She went to the supplies in the bathroom. There was the salve, in its blue tub, like hand cream.

She brought it to him and knelt on the floor by his hands.

“Close your eyes.”

He did.

She opened the jar, put down the lid, and stuck three fingers into the lightness. From the first day she became a nurse on this unit, she had never stopped being amazed by this weightless substance. It was not a lotion, it was not a cream, it was not anything but a suspension of micronized silver, and there was really no way, until you felt it, that you could even imagine the absence of its touch on your person. She took his hands, both of them, and smeared it all over; all five hundred dollars of the jar went on his thumbs and palms and every finger. She let go.

“Move your fingers.”

He did. He was the trusting man she never thought would come to this hospital, to her unit. But here he was, and he moved his fingers, each against another, thumbs on the pads of all of them.

“They feel as if they have no skin.”

“Yes.”

“Your feet are going to be fine. Tomorrow, there will be an operation. And I promise you, after that, we will be able, not right away but in time, to stop using this on the burns, and when we do you will see that you have skin on your feet.”

He opened his eyes. It was then she saw he was no child, and he was also not in love with her. She felt a twisting momentarily for having lied to him, because there was, in fact, no skin on his toes or even his heel. The black dead of it had to be removed, and when more of it coagulated, even into just red, or most often, that distinctive brick color, it too had to be cut away and discarded. To debride, at first, had been the one thing she was not sure she could do as a nurse. She would be light-headed from revulsion, examining burns catastrophically involved. Mouthing but not understanding her study tricks: “Fascia you should slashia” and the Four Cs—color, consistency, circulation, contractility. A mush of dead muscle, a jelly of fat. Dead muscle you cut. Fat you save. Fat protected precious nerves.

She was leaving people more maimed than they needed to be. At night on the bus going home she feared for her future. If she could not master this, what would she do? Where could she go? She realized after a while that she was giving little thought to the trusting burned-up ones she was hurting further than they were already hurt. As she left the room to answer the bell, Osana looked at this Xavier Ricco, or whoever he was, and wondered if he knew it was possible to care about only yourself.

Chapter 7

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