The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [210]
We passed Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, long since closed up and dark by now, around the corner, past the dumpsters by the kitchen door, and opened the door to our apartment, and Leon carried me inside, reminding me to duck beneath the doorway. He took me into the apartment without snapping on any lights that would have disturbed my retinas with their unwanted brightness, guiding himself only by his intimate knowledge of the space. He laid me supine on my bed, the futon in the living room. It wasn’t made. Leon tucked me in. I clutched the blankets and fell asleep almost immediately: my eyes shut, and I returned to oblivion like a weary traveler finally returning home, mumbling Lydia’s name until it dissolved into nonsense syllables and disappeared into silence.
XLII
When I woke up the next day it was the afternoon and my head felt hot and my skull was throbbing fuzzily with a headache. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, at my gauze-wrapped head, felt my face flaming with postoperative pain, and felt with my hand the new protrusion in the middle of my face where my nose was, hidden underneath the bandages.
“The doctor informed me you’re not to remove the bandages for six days,” said Leon over breakfast, rattling the pages of the New York Times he had purchased that morning when he had left the apartment to buy donuts. He had purchased two dozen donuts at a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away, and had even abstained from eating two of them, which were for me. One of them was a plain cake donut, which I found at least marginally palatable, but the other was coated in chocolate frosting, in which was embedded an overabundance of those unsettlingly plasticlike sticks of color called “sprinkles,” which I find to favor the eye over the tongue, so Leon obliged to eat that one as well.
“And he apologized,” continued Leon, the chocolate-and-sprinkle-coated donut making spongy squelching noises in his mouth as he chewed it, “for the sad fact that he had no painkillers to spare and for obvious reasons was not able to write you a prescription. But he said you should be taking them for the next few days or else you will probably have to endure excruciating pain.”
The pain I was in was dull and horrible, but not yet excruciating. I consumed my donut, taking tiny rabbitlike bites because I couldn’t open my mouth very wide without experiencing a burst of flames in my facial nerves, in the place where I now understood my new nose to be.
I didn’t leave the house for a week. I drank a lot of wine. From beneath some pile of rubble in the apartment Leon managed to unearth a brown plastic prescription jar of Percocet pills with a long-expired label that he said was from a past knee surgery. They did the trick. I took the Percocets and washed them down with wine, and spent much of the next few days lying with my head propped up on a mountain of pillows watching TV while floating about three feet above my body. I completely exhausted Leon’s video collection. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Last Tango in Paris, Annie Hall, Satyricon, and I blew through an entire boxed set of Ingmar Bergman videos that Leon had, titled Let’s Talk About Death. Leon even rented Pinocchio for me, which I watched several times in rapid succession, and it brought me joy. Leon kept me company while I convalesced, and occasionally went out to rent videos for