12. Then The Hospital

The following—or versions of it—is what I've told interviewers about my missing finger. For the purposes of this audiobook, I went back and reread some of those interviews to see what I'd said and how I'd said it.

I don't remember much from that morning on-set and the chaos during and after the accident. I don't remember who drove me to the hospital. I don't remember who had the severed half of my pinky. I do remember Cleo sat in the backseat with me, holding my other arm while I had my wounded hand wrapped and raised. She asked me random questions about the street I grew up on, my favorite ice cream flavor, and got me talking about bands I liked. When I ran out of things to say, she told me about how in fifth grade she found an abandoned, sickly baby squirrel in her backyard. It was so thin its head appeared too big, as though the body were failing under the strain of sustaining such a head. She tried to nurse the squirrel back to health. Her trying equated to placing it in a big cardboard box, padded with dish towels and newspaper. In one corner of the homemade terrarium was a plastic bowl of water, grass, and some granola. Her parents wouldn't let her keep the squirrel and the box in the house, so she left the box in their beat-up garage. I assumed hers was the garage referenced in the screenplay. Cleo slept terribly that night and was up before the sun the next morning, which was cold enough for frost, and when she went out to the garage, the squirrel was dead. Cleo had teary eyes and ended the story by saying she didn't know why she was telling me any of that. I asked if I was the baby squirrel now, and she said no, of course not, and, "You're all grown up." We laughed. I think we laughed, or I choose to remember we laughed. I think we're in more control of what we remember and what we don't remember than we assume.

After being seen and treated in the ER I was given a private room in the adjoining hospital. Visiting hours were supposed to end at 7 P.M., but Valentina and Cleo showed up after 8 P.M. I was exhausted and groggy on pain medication. My memory of the conversation within that room has a dreamlike quality, insofar as the logic of what was said and who said it and in what order is all off. Consequently, what follows is a forensic-like reconstruction of what might've been said, what should've been said.

Valentina spent a solid five unbroken minutes apologizing, promising to pay current and future hospital bills that insurance wouldn't cover, and took full responsibility for the accident, that the safety and care of everyone on-set was her priority. Yes, we had staged a shot of my wriggling real finger between the blades, but the blades were locked in place then. To Valentina's credit, she did not ask how my real finger ended up between the blades after the fake finger rigged with a blood-spurting tube under it had been attached to my entirely closed fist. She did not ask how my real pinky somehow ended up between the blades when they closed. If she had asked (maybe she did and it was what precipitated an argument between her and Cleo), I wouldn't have been able to give an answer. Cleo and Valentina argued about the movie itself. Cleo said they should shut it down, and Valentina asked for how long and said they could shoot other scenes while I recovered, and Cleo said, shut it down for good, and speaking for me, she said that there was no way I could go on filming after this, and she mentioned how upset Karson was and didn't think he wanted to continue either. I interrupted, at some point, to say that the doctors would be by anytime now to tell me if they could reattach the half pinky, which meant longer recovery time, but they also thought the chances were slim that they could, that the reattachment wouldn't take, my body might reject the old piece. I didn't tell them that I'd already decided I didn't want the half pinky reattached because I knew we couldn't afford to postpone shooting for what would be weeks of recovery. Without the pinky, I'd be ready to go tomorrow, metaphorically speaking. Maybe I did say all that out loud, because I remember Valentina's cagey and wary facial expressions along with Cleo's horrified and confused ones. Valentina said they'd wait for me, and I said that I would wait for them, which didn't make sense, wasn't what I meant to say, but they must've taken it as my saying I would continue to be in the movie and there was no way I was quitting now, that I'd sacrificed too much to not continue. They said okay, okay and soothed and shushed me as though I'd been yelling. Hourglass sands of silence dripped until they started talking again, this time about stuff not related to the movie, so I left them and went back to the movie set in my head, to piece it all together. Not sorry for the pun. Did Valentina insist on a second shot with my real finger between the blades while they weren't locked in place? Maybe? I think so? While my finger was inside the metal beak—that's what the opened shears looked like to me, a giant bird's opened maw, the same bird that hid within the drawing I'd made in third grade, inexplicably that magical thinking/random connection made sense and soothed me—did Valentina lie about the shears being safety-locked? Did run-of-the-mill garden shears have a safety feature like that? What was so safe about locking blades open? Those doubts were preferable to my inexplicably sticking my finger out, hiding it under the fake pinky, planning to retract it the nanoseconds before the blades closed, before the beak closed, just so I could be the real Thin Kid for those extra moments, those real moments. Maybe that's why I left the pinky there, hidden under the fake finger. Maybe it had nothing to do with the Thin Kid and I wanted to see and feel what would happen. I told Valentina I didn't blame her or anyone else, that it was an accident. My mouth was dry, full of that hourglass sand, and my hand throbbed with my heartbeat, and I tried a joke, I said maybe I blamed Dan and the crew for cursing us, and when Valentina asked, "What curse?" I reminded her that on cigarette day they said if forgetting the cigarettes carton was the worst mishap we'd have on-set, we'd be lucky. Cleo agreed. We were totally cursed.