Duma Key(82)

"Or a reasonable facsimile," I said. "Christ, Wireman."

"I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth."

Suddenly I understood why they'd X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

"Wireman, can I ask you something?"

"All right."

"Are a person's optic nerves... I don't know... bass-ackwards?"

"Indeed they are."

"So that's why your left eye is f**ked up. It's like..." For a moment the word wouldn't come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. "It's like contracoup."

"I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it's my left eye that's f**ked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.

"Then I went to bed and tried to sleep. I might as well have tried sleeping in the middle of a brass band. I didn't sleep for four days. I felt I would never sleep again. My mind was going four thousand miles an hour. This made cocaine seem like Xanax. I couldn't even lie still for long. I managed twenty minutes, then leaped up and put on a mariachi record. It was five-thirty in the morning. I spent thirty minutes on the exercise bike first time I'd been on it since Julia and Ez died showered, and went in to work.

"For the next three days I was a bird, I was a plane, I was Super Lawyer. My colleagues progressed from being worried about me to being scared for me to being scared for themselves the non sequiturs were getting worse, and so was my tendency to lapse into both pidgin Spanish and a kind of Pep Le Pew French but there can be no doubt that I moved a mountain of paper during those days, and very little of it ever came back on the firm. I checked. The partners in the corner offices and the lawyers in the trenches were united in the belief that I was having a nervous breakdown, and in a sense they were right. It was an organic nervous breakdown. Several people tried to get me to go home, with no success. Dion Knightly, one of my good friends there, all but begged me to let him take me to see a doctor. Know what I told him?"

I shook my head.

"'Corn in the field, deal soon sealed.' I remember it perfectly! Then I walked away. Except I was almost skipping. Walking was too slow for Wireman. I pulled two all-nighters. The third night, the security guard escorted me, protesting, from the premises. I informed him that a rigid penis has a million capillaries but not one scruple. I also told him he was a dandy in aspic, and that his father hated him." Wireman brooded down at his folder briefly. "The thing about his father got to him, I think. Actually I know it did." He tapped his scarred temple. "Weird radio, amigo. Weird radio.

"The next day I was called in to see Jack Fineham, the grand high rajah of our kingdom. I was ordered to take a leave of absence. Not asked, ordered. Jack opined that I'd come back too soon after 'my unfortunate family reversals.' I told him that was silly, I'd had no family reversals. 'Say only that my wife and child et a rotten apple,' I told him. 'Say that, thou white-haired syndic, for it did be mortal full of bugs.' That was when the roaches started to come out of his eyes and nose. And a couple from under his tongue, spilling white scum down his chin when they crawled over his lower lip.

"I started to scream. And I went for him. If not for the panic button on his desk I didn't even know the paranoid old geezer had one I might have killed him. Also, he could run surprisingly fast. I mean he sped around that office, Edgar. Must have been all those years of tennis and golf." He mulled this for a moment. "Still, I had both madness and youth on my side. I had laid hands on him by the time the posse burst in. It took half a dozen lawyers to haul me off him, and I tore his Paul Stuart suit-coat in half. Straight down the back." He shook his head slowly back and forth. "You should have heard that hijo de puta holler. And you should have heard me. The maddest shit you can imagine, including accusations shouted at the top of my lungs about his preference for ladies' underwear. And like the thing about the security guard's father, I think that may well have been true. Funny, no? And, crazy or not, valued legal mind or not, that was the end of my career at Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum."

"I'm sorry," I said.

" De nada, all for the best," he said in a businesslike tone. "As the lawyers were wrestling me out of his office which was trashed I pitched a fit. The grandest of grand mals. If there hadn't been a legal aide handy with some medical training, I might have died right there. As it was, I was out cold for three days. And hey, I needed the sleep. So now..."

He opened the folder and handed me three X-rays. They weren't as good as the cortical slices produced by an MRI, but I had an informed layman's understanding of what I was looking at, thanks to my own experience.

"There it is, Edgar, a thing many claim does not exist: the brain of a lawyer. Have any pictures like these yourself?"

"Let's put it this way: if I'd wanted to fill a scrapbook..."

He grinned. "But who'd want a scrapbook of shots like these. Do you see the slug?"

"Yes. You must have been holding the gun..." I held up my hand, tilting the finger at a pretty severe downward angle.

"That's about right. And it had to've been a partial misfire. There was enough bang to drive it through my skull-case and deflect the bullet downward at an even steeper angle. It burrowed into my brain and came to rest. But before it did, it created a kind of... I don't know..."