My senses detonate. My nose and mouth flood with the nauseating odor of Nix. My tongue has turned into a furry yam and the nerves in my extremities are flayed and burning with an unbearable heat. I try to pry out the dart but my hands won’t move. All over, my skin feels as if it’s swarming with stinging insects. My visual field ruptures and beads with shifting, luminous channels. I can hear the sound of huffing and puffing and footsteps sprinting down the hall, but it all seems distant and small, as if the mouse response team were scampering to a crime scene in their mouse boots, tiny keys jangling.

“Rethponth team ah heah, ath-hole,” I tell him.

The pain from the Nix vies for brain recognition with the skull fracture. My inhibited nervous system dimly perceives that the puddle from my head has expanded on the concrete to engulf my back and hips. It feels as if I’m wrapped in a wet, blood-warm, amniotic cape.

Finally the concussion wins. My eyelids succumb to gravity and I surrender to the undertow. As I’m pulled down I am grateful that my last vision isn’t the Rat Burglar’s mask but Charlie’s beautiful face, lips parted, expectant and alive, her eyes full of love.

The Treachery of Images

The Treachery of Images

At first my viewfinder finds no view. There are only noises to indicate whereabouts: juddering plastic wheels on industrialized surfaces, the self-important clicking of ballpoint pens, the stentorian burr of powerful machinery drawing an immense electrical charge far below my unergonomic gurney, and, underneath it all, the constant beeper-bleat and sneaker-squeak obbligato of the late-shift hospital.

My sensation starts to return, too. I feel not just paralyzed but peristalsied; there is a livid body-heat to it, a grublike feeling of inertia and filth. I don’t feel as if I am lying under sheets; I feel as if I’m buried in mud. Or steaming mulch. But at least I feel. Correction: at least I feel in most provinces. I do a roll call of body parts. I squeeze fingers, curl toes, flex limbs and abs and facial muscles. Everything sounds off except my left leg. Opening my eyes doesn’t reveal much except a voltaic charge and sheen of pulsating ultramarine light. Nowhere is my leg manifest. I may have to accept that it has been amputated.

As I’m reconciling myself to the idea of a life of pegleggery, my consciousness incandesces between what all cues inform me is the usual reality and another, vibrating, ulcerated one. In both worlds, one sentiment lifebuoys unsinkably: forfeiting one leg in exchange for the apprehension of the Rat Burglar is a very worthwhile, very equitable trade.