Sharkman by Steve Alten

Author:Steve Alten [Alten, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

22

Help me welcome my first guest. Straight from Miami Beach . . . ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Kwan Wilson.”

My pulse raced as I stepped out from behind the curtain of the Ed Sullivan Theater and into the bright lights. I glanced to my right and waved at Paul Shaffer, who was leading the band in a middle-aged, Jewish white man’s rendition of “Kwan-dunk Style.” Crossing the stage, I stepped onto the carpeted riser to shake hands with talk show legend David Letterman—the moment surreal.

“Thanks for being here, young man. Now, yours is an amazing story. From what I understand, you were paralyzed in a car accident about a year ago.”

“Yes. I was driving and text messaging, which I shouldn’t have been doing.”

“Your mother was in the passenger seat and she was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Geez. So then what? You wake up in the hospital and you’re paralyzed from the waist down. And I read where you had some other serious injuries?”

“Yes.”

Dave reached across the desk to touch my arm. “This isn’t an interrogation, Kwan. Feel free to give us more than a one word response.”

“Sorry.”

The audience laughed.

“So, you wake up, you’re in the hospital, tubes everywhere I imagine. You find out mom’s dead, you can’t walk . . . what goes through your mind?”

“To be honest, I wanted to die.”

“And so it’s left to your dad to console you. Your father is Admiral Doug Wilson, is that correct?”

My back reflexively arched as the muscles along my spine tightened. “Yes.”

“As someone who’s been on the battlefield, I’m guessing he probably has had to console a lot of folks. What did he say to you?”

“First, he asked me what happened. Then he yelled at me for texting. Then he said it should have been me who died, but at least I’d suffer for the rest of my life.”

“Ouch. Tough guy, the admiral.”

“Yes.”

“Was he always like that?”

“Yes.”

“So then what? You spent some time in rehab . . . how was that?”

“It was hard. They have you in a large carpeted room with other patients and some have been going to rehab for twenty years, and you start to think . . . how am I going to do this? Because you never imagine that this can happen to you. It smells like urine and disinfectant, and bad sweat—stress sweat. There are trainers stretching and moving people around on mats, and you’re one of them. It’s like an out-of-body experience except your spine aches, like there’s a hot coal sitting on top of the place where your spinal cord’s been damaged, and the hurt’s always there, which is why a lot of people get addicted to their pain meds. But the therapists are real nice—most of them, anyway, and you just . . . you just do it.”

“Did you ever think you were going to walk again?”

“I did.”

“After rehab, you moved to Miami Beach to live with your maternal grandmother—”

“Delray Beach.”

“Delray Beach. And how did granny take to caring full-time for the guy who killed her daughter?”

What did he just say? My blood pressure jumped.

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