RUSH (City Lights, #3)(43)

“Noah? Please talk to me, baby.”

No! I can’t be like this…I can’t be like this forever. My job…Planet X…my photography, my car…I can’t drive it anymore. The coral reef in Cairns I was supposed to photograph this summer. The Carlsbad Caverns I had plans to visit in September…

And on and on.

They piled on me, one after another, all the things I would never do or see or experience ever again. One after another, until their weight pressed me down into my wheelchair and I could hardly breathe.

And then the future unspooled before me and it was all black. What would I do? Where would I work? Or live? And how? I had no plans to get married any time soon but it was out there, someday. And now…I’d never see my wife on our wedding day. I’d never see her walk down the aisle toward me in her dress. I’d never see her face the first time I told her I loved her. I’d never see the faces of any children we might have. My own kids would be mysteries to me.

Christmas lights strung on a tree; candles flickering in a darkened restaurant; the snow around my parents’ house in winter that glistens like diamonds in the starlight.

All of it. Gone.

I clenched the armrests until my tendons ached. Doctors and parents flitted nervously around me, asking me if I were okay, begging me to answer. But they were on the other side of the black curtain, and it was never going to lift.

I felt tears sting my eyes. Tears. No f*cking way. I wasn’t going to mourn. I wasn’t going to give in. Fuck this. Fuck them all. I wasn’t this person they were trying to make me be. This person who couldn’t do what I’d been doing for twenty-three years. I would never accept that.

Never.

*

The Vesuvius eruption arrived.

I lay awake all night replaying that moment in the hospital, over and over again—like prodding a sleeping monster. When I finally slept, I had the usual nightmare. I awoke choking so badly on nothing, I thought I might actually die. How ridiculous if, after all the hell of the accident, it was a f*cking dream that did me in. I was finally able to suck in air instead of imaginary water, and the tightness in my chest loosened and then fell away. The blackness, of course, did not.

Neither did the outrageous sense of injustice. The unfairness of it all. I felt it every second of my life. It was the fuel to my rage and bitterness, lurking behind the scenes. But some days, it took center stage, demanding attention, and this day was going to be one of those days.

I hated everything and everyone. I hated the bed I lay on, the walls around me, and the floor beneath me because I knew it was wood but not the color. I hated the house, my parents for letting me live in it, Lucien for trying to take care of me, and Charlotte for not quitting weeks ago when I raged at her for opening the goddamn drapes on a beautiful day over a city I couldn’t see.

I hated her prick of an ex-boyfriend for touching her and sleeping with her and then abandoning her. I hated her brother for dying, for branding her with that loss for the rest of her life. I hated myself for stoking her pain with my stupid, blundering questions.

I hated Mexico, I hated the magazine for sending me there, I hated the way the danger tempted me. I hated the local divers who dove too, and remerged alive and whole, while I broke myself on the rocks below.

I hated, hated, hated.

I lay in bed feeling the hate wash over me like waves on a beach, surging and ebbing, eroding me bit by bit. Someday there wouldn’t be anything left.

Charlotte came up sometime in the morning hours, saying she’d made breakfast, and would I like some, or prefer my usual takeout? I barked at her to get the hell out and not come back all day.

I hated how I spoke to her.

I hated that she left.

The hours passed and I could do nothing but stew in the rage. They’d told me that this might happen. During my rehab. They’d offered me drugs to control my moods. I took one once, and the eight hours of nothing I felt were the most terrifying of my life. I was already robbed of sight. The drugs robbed me of emotion, leaving me numb. The rage was better, in the way cutting off your hand is “better” than cutting off your arm, but still better. I never took a mood med again. But that morning I probably would’ve needed about a hundred to quell the hatred that pumped through my veins instead of blood.

I fumbled around for my special little MP3 player, modified with voice-activation for blind f*ckers like me, and jabbed the ear buds in. I told it play Ministry’s “Psalm 69.” Loud. Louder. As loud as I could stand. The music infiltrated my brain, and I hoped it would leave room for nothing else. Instead, it fueled my rage to greater heights, until I felt ready to explode.

And then I felt it. The first twinges at the back of my skull. The Monster, waking. And not a slow emergence from hibernation, either. The Monster was roaring to life with a speed I hadn’t thought it capable.

I told the music to stop and sat up quickly. I tore the ear buds out and reached for the little bottle of migraine medication. But I was already panicked, shocked at how fast the pain was growing. My hand brushed the lampshade; my elbow hit the medicine, knocking the bottle over. Dread took hold of my heart and squeezed while the pain in my head did the same. It wrapped a steel band around my skull, tighter and tighter. The hatred I’d been marinating in quickly morphed to out-and-out terror.

I searched the floor, hoping desperately that my fingers would close around that goddamn bottle. My groping fingers found nothing but wood floor, bed post, side table. My breath turned to panting. My clothes became drenched in sweat.