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When he tried to explain about the gig to his family, to the nurses and doctors—
I've got to go home and practice!—
they nodded kindly and smiled, as though he'd told them he had a date with Jesus Christ.

Finally, in despair, he yanked out all his tubes and made a break for the door, his splinted arm bouncing beside him like a wing. He knew his legs weren't burned, so it didn't surprise him at all that he could run. What surprised him was that a nurse no bigger than his grandmother could stop him at the door: she grabbed his arm, to catch him, and the pain was so bad, so spine-shriveling, that he shit in his hospital gown. Actually crapped down his leg. The same puny nurse had been holding his dick when he peed, but for some reason it took shitting himself from pain to drive home his helplessness.

Dustin remembered trying to escape only once. Apparently, though, he was a major tube puller. One day he woke up, paralyzed, his arms and legs strapped to the bed frame with plastic cable ties. He started to wail and curse. They were detaining him against his will, his father would sue them back to the Stone Age as soon as he found out. He'd call
60 Minutes;
the entire hospital would get shut down. Amazingly, though, when his dad saw Dustin tied up like a war prisoner, he did not offer to call the police. Instead he brought a mirror into the ward so Dustin could look at himself. Dustin had yet to see his face. He'd seen his arms, of course, but the silver nitrate stained them so brown it was hard to tell what they were like underneath. There were no mirrors in the ward, not even in the bathroom; it hadn't occurred to him before then that this was intentional.

The nurse took off his dressings, glancing at the mirror in his father's hand with an odd glint of fear in her eyes. His father had the same look, as though he was about to leap out of a plane, and Dustin started to get scared as well, his heart hammering in his chest. His father held up the mirror. Dustin focused on the person staring back at him. The person's right eyelid had crinkled up, revealing the sphere of the eyeball as it curved into the skull, the
veins like tiny lightning bolts. A fish's eye. Beneath it, the cheek was rippled and blotchy, glazed like the frosting on a cake. The mouth drooped a little on one side. Dustin blinked his left eye and saw the monster in the mirror blink back.

His first thought was:
My face is dead.

He did not try to escape after that.

Soon afterward, the pain began in earnest. It was fierce and unspeakable. The word “pain” didn't do it justice: there was nothing remotely analogous in the dictionary. The dressing changes were bad enough, but nothing compared to the tubbings. Just the sight of the hydro room would send Dustin into a spiraling, Paleolithic terror. He would tremble and get suicidal ideas. The burn tech, a Russian woman with glasses thick as ice, would lower him into the whirlpool bath and then begin to torture him, scrubbing his arm or chest with a washcloth and plucking the pieces of dead skin off with a tweezers. It felt like a cheese grater shredding his flesh. Dustin would take his suffering out on the tech. He screamed and called her a fucking bitch. He called her a fat ugly cunt. He reached into the darkest corners of his heart and pulled out names that didn't even make sense.
Fucking flabby-cunted cunt-face. Blind-as-shit fuck-eyed bitch. Gestapo Olga torture cunt.
He was ashamed of himself but couldn't help it. Sometimes he'd stick washcloths in his mouth—two or three of them—so that the burn ward wouldn't hear him scream like a baby.

Compared with the tubbings, the surgeries were a walk in the park. They'd put Dustin under and then he'd wake up with his back or ass stinging like a bitch where they'd harvested skin. That's what they called it: “harvesting.” As if he were a plant. Once, walking back from the hydro room, he saw the machine they used for shaving off skin: a monstrous deli slicer sitting on a trolley. The worst was when they refused to dress his ass. More than once the nurse had to help Dustin peel his butt off the mattress, ripping him free like a Band-Aid. When he yelled at her, she said he should count his blessings, he was only 40 percent burned and had lots of good donor sites. They didn't have to use cadaver skin.

“What do I care?”

“You'd rather have someone else's skin?” the nurse said gently. “I bet your body feels differently.”

“It's not my body,” Dustin said. “Don't call it that.”

“Well, whosever it is, it got off pretty lucky. There's a guy down the hall with eighty-five percent burns and no legs.”

This wasn't the first time someone had used the word “lucky” to describe his accident. He was lucky to survive, lucky not to have been alone, lucky his eyesight wasn't damaged. It mystified Dustin. Wasn't it his
family
who was lucky? Or the trillions of people who went happily about their lives without ever catching on fire? Or the stupid fucking nurse telling him how lucky he was? If you couldn't hold your own dick, if doctors had to make you a new eyelid out of your ass, if you looked like half a zombie and couldn't blink one eye and had to wait a year or maybe longer before they could make you look partway human again—in what grievously fucked-up world were you lucky?

As soon as the grafts on his arm began to heal, the occupational therapist made him start doing things. He was supposed to put on his gown for her. The idea was that he'd slip it over his head himself, using the God-given power of his arms. Except they were no longer the ones God gave him. He couldn't raise them more than a foot without wilting from pain. His right hand was useless, too. His fingers seemed stiff and finlike, fused like a GI Joe's. It amazed him that he used to dress himself every day, without a thought. In the end, the OT adjusted Dustin's ADL rank and focused on “bathroom independence.” This became the new goal: to wipe his ass on his own. It seemed a basic human right, to go into the bathroom by himself and return in a presentably shit-free state. When he tried it, though, Dustin found it was in reality a privilege. He could reach the toilet paper with his less-burned hand, could even tear a piece from the roll, but try as he might, he couldn't manage to lift the paper up to his ass and wipe. The pain in his arm was too great. He tried for fifteen minutes, sweat pouring down his face, until he finally—dejected, trembling with exhaustion—called to a nurse to help him.

Now, nine months later, Dustin watched the closing credits of
Jaws
at Mojave Video
,
waiting for the list of bit roles at the end. Often they stuck in his mind more than the movies themselves:
Ballistic Neighbor. Hooker with a Doughnut. Man Dodging Debris.
He liked this last one in particular. There was something inevitably misanthropic about him. If you were busy dodging bits of debris, how could you possibly care about anyone else? Dustin walked to the Comedy section to reshelve a video, trying to reach
the top row to alphabetize it correctly. His arm quaked with pain. Sometimes it took him half a minute to reach the shelf. He hadn't been doing his ranges: What the hell difference did it make?

While he was ejecting the tape, a girl with a purple cast on her foot backed through the door on crutches. She pivoted around, surprising him with her beauty. Somehow, the cast and crutches made her seem even more beautiful. Instinctively, Dustin hid his face, pretending to count the money in the register. He could sense her glance at him absently before heading to New Releases. As often happened, Dustin's brain split in two, aware of what he might have done before the accident. He might have recommended a movie:
Repo Man,
say, or
An American Werewolf in London.
He might have flirted with her. When she chose a movie, crutching lazily to the counter, he might have said, “You're not watching this by yourself, are you?” But he didn't do these things. He counted the ones in the register. Thirteen. Then he ducked into the bathroom, pretending to wash his hands, and waited for her to leave.

At the sales meeting, Ted, their regional team leader, went around the room and asked each team member to share an inspirational anecdote about his week. Warren was a bit fascinated by Ted. To begin with, he drove a Porsche 911 convertible that he referred to as “Baby.” Once Warren had had an entire conversation with him about his weekend, believing Ted was talking about his girlfriend until he happened to mention that he'd replaced her ball joints. The convertible appeared to have no effect on Ted's hair, which was so sculpted with gel that you could balance an egg on it. The face under this helmet was improbably square. He looked less like someone on TV than the TV itself. What interested Warren the most, though, was the way he clapped after everything he said, expecting listeners to join in. This was amazingly effective. You could only watch a man applaud himself for so long before you started clapping, too, out of embarrassment and a sort of toddlerlike wish to please.

The other team members seemed less embarrassed. They sat in their plastic chairs like AA disciples, unbothered by the shabby, depressing office or the single poster on the wall that said
BLADECO: A CUT ABOVE THE REST
. They were all in college, which made Warren the oldest member by twenty-five years. He was older, in fact, than Ted, who liked to repeat evangelically that he was only twenty-nine and owned a $50,000 car and vacationed in Bermuda every Christmas. It seemed like a pretty humiliating position for Warren to be in, until you remembered that BladeCo was an equal-opportunity company that didn't believe in discrimination of any kind. They believed in sales. It didn't matter if you
were old or leprous or missing several limbs, as long as you were raking in the dough.

“Thanks for that inspiring anecdote, Delio,” Ted said, responding to a tedious story about convincing some woman with a walker to buy a Complete Kitchen Set by throwing in a free spatula. No one mentioned that the spatula would come out of Delio's commission. “And we should say, now's as good a time as any, that Delio was our top team member this month, making thirty-six appointments and earning a whopping six thousand twenty-eight dollars in sales. Which means, because BladeCo likes to reward its high fliers, he gets automatically entered into the statewide raffle to win a free trip to Cancún! What do you say to that, team?”

“Awesome!” everyone shouted on cue.

“Just awe
some
? Or awe-
much
?”

“Awe-much!”

Warren had stooped to many things, including selling knives to crippled old ladies, but he could not bring himself to say “awe-much.” It was not a word he could say and look at himself in the mirror ever again. As a matter of fact, it was not a word at all. Ted had invented it because he felt that “awesome” failed to deliver the passionate encomium that BladeCo knives deserved.

“Warren,” he said now, checking his name chart, “did I hear you say ‘awe-much'?”

“No,” Warren mumbled.

“Why not?”

“I'd rather not, if you don't mind.”

Ted lost his smile for a second, like a waiter learning you'll only be drinking water. There was a whiff of desperation behind these pep talks that reminded Warren of his own sales approach. He guessed that Ted had some selling to do himself, to the higher-ups at BladeCo, and that Warren and the rest of the team were his product.

“Well, you
are
a member of this sales team, which leads me to believe that we're all in this
together.
And the definition of ‘teamtastic'”—here Ted pointed at a homemade poster with
TEAMTASTIC
, another word he'd coined, written on it in capital letters—“correct me if I'm wrong, is that we're all equal. No better or worse than our teammates.”

Warren could not possibly correct him, since Ted had made up
the definition himself. “I'm sorry,” Warren said, “I don't think I'm better.”

Ted turned to Austin, a boy with blue novas of acne on each cheek. “Austin, do you have any objection to saying ‘awe-much'?”

“No, sir. Awe-much.”

“Shara, what about you?”

“Awe-much,” Shara said, smiling.

“Carl?”

Carl, asleep with his eyes open, bolted upright in his seat. His tie was stained with coffee. “Yeah?”

“Does it affront you in some way to say ‘awe-much'?”

“Huh?”

“If someone asked you to say ‘awe-much,' in place of ‘awesome,' would you in any way object?”

“Awe-munch.”

“Warren,” Ted said, ignoring this, “I don't think your team members have any problem with it. Which means that you're letting them down. And if you're letting them down,
us,
how are we ever going to beat Quikcut's fiscal earnings—that's right, guys,
booo!—
for the second year in a row?”

“Come on, dude,” the guy next to Warren said, clapping him on the back. “It's just a word.”

Warren looked around helplessly. His teammates seemed to agree that the word was harmless. They were all waiting for him to say it—seemed, in fact, to share Ted's animosity toward Quikcut, the Darth Vader of cutlery, to the degree that they'd begun to eye Warren like a traitor. He wondered if losing your last shred of dignity in a place where no one was capable of perceiving its demise was like a tree falling in the forest.

“Awe-much,” he said quietly.

“Thank you, Warren,” Ted said, his smile deepening in a way that suggested genuine pleasure. “Let's show our support for team member Warren, who may—I'm just guessing, please correct me—need a bit of a boost today?”

After the meeting, Ted called him into his office and then made him wait there alone while he left to use the “crapper.” Warren looked around the windowless room. Except for the framed picture of a bikini-clad girl on the desk, facing outward as if by accident, the office was as bare as a prison cell. Warren had a flashback to his day at the PV County Jail. That had been a humiliation,
certainly—though after the degradations of BladeCo, it seemed like a prefatory glimpse. At least the Shackneys had dropped the charges after the accident; who was going to let him off the hook now? He was forty-five years old. No one wanted to hire someone his age, especially if they'd gone to law school and had nothing to show for it. He'd tried to get work in an office when they first moved to Auburn Fields, but after three months of sending him on interviews, the young woman at the employment agency had finally lost patience and said, not unkindly, “If you were younger, even by ten years, we'd be able to get you a job as a paralegal assistant.” “Is that a paraparalegal?” he'd joked, but she hadn't laughed. That afternoon he'd seen the ad in the paper for BladeCo, asking him if he wanted to make “30K in 30 days.” He didn't believe it, of course, but even 5K would be a nice start. He couldn't bear to work as a cashier somewhere: the idea of driving himself around, more or less his own boss, seemed less miserable. And at least there was the possibility of making a living.