Page 65 of The Same Backward as Forward

Not reading my mind, then, I think, and then I remember suddenly that, in the beginning, it was just blankets beneath me. At some point, that changed. I wonder with some horror if I pissed on the blankets. I’ve been here for days. I can’t smell urine—or worse—but I have no memory of a catheter… or anything else.

“Got an empty bottle?” I ask crudely.

Jackson snorts and nods toward a door—not the exit. “Bathroom. I can move you. Won’t be pleasant.”

“Knock yourself out.”

One thing about Jackson: He’s big enough and strong enough to lift me from the bed and carry me to the bathroom.

Another, less mortifying thing: There is a reason this man pulled me from the ocean, a reason he feels compelled to help me now. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. I try to focus onthatinstead of the agony and humiliation of not even being able to hold myself up to piss.

Damn it all to hell and back, I hurt.

I refuse to say a word until it’s done. When Jackson picks me back up, I bite out question after question. “Why did you pull me out of the water? Why bring me here and not to the hospital? Who are you and Hannah to me?”

I might as well be an overtired toddler for all the attention Jackson pays to my questions as he lowers me back onto the mattress.

“Hannah went for more pain medication,” he tells me.

“Did I ask where Hannah went?” I’m lying on my back again, staying as still as I can, but it doesn’t help. Nothing helps, except trying to focus on the mysteries at hand.Who am I—and who is she?“Is she your daughter?”

“She’s a pain in my ass.” Jackson runs a hand roughly over his beard. “But she’s a good girl.” My burly companion fixes me with a look. “Damn good.”

“And I am a bad, bad boy,” I reply, my breathing and my words both ragged.

Jackson snorts yet again, then returns to sit at the battered wooden table. For the longest time, there is nothing but silence and pain, pain and silence.

Finally, he speaks. “I fish. You asked me earlier why I pulled you out of the water. I’m a fisherman. Ifish. Didn’t give pulling you out a second thought.”

I have no response for that.

Silence and pain.

Pain and silence.

Eventually, Jackson leaves out the exterior door. When he comes back, he’s holding a bottle of whiskey smudged with dirt.

“You bury your alcohol?” I say.

“You don’t?” He pours me a glass. “This is all I’ve got for the pain.”

I’m two glasses in, my body welcoming the liquor like an old friend or lover, whenshereturns.H-A-N-N-A-H.There are drugstore bags in her hands.

She’s a good girl, I think, Jackson’s words whiskey-slow and a little bitter in my mind.Damn good.I throw back glass number three. “Miss me?” I ask.

One thing about Hannah? She has zero tolerance for drunks.

Chapter 5

Alcohol keeps the stone room away. Instead, in my dreams, I find myself standing on a cliff.

I turn slowly, three hundred sixty degrees. There’s nothing in front of me and nothing behind—just the cliff and me and a black hole of oblivion on all sides.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, I think, the words low and silky in my mind,the abyss gazes also into you. Those famous words are not mine, but I know them, I feel them, Iamthem, standing on that cliff.

The abyss gazes back into me—and suddenly, the world is ablaze. Fire. It’s everywhere.

And just as suddenly, I’m underwater. Salt in my nose. In my throat. Everything is black. I’m burning, and I’m drowning.Fire. Water.