Theory of Bastards

by Audrey Schulman

  *

  At some point during college, Francine began to lose faith in medicine, at least in its ability to fix her problem. Instead she began to visit clinics or ERs where she no longer tried to describe the pain in her gut, but used words such as migraine, back spasm and gut pain. In response the doctors sometimes used words like codeine, Vicodin or Neocontin.

  Checking into these medical facilities, she gave her name as Frankie Burk. Changing her first name like this wasn’t an attempt to hide her identity, because the name Francine was clearly printed on her insurance card. More she was trying to assume a role, take on the kind of persona who could lie to a doctor. She considered the words she said not as mirrors of reality, but instead as the words necessary to convey the truth of her pain and get an appropriate response from the medical community.

  It wasn’t until the end of senior year that she finally learned the name of her disease. Long before this, during sex, she felt with each casual slam of the hips that her internal organs were made of the most delicate silk.

  Her professor, Hyman, told her the pain came from her conflicted emotions about having sex with a married man. Women, he said, rolling his eyes, And guilt.

  But Frankie wanted sex, had long detailed dreams of it where Hyman had miraculously developed telekinetic powers so precise he could look at her and she would feel pleasure roll up her spine. She woke from these dreams too scared to even masturbate.

  Given this, she preferred kissing and petting. Hyman got angry, said she was an immature tease. Did she know what he was risking to be with her? His career, his marriage, his child? Could she have some perspective?

  Then on March 14th, that year when she was 21, his four-year-old son went into convulsions from pneumonia, was taken by ambulance to the hospital. His wife stayed that night with the boy. Hyman was supposed to get a good night’s sleep, so he could be by his son’s side the whole next day. Instead he brought Francine to his home. She didn’t know how bad the pneumonia was or what the doctors had said, but Hyman was jittery and tense, pacing back and forth for hours, unable to settle down until late that night. He wanted her presence, but hardly spoke a word. A part of her watched him, clinically interested in how he showed his distress. He appeared physically healthy and yet no one, hearing his story, would doubt his pain.

  In the middle of the night, he woke her to demand sex. She didn’t feel under the circumstances she could deny him. Assuming the doggy position so at least the weight of his body wouldn’t press on her gut, she tried to turn the pain into a loud train chugging away from her, receding into the distance. Chug, she thought, chug chug. Although he wanted this, his erection at times flagged, the sex dragging on, until he began to pound into her, punctuating each stroke with a grunt close to a sob.

  In this moment, trying hard to breathe, she heard the voice speak to her for the first time.

  (In the years after this, she heard the voice twice more, each time during an extreme situation when in the heat and bustle of life she’d missed some critical detail. Each time, the voice didn’t sound like voices in her dreams, which floated fuzzy and unanchored in her skull. No, this one had a physical location in space, about two inches from her right ear. She could hear the wetness of the mouth, the raspiness of the throat—an older woman, definitely a smoker, the kind who referred to all strangers as Honey. Although the information this voice relayed was always helpful, the tone wasn’t what might be expected. There was no feeling of affection, alarm or even interest. It sounded more like a crossing guard’s voice, impersonal and factual, paid for by the hour.)

  The voice said, He’s not a good guy.

  Then she felt something tear—a bit like soggy linen ripping—there was a piercing pain and she blacked out.

  *

  Her next memory was of standing in the brightly lit hall in front of her open apartment door, her roommate staring at her. She had no idea how she’d gotten there.

  (Afterward she decided Hyman must not have panicked at this unconscious naked student in his bed. Instead she imagined him understanding this was an emergency and picking her up in his arms to carry her clear across campus, not caring who saw them. She visualized him opening the front door to her dorm and riding the elevator up to her floor. She pictured him propping her up dazed in front of her door, ringing the bell and then retreating a few feet to hide around the corner while inside their apartment her roommate Tina closed the image of her newest science fiction book on her Lenses to walk across the room and open the door.

  Frankie believed this is how it must have happened, because she couldn’t imagine any other way she could have made it across campus when she was barely conscious, naked and with blood dripping down her legs.)

  In the E.R., for the next three hours, Tina sat with her, chewing methodically through a pack of Juicy Fruit, moving from the waiting room to the exam room to the hallway before pre-op, never displaying impatience, even when she finished the first book and had to search for a second.

  During the surgery, endometriosis was found throughout Francine’s body cavity: small chunks of uterine lining that had implanted where they shouldn’t. The implantations thickened with blood until the end of the month, when each attempted to forcibly shed the blood, small chunks of flesh torn off her abdominal wall, her liver and other organs, over time the scars webbing together, delicate strands that tightened into ropes. Sex with Hyman had torn a hole in her bladder.

  In the recovery ward, she got to know her roommate much better. Before this she’d purposefully stayed distant, keeping her door closed when Tina was home, scared if she engaged in idle chitchat, the secret of her professor might slip out.

  Hyman didn’t try to contact her in the hospital, nor at any time after that. So far as she knew, he never found out if she was all right.

  Tina had spent the summer of her junior year being a Mormon missionary in Mexico. She visited Francine each day, delivering a banana smoothie from a nearby café (nutritious food so rare in the hospital) and five prunes (so Francine wouldn’t have to clench her surgically traumatized gut to poop). At the start of each visit, Tina made a small pyramid of the prunes on a napkin on the bedside table and placed the smoothie beside them.

  Francine was hypnotized by the kindness of the prunes.

  Hyman had used the word love repeatedly with her, although of course never within anyone else’s hearing. Tina—who did not love Francine at all but was in the habit of helping people—didn’t use many words at all, just plopped herself down in the chair beside the bed to read.

  Francine, staring at that pyramid of prunes, realized she would not contact Hyman again. It made sense to her that the only way she could have left him was to have him torn from her guts, blood welling from the wound.

  For Tina, there seemed to be nothing about hospitals she didn’t know. Big family, she said dismissively, A lot of older relatives. She folded another slice of Juicy Fruit into her mouth and said nothing more.

  Once Francine had finished the prunes and sipped as much as she could of the smoothie, Tina cleaned away the garbage to replace it with the nurse’s call button and a bottle of water with a bendable straw.

  Watching her roommate position these essential objects within easy reach, Francine remembered the way Hyman had pronounced the word love, extending the v into a slight fricative, so it sounded more like luff. She pictured a sail in the wind luffing, the material unable to catch the wind appropriately.

  On the third day, when a doctor finally appeared by her bed, Tina was away at class. The man introduced himself, not with his name, but just as the surgeon who had performed the operation. His name was written across his shirt pocket, but a banana peel drooping out of that pocket obscured most of the letters. The word started with a ch and ended with a b, perhaps four letters in between. He looked only a few years older than her.

  He glanced up and to the right to examine the display on his Lens
es. At this point Lenses weren’t universal, so it wasn’t until he flicked his finger to page through the display that she was sure he wasn’t staring at a bug on the ceiling. She’d learned enough from the nurses to know the disease he’d found in her guts matched her symptoms. She’d been waiting to talk to him, assuming now that she had a real diagnosis, modern medicine would finally cure her.

  He flicked through her file, describing what he’d found during surgery. He used precise medical terminology she did not know, mixed in with vivid phrases such as extensive scarring and stage four.

  The more he talked, the harder she found it to hear what he was saying.

  Bright-eyed, he stared at the photos of her adhesions, explaining how the granulation tissue webbed her organs together, how every time she reached upward, the scarring must have tugged on her liver.

  Some distant part of her brain began to busy itself with the options for the four missing letters of his name—Chaffob, Cheralb—her mind a hamster on a wheel, spinning nowhere, making noise.

  When it didn’t seem as though he would ever pause, she interrupted, How will you fix it?

  This, to her, was the point of the conversation.

  He blinked and focused on her, seeming to remember he wasn’t talking to another surgeon. His eyes bounced away to the wall.

  Well, he admitted, Endometriosis is hard to treat.

  She grew very still.

  He said, Mostly we just try to control it.

  Chriseb, Cheebob.

  It was to the wall that he confessed, Unless you choose to get a hysterectomy. That frequently works.

  She asked, A what?

  (Of course she knew what the word meant. Her question was more a way of saying, You gotta be kidding.)

  He didn’t seem to comprehend this subtlety. Instead he defined the word, adding that he would recommend removing her ovaries too.

  They stared at each other, as baffled by each other’s responses as if they spoke different languages. The only reply she could think of was, I’m 21.

  In response he offered, The treatments for surgical menopause have radically improved.

  She blinked, unable to process this statement. She said, But if you took out my . . . —she didn’t speak this word for uttering it would make this situation more real. Instead she simply paused, leaving an empty spot in the sentence for the name of the organ he wanted to edit from her body— . . . how would I have children?

  Later on, the fact that she asked this question mortified her. However the enormity of this concept, like a mountain, needed to be climbed in stages.

  When the surgeon spoke again, it was more slowly, using words with few syllables, Do you want kids?

  I’m not . . . I don’t . . . , she said. At 21, when she thought of the word home, she still pictured her mother’s apartment. She was years away from figuring out if she wanted to become a parent herself.

  The doctor spoke with less interest. Clearly this part of the conversation was outside of his purview, like a plumber being asked to consider paint colors. He asked, When would you want the kids? Three years from now? Five years?

  She pictured her naked body standing in the hallway in front of her apartment door and closed her eyes, unable to answer.

  After a moment he offered one more word she had never considered associating with her life, offering it in the same tone with which he might suggest a more convenient restaurant. He said, Adopt.

  Her eyes snapped open, for in a way this word did take away her pain, at least for the moment. She heard herself speak, deep and gravelly, every consonant sharp.

  She said, You seem confused about your function here. It is to offer medical solutions for my disease. If you cannot, you pass me on to a more competent doctor.

  She listened to these words, as surprised as he was.

  This deep voice lied without effort, saying, My Lenses have recorded this whole conversation.

  (She did not even own Lenses.)

  Her mouth said, If you and this hospital don’t start finding solutions very quickly, I will call a news conference from this bed and I will replay this conversation where, in under 97 seconds, you moved from informing a college-age woman of her disease to suggesting she adopt.

  He was staring at her now and she realized with an internal lurch her professor would probably never look at her again, certainly not with such attention. Her eyes began to well and her voice said, You will find I can look quite distraught.

  From this day forth, this voice appeared whenever she needed it to, rising raspy from the scars inside her. She lied, she threatened, she said whatever she needed to get help. From this point on, she introduced herself as Frankie.

  The hospital arranged the medical appointments for her, so she could try out the potential treatments. These new doctors treated her as a fundamentally different patient than the one she’d been before her operation. Their fingers flicked through her medical records, the file filled with precise vocabulary and color photos. These doctors informed her she was in terrible pain.

  DAY 10

  Fifteen

  At 5:15 A.M. she tried walking across the Foundation, wanting to see how far she could manage. Young, with the adhesions surgically removed, she was healing quickly. As she walked, she windmilled her arms round and round, looking a bit like a slow motion video of a person attacked by bees. She was trying to stretch out her muscles and tendons, to break the adhesions inside.

  Stepping off the path, she’d wandered past three flower beds and around a large hedge. Walking here, outside of the area visible to the public, the lawn felt rougher, rustling under her feet. After 10 yards, the grass simply dead-ended, the line precise. Examining the edge, she saw this part of the lawn was actually a carpet, a plastic green skirt. Past the carpet, the bare earth continued for 100 yards all the way down to the highway, devoid of detail except for two dead trees and a desiccated patch of grass. On the far side of the highway was an irrigated field lush with some type of pink flower, the field placed precisely in the bare landscape, its corners as exact as a box. Water so expensive these days.

  She made a slow circuit of the lawn carpet around the Foundation, stretching her arms, staring out at the dry landscape, then headed back to her kitchen, hungry. She finally wanted something more than a spoonful of mayonnaise or some crackers, something better than the chips or rubbery hot dogs from the Snack Shack near the Visitors’ Center. In her apartment’s cupboards, the only food was a few dusty jars of marinated olives. Either olives were the previous tenant’s favorite type of food or he hated them so much he hadn’t bothered to pack them when he left. Even hungry, she didn’t consider opening them. After years of dietary restrictions, she was only going to eat what she truly desired.

  So she sat down at the counter and said, Ok Bindi, make a list.

  Each item she named appeared in a small window on her Lenses: bulleted, spelled correctly and with all pertinent trademarks. She ended the shopping list with, Ok Done.

  Since ok had become the vocab that activated so many devices, the word had fallen out of use in normal human conversation, for fear a nearby oven might click on or a garage door shut.

  On the wall, the E-musement broadcast was currently showing some flooded street—people wading past submerged cars with children on their shoulders. Probably Miami or St. Louis, those cities seemed to be flooded every few weeks. The video was shot from 10 feet above the water; the person who shot it must have been leaning out a window. E-musement used a lot of amateur videos. Since everyone had Lenses, the videos were uploaded to a news site long before any professional reporter could get to the scene.

  The current video zoomed in on a three-year-old, holding tight to her mom, her other arm wrapped around a teddy bear. One side of her face was discolored, a birthmark or bruise. The Lenses were zooming in closer.

  Frankie jerked her eyes away and got to her
feet to search through the apartment, checking every closet and drawer, until she’d found a box of garbage bags and some nails. The crowd-sourced scenes had a tendency to linger on the sad and horrific, images a professional crew might have avoided. These amateur videos were given more leeway given the hypnotic intimacy of looking at an emergency literally through the eyes of someone involved. The videos drove ratings up.

  Frankie had no need for gratuitous pain and so stopped watching E-musement years ago. The little information she got about current events came through Public Broadcasting: calm avatars explaining context, divergent opinions aired, warnings delivered before any disturbing visual in case children were watching. All of this created a certain emotional distance.

  Since she couldn’t find a hammer in the apartment, she grabbed a frying pan instead and climbed onto a chair in front of the E-musement wall. Using the pan as a hammer, she nailed a garbage bag flat across part of the image, then got down off the chair to take a look. The upper right quadrant of the newscast was now projected onto the surface of the dark bag—the visuals much harder to see.

  Satisfied, she started to step forward to hammer the next garbage bag in place when the camera—still showing scenes of that flooded city—panned past a half submerged subway entrance. The water lapping at a sign for the 1, 2 and 3 lines and those familiar green railings.

  Frankie froze for a moment. Manhattan.

  Glittering text twirled onto the screen: Poly-roach Attack.

  The visuals now showed three engineers in some sort of control room working at their screens, speaking commands quickly, intent.

  An official in a suit stepped in front, holding his hands up, blocking the view of the engineers. He addressed the camera, groomed and calm. The text at the bottom of the screen said, Jack Santos, NYC Water Department Communications Director.

  The poly-roaches had been hitting a lot of infrastructure recently: the grid in Texas, satellite radio, the navigation of self-driving cars.