My shirt was off. My right arm ended three and a half inches below the shoulder. I twitched it at her - a twitch was the best I could do with the muscle that was left. "This is me," I said, "giving you the finger. Get out of here if that's how you feel. Get out, you quitting birch."

The first tears had started rolling down her face, but she tried to smile. It was a pretty ghastly effort. "Bitch, Edgar," she said. "The word is bitch."

"The word is what I say it is," I said, and began to do crunches again. It's harder than hell to do them with an arm gone; your body wants to pull and corkscrew to that side. "I wouldn't have left you, that's the point. I wouldn't have left you. I would have gone on through the mud and the blood and the piss and the spilled beer."

"It's different," she said. She made no effort to wipe her face. "It's different and you know it. I couldn't break you in two if I got into a rage."

"I'd have a hell of a job breaking you in two with only one amp," I said, doing crunches faster.

"You stuck me with a knife." As if that were the point. It wasn't, and we both knew it.

"A plastic rudder knife is what it was, I was half out of my mind, and it'll be your last words on your fucking beth-dead, 'Eddie staffed me with a plastic fife, goodbye cruel world.'"

"You choked me," she said in a voice I could barely hear.

I stopped doing crunches and gaped at her. The clock-shop started up in my head; bang-a-gong, get it on. "What are you saying, I choked you? I never choked you!"

"I know you don't remember, but you did. And you're not the same."

"Oh, quit it. Save the New Age bullshit for the... for the guy... your... " I knew the word and I could see the man it stood for, but it wouldn't come. "For that bald fuck you see in his office."

"My therapist," she said, and of course that made me angrier: she had the word and I didn't. Because her brain hadn't been shaken like Jell-O.