Chapter 13

The doctor said he could be as aggressive as I wanted him to be. He was, of course, talking about how aggressively I wanted to pursue the perfect nose. I wasn't after the perfect nose per se. I just wanted my natural nose back, which coincidentally happened to be perfect.

I was in yet another examination room. For the eleventy-twelfth time I was describing the assault to yet another doctor. Each time, the experience was like a flashbulb going off in my head - a silent shutter clicking - capturing the memory like a photograph that each time receded further away. The photograph was 18 days away now.

The doctor - in my mind he was Dr. Who after his power to transport my nose back in time - explained the options available. He was a young Asian with flawless bone structure and a perfect nose that at least inspired confidence in the painful procedures I was soon to endure. Dr. Who said that he had to offer the option of doing nothing, which I immediately waived away. Then he described the first procedure, called Closed Reduction, a name that gave no inkling as to its nature. Closed Reduction involved using tools inserted in my nostrils to move the broken bones around in the nose and align them correctly.

Should the perfect nose not result from Closed Reduction, Dr. Who then described three other progressively more invasive procedures that would prove increasingly effective. They involved incisions and insertions and anesthesia and long recoveries. But, he stressed, there was no guarantee. I was going to ask him if he had gone to law school as well as medical school but thought better of it.

Dr. Who summoned to his computer screen the image of the CT scan that was taken at the emergency room 18 days ago. There, in bright x-ray yellow, was a picture of my skull, brain, and other insides of the head. Dr. Who pointed out the dark spots - the sinus cavities - which were supposed to be dark. Then he pointed out the bright spot - my brain - which he said was likewise in good order, by which he only meant that there was no brain bleed or skull breakage.

I stared at my brain in faint wonder . . . that strange object that was both camera and subject - from which sprang crying envelopes, Korean greetings, lives that flipped like coins, stupid and senseless headlines, captive dreams, the sadness that speaks, trauma, empires racing across the earth, time travel, wolves, satellites, ice ages, earthquakes, patterns, Dr. La-la-la, the Eyes of Innocence and Experience, and all the madness of the modern world.

Moving away from the bright spot, Dr. Who pointed out the bone of my nose, which was supposed to be a perfect triangle but which was in fact a jagged triangle showing fractures in at least seven different places. That was when I realized that serious pain was headed in my direction from the future, like a cresting wave still invisible under the ocean.

Dr. Who asked me to email him photographs of me prior to the incident to aid him in the reconstruction of my nose. We scheduled surgery for Tuesday, a little soon I thought, but better to rush headlong into the ocean than to wait for the tidal wave.

On his way out, Dr. Who reminded me to make arrangements to have someone pick me up from the hospital and watch me overnight, as I would be too disoriented from the anesthesia to get myself home. "Doctor, who?" I wondered. Who in the modern world would one day wade into these memories, not-yet-surfacing?

Chapter 12

To those with an active imagination, the rain signaled the End of Days for poor 2007. The wind blew the cold droplets, sometimes stinging the face. I had missed most of the fury, having spent the day in my little office cave.

Now I shuffled through small piles of wet, mangled leaves - the little-noticed victims of time. In the day they had fallen from the trees, the collective sighs of the year. In the night, rain and human shoes had trampled many into wet smears on the sidewalk soon to vanish from time. Somewhere in the world, every day, war and famine made thousands of people vanish the same way.

With these cheerless thoughts, I hurried home but stopped short across the street from my building. There, at the door, a woman was struggling with her purse, looking for her keys perhaps. I could go there and open the door; we would both enter. But my face would be too close to her in the lobby's light. So I waited there across the street until she entered. The nearby streetlamp was the only moon tonight; the sky pitch dark.

Moon-faced, that is how I remembered him, standing there for one brief moment on the stairway before he delivered the surprise blow and ran away. I imagined his moon face walking along the sidewalk, talking to a friend perhaps. Passing me in the night, he would not notice. But I would follow, calling 911 and providing my police report number. In moments the police car would arrive and I would identify him, turning his words against him, "Hey, remember me?" He would be arrested and tried for assault. I would suggest that the federal prosecutor check Moon-face's immigration status, which would result in his detention for deportation to El Salvador.

I did not imagine a rock thrown at the back of his skull; I did not imagine tacking him to the ground in the dark. Nor did I imagine my shoe stomping his face, crushing his nose; again stomping, this time breaking his neck. Strangely, there was not enough anger for all that.

Finally, I crossed and entered the building alone, safely passing from one cave to the next. I opened the apartment door with my left hand, pinning the mail under my right arm, stifling the cries of the envelopes filled with pleas for donations to aid the victims of war and famine.

Chapter 11

I scurried out my building door in the morning cold towards the train station. In the dawn light, I had discovered that my emotionally-detached bathroom light bulb had died overnight. Having waited for more sunlight to shave, I was now running late.

But I was wrapped in the warmth of my big, wool coat. I had retrieved it from the dry cleaner the week prior. The Korean lady had smiled, jovial and squinty-eyed, emerging from a forest of hanging garments. "An yung ha se yo," we had greeted each other.

Then, pointing at the beard on my face, "Oh! You new look!" she had said. Then she noticed the splint and her face flipped into a frown. I explained that a bad man had hit me and I fell down. But I was OK, I lied. "Kamsam ni da," we had thanked each other as I left: the civilized convention of "Thank you" restored order in our universes.

Once home, I took the coat out of the plastic covering and stroked the lapels - all the blood had been cleaned away. For a moment I was thrilled by the sensation that life could return to normal, to what I knew to be normal. But we can never go back, the sadness said from a corner. This was true, I knew. Even my recent time travel attempt had been a total failure.

And so I studied the cracks in the sidewalk until I reached the train station, secure in the knowledge that work was waiting for me with open arms. Work: the way the modern world suspends consciousness.

Chapter 10

When I called the doctor's office, the receptionist delivered his interpretation of the x-rays. It felt a bit like my mother reading a message to me over the phone from the mortgage company off a sticky-note she had posted on the kitchen refrigerator.

The doctor, the receptionist explained, said to tell you that you need to keep the splint on the arm for four more weeks and that he wants to see you again in four weeks. The fracture has not moved, so that's good. He said you can also get a splint where your thumb is not held like that so that your thumb can move. Oh, you can get one of those splints for the wrist, yes. I don't know, oh they have them in any pharmacy; we have one downstairs. It's an over-the-counter; you don't need a prescription for it. Yes, sure, you can make an appointment now. Yes, the fracture has not healed. These things take like six to eight weeks sometimes.

I detected that the receptionist had lapsed into some Armchair Medicine at the end there. What did she know about how long the fracture on my arm would take to heal? Perhaps she had seen this sort of thing happen often, to the point of routine, and the patients on the other end of the telephone line merely nodded, uh-huh, OK, in a kind of distracted, unthinking acceptance.

The day had been like a coin tossing in the air since morning. Suddenly the coin landed with Disappointment face up. Earlier, when the coin was still flipping in the air, the doctor had walked into the exam room and informed me that he could not do the x-rays in his office because my insurance company would not pay for them; I had to go to a separate "facility." I had to prompt him to offer to send me to a radiology clinic on another floor of the building, as I wanted to avoid re-scheduling this visit for lack of x-rays. He agreed to view the x-ray report, which would be available within an hour, and I could simply call the receptionist to learn about his findings.

I grumbled that this country needed to get its act together and provide real health care. Unfortunately, the doctor replied with a pleasant smile, the direction we seem to be going in is towards more "facilities" and "fewer choices." It was a simple, telegraphed message, which would be lost on the distracted and the unthinking. I got it: the doctor was opposed to nationalized health care.

"How does it feel?" He took off the splint and moved my wrist.

"OK, I guess." I complained of soreness, probably from the splint itself.

"That's fine," he said.

In less than five minutes I had my x-ray prescription and saw the last that day of the doctor with his pleasant smile, his tanned, middle-aged complexion and his blond, curly hair. I walked out while the flipping coin made an arc over my head.

Every day in this, the wealthiest nation on earth, millions of patients attend five-minute "That's fine" exams with disinterested, smiling doctors who send them flipping through the air to all manner of busy, clattering "facilities" at the promptings of enormous health insurance companies. Every day the insurance companies flip the lives of patients, like so many coins, until they land on the ground, dollar-value face up.

Chapter 9

The headline on the Internet, the first object on the screen:

"Cheney's Heart Restored to Normal Rhythm"

Life is full of disappointment, I sighed. Another day had passed, for instance, and still no call from the supposed investigator who would be assigned my case. Another day had passed filled with senseless, stupid headlines but with no police detective to interview me about the assault.

"McCain Sees Progress, Problems in Iraq"

Stupid . . .

"Tourist Boom Threatens Antarctica"

Senseless . . .

"NOVEMBER 26, 2007 - Last week's release of the annual Federal Bureau of Investigation Hate Crimes Statistics Report documents and quantifies the increase in anti-Latino sentiment and community tensions we see across the nation. . . Some of the key points from the report:

"A greater percentage of crimes motivated by national origin are committed against Hispanics compared to the previous year. In 2006, almost two-thirds of all ethnic-based hate crimes were committed against Hispanics.

"Since 2004, the number of victims of anti-Hispanic crimes increased by 25%.

"While most race-based and religion-based hate crimes involve intimidation instead of assault, most hate crimes against Hispanics (and Asian Americans, Indians and gays) were assaults. Anti-Hispanic crimes are more severe. Unlike every other group, only Hispanics suffered a greater number of aggravated assaults than simple assaults."

I wiped away the news screen and turned to check email. Maybe those investigators are a bit busy.

Chapter 8

I overslept, terribly, forcing dreams to keep me captive - despite the sunshine seeping through the blinds and suffusing the entire room. It did not help matters that as my body rebelled against sleep, all the dreams liquefied, evaporated in moments.

Without seeing, I knew the sadness was there, sitting at the bedside, whispering, as it had been whispering all morning.

Depression, in highly functioning individuals, is strictly a creature of the modern world, like a celebrity walking about the room brooding, fairly unaware of the fundamental elements of life. It mattered not that I had a fully-functioning mind (relatively), working limbs, otherwise excellent health, a good job, a family being maintained by me, and a handful of people who cared if I were to be erased from the earth. The tree in the corner of the room was still forlorn, sparse leaves drooping. When was I going to replace that thing, or tend to it?

The garbage piled in the kitchen, albeit in bags. The dry cleaner awaited my arrival to retrieve the big wool coat that may or may not still have my blood stains on it. I peered through the blind - the daylight seemed like a formidable enemy. At times like these, there was nothing for it but to seek the consolation of work.

Chapter 7

The doctor entered, took two steps - it was a small room - and lifted himself onto the examination bed while I sat on the chair next to the bed, a reversal that did not occur to me until much later.

I told him what had happened that night, how the punch really didn't hurt, how all the damage was actually sustained falling down the concrete steps. In the course of this he said in his soft voice, looking up from his papers only as long as he spoke, "You have P.T.S.D., Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"P.T.S.D.? Me?" I thought. Isn't that only for war vets? But that would explain the pains I experienced where there were supposed to be none.

But the doctor said, almost under his breath, not to worry about it; the P.T.S.D. would fade. He always spoke this way, in soft, hesitant tones that gave the impression he was unsure of himself. He looked up at me for an instant, long and crooked nose prominent, and then hid once again in his papers, reverting to a shock of wild, black Indian hair in a white coat.

Trauma was everywhere - I wasn't entirely sure that my mousy doctor was free of P.T.S.D. himself. Indeed our very first experience - birth - is nothing but trauma. No one escapes that trauma without crying. If anyone tries, he is beaten until he cries. Welcome to the World: here is your trauma, baby. It remains to be seem whether death is equally traumatic, the sermons notwithstanding.

Chapter 6

In the aftermath of the assault, some interesting consequences have flowered - not the least of which is my new found appreciation for that most marvelous of evolutionary phenomena: the opposable thumb.

With my right hand in a splint that encases my thumb, wrist, and forearm, I have been left with one working hand; and although one hand is enough to type these words, there are unfortunately a great many vital tasks in the modern world that require the use of two functioning hands. For instance there is the tying of shoelaces and the fastening of pant clasps and shirt buttons, without which the American workforce would be compelled to commute naked or all work from home - with catastrophic consequences for the commercial real estate market and the fashion industry.

How is it that such a small but useful member resulted in the raising of human civilization? For scientists have theorized that the size of the humanoid brain truly increased and developed only after a freakish evolutionary mutation shifted the location of the thumb to become an opposable digit. The ability to grasp things generated all manner of brain activity, which in turn generated more ideas about what else could be grasped and thrown and scraped and pulled and pushed.

And before long, geologically speaking, we were racing across the earth in the form of gigantic empires - razing, pillaging, conquering, assimilating, selling, purchasing - a phenomenon that has changed barely in form and naught in substance over the millennia.

This leads me to reconsider the effect of thumbs on brain size. In fact, just over a week ago that night, a simian brute - clothed and probably employed, too - made a compelling case that the opposable thumb, even if it increased brain size, had no effect whatsoever on brain content.

Chapter 5

The rushing sound of the train and the clacking of the wheels mingled with the dark of the tunnels, oddly comforting. Patches of light darting against the dark walls outside the window drew my attention away from staring half-lidded at the back of the seat before me. Faster the patches of light came - until one swooped past and ripped my consciousness away.

I was standing in the middle of my apartment, in my underwear, holding my big wool coat. It was the night of ten days ago - the cold realization that I had somehow traveled in time rooted me to the floor. It did not occur to me to wonder how I had managed time travel. My hands clung to the wool coat. Five hours from now, this coat would be covered in my own blood.

Or did it have to be this way? To think that I could toss the wool coat aside and avoid the anguish and expense of explaining to the Korean lady at the dry cleaner about removing the blood. My leather jacket was hanging close by. Blood would be much easier to wipe from it.

Wait, did I really have to bleed, though? Alone in all the universe perhaps I was possessed with the knowledge of what would happen this night. I could easily choose another nightclub rather than that particular one. I could simply ask for an escort up the concrete steps to the sidewalk. I could spy his face in the crowd and merely avoid him throughout the night.

The possibilities were endless . . . just as endless as they had been the first time this night took place in history.

Slowly, the thought formed, the cold certainty that possibilities are always the same in number. I could not prove this mathematically, not in this lifetime. But the epiphany would not be denied. The only difference this night, it seemed, was that I was aware of the endlessness; I could slowly name the choices like pearls pulled out of the rushing waters of the future.

But what effect would my actions on this night of the past have on my future? Could I be certain that only my future would be affected? What if I went to the other club and someone bought me a drink and I took it and this act sets off a chain of events that would result in the assassination of the President of the United States? How many Emperor moths would die in Tokyo?

I was not prepared to be the Destroyer of Human Civilization - not, at least, to save on a dry cleaning bill. Here then was the great irony of time travel. The increased awareness of the future availed me not. I was paralyzed, unable to choose from among the visible futures, as if I were wholly unaware of them - as if I was, in fact, living in the present moment . . .

Ascending towards the surface world and the cold, cloudy night air, two women passed me by on the moving escalator. They were speaking French; I thought one of them stared at the beret on my head as she climbed past but I could not be sure. My head was bent downward, staring at the metal steps, listening to the clack of the machines beneath.

Chapter 4

Pattern recognition: it is the secret to all life . . . how the human infant recognizes his mother's face and sees safety; how a pack of wolves know each other by familiar scent; how a serial killer whose MO is predicted falls captive; how faraway military exercises captured by satellites are interpreted as the build-up to war; how whole species rise and fall in the recurring periods between ice ages; how earthquakes add miles between continents.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize my face; the beard growing there - while accomplishing its purpose by drawing attention away from the broken nose - created a portrait of another person. Who is that man? The right side of his beard has more white hair than the left side. Odd, I thought. The visual sensation was so unusual that I could not decide if the beard made the man's face younger or older. I might as well have been a castaway from the future, wild-eyed and bearded, howling about the End of Days . . . except that I was too sleepy to imagine all that.

Chapter 3

The hospital nurse forgot to tell me that my arm was broken. Apparently, I mean. That explains some of the knocking about I've been doing with my hand, useless with my wrist in a swelled and bruised state.

"You're kidding," was all I could say to Dr. La-la-la on the phone when she said that the x-rays revealed a hairline fracture in my right forearm. La-la-la was the doctor's name, I decided, because it was wholly inarticulate; like the voicemail message she left me with the wrong telephone number to call, her recorded name unintelligible - another wonderfully bright foreigner who had some trouble with English but no trouble with the medical boards.

"Oh, sorry. I meant to say 715 not 714," said Dr. La-la-la. She said that I should see a doctor as soon as possible to have my hand immobilized - Oh, and until then no typing or writing. Thinking soon and possible, I snapped the mobile phone shut and looked up at a clear blue Miami sky - 1,000 miles away from Dr. La-la-la.

I looked down at my hand. It stared back, gloating, reveling in the anticipated increase in attention as I realized that it held my fingers hostage. If I could not type or write I was effectively silenced. There was no use flattering it with a self-portrait; I could not draw hands to save my soul. Very well, then, I will write less.

But, before I go into that good night, how is it that we walk about our days so unaware of our palms and wrists, innocuous things that if slightly impaired could deprive us of a whole range of motions, from writing to exercise to bathing to eating to driving to beating someone up?

Upon reflection, there is not that much to write in the modern world.

Chapter 2

I grow uglier with each passing day. The bathroom light bulb was totally emotionally detached. Staring in the mirror, I noted the mound of blood making its way from the side of my nose, passing below my left eye, bringing the swelling in its wake. It struck me as some kind of blue burrowing creature, like an animal burrowing under the snow across a white landscape.

A fly weakly collided with the bathroom mirror and flew erratically away.

On either side of the broken nose, two eyes stared back at me, one dark and swollen, the other light and intact. With a nod to William Blake, I christened my eyes: the light eye was the Eye of Innocence; the dark eye was the Eye of Experience.

And the Eye of Innocence said back to me:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
He is meek and he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

And the Eye of Experience said back to me:

Little Fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away

Am I not
a fly like thee?

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Til some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

The Incident: Chapter 1

"And before you clean the cut on your head, be sure there's no dirt under your fingernails first," said the nurse.

I was prodding at something under my right nostril before I realized that it was dried, caked blood from the broken nose. "So I guess I should cut my fingernails," I said.

"Good idea. I'll make sure someone comes in to give your tetanus shot." The nurse disappeared behind the curtain and I wondered what time it was, despite the clock on the wall of the hospital room attempting to communicate that message.

Later, I would learn that it had been eight hours that lapsed at the hospital - from the attack in the middle of the night - until late in the morning with the weak autumn sunlight shining on my disheveled form as I hailed a cab to my apartment. But it had seemed like much less time, an illusion of the modern world covered in the eyes-closed motion of a stretcher wheeling into rooms with machines that peered into the cranium but left the sadness undetected.

My apartment appeared as if I had returned from travel, quiet and expecting. It was all I could do to wash my face and wait for him to come. Sitting on the couch, the weakness from the loss of blood made itself known, knocking on my mind, coming and sitting beside me to whisper the thoughts of sadness.

When he walked through the doorway, we embraced briefly; I was too tired to show emotion. In the bathroom, he cleaned the cut on my head with a wet washcloth, dabbing until the dried blood liquefied. There was very little pain left. Then he showed me how cotton swabs dipped in alcohol could clean out the dried blood in my nostrils without causing a nose bleed. We sat on the couch and I handed him the fingernail clippers. My wrist was swollen and bruised; I hadn't the strength to clip my own fingernails. So we sat - he clipping my fingernails and me laying my light head on his shoulder. With each click of the clippers in his dark hands, I traveled back through the years; hands that had been an oasis in my long trek through the desert of the solitary life; hands that had offered a rose once.

It was the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, and it had come down to clipping fingernails in the low afternoon sunlight of the quiet apartment. For a time we said nothing - for what was there to say? He would soon enough return to his home an hour away; the children would be coming in from playing some game outside while their mother slept. There could be worse fates, I imagined. Fortune is fickle, handing out roses and breaking noses.

The Cage of Years

Salted trail of tears
On a baby doll
Leaning in a corner
Of our Childhood Room:

Could we but have seen
That youthful dreams would not be free.
Down, around the years the Cage we hear
While against the window panes we lean.

Try as we might
The wings of dream to beat in flight -
Down the Cage falls, much too soon -
Feathers in the gloom.