Oliver Benjamin
Kip explained that the antennae coming out of his head were
two ends of the same piece of wire that was holding the bones of his
face together. His heel, he said was completely rebuilt, and when I
asked him what he meant, he offered to show me what they had done
to his leg. At this point, Yippee and a Danish guy who was also new
to the room were watching. Kip grimaced in pain as he sat up and
began to unwrap the bandage. “It’s good if it gets some air now and
then,” he said as we watched intently. Slowly, dramatically, the
bandage unwound from his leg, and I started to feel light-headed. All
of a sudden, the room started to turn black. At the instant he
managed to take the bandage off completely, I could make out that
the scar wasn’t really all that bad, but the anticipation had been so
dramatic and severe, and I had expected something so indescribably
gruesome that I fainted dead away. Awakening to find myself on the
floor, I felt extremely humiliated. This poor guy had such an awful
tragedy happen to him, and here I was fainting before I even see a
moderate wound on his leg! I realized that Yippee was chuckling at
me, but when I got up off the floor I was comforted by the sight of the
Danish guy flat on his back on the ground, with two of the guys in the
room trying to revive him. But he had actually seen the exposed gore.
I laid down on my bed, feeling ashamed, and thought for a few
minutes. How could I complain about my little problems when this
guy is a walking, talking tragedy? My pathetic little sufferings were
nothing compared to what this guy had to carry on his broken back,
and he was taking it in stride. I felt certain that if I was in his position,
I would fall to pieces like Humpty Dumpty. Later when I asked him
how he could be in such good spirits, he said, “Listen, mate. It’s all I
can do to keep my chin up, else I’ll fall apart. I have no other choice,
really. If this happened to you, you’d be forced to deal with it, and
you’d survive also. If I knew this was going to happen to me before it
happened, I might have killed myself to avoid having to suffer it, but
after it happened—well, you survive, you become a survivor. You
develop a fanatical desire to live and fight. Either that, or you perish.
You’d be surprised how much meaning life takes on when you come
that close to losing it. And don’t worry, mate, you’re not the first
person to have fainted at the sight of me. I’m used to it by now. You
should have seen me after the accident. I didn’t look human.” Then,
he pulled himself out of bed, grabbed his crutches and suggested we
go downstairs and have a beer. I certainly couldn’t refuse a man of
this caliber. As he hobbled, his antennae bounced around on his
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