We talked for a while. “I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.” I said it to the officers, but I meant it for Aaron, too. “Sorry for wasting your time.”
“Don’t ever be sorry,” one of the paramedics said. He was tall and lanky, with strawberry blond curls and a kind voice. “That’s what we’re here for.”
As they drove away, another shame settled in: that I, a white woman afraid of my husband’s madness, had taken three seconds to decide to call the police. I knew they would keep me safe. I knew they were likely to keep my husband safe. And I knew that other people in neighborhoods nearby might choose any gory probabilities of a mental health crisis before electing the gory probabilities of a police call.
I didn’t go inside to look at the damage. “I don’t care about the stupid mirror,” I said. We got in the car. I said I was sorry and he said he was sorry. The adrenaline cooled in our veins. At Jaime’s, the kids were watching The Empire Strikes Back on a shower curtain Jaime had rigged in the living room. Aaron and I went in for a minute and sat awkwardly on the couch. Then we thanked her and we all left.
“You okay, Dad?” Nico asked, buckling his seat belt.
“I’m okay, Bubba,” Aaron said.
“Are we still going to Jurassic Park?” Henry asked. He was confused. We were confused, too.
I raised my eyebrows at Aaron. We had been to hell and back in twenty minutes. The movie had only just begun. “Sure,” he shrugged.
And so as the sun went down we drove to the park and slipped into the back row and set up our beach chairs, and the stars came out over the lake, and the mosquitoes. No one noticed us but the moon.
STONE BABY
There’s one other thing Sandra says about Aaron in “The Painted Picture.” This one gets his attention.
“When Aaron was born, I was huge. It was actually twins, but only one developed. Twins run in the family, and my brother had twins, my grandmother was a twin, and genealogy-wise, I was really supposed to have twins. So only one developed and I felt, ‘Thank God.’”
My mouth must be open, because Aaron says, “Right?”
“How did she know? Did they have ultrasound back then?”
He shrugs, eyes wide.
“Honey,” I say. “Dude.”
* * *
He agrees to see the doctor, the GP he hasn’t seen in six months. “Just to get referred for a scan,” he says. Aaron can never remember his name, so he calls him Dr. McLovin.
Aaron lies on his back on the exam table. The doctor palpates his gut. He touches, very lightly, the mass above the mass, as though cupping an infant’s head. “You’ve got a little baby in there,” he says.
We laugh. “That’s the joke.”
The doctor suggests an X-ray and an ultrasound. Then, on second thought, a CT scan. A CT scan should catch anything. It takes so long to schedule an ultrasound these days.
We schedule the CT scan for Monday.
* * *
Things have been better, no doubt. Long, lovely spans of weeks and weeks when my love is back, when he’s there. He bakes us our favorite pastry, strawberries and cream cheese tucked inside croissants. He speaks sweet nothings to the cat. He hides a plastic grasshopper in the fiddleleaf fig plant, making us scream, and then laugh.
So when it happens, it’s all the more painful, all the more clear: he’s himself, and then suddenly he’s not.
Half his face is purple now, deflating, the bloody nose collapsing into a bruised cheek. He opens his bathrobe to reveal the wings of his collarbone. Across his chest is a sprinkling of fresh lesions.
“Do you see the lettering?”
It does look like cuneiform, an ancient language tapped out on his skin. But I say, “Honey, it’s not lettering.”
“Or numbers.” He runs his finger along the marks on the ridge of his fist.
“It’s not a message.”
“It’s okay. It means I won’t be here for long.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It means I’ll be okay. I think it’s from my dad.”
* * *
I read with the boys before bed. Aaron’s on the couch, delirious. “I wish Dad could be here,” Nico says.
“I hope he can sleep,” Henry says.
“I know. I’m sorry he’s like this.” From the other room, I can hear him talking to himself. “He’ll be back to normal soon, okay?”
* * *
“The surface of this singular monster was covered with a quantity of sebaceous matter, such, in all respects as is often met with on the skin of infants recently born. When this was removed the creature appeared as rosy and as healthy as if it had been yet alive.”
In 1808, George William Young described in detail one of the earliest cases of fetus in fetu, in a chapter titled “Foetus in a Boy.” In the illustration plates, the parasitic twin looks like a yam-shaped organ folded in on itself. The twin has a penis but no anus, blood vessels but no brain. It has a foot. “It must be said,” writes the doctor, “that to this foot belong eight toes.”
One of the things that gets me about these parasitic twins: sometimes, their hair and nails don’t stop growing.
Usually, the mass is identified in a baby or child. The oldest person discovered to have a parasitic twin is a forty-seven-year-old man from Italy, who had an upper abdominal mass and “a familial history of twinning.” I do a double-take, reading the abstract. I request an interlibrary loan. When the article arrives, I read it for more signs. When the cystic mass was removed in 1989, it contained several ribs, some bones, an incisor, and two liters of “a viscous yellowish fluid with hairs.”
The mass was visible from birth, though, and it didn’t cause him any pain. Still, I imagine the Italian man is Aaron’s twin. I stage the sick C-section, the surgeons lifting the singular monster from Aaron’s body. I’ll watch from the other side of the blue sheet, breathless as a new parent, waiting for the doctors to deliver him, for life to begin.
The article about the other forty-seven-year-old man concludes: “the patient is in good health and leading a normal life.”
* * *
They say that twins have a connection, that one feels pain when the other feels pain. Twin telepathy.
This isn’t limited to twins, maybe. My mother used to tell me a story. In the seventies, when she and her siblings were grown, she woke up in Miami in the middle of the night with the gut feeling that something was terribly wrong. Her sister woke in Philadelphia with the same feeling. The next day, they found out that their younger brother, the one who years later would die of AIDS in San Francisco, had been mugged, stabbed in the stomach, while cruising in Central Park.
On Days of Our Lives, the long-married couple Bo and Hope share this sense of intuition. It’s like a spousal telepathy. Bo can sense when Hope is trapped in an elevator. Hope can sense when Bo has been in a car accident. When Aaron and I read each other’s minds, we say we’re having a Bo and Hope moment.
I’d like to say I feel Aaron’s pain. I can sense when he’s off, when he’s in distress. When I’m away from him, at my desk at work, sometimes I think: he’s not doing well. A gentle little pang in the belly, like a tug on the umbilical cord.
Sometimes, though, Aaron says, “If you could feel this pain for even a second…” He says, “You have no idea what kind of pain I’m in.”
* * *
By Halloween, Aaron has turned a corner, crashed: the transition phase. He sleeps on the couch, in a sleep that seems both deep and restless, while I take the boys trick-or-treating in the rain. Pennywise in a frog raincoat and boots. The Joker with an umbrella. Aaron wakes up to text, Don’t forget to take pictures, with a heart.
One of the kids we pass is wearing a long, black wig that covers his face. “I’m Cousin It,” he tells me, and I say, “Oh, I know,” but all I can think of is the fetus in fetu with the long, black hair, and then all I can think of is what a grotesque Halloween costume that would make. Nobody would know what you w
ere and everyone would be scared. Fetusinfetu, cousin of Nosferatu (another of Aaron’s favorite silent films from 1922). Fetusinfetu is your undead twin, haunting your abdominal cavity, sucking your blood from the inside. It is not fair that you were the one who got to live.
* * *
Dictionary.com lists three definitions for parasite:
an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.
(in ancient Greece) a person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.
* * *
For three days—not a week this time—Aaron sleeps on the couch. When he wakes, he sits but remains a stone. When I try to look at him, there is nothing in his eyes. There is very little more painful to me than this—not being able to find my love, who is right in front of me. Is this his pain I’m feeling, or mine?
I have a friend who is a physical therapist at a rural hospital not far from Ithaca. A few years ago an elderly patient was admitted with a huge, swollen belly. “Let’s get you scanned,” she told her. In the patient’s abdomen, doctors discovered a stone baby. A fetus, grown inside the uterus, dead and calcified for half a century.
These are the words I think of when I look at Aaron on the couch. He is awake but unmoving. Trapped in the womb. My stone baby.
* * *
You don’t have to have shared a placenta with someone to sense their pain. Some would say that empathy is what makes us human. But I think empathy was here, like parasites and the moon, before we were: a sixth sense, an intuition. The thrumming awareness that we are all connected to the smallest speck, the most distant stars, by the great umbilicus of the solar system, the orbits tossing and tearing us with the force of the tides. When we pay attention to things like parasites and the moon, we are paying attention to the fact that we are citizens of the universe. Most of being human is an effort to forget.
* * *
My next interlibrary loan is an article written in German and published in an Austrian medical journal. This time last year, Aaron and I were in Germany, where I downloaded Google Translate and marveled over my phone’s ability to magically mutate the words on my menu into English. Now I use the app to take pictures of the article, then watch the text transform. The ancient Greek “parasitos,” Dr. Andreas Hassl tells me, “possessed no fortune himself and no prospect of acquiring one.” Considered “the house fool”—a kind of jester—he was also “a flatterer and seducer of his host.” A sycophant.
(“The jokes are a front,” Aaron sometimes tells me, usually after someone tells him how funny he is. “If I were to act the way I felt inside, it would be a world of darkness.” This makes me incredibly sad for the parasitos.)
The parasitos was also considered a storyteller. In the work of Homer and Aristophanes, they were “immortalized as intriguers.” They spun long, comic tales. They were beloved for their entertainment, yet they were always apart.
The ancient Greek character of the parasitos resurfaced centuries later in Roman comedy, but the word “parasite” didn’t come into use in English until the days of Shakespeare, who extended its first definition. “The renaissance of the ancient term Parasit, however, does not lack a noteworthy degree of irony.” Hassl seems to ascribe the shift, with some exasperation, to poetically inclined scientists. “In a work written in 1646 by Sir Thomas Browne, there are folkloristic errors,” he laments. Browne started to use the term too figuratively, describing some plants as “parasitic” because they lived at the expense of other plants.
The fact that Mary Leitao, the mother of the young boy with “harsh hairs” on his back, revived the word “Morgellons” from the work of Sir Thomas Browne, does not lack a noteworthy degree of irony. I suspect she, too, was making a folkloristic error. I suspect I am making a number of them now.
How lovely, how baffling the world must have seemed to Sir Thomas Browne through the lens of the newly invented microscope. I can’t blame him for finding a metaphor there.
* * *
When Aaron wakes up from his ancient slumber, there is a kind of melting period, wherein he admits he is not made of stone. He says to me, in a who-am-I-kidding-voice, “I can’t do anything without you.” He hugs me in his size-small gray bathrobe, which can barely close over his big belly now. He corrects himself: “I don’t want to do anything without you.”
I’m relieved and moved by this small revision. This is the marriage I would sign up for: everything I have isn’t yours, but everything I have is better when shared with you.
For his abdominal scan Aaron changes into a pair of drawstring shorts and the puffy yellow jacket he bought in Germany. He is to have nothing but clear fluids that morning. He drinks vodka. “Vodka is a clear fluid,” he says.
* * *
The difference between a twin and a parasite is a parasite never wanted to be born. They want you alive so they can be alive. You are their safe and warm cosmos.
* * *
“Maybe we ourselves are organisms inside some cosmic superbeast,” Kathleen McAuliffe writes in This Is Your Brain on Parasites. “What we call the universe is nothing more than a bubble of flatulence in its monstrous, gurgling gut, and we can no more comprehend its complexity and purpose than E. coli could imagine what makes a human tick or fathom the vast expanse of time that separates its lifespan from our own.”
* * *
We call for the results of the CT scan. We are told to access the Patient Portal. From the couch downstairs, Aaron texts me a screenshot of the doctor’s note:
The report has a lot of small, incidental findings. Nothing of great concern.
* * *
By this time, the mass has receded. Vanished, like a twin. Aaron’s belly is as flat as a lake. Above his navel is the healing blister of a sun. Under his right nipple, a patch of pink.
* * *
Some call people on public assistance parasites on the system. In his job as a housing assistant, Aaron defended them. Now, he does not qualify for one kind of disability benefits because he did not work enough in the last ten years. He didn’t put enough into the system. He doesn’t qualify for the other kind of disability benefits because he is married to me, a person with sufficient income. I feed him. I house him. I feed and house his parasites. Some would call him my parasite. Perhaps that makes his parasites mine, too.
Where does his body end and mine begin? We can point to the epidermis, but the epidermis is porous. If we were a different kind of twins, conjoined, forged from the same yolky egg in the ocean of the womb, we might be born merged, sharing an organ or two. What then?
Anyway, marriage is a parasitic arrangement. I can no more change that than I can stop the earth from turning, or exorcise the invisible beast from my husband, or outsmart God.
* * *
I prefer to think of him as my parasitos, selected partner, immortalized intriguer, bringer of joy, giver of jokes, compliments, rhymes, stories at the dinner table, drawings and love notes and heart emojis and half-recorded songs. Isn’t this a kind of provision, a family nutriment? I like to think it’s worth something. I like to think it’s enough.
Still, there’s the ancient caste system. If he’s the intriguer, that makes me the intrigued. I’m the divine, the immortal, the one with the power. For his loyal entertainment I pay him with food and a roof and vodka. If I wanted, I could banish the mortal from my kingdom.
I prefer to think I’m the epic poet, immortalizing him, but maybe I am both.
* * *
If I shared this theory with Aaron, he would no doubt dismiss it on the grounds that the Ancient Greek social system also included pederasty, “the love of boys.”
* * *
More romantic, maybe, to just say he is my moon, or my sun, or I am his. Or maybe on
e of us is the Earth—who is the primary celestial body, and who the satellite?
With Aaron at the library, I spotted a book on the new shelf: The Moon. In it, Oliver Morton writes of moon landings, gravity, moon myths.
“It is generally true that, when the Moon is male, the Sun is female, and vice versa—‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon,’ as the Franciscans have it. Often the two are siblings. That said, they are also often lovers, and not infrequently both.”
We make metaphors of the moon, of the sun, in order to understand them, but they shine over their light-years back to our earthly relations: siblings, lovers. Metaphor tells us that everything is related, nothing is wasted, nothing alone, nothing beyond our measure. What to do then, with the excess? With the detritus of our home planet, the mistakes, the vestigial organs, the tumors and miscarriages and garbage islands, forests and bodies on fire? They are as manifest as the pockmarked face of the moon, which itself was a made thing, “born molten.” Its craters were formed from fountains of lava. They remind us that no metaphor is stable, that the cool slice of blue cheese in the sky was once fire.
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