after it knelt by the stop, the BX 55 bus unfurled its wheelchair lift, a grimy, steel origami.
still looking at a loss with the driving knobs in his shiny motorized wheelchair, he wheeled in short spurts and curt brakes towards the handicapped seating bay. he of the many questions.
he did not look inquisitive this time. with his throwback hood over his new york yankees cap, he looked indifferent. reconciled, I guess, is the word.
he did not see me crouching in my seat all the way to the back of the bus. I was grateful he didn't.
candidly answering questions from someone shot in his spine is itself debilitating. I never had the energy or the courage. not yesterday morning. not even before that.
he was three weeks short of his 23rd birthday when he was admitted to my floor. trauma 1 patient. shot in the back. three bullets strategically buried in various landmark spots in his spine.
trauma doctors said it was gang venganza, south bronx style. a midwesterner resident who seemed at a loss himself at all the trauma cases he had been exposed to in this part of new york told us nurses that some deliberation, some careful thought, went into the shooting. he said this like he was explaining a well memorized arcane patophysiological process that he still could not fully grasp.
three weeks after, that's when the patient became incontinent himself of questions.
will I ever walk again? will I be able to control my pee? can I still get it up? will I be able to do it with my girlfriend again?
from then on, I made myself scarce. foolishly I deemed it was better to be thought of uncaring than to be honest. cripplingly honest.
I was off when he was discharged. I heard that his girlfriend, whose bloodied picture he always insisted on keeping in his hospital gown, did not come to take him home.
the bus lift lowered him off at a busy intersection along grand concourse. the queue of passengers parted quickly like giving way to a speeding stretcher carrying a desperately bleeding patient.
a fully made up young girl in a tight waist length jacket stared hard at him. she pretended to take a call in her mobile when he looked back straight at her.
all throughout his stay with us, an NYPD officer watched over him. the investigators feared that the gang members who shot him would finish him off right in our ward. things like that happen, they said.
i did not think so.
shooting him was not about killing him. it's more unkind.
it's to make him wheel his wounds around so everybody else, especially inquisitive, nubile girls, would know that he has forever lost what made him a man.