“The kidnappers would then beat the men into submission and sell them to ship captains as white slaves.”
Nearby, he indicated a pile of old boots and told the tale of barefooted captives, trapped in a dungeon of broken glass.
People took pictures and jiggered with their cell phones, so that LCDs swam the depths in bioluminescence. Theresa texted as if baited by a dangling light. Because of the confines, and because of the angle, Justin couldn’t read over her shoulder.
“The white slave trade continued well into the time of Prohibition, when all of the bars moved underground with the opium dens.”
As the group moved toward one of the prison cells, Theresa took Justin’s hand and pulled him away from the voices and lights. “Come on,” she said. “I’m bored.”
She let go and looked at her phone, as if for navigation, and took off. Justin ducked and maneuvered around pipes to keep up.
Through a smash in one of the walls, they stooped. Theresa’s flashlight cast a jumble of crumbling old chairs as eight-legged shadows, with the ribs of a crib on the wall.
“Trying to get me lost?” he asked her.
They stopped; they heard only the footsteps above them. Justin noticed a wooden cell like the opium dens they’d seen earlier: some old wood slapped together in a corner, warped with age. This one had been built no bigger than half a confessional.
“It’s where they kept the women,” Theresa said quietly, “until their spirits broke.”
She explained nothing more, and somehow that made it worse.
She sat inside the cell and set up her flashlight like a lantern. “Sit,” she said. “Eat.”
He plopped down in the dirt outside, and she opened their sack of treats. He had ordered donut holes; she had bought a Voodoo Doll in chocolate.
“So,” Justin said after a few moments of snacking and looking up at the joists. “Stripping in front of Specht: you’re cool with that?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She wiped her mouth on a napkin from the sack and flicked her mourner’s veil of bangs. “I haven’t gone all the way like Sarah and Beatrice yet—haven’t done a full navel-gazing, but…Henry’s helped me a lot.”
“Henry?”
“Dr. Specht.”
“Oh, right.”
Theresa twisted her voodoo doll’s left arm. “Actually, Henry helped me remember all sorts of stuff.”
“Like what?” Immediately he knew better. Therapy was confidential for a reason.
She leaned forward and wiped powdered sugar off of his chin. Her fingerprint rasped against his stubble. “I think Beatrice is wrong about you.”
“Yeah? What’d she say?”
“The same thing she says about all men.”
“And what’s that?”
“She’s wrong about you though.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
Her smile deepened into a dimple. “Maybe.”
For a while he ate in silence. She probed her donut’s gut. In a way, he was glad she hadn’t answered his question.
“Specht wanted to hypnotize me,” Justin said, picking through the donut sack, trying not to contaminate it with dust. “At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what he wanted. But I’m sick of doctors, quacking around my head—you know? I’m sick of those people who just sit around, thinking about the universe. I mean, look at what Sarah and Beatrice and some of the other girls have done to themselves. The strange symbols and stuff… Has Specht really helped them? Or made it worse?”
Theresa abruptly said, “Those don’t exist.”
“Huh?”
She pointed at his donut: “Holes. They don’t exist. It’s something my mother used to say. Holes don’t have calories, so she could eat as many as she wants.”
“Huh.” Justin had lost his appetite. He had heard the saying before, about holes.
“That’s one of the things I remembered,” Theresa said. “The first time Henry helped me.”
She reached over and lightly played piano on the back of his hand. He hadn’t worn the hoodie with the cuff-made-glove, so inky tendrils uncoiled from beneath his sleeve.
“Love your tat,” she said. “I’ve always wanted one. A sun, maybe, or two cells splitting. Where’d you get it?”
Justin gently pulled his hand away to grab a donut hole that didn’t exist. “Believe me, you don’t want one. They’re like scars.”
“I like scars,” she said, and her eye grew keen with a smile. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
“That’s all there is to see,” Justin said. “Mine stops at the wrist.” It didn’t. He sat back and dug out a cigarette. “Want some fresh air?”
“Sure.”
Smoking in any Oregon establishment, even in the tunnels, had been illegalized. They found their way outside and sat on a bench. Theresa wore shorts, and he noticed how long her leg was, buckled with grace like a fawn’s.
He offered her a cigarette, but she insisted they share. As she exhaled into the lamplight, he glanced at her. The light clearly illuminated her hair, the dye in it, but not the side of her face beneath it.
“So what do you remember from when you were a kid?” she asked, studying her nebulae of smoke.
Justin looked away from her, down the empty street…
(holes don’t exist)
“I was in the hospital a lot,” he said, with instant regret.
Theresa said, “What kind of hospital?”
“Kid’s hospital.”
“Like Doernbecher?” she asked.
Doernbecher was a hospital and part of the Oregon Health and Science University: a construction of skywalks, parking garages, and curved architectures of metal and glass better suited to a space station. Specialists there treated cleft palates, hydrocephaly, and other diversities.
“Yeah, sort of like Doernbecher,” Justin said. “Only a longer elevator ride.”
“Do you remember Christmas?”
He shrugged. “The hospital was always decorated.” Making a joke about it didn’t improve the situation. He started to say goodbye, that he had to catch the train. He couldn’t stand all the questions.
“Well, goodnight,” Theresa said, beating him to it. She stood and handed him the rest of the cigarette.
He stood up too. “Oh. Want me to walk you home?”
“No, I’m fine.”
She paused. He wondered why.
Then she said, “It’s my turn next week. Wednesday, if you’d like to come.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t immediately grasp what she meant. “Totally.”
“Okay then. Bye, Justin.” She kissed him on the side of the mouth. A quick peck and the taste of lip gloss, lingering long after she had gone.
V
“What happened to the couch?” Justin asked, remembering black furniture and MRI art. The entire office had been stripped to the blanks.
“Have you ever played Scattergories?” Specht asked.
“What, the word game?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I don’t know—maybe once or twice. Why?”
Specht considered this and nodded. “Because a friend of mine once contested an answer which I thought acceptable. The die had landed on S, and the scattergory was types of vegetable. I responded ‘sliced mushrooms.’”
“Oh, no points!” Justin said, pretending to play the judging round of the game. “I wrote the same answer.”
“This friend of mine,” Specht continued, “he loved the game for the debate, at which he was quite skilled. He worked as a deconstructionist of alien literature.”
“Huh.” Justin was beyond paying any attention to this drivel.
“It was his contention that the state of the mushroom did not matter, whether chopped or whole. I asserted that states of existence certainly do matter, otherwise he could be chopped up himself and couldn’t complain!”
Justin attempted to return the clipboard. “Here,” he said. “No point in staying if there’s no couch.”
“I’ll see y
ou to the elevator,” Specht said.
“Nah, I can see myself out.”
Specht said, “I’m headed that way.”
“Oh.” Justin considered taking the stairs, but didn’t.
Specht stepped into the elevator first, directly to the console, and Justin said, “Lobby, please.”
The doctor pressed something, and the door closed. The car started to descend.
The elevator smelled familiar, like mold and sea. The indicator light displayed no distinct floors, only the symbol for pi. That, too, seemed familiar.
After two minutes, Justin said, “Did you push the lobby?”
The elevator door opened before Justin realized the car had stopped. Beyond, crowding the large circular floor of the room, anatomical displays posed in different actions. A small group of them played Charades.
Specht stepped out of the car, and Justin, still inside, went immediately to the elevator console. All of the floor numbers had worn off. He pressed the close button, but the door refused to shut all the way.
Justin pressed more buttons to get it to close. The elevator groaned and dropped a few inches on the side.
“Fuck!” He pried open the door and hopped into the museum.
Specht stood waiting.
“Fuck’s wrong with your elevator?”
“It’s an old building,” the doctor said.
Justin looked around, annoyed. He didn’t enjoy Specht’s mind games, and yet he continuously walked right into them. “Where’s the stairs?”
“Opposite side.” Specht pointed through the host of dissected bodies, so Justin went that way.
One of the male cadavers ran toward him, but in place. Muscles exploded off of the man, layer by layer: all part of the tableau, as if he were running so fast that the force had blasted tissues right off of him, all while standing still.
Another cadaver was suspended in midair above Justin, an aerialist arched like a swan but split in half, the internal parts of him suspended, too, between his two halves.
Specht caught up with him. “Anatomist Gunther von Hagens invented plasticization in 1977.”
“Groovy,” Justin said, hoping Specht got that he didn’t give a shit.
“Simultaneously, another scientist perfected it as well.”
“Sweet.”
“Each of them conceived of it independently, on completely different planets, millennia of light years apart—maybe more.”
Justin kept his eye straight ahead. He was getting sick of all the tour guides.
“Essentially, the procedure turns the very muscles, organs, and bones into anatomical models, plasticized in various exploded views.”
Justin expected to smell formaldehyde or something rotten, but the place smelled like a loose lot of old action figures.
“The eyes are the only inorganic part,” Specht said.
Nevertheless, the eyes seemed to follow Justin. One man’s eyeball had popped out of its socket on the fleshy stalk of his optic nerve, like a crab’s.
“Correction,” Specht said, “the breasts are counterfeit as well. To stop decay, all fat and fluid must be subtracted.”
Justin noticed that even the models with breasts had male genitalia. “Are these all dudes?” he asked.
Specht simpered and said, “All art leaves some great question unanswered, Mr. Devecka.”
Justin looked at a few of the men a bit closer and noticed they all had similar facial features and builds. He grew quite certain they all were the same man, but said nothing.
Above the many heads and exploded skulls, he saw the archway for the stairwell entrance. He walked a little faster. Just one last display in his path, and Specht behind him.
This version of the visible man—same face, different dissection—hung in sequential slices, as if a giant biologist had planed him thinly onto microscope slides.
“My Scattergories opponent,” Specht announced. “I call him The Mushroom.”
For the briefest second, Justin slowed. He remembered this particular model, had seen it before at the children’s hospital decades ago. Yet he remembered it clearly, remembered the varying iterations of organs and bones from slide to slide.
“He wanted to prove to me that nothing mattered,” Specht said, “so he donated his body with special instructions on how to prepare him.” He made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate the entire exhibit of the macabre. “I could have violated his wishes to prove a point, but it was a point that he had unwittingly proven: if states of existence do not matter, why the special instructions?”
Justin tried to throw open the stairwell door without slowing down. He crashed into it a second after he realized it was locked. “Unlock it,” he said.
Specht jangled keys as he approached. “It was Zeno’s conceit that every halfway point has a halfway point, ad infinitum.”
Justin stepped aside so the doctor could unlock the exit, but stood close enough to intimidate him.
Specht unlocked the knob, but then stood in front of it. “Slice a man thin enough, you can slice him forever.”
Justin said, “Don’t make me make you move.”
So Specht moved.
The stairwell went on and on.
VI
Still clothed between the mirrors, Theresa stood amid the circle. Justin noticed she had worn neither eye shadow nor lipstick, nor any cover-up of any kind. Her lips parted innocently, and the skin was pitted along her right cheek. Hair still covered the other side.
From the fit of her blouse, Justin guessed she wore no bra.
“What will you be revealing tonight?” Specht asked her from his seat on the floor.
Theresa’s hand shook, though not her voice. “Navel-gazing.”
Everyone smiled and murmured encouragement. Someone said this would be her first time.
Specht, with a smile that barely existed, nodded for Theresa to begin. She nodded too, excruciatingly self-conscious. Justin tried to imagine himself in her place but couldn’t. He didn’t think he was that brave to reveal all of himself—and the black thing growing on him.
Her fingers fumbled and unbuttoned her blouse. From the neckline down in a V, she gradually parted the fabric. Down to the absence of a navel.
Justin’s brow twitched.
No navel.
Sometimes women’s denim rode high and covered the belly button, he thought. Even though her waistline rode low enough to show chiseled hip, he clung to the rationalization.
“Join the sisterhood!” Beatrice shouted, lifting her own shirt. For the first time, Justin realized she also had no navel. Just a piercing, a hoop that puckered a scar into a lip.
He hadn’t noticed the abnormality during Beatrice’s strip show either. He’d been too distracted by innumerable piercings and scars.
A few women in the circle, including Sarah, grinned timidly at Beatrice’s audacity to interrupt a gazing. Justin wondered if Sarah’s burn marks had hidden her navel as well.
“Theresa has the floor,” Specht said. “Our undivided attention.”
Everyone refocused, and soon Theresa stood nude, breast aquiver, delicate spine in the mirrors. She had no marks, no scars, no evidence of self-mutilation—and definitely no navel.
Justin’s fingers brushed the bottom of his own T-shirt…
(holes do not exist…)
“Tell us, Theresa…” Specht readjusted his lens. “What did you reveal to me about your childhood? During our sessions?”
“Um…” She stared down at her unpainted toes, which wiggled.
Sarah leaned toward her from the circle. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We’re family.”
Theresa nodded. Her eye focused on the wall above everyone’s heads and darted here and there, as if focusing on any single point would inflict great pain.
“My childhood was perfect,” she said. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
Several of the women nodded, as if her revelation hit home. The whites of Theresa’s eye reddened, moistened.
>
“What do you remember about your parents?” Specht asked.
“Just…their smiles.”
“Did they ever frown, Theresa?”
“Umm…no.”
“Ever scowl or yell?”
“Never.”
“Did they ever make you cry?”
“No. I never-never cried.” Tears dripped off of her chin, then trickled down her breast.
“Did they spank you, hit you, abuse you in any way?” Specht asked.
“No, never. Nothing hurt. Nothing at all.”
“So everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
“Yes.”
“And all you remember are smiles.”
“Yes—that’s…yes.”
“But it hurts now, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Because of the holes.”
“Yes.”
“You remember the holes.”
“Yes,” and most of the women chanted it with her.
“Theresa,” Specht said, “show us where it hurts.”
She shut her eye and shed silent tears.
Justin could say nothing. He had wanted to stop the session since the beginning, but—no navel.
“Take off the wig,” Specht said.
Wig? Justin had assumed it was a dye job, cut to hide the side of her face. But a wig did explain the synthetic color.
Specht said, “Take it off.”
Theresa blushed. Her entire body quaked. Her aureole puckered in one big goose bump.
“Let us gaze.”
“Don’t bully her—” Justin began, but as he said it, Theresa scooped up her clothes and ran from the room.
Justin glared at everyone in the circle. No one said a word or looked at each other. Specht pretended that Justin didn’t exist. So Justin said, “Fuck it,” and he ran after Theresa.
He came around the corner in the hall just in time to see her in the elevator, bent to step into her panties, the most vulnerable part of her parted.
Justin almost called out but let the door close. She needed a few moments alone.
The stairs: he went down them two at a time, hurrying to catch her in the lobby.
The stairwell seemed longer than he remembered, an old wooden one built down a square shaft. It creaked, it cracked. It smelled of dust and old damp breath.
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