"Doctor-"

"Ah…" She cocked an eyebrow. "Wendy," he corrected. "It seemed so real."

She raised an eyebrow. "The pain."

She stood up and opened the window, to air the room out, and returned to the chair. He felt the cold air on his arms and face. But he didn't feel it on his legs. She said, "It's both psychological and physiological. Amputees have the same sensation. It's real in the sense that pain is a subjective experience and what you're experiencing is just like any other pain. But it's phantom because you aren't feeling a pain response to stimuli at the nerve endings. Say, wasn't your wife going to be coming by?"

"She was. A while ago. She'll be back tomorrow." He tried to picture Penny Buffett and Wendy Weiser chatting at a barbecue or PBA picnic. It was impossible to imagine this scene.

Weiser nodded. "Well, next time. This is mostly a social visit, Donnie. We've done a lot of tests and we're going to do a lot more. I'll be talking to you more specifically about the results of those tests in the next couple days. What I'd like to do now is just talk with you about your injury in general."

He looked away. She shifted her chair casually so that she was closer to his line of vision. He glanced at her and he felt compelled to hold her gaze.

"I want to tell you what I'm going to do, as your doctor, and talk to you about what you're going to do for yourself."

"Fair enough."

She said, "First, I want to do something I don't do with all my patients: I'm going to tell you what's going to be going on in your mind over the next several months. This is sort of like-what's that they say on Wall Street?-insider information. Normally this is what we doctors keep in mind as we work with our patients but you seem like somebody who's got a good handle on himself. You look skeptical. Donnie, I've had SCI patients that won't even let me in the room for the first month after their trauma. I've had vases thrown at me. See this scar? It's from a dinner tray. I've had patients who don't seem to see me. They watch TV while I'm talking to them. It's as if I'm not even in the same room. They don't acknowledge me, they don't acknowledge their injury. You're in a different league from them."

"I can't ignore a woman in a leather skirt. It's in my genes or something."

"I think we're going to be a great team." She then grew serious. "There are several stages of recovery- I'm speaking of emotional recovery-in a trauma like you've experienced. The first is shock. It's numbness, emotional blockage. It's similar to what happens to the body with physical injury. Shock insulates die patient. That can last up to two or three weeks after the incident. I'm amazed but you seem to be out of this stage already. That kind of snappy recovery is rare. I'd guess you're already in phase two, which is realization of what's happened. You'll start feeling anxiety, panic, fear. A real bummer."

"Bummer."

"My daughter's language."

"You have a daughter?"

"Twelve."

"Don't believe it."

She deflected this with a polite smile. "What you're going to experience is that you're not real present. We say that you'll be, quote, unavailable psychologically."

"And what would your daughter call it?"

Weiser considered. " 'Zoned out,' probably. A defense mechanism because you're going to start to feel awful. But with you, I have every reason to believe that it'll be short-lived."

She pronounced it with a long i. Short-luived. That sounded weird so he figured it was probably right He also guessed that between the punk earrings was a very, very smart brain.

"So that was the second phase," he said. "What's the third quarter going to be like?"

"What we call 'defensive retreat.' You're going to believe that you can cure yourself. Or that you've come to accept your injury and it doesn't bother you. You'll miss therapy sessions, you'll do everything you can to avoid thinking about the accident. Oh, by the way, you'll probably become an insufferable son of a bitch. You'll want to blame somebody for what's happened. You'll have a lot of anger in you."

"Kid I knew got hurt once, bad. We was diving off the docks, and this kid from the neighborhood-"

"Which is?"

"Alton."

"No kidding," Dr. Weiser said, "I'm from Wood River."

"Ha, Land of Lincolners in the Show Me state." Buffett snorted.

"When I was married-he was a professor at Wash U-we lived in Clayton. God, I was glad to get out of there, move back to the country… You were telling me about this friend of yours?"

"Just a kid. He dived in the water…" Buffett wondered if dived was the right word. Dove? He wished he'd said jumped. "

… and you know how high some of those piers are. He hit a board he didn't see. We got him out right away so he didn't drown but what happened was he went blind. He hit the back of his head or something. He tried to beat me up. He said I should've seen the board. He accused another kid of pushing the board under him. Finally he moved away. He never came back or called."

He wondered what the point to the story was. He looked for something concluding-something to tie it into what she was saying-and fell silent.

Weiser said, "We're used to behavior like that. It's part of recovery. You may get some of it right back from me. I grew up with three brothers. I've got kind of a short fuse myself sometimes." She retrieved her cigarette from her pocket and broke away the crushed part. She lit it again and drew three times then went through the extinguishing routine once again. "The fourth phase is where we get the work done. You're going to come to understand what's happened. The defenses-whether it's anger or denial or rationalization-will crumble and you'll confront it."

"I never did understand that word. Confront. Like deal with. Those aren't words that mean a lot to me."

"You're not there yet so you can't expect them to. You'll be in heavy-duty physical therapy throughout this phase. Finally… You're looking skeptical again. Are you listening? The final phase is the coping phase. In effect, you accept what's happened and you reorganize your life around the way you are."

Buffett laughed again. "Yeah, yeah, I'll be able to play the violin after the operation."

Weiser's smile faded and she leaned forward. For an instant he was wholly unnerved by the eye contact but was compelled to return her gaze. He felt electricity between them. His scalp bristled and his heart suddenly pounded like a snare drum.

He felt a twitch of pain. Well, phantom pain. When he spoke, it was not his own voice that he heard but one that was lower and more mature and calmer. "Doctor, I don't want you to think I've got a swollen head or anything but I'm a survivor. I don't lose. At anything. Ever. Getting into the police academy, getting onto the varsity basketball team, yeah, even at five ten. Everything I've ever set my mind to do, I've done. Well, what happened to me is crap, sure. But I'm alive. I got friends. I got family." His right hand curled into a fist. "And I'm going to get through this."

Weiser sat back, her pine green eyes neither cautious nor inspirational, but immensely pleased. It seemed as if by delivering his monolog he'd passed a test of some sort. "It's going to be a real pleasure working with you, Donnie."

They shook hands and made an appointment for their next session.

When the door closed, Donnie Buffett exhaled slowly and said a short, silent prayer of thanks. If Weiser had turned inches to the right she would've seen the hypodermic syringe that a harried orderly had accidentally left on the bedside table just before the doctor entered the room-the syringe that had been virtually the only thing in Buffett's thoughts during the doctor's entire visit. He gripped the head of the bed with his large hands and tightened his ample biceps. He moved up one inch. Sweat broke out. Another huge flex, another inch. He felt as if he were dragging the weight of ten men with him. He reached for the syringe.