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“Is that before or after he writes
A Season in Hell
?”

Dustin scowled, looking at her for the first time. It was always a shock to see him: the face not quite his, blotchy and discolored on one side, his cheek smudged into a purplish, rumpled bark. They'd rebuilt his eyelid, but it was still droopy and half-closed like a boxer's. It was supposed to gradually correct itself, but Lyle was having doubts. The lower lid had begun to sag, too, from the
scars contracting on his cheek—you could see the inside of the lid, a dewy pocket of pink. Just a sliver, but it was enough to turn his eye from an ordinary thing into an eyeball. She went over and stopped the VCR just as Rambo was letting his bazooka loose on some astonished commies.

“Hey,” Dustin said angrily, scratching at his elastic Jobst shirt. They'd measured him for the shirt at the hospital: it was meant to reduce scarring, though like the eye surgery it seemed a bit unambitious. Hard to believe a skintight shirt could do anything but make him feel more miserable. Along with the glove on his right hand, he was supposed to wear it twenty-three hours a day—his “second skin,” the burn therapist had called it, though in reality it looked more like a scuba suit.

“Get your shoes on,” Lyle said. “We're going to lunch.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You can wear your, um, mask if you'd like.”

She'd meant to be sensitive but realized by his face that she'd said the wrong thing. He raised his gloved hand off the bed. For dexterity, the fingers of the glove had been cut off at the tips. Lyle didn't know what was happening at first: she saw the fingers uncurling slowly, all together, Dustin grimacing in pain. Then the middle one inching higher, slow as a drawbridge. Less than thirty minutes she'd been home, and two people had flipped her off.

“I didn't know you could do that,” Lyle said.

“I've been practicing.”

Dustin insisted on going to Taco Bell, even though they had to drive an extra ten miles through Lancaster to get there, but Lyle was relieved she'd been able to coax him out of his room. It was like charming an animal out of its hole. He did not wear his mask, though he'd bought some mirrored sunglasses, huge and sparkling as a sheriff's, to cover up his eye. Lyle was surprised by how much better he looked. Still, when it was Dustin's turn to order, the cashier at Taco Bell turned to Lyle and asked in a quiet voice, “And what would your friend like?”

“I can't believe she asked me your order,” Lyle said when they'd sat down. She was furious.

Dustin shrugged.

“It doesn't bother you?”

“At least she didn't point.”

“People point?” she said quietly.

“Are you kidding? I've seen people back up their cars in the middle of the parking lot, just to get a better look.” He took a bite of his Burrito Supreme, clutching it with his good hand. “Sometimes it's funny.
The Three Stooges.
The other day I was at the movies, buying a ticket, and a guy walked into a pole.”

The air-conditioning was cranked so high that she was actually cold, her sweat-soaked T-shirt icy against her back. Dustin looked cold, too, even though he was wearing a sweater over his Jobst shirt. Lyle started to unwrap her taco and he flinched; she was always forgetting not to crinkle things.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don't apologize. It makes it worse.”

She wanted to ask him how he could watch explosions all day long, then get mad at her for unwrapping a taco, but of course nothing about his accident made sense. At the next booth, a toddler in a pink dress had twisted around in her seat and was staring at Dustin with her fingers in her mouth. The toddler was nearly bald but had a giant bow stuck mysteriously to her head. Dustin was too absorbed in his burrito to notice.

“You never used to like Taco Bell,” Lyle said. “Remember? You called it Taco Smell.”

“That was you,” he said.

“No, it wasn't.”

“I always liked it.”

“You hated it! We bought some tacos once and ended up giving them to Mr. Leonard.”

Dustin looked up impatiently. “They have the Burrito Supreme now.”

He sounded like Jonas. Lyle picked the tobacco-like shreds of lettuce from her taco, wishing she'd never come home. The excuses she'd been giving for not visiting every weekend were just that:
excuses.
She'd been avoiding Dustin's misery. Lyle watched him eat, succumbing to the silence until she couldn't bear it any longer.

“How's Toxic Shock Syndrome?”

He shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

“Aren't you still writing songs?”

“I sold my guitar.”

“Dustin,” she said. “You didn't.”

He lifted his gloved hand, as though it belonged to somebody else. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Play with my teeth?”

“The OT said it might take a year. She wants you to practice.”

“My amp's shot anyway. Smoke damage. Do you know how much a new one costs?”

“Mom and Dad would have helped you out, if you needed money.”

He looked out the window. “Grow up, L. Dad's selling knives, for Christ's sake.”

Stop feeling sorry for yourself,
she wanted to say. But how could she? She didn't feel cold all the time, her face wasn't purple on one side, she hadn't been forced to give up college and work in a video store in the middle of nowhere. Lyle glanced at the next booth. The little bald girl with the bow was still staring, chewing on her fingers like a moron. Why the hell didn't her mother do something?

“What's up with Mom and Dad anyway?” she asked, changing the subject.

Dustin shoved his tray away. “Actually, they don't yell as much. Now that they've stopped sleeping in the same room.”

“I saw the futon.”

“They only talk to each other when they have to pay bills.”

“Jesus.”

“Anyway, she's never home. Dad does all the cooking.”

“I can't believe she drives all that way to work. It took me an hour and a half, and it wasn't even rush hour.”

Dustin frowned. “I never thought I'd miss Polynesian pork. Hector was over on Wednesday night, and Dad served us fried eggs for dinner.”

“It's too weird,” Lyle said, watching her reflection in his glasses. “You guys being friends.”

“He's into pets. Makes perfect sense.” Dustin laughed. “Anyway, he's the only person who doesn't pretend nothing's happened.”

“What about Biesty?”

“
Mark,
you mean. He's in college now and too mature for nicknames. He's like a Moonie or something, always smiling at me and telling me how ‘awesome' I look. Anyway, he's got his UCLA friends now.”

Lyle watched her brother slurp the dregs from his Coke, wondering if there was an emotion besides bitterness lurking somewhere in his heart. Even though she'd returned none of Hector's letters, he'd driven out here to see Lyle in person and had ended up talking to Dustin in the kitchen for an hour. This was after she'd moved in with Bethany. For whatever reason, the two of them had hit it off. Maybe Dustin was right: there was something petlike about him that appealed to Hector. With his crankiness, his precarious health issues, he was not unlike an exotic lizard. Like a lizard, too, he barely moved from his bed.

The little bald girl in the next booth was still staring at Dustin. Without warning, he whipped off his sunglasses and growled satanically at her, his teeth bared like a tiger's. The little girl burst into tears.

“What did you do?” Dustin asked the mother. “Krazy Glue that fucking bow on?”

“Dust, Jesus,” Lyle said under her breath.

He turned back to his Coke. “One of our major pastimes around here. Scare the children.”

On the way home, they didn't talk. Lyle squinted into the sun as she drove. They passed a Carl's Jr. on the outskirts of Lancaster, the last outpost of civilization; Dustin grimaced as if from a punch. It hadn't occurred to her that he'd insisted on going to Taco Bell out of fear, that the smell of broiled hamburgers was somehow distressing. She remembered when Dustin was in the hospital, that first week, the thick, Fourth of July smell of charred flesh seeping into her clothes. Zonked on morphine, he'd lain there in the sweltering room under a spiderweb of tubes. What she remembered most was how gigantic he looked: he'd blown up like the Michelin Man, bandaged from the waist up, his skinny legs sticking out as if he'd been crushed by a boulder. The nurse was worried about hypothermia and kept turning up the thermostat. Despite the nurse's warning, Lyle insisted on staying while she unwrapped Dustin's arm, stained black with chemicals. The stench was unspeakable. After washing his arm with sterile water, the nurse moistened a gauzy sponge and began to debride him, scrubbing his arm to loosen the skin, focusing on one spot at a time as though she were polishing a dresser, occasionally reaching down and picking some dead skin off with her fingers or using a scissors to snip it free before tossing everything—skin
and sponge—into the hamper. It was something you could watch only by turning off your brain.

Near their house again, Lyle looked at the sun-choked buttes in the distance, which from this direction seemed to be covered in orange flowers. The poppy preserve. The blandness of the desert made the flowers stand out like a dream. Lyle was sure they hadn't been there a month ago. A strong wind buffeted the Renault; a minute later the whole hill seemed to stir, a great ripple of orange, like an insuck of breath.

“Has it been raining?” she asked Dustin, who was staring at the road.

“Beats me,” he said.

Dustin liked working at the video store, because he enjoyed the way people responded to his face. It gave him an excuse to hate them. Not that he needed an excuse: Lancaster was filled with people clamoring for his hatred. They had wraparound sunglasses and wore T-shirts that said
TGIF: THANK GOD I'M FREE
! or
JES
usa
VES
or
I'M ALL FOR GUN CONTROL . . . I USE BOTH HANDS
.
Most of the T-shirts had eagles on them. Dustin had begun asking these customers if they were bird-watchers. It was then that they'd get a clear look at his face. A sort of helpless double take, then a vague gastric wince they weren't aware of, then a polite glance away to pretend they hadn't seen anything. It was the glance away that made Dustin the maddest. Why didn't they have the fucking honesty to gawk?

“Rats, you just missed it,” Dustin would say when someone asked why
Rambo: First Blood Part II
was still rented out.

He'd always wanted not to give a shit if people liked him. It was easy now, a reason to get up in the morning.

Dustin unzipped a sleeve of his Jobst shirt, scratching the itch that seemed to live inside his skin. It was deep and relentless. Beneath the welts from his nails, he could see the ghost of the skin they'd grafted on, a faint mesh stretching up his forearm, like fishnet. He preferred not to look at it. Since it was a slow Friday, there wasn't much to do but succumb to the itch and watch action movies on the mounted TV until his brain rotted. This afternoon, for a change, he was watching
Jaws.
Dustin liked that Brody wanted to blow up a shark with a scuba tank. It seemed creatively unsporting. Just as Brody was climbing the
sinking ship's mast, preparing to take aim with his rifle, the phone rang.

“Do you have any adult films with little people in them?” a man's voice asked. It was hoarse and sniffly, as though he had a cold. Dustin hated it when people called pornos “films”; they were the only customers who didn't say “movie.”

“Do you mean dwarves?”

“Yes. Adult films. With dwarves.”

Dustin paused, and the man coughed. “What are you?” Dustin said. “Some kind of sicko?”

“Actually, I'm a dwarf,” the man said indignantly before hanging up.

Dustin put the receiver back on its cradle, ashamed. The shame was mixed with a gratitude that dwarves existed. There were people more conspicuously out of whack than he was. He felt the same way when he went to outpatient rehab, glancing at people who'd lost their noses or had to have their jaws bolted through so they wouldn't melt into their necks. He tried not to think of the hospital, but the memory of those two awful months was there all the time, circling him like the unwearied shark in
Jaws
. Movies distracted him, but only for a while: sooner or later the memory returned, preying on his thoughts.

Luckily, he didn't remember anything from the first couple weeks. Just the nightmares, a parade of ghastly tortures: trapped in a burning leaf pile, skinned alive by demons. Then it was like a nightmare but he was awake, or at least conscious—floating on morphine. He'd pull in and out of sleep like a wave. When they told him he'd been burned, his first thought was World War III. The Russians must have attacked. He didn't remember the accident, but when they told him about it—the cigarette, the house exploding into flames—it seemed too ludicrous to be true.

It was Lyle who finally convinced him the human race was okay. She brought him an Egg McMuffin as proof: the ingenious hockey puck of egg and bed of yellow cheese, dog-eared over the side of the muffin. He couldn't do anything with it—he was still eating through a tube—but its perfection was indisputable.

Looking back, it was hard to believe how clueless he was. Dustin knew nothing about burn victims; aside from Freddy Krueger, he'd never even seen one. Those first weeks, before the nerve endings had grown back, he couldn't understand why they were keeping
him there. He was upset about missing band practice. Mummified in bandages, his right arm suspended in a splint—but incredibly this was his biggest worry. Toxic Shock had a gig that weekend at a party in Redondo. (So he believed: actually, the gig was two weeks past.) He didn't understand that his life had ended.