the crack-up.

He can hardly go to Georgetown with two broken legs in plaster. Julian gets headaches that swallow up his entire field of vision, and send him staggered with nausea into the next week. Everything is too-bright. In the hospital, he can scarcely do as much as read a magazine — he listens to the same cassettes and waits for the same meals to come on the same trays, and then the pills.

By any reasonable measure it should have been Paul. Paul was stronger. He had turned his gawky frame into a weapon through careful regular repetition — Paul was crueler, more tenacious, and he wanted more from life with the hungry and seeking tenacity of a parasite, something that lives only to keep living. He had wanted to extract meaning from life, even if that meant crushing something fragile. Julian, on the other hand — Julian has bad lungs, a bed of scars around his heart, flat sluggish veins ill-suited for a needle of any gauge. He has had all manner of foreign objects pierce him now, in this period of what is euphemistically termed his recovery — convalescence as a term has exited the American vernacular, but it seems better suited for the bright white half-life he lives now. Sunshine through every window, clean tiles and soft music and all of it landing like a blow to the heart.

Hypothermia, dehydration — low temperatures, shock, frostbite. How easy would it be, to hurry off and die? He hadn’t wanted to die, not like that, but who does? Julian is seventeen years old, not yet too old for an institution far less august than Georgetown — though the company may be better, Julian thinks, with an edge of pleasant absurdity. Even in the privacy of his own mind he makes these preposterous quips, these jokes, these lines he might once have delivered with a preciously constructed insolence — these are the things he might have said to Paul, these things he had long since stopped saying out loud without an audience.

His physical therapist is a young black man with serious eyes and glasses that are almost, but not quite, Paul’s. His hands are steady and unflinching, he does not make conversation or make a game out of the excruciating act of coaxing a limb back into use. Julian wonders some times — at the steadiness of his hands, at his calm restraint —if he’s a queer like them, this man with a woman’s job, like a nurse. But then no one else is truly like Julian and Paul are — no one else is like Julian is now.

Paul is dead and can give no reckoning for himself. An accident is not an admission of guilt, not when accidents happen every day, not when young boys die every day. Surviving is worse. They are only waiting until Julian is whole again in body and then they will deliver their tests.

There was never any doubt about how it would end — only what brought them there, over a span of time too short to register on any other scale than the experience of young boys. Julian remains, like a mismatched limb — like a hand without its mate. He once knew a man, some bluff-voiced friend of his father’s with flat Presbyterian vowels, who had lost the ring finger of his left hand in some already-defunct war. The man had snagged his wedding ring on a length of barbed wire. Julian can imagine how it happened now, a prolonged struggle of flesh and gristle reluctantly parting ways, but to a boy’s imagination it seemed it must have happened fast.