They didn’t have the technology

They didn’t have the technology, they couldn’t make him better, nor stronger and certainly not faster. It had been seven months and still the inanimate digits stared up at him; cheap prosthesis in all but manufacture. If he looked away, as he so often wanted to, he could feel his fist clench. If he looked down, he realized that the feeling was a lie; a pair of sensory phantasms were mocking him. Their cruel jape made him feel like half a man; in reality it was less than one-hundredth of himself that he’d lost. In his case though, that hundredth had robbed him of more than it had any right to.

Gavin was glad that the scar tissue was largely confined to his elbow, where he couldn’t see it without twisting about or making use of a mirror. It was a map of his pain and of his misery; a map he didn’t require GPS to navigate. Those long purpled tendrils of puckered flesh radiated from a point just above the elbow; meeting in a Gordian knot, already severed. That was where it all began and as far as Gavin was concerned, where he ended.

He couldn’t remember much of that night, when he tried to think about it; except that he had been too excited to sit still. Jerry had laughed and told him that if he didn’t calm down his teammates were going to think they’d drafted a meth addict. The laughter, while nervous, had helped to ease some of the tension he felt in his chest. Jerry had always known just what to say; he loved that about him.

It had been time to go. Jerry handed him his duffel bag. “You are going to wow them out there; I know you are.” He’d kissed Gavin at the door, part-romance, part-reassurance. “Get going, I’ll be right there cheering in the front row!”

He was told when he woke up that he didn’t even make it out on to the field. Fans had lined up to see the players arrive at the stadium, but one of them had been from some fundamentalist Christian group. You know the sort: the ones that think the Bible begins and ends with Leviticus. Whose firebrand preacher will be outed as a closet homosexual in a year at most. The good samaritan had managed to smuggle in some sort of homebrew grenade. There were a few other injuries, but thankfully no one had died. The bomber had been captured was being tried for a laundry list of crimes. Good, Gavin thought savagely, if he gets out while I can still walk, he and I are going to have words, consisting mostly of “please,” “no” and “don’t.”

When he wasn’t trying to remember, a few more fragments of that night would come to him unbidden. Just enough to ruin any sort of calm he might have achieved or disrupt his alcohol-saturated sleep. From Gavin’s right; it wasn’t a shout, but the furious vibrato in the man’s voice carried. Serrated sound waves ripping their way through the cool night air.

“Baseball is for real Americans, you fucking queer!”

He never saw the face of the man who had hated him so much. To whom his very existence had been an affront and a blot on the nation’s honor. Beyond that he could remember lying on the ground, pain arcing all over his right side. Craning his neck he could see people struggling to get to their feet and put out smouldering patches. As he looked back he could see shrapnel from the bomb embedded in the ground, but also in him. There were pieces in his leg, his shoulder and just above his hip. One piece was larger than all the rest; it was twisted in this sort of zig-zag pattern and stuck out from his elbow, like a meat thermometer. Absurd though it was, he remembered thinking that it looked like a lightning bolt. Perhaps he really had been smote by some god of the shitheads.

He woke up to his heartbeat echoing through a heart monitor speaker. The drip of an IV and the quiet of his surroundings told him that he wasn’t being treated for just some scrapes and burns. He couldn’t feel anything particularly well; they must have had him on the good drugs. All the same, he knew something wasn’t right. When he saw the white cocoon that had been his right arm, it was clear the news wasn’t going to be good. Was he going to miss his first season?

He took some comfort in seeing Jerry’s somnolent form through the glass, head lolled against the white wall. His boyish curls all a-tangle, as usual. He looked good no matter what he did with his hair. The smile these thoughts brought on did not have the luxury of a long life, surrounded by little grandsmiles. An elderly man in blue scrubs walked in less than a minute later. He had the air of someone who thought he had a very important job and thought you should think so too. Could he have been waiting in the hall?

“Hmmmm. Hello Mr. Fraser, I’m chief surgeon, Allen Carmine. I had someone page me when you woke up. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good right now, these are some awesome drugs. Can I order you a round?”

“Hah, hmmmm. I think I’ll pass for right now, but thanks.” The smile never reached his eyes, the wan lines of exhaustion that television has taught us to expect were all there, but there was something more. There was something sheepish mingled in with the exhaustion, was it shame?

“I wanted to ask about my arm, that’s a lot of bandages down there.” Gavin tried to gesture with his other hand.

“Hmmm, yes. That’s what I came to you talk about. You’re a very lucky man, Mr Fraser. The burns you suffered were minor and the shrapnel you were hit with didn’t pierce any internal organs.”

“… But?”

“Ermmm,… but the piece that hit your arm just above the elbow, it hit the nerve bundle that carries signals to the hand. We made incisions in the area to give us better access, but there was already damage done on the way in and some, unavoidably, on the way out.”

Panic started to rise, despite the drug-induced Zen that had been in place mere moments ago.

“What does that mean?” Gavin’s voice rising, unintentionally.

The chief surgeon sighed “Son, it’s likely that you’re going to lose function in that right hand. You might get some of it back with physical therapy, but we’re looking at the likelihood of minor, but permanent loss of motor function. I’m sorry.” He patted Gavin’s leg in what he imagined was a comforting manner and walked out.

He may have said something else afterward, but Gavin was past listening. Jerry woke up shortly after and Gavin explained what had happened. They cried and Jerry held him the best he could.

“You’re going to be alright. We will get through this.”

That was seven months ago. Jerry had started sleeping at his place to “let him rest.” He hadn’t seen him in three weeks. Gavin couldn’t blame Jerry; he had said some horrible things. Lashing out at anything that entered his field of vision. They talked on the phone occasionally; Jerry’s attempts to cheer him up were sweet, but became no less infuriating with time.

He did his PT exercises daily like a good little boy, but it hadn’t changed anything. The ball still fell out his grip or released awkwardly. His fastball wouldn’t get past a little leaguer and his curveballs often ended up in different zip codes.

He took a shot every time he completed a pitch. Which means it took a while to get piss-drunk, but he still managed it. One thing he did learn, in the intervening time, was that vodka was a lot harder to smell on you than whiskey the next day.

He was a man who spent his whole life training to be a pitcher. Every day after school, he sometimes threw to an empty net when there was no one to play with. Especially after he came out, he had a lot of solo practices with the net then. Eventually the team realized they just wanted their star pitcher back, even if they got weird in the locker room. He put up with every homosexual-pitcher joke in the book and more than a few that were too stupid to record.

He had put up with all that for years, he had finally made it and it was taken away in a matter of seconds by some self-righteous asshole. Now all Gavin had to look forward to, was the next shot.