by Ryan Schow
He hands me my phone and whispers, “When you’re ready, hit SEND.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s going to be epic,” he says, grinning. “Trust me.”
2
I look down on my phone and in the text box it reads, “OMG, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHO PROFESSER TELLER IS SLEEPING WITH!”
Without thinking, I hit SEND and the phone—now on silent mode—shows it’s been sent. Brayden nods toward Cameron, who’s fishing her phone out of her pocket when Professor Teller isn’t looking. She pushes a button and that’s when it happens: the best thing ever.
The phone farts.
Not quiet, not fake sounding, but a true wet blaster loud enough to make a few people jump. Cameron’s face blisters as she frantically tries to silence the phone. Heads turn her way so fast it’s a miracle no one breaks their neck. One of the guys near her mumbles, “That’s disgusting Cameron,” and everyone else chimes in. A girl next to Cameron holds her nose and waves her hands like it stinks and says, “Just in case.” My insides are breaking apart with laughter and I want to cry and cheer at the same time. Honestly, it’s all I can do to stay quiet.
Then Brayden says, “Mr. Teller, can Cameron please be excused to go to the bathroom?” and everyone starts howling.
Professor Teller looks at Cameron and says, “You should probably go before I get deeper into my lecture, Ms. O’Dell.”
“I don’t have to go, Professor Teller, it was a joke—”
“Explosive diarrhea is nothing to joke about,” Brayden says. “You should totally go so you don’t interrupt class anymore.”
“Shut up, dog,” she snarls.
“Woof, woof,” Brayden taunts, making that stupid looking grin of his at her.
Just below the roar of laughter, Professor Teller says, “Great, I’ve completely lost control of my class.”
Just after class lets out, Brayden says, “Don’t tell anyone about the fart app. I don’t want it getting out that you and I did this or we won’t be able to do it anymore. My goal is to be able to use it all semester long. I’m working on hijacking the ring tone function for an updated app. This app would upload the fart into ring tones, set it as the default tone, then turn the ringer to its loudest setting. All you have to do is make a call, and boom, it’s poopy-pants out loud. No having to read a text to activate it. ”
“That’s awesome, Brayden, but won’t Cameron know my phone made the call?”
“Nope. I blocked the real number, created a false number. All nines. She’ll never know. No one will ever know.”
“Genius,” I say, wondering how this is possible. A smile breaks across my face at the memory of Cameron’s embarrassment. “Class-A freaking genius.”
“I’m also working on making it automatically redial without tying up your phone. For the Cameron O’Dell’s of the world, one good fart deserves another. And another. And perhaps another.”
If Brayden wasn’t so damn unattractive, I’m thinking I could fall in love with him. Serious. I totally could. But he isn’t, so I can’t.
3
After sixth period and a guilty laugh with Georgia and Bridget about Cameron’s gastric “accident” in class, we make plans for dinner, then I head over to see Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard. His office is part of the main building and is located in the school’s inner courtyard. The grounds here are perhaps more beautiful and serene than any other place on campus. A veritable heaven on earth. With the hypnotic sounds of a gigantic fountain (aptly modeled after the world-famous Trevi fountain in Rome, but on a far smaller scale), the tranquility of the surrounding gardens and the gentle sweep of a late afternoon breeze across my face, I almost don’t even bother with the doctor. I just want to sit on one of the many stony benches surrounding it and listen to the water. Perhaps after my mystery appointment.
The front door of Dr. Gerhard’s office bears a decorative placard with two names printed in raised gold lettering: Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard, M.D.; Arabelle Diederich, N.P. Inside, an unnaturally attractive black haired nurse with brilliant purple eyes that I can’t stop looking at (are those contacts or is she a freaking alien?) says Dr. Gerhard will be with me in a moment. Her voice is distinctly Russian. When I look at her face, she could be a doll for all the emptiness it holds. I can’t tell if she’s seventeen or thirty; not a single wrinkle mars her milky white skin. She sees me seeing her. She blinks. Then nothing. It’s creepy. Pulling my eyes from her so as not to be rude—because in truth I am probably as strange looking to her as she is to me (except she’s gorgeous and I’m a hideous cow)—I look around the waiting room. The office colors are pale yellow and black with cream accents and chocolate brown furniture as nice as the furniture we have in our home in Palo Alto.
This is the nicest physician’s office ever.
I pick up a magazine and mindlessly flip through the pages. I could care less what I see. I just want to keep my hands and mind busy, even though all I can think about is those amethyst eyes. When five minutes pass, I drop the magazine, stand up and head to the reception window where the sexy, zombie nurse sits. Behind her are several filing cabinets set against the cream colored walls. Her eyes lift and meet mine. Cold, but not mean. Indifferent. Her surrounding work space looks so clean you could probably lick any part of it and still come away healthier than when you started.
“Do you know what this is about?” I ask, sliding the note across the counter. She looks at it, then looks up at me.
“The doctor would like to see you,” she says.
“Yes, I know. That much information I deduced for myself, thank you. What I’m asking is why am I here? Is this standard procedure for new students? Is there a stomach flu going around? Have I contracted AIDS through some airborne contagion? Or mad cow’s disease from the goats milk in the cafeteria?”
I look at her; she looks at me. A bucket full of nothing. Maybe she really is a doll. Those gorgeous eyes blink once, twice—nothing. My eyes slide down her face, to the porcelain white skin of her unmarked neck, and there is the steady pulse beating against the skin. Okay, so she’s neither a zombie nor a doll. She’s alive.
“So, no help?” I say.
“The doctor will be with you shortly,” she says. The smile she makes is so flat it looks phony, like there’s miles of emptiness behind it. Like if you gaze too far beyond her eyes you might see eons of dark, emotionless space.
“You have nice teeth,” I tell her. “They’re practically perfect.”
Her smile fades. She blinks twice, robotic. “Thank you.”
I blink twice, let the muscles in my face fall as flat as her smile and say, “You’re welcome.”
We stare at each other for maybe ten seconds, maybe less. The time feels forever long. Nothing. I check her neck. Still a pulse. Defeated, I return to my seat and sit down, pick up the same magazine, skim the same pages. Seeing everything. Seeing nothing. Waiting.
Five minutes, or perhaps six, pass and then the doctor emerges with a student I don’t recognize from any of my classes who looks somewhat happy. Or maybe he’s just been tranquilized. Shot up with medicine to make the world feel bright again, washed in happiness.
The doctor smiles at me, and my eyes zero in on the small gap between his front two teeth. His smile is pleasant enough. He is not a tall man, and he wears a white lab coat that looks a size too big. With thick black hair swept neatly across his forehead, he extends his hand and says, “Hello, Savannah, I’m Doctor Wolfgang Gerhard” in a noticeable German accent that makes my skin crawl. The word Nazi comes to mind. I watch the History Channel a lot, so I know about World War Two, the Auschwitz death camps and men who look like this. While trying to clear my brain of presuppositions and judgments, my mouth makes some kind of smile, one that feels as plastic and as insincere as the nurse’s vacant smile.
“Hi,” I say.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” he says. “Thank you for taking your time to see me.” I ask him what this is regarding and he says, “Your father didn�
�t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“About me. About the advances we made in behavior therapy with relation to many of the more common physical and mental disorders children your age are suffering from.”
“He must’ve skipped that part.”
“Oh, my sincerest apologies. Please, come back to my office where we might discuss these advances in private.” He steals a quick glance at the purple-eyed nurse at the desk, who isn’t paying attention to us. He returns his eyes to me. His smile widens. I can’t stop seeing the gap in his teeth. And I don’t like being referred to as a child. I know I’m not an adult, but I’m not a gosh damn child either.
I follow him through a door, down a hallway, then into what looks like his office. He takes a seat behind his large, dark inlaid walnut desk and says, “Would you care for something to drink?”
My eyes peruse a bookcase to my left. Lots of books. All look like they’ve been read at one point or another, and some perhaps more than once.
“No, thank you.”
While he pours himself a glass of water from a mini-fridge behind his desk, I look around the room, pausing again on the gigantic bookcase on the adjacent wall. Upon closer inspection, I see medical journals galore, books on behavioral modification, psychology, and a large blue book on mental disorders. The doctor removes a small container of loose ice cubes from a mini-freezer that sits beside the mini-fridge. With a pair of frosted ice tongs, he collects four perfect cubes, one at a time, setting each of them gently into his water glass. The popping sounds of the ice makes me thirsty. He returns the tongs to their place and the ice cube container to the mini-freezer looking satisfied with himself. One sip of his water, a sigh of relief in his features, and I can feel him unwinding.
“It’s the end of my day,” he says. “Please, forgive me for showing my fatigue.”
“Why am I here?”
“Your father says it’s time you come off your medications and receive a more permanent cure for your…ailments.”
“That would be nice. But it’s not like my father can’t afford the very best care for me already. What have you got that’s any different from what I’ve been taking?”
“Outside Astor Academy, you receive the same drugs anyone else receives no matter the measure of your father’s wealth or the pedigree of the doctor you have collectively chosen. This is not the case here. We are not burdened by the FDA’s oversight, and our budget for research and development is a hundred times that of conventional research and development companies. Over the decades I’ve made impossible strides in the field of somatic human genetic engineering, which is how I am able to cure specific, isolated problems and disorders at the cellular level. In so many words, your DNA was corrupted from the time you were in the womb, and these subtle, very natural mutations are responsible for the bulk of your problems.”
Great, the burly sow is now a genetic mutant, armed only with the power to feel sorry for herself. He has an open file sitting before him. I see my name and what looks like my medical records, complete with a long history of prescribed medications.
“Your medications treat your symptoms, but they are not the cure. Your blood tests prove that.”
“You’ve looked at my blood?” He nods, gestures at the file. “Oh.”
“Think of it this way. If you get a cut, you put a band-aid on it so it doesn’t get infected, but the band-aid doesn’t heal your cut. Your body does that. This is the same with your social anxiety disorder, your poor metabolism, your eye sight—really anything else you’re taking medication for or have had problems with. Since your DNA has minor…deficiencies, your body can’t correct the disorders, which is why you sought outside treatment in the first place. It is elements within your DNA that, in fact, bear a certain responsibility for these deficiencies, so it is the DNA we must cure. What I am going to do is recalibrate your genetic makeup so you will never need another medication again.”
“Okay.” I’m only half listening because my stomach is growling with hunger pangs. The clock says four-thirty eight. It would be nice to change clothes before going to dinner. No, the way I stink, what I’m going to need is a hot shower and fresh deodorant.
“Miss Van Duyn, I will tell you something most people don’t know, not because they are ignorant, but because of years of conditioning. When you think of doctors, you are conditioned to associate them with health and healing, right?”
I nod my head, thinking, where is this going?
“Most healthcare, however, is a for-profit industry. This means once you’re cured, you no longer need their drugs or their services. The healthcare industry needs you to stay sick in order for them to stay in business. If we are healthy, if we received actual cures for actual problems without suffering all the side-effects, we wouldn’t need doctors, medical breakthroughs, pharmaceutical miracles, lawyers to sue those pharmaceutical companies, and so on and so forth. There are a multitude of industries that thrive on people not getting well. Think about it. Tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue is made looking for the cure. If the cure were actually found, however, hundreds of billions would be lost, because ‘looking for the cure’ is an extremely profitable industry.”
Now he’s got my full attention. I let him continue.
“Furthermore, perfect health would cost these industries hundreds of billions of dollars in sales otherwise made in fruitless tests and treatments, prescription drug sales, radiation therapy. The minute they find the cure, the industry starts its rapid decline, because if you’re healthy, you don’t need them. If you get healthy, they go broke. Most doctors are good people who believe in what they do and can heal people on a normal level, Savannah, but make no mistake, there will never be ‘a cure,’ only more drugs. Only more looking. Here at Astor, with me, you will get the cure.”
“How do you have the cure if ‘they’ haven’t found it yet?”
“Savannah, they have a cure for everything already. Haven’t you been listening? There is a cure for everything! Making this cure available to the public, however, would strike a death blow to many of the country’s most profitable industries. Entire economies would fail. This nation would fall into bankruptcy and never recover. The cures aren’t for the masses, they’re for the elite. People like your father, people like you.”
Satisfied, he takes another sip of his water and it seems to move him the way a beautiful symphony would move him, or a Kobe beef filet still piping hot from the kitchen.
“Okay, so what are you going to cure me from?”
“I’m going to cure you from yourself.”
“I’m sure my father told you, I’m one giant problem from head to toe.”
His face shows a practiced sensitivity that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “We will start with a full physical.”
I’m thinking of taking my clothes off in front of him and it’s making me sick inside. I’ve never had a male doctor. Or a freaking German doctor for that matter.
He picks up his phone, presses a button and says, “Nurse Arabelle? She’s ready for her physical.” My heart rate soars. He sets the phone in the cradle, smiles again, then sips from his water. “Nurse Arabelle will conduct your physical, and we will meet afterwards to start your treatment.”
Knowing he won’t be seeing me naked, I breathe a long sigh, most of my tension dissipating instantly. He says, “Nurse Arabelle is a kind woman behind her…overly serious exterior. I think you will come to appreciate her.”
“Okay,” I say. Nurse Arabelle, kind? Hah! My dimpled half-Spanish ass.
The door opens and the purple-eyed nurse walks in, robotic, plastic, a small engine where her heart should be. “Come with me, Miss Van Duyn.”
4
Nurse Arabelle’s apathetic demeanor feels more inhuman than ever. She has me stripping to my underwear, then she hands me a paper-thin robe made of the same material they use in those toilet seat covers we’re all forced to suffer in public restrooms. My skin is cold and naked and peppered with
an unsightly smattering of goose bumps. My insecurity is off the charts.
My height is five foot four inches, my weight one hundred sixty-two pounds. Nurse Arabelle measures my calves and thighs; she lifts my paper robe and measures my big fat surface-of-the-moon butt. Talk about humiliating. She measures my soggy brown biceps, the width of my low sloping shoulders. My eyes are pooling, and inside my body a tearful trembling begins, just enough for me to know the waterworks are coming.
She says, “Please remove robe,” in that clunky Russian voice of hers and already I can imagine what it might be like to be a prisoner of war.
I grip the designer toilet seat cover robe, hesitate, then take it off. I hate everything about what she is seeing. The lumps and rolls start from my poor, malnourished breasts and end hanging slightly over my underwear. I am a pitiful sight.
She measures my waist and chest, then puts on gloves and says, “I must check for lumps. Please remove bra.”
Oh my freaking God, can it get any worse? Her being perfect only makes me feel more revolting. Off with the bra, hello nausea. She feels around my poor, uneven breasts and my humiliation is complete.
Some boy called me a swamp donkey last year and I hated him for it. That’s how I feel right now, like a hairless swamp donkey. I look into Nurse Arabelle’s eyes. Nothing. Not a shred of humanity. There is barely even a light behind those luscious spheres, certainly none bright enough to illuminate the deep purple coloring. I scan the circular edges that would betray her contact lenses and find none.
How is this possible?
She asks me to put my bra and robe back on and my relief measures enormous. A trickle of sweat slides from my underarms down my sides until it meets the toilet seat cover/robe and is absorbed into a flower of toxic moisture.
On a clipboard with a sheet of paper containing lots of boxes to check and lines to write on, Nurse Arabelle notates my hair color (chocolate brown), my eye color (flat brown), and my skin tone (I see her write mocha and that’s the first thing about me I’m not embarrassed about—thank you Margaret for at least that!). We do a vision test without my contacts which I’m sure I fail because everything is blurry and half my answers are guesses. Then for some reason she wants to record my vocals and for the first time I actually listen to how I sound. Nasally. Weak. Like a radio signal coming from another city that just sounds enervated, dull and distant. She records high and low notes. The way I sound, they wouldn’t even let me go near the American Idol tryouts.