Page 147 of Antihero

“… sorry … just keep…” Evan left two hundreds on the counter and staggered out.

Anca followed him and helped lower him into the passenger seat. He unbuttoned his shirt, poured vodka over his chest, took out the inflating needle and dunked it in vodka.

“Are you sure about this?” Anca asked.

He fingered across the top of his chest, finding the spot on the high rib again. He set the needle just at the top edge to make sure he missed the artery. Since it was blunt-tipped he’d have to smash it in hard enough to pierce skin, muscle, and the pleural membrane surrounding the chest cavity to get to the trapped pocket of air. A wrong guess would create another pneumothorax instead of relieving this one.

Anca had closed his door and come around to the driver’s seat. “How will you push it in?”

He pointed at her tote bag at his feet. Sticking out was the thick Solzhenitsyn tome. She grabbed it, held it carefully across the base of the needle as he pinched the slender shaft.

Static sparkled across the book, his fist, the windshield. He readied his right fist to pound the book inward and punch the needle through. A rare hesitation.

It was gonna suck, plain and simple.

The hardcover was nearly flat to his chest, close enough that he could see over it and read the title:

A blunt, unsubtle instrument for the task. It would have been amusing were he not in the process of suffocating inside his own body.

He took a moment to relax everything within his power to relax, a total release of muscle and sclera, of the skin itself. The more open he was, the less damage the stainless-steel shaft would cause ripping through.

He smashed his fist against the book as if beating his chest.

The shaft went in smoothly, he knew it right away in the split second of relief before the pain came. And then it arrived, husky and hard-edged, looking to trample him. It did.

His throat had seized up and he focused first on unseizing it, relaxing the knot from the outside in, onion-peeling it to the core. It gave and he gasped in a clump of air.

A faint hissing reached his ears—thank God—and he counted the seconds, rewinding to account for the one and a half when he’d been frozen up breathless. The rush of air through the threaded end of the pump needle lasted another six seconds and then wisped off into a pleasing silence.

All was peaceful. Evan breathed in, breathed out. He stripped a neat square of athletic tape off the roll and stuck it over the threaded base of the needle, sealing it off.

He breathed some more.

He was sweating. All the way down and all the way through, his clothes double soaked from the rain and from perspiration that the pain had roasted out of him.

The buildup started again, a twinge in his upper left lung, the tendrils reigniting across his chest with the memory of what was coming.

He peeled the tape back, counted the hiss of relief. Just four and a half seconds now.

That was good. That was very good.

The hole in his lung was small. If it was small enough, it would heal itself over.

Slow inhalation. Slow exhalation.

Anca was perched on her knees in the driver’s seat, legs folded under her so she was sitting on her calves, wide-eyed with some secret confidence.

“You’re very brave,” she said.

“No.”

“What, then?”

He didn’t know. He’d never put words to it. Never even thought it all the way through. But he took a moment to do so now.

What, then? A nightmare, a hope, a premonition? That the world might tear itself down to the last man standing.

“Ready,” he said. “I’m ready.”