To Feel Stuff Read Online Free Page B

didn’t process any of it, El.
    This guy, though, he was coming at me like a girlfriend who’d been waiting hours for my flight, so happy to see me, and I know it’s idiotic, but I remember opening my arms to catch him.
    And then the guy fulfilled that contract of togetherness he’d initiated. He lifted the crowbar over his left shoulder and brought the metal down on my kneecaps, I think as hard as he could. I passed out for the first time in my life. It had never even happened while drinking.

Chapter 4
    Paxil CR: Get back to being you
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    In the dark I was lying on my bed, looking at the five other beds in the room, all empty. Police and ambulance lights slid across the ceiling, pink and aqua, and in the window, I remember the tree branches pulsing like neon.
    Sarah threw open the door and I craned my neck from the pillow to see her better. She looked like a sexless Eskimo, because she had her puffy winter coat on and her fur-lined hood up.
    â€œI’m going to go talk to the paramedics. I’ve got to start networking, getting myself out there. They know all the doctors and staff at every hospital,” she said.
    I know she never told you this, but in the beginning, Sarah had only wanted to work with babies. That’s why she was the way she was with us. The Women’s and Infants’ Hospital especially taunted her since she could see it from her house. Every day there were hundreds of babies on dim monitors, not even technically babies yet. There were babies being spanked and crying for the first time, and babies in incubators like dioramas. And the reason for her baby fever was that Sarah really believed that humans are born innocent. She told me once that this wasn’t to be confused with being born clueless. Which babies are. But she believed in a natural innocence with a moral component. For a while she used to talk about wanting to publish papers on this.
    I’d heard a lot about this from her. If you were to put a bomb in a baby’s arms, Sarah thought, it would instinctively know what the weapon was and the harm it could do. Babies were adamantly opposed to cruelty and pain. Inside of their heads.
    When Sarah had first told me about her theory, I’d wanted to know how motor skills fit into this philosophy. Sarah argued, “Babies are pure goodness, and pure goodness is not something that is physical. As a baby starts to move, it transitions into the adult world and its innocence decreases exponentially.”
    â€œBut the bomb,” I’d said. “The baby simply couldn’t do anything with it.”
    Sarah had gulped, excited by the proof in her pocket. “Get this. I put a gun, unloaded, in my nephew’s crib one day and he averted his eyes from it. No interest. None.”
    I’d tucked my chin into my chest and stared at her while opening and closing my jaw.
    Every time a nursing position opened up in the maternity or preemie ward at one of the local hospitals, she’d apply. She was always weeded out. After the last rejection, in September, she collapsed onto a bed across the room from me. Half asleep (I think), she started muttering, “Little star, stay still. Don’t move. Trust me, I’ve been working at Brown Health Services for four years and all that’s ahead is mono, herpes, and the day you’ll puke up the macaroni and cheese I’ve brought you because your stomach doesn’t recognize anything that isn’t malt liquor.” I think the baby thing was an attempt to freeze a moment in time and put her faith there. She seems to have given up on it since.
    By the time you met her, she had become much quieter about this stuff. I guess I also spent less time with her once you came, so I heard less about the babies.
    â€œNetworking is a wise decision,” I told her, and then I lowered myself back onto my pillow, thinking of myself as Dracula disappearing into his coffin.
    â€œYou don’t think