The bonobos, used to humans slapping the plexi to get their attention, glanced at the boys and then turned their backs.
Seeking a bigger reaction, the boys began to kick the glass rhythmically with their leather boots. Bam-ta bam, bam-ta bam. The level of noise reverberated. Inside the enclosure, it must be louder. The juveniles jumped and Mama’s baby, Tooch, startled awake and began to wail.
Mama looked at the boys: furrowed brow, intense stare, rigid mouth.
The teenagers kicked harder, encouraged.
The humans considered the boys and then looked away, wanting someone else to deal with them.
The teenagers continued to kick the glass. Bam-ta bam, bam-ta bam.
Mama panned her eyes across the assembled people, looking for help. Spotting Frankie, she paused, staring directly into her eyes. Once she was sure she had her attention, she flicked her gaze to the teenagers and then back.
Frankie stared back, surprised.
Mama raised her eyebrows at Frankie’s slowness and repeated the eye flick for clarity.
Irritated at her attitude, Frankie did nothing. For a moment there was a standoff.
Then the teenagers’ kicking escalated and Tooch threw his head back to scream louder, flailing with fear.
So Frankie turned to the boys. Unlike the other adults here, she’d lived in Manhattan for most of her life and had a sense of which strangers were dangerous and which just dressed the part.
She called, Cut it out.
The rhythm of their kicking didn’t change. Perhaps they hadn’t heard her.
Mama waited, her eyebrows raised.
Frankie inhaled and boomed out in the gravelly voice she normally saved for medical staff, You dicks touch that glass one more time and I’ll call security.
The teenagers paused mid-kick to assess if she meant it.
Over the years, she’d learned how to be the loudest patient, how to make doctors obey. The ability to lie was a muscle; it grew with exercise. She said, Head of security here is Roger Craig. He was a Navy Seal. Want me to call?
They looked at each other.
Ok Bindi, she said, Call Roger.
Quickly they backed up, walking away down the path. They couldn’t hear her EarDrums say, Roger who?
Mama grunted to herself and then sat back down. She didn’t glance again at Frankie, not even to acknowledge her help.
*
During grad school, Frankie wouldn’t consider a hysterectomy. This wasn’t an intellectual thought; it was more a demand of her body. The urgency reminded her of the time she’d tried scuba in college. Scuba had attracted her because she’d assumed it would be a languid swim where life was weightless, a sport she could manage. However during her second scuba dive, 20 feet down into the water, the instructor had snuck up behind her to yank the respirator from her mouth, tugging it back over her shoulder where she couldn’t easily reach it. The teacher had been doing the same to different students, forcing them to practice retrieving the respirator with a slow roll of the arm. This way if the respirator ever came out of the mouth when in deep water, the person would be able to get it back.
However when the respirator was pulled from her own mouth, Frankie forgot what she was supposed to do. Watching her lifeline air dart out of sight, she forgot everything. All conscious thought disappeared. The only thing that remained was the emptiness of her mouth, the lack in her lungs. She kicked toward the surface.
Her reaction to a hysterectomy was at the same biological level, an unthinking physical flight.
So instead, she scheduled laparoscopic surgery to burn away all visible endometrial adhesions, as well as to cut through the scar tissue that tied her diaphragm to her liver and her uterus to her bladder, freeing her innards from their webbing. Waking in the recovery ward, the first thing she was conscious of was how easy it was to breathe, her gut moving freely for the first time in years. With that simple difference, the pain she was in seemed negligible. Recuperation was effortless. She had hope.
She went on the Pill to minimize her menstruation, decreasing the speed with which new adhesions would develop. Within two weeks, her legs straight, she could reach down as far as her ankles. She discovered, without adhesions, she had a walk that bounced. Everything seemed doable. Her laugh returned, bubbling up at the slightest excuse. She hardly needed sleep, having spent so much of the last few years in bed. She wrote her dissertation in three weeks, her EarDrums blaring Shakira, her concentration laser sharp.
Within a month, she’d met JayJay in a Tribeca rooftop bar, the bar decorated with plastic lit-up skeletons, the night air smelling of vinegar from the artisanal pickle plant around the corner (forever afterward JayJay called her his little cornichon). He fell in love with her over a plate of onion rings while she grinned at the bright skeletons.
At first their time together was effortless. He was a happy-go-lucky soul who played tambourine in a band called Eat a Peach. He worked at a restaurant and had a large collection of Japanese erasers in the shape of food products. Once on a lark, he took her trash-picking with some Freegans he knew. He clambered right into the supermarket dumpster, up to his knees in trash, yodeling with delight when he found some steaks past their due date, encased in plastic and still cold from the fridge.
Everything was different from how it had been with the professor. She could be with JayJay whenever she wanted, holding hands and calling him Baby in front of others, sleeping with him in the same bed at night.
There was an ease to being with him, a nice guy who got along with everyone and made her laugh, but who under no circumstances could make her lungs ache with loss. The few times they argued, she engaged without fear or limits, feeling the high-wire exhilaration of knowing she could walk away right now. Inevitably, he gave in. Afterward they’d have sex and she’d rock hard against him, grunting with surprise.
They moved into a beat-up Victorian on Staten Island, a group house with 12 other people (a combination of landscape-design students, would-be recording artists and anarchists). Lines of carpenter ants bustled across the floor and walls, doing their best to transform the building into sawdust. The living room chandelier was made of coat hangers strung with slices of pizza that at some point had been carbonized by mistake in the oven to the airy perfection of graphite. The slices glittered in the sun, twisting gently. The house pet was a wild spider that scuttered about on its own shelf over the kitchen table. The housemates left offerings for it of the dead ants they found on the floor. The spider grew rapidly, glandular and misshapen, an inflated glove with beady eyeballs. Frankie hadn’t realized spiders could get fat. When she stepped toward the shelf, cupping the comma of a dead ant in her palm, the spider would edge into sight around the corner of the books it hid behind. It waited there, motionless as a rock, until her hand retreated. Then it would pounce upon the dead prey.
JayJay and Frankie were the last couple to move into the house. There were no rooms left so they chose the knee-wall closet on the top floor. The door to their closet was only four feet tall so they had to get on their hands and knees to enter. Inside, the ceiling slanted down at a 45° angle to the edge of the roof. In cross-section their room was an isosceles triangle 10 feet wide at the base. JayJay said they were living the Pythagorean dream. The most they could jam inside this space were two boxes of clothes, a lamp and their mattress. All of this, of course on the taller side of the room.
There was no insulation in the roof between them and the outside. In the morning, the pigeons would land on the shingles—so little between her and them that it sounded as though they were landing on her back. On summer afternoons, the closet was blisteringly hot. In the winter, Frankie and JayJay had to bundle up in quilts and spoon one another for warmth.
Still the rent for the space was affordable, even considering their low incomes (an adjunct teacher and a waiter). Near the City, this type of living wasn’t unusual;
especially since the war in Syria had begun to drive up oil prices, increasing costs on almost everything. JayJay’s best friend lived in a Village apartment with a warm-bunk schedule. It took 10 of them to pay the rent on the small apartment, so each roommate was given a scheduled time to sleep, the blankets still warm from the last person.
Frankie didn’t mind. She was in her twenties and without pain. Life at this point seemed a stage play that she had no need to take seriously, neither the scenery nor the role. Their attic garret was a set, a child’s hideaway, the pigeons cooing like the audible purr of her heart.
And she really needed the cheap rent, because a majority of her income went to her health insurance and medical expenses.
Ever so gradually over the next few years, the pain began to creep back. One day a month, two days, then more, gradually becoming worse than it had been during college. Each morning she spent a little longer in her knee-wall room, lying on her side, staring at the underside of the roof while she mustered energy to move. She thought of the dead ants she found everywhere in the house, stiffened into that final contortion. In her mind, she listed all the tasks she needed to accomplish before she could lie down again, calculating the shortest distance between each. Although life remained a stage play for JayJay, for her it returned to reality. She did whatever she needed to cope.
She found a second job—an easy one with access to strong painkillers—as a part-time employee in a compounding pharmacy. She told her manager she couldn’t start her shift until 11 A.M. When he asked why, she answered flatly the mornings were when she had her chemo.
At this, her manager’s eyes went wide, then flicked away. As though he’d glimpsed her nude. He didn’t ask follow-up questions.
Most people had no association with endo, no idea of its scope or implications, whereas they did know about cancer. By giving him the wrong disease, she communicated more about the truth of her experience.
She had a shuffling walk already, so now each day before work she simply tied a scarf over her head to cover her hair. She stole from the pharmacy whatever pain medications she needed. Although she knew others probably saw or suspected the thefts, no one said a thing. Instead each day they asked in a voice close to a whisper how she was feeling.
She answered honestly, Not great.
Even with health insurance, her medical bills piled up, all the items that somehow weren’t covered—lab tests, pathology reports, deductibles on medicines, the referrals to specialists. Her credit card bill grew larger every month. She could barely manage the interest, much less pay down the debt.
DAY 19
Twenty
In the morning, when she turned on the thermal app, she noticed an ampersand had joined the single percent sign in the corner of the screen, both of them pulsing.
Once she’d read the temperatures of the females’ sexual swellings—Marge’s temp now the highest—Frankie asked Mama if she could enter the enclosure.
Mama considered her, her brown eyes focused. Only after a moment did she shake her fist no.
This, Frankie figured, was an improvement.
She took her seat in front of the enclosure. This morning in her circuit of the Foundation, she’d managed to maintain the speed of a shuffle-jog, the whole time thinking about what she would eat for breakfast. Now she unwrapped this food, a pork sandwich with lots of mayonnaise. Holding the sandwich up under her nose, she inhaled the scent, feeling her mouth water.
Goliath was sitting near her nibbling on a piece of printed fruit, his nose wrinkled. She pulled the sandwich away from her mouth long enough to tell her Bindi to increase her daily order of mangos to 20 pounds and to add five pounds of papaya.
Then she bit into her sandwich, feeling the hunger deep in her bones.
For years, her diet had been restricted in an attempt to control her symptoms and pain. She understood pain was necessary in the world, a sense as critical as sight or hearing. It functioned to keep people safe, a very persuasive stop sign. In a way it was the mother to us all, slapping us back from the hot stove, forcing us to put down the sharp knife, teaching us self-preservation, training care into our bones. Pain was the reason we were alive. It was why as children we didn’t toss ourselves down the staircase for the thrill of the ride, didn’t stop eating just to bother our parents, didn’t nibble off our fingertips to examine our insides. Pain made our existence in this world possible, opened life up to us.
And pain was not only about damage. In smaller doses, it could be a sign of improvement and increasing strength: the ache of muscles growing, the gasp of lungs strengthening, a soul learning to endure in order to fulfill its desires. Pain could be the sign of achievement.
However all these benefits were predicated on the pain being able to be avoided—on the assumption that if the knife were removed, the agony would go away; that once the muscles were stronger, the ache would stop. A lesson learned, an adjustment made, the hurt circumvented in the future.
Unstoppable pain was different. The sensation in this case was not a mother. It was an abuser. It taught nothing. Instead it wrapped itself around the ribs, settled on the shoulders, a weight to be borne, making it hard to breathe or talk. During college, it had pressed Frankie down into a smaller person.
Pain like this did not open up the world; it erased it bit by bit. Over time, it erased her love of yard sales, of eating, of the simple act of laughing. By the middle of graduate school, it took away her good temper, as well as her desire to spend time with friends. Then one by one, it erased the last of her college friends. She survived through drugs like Vicodin and Riophine and through learning to focus on problems she found very very interesting, difficult problems with many variables.
*
In the research room, Goliath studied her attempts at flint knapping. Her fumbling motions were much slower than Stotts’ and she practiced each strike in the air a few times before attempting it. Watching her, Goliath stopped slamming the rocks together in front of him at the end of his arms. Instead he began to imperfectly copy her attempts, raising one stone to slam it down onto the other. Sometimes he slapped the chert into the hammerstone, other times the hammerstone into the chert. Both of them paused at times to eye each other’s progress.
At one point, she heard a loud clang and looked up startled. Goliath had propped the end of the carved rock on the desk to hold it steady and was hitting the rock with the hammerstone. The metal desk now had a divot in it.
She propped her carved rock on the other corner of the desk and began to hammer at it that way too.
Ma’am, said Stotts, shaking his head.
Both she and Goliath shot him an annoyed look and continued.
Mostly Stotts was alright with her experimenting with flint knapping in front of Goliath. He said it was possible the two of them learning from each other might be a closer analogue to the way pre-humans had mastered the skill. After all it was unlikely there had been one pre-human genius who figured out knapping in a single generation. Instead there’d probably been a group of them who, through innumerable experiments over many generations, taught each other what they needed to know.
She could feel Stotts at times studying her as she slammed the hammerstone into the chert, her strikes weak and without skill. Still she worked at it, willing to take pointers from an ape. She was not the person he had expected.
After a few minutes Goliath and she found that hitting the chert while it was on the desk tended to shatter the rock into small chunks as useless as gravel. They returned to balancing the rock on one thigh when hitting it.
*
Living in the attic with JayJay, in spite of her illness, she continued her research into the smell of love. She persuaded 20 male students to help her, gave each an identical white T-shirt. Each slept in his T-shirt for a single night, then returned it to her. She folded each into a cardboard box with a hole cut into the box (not a hole big enough to
see through, just big enough to smell through) and placed all the T-shirt boxes on a table. Each research subject—always a young woman who was ovulating that day—was brought into the room to pick up box after box, hold each to her nose and inhale.
Which box, Frankie asked, smells the most attractive?
She did not tell the woman what was inside (held to Frankie’s own nose, she couldn’t discern body odor, but only the sweet scent of cardboard). Whichever box the woman chose, Frankie noted it down: Female Subject A selected the box from Male Subject 14, Female E selected Male 7’s box, etc. Sometimes the woman wouldn’t want to put the box down once she chose it, lingering over it, inhaling, then saying, God, what’s in here?
The most obvious initial finding was that attraction based on a person’s scent was not like attraction based on looks. There seemed to be no universal criteria that would allow most women, eyes closed, to point to the man in the room with the most attractive scent. Instead, Frankie found, each of the men’s shirts had its own fan club of ovulating females.
She had every male and female subject also take IQ and personality tests, fill in a questionnaire about lifestyle and eating habits, and give a saliva sample for genetic analysis. She ended up with a thick book of data on each person. For this first iteration of her research, she sifted through these books, searching for clues about what Female A might have comprehended with a single sniff, why she selected Male 14’s cardboard box.
Meanwhile, Frankie’s new doctor suggested, if she wasn’t going to get a hysterectomy, the best treatment was for her to get pregnant, now. Pregnancy had been shown to frequently reset the endometriosis to an earlier stage and in any case, it would stop her from menstruating for nine months. He suggested this treatment in the same way he might have suggested she take ibuprofen—a dry logical voice. As though this particular type of medicine wouldn’t need to be diapered, clothed and loved. At the moment, she didn’t have enough money to take care of a hamster, much less a child.
Theory of Bastards Page 14