Chapter 2: Atomic Squirrel Fury
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In the early days of paralysis, you spend a lot of time waiting for your body to do something familiar. Anything. A twitch. A shiver. A signal that the guy running the control board hasn't completely walked off the job.
You stare at your hand and think: move. You think it hard. You put everything into it. It just sits there, looking back at you like a coworker who's been quiet-quitting for six months.
Three months in, I was in Physical Therapy. The Mat.
The room smelled like rubber mats and industrial cleaner and the specific human smell of effort — not gym effort, which is its own thing, but the effort of people fighting biology at close range. Sweat that comes from concentration, not cardio. Fluorescent lights overhead, the kind that don't flicker but still somehow feel relentless, like they're keeping score. The clock on the wall moved wrong. Fast and slow in the same hour. You'd look up expecting forty-five minutes to have passed and it had been nine. You'd look up again and lose thirty minutes without accounting for them.
If you've never been to spinal cord rehab, imagine a gym where everyone is working harder than an Olympic athlete just to sit upright without falling over like a sack of potatoes. It's grueling. It's humbling. It's also weirdly funny in the way that only truly terrible situations can be, because every single person in there is fighting like hell to accomplish something that a toddler can do without thinking. Roll over. Sit up. Hold a cup.
Two mats over from me, there was a guy with a T4 injury. Lower than mine on the spine, which in the cruel arithmetic of spinal cord injuries means a different set of abilities and a different set of losses. He was working on trunk balance — the foundational work of just staying upright, just not tipping sideways from your own center of gravity. He'd get himself positioned. He'd last maybe four seconds. He'd go over. Every time he came back up, he said one word: "Almost."
Not "damn." Not "again." Just: Almost. Like he already knew he was getting it and this current attempt was simply not quite the one yet.
I watched him do this maybe eight times the first day. He said "Almost" eight times, with the same tone each time, like it was a fact about the near future rather than a commentary on what just happened.
Everyone's got their game face on. Therapists and PT staff trying to stay clinical and professional. Patients trying to stay stoic. The whole room has this quiet intensity, like a library where everyone's studying for the hardest exam of their lives.
And then I sneezed.
Or tried to.
I was lying on the mat, sweat dripping into my ears — which, by the way, is one of those indignities nobody warns you about, having sweat pool in your ears because you can't wipe it — when I felt it.
The tingle.
Deep in the bridge of my nose. The universal, undeniable pre-cursor to a sneeze.
Now, you have to understand: I hadn't sneezed since July 3rd. My diaphragm — the muscle that powers the sneeze — was partially paralyzed. My abdominals — the muscles that give it the OOMPH — were offline. I didn't know this at the time.
All I knew was that a sneeze was coming.
And it felt Atomic.
It built up like a storm front. The pressure behind my eyes. The hitch in my breath. Ah... ah...
In my head, I prepared for the explosion. I braced myself. I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out. I thought my limbs were going to flail in that chaotic, beautiful spasm that clears your sinuses and resets your soul. I was ready for the thunder. I was ready to roar.
I thought about every good sneeze I'd ever had. The kind where you have to brace against a wall. The kind that shakes the car. The kind where you do two or three in a row and come out the other side feeling like you just hit a reset button on your whole nervous system.
This was going to be one of those. I could feel it. Every receptor I had left was screaming: HERE IT COMES.
AHHH...
Here it comes. The release. The return of the old Chase. The power.
...squeak.
That was it.
No thunder. No flailing. No explosion.
Just a tiny, high-pitched, pathetic sound. Like a squirrel coughing.
Squeak.
I laid there, stunned. The silence of the gym rushed back in. My therapist looked at me. I looked at the ceiling.
"Was that it?" I thought.
The ceiling did not answer.
I replayed it. The buildup. The anticipation. The full-body commitment to the most violent act of biology I could muster. And then the output: a sound you'd barely hear from a church mouse. A sound that, if a cartoon character made it, the laugh track would be embarrassed for them.
I tried to be mad. I tried to summon the rage. I wanted to scream, "I am a grown man! I do not squeak!"
But then the absurdity hit me.
I am an Atomic Bomb trapped in a Squirrel's body.
From two mats over, the T4 guy looked up from his trunk balance work. He caught my eye. He didn't laugh. He didn't look sorry for me. He just gave me a single nod — the kind that means I see you and I know and keep going all at the same time. The foxhole acknowledgment. The nod that only passes between two people fighting the same fight from different trenches.
I nodded back.
He turned back to his work. "Almost," he said.
Inside, I had the fury of a nuclear weapon. I had the intent, the energy, the buildup of a Category 5 hurricane. But my output? My speakers? They were blown. All that voltage was being pushed through a tiny, broken tweeter.
Here's the thing about that moment — it wasn't just funny. It was clarifying.
Because I'd been making the mistake, in those early months, of measuring myself by my output. Which is a brutal way to measure yourself when your output is a squeak.
Before the accident, I was the guy who could lift things. Fix things. Drive things. Hold things. The guy who picked up the tab, who ran the party, who managed the chaos. My output was enormous. I was always doing.
Then everything changed, and my output went to near zero. Couldn't lift. Couldn't drive. Couldn't hold a cup without a special setup. Couldn't sneeze.
And I made the mistake that everyone makes when they lose something they were good at: I confused my output for my identity.
My therapist that day — I don't remember her name, which I feel bad about, because she was extraordinary — she had this habit of not reacting to things the way you expected her to. She didn't rush to encourage you when you did something good. She didn't wince when you failed. She just observed. Noted. Moved on.
When I squeaked, she wrote something down. She didn't laugh. She didn't comfort me. She just said, "Diaphragm initiated. Good. We'll work on force."
We'll work on force.
She didn't see a squirrel. She saw the reactor.
That's it. That's the whole thing. The squeak wasn't a failure. It was a data point. The system was trying. The signal was getting through. The output was just lagging behind the intent. That's not a reason to quit. That's a place to start.
That moment on the mat defined the next decade of my life better than any doctor's diagnosis.
The world sees the Squirrel. They hear the squeak. They see the guy in the chair who needs help opening a door, who speaks a little slower than he used to, who can't reach the thing on the shelf.
They make assessments. They form conclusions. Eyes drop to the wheels before they reach my face. You can watch it happen, the recalibration — the way someone's voice gets careful, the way they slow down or lean forward or start using small words, like maybe the chair is contagious to the brain. The assumption that a squeak input means squeak output. I don't make scenes about it. It's not my job to correct everyone's math in real time.
But I'm aware. I notice it every time.
People don't see my pain and I don't think it's my place to make them see it. That's not their burden. And honestly, I don't want their pity — pity is just discomfort that's given itself a name. What I want is for people to stay long enough to realize the reactor is running at full power. Most of them don't stay that long.
They hear squeak. They do not imagine Atomic.
But inside? It's still Atomic. The ambition hasn't changed. The drive hasn't changed. The desire to compete — to build something, to make something, to matter — hasn't changed. The engine is exactly what it was. We just had to reroute the exhaust.
That's the gap nobody talks about. The gap between what you contain and what the world receives. Between who you are on the inside and what the outside manages to show.
Everybody lives with that gap to some degree. The guy in the meeting who can't articulate the idea clearly but sees it perfectly in his head. The kid who tests poorly but thinks brilliantly. The person who loves deeply but expresses it like a confused Labrador retriever.
My gap is just... visible. Mine has wheels.
The lesson wasn't about learning to sneeze better. It was about learning that Output does not equal Intent.
Just because the world hears a squeak doesn't mean you aren't roaring. You just have to find a different way to amplify the signal.
I started writing. I started talking. I found that language could carry the voltage that my body couldn't. I found that words, when you mean them, land hard. And I have always meant them.
I found the GTR. I found the business. I found the book. I found Beka. I found all the different wiring diagrams that got the signal out of the Atomic and into the world, where it could actually do something.
None of it looked like what I had before. A twenty-four-year-old kid who could walk into a room and physically command it — that guy was gone. But the thing that made him compelling? The voltage? That was still on. Full power. Looking for a new outlet.
I laughed that day on the mat. A real laugh. It sounded a bit like a squirrel too, but it felt like me.
And I made a decision, right there, staring at that fluorescent ceiling with sweat in my ears and a squeak still echoing in the air.
If I was going to be a squirrel, I was going to be the most furious, atomic, high-voltage squirrel they'd ever seen.
Turns out that's enough. Maybe more than enough. Maybe that's always been enough.
The world has plenty of big, loud, thundering people who are hollow inside. A squirrel with a nuclear reactor? Now that's interesting.
I'm still interesting. I promised myself that on the mat.
I've kept that promise.