At first, Steve didn’t understand that the brilliant white curtain settling in over his vision was anything to be concerned about. He was, after all, in a bathroom. Then he remembered the one in which he sat was a muted green and his nausea reflex caught up with the shredded remains of his nervous system. He held back, but not by much, and squinting through the haze he could see Sheila watching as his torso convulsed entirely against his wishes.
He had, many times, wondered in the abstract whether or not death would be preferable to his current situation. Not the one he was currently in, being treated for wolf wounds in a poorly decorated bathroom with an Industrial Age lubricant, but more generally. The life outside this house was not the one he’d grown up wanting to and then finally living in when he was a farmhand or professional surfer, and that is what he had previously compared to the possibility and benefits of death. He’d never quite found his way to cross the line and let death win- he wasn’t exactly competitive by nature, but he knew he was something by nature and that by its nature death would put an end to that. The potential loss of whatever he was had always stopped him just short of considering death the broad green field of hope.
He understood it now though, the appeal. His body was not fine. It was now on fire, prickles of cartoon flame shifted across his swimming vision crafting twins by mitosis and amplifying his miserable state in their quest for population dominance and freed by the ministrations of his goat-butchering housemate. Everything, he thought, mustering the greatest possible clarity he had ever known, is shit. He clenched the side of the bathtub with his right hand, the strength in it still undimmed and a hope, therefore, in his own mind that he might rip off the bathtub’s sidewall and find himself impaled and bleeding out upon the jagged rump of plastic or porcelain or metal or whatever bathtubs were actually made of bubbled free in his mind. He twisted and his hand slipped off. The knowledge that he was not able to break manually and then kill himself with the side of a bathtub single-handedly threatened to become the most depressing thought of his entire life.
And then the pain noticeably subsided. The red shroud he hadn’t even realized he was looking through began to part. Sheila, now more caregiver than medieval torture matron, was leaning him forward to get the strips of shirt from around his back and arms, and he complied with the intent demands of subtle movement. They were a small penance to pay, now that the fire had stopped. She piled them in the corner, then worked his boots off. Together they worked his pants down and she pulled them and set them in the corner. Then she ran water into the tub, walked through the door, and closed it.
Steve sank down into the water, relaxing his torso but not entirely sure whether or not he would enjoy dunking his shoulder, given its current state. Soap lay on the weird dish projecting out of the wall, and a cloth hung over the faucet. He leaned forward, grabbed one in each hand, and then lay back again, defeated by the effort. This, he thought to himself, is less than ideal. Considering his options, which were limited, and smelling roast meat, which was alluring at minimum, he pulled his hands together and began to froth.
Injuries are inevitable. They will happen- they will happen to you in your normal, more or less and comparatively cushy life, so trust us when we say that the likelihood you experience some sort of debilitation in one that is no longer supported by trams and bumper rails is… high. And yet most, even being unequipped for such rough treatment at the hands of a reality forgotten by all but the least smooth-browed, would probably take it in stride. The body is designed to shrug these things off, after all, except for the tooth region which certainly baffles us but is irrelevant to most concerns in all but the longest of injurial runs. So let’s not glorify Steve too much here for his apparent ability to drive home and then wash up with minimal help.
That said, consider your own reaction to the situation on offer. A wolf savages you. We think you’d cry, and perhaps lay down waiting for death, Until, that is, or unless you were faced with the certainty that in doing so you would achieve said state. This is our entire point, encapsulated: the renormalization of this world in which making certain decisions would result in the achievement of states heretofore assigned to simple dramatic effect. You would get off your ass and drive home, and then after your roommate//lover/master/neighbor dumped a pint of alcohol on your body you would wash up and get ready for dinner. It would, in a word, be normal. Welcome to the party.
Steve completed his washing, his ruined shirt and unruined but stiff, bloody, wet, and currently unusable pants in a pile next to the green commode in a sort of pastel monument to terrible choices. He stood, his shoulder aching but clean and only bleeding a little bit now. Sheila came in, alcohol in one hand and bandages- torn apparently from the nurse scrubs Steve had once brought home in a combination of eroticism and irony- in the other. She motioned for him to sit.
“Wolf got me,” he said, lowering the lid of the commode and sitting down.
“I can see,” she said. “What about the men?” He looked up, moving his shoulder, and she smacked his forehead with her palm. “Don’t move. I heard it on the radio.” He doubled down, his eyebrows threatening to come off his skull- but he didn’t move. She carried on, bathing his wound with the alcohol and occasionally bring tears to his eyes when she pressed down to stop the bleeding.
“What radio?” He asked, his teeth gritted and clenched. “We didn’t have one when I left.”
“Didn’t have these bites either, and yet here we are.”
“Fair point.” She began wrapping a bandage around his shoulder, raising his arm and spooling slowly, keeping the bandage taut. “Hermit?”
“Yep,” she said. “Took him some food today.”
“Knife practice?” She grinned.
“Almost got him.”
“I doubt it.”
“You’re right. Hold this.” She raised his hand and had him hold the edge of a bandage strip, before reaching into her pocket and pulling out a roll of fabric medical tape. “I love this stuff.” She tore off a piece of tape, holding it to the end of the bandage and pushing them both down. Steve grimaced but held, and she tore a larger strip and ran it perpendicular to the first. “Should hold you, long as the bandage is wrapped right. Move your arm.” He did. The bandage held. She checked it, pulling and prodding slightly at various points before nodding once and turning. “Dinner’s ready. Get dressed.” Then she was gone.
He stood alone and naked in the bathroom for a moment, a throb in his shoulder reminding him that no matter what else happened life had moved pretty fast over the last few hours. Considering he’d woken up that morning with a plan to build a fence and maybe wear the now shredded shirt that lay on the bathroom floor for a couple of days while he did it, he was pretty sure the last twelve hours or so had to be written off as a loss, objectively speaking. On the other hand, he felt renewed and lucky that he wasn’t actually dead. Looking at things in the clearest possible light he found it difficult not to see at least the shadow of a win. Dinner, after all, was apparently ready and he was going to be able to eat it.
He shifted, looked in the mirror, nodded, and decided that wins and losses were pointless before shuffling out and into the bedroom, taking great care lest he bump his shoulder on the doorframe the way he always did when he left this particular bathroom.
