Where It Began(10)

Huey’s mother and the gimpy pit bull! Which, combined with the failure of my ac tual boyfriend to call, write, text, or show up, makes me cry for what feels like days on end, except with everything including time and the days of the week blurred together so much, it might have been more like forty-five minutes.

So where is he?

Where is Billy?

“That’s it,” Vivian says to the roomful of medical residents who want to hear me try to count backward from a hundred by sevens some more for a laugh, shooing them all away. “Look at her face! She’s completely unhinged. How can it possibly be good for her to talk with the police looking like that?”

Even flat on my back, hooked up to a bottle of liquid narcotics, and amusing myself by making the electric bed go up and down, I can tell that talking with the police would not be good.

Until I forget all about it.

Although the way I look has not left my consciousness once in, basically, forever.

“You know what, Wendy?” I say. “I think I want to sculpt my head.”

Wendy is such a paragon of guilelessness and I am such a shameless liar, I’m pretty sure that this is going to work. There is no way you could make an ashtray with sides that stand up out of this mushy clay, let alone sculpt a face. Not to mention, if you actually want to sculpt a face, it’s helpful if your left hand doesn’t have to lie useless in your lap because the steel pin in your ulna seems to send out shock waves when you so much as try to curve your fingers around a dinner roll you’re trying to butter. But I’m pretty sure Wendy can’t tell.

“That sounds wonderful!” she says.

I almost feel guilty.

Almost.

“Yeah,” I say. “Only, I don’t think I’m supposed to touch my face. I might have to look at it and extrapolate to 3-D. Do you think?”

“You’re the artist!” she says, just beaming away. “If you think you can do it, then I’m sure you can.”

“Only, I don’t have a mirror . . . Do you have a mirror?”

She does.

This is how I look: like a scary thirty-second community service ad for seat belts that can only run on late-night between infomercials and porn because it is unsuitable for children and adults with weak stomachs. Oh, and the color-blind. Because it’s hard to justify exposing anyone to all that gore and medical handiwork—the stitches, staples, bandages, and butterfly Band-Aids arrayed across my face—without giving them the psychedelic thrill of the color palette. Purple and black and violet around the eyes, the left eye sinking into greens, banana-yellow down the cheekbone, interrupted by a splash of white bandage with a crusty brown trim of blood and unidentified gray ooze. Bluish eyelids rimmed with perfectly dyed eyelashes, my eyelashes, the only recognizable, remaining portion of what used to be my face.

And I think: How is it that I’m going to go from this to normal?

And I think: How did you do this to yourself?

And I think: Even if Billy is sitting around watching porn after a quick run to the Westwood Cannabis Club on Le Conte with Ian Brodie’s dog-eared med club card, even full of Master Kush-laced, semi-legal, double-chocolate pot muffins, it is not an entirely bad thing that he isn’t here to see this.

Which you would think would make me feel somewhat better about his being somewhere else, the silver lining of the disappearing boyfriend.

You would think.

My eyes close and I don’t feel anything.

This is what happens when you are lying on your back in a hospital gown made of coarse retro-print cotton, when your current life ranges from swirling fog to basically unbearable: Your eyes close and you are still you, only somewhere else.

My eyes close and there’s Billy, driving too fast around the curves on Mulholland with open bottles of old scotch on the front seat and a couple of girls from Holy Name riding in his open trunk. Then Agnes shows up, fuming, to drag him home from the police station. Not that there is the slightest possibility that anything bad will ever happen to him, or he’ll get kicked out of Winston. It isn’t as if he stuck actual Winston girls into his trunk.

But as it turns out, when Billy says, “Let’s violate some probation,” every time he lights up, he actually means it.

There we are sitting on Billy’s bed, throwing darts at his conditions of probation. Billy keeps the thirty-two conditions of his probation—Maintain a 3.0 average; Do not exit domicile between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m. without permission of parent or guardian; Do not consume controlled substances or alcoholic beverages of any kind; Do not cavort with known underage users of said substances—on the bulletin board over his desk. We are sitting on the bed trying to hit his favorite ones.

We are sitting on the bed and he is nuzzling the back of my neck.

“Follow the light with your eyes,” Ponytail Doctor says, glancing down at her clipboard, reviewing my daily mental state as ascertained by one of her eager little intern helpers, dropping Wendy’s mirror into her giant pocket and leaning in toward me in the mistaken belief that we have anything, including human-looking heads, in common.

She tilts her head to consider my face.

“The swelling will come down,” she says, staring down at the bandages some white-coated flunky plucked off, depositing them, soaked in bodily fluids and livid orange antiseptic, on a stainless steel tray so I could admire them.

“I saw it,” I say. “You know I’m screwed.”