La Voglia

Chapter OneSix O'Clock

I ran the same mile every morning for six years, and I can tell you exactly what it was made of.

It started at the front door of my building on Parallel Parkway, went east along the sidewalk past the dry cleaner and the Vietnamese place that never seemed to open, turned left at the light, and looped back through the parking lot of a church whose sign out front changed every Monday. One mile. I measured it with a wheel the first week I lived there, because the phone said 0.97 and the watch said 1.04 and I did not trust either of them. It was 5,281 feet. I let the extra foot go.

People asked me why only one mile. My father asked me that, actually, more than once, standing in the barn with his hands in his coat. Ralph McMurphy did not understand exercise that did not produce anything. You could carry feed for an hour and get the same result and have fed something.

"It's not about distance," I told him.

"What's it about, then?"

I didn't have a good answer. I said something about consistency. He said, "Huh," which is what my father says instead of arguing.

The truth was simpler and a little embarrassing. I liked a thing that came out the same every time. Six o'clock, one mile, somewhere between six minutes fifty and seven ten depending on the wind and whether the church lot had been plowed. I wrote the time in a notebook. Not an app. A notebook, green, the kind with the grid paper engineers buy because we like to pretend we'll sketch something.

That Saturday was six fifty eight. The air was cold enough to see. The leaves on the maples by the church had gone the color of a rusted pipe, and somebody had raked them into a pile and then left the rake standing in it like a flag.

I remember the time because it was the last thing I wrote down.

My condo had two bedrooms. I used one to sleep and one to keep things in. The second one had a desk, a bookshelf of textbooks I would never open again, a road bike I would never ride again, and a box on the closet shelf that I did not take down. The realtor had called it a guest room. I had never had a guest stay over. My mother had looked into it the first time she visited and said, "Well, it's a nice size," in the voice she uses when she is deciding not to say something else.

I showered. I ate nothing. I never ate before noon on weekends, which my mother also had opinions about. I made coffee in a machine that cost more than it should have, and I drank it standing at the window, looking down at the parking lot, at the car.

I want to be honest about the car, because I think it says something about me that I would rather it didn't.

It was a 2025 BMW M8 coupe. BMW had stopped building them that spring. I had read about it in March on my phone, at my desk at work, while a test rig beside me cycled a pressure valve four thousand times, and I felt something I can only describe as alarm. Like a door was closing that I had not finished looking through. I had wanted that car since BMW first showed it, the spring of my junior year. I had a photo of it on the wall of a dorm room in Pennsylvania, torn out of a magazine, and I am not going to say who used to tease me about it.

I found one in Overland Park. Dealer had held it back. Dark gray, a gray so deep it looked wet even when it wasn't, black leather inside, carbon fiber roof. Twin turbo V8, 617 horsepower. I paid more than a development engineer should pay for anything that isn't a house. I signed the papers on a Thursday. That Saturday was my third day owning it.

I had an engineer's way of loving it. I knew the torque curve. I knew the curb weight. I knew that the passenger seat had never had anyone in it, because I had driven it home alone and driven it to work alone and driven it to my parents' farm alone, where my father walked around it twice, looked underneath it, and said, "Huh."

My mother had said, "It's beautiful, Andy." Then, "Who are you going to take out in it?"

"Nobody," I said. "That's not what it's for."

She let it go. She always let it go, and I always heard the place where she let it go.

My phone rang at seven forty. Saturday. It was always Saturday.

"You ran," my mother said.

"I ran."

"How cold was it?"

"Thirty four."

"You wore a hat."

"I wore a hat, Mom."

"Your father wants to know if you're coming out tomorrow. He's doing the pumpkins for the Hendersons' girls and he says he could use somebody who knows how to count."

"I can come tomorrow."

"Good." A pause. In the background I could hear the kitchen radio, the farm report, a man's voice reading off soybean prices like scripture. "What are you doing today?"

"Driving."

"Driving where?"

"Nowhere. North. Up along the river, maybe up to Leavenworth and back."

"In the new car."

"In the new car."

"Andy." She said it the way she used to say it when I was eleven and had taken apart the toaster. "Be careful in that thing."

"It has more safety systems than the hospital."

"That's not what I said."

"I'll be careful."

"I know you will." Another pause. "You sound tired."

"I'm not tired."

"Okay." Then, quieter, almost like she was talking to herself, "Okay."

I said I'd see them tomorrow. She said she loved me. I said it back, the way you say it at the end of a phone call, like a period at the end of a sentence. I have thought about that since. About how she said it with a different weight than I did. I wasn't listening for weight back then.

I took 635 south to Interstate 70, then cut over to K 7 and went up through Bonner Springs, past the farm stands that had already gone to pumpkins and gourds, past a church with a hand painted sign that said FISH FRY FRIDAY, past fields cut down to stubble. The road was mostly empty. I kept it legal, mostly. A couple of times on the long straight stretches I let it breathe, and the car made a sound like something waking up and remembering what it was.

I had a habit of thinking about work when I drove. I was on a team at Medical Device Innovations, which everybody in Kansas City called MDI, the way people call a company by its initials when they're tired of saying the whole name. We designed equipment for hospitals and clinics. Infusion pumps, mostly, that year. A little gray box with a screen that pushes medicine into a person at a precise rate, milliliters per hour, and stops if there's air in the line, and screams if anybody tries to give too much. My piece of it was the occlusion sensor. If the line kinks or clogs, my part notices. That's the whole job. Notice when something stops flowing.

I'd spent nine months on that sensor a few years back, and I still ran most of its testing. I knew every failure mode. I could tell you how it behaved at forty degrees and at a hundred and five, how it handled a bubble the size of a grain of rice. I was good at it. I'll say that much for myself. I was good at noticing when things stopped flowing, as long as they were inside a plastic housing.

North of Basehor the road went to farmland again, and then the outskirts of Lansing came up, gas stations and a Dollar General and a long low fence on the right with razor wire along the top. The prison. Lansing had a prison the way some towns have a water tower. I had driven past it a hundred times as a kid, in the back of my father's truck on the way to buy parts in Leavenworth, and I used to stare at the windows and wonder what the men inside had done. My mother told me not to stare. "Everybody's done something, Andy," she said. "Just be glad yours didn't put you in there."

I was eight. I didn't know what she meant. I think I do now.

K 7 and US 73 run together through Lansing. It's the main road, Main Street they call it in town, four lanes with a turn lane and lights at the big crossings and stop signs at the little ones, where the side streets come in from the neighborhoods and the fields. I was in the right lane doing forty five. The posted limit. I remember checking.

I was hungry. That's a stupid thing to remember but I remember it. I'd skipped breakfast, and I was thinking that I'd find a diner in Leavenworth and get eggs, and then I was thinking, for no reason I could name, about bread. Warm bread, the kind they bring to the table before you've ordered. Oil in a shallow dish with something red floating in it. I had the smell of it for a second, clear as if somebody had opened an oven beside me. I didn't know where it came from. I had not been to a restaurant like that in years. I made a point of not going to restaurants like that.

I was thinking about the bread when I saw the truck.

It came from the right. A side street, one of the little ones, a stop sign on a bent post. It was an old grain truck, red once, gone pink at the fenders, with a wooden box on the back and plywood sides. I saw it like something in the corner of a photograph. It was there and it was moving and it should not have been moving.

The thing about an occlusion sensor is that it only has to answer one question. Is it flowing or isn't it. My brain, which had been trained for six years to answer that kind of question, answered it before I did. It said: that truck is not going to stop.

He wasn't looking at me. That's what I saw. The driver. A man, heavy in the shoulders, a ball cap, his head turned down and a little to the side like he was reading something on the seat beside him. He never looked up. He never looked at the stop sign. He came through it at maybe twenty five miles an hour, which doesn't sound fast until you put ten tons behind it.

I hit the brakes. The car did everything it was designed to do. I felt the ABS shudder through the pedal like a fast heartbeat. I turned the wheel left, toward the empty lane.

The world slowed down.

People say that and I always assumed it was something people said. It is not something people said. It is real. Everything went thick, like the air had turned to the clear gel we use for ultrasound testing. I could see the grain of the plywood on the truck's side panel. I could see a bumper sticker, faded, half peeled, that said something about a high school band. I could see a single yellow leaf stuck under the truck's windshield wiper. I could see my own hand on the steering wheel, and I remember thinking that it looked like somebody else's hand, very calm.

And I could see the passenger seat. Empty. Black leather. Nobody in it. The truck was coming right at it, at the door, at the seat, at the place where a person would sit if I had ever let a person sit there.

I remember thinking: good. Nobody's in it.

I remember thinking: there was supposed to be.

Then the sound. Then nothing.

I opened my eyes, and there was a light directly above me, round and white, with a ring of smaller lights inside it, like an eye looking down.

I couldn't move my head. Something held it, hard on both sides. There were voices all around me, fast and overlapping, none of them talking to me.

"Pressure's eighty over fifty."

"Second line in?"

"Going in now."

"Get the FAST back, I want to see the left upper quadrant."

"He's got free fluid."

"Yeah. I see it."

I knew where I was before anyone told me. I knew because of the beeping. I had heard that beep a thousand times in the test lab, a little two tone chirp from a pump we had benchmarked against ours. It was on a pole to my left. I could see the edge of the housing out of the corner of my eye. Not ours. A competitor's. I remember being irritated by that. My mother would call that a very Andrew thing to be irritated about while bleeding into your own abdomen.

A face came into the light. A man, older than me, maybe fifty, with a gray beard trimmed close and reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, under a blue paper cap. His eyes were tired and very steady.

"Andrew?" he said. "Andrew McMurphy?"

I tried to say yes. Something came out.

"Okay. Good. Don't try to talk. My name is Dr. Marchuk. Tim Marchuk. I'm a surgeon here. You're at the University of Kansas Hospital. You were in a car accident. Do you understand?"

I blinked. That seemed to count.

"You've got some bleeding inside. Your spleen took a hit, and there may be some other damage we need to look at. We're going to take you into surgery right now. I'm going to be doing it." He said that last part like it was a promise, not information. "We've called your parents. They're on the way."

My mother. On the farm, in the kitchen, with the soybean prices on the radio. Getting a phone call. I tried to think about what her face would do and I couldn't, and that scared me more than anything else in the room.

"The car," I said. Or tried to.

Dr. Marchuk leaned in. "What's that?"

"Was anyone," I said. "In the. Seat."

He looked at me for a second. Something moved behind his eyes, and I didn't know then what it was. I have a better idea now.

"No, son," he said. "You were alone."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said, and put his hand flat on my shoulder, once, and then he was gone, and the ceiling started moving.

They took me down a hall. Ceiling tiles, one after another, the kind with the little holes in them, and every fourth one a light. I counted them. Of course I counted them. Twenty two tiles, then a set of double doors that opened by themselves, then cold.

Operating rooms are cold on purpose. Sixty eight degrees, sometimes lower. It keeps bacteria down. It keeps the surgeons comfortable under their gowns. I knew that. Knowing it did not help.

Somebody was moving me from one surface to another. Somebody was saying "on three," and then not counting to three, just lifting. A woman leaned over me, small, dark eyes above a mask, a surgical cap printed with tiny cartoon fish. Her badge was clipped upside down on her scrubs, and I read it upside down, because I couldn't stop reading things. KIM. ANESTHESIOLOGY.

"Hi, Andrew," she said. "I'm going to help you sleep, okay? You're not going to feel anything."

Another anesthesiologist was on the other side, a man, saying numbers. They were both doing things to my arm. I felt cold go into the vein, a thin line of it, climbing.

"I want you to think about something nice," Dr. Kim said. "Somewhere you liked to be. Can you do that for me?"

I tried. I thought about the farm, the barn, my father saying huh. That didn't stick. I thought about the car before it was a car anymore. That didn't stick either.

What came was a window. A table by a window, at night, with a candle in a glass, and bread in a basket under a cloth napkin, and somebody across from me laughing at something I'd said. A long time ago. Pennsylvania. I could see her hands on the tablecloth.

I did what I'd done every day for years when that window opened. I started to close it.

I didn't get it all the way shut.

"There you go," Dr. Kim said, from very far away. "That's it. Just let go."

The light above me went soft at the edges, then soft in the middle.

I fell asleep.