Nobody told me to wear sunscreen. So for a whole afternoon at the lake, I was shirtless, swimming, reading, and tipping back drinks. And at the end of the day I was a human tomato. At the end of two days, I was in incredible pain, so much that I had trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep. The pain lasted about a week until the peeling began.
This was, without a doubt, the worst sunburn of my life. It’s one of those memories that will always stick with me.
Years later, as I wrote the first draft of Spacewalker, I came across a scene that stumped me. The main character is thrust into a no-win scenario. In order to save his crewmates, he must very nearly kill himself by burning toxic chemicals off his spacesuit. On the other side of combustion, he awakes in an infirmary bed in unimaginable pain.
What’s it like to wake up from self-immolation by hydrazine? Fortunately, I don’t really know. After doing the requisite research of the physical effects of such an experience, I reached toward the closest analog I’d lived through: the worst sunburn of my life.
I took that experience and stretched it to its extreme—tight skin that feels like its cracking open at the slightest movement, the inescapable heat radiating from my body, the lack of sleep driving me to frustration and madness—and dramatized it for the page.
Pain was a companion, blurry, uncertain, and ever-present. A spiteful lover. She wrapped and coiled herself around Edred’s body as she pleased, kissing his skin with the surface of the sun. The inescapable heat threatened to drive his sleeping mind mad.
Now and again his brain would bob above the waves into a limited form of consciousness, where he would move his legs and curl his toes and scream in agony at the disturbance of blistered skin. The routine always ended with the gentle hiss of something, and then a sensation of cold and numb to push his thoughts back under the surf.
The experience between wakeful episodes was dreamless and mostly thoughtless, with that constant undercurrent of roasting, searing pain. Edred wasn’t coherent enough to count the number of times he endured these waking and sedating cycles. Yet, gradually, Pain’s kisses and ministrations scorched less. She faded back inside his body, a slow burn to live within. The tide rolled out, and his mind floated above the waves.
Perhaps a little overwrought, but this original passage (and that original sunburn) have been on my mind a lot lately.
Why? Because I just returned from vacation with a nasty sunburn from hiking in Utah. Nobody told me to wear sunscreen. Unfortunately, in real life, there’s no trusty bedside button to deliver a dose of anesthesia to help me sleep through the night.