by Unknown
The desperate poor sometimes pulp their own thighs or abdomen, because they saw—or hoped they saw—a faint blush under the skin, or felt a lump. I once saw a man whose face evaded all features limping up the street with blood in his shoes, daintily tweaking open his overcoat to proffer a putti still smutty with clotting blood and lymph, still half wed to what it was plucked from. A doll daubed red in a drenched paper towel. These are the lucky ones, who make it out of the house with a sales pitch and a stagger. Bitch Henry bled to death, a kitchen knife in his hand.
Worth less fresh, putti’s still a draw, and I’ve seen businessmen giddy at the cut-rate commodity empty their lunch bags on the sidewalk and slip a dribbling packet of red abortion in a suit pocket. The gutted host hunches off to the health project, where there’s a room always full these days, men and women laid out under the needle, like samplers awaiting cross-stitch Americana, houses and token cornstalks, verses cautionary or wry. Or he risks it unsewn with something else to sell, and limps to an hourly rates motel where someone pays top dollar to point his groin at the gash in the thigh, to press his thumbs on either side of the cut, part the rubbery banks lined with razed cells and “put the putti back.”
Users brag they can taste the putti’s past, can tell aesthete from prankster from the household handyman who keeps the pages of the newspaper lying smooth or prevents the cleanser from clumping. Never mind that—no one knows whether the putti do these things or do anything at all other than grow and wait. The tabloids are full of doctored photographs of putti on toadstools and bibles, guarding pilfered toothbrushes, bobby pins and wedding rings, like bower-birds. The science news is equally fantastic: scientists attempt to detect infinitesimal free-roving putti in their cloud chambers. Slice specimens like hot dogs. Dunk them in acid, cook them, crush them in presses, stretch them on racks, plant them, launch them into orbit, psychoanalyze them, irradiate, explode and oh most certainly smoke them.
Does the smoke transmit their seed? But users aren’t all carriers, nor the reverse. Where did the first putti come from? A graft, say some, information formed into flesh, a top-secret experiment run amok. A floppy disk gone sticky, sloppy. Self-propagating meat-friendly infochop. They have something to tell us, say some. But when will they speak?
Dr. Crane, amateur biologist, claims success with shock treatment. Stuck with electrodes and pumped full of juice, his specimens totter around jerking and sizzling, and choke out a few glottally inflected phrases in a wheeze that comes from no lungs, but from some pocket of air expiring under pressure, battered into consonants by whatever masses can come together like lip and tongue. He surrounds them with microphones and recording devices, he compiles glossaries of whoosh and hiss and analyzes them with a code-breaking program. He claims to have deciphered one such utterance as “Bring it to Jerome,” and makes much of this Jerome, whose name resounds with religious associations. The putti don’t stick around to make sure their message is understood. A few seconds at that voltage and they’re jerky, flamingo filet.
It is my elegy to Bitch Henry that reflective particles have been released from nozzles camouflaged with faux pigeon shit in the facades of the surrounding buildings and are forming a cloud that will take some hours to disperse (those experiencing respiratory difficulty will be issued oxygen masks in flattering pastels) and in moments you will see and here it is now from horizon to horizon a realistically tinted electron microscope image of a fraction of a centimeter of Henry’s skin, taken from his left hip by Dr. Crane some months before his death. Stroll under this flesh canopy lit by sourceless electron light while noshing on the scale models of human skin flakes and shed hairs provided gratis by the talented bakers of our catering service, enjoying the illusion that you are the size of dust mites or indeed of putti.
Look closely at the horny thickening around the base of the nearest magnified hair. Most scientists agree the putti have no means of locomotion and no sensible life as we know it, but observe: a putti lounges against the hair, his legs lolling wide, jaw askew. Another hangs on with one hand, swings wide, wrinkling his nose at the camera. Tinted too energetic a fuchsia. Phony, like A.C. Doyle’s fairies with their backwards shadows and fingertips lost to the scissors?
A pit opens in the surface nearby. Round and fuzzy viral bunnies are nudged into crevices three, four at a time, or cling to a ridge, contravening gravity. They’re dyed acid green. The purple hot dog buns are probably bacteria. Their needs are simple. This is their KOA, rugged enough to smack of the outdoors, but safe as houses. Wedged between bunnies, however, and with none of their outdoorsy freshness or beach ball/kitty toy esprit, the putti lounge on and under one another with opium negligence. They jam the crannies and festoon the ledges of the whorl. They’re a nest of earwigs, pincers agape with insouciance. They’re the Brownies without the will to fun. They’re beggars | with a trust fund. Someone should do something, rout them with a fingernail, hose them off the White House lawn. They issue in droves from strings of eggs, says the doctor, cruising each other, causing dandruff and waxy buildup, but only the ones that lodge a foot or a fist in a cranny will survive. The resultant abscess admits the putti further. Tucking head, shoulders, knee into the pocket, the putti extends itself until it is completely embedded and stretched to its full length, at which time it rests and stilly grows.
The doctor’s viewpoint is not widely shared. Please attend to an old but unsurpassed scientific treatise on the topic at hand: “Whether fanciful Stories of the Nesting habits of Putti have any basis in fact is doubtful. No Eggs have ever been found; nor is there any sign of organs in the putti capable of their production. Nor can this theory account for the sometime presence of the putti in places so far Internal to the human body that it is wonderful that Science ever thought she could explain this, by recourse to an account of such noble burrowing as rivals the excavation of the famed Sewers of Paris, in a creature as little given to energetic exertion as we have seen the Placid putti to be.”
Rival theories evoke the plant that sprouts new roots from its elbows where they touch down on the mulch. Filaments probe the tenderized meat around the putti and extend throughout the host, until the tip thickens and begins to scratch a seat for a new member. This fist of aggravated flesh twinges, “like teething all over”, victims report. The encysted putti grows steadily, sustained by the surrounding tissues, until it reaches its mature size of approximately three and one half inches, at which point the growing stops, though the putti continues to nourish itself, and retains its body mass up until the death of the host, or until it is removed by a surgeon or harvested, illegally, by traffickers.
Look down the alleys to observe our evocative tableaux: illustrating subsistence-level production techniques, the harvesters bend over their hutches, forked sticks dipping and turning. They wink over their shoulders as they work, with the eyes of babies, glossy and pudged. The peppery fumes fret the lids, enter the bloodstream and make the whole body thicker and meatier. The harvesters jut without letup. We fear them but we scrub ourselves scarlet in our beds dreaming of them; their dicks are said to be thicker and more pointed than most. Uncut, they breed pink devilish smegma. Jenny and Lydia, neighborhood whores and lovers, roll on double-thick condoms and cut open the sticky bag afterwards in motel ashtrays with their nail scissors to look for the spawn they think swim with the sperm. They hunch over the tray, laugh and dump it in the toilet, clear out.
In some people the putti are so close to the skin, or the skin so thin and so pale, that you can see their shapes, faint, like a minor rash or a blush that floods one spot with heat. These prodigies fill pages slick and reeking of chemicals; samples are available for viewing from the young man in the hairnet. But there are also the vain or pragmatic of both sexes who fake it, growing skilled with lipstick pencils, blush and powder, whose towels are a grotty carmine, whose wastebaskets are full of the putti’s imprint on folded tissues, waxy cream staining the pulped fibers. The Shroud of Thrin in Maybelline (“Scoundrel”, or “Cherries in t
he Snow”). Fetishists will pay to trace the outlines of these figments (real or not), these spelunkers of the body, these deep-tissue divers. They cup their hands over imaginary swellings and persuade themselves they feel something stirring.
And the fetishist who adores himself? He might scratch the itch with just the tip of the knife at first, a white tracing that becomes a welt that becomes a runnel that becomes a gash, until the tip touches flesh that doesn’t touch back, and pries it out: a tiny greasy badger, a hairless hamster. Men who snuck off in the jungle to scratch their thighs with sharp sticks and dab Kotex on the wounds, lying on their sides in their own menstrual huts and moaning to the moon, are now in luck. They jab their biceps with fake knives, bleed and cry, clench their muscle and force out a little red whippersnapper, never mind that it’s brainless and doesn’t resemble Daddy. Wash it, hang it upside down, slap its butt if pantomime appeals to you. The world is reconfigured: the womb is anywhere flesh is.
Some say the putti is a child that will not be born, that likes it in there. Some say the putti is a child that hates the world, and crawls back in to chew the womb in vengeance. Some say the putti is a sickness we have mistaken for a message. Some say the putti is a message we are treating like a sickness. Like locoweed, like mistletoe, it hangs on without ambition. It breeds without desire. It multiplies because it’s good at that. Bit by bit your flesh becomes another’s. Nothing is subtracted, just estranged.
Please remember: it’s no parable. The putti are stuff. They’re not even as malignant as a tapeworm; they’re vegetable, calm as carrots. Your own organs may be combative, aggravated, fibrillating over diddly-squat. They’ve got the heebie-jeebies, the willies, the shakes. Your putti, on the other hand: solid. Did they come from outer space, did shoals of pink spores die on Pluto, die on Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, before they hit our hospitality? So what? They’ve got neither cortex nor Cortez. If they have a will to power, it’s a program appended to their DNA, a genetic cruise control; the dial is fused to its setting, the needle is stuck.
We can’t stop talking about the putti, but they keep mum. Who killed Bitch Henry? Not they. The putti have no plans. They’re a thickening at the point of intersection of our obsessions. Our desires have become pregnant with matter. People are not thingly enough: vision eclipses the eye, the sense of touch retracts the hand, words recant lips. It’s easy to love a thought, but we want flesh unperplexed with mind. It is not human, but to slice it from the human exacts a mortal cost.
Our handsome guards will feel you up as you exit. Please empty your pockets to make their job easier and more enjoyable.
Dr. Skelley Jackson
THE OBSCURE MEDICAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
AS REVEALED BY THE LAMBSHEAD POCKET GLIDE
by Dr. Stepan Chapman M.D., D.V.M., D.Z.L.
Part One: THE EARLY EDITIONS, 1921–1938
The illustrious Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead earned his first medical degree in 1918 at the tender age of eighteen years. He was the youngest graduate ever matriculated to that date by Oxford Medical College.
Dr. Lambshead served internships at Combustipol General Hospital of Devon and at the St. Agnes Charity Clinic of Edinburgh. Then began his years abroad, years of almost constant wanderlust and travel, as the doctor pursued a hectic pan-global career of private practice and public health consultation work. The erratic progression of his forwarding addresses never deterred him from sending steady streams of long discursive letters to his far-flung network of correspondents.
In early 1921, while involved in the design phase of an innovative sewage treatment plant in Calcutta, Dr. Lambshead circulated the single-stapled hectographed pages of his first collection of obscure disease abstracts. He had typed it himself and made rather a mess of the job. “Thought you might like to see these,” is scrawled in wax pencil across one copy of the first edition. Some of the abstracts were gathered from neglected comers of medical literature. Many were personal accounts of novel disorders that were nowhere to be found in the literature—accounts that the doctor gathered from the letters he’d received.
These circulars evolved into center-stapled pamphlets and finally into book-length reference volumes. Private publication of the thick leather-bound editions of the 1930s were financed and overseen by Dr. Lambshead’s college friend, John Trimble—bon vivant, Arctic explorer, outlaw anthropologist, and sole heir to the Trimble Fisheries fortune.
In all its forms, the Guide has been an invaluable resource for thousands of hard-working physicians the world over. From Nome to Istanbul, from Madagascar to Ulan Bator, on land and on sea, the Guide has proven its value under the most rigorous field conditions and on the wards of the most sophisticated hospitals. When a doctor lost in the Congo rainforests with only a few antibiotics and feral pygmy elephants for company cannot diagnose his odd spinal condition, he reaches for his handy copy of the Guide. When a family practice doctor cannot understand why a patient of 30 years with no history of mental defect suddenly begins to mimic inanimate objects, she turns to the reliable Guide.
It is equally true that by their failure to consult the Guide, some M.D.s have let their patients down. Many patients have slipped away who might have been saved by a G.P. familiar with the Guide. Many have been crippled by undetected parasites or bacteria that might have been extirpated if only the attending surgeon had taken the time to do a little basic research in the Guide.
Crucial events in the conduct of world affairs and in the lives of great men have been profoundly affected by the Guide. But more importantly, it can always be relied on for accurate reportage, even when “the official story” of a case is merely a tissue of fabrications. A cavalcade of examples spring to mind, leaping to our attention from the annals of that convulsive century so recently concluded—the Twentieth.
Polio And Influenza, 1916–1918
It seems prophetic that the Guide’s first edition included the first accurate diagnoses of two recent epidemics, falsely identified by the historical record as Paralytic Polio and Spanish Influenza.
In 1916, New York City was rocked by a terrifying outbreak of what seemed to be polio. Dr. Geraldine Carter, (who would later edit The Guide Psychotropic Balkan Diseases,) rode a train into this maelstrom of hysteria, armed only with her little black bag. She soon realized that the fever had no connection to Poliomyelitis. By means of her unique methods of dietary analysis, Dr. Carter determined that the fever was a new form of Vasospasmolytic Otodysneuria, resulting from the recent introduction of chemical stabilizers into the city’s baked goods. Her research findings, previously denied publication, appeared in the 1921 Guide, badly typed onto smudgy hectograph stencils by Dr. Lambshead. Thus, an unacknowledged medical mystery was finally solved.
The so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 claimed a larger number of lives than the Great War. It was the indomitable Dr. Buckhead Mudthumper of Pretoria, South Africa, who penetrated the actual nature of this infection. He first encountered it while serving as a field surgeon for the German military. He was unconvinced that airborne microbes of any kind were at work. He experimented with the invalid soldiers in his care, trying out various combinations of his idiosyncratic vaccines. By lateral diagnostics he was able to unmask the true pathogen—a Tunisian skin mite that deposited toxic histamines in the hair follicles of its hosts.
In 1921, the true nature of the pandemic was made public in the Guide, thanks to the unprejudiced mind of Dr. Mudthumper, who would soon begin to assemble his voluminous Encyclopedia of Forgotten Asian Diseases.
Dr. Carter’s and Dr. Mudthumper’s publications came too late to lessen the loss of life and limb associated with the two aforementioned health crises. But after 1921, again and again, the Guide would be there when a bewildered M.D. needed it most.
Margaret Sanger, 1921
Consider the case of Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control education. In 1921, she bravely opened her first clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Late in the year, she was struck down by a
perplexing anemia complicated by Anginoform Hemophilia. Happily, her physician, Dr. Isaac Borodini, remembered a certain article in the first edition of the Guide, elucidating the radical inoculation techniques of Mr. Randolph Johnson, author of Confessions of a Disease Fiend. The article inspired Dr. Borodini to attempt a Johnsonian strategy in the treatment of Miss Sanger’s anemia. The introduction of a blood-thickening spirochete arrested the patient’s symptoms and maintained her in a fragile but ambulatory state for decades.
Franz Kafka, 1924
Other patients weren’t so lucky. Consider the alleged Tuberculosis of Franz Kafka, first diagnosed in 1917, terminal in 1924. Any close reader of the Guide’s second edition could have told his benighted therapists that Kafka never had Tubercle Bacillus. His was clearly a case of Polyretinoidal Ink Poisoning, indicating a long history of compulsive ink drinking. If all those health sanatoriums had simply forbidden him the use of ink bottles, a great writer might have lived to a ripe old age.
Kafka’s biographies have good company in their flagrant inaccuracy. Lou Gehrig never had Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Woody Guthrie never had Huntington’s Chorea. Those American Legionnaires in Philadelphia never had Legionnaire’s Disease, because there’s no such thing. And Shirley Temple was a midget. Little if any of this valuable medical information would reach the public if not for the Pocket Guide.
Roald Amundsen, 1925
In 1925, Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, attempted to fly two Domier-Wal dirigibles across the North Pole. The expedition was forced to turn back by mechanical problems, or so Amundsen claimed when he returned to Norway and thunderous international acclaim. A year later, his party completed a successful polar crossing.16