The Pain Scale Read Online Free Page A

head but couldn’t completely hide the grin.
    Back in the saddle.
    Whoopie-ti-yi-yay.

    Sometime past midnight, Jen had called it a night and headed home for a few hours of sleep. I was tacking the night’s final crime scene photo on the board when I felt a twinge of pain shoot through my wrist.
    “Motherfucker,” I said to the empty room.

    In my seventeen sessions with the pain psychologist, we worked on things like creative visualization and guided imagery and mindful meditation. The purpose of these activities was to find a technique that could be successful in occupying my conscious mind to such a degree that it might be possible to direct my thoughts away from focusing on my chronic pain and down more serene and pleasant paths.
    “So basically the point is to distract myself,” I said.
    “Well...” She danced around the phraseology a bit but ultimately agreed that I was right about the basic idea.
    So we imagined peaceful streams and secluded beaches and snow-kissed mountains and tropical islands and suns setting over distant horizons.
    Pretty stuff.
    It never occurred to either of us that pretty stuff was the exact opposite of what I needed.

    I thought back over the previous several hours. The last time I remembered thinking about my pain was early in the evening, picking up dinner at Enrique’s. I had stretched my neck while I was waiting for the takeout. And before that? On the way to the crime scene.
    As I felt the awareness of the pain wash over me again, I couldn’t fathom the sensation. I think I might have smiled.
    Five hours. Maybe six. Hours I’d spent losing myself in the Benton investigation. With almost no awareness of my pain.
    That was the best I’d done in over a year.
    Son of a bitch.
    The psychologist was on to something, after all. It wasn’t the technique that was wrong. It was the imagery.

    I live in the lower unit of a duplex in Belmont Heights, on Roycroft, a block from Warren High School. The tenants before me were a graphic designer and his family. He had a flair for color, and the way he’d painted the place was the reason I moved in. The kitchen is done in bright primary colors—red and blue and yellow—with a Caribbean flair. The dining room, living room, and master bedroom are finished in textured plaster, each in a different earth tone, with the ceiling molding and accents in perfect contrasting colors. The detail that really sold me, though, was the bedroom that had belonged to his daughter. From the doorway, the wall on the left is painted a deep blue, highlighted with a night full of white-gold stars surrounding a smirking crescent moon over which jumped one very happy cow. As your eyes travel up the wall and onto the ceiling, the colors gradually fade, perfectly blending together in imitation of the growing dawn, becoming lighter and lighter until day breaks on the far right wall in a rainbow of bright colors, with a glowing yellow-and-orange sun that beams out from behind a perfectly detailed pairof Ray-Ban sunglasses. Even now, I like to stand in the middle of the room and let my gaze slowly drift from one wall to the other.
    When my wife, Megan, died, she was pregnant and hoping for a girl.
    I moved in about six months later.

    The night of the Benton murders, I tried to sleep, but as is often the case, I couldn’t. I went into the spare bedroom, spun the desk chair away from the computer in the corner, and stared at a grinning star painted by a man I’ve never met. As I massaged the pain in my left forearm, I thought about the day and all that had happened. I couldn’t help wondering if it was a twinge of guilt I felt as I smiled back at the sun and imagined the coming day.

Five
    I MANAGED A few hours of sleep and woke to the pain dull and throbbing in my wrist and forearm. It seemed like a good sign. I do better with that than when it’s sharper and more piercing.
    Most days I have to make a choice. Usually I know shortly after I wake up whether the day will