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1.
The day it comes back Nathan heaves in a gulp of air, out of breath from the fight, from the yelling. The burn of the air in his lungs is deep and piercing. He’s seething with betrayal, with the combined weight of their history and the could-have-beens of the past. He takes one step, two steps, towards Duke, and his vision blurs.
He feels light all of a sudden. Something is wrong.
The punch seems to come out of nowhere, connecting with his cheekbone, the pain is bright and blazing until-
-until it isn’t. It’s nothing. He’s nothing. He’s…. Numb.
All of a sudden, Nathan feels as if he doesn’t exist anymore. His body seems to float, both everywhere and nowhere all at once. He breathes but there is nothing in his lungs, he takes a step but the pressure of his foot against the ground escapes him like mist through his fingers. His ears ring. The gravel crunch against his boot grates at him as his foot slips, giving way underneath him.
Suddenly, he’s on the ground.
“-oh.” He hears Duke gasp, eyes wild and fists clenched.
2.
The day after, Nathan stumbles through the motions of his morning routine, feet catching clumsily on what feels like every uneven corner of his bedroom, an unstable vertigo following him in the absence of touch. His body is covered in bruises, dark shadows tracing maps across his skin, joints stiff. The pervasive, inescapable feeling of numbness encompasses him and the claustrophobia of his own body aches in a way that is altogether removed from the frozen nerves of his Trouble. The version of him looking back from the bathroom mirror looks horrible, pale and tired eyed. His split lip pouts out, swollen. He knows from experience that it should be throbbing. The bruise sitting high up on his left cheekbone, stares back at him, dark, puffy, and mocking.
He brushes his teeth carefully, the mint flavor sharp and spicy. His mouth feels like nothing.
In his office, he makes his coffee slowly, filling the machine with water and measuring the beans carefully, careful not to spill anything, relying on muscle memory years in the making. He waits exactly fifteen minutes to take a sip, hoping it’s not too hot. The coffee bursts, bright and bitter on his tongue. For lunch, he eats a sandwich from the deli. He doesn't feel the coolness of it in his mouth, just the taste of it as he chews.
0.
(When Nathan was in second grade, newly seven, he wiped out on the playground while playing cops and robbers. He lay on the ground for a moment, stunned and breath caught in his lungs, before struggling to his feet to continue playing. When he woke up the next morning, his knee was stiff and swollen, black and purple bruises standing out against pale skin. His father had pursed his lips and driven him to the hospital, grim and quiet.
The next day, everything was fine, his knee still didn’t hurt, but his wrist did a bit from catching himself. It wasn’t anything to worry about, his father told him, sometimes stuff happens like that. Nathan had accepted the explanation with little worry. After all there was still much he didn’t really understand about the world.
In class the next morning, the kids didn’t believe him, that he broke his leg playing on the playground.
“You would have felt that!” They say. “There’s no way you didn’t cry.”
No, Nathan had thought, I didn’t feel anything.
In February everything had changed.
One moment he was sledding down the hill, the next the people around him were gasping in shock and he’d looked down at his bone, bright white and red in the winter sunlight.)
3.
“Nathan, there’s blood on your face.” The Chief says. He looks worried, almost, as he takes in bruises and the split lip. It’s an echo of a hundred conversations they’d had in the months of the last troubles, times his father had known he was hurt before Nathan had a clue.
“I know.” Nathan croaks. He rubs his hands over his face, suddenly tired. “It’s back.”
Nathan closes his eyes and clenches his fists, they should hurt, he knows, his knuckles are bruised and swollen. They’re stiff, he can tell, but the pain that should be there is gone. He remembers the feeling of flesh hitting flesh, the sweet, satisfying burn of pain and then the horrid, earth-shattering moment when he had realized. That after all these years, his affliction is back.
4.
After his shift, Nathan buys a full length mirror. He hangs it on the back of his bedroom door and stands in front of it, a ritual he hasn’t done in two decades but feels familiar as breathing. He runs his hands up and down his arms and legs, eyes following in the wake of unfeeling fingers, checking every inch of skin for new afflictions. He rolls his neck and stretches his legs to test for a change in mobility.
People learn quickly what hurts and what doesn’t, pain is their body's way of saying “No, don’t do that!” Nathan learned long ago to compensate in different ways, to keep his eyes on all the sharp objects, corners and doorways around him, careful not to run into them. It’s something he hasn’t done in a long time, but the habits return easily. Maybe, he thinks, it’s his Trouble’s way of making sure he survives, doesn’t accidentally kill himself while stumbling around. Nathan has always adapted quickly.
0.
(The first year, Nathan had to take a timer to school and set it for every two hours. His teachers would look at him knowingly and nod politely toward the door when it went off, and his classmates would snicker behind their hands as he got up to use the restroom.
Other kids look at him with disgust and their parents aren't much better. They pull their children away and by the time he’s in fourth grade the only one who'll talk to him is Duke Crocker.)
5.
After work, he buys a thermometer and uses it to measure where to mark his shower knob with a piece of duct tape at a temperature that isn’t too hot or too cold. There’s part of him who doesn’t want to even bother, he wouldn’t feel it anyways, but that feels too much like giving up, like admitting that he can’t handle this. Like letting Duke, or the Troubles, or the world, or whomever, win.
He showers quickly, wiping away crusted scabs from the day before and watching the brown flakes spiral down the drain. The smell of his shampoo is bright and crisp and he breathes it in deeply.
That night when he lies down to sleep. He drifts, trying to sleep but unable to. Suddenly, he’s lost in a prison of himself, where in the darkness of a room he forgets that the world exists around him. The numbness is all encompassing and all consuming. He takes his bottom lip into his mouth, feeling the texture of the split and bites until the metallic taste of blood floods his mouth. He breathes deep to calm his racing heart. Nathan sleeps with the light on for the rest of the night, the pink of the light though his eyelids grounding him into his body, into the room, and into
The next day he buys a lamp for his bedside table and every night he switches it on before turning off the overhead light.
Nathan Wuornos is not afraid of the dark.
0.
In high school, newly sixteen and brimming with possibilities, Duke had asked him about it. They’d been laying on the grass, fingers tangled together, sweaty and a bit sticky, but uncaring. It was in a clearing on top of a cliff to the south of town, their spot. At that point in their lives they’d spent as much time as they could there, surrounded by fresh air, the scent of pine and soil thick in the air.
“To feel nothing.” Duke had clarified, at Nathan’s confused humm.
“Like nothing.” Nathan had dodged the question.
“I don’t know,” Duke had started, “it’s almost like a superpower.” Duke had propped himself up by one arm at that point, turning in toward Nathan, face animated. “Dude, you were like a superhero!”
Nathan snorted sardonically, a little bitter.
He thought of bruised elbows and stubbed toes, of peeing his pants in front of all his classmates, and tacks in his back. Like a superhero, sure.
He’d rolled his eyes. “We’ll your eight year old self would have been the villain then.”
Duke had laughed, easy and open, at the jab, grinning, a little self deprecating, but mostly confident and open in a way that Nathan had both envied and loved about him in turns.