Pain

They clambered into the Uber. They didn’t usually Uber around the city, but Ella’s foot was in a boot, so they didn’t have much of a choice. Ella, Casey, and Daniel were in the backseat, and Saoirse sat in the front. 

“Does it really hurt to walk?” Casey asked. She was wearing dark lipstick. “You’ve had so many calamities lately.” 

Ella had just recovered from emergency appendix removal surgery, and then the flu, when she’d broken her foot in a bicycle accident. “It’s just hard to walk more than, like, ten minutes,” she said. “Actually, the one thing I’ve learned from all this is that I have a much higher than average pain tolerance. That’s what the doctors have told me anyway.” 

“That’s like when the barber tells me I have unusually thick and lustrous hair,” Daniel said. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced, like, real pain,” Saoirse said. “Once I had really bad period cramps and I threw up. But I think that was more a function of nausea.” 

“I had an infected tooth once,” Casey said. “Whenever I went outside in the cold it felt like someone was stabbing me in the mouth with a long, hot needle, all the way up to my brain. Also stitches on my forehead from trying to backflip off a diving board.” She pointed to a pink line above her right eyebrow.

“I broke my collarbone playing football in high school,” Daniel said. “Yeah, it was painful, but I don’t know if it was real pain. My girlfriend broke up with me right afterwards, although she said it wasn’t because I couldn’t play football anymore. So I was also suffering from heartbreak, which was very close in proximity to my collarbone. Playing Portal pretty much got me through it.” 

“I was in a horrible car accident,” The Uber driver said. “I had broken ribs and a collapsed lung. They had to reinflate the lung by putting a tube between my ribs. That was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. There was a young nurse there. She came around to the other side of the bed and held both my hands while they were doing it. She was the angel I needed.”

Everyone was quiet. Saoirse wasn’t sure how, or if, they should continue the conversation with the Uber driver included. Casey resented the inclusion of the “angel” nurse in his story—didn’t he know you couldn’t really call women angels? 

The driver continued, “I thought about that nurse every day for months. I was going through a divorce at the time—that’s probably why I was driving so recklessly in the first place. My wife was being a real bitch about it, and my daughter was failing Algebra I. I thought to myself, ‘Is this all I’ve done in my life? Married a bitch and raised a stupid daughter?’ I know she wasn’t really stupid. It was my fault she was failing Algebra I. Anyway, I wanted to see the nurse again. I ended up writing her a letter, telling her how much it had meant to me, when she held my hands during the procedure. I dropped it off at the hospital. It had been months at this point. I included a small photo of my face, so she’d remember who I was. I didn’t have any photos of myself printed out, so I cut it out of my wedding photo.” 

Saoirse felt she had to reply, since she was sitting in the front seat. “Did she respond to the letter?” 

“Yeah,” he said. “We went on a date. I was pretty handsome in my wedding photo, probably because I was so happy that day. Anyway, I took her out to dinner. Real nice place, real fancy. I told her, ‘Get anything you want. I owe you after that surgery.’ She looked so pretty, sitting there across from me. Truly, an angel.” 

“Wow,” said Casey. “Sounds like a happy ending.” 

“I got really drunk at dinner,” he said. “My ribs were healing, my lung was healing, they didn’t hurt so bad, but it felt like the pain had bled out into the rest of my body. The pain was eating me, literally eating me. It was like a demon that had been with me, ever since the car accident. She asked about my wife, about the divorce, and I told her the truth—that my wife had been seeing another guy.” 

“She was cheating on you?” Daniel asked. 

“The other guy sold medical lasers and wore pants with a crease down the middle of each leg. He bought her shoes and took her to get her nails done. That was the first time I noticed something was up—she was making dinner and on the ends of her fingers were these long, silvery claws. I said, ‘What’s up, Wolverine?’ and she said, ‘Fuck you.’ When the nurse held my hands during the procedure, I noticed that her nails were short and simple. She’d spent all day helping people and healing people. That was the kind of woman I needed in my life. But when I was sitting across from her at dinner, I saw her buttering a piece of bread so gently, with such care, that I suddenly knew she’d held other men’s hands during surgery. Maybe she held everyone’s hand! Maybe my angel was actually Nurse Whore-Hands.” 

Saoirse looked at the Uber driver’s hands. They were pale-knuckled, gripping the wheel. They were driving fast. Bright bars and restaurants clipped passed—were they getting any closer to the birthday party? The car slowed as they approached a red light.

In the backseat, Ella felt Daniel’s knee touching her knee. Normally she would have moved it away, but her foot was in a boot and she didn’t feel like moving it. It felt comforting, to be injured in this small way and to rest her knee against his. She wondered if this feeling would continue once she’d exited the car. 

“I tried to butter my own bread, but my hands were shaking so much I could hardly do it,” the driver continued. “My food was falling off my fork as I raised it to my mouth. I kept taking bites of air. She apologized for bringing up the divorce, and said she could see that she’d upset me. I looked at her sitting across from me, her sweet halo of curly hair. ‘I’m not perfect,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t deserve what happened.’ She put down her silverware and told me she had also been divorced. It was a short marriage, to her high school sweetheart. She’d been married at nineteen and divorced by twenty-two. ‘He wasn’t a bad guy,’ she said. ‘He was my best friend for a long time. Sometimes I still mourn that he knew an evolving version of me that no one else will ever know. But he would get so angry, and then he would get so, so sad. The sadness was worse than the anger. He would kneel with his head in my lap and just cry. Every time that happened, I would have to contrive a situation for him to redeem himself after, where he had to save me. Sometimes I would flirt with men while he was in the bathroom at the bar, just to give him the chance to defend me and exert ownership over me when he came back. It became a little game for us, until finally it went too far. He became obsessed with one of the surgeons at the hospital who he was convinced had a little crush on me. And he was right, but the surgeon was harmless—he was seventy-five years old! Once while he was waiting for me to get off work, he saw the surgeon heading home for the night, and he confronted him. He didn’t identify himself, just accused the surgeon of staring at a young woman who was smoking outside the hospital. He called him a creep, and an old lech, and spit at the ground near his feet. I had just left the hospital, and saw it from a distance, though he didn’t see me. I’d been feeling uncertain for a while, but that’s when I knew the marriage was over.’” 

The Uber driver sucked his teeth and hooked a left turn. “I didn’t really like hearing about her and another man, but I liked that she had opened up to me emotionally, just as I had opened up to her. It made me feel secure. My wife apologized to me a few years after the divorce, at our daughter’s high school graduation,” he said. “She took my hand, real simply, and said, ‘I’m sorry for everything I put you through.’ I looked down, saw her long painted nails, and I knew exactly what her apology was worth. But I had a beautiful nurse sitting next to me, and my daughter had somehow passed Algebra I, and all the other algebras. I decided to let it go. And in that moment I felt the demon that had been inside of my lung since the car accident, the evil demon causing me so much pain with every breath—he flew right out of my body.” 

He pulled to a stop. “Here okay?” 

“Here is great,” Ella said. They clambered out of the Uber.