The bureaucrats look at him and see nothing wrong. A big strapping man. The bulge in his temple they say is anger or nerves or nothing. His boy rubs at the spot gently, his voice so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “Does that hurt, Daddy? Does it feel better? Does that hurt?”
One morning he woke without a headache and the pain in his back and neck eased up a bit, nothing tearing and shooting down his arm and leg. The twins were sleeping. Ingrid in the shower. He didn’t tell her anything, got dressed fast without her help or his vodka, and took the keys. Behind the steering wheel, he worked the clutch and shifted gears the way it used to be, without a whiteout of pain. Then his head got in the way. He forgot where he was going and why and what the gas pedal meant and he coasted to a stop, the whatchamacallit still running, and ran his hands over a cold metal circle and a shaft. He sat rigid and perplexed in some sort of enclosure till he realized he was all fucked up and then he lay his head on the steering wheel and wept though Albert Stille does not cry.
Some girl from the commune found him and went for Ingrid–the first friendly contact he had with those people.
The girl gave Ingrid the idea, the new angle. No objective evidence of physical impairment so maybe there was a mental block. Some reactive conversion blah blah Sigmund Freud bullshit. What could he do? Too fucked up to fight them so he went along for the ride, two hours’ drive stuck in a pickup truck with the hippie lawyer Blanche. Two hours was how long you had to travel to get to a head shrink because the one good thing to say about this prairie-land state, people were too smart to fall for that on-the-couch crap.
“You can file an appeal with Social Security,” Blanche told them. “They turned you down on the reconsideration, but that’s par for the course. Paper shuffling. They rubberstamp the initial decision. You have a much better chance at a hearing, especially with new evidence. You’re entitled.”
“I’m entitled to justice,” he said. “I’m entitled to my goddamn money.”
In the meantime, there was no point in their starving. Blanche was sure they could get money from the State. He and Ingrid had already been through that. He was a worker. He was a veteran. He didn’t want welfare. He wasn’t looking for a handout.
“Of course not,” said Blanche with a glance–and don’t think he didn’t see it–at Ingrid. “It’s not welfare. It’s disability.”
So how come it said Health & Welfare printed right there on the letter? He wasn’t healthy and he didn’t want welfare and it looked like he wasn’t going to get it either. The goddamn determination–just like Social Security–that there were no objective findings of illness or impairment.
“In the hospital they said I had a head injury. They said I had a broken back. I heard the doctor say it. It’s not going to end here,” he said.
“No, it won’t,” said Blanche and she let the bastards know they couldn’t deny assistance, the college-educated shits, not without paying for a psychological evaluation. Good thing about the distances, she dealt with them in letters and on the phone, the pencil pushers didn’t see what they were dealing with, some hippie whore, an LSD-crazed bra-less nincompoop. And Ingrid let him go off with her, alone with her for a long long drive, and he’d caught them exchanging glances, in this together, two against one, conspiring against him.
“Let’s get our shit together and go to San Francisco.” He mocked her, the little hippie bitch behind the wheel.
What had he looked like to her when she found him that day in the car? A big baby in the middle of the road. Humpty Dumpty. Something big and awkward and split.
What did he look like to Ingrid these days? A wreck of himself, his high school football player’s body run to fat. (At the V.A. hospital they told him to lose weight, he was putting a strain on his back, as if that were his problem.) Overfed in captivity. Potatoes, spaghetti, dumplings, bread, everything cheap and pasty and filling.
To the twins he must be a marshmallow mountain. An erupting pudding. What did he look like to Terry Ann and Jerry when he lay on his back on the floor, his belly trembling? How will they remember him? A hollering monster, all bark but no bite, who’s never laid a hand on them in anger, whose anger is only on their behalf. (When Jerry came home from kindergarten saying some boy had hit him, Albert asked, “Should I shoot him?” Ingrid was upset: “Don’t talk that way in front of them.” But they had to know what a family was for. They had to know their father would do anything for them.) Ingrid used the twins–“The children, the children!”–when his angry voice was more than she could bear. She used them to try to make him smile: Terry, finding shade beneath a sunflower, “Thumbelina,” said Ingrid. “Oh, Albert, look at her! Isn’t she cute!”
Cute, hungry, and in the winter, cold. He had to provide for his children and so he let Blanche drive him to the head shrink.
“Summer of love,” he said. “Dopeheads. Screw the shrink. Let’s go to a motel.”
Ingrid didn’t have to worry. In spite of the lack of objective findings, she knows damn well he can’t fuck. Can’t fuck, can’t work, can’t even drive.
“So, Mr. Stille–”
“STILL-uh,” he corrected. “STILL-uh, two syllables. Still a crazy son-of-a-bitch, oh pardon me, I can’t use the word crazy, that’s a diagnosis, you have to be a specialist to–”
“Well, Mr. STILL-uh,” said the shrink. “I see that after the accident–”
“IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT.” The prissy steeple-fingered bastard wasn’t going to catch him that easy, trap him like the damned lawyer who made a deal with the insurance. He might be a cripple but he could still snap the little shit’s scrawny neck. Throttle him with his own tie. An educated man in a backwards state like this, what was his excuse for being here? This Dr. Juergens had to be running away from something. Albert let his fists relax; the idea pleased him. He sank back into the chair–no couch for him–and smiled.
Dr. Juergens smiled back, but barely, still scared or else suppressing his amusement. “Well, what shall we call it then?”
What shall we call it then? Hearty as a pipsqueak can be and humoring, a tone just asking to be mimicked. (Cooperate, Ingrid had told him. We need the help.) The shrink’s amusement reminded Albert of something, laughter, yes, good humor. If he could laugh at himself, that was probably healthy. Too healthy. To be that healthy was to minimize the forces that oppressed him. So he narrowed his eyes and stared the doctor down. “You can call it The Crash. You can call it Criminal Negligence. You can call it The Morning the Crummy Went Over the Cliff. You can call it Conspiracy to Defraud. I had a broken back, a head injury. The lawyer made a deal with the insurance–”
“After the, the crash,” said the shrink, “you began to experience difficulties in driving.”
“Not in driving,” Albert corrected. “At first the problem was pain. Then, the difficulties were in my mind. In connecting one thing with another. It’s not my memory. I remember everything. It’s not about driving. It’s like my mind going blind.”
Dr. Juergens made a note.
Albert said, “You better get it right.”
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