“It’s a miracle, really,” Doctor told me, shaking his distinguished gray head; residents and nurses flanked him as if adding moral support to his expertise by their numbers. “A few millimeters to the right and you’d be dead, or a vegetable.
“The bullet passed completely through the orbital bones of the left socket and out. The brain was physically untouched except for hydrostatic shock, but I’m afraid the eye is completely gone.”
I reached up to touch the bandages swathing the left side of my head and face. Even through the excellent dope they had me pumped up with, I could still feel throbbing pain in the hole where my eye had been.
“How’s about bringing me a mirror?” I said.
Dorcas, the same blonde nurse I’d first woken to, went and fetched one. I held it up to take a gander at myself. They’d done a good job; the bandages were wrapped pretty neatly.
The right side of my face looked completely normal. I plucked at the clean white gauze concealing the left half, lifting the bandages away.
Doctor raised a hand as if to stop me. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Markus.”
I looked at him, and his hand dropped. Even though I was a convalescent Cyclops, I was still twice as wide as him and fully conscious this time.
“Let’s just call it a self-diagnostic, Doc,” I said as I finished pulling the bandages off. “I’ll be my own second opinion.”
I raised the mirror and studied my reflection: the angry red pit where my left eye had been; the stitches radiating outward from the weeping hole like the cracks you’d see fanning out around a bullet hole in a windshield after someone got shot helpless and terrified in their car.
Slash had popped me at point-blank range so the muzzle gases had left a grayish stain surrounding the wound; the packing and un-ignited cordite had peppered into my skin. I’d be wearing that facial tattoo for the rest of my life as a sweet little additional embellishment.
The empty eye socket and the gunpowder stain looked fake somehow, like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t me, couldn’t be.
But it was. My jaw clenched so tight the muscles thrummed a drum roll in my temples that wouldn’t stop; my teeth squeaked and ground together.
Someone fumbled at me, holding me down as a needle slid into my arm and everything started feeling right again. As I slipped back home into darkness I opened my eye and spoke to the faces surrounding me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all good. I wasn’t much to look at before, so no harm done, eh?” I rolled my head on my pillow, closing my eye to shut them all out. After a short while I got to go to sleep again.