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “The pain.”
    She stood up and opened the window, to air the room out, and returned to the chair. He felt the coldair on his arms and face. But he didn’t feel it on his legs. She said, “It’s both psychological and physiological. Amputees have the same sensation. It’s real in the sense that pain is a subjective experience and what you’re experiencing is just like any other pain. But it’s phantom because you aren’t feeling a pain response to stimuli at the nerve endings. Say, wasn’t your wife going to be coming by?”
    “She was. A while ago. She’ll be back tomorrow.” He tried to picture Penny Buffett and Wendy Weiser chatting at a barbecue or PBA picnic. It was impossible to imagine this scene.
    Weiser nodded. “Well, next time. This is mostly a social visit, Donnie. We’ve done a lot of tests and we’re going to do a lot more. I’ll be talking to you more specifically about the results of those tests in the next couple days. What I’d like to do now is just talk with you about your injury in general.”
    He looked away. She shifted her chair casually so that she was closer to his line of vision. He glanced at her and he felt compelled to hold her gaze.
    “I want to tell you what I’m going to do, as your doctor, and talk to you about what you’re going to do for yourself.”
    “Fair enough.”
    She said, “First, I want to do something I don’t do with all my patients: I’m going to tell you what’s going to be going on in your mind over the next several months. This is sort of like—what’s that they say on Wall Street?—insider information. Normally this is what we doctors keep in mind as we work with our patients but you seem like somebody who’s got a good handle on himself. You look skeptical. Donnie, I’vehad SCI patients that won’t even let me in the room for the first month after their trauma. I’ve had vases thrown at me. See this scar? It’s from a dinner tray. I’ve had patients who don’t seem to see me. They watch TV while I’m talking to them. It’s as if I’m not even in the same room. They don’t acknowledge me, they don’t acknowledge their injury. You’re in a different league from them.”
    “I can’t ignore a woman in a leather skirt. It’s in my genes or something.”
    “I think we’re going to be a great team.” She then grew serious. “There are several stages of recovery—I’m speaking of emotional recovery—in a trauma like you’ve experienced. The first is shock. It’s numbness, emotional blockage. It’s similar to what happens to the body with physical injury. Shock insulates the patient. That can last up to two or three weeks after the incident. I’m amazed but you seem to be out of this stage already. That kind of snappy recovery is rare. I’d guess you’re already in phase two, which is realization of what’s happened. You’ll start feeling anxiety, panic, fear. A real bummer.”
    “Bummer.”
    “My daughter’s language.”
    “You have a daughter?”
    “Twelve.”
    “Don’t believe it.”
    She deflected this with a polite smile. “What you’re going to experience is that you’re not real present . We say that you’ll be, quote, unavailable psychologically.”
    “And what would your daughter call it?”
    Weiser considered. “ ‘Zoned out,’ probably. A defense mechanism because you’re going to startto feel awful. But with you, I have every reason to believe that it’ll be short-lived.”
    She pronounced it with a long i . Short-liiived . That sounded weird so he figured it was probably right. He also guessed that between the punk earrings was a very, very smart brain.
    “So that was the second phase,” he said. “What’s the third quarter going to be like?”
    “What we call ‘defensive retreat.’ You’re going to believe that you can cure yourself. Or that you’ve come to accept your injury and it doesn’t bother you. You’ll miss therapy sessions, you’ll do everything you can to avoid thinking about the accident. Oh, by the way, you’ll probably become an insufferable son of a bitch. You’ll want to blame somebody for what’s happened. You’ll have a lot of anger in you.”
    “Kid I knew got hurt once, bad. We was diving off the docks, and this kid from the neighborhood—”
    “Which is?”
    “Alton.”
    “No