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.