Endless Possibility: a RUSH novella (City Lights 3.5) Read Online Free Page A

the mic for a good ten minutes, feeling supremely stupid. But the question needed answering.
    You want to learn how to live blind? Then fucking learn, snowflake. There is no other way.
    Except that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to learn to function blind. I didn’t want to be blind at all. My grief wasn’t deep or poetic. It was sinister in its simplicity. I wanted to see again and I never would. That was my torment: two implacable forces, smashing up against one another like tectonic plates along a fault, waiting for the other to give. My blindness couldn’t and I didn’t want to, so I remained caught between them. And it was crushing the life out of me.
    “I don’t want to be blind,” I said aloud.
    Tell us something we don’t know, genius.
    Apparently, my inner editor had become an asshole since the accident.
    But it was the crux of the problem. It was the problem. I didn’t want to be blind. I wished I’d never fucking jumped off that cliff. Or that I had jumped at the right time, or a different time and suffered a different injury. Something that wasn’t so goddamn life-altering.
    Without realizing it, I began to speak, soothing my bitter anguish with an alternate reality. A fantasy of what might’ve been…
     
    I dove too late. I know it even as my feet leave the rocky outcropping. I have time enough to think ‘This is going to end badly’ and then I’m in the water, curving into the dive. The water tosses me and I slam against the rocks. Pain explodes up my right side. It feels as if a giant steel trap has snapped over my leg from ankle to hip. Or maybe a shark bit me. The pain is both the deep agony of shattering bone and the burning fire of torn flesh. Panicked, I nearly inhale ocean water as I claw my way to the surface.
    Local divers haul me to the shore. I suck in deep breaths to calm myself and then nearly lose it all over again to see my right leg. It’s a fucking horror show, there’s no other way to put it. Bent and twisted, skin torn away, it looks like I have three knees instead of one, and blood is seeping into the sand. The sun is hot on my damp skin, but I begin to shiver.
    An ambulance arrives and I’m whisked to the naval hospital, then airlifted to UCLA Medical Center the next day. Three surgeries later, I wake up to Lucien and my parents around me, all of them trying really hard not to look at my leg. I don’t want to look at it. It’s caged in metal scaffolding from my ankle to just above my right knee. Steel pins from the scaffold penetrate my bloated, bruised skin in eight different places, holding my bones in place, though I have more titanium rods than bones now.
    I want to vomit, but the doctors tell me that while it looks godawful, I’ll be able to walk and run and live a normal life again, given time and a shit-ton of rehab.       
    “It could’ve been worse,” they tell me over and over.
    It could’ve been worse. A-fucking-men.
    When I’m able, they fly me to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for another few weeks, until the pins come out. My imprisoned leg is free, and then I head to White Plains for physical therapy. My therapist is a great guy named Harlan Williams. We talk and joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was.
    Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige.
    But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes