Via Dolorosa(18)

—Chapter V—





The backup generators kicked on just as night approached. Nick was up on the ladder, ushering a stroke of green paint in a horizontal line across the bottom half of the mural when, above his head, the light fizzed, popped, and came on. A muffled early evening cheer could be heard from both the lobby and the adjoining ground-floor restaurants. Nick, who had been painting mostly in the dark since after lunch (except for the flashlight given to him by the concierge that he’d propped in place on one of the ladder’s steps, affixed by a length of packaging string), sighed and climbed down the ladder. He wiped his hands on an old rag that smelled of turpentine then picked up the bottle of Red Truck, which was half empty now. He took a drink from the bottle then packed up the rest of his equipment. At one point during the afternoon, the young bellhop had returned (reeking of marijuana) and set Nick’s trunk on another dolly for him. There were plenty of dollies, the bellhop explained, and it made sense just to leave the trunk on this one so Nick could easily roll it back and forth from the lobby to the storage closet and back again at his own discretion. Nick thanked him and, this time, insisted the kid accept a five-dollar tip.

Nick rolled the dolly and the trunk into the storage closet and locked the door. Carrying the wine, he went to the bank of elevators at the other end of the corridor and rode up to the sixth floor. Emma was not in the room.

He set the wine on the nightstand next to the Holy Bible and a couple of colored leaflets then disappeared into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower. The scent of Emma’s body, fresh and undeniably female, still lingered in the bathroom air. He turned the water as hot as it would go, filling the bathroom with steam in an attempt to sweat Emma’s female scent from the air.

He stood naked before the mirror over the sink. His body still looked tight and to be in good shape. His calves were well-defined, his chest broad and masculine and sprouting a vague T of hair at the upper portion of his chest. His waist was narrow and pale—much paler than the rest of him, which was mostly tanned and naturally dark—and his shoulders came out like twin hubs, strong, tanned, and only vaguely pimpled. His arms were not big or overly muscular, but they were certainly good, healthy-looking arms…except, of course, for his right arm, beginning just at the elbow and tracing down the length of his arm to the wrist of his right hand, his palm, and the front and back of his hand. His fingers, too. Tracing down. It wasn’t the arm that was so bad and the arm itself never bothered him. Cosmetics meant nothing to him. There was a deep, puckered, raw-looking tract of pink skin running from the crook of his elbow down to the center of his palm where it dispersed in an eruption of jagged, pink tributaries, the discolored flesh startlingly in evidence, nearly obscene, against the dark pitch of his natural flesh-tone. The scar was not very wide, but it was long and it was visible. But that was all, and the arm itself was not necessarily bad. The hand, though, was not pretty and was not—and never would be—the same. It was not good.

He held it up now and looked at it, holding it far enough away from his face to not truly see everything about it. The last two fingers were misshapen. The soft and tender flesh of his palm was a corrupt and inhospitable terrain, marred by jagged flecks of poorly-healed flesh and bisected by the crooked, railroad track scar that originated at his elbow. Likewise, the back of his hand was ridged with scars, like large ball bearings stitched together just beneath the surface of his skin. He ran his good hand over the back of his ruined hand, fingering the disarrangement and discord of fleshy mounds and bumps and scars. It did nothing for him to feel the skin; he did not necessarily care what it looked or felt like. But making a fist forced him to care, as it took all his effort to bring those twisted and gnarled fingers around and to press them in and together and against the ruined flesh of his palm. Similarly, it was with much difficulty that he was able to bring his thumb around and to close it over his fingers. A fist: something that should have been so goddamn simple…and here he was, learning how to do it all over again. He felt helpless and like a child. And the painting—or, more specifically, the difficulty of painting—was only one aspect. There were many others, each a silent but stealthy reminder, a blow to his character and his pride. Specifically, he could not lift what he was once able to lift; he could not open what he was once able to open; he could not hit as he had once been able to hit. He could not make love to his wife the way he used to, either, and he recalled one time in particular, hovering above her, sliding his ruined hand beneath her and pressing his deformed fingers against the small of her back, attempting to raise her up off the bed but finding it impossible, and how she relaxed and eased herself down on his hand and his arm, and the white-hot agony that had exploded and raced, inferno-like, all through him, causing him to cry out once, sharply, painfully, before he even knew he was doing so, like a goddamn child. He had never been more aware of the injury, and had never been more aware of the pieces of metal and the half dozen twists of steel screws that were in his arm and in his hand keeping it all together. Most of all, he had never been more aware of his vulnerability.

But he did not want to think about that now. He did not want to think about Emma, and being with Emma in that way. Not right now…

Steam filled the bathroom, clouding over the reflection of his body in the mirror and creating fresh blossoms of condensed fog on the glass. He felt the water and made it cooler before stepping beneath the stream and forcing himself to forget everything around him for the time being.