Chapter 92

It'sstrange what you think about when someone is pointing a gun at your face.

It's happened to me twice now. While two is a relatively small number, it still seems way above average. Most people have never had a gun pointed at their face even once. And it's not like I'm some sort of drug dealer or gangster—I'm an anatomy professor. It's not clear why this should keep happening to me.

The first time someone pointed a gun at me was the far more surprising of the two. I suppose once you realize such a thing is possible, it loses its shock value a bit. No offense intended to Mason—it's still very scary to have him pointing his gun at my face. Especially since I'm pretty sure he intends to kill me.

I was twenty-two years old the first time. In retrospect, that seems incredibly young. So young that it's surprising I was even allowed to go out and live on my own and pay bills and make important life decisions. I was an idiot at twenty-two. Well, no more of an idiot than the average twenty-two-year-old, but you lack good judgment at that age. The frontal lobe isn't fully myelinated yet.

And yes, I do realize the irony of my saying such a thing in light of the fact that I'm currently having sex with a twenty-two-year-old girl. I'm a hypocrite. I'm not going to make excuses for myself.

Anyway, back to Kurt Morton and the gun he so rudely pointed at my head. I was sleeping when Kurt's mumbling woke me up. And there he was: sitting on his bed across from mine in the darkness, playing with that damn revolver.

"It's all over, Matt," he mumbled. "I'm fucked."

"Shut up and go back to sleep," I said brilliantly.

That was a dumb thing to say, right? But I was incredibly tired, and also, I was too young to realize how bad this situation was. I thought I was immortal. If I had it to do over again, I would have said something different. Maybe along the lines of, "Please, please don't shoot me in the head, Kurt."

"I'm flunking out," he said, his voice cracking. "Did you know that?"

I shook my head. "Wow, man, that sucks."

Again, not the most brilliant thing I could have said. I've had a lot of time to go over this in my head and highlight my mistakes. Could I have stopped him? We'll never know.

"What do you care?" Kurt shot back. "Mister honors student."

Yes, I was an honors student. I wanted to be a surgeon back then. But we all know what happened to that particular dream.

And that was when Kurt went from playing with the gun to pointing it at me. I aged about twenty years in that moment. I stared down the barrel of the revolver, thinking to myself, "Holy shit, he's going to kill me."

The next thing I remember, it was about two weeks later. Someone was asking me my name, if I knew where I was, what the date was, and my birthday. Also, they told me I'd been shot in the head and that Kurt was dead.

They called me "lucky" a lot. Kurt was aiming his gun right at my face, but his hands were shaking, and he instead hit me on the left side of my skull. If he'd had steadier hands, I might have ended up like Ann, a girl on the rehab unit who was two years younger than me. Her boyfriend shot her through the eye, and the bullet's trajectory veered downward and severed her spinal cord. Aside from being blind in one eye and having a deformed face, Ann was paralyzed from the neck down, dependent on a ventilator to breathe for the rest of her life. It could have happened to me. Or more likely, I could have died.

Although once you get shot in the head, you lose the right to ever call yourself lucky.

What I lost was half my skull. It was smashed to smithereens by the bullet, so they just took it off. If you pressed your finger against the left side of my scalp (and believe me, I attempted this a few times during moments of boredom and/or itchiness), there was nothing but brain underneath the skin. I had to wear a helmet when I walked in case I fell. Well, not in case I fell. I couldn't move half my body, so falling was fairly inevitable.

My right arm and leg got stronger, though, although never even close to full strength. Good enough, though, that I could walk (more or less) and dress myself and bathe myself if you gave me half the day to do it. They gave me a new skull too. For a brief time, I deluded myself that I might return to medical school. This was probably quite hilarious to the people around me.

It was my neuropsychologist who set me straight. Dr. Watson. He spent hours doing tests of my memory and reasoning and problem-solving. When it was over, he laid out the results for me in his office. He used a lot of big words, but the message was painfully clear: I'd never be able to go back.

Naturally, I argued with him.

"I read that I could arrange to get extra time on exams," I said. "All I'd need would be your documentation."

"Sounds great, Matt," Dr. Watson said in a voice that made it obvious that my idea was not, in fact, great. "But what will you do when you're doing surgery on a patient or performing a procedure? How will you arrange for extra time in that situation?"

We went back and forth for the better part of an hour. I don't know why I bothered—he was right. I couldn't go back. I'd never be a physician.