“I told her that they can come by as soon as visiting hours start. And, of course, she ignored me and said they’re coming over now. I didn’t see any real point in trying to argue with her.”
“Smart man,” I say, though I’m grateful that my oldest friend is dragging her boyfriend into their car and heading toward me, probably at blinding speeds. I need Penny’s eyes, and her honesty, to tell me if I’m the same as I was before. Sam has been so wrapped up in the mechanics of my disease, and the day-in, day-out of my life at the hospital, that I’m not sure he’d be able to tell. Maybe I’m afraid that he doesn’t remember what I was like before I was sick, even though it’s only been a handful of months since I was diagnosed. Or maybe, despite his righteous honesty, the journalistic ethics that have seeped into every bit of his life, I’m still afraid he’d lie to me.
Penny breezes in like a wash of winter air, crisp and bracing, the tiny dark ropes of her braids animating around her as if caught in a wind that belongs to her alone. She strides over and clasps my face in her hands, the silver of her rings cool against my skin. She studies me, her heavy eyebrows furrowed above the dark scrutiny of her eyes. I hold still, feeling very much like I’m showing her one of my paintings, watching her eyes scan with passionless appraisal. I’m about to interrupt her concentration and demand a response, when she breaks into that lovely smile of hers.
“There you are,” she says and kisses both of my cheeks, releasing me.
“Am I?” I ask, still internally bracing myself. I don’t doubt Penny’s judgment; I’m just unaccustomed to walking away unscathed by it.
“You look pretty decent, actually,” she replies. I grin, because to Penny, decent is just this side of tremendous. She turns to Sam, who is sitting by the window reading something on his laptop. He’s been on a leave of absence from the Chicago Tribune, where he covers national politics, though it hasn’t stopped him from working during every spare moment. I wonder what it’s costing him, these weeks away from his job, and wish I could signal to Penny to lay off him, at least for today. But I’m already out of luck. “You, however, look dreadful,” she says.
“Thanks, Pen,” Sam replies, barely glancing up from his work. Penny’s friendly dislike of Sam is nothing new, and he’s as familiar as I am with the smooth clarity of her whims and the depth of her candor.
“Connor’ll be up in a minute. He stopped downstairs to get coffee,” she says, flopping down into the seat next to my bed. Every time she moves there’s a dull clatter of bangles and beads. I’m sure I look bare and unformed next to Penny’s intricate, well-curated beauty. “So how do you feel?”
“Good. And really strange. A bit naked.” I roll up the thin cotton sleeves of my hospital gown and show her the pristine skin underneath. My arms are spindle-thin, broken only by the joints of my elbows like dense knots in sapling branches. They are as unmarked as porcelain.
“A waste of good artwork,” she replies, and sends another pointed glance in Sam’s direction. “Better for the country club though, I guess. Finally smoothing out all of those pesky rough edges, aren’t we?” Sam isn’t listening, or he’s choosing to ignore her. Either way, changing the subject is best.
“I keep feeling like I should have my glasses on.” My battered frames sit on the table next to me. I grabbed them out of habit a few minutes ago, sliding them on and recoiling at the warped blur that clouded my vision.
“What happened here?” she says, motioning to my bandaged hand.
“Pulled out my IV,” I reply. “Accidentally.”
“See,” she says, making a soft tsk-ing sound in mock reproach, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”
“Do you have a mirror?”
Penny goes fishing in her bag, an old gray corduroy satchel that seems to hold a good portion of her worldly possessions at any given time. I’ve seen paintbrushes, lace underwear, antacids, spools of thread, condoms, even bottles of perfume produced from that bag at a moment’s notice. And yet somehow, magically, Penny is always the first one to dig out her ID when we go to bars together. She hands me a tortoise-shell compact with a circular mirror inside.
“You haven’t seen yourself yet?”
“They won’t let me out of bed,” I reply, peering at my right eye, which is huge and bright and the color of coffee under a shapeless, overgrown eyebrow. I move the mirror down, trying to glimpse more, to get a sense of my face as a whole. But it’s too small, that scrap of reflection. I can only see one feature at a time.
The freckles on my nose and cheeks are gone. My skin is poreless, scrubbed of its ruddiness and even the barest hints of sun damage, like a doll’s face. The small dent of an old piercing is gone from the right side of my nose. The mirror reveals hollow cheeks, a chin that is more pointed than it was before. I am all bone structure, a skull that has been dipped in wax. My upper lip sports dark fluff, a shadowy contrast against the muted pallor of my face. I’m a bit mortified by this discovery. I think of Sam and the waxing strips I hide behind a bottle of lotion in our medicine cabinet. Such petty dishonesties that have always existed between us, where our bodies are concerned. How piteous it is that they linger still, even through the worst of circumstances. I snap the mirror closed, handing it back to Penny. It’s too close, too fragmented an image to satisfy me.
“So here’s a question,” Penny says, dropping the mirror into her purse and sitting back. “I know they supposedly have the genetic side of this all figured out. But what happens if you take up smoking? All bets are off?”
I shrug. “I guess. They can’t do much about environmental risk factors.”
“Actually, you can’t take up smoking,” Sam says, glancing up from his reading. He’s been listening after all. “It was in the paperwork you signed before the transfer. You’re not allowed to do anything unnecessarily dangerous to your SUB.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Penny asks, before I have the chance.
“Smoking, skydiving, driving drunk, things like that,” Sam replies. “That’s an expensive bit of medical research you’ve got there.”
“And what are they going to do, take her body back?” Penny’s crisp diction holds the slightest hint of her father’s thick Parisian accent.
Connor interrupts Sam’s answer by appearing in the doorway, flush-faced and jubilant in his thick glasses, a tray of coffees in his hand. The three of us cheer as he distributes the spoils, kissing me on the forehead as he passes, his patchy attempt at facial hair prickling against my skin.
“You look gorgeous, Han,” he says, handing me a steaming cup. “Are you allowed a little jolt?”
“Who cares?” I reply, popping open the cup’s lid and blowing a ripple of steam across its contents. I inhale the scent of dark-roasted beans. That smell used to immediately conjure the frosted mornings Penny and I spent in the coffee shop across from our first apartment, eating sticky Danishes and sharing the discarded sections of other people’s newspapers, flirting with the baristas. But the memory doesn’t come easily now. Something is missing, some connection that I can’t place. I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s so shocking, so appallingly bitter, that I spit the hot mouthful back into the cup.
“Jesus, where did you get this shit, Connor?” I ask, meeting three pairs of startled eyes.
“The coffee stand downstairs. Did you want cream and sugar?” Connor asks.
“No, of course I didn’t . . .” There was an ancient coffee maker in the School of the Art Institute’s Fine Art building. It produced sludge so thick you could almost stand a paintbrush on end in a cup of it, and I was infamous for drinking it with religious devotion. Now I glance at Sam. “Yours is okay?”
He nods, the crease between his eyebrows deepening.
“I can get you something else,” Connor offers, but it doesn’t do much to diffuse the sudden wary tension in the room.
“That’s all right,” I say, unable to brave anything else from the coffee cart at the moment. But I do need something, something to get th
e burnt, tarry taste out of my mouth. “Maybe just some water.”
Sam goes to get it for me, and no one says anything while he’s gone.
David
Within an hour of waking up, all I want is a shave and a cigarette. Through all of it—Beth’s tears and the stop-and-frisk from my doctors and the Skype conversation with my son—my beard itches. Politicians don’t grow beards, at least not unless they want to look like hippies, or worse, Communists. I haven’t gone more than three days without a shave in my entire adult life. But here I am with a half inch of thick brown hair rooted to my face. I look a hell of a lot like a teenager when I wheel myself into the bathroom to take a piss. Under the green flicker of fluorescent lighting, I see an overgrown kid, like those pock-marked hipsters who always show up to protest at town hall meetings, scrawny boys in tight jeans with perfect teeth and long eyelashes who bitch about the evils of free trade or the plight of the polar bears. The kind of kid who has to grow a beard so he won’t be mistaken for an ugly, broad-shouldered girl. I only hope my real face is waiting for me underneath the facial hair.
My slightness is the biggest surprise. I’d almost forgotten what I looked like before college, how small and inconsequential I once was. And here he is again, that wisp of a boy, with his thin frame and bony arms. My skin is chalk white and shows none of the lines that sprouted from my eyes or parenthesized my mouth during the past few years. I never minded the wrinkles, even when Beth did her best to talk me into getting them injected with Botox for the sake of the cameras. They made me look older, more distinguished, like I’d worked for what I’d earned in my life. For a congressman, that kind of perceived credibility was worth its weight in gold. I run a finger over the skin on the outside corner of my eye. It’s smooth and tight, flawlessly supple. Fuck. The last thing I need is to look like I took this leave of absence to get some work done at a fancy spa somewhere.
It’s ironic that returning to this particular body has actually saved me. It’s a body that looks spindly and wan compared to the one I had yesterday. I’d spent years cultivating and maintaining the muscle mass I had, enough that GQ ran a cover story on me for their fitness issue. “The Best Abs in Congress,” it read, and the guys in my caucus ribbed me constantly for it. But privately, I was damn proud. It was part of my dogma; hard work and personal determination had literally shaped me into the person I was. And now all of that effort has been wiped away.
I want a cigarette. It’s a Pavlovian impulse, like an itch you don’t know you have until scratching it feels delicious. Smoking in bathrooms has become a habit for me. During session breaks, in the middle of black tie events, before press conferences. Blowing smoke out windows or into exhaust fans. Hell, I once smoked a cigarette in a bathroom on Air Force One. After all, the vice president can only bum so many smokes during a flight before you realize that the smoke detectors in there are mostly for show.
The sudden gnawing of the craving pisses me off. The doctors all but guaranteed that I’d be rid of my chemical dependencies in this new body. They were as gleeful as doctors get about an untested theory, a mix of earnestness and lustful salivation over the idea of it. A body that has never tasted nicotine, never had a sip of Scotch. And yet, the memory of that long-suffered impulse has me patting the pockets of the scrubs I cajoled from a cute nurse, looking for cigarettes I don’t have. I bang my way out of the bathroom, startling Beth where she sits, watery-eyed and still breathless with exultation at the miracle of it all.
“Where’s Jackson?”
“Camped out in the hallway, I think,” she says, spinning her wedding ring around her finger. She started wearing it again when I got sick, and she plays with it now like she did when we were first married, as if it is something new and not quite comfortable. “It’s the only place he can get cell service.”
I wheel my way to the door, which takes considerable effort, and bang the side of my fist on it in three jarring beats. I’m halfway back to the bed when Jackson steps into the room behind me. He’s grinning, his mouth full of teeth that are one size too large for his face, and combined with his orange hair he looks a bit like the kid from MAD magazine.
“You rang?”
I use the last of my upper-body strength to haul myself into bed and slide back between the covers. I try to hide the fact that I’m winded when I speak. “What am I missing out there?”
“There’s going to be a floor fight on the farm bill. Apparently the Democrats have some issues with the rider the minority leader attached. The Dow is down, but it’ll rebound as soon as we vote on the budget. And the AP is reporting that Keith blew a point-one-five last night during a traffic stop and then tried to show his ID to get out of it.”
“What was it, some crusader cop?”
“A rookie. Second week on the job, if you can believe it. Had Keith in handcuffs before his partner even realized what had happened.”
“Bad luck for Keith,” I say. The worst that usually happens is a cop with an oversize conscience makes you leave your car and drives you home in his squad. But most just send you on your way when they see the seal on your badge.
“Looks like there’s a new bad boy on the Hill,” Jackson says. He’s in a good mood; he’s grinning like he’s done something really disastrous this time and no one can pin it on him.
“Hey, he’s pinch-hitting. I won’t be out for long. Speaking of which, where are we on the polling?”
Jackson pulls a manila folder from under his arm and hands it to me. “You’re not going to believe it.”
I glance over the data, a breakdown of percentages and their corresponding questions. My eyes catch on a number. “Rehab? You’re kidding.”
“We pitched everything from autoimmune diseases to exhaustion to sex addiction. Turns out, Wisconsinites think a man who has to get dried out is more trustworthy than one who is sick or tired.”
“Or balling prostitutes,” I add, and then catch a look from Beth. “Sorry babe. Jackson is a bad influence on me.”
Beth leans over to squeeze my hand. Her blonde hair pools in front of her shoulders and the silk of her blouse whispers as she moves. She’s wearing red lipstick. She always wears lipstick, even on international flights and while playing tennis and during midnight trips to the pharmacy for baby aspirin. I seem to remember her lips were a particularly bright shade of pink when she was in labor with David Jr.
“How about I get you something from the cafeteria, hmm?” she says. “Leave you two to talk?”
“Great, babe. Anything with chocolate, right?”
“Right, because you need junk food in your condition,” Jackson quips.
“Eat me.”
“Don’t kill each other while I’m gone, please,” Beth says, giving me a brief kiss on the lips, not enough to smudge her lipstick. I realize a moment too late that it’s a first kiss, of sorts. But then she’s already heading for the door, her heels clicking on the tile of the floor in a perfectly measured rhythm, and I don’t even have a chance to savor it. It’s already gone.
Jackson sits down in her chair once we’re alone, leaning back with a stack of files balanced on his knee. He waits for me to speak, to ask the question. I try to wait him out, to see how long I can stretch the silence, but after a few moments my resolve crumbles.
“So what’s the real damage here?”
Jackson chews the inside of his lip, the way he has ever since we were kids, the way he did the time we dented his father’s truck playing baseball and tried to think up a good excuse to keep from getting throttled.
“We’re going to take a hit, no matter what. But if we can make the rehab story work, it might buy us enough time for things get back to normal before SUBlife goes up for FDA approval. The public has a short memory, and a year is a long time. If we do it right, they won’t connect the dots when the word ‘cloning’ starts to get thrown around.”
“And if they do?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Jackson shrugs.
“You’ll have
a lot of time to perfect your hook shot, I guess. Or hey, I could run for your seat and you could be my chief of staff. That could be fun.”
“Right.” I scratch at the prickle of thick hair on my neck. My fingernails are trimmed short, and for the first time I realize that someone had to have trimmed them for me. Someone was in charge of maintaining this body as it was being grown, before my memories were transferred in. The idea makes me feel a little sick.
“And the support group?”
“Apparently nonnegotiable. But there will be iron-clad confidentiality agreements all around. The others can talk all they want about their own experiences, but the minute your name comes into it, we’ll be taking fifty cents of every dollar they make for the rest of their lives.”
“Good. Hopefully they make enough for that to be a motivating factor. Get me the background information on them, will you?” I say, picking up my cup of water from the side table and toasting him with it, wishing it were three fingers of Scotch.
But the more Jackson and I talk, the more this seems possible. I could wake up next year and be back to the man I remember. Better even, the man I promised Beth I would be when she came back and began wearing her wedding ring again. I could quit drinking altogether, quit smoking, spend more time in my district, even live at home with Beth and David Jr. for most of the year. Yes, this will be a beginning. I polish off the water in a large gulp and then crush the cup in my fist, tossing it at Jackson, who deflects it with his forearm.
“You must be feeling better.”
“I feel like a million dollars, brother. But tell me, who do I have to blow to get a shave around here?”
And Again Page 2