Bedside

Not really knowing what to say, I simply asked, "Are you alright?"

Amy shut her eyes for a moment and grinned just slightly. "More or less," she said. Her voice was a bit froggy.
"They were talking about a tracheot--tracheon-- cutting a hole in your throat so you could breathe, before."
She slowly lifted her hand to her throat and rubbed it with two fingers. "Ouch. No, they just stuck a tube down my throat for a while; that sucked. After a while they said I was breathing on my own so they took the tube out; that also sucked."
"Breathing on your own, so the strychnine is all out of your system?"
"Yeah, I guess so. I'm not twitching anymore." She raised both arms a few inches and dropped them onto the bed.

I sighed in relief. "So you're going to be fine," I said.
"That's what they tell me. I just have to stay here until my muscles come back."
"Come back?" I asked.
"They say I tore up most of my skeletal muscles from that little dance back at Costco. You know that kinda-good-mostly-bad pain you get in your muscles after a workout?" She spun her right hand around at the wrist. "Everywhere."

"At least it would be," she continued, "if they didn't come by and shoot some morphine-stuff into this thing every hour." She moved her right elbow and nodded toward the IV line running into her forearm. A clear rubber tube ran from it, wound slightly around the back of the bed, through a complicated-looking machine, then up into a plastic bag hanging from a silver pole. A smaller plastic IV bag was hanging next to the larger one, a tube from it connected it to the main line with a kind of Y-connector.
"The big one is just saline, to keep me hydrated, the small one is some kind of protein. For the muscles."

I took another look around the room. There was a flat-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall from the bed, above a dresser and below some bland artwork. Aside from the hospital bed and linoleum floor, you might think it was a hotel room.

"That pain you get after a workout," I said, "is partly from the muscle rebuilding itself after being torn up. When it rebuilds it overcompensates, making the muscles bigger. You might be pretty beefy after all this."
Amy chuckled. "Upside to everything, I guess."

After a few seconds, I asked, "How much do you know? About what happened, I mean."
She licked her dry lips and took a few breaths. "Strychnine. Isn't that what they said Mr. Comstock might have gotten?"
I nodded.
"And it was in that tea from your hotel room."
I nodded again.
"So that Irish guy tried to kill you, and killed me instead."
"Almost," I said.
"Right. Because you knew exactly what to do."
I nodded, a bit slower. My eyes fell down to the tube in Amy's arm.
Amy swallowed. "Was that you, or the -- other you?"
I looked back up, into her eyes. "The killing me?" I asked, then paused. "I'm not sure. It could have been something I heard before, or it could be part of whatever Schumer and my dad did to my brain. I don't know why a program just designed to skip boot camp would include first aid for specific poisons."
She shrugged. "I've never heard of cutting a Brita filter open and pouring it down someone's throat."

"Do you remember everything from when it happened?" I asked.
She rolled her eyes upward slightly. "I remember your zombie theory, and a headache, then my jaw not working, but after that it all kind of blurs together."
"Like you were passed out, or not aware of what was happening?"
"I think I was aware; I remember being aware, but not what I was aware of."
"So how did you know about the Brita filter?"
She grinned. "My dad told me. He says some FBI agent told him about it, and about what happened at Comstock's house but none of the other stuff. Was that one of your FBI people?"
I nodded. "Rubino came here."
"What for? Just to tell my dad?"
"No, I needed a ride because my car was still at Costco."
"A ride where?"
I dropped my eyes again, turned around and moved one of the chairs closer to the bed so I could sit down.

"To go kill Schumer," I said after I'd seated.
Amy was silent for a few seconds, then said, "Oh. Did you?"
I shook my head. "I wanted to, but I guess it might have been a bit overboard."
"Possibly," she said.
"It was good that Rubino was here, though," I said. "When the doctors heard it was strychnine and that I magically knew exactly what to do for it they called the police on me. Rubino smoothed that over, and told your dad just enough of the truth for him to hate me forever."
Amy rolled her eyes.

"Where is he, anyway?" I asked.
"My dad? He went back home to get some of my clothes and stuff after they moved me in here. They cut up the shirt I was wearing."
"I know," I said, "I was there."
"Oh," Amy said, blushing slightly. "Well it was stupid, it was a button-up shirt. They could have just unbuttoned it."
"They've got those shirt-cutting scissors and they like to use them," I said.
"I liked that shirt."

The hospital gown she was wearing had rather short sleeves that were being scrunched up because of the position she was in. On her left arm, just below her shoulder, I could see the long, thin scars I'd seen before. It looked like there were four of them. She saw me looking and perhaps too-quickly drew her right hand upward and pulled the sleeve down. She winced from the movement.

"What?" I asked, carefully.
"I didn't want you to see those," she said. Her eyes seemed to be watering, perhaps from the pain in moving too quickly.

I'd seen scars like those before, mostly in pictures on the internet but a few times on girls in school. Depressed teenagers who wanted the rush of cutting themselves but couldn't bring themselves to cut at their wrists would often use straight razor blades to cut very thin lines just below the shoulder. Same rush, less risk. People who cut at their wrists were usually just trying to get attention, it would seem. Doing it below the shoulder means you're doing it just to feel something. Using a razor blade also made a very fine, almost invisible scar; another sign that it isn't so much a cry for help as in other forms of self-mutilation. People who do this to themselves are called cutters, and doing so is practically a cliché among "emo" and "goth" subcultures.

My silence seemed to frighten her. "Not because I think you'd judge me," she said, looking away. "I just don't like what it says about me. I think it tarnishes me."
"I don't care about it, Amy."
She looked back at me, her eyes heavy with tears, then she leaned back and pressed her head against the pillow.
"Do you still do it?" I asked.
"No," she replied after a few breaths. "When I was, like, fourteen."

I tried to remember when Amy had said her parents split up. I thought it was younger, but it seemed to affect her later. From what I could tell, she was just coming out of a punk phase. I felt a bit of empathy for her, though my parental drama was much more recent and not as deep-seated as hers. Parents split up all the time, driving millions of teens into depression. The thought of it somehow made Amy seem more real.

"It doesn't tarnish you," I said. "Not unless you let it."
She was silent.
I went on, "Earlier I was trying to figure out what defines a person; is it the mind, the body, the sum of his actions, and so on. I think it's more than that. I think it's how we take our experiences and our actions and move forward from them. A bum isn't a bum because he lost his house and all his money, he's a bum because he doesn't do anything about it; he gives up and begs for spare change. Whatever you did before, it's not who you are. What you learned from it, and did to move on from it, that's who you are. That's something between the mind and body."

She was silent for a few seconds more, then rolled over slightly to look at me with her head still on the pillow. "You were trying to figure that out because you said your mind and body weren't yours. If your dad and some team of geneticists designed your body, and some psychologists and drill instructors designed your mind, like Schumer says, what does that make you?"
I thought about it. "I wish I knew," I said.

"Keep fighting until the answers come?" she asked.
"Or until there's nobody left to fight."

I thought about this guy who's coming after me. If I, the police, or the FBI can stop him -- what will that solve? If I knew who had hired him, would that lead me to the end of this mystery or just up another dark alley? Will a few more words answer all my questions, or just raise further ones? How many more people would have to be hurt before I felt safe, or before I had the truth? How much more of myself would I have to lose just to find out who I am? My dad, Schumer, Rubino, Bremer, Pratt, dead Austrian guy, Comstock,Dingan, Scottish guy, how do they all fit together? Don't ask questions, don't ask questions.

"Wait," I said. "You said Irish guy, before. I thought he was Scottish."
Amy blinked twice. "Umm," she started, "the accent sounded like Irish to me."
"Not Scottish?"
"No, Scottish is more Scrooge McDuck. That guy was more Colin Farrell."
"Huh."
"Does that answer anything?" she asked.
"No," I said, truthfully. "Absolutely nothing."