The Mortification of Fovea Munson

by Mary Winn Heider

  Around then I finally started to breathe again, for the first time in about four months.

  Also, it was probably time to wash my hands.

  And a couple weeks later, at exactly three minutes until noon, I turned the corner, crossed under the train tracks, and stepped out into the sun. I’d gotten used to the street being quiet again, so I was surprised to see five beret-wearing delivery people standing outside the front door of the lab. Whitney was in the middle of them and the lead deliverer kept gesturing to the truck behind them.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as I walked over.

  Whitney sounded exasperated. “They insist that we ordered six hundred legs. We would never order six hundred legs. It would take forever to get through that many legs.”

  We both turned and looked at the large truck. It was a really large truck. That was a lot of legs.

  The lead deliveryman returned with some paperwork, which he presented to Whitney with a flourish. “See? Right there.” I peered over her shoulder, and in fact, it did say six hundred legs.

  “Well, I didn’t order that,” Whitney said. “If that date is correct, I was still on the road to Florida.”

  “Oops,” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  “It’s possible,” I said, “that I accidentally ordered six hundred legs. At one dollar apiece.”

  “It’s not our job to correct typos,” said the beret. “We just deliver the number of legs you ask for. This page here is your invoice.”

  Whitney looked at the bill and went pale. “I can go ahead and confirm that there appears to have been a slight clerical error on our part. Can we please return five hundred and ninety-nine of the legs?”

  “There’s going to be a restocking fee,” said the beret crisply.

  Whitney agreed to it, and as we walked back into the lobby, she said, “It’s okay. You were new to the job. Also, your parents probably aren’t going to fire you.”

  “Actually, I can’t wait to tell them.”

  “Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.

  “No reason,” I said. I settled into the swivel chair and glanced at Herophilus, who seemed to be completely back at home in the castle. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Inko’s apology arrived.”

  “No way!”

  She showed it to me. A formal, notarized statement of apology for any perceived wrongdoing, and a promise never to come to the lab again. There was also an informal statement of apology specifically for Whitney, where Inko admitted that he got a little overexcited about things, and he would no longer stand in the way of whatever happiness she was after, even if it was with somebody else. He said his brush with death had made him more mature about such things. At first I thought he meant Grandma Van coming at him over and over again with the Taser, but then I realized that he meant McMullen. Even if you were a cremator, having a decapitated head roll into you was probably terrifying.

  In the end, nothing had been proven, because nobody, including Inko, could explain how Inko had gotten the head out of the lab and across the street without being seen. He tried his best to pin everything on my parents, but the only evidence (him in the middle of the street with a spare head) pointed to him as a potentially compulsive body-part thief. When the police interviewed me and Howe and Whitney, we all mentioned that more than anything else in the world, Inko loved cremating.

  Since there was no evidence anywhere of the other missing head, the police suspected that he’d cremated it, but they couldn’t prove anything. The case didn’t even go to trial. Inko got probation and paid a fine for having a massive biohazard out on the street like that. My parents paid a fine for not having better security and they immediately bought a very high tech alarm system. Everybody agreed that whatever had happened would never happen again. I sure hoped not.

  Whitney nodded toward the back, where my parents were. “They’re about to take off for the afternoon. They’re giving a lecture on—”

  “It’s okay, I don’t really need to know the details,” I said. One surgery was about the same as any other surgery to me.

  “And I’m off to Nussbaum’s!” Whitney smiled. “She’s calling today’s lesson ‘Micro- and Saxo-: When Phones Go Wrong.’”

  After everything went down, Whitney discovered that it made her sad to sing without Dean. So she reevaluated her quest for fame and fortune, and apprenticed herself to Nussbaum to learn the mysteries of sound recording and mixing. It turned out that Nussbaum had been developing a series of lessons for the last ten years, she just hadn’t really been that aggressive about getting students. And all of a sudden she had three.

  Whitney was one.

  Em Taylor was another one. Every now and then, Em would say hi to me through Whitney. I couldn’t be totally sure if it was really her or just Whitney trying to be nice. I was happy for Em that she’d found something she liked so much. And I was sort of proud that I’d basically given it to her—but it didn’t miraculously bring our friendship back from the dead. It turned out that was okay with me.

  My grandmother was Nussbaum’s third student, at least for a week and a half. When she eventually got tired of Dirk, she quit and decided to teach a class of her own at the Swan Song: All About the Philippines. On alternating days, Julia taught one called All About Armenia. They went to each other’s class and the truce seemed to stick, mostly.

  One time, I sat in on my grandmother’s class, and she had me call her Lola Van, like I was a normal partly ­Filipino kid instead of a weird completely surgeon kid who was named after the Father of Modern Medicine.

  Lola Van.

  It was nice. I might try to make that stick, too.

  Of course, I wasn’t done with the Hippocrates stuff either.

  Whitney’s schedule at Nussbaum’s was great because it left her plenty of time to work the morning shift at the cadaver lab. She took the mornings.

  I took the afternoons.

  After clearing things up with my parents, I didn’t mind it so much. First of all, being a Future of America was way better than being a Future Doctor of America. And I knew that I was so far beyond the Igor biz, I stopped worrying about that, too. Eighth grade was going to be great. I had a solid feeling about it. I’d handled blackmail and big-time threats and kidnapping and lovesickness and heads, for Pete’s sake. Eighth grade was going to be a breeze.

  It also meant that I was spending a little more time with Whitney, who was pretty cool when she wasn’t running off with biohazards named Dean. She was sort of big-sisterly, which I’d never gotten a chance to experience before.

  Anyway, on that day of the six hundred legs, Whitney and I checked in and then she left. A few minutes later, my parents came through.

  “By the way,” I said as they gave me drive-by forehead kisses. “I accidentally ordered too many legs.”

  “Oh yeah?” asked my dad.

  “Whitney and I returned them,” I said. “You know. For a small re-stocking fee.”

  They lost it. It took them ten minutes to leave, and even then, they were hanging off each other, laughing. “Miss you!” my mom said as they left.

  “More than an appendix!” we all said together. I know. I know. But it was sort of our thing now. They liked that I knew what an appendix was. I liked having a thing.

  I did what I normally did when they left. Called the ­Children’s Refinement.

  When Howe came on the line, I told him about the legs. I had to explain the joke to him, but then he laughed. He’s pretty there for me when it comes to laughing, even when the jokes involve medical terms he doesn’t get, or in this case, ladies’ stockings. “Your jokes are entertaining and educational,” he said one time. “What’s not to like?”

  When I was done with the leg thing, he had double good news to tell me. First, his mom had agreed to run a class at the center on how to build hologram lasers. Strict age limit. Howe said it was probably only going to be the two of us, and I knew Howe was just doing it to keep me compan
y, but it was nice of him. I knew exactly what my first project was going to be.

  A bowling ball. Simple. Perfect. A cosmic joke.

  And second, Howe’s mom agreed to give him some scheduled, structured unstructured time. I asked why they didn’t just call it free time, but he said he wasn’t going to rock that boat.

  I got it.

  I got him, too. And he got me. It was pretty spectacular to have a best friend again.

  Plus, we had a mission. We’d been using Howe’s CRUD skills to locate McMullen’s son, and we were getting closer every day. Howe wanted to tell me about a new lead, but before he could, the delivery people reappeared at the front door. I told him I’d call him back right after I helped them.

  Turns out, they’d been so distracted by the leg thing, they’d forgotten that there was one small box, too. I signed for it like usual, and the guy handed it over. The stickers on the front suggested immediate freezing, so I took it back to the lab. It was clean and shiny in there, no real traces of the magic. Just echoes.

  And then there was something more than an echo. There was a tapping. It was quiet, coming from the direction of the walk-in freezer.

  My heart beat a little faster, but I wasn’t exactly scared. Not here. Not anymore.

  I opened the first door and walked into the fridge section.

  There was an arm on one of the shelves, and the hand at the end of it was doing the knocking. “What’s up?” I said, not sure if arms could even hear. But the hand stopped and started gesturing. I walked back out, went into my parents’ office, and got a pen and paper.

  I slid the paper under the hand, then gave it the pen.

  As I watched, it wrote:

  Always wanted to do a handstand.

  “Okay,” I said.

  On the Eiffel Tower.

  Whoa.

  Heard you know people.

  Oh boy. This one was going to be a doozy.

  (You didn’t think I’d cut it out, did you?)

  Written and Performed by Franz Munson and Diana De Leon

  My name is Hippocrates, I come from Kos

  I am the inventor of the Hippocratic Oath

  I’m known for my wisdom and my smarts and my charm

  But most of all I’m known for Do No Harm

  (Most of all he’s known for) DO NO HARM!

  My birth date itself is a little hard to nail

  Like lots of things back then, there’s not much detail

  The records are scarce if they’re there at all

  But likely as not, I wasn’t very tall!

  (Likely as not, he) WASN’T VERY TALL!

  So I was small for my age, but I didn’t let it stop me

  I read and I wrote and studied sickness as a hobby

  “Whoa,” I said one day, “Hey, medicine is rad!”

  And that’s how I became an Asclepiad!

  (That’s how he became) AN ASCLEPIAD!

  My dad and my grandpa were probably both docs

  My family of physicians totally rocked

  But the older I got and the more I learned,

  The lessons I was taught made me concerned!

  (Lessons he was taught) MADE HIM CONCERNED!

  “Hold the phone,” I said, “this can’t be right,

  Your theory of medicine is not airtight.

  Getting sick isn’t all about superstition

  It’s germs and genes and bad nutrition!”

  (Germs and genes and) BAD NUTRITION!

  “I have this idea,” I said at the time,

  “That the brain and the heart are connected to the spine,

  That each organ of the body feeds into another

  If we try using science, there’s a lot to discover.”

  (If they’d try using science) THERE’S A LOT TO DISCOVER!

  Now, I wasn’t quite right, and you know that today,

  But I did start folks thinking in a different way

  And a few things I tried would pass a modern test

  Like my method to drain a chest-wall abscess!

  (His method to drain) A CHEST-WALL ABSCESS!

  I’m quoted a lot, but to be quite frank,

  It’s hard to say what’s true and what is crank

  My advice to you, if you’re not a porpoise

  Is to read the collection called the Hippocratic Corpus!

  (To read the collection called) THE HIPPOCRATIC CORPUS!

  [Note from Franz and Diana: We are still working on this, so check back in with us, okay?]

  You’re the sauce to my spaghetti, I’m the footprint to your Yeti.

  Your skin’s a bit blue; my heart is well, reddish I don’t care at all that you’re somewhat deadish.

  Who’s to say

  What makes love work?

  Is it promises? Is it romance?

  Is it conversations in the moonlight?

  It isn’t feet, I can tell you that much.

  Songbird in ice

  You sing so nice

  My heart goes kablammy

  Let’s go to Miami!

  Two heads are better than one.

  My heart is big enough for the both of us.

  Thank goodness for that.

  Head Zeppelin

  Brain Drain and the Occipitals

  Nasal Spray

  Jaw Bones and the Soft Spots

  Guns and Noses

  A Head of the Pack

  Whole Note and the Three Quarter Notes

  Mandible Lector

  The Headlines

  Howe and the Get Aheads

  Heading Toward Harmony

  Lake and the Michiganders

  So many brains went into the making of this book! So many hearts! So many eyeballs. So. Many. Eyeballs.

  I’m everlastingly grateful for them all.

  Thanks to the incredible community at VCFA, especially my brilliant advisors, Uma Krishnaswami, Coe Booth, Martine Leavitt, and Matt de la Peña. Thanks, also, to Amanda Jenkins and Tim Wynne-Jones, who read the first few words of the first ever draft for workshop.

  Many thanks to all of Fovea’s early readers (and ­listeners)—Rachel Wilson, Cordelia Jensen, Laurie ­Morrison Fabius, Katie Bayerl, Amy Rose Capetta, Eden Robins, Jarrett White, Emily Warren, the Gardeners, the Beverly Shores HTs, and the MC. Thanks to Varian Johnson for all the incredible writerly ballast.

  Thanks to Ben Clark, Jake Garguilo, and Mike ­Wszalek for the holographic help. I’m grateful to Emjoy Gavino and Taylor Bibat for the long Lola talks. Thanks to Katie Bayerl, Hector Bacarra, and Hector Toro for language chats. Thanks to my patient lab colleagues for answering questions like, what’s the difference in thawing time for a ceph in a climate-controlled lab versus outside on a warm summer evening? Thanks especially to them for not getting me locked up after asking those questions.

  Thanks to Rachel Hylton and Steve Bramucci, my left and right kidneys, respectively.

  Thanks to the greatest imaginable accomplices, my killer editor, Rotem Moscovich, and my genius agent, Tina Dubois. I can’t imagine Fovea without the two of them and their rad assistants, Heather Crowley and Berni Barta.

  I am endlessly inspired by my parents, Karl and Malie. They are the coolest. Thanks are also due to my sibs, John and Paul. This book probably would have been way less gross without the valuable education of life with them.

  My fantastic grandparents donated their bodies to science, and they’re probably the reason I started this story in the first place.

  And finally, thanks to Jorin, for heart-related biz.

  A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Writing for Children and Young Adults program, Mary Winn Heider lives in Chicago, where she is a member of the theater company Barrel of Monkeys. Through the company, she teaches creative writing to third to fifth graders. She also briefly worked in a cadaver lab. Yep, there were heads. You can visit her online at marywinnheider.com.

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