The Normals

by David Gilbert

  24

  THERE IS, Billy thinks, a comfort here, in the routine, in the hourly drift, in the purposeless purpose of the AHRC. The slight twist of a side effect (a ghost shadow here, an imagined murmur there) reminds him of the drama going on inside his body, a sort of suspense as he waits for the next creep. Otherwise, he's sleepy and pleasantly removed from the process of survival. The sticky details of life are gone. All he has to do is swallow and bleed.

  Meals, like lunch on Thursday, simply appear on his tray, well balanced and nutritious, the daily values hitting 100 percent and measured for a healthy diet of two thousand calories. Done. No longer is there any panic when morning, noon, or night rolls around and a decision has to be made. What to eat? Just feeding himself can crush Billy with bother. Particularly lunch. Lunch is the bane of his mealtime existence. So many questions seem involved with lunch. An early lunch or a late lunch? A big lunch and then a small dinner or a small lunch and then a big dinner? Maybe no lunch and then a really big dinner? Lunch puts him in alimental limbo where he wanders the streets hoping for an answer. Make a fucking sandwich, Sally might say, Sally always decisive, Sally's desire providing breakfast and dinner. But for lunch, Billy is on his own. Here in the AHRC lunch is delivered hassle-free and today it's macaroni and cheese, which Billy accepts from the cafeteria staff—"Thank you so much"—as if love did the melting.

  Comfort continues back in his room, as Billy digests with cable television and air-conditioning. These luxuries come without charge. No bills will follow. No tabs will remind him how fast the month ends. No due dates. No checking-account fears. No need for stamps never in supply. And on the opposite end of comfort, there's no litter, no recycling, no separating the garbage into paper, metal, plastic, and glass, no questions about what is deemed salvageable. No trash piling up in the corner. No worries about cockroaches and mice. Consumption has no refuse and the supplies are endless. No grocery shopping. No thousand products for the same thing. No going to the store for just a roll of toilet paper and trying to make this purchase with dignity. No milking the last skim of soap. No cleaning. No false promises of tackling the grime tomorrow. Billy can sit in the bathroom, like he is right now, and do his business with pure ease of mind. On Monday a janitor will roll through with a wet mop. Towels will be laundered without lugging a duffel to a Laundromat five blocks away, without begging for quarters, without the washer-dryer politics and the lame attempts at folding. Twice a week bedsheets are changed while Billy is somewhere else, the only evidence of this mysterious event being a fresh green shirt on a crisp pillowcase.

  Even Lannigan is of some comfort. His foolish full-body shave is almost endearing, as is the way he talks to himself right now. "That's a good question," he says though neither Billy nor Do has asked him anything. "I was fascinated by the character." He speaks barely above a whisper but loud enough to be heard. "This character," he continues, "is a character I've never seen before on-screen, and I really wanted to sink my teeth into the part. More for my soul than for anything else, because, honestly, my last few movies have been soul crushing. Successful, sure, but not deeply satisfying projects. And for this role my soul had to be totally invested. I needed my kidneys, my liver, my heart; all my internal organs had to be on board for my performance to register. It was almost like I needed to be one of those swamis who can control their pulse. I needed that level of control. Transcendence." Lannigan smiles like a newborn who leaves you wondering if it's anything more than gas. "I'll tell you, and this is the God's honest truth, I've never been so scared about a part, about doing justice to a part. Because this is great writing. It is. This is, this is, well, art. I honestly believe that. This is Shakespeare if the guy were living in Hollywood and his first screen credit was Hamlet. You know I'm doing Hamlet, my Hamlet. Very exciting, but that's another question. Anyway, this script set a very high bar and I could either rise to the occasion or crash and burn in front of the whole world." Pause. "Well, thank you." A longer pause. "I really wasn't fishing for a compliment but that's very nice of you."

  "What are you talking about?" Billy asks, more charmed than annoyed.

  "Huh?"

  "What are you going on about?"

  "You were listening?"

  "You were talking."

  "Softly," Lannigan says.

  "Loud enough."

  "I was interviewing myself. Sometimes I do that. I just know I could give a really great interview if given half the chance. I could be funny or earnest. I could talk about the jobs I had before I made it big. Waiter, of course, but also a masseuse with absolutely no training. For real. I just faked it, rub-rub-rubbed like I knew what I was doing, even improvised this Nepalese deep-tissue technique. And I was good. I had clients who swore by me. And I was also a private eye for a year, another job that requires no certification. A dog walker, then a dog trainer, though that was me being cocky. A model, but not the glamorous kind. An assistant stylist. A personal shopper. I was briefly but fondly part of a posse when a friend of an acquaintance became famous for like a millisecond and needed bodies to bulk up his club presence. Okay, that's a lie, but you see, I can lie as well. I can spew the most fabulous bullshit. Right now I could lecture on anything for an hour. Give me a topic. Anything. Israel. Uhm, Diet Coke versus Diet Pepsi. I'm on a roll. Screw expertise, it's all about presentation." His browless eyes are manic, like lamps without shades lighting a nighttime of obsessive work. "I have such good answers to questions nobody asks."

  Yes, Billy is fine with Lannigan.

  Do is all right, too. Sure, he's a mess, but Billy feels protective of him and defends him against Lannigan's jibes. He's sort of his man Friday if Friday were a Monday morning in New York. Every hour or so Billy asks for the time in Luke, and Do obliges, and they try reading in the words something meaningful. They've also discovered Lannigan's weak spot: the Health Channel, in particular, Inside the Operating Room, a show that goes into graphic detail on different varieties of surgical procedure. Today is cosmetic surgery day. This causes Lannigan to cover his face and scream, "C'mon, we're not watching this." But Billy and Do hold firm, like they're backing away Dracula with a crucifix. Soon enough Lannigan abandons the room for less squeamish environs.

  "Much better," Billy says.

  "Much much better," Do answers.

  They stay tuned against his return and watch three hours of plasty. They absorb an hour of liposuction, where the patient, Nathaniel, a lawyer from San Bernardino, wants to do away with his love handles. "I work out," he says in a prologue that shows him running on the beach, lifting weights. "But no matter what, I have this spare tire. I've been told it's recalcitrant fat and beyond my control." The entire liposuction process is shown, from consultation to surgery to post-op results, with the bulk of the time spent in the operating room where a doctor brutalizes Nathan's unconscious flesh with something misnomered a "wand." It's the same with Kimm's eye tuck and Charlotte's cheek sculpting and Todd's hairline resection and Pat's nose job/chin implant/ ear pin. It's like an afternoon talk show under the knife. Next week is breast week. It must be sweeps, Billy thinks.

  "Billy," Do asks during dermabrasion.

  "Yeah?"

  "Does your mouth ever water when you smell shit?"

  "Uhm."

  "Or is that an insane question to ask? It is, isn't it?"

  "Well, no."

  Yes, Billy likes Do.

  And there's always Joy, Joy after breakfast, Joy, like now, after dinner, Billy talking with her through the span of his blood. "I'm starting to like it here," he says. "I'm content. Interesting people. Decent food. TV. Mind-altering drugs. It's like college all over again."

  "Wait until Saturday," she says.

  "PK day?"

  "Yep."

  "It'll give us more time to chat," he says.

  Joy disconnects the test tube from the cannula.

  "Can I feel it?" Billy asks.

  "What?"

  "The test tube."

  "I suppose." Joy hands i
t over, and Billy palms it like some sleight of hand will commence and the object will—voila!—end up in her ear. But Billy knows no tricks.

  "It's warm," he says.

  "What'd you think, it'd be cold?"

  "Can I keep it?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "You could take another," Billy says. "And I could keep this one."

  "It's hazardous human waste material," Joy tells him.

  "That quick, huh?"

  "The second it leaves your body."

  Billy hands back the test tube with exaggerated care. "What do you do with the excess blood, after all the research has been done?"

  "I really don't know."

  "Is it buried deep in the desert, in yellow skull-ridden drums, or is it just poured down the drain?"

  "We're finished. You can go, Mr. Schine."

  "Alas," he says. As he leaves, he passes a Time magazine tossed aside on a countertop. On the cover is the MRI of Charles Savitch, SECOND COMING OR COMING ATTRACTION? written across the bottom. "Jeez," he says to Joy, "Time, she is a-slumming."

  "No dawdling."

  "Can I just read this article?"

  "Take the whole magazine but leave."

  "A gift, thank you."

  "More like a bribe for you to go."

  "I'll take it any way it comes." Billy departs, pleased.

  Yes, he thinks, these daily moments with Joy are pleasant.

  And, of course, there is Gretchen. Billy passes her room, peeks inside, "Hello."

  Gretchen lounges not quite lovely in bed, the weather swirling in front of her, like Isis if Isis were in the witness protection program after ratting out the syndicate of gods. She spots Time in his hand and asks, "Is your mail being forwarded?"

  "I borrowed it from Joy."

  "What's on the cover?"

  Billy breezes in under sail of Charlie Savitch.

  "What is it, the disease of the year issue?" Gretchen's hands are all gimme. As she rips through the pages—in some cases, literally—Billy imagines touching the tip of her nose, feeling the pinch of arrowlike cartilage, her face the bow. "Are you getting excited for the big inter­view?" she asks.

  "Not really. But I suppose I will."

  "I can't wait," she says.

  Kiss her, Billy thinks, disarm her jaw with a little kiss, a tester kiss, a floater, almost filial, no tongue, no lip even, just kiss her cheek or forehead and immediately apologize, if need be, though who knows, she might raise her chin and lock her hands around his neck and hum an electric trill of climb-deep-inside-my-throat, and in the pause before full-on face sucking, romantic banter might percolate (Billy: "I don't know if what I'm feeling is a side effect or the real thing." Gretchen: "Love is the biggest adverse event there is") as he strokes her hair and smiles on the strange circumstances of fate, while the weatherman points to the radar and the turbulent swath of green that's soaking the Midwest and is heading toward the northeast.

  "Can you believe this?" Gretchen says of the picture showing the pilgrims in front of the Savitch home.

  Billy nods, the idea of the kiss having passed.

  "What are they expecting?" she says. "Cancer as salvation, as a gift from God?"

  "Who knows?" Billy watches her skim the article, Time spread in front of her face like this is an X ray of her own head, and it shows his own face shadowing her brain, an all-encompassing thought, his eyes and mouth inhabiting her desire, lips puckering into a prompt that would lead him toward her bed—Billy, come here, I want you —and have him gently lower the magazine from her grasp and reveal, in humdrum glory, the original. But Chuck is Chuck, and Billy is Billy, and he asks Gretchen, "If you could have any disease, what would it be?"

  "What disease would I want?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't want a disease," she says.

  "It could be from any era," he explains. "Tuberculosis, the plague."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't want any disease," Gretchen says.

  "You never think about it?"

  "No."

  "Even as make-believe, like a poet with consumption in the nineteenth century."

  "No, sorry."

  "Like for me, it's Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. That's what I'd pick."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Lesch-Nyhan syndrome," Billy repeats. "It's a hereditary condition that affects purine metabolism. It does all sorts of horrible things to you, the most horrible being a tendency toward self-cannibalization. You compulsively bite your fingers and hands, your arms, whatever your teeth can get their grip on. You basically try to eat yourself. Lips, tongue, toes."

  Gretchen flinches. "How gruesome."

  "Even worse, it only affects children."

  "You eat yourself to death?"

  "No, you die from a host of other things."

  "I've never heard of the disease."

  "It's rare, thank God," Billy tells her. He only knew of the disease because of a book his parents had, a circa 1950s child care book aptly titled Is Your Child Sick? It listed symptoms, the possible diagnosis, and the best treatments, and wedged in the middle, like a slice of fatty ham, were fifteen pages of pictures in black and white. The last picture was of a boy restrained in bed and surrounded by doctors. A black bar covered his eyes. To a nine-year-old Billy, it was frightening, that Lone Ranger mask without the William Tell overture, without Tonto and "Kemo Sabe," without "Hi-yo, Silver, away," none of that which pleased him on lazy Saturday morning when the local public TV station dipped into the past, Flash Gordon not far behind, Superman, shows that thrilled fathers now thrilling sons. But this black mask didn't disguise anything. Suffering was not a secret identity. And Billy, haunted, found his father and said, "I think I might have this."

  His father, instantly bothered: "What?"

  Billy showed him the boy.

  "Lesch what?" Abe said. "Don't be silly."

  "I think I might have it," Billy maintained.

  "You don't."

  "But I might."

  The weight of a ridiculous belief sagged Abe's shoulder. "It's very rare," he said.

  "But I think I have it."

  "You're being silly. You're a healthy boy," he said with what seemed like disdain.

  "But I could get it."

  "You're not going to get it."

  "There's still time."

  "You would've been born with it," Abe said. "It would've been instantly known."

  "I'll fight it," Billy promised. "I'll do my best not to chew up my fingers. At night you might have to tie me to my bed."

  "Enough, Billy."

  "I already chew my nails. Who knows what's next?"

  "Billy—"

  "But what would you do if I got it?"

  Abe's eyes were as anonymous as that boy's black bar. "What would I do? What could I do? It's a silly question. You're not sick. You're fine. Now enough of this and give me that book."

  And that was that.

  But instead of going into that with Gretchen, Billy simply says, "I don't even know if Lesch-Nyhan is relevant anymore, what with sonograms and amniocentesis."

  "But why would you want a disease like that?" she asks.

  "I don't know," Billy says, realizing he's wandered far afield from flirtation.

  "You shouldn't wish that sort of thing on yourself," Gretchen tells him. "Even if you're being provocative or something, which I can appreciate, nothing good comes from being sick. I keep on thinking about the people who might take this drug we're testing, you know, down the road might benefit from our participation. Not to be schmaltzy, but I feel like I'm one of a thousand helping hands lifting them up to their feet and brushing the confusion from their shoulders. It's like when they take their meds they'll be taking a little piece of me. Okay, maybe that's schmaltzy, but we're healthy, thank God. Don't begrudge it. At some point you'll get sick, and you'll die—don't worry, you'll have that opportunity. But right now you're healthy. You should be glad for it. I, for one, am glad you've got all of your fingers and all of your toes."


  Gretchen tilts her head toward Billy, hits the mark where her face does wonders with light. Eyes ripple as though a mirage from the heat betwen the beds, the air near his chest wobbling until his sternum feels like it's collapsed into a wormhole and this woman could climb in and pick and choose any Billy from any moment in time because she owns them all and understands every last one.

  And though he doesn't kiss her and soon enough leaves for his own bed, he thinks, yes, this place isn't a bad place to be.

  25

  THERE ARE scars, though not many, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. There is John Bunyan and Mr. Valiant-for-Truth who says of his scars, that they will be carried with him, to be a witness for the battles he's fought. There is Lord Macaulay talking of Boswell's Life of Johnson and that dazzling face seamed with the scars of disease. And there is Shakespeare and Henry's Saint Crispin's Day speech where the happy few, the band of brothers, will strip their sleeve and show the scars gained on the feats of that day. Billy lies in bed, nearing a nap, his head filled with scars, literary and worse. Perhaps Bartleft's has more scars, but the ODQ only has three. Frank Gershin, Billy thinks, has them all beat.

  That morning in the lounge, Friday morning, Billy watched a docu-reality program about maternity wards in various hospitals nationwide. "Maybe they'll show some vag" was the crowd's impetus for staying tuned, but the impetus soon gave way to the natural drama of labor and delivery as well as the power of good editing. All the normals were on edge as woman after woman gave birth under a variety of circumstances. There was consensus concerning its miracle, its positively science fiction quality. Then Stew Slocum jumped to his feet as if catapulted by cushion and said, "I'll show you labor and pain." He pulled his shirt over his attention-starved head. Across his chest was a tattoo of claws ripping through flesh and rib cage. The gore was rendered with all the precision of Gray's Anatomy. A section of collarbone was visible and an angry red eye of an unknown beast peeked below a bloodied nipple. "I was under the needle for two full days," he told everybody with pride. His sternum was sunken, the pallor of collapsed souffle, and while Billy could appreciate the art, the torso brought to mind rickets instead of viciousness.