Body Surfing

accident, fallen out of a tree, gotten tackled in a football game. Sue had minored in comparative literature in her undergrad days, and a line from The Thousand Nights and a Night flashed in her mind. “Those who saw him weredamned for their thoughts.” Mohammed Qusay sat on the edge of the examination table, his blood-spattered torso curved like a half-ripe pepper. Dark hair clung to his skull in licorice ringlets, his mouth was purple and full as a plum. Between hair and mouth were a pair of eyes as dark and deep and oblivious as two glasses of wine.
    According to Mohinder, Qusay had no idea what had happened. Kept insisting someone else had been driving, even though it was his body that had been pulled from the driver’s seat (and only after sawing off the steering column, which had pinned him in place, though it hadn’t broken a blood vessel, let alone a rib). Mohinder thought it might be MPD—he was always looking for a case he could turn into a book, his own personal Sybil . Sue had suggested shock, perhaps a blackout caused by the accident or alcohol or drug consumption. Somewhat smugly, Mohinder informed her that the boy’s alcohol and tox screens had come back clean—sparkling, as if he’d never touched a controlled substance in his life. “A most curious case. Don’t you agree?” Sniveling twat.
    It wasn’t until she got to Mohinder’s line about Qusay’s having been “in a state of partial undress” that she finally put two and two together, realized the boy on the other side of the glass had been the driver of the vehicle whose pictures Larry had texted to her phone. With his inimitable nonchalance, Mohinder had written that semen had been found in the mouth of the girl in the passenger seat and, more disturbingly, that bruises “consistent with the dimensions” of Qusay’s hands had been found on the back of her neck, meaning that the boy in the examination room had basically forced his passenger to blow him, shot his wad, and driven the car into a cliff. The passenger had been dead by the time Larry and his partner arrived, as well as the boy in the backseat. The fourth occupant of the car was in surgery to relieve the pressure on her spinal cord caused by three crushed vertebrae, faced a likely future as a quadriplegic if she made it out of the OR alive. It sounded like a suicide pact—something out of a modern-day Goethe novel, or maybe just a Marilyn Manson song. Sue glanced at the names of the other passengers. Sila Patel was the girl in the passenger’s seat, Jasper Van Arsdale thesecond fatality, Michaela Szarko the girl with the broken neck. All four were seventeen. Jesus, Sue thought. This kid had a hell of a lot to live with.
    Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open.
    “Mr. Qusay,” she said brightly. “I’m Dr. Miller, the psychiatric resident here at Columbia Memorial.”
    Sue had to fight back a gasp when the boy looked up. The emptiness in his eyes. The innocence. The helplessness. The only time she’d seen a similar expression was during her internship at the VA hospital in New York just after the Gulf War—soldier after soldier who seemed to have left part of himself in Iraq. The part that could remember. The part that could feel.
    The boy was rubbing the plastic ID bracelet on his right wrist. She was about to ask if it was chafing when he said, “Do you know where my watch is?”
    She took a seat at the desk. “I imagine the EMTs or one of the admitting physicians removed it to, ah, examine you.” Although really, she thought, what could they examine? Even a cursory glance revealed that the boy was glowing with health and vigor.
    “My dad gave it to me. It was a graduation present. Pregraduation. A Patek. He’ll be pissed if I lost it.”
    A wave of compassion washed through Sue. The technical term was posttraumatic stress disorder, but she preferred the poets’ word: shellshock. The poor boy had killed his friends, and he was worried about losing a watch. She wondered if the fact that it came from his father was significant. Daddies rich enough to give you a Porsche and a Patek almost always came with issues.
    “I’ll speak to Dr. Mohinder about it when we’re done. Right now I’d like to ask—”
    “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me, I swear it wasn’t!”
    The boy had begun rocking back and forth on the examination table, and the paper crackled beneath him like the sound of a distant fire.
    “No one’s accusing you of anything, Mohammed.