You come out of that room crying, I swear to God. Saying: I want that. Want the field and the woman, the safe, loving cow and rain and not to sleep anymore on the floor of my mother’s tiny habitable with ears chafed raw because of the earplugs, because of her snoring. Thinking how I’ve been so alone and all confused and no amount of long walks back and forth to the noodle shop on the far side of the Barlow Bridge seems to make me feel any better. I want to help. I’ll do what it takes.
Beside me, Polly grunts and a short, powerful blast hits the porcelain back of the urinal and a fine warm mist settles on my right leg below the gown.
“It’s late?” he says. “Or it’s early?”
“I don’t know.”
Johnny, the night monitor, and a special kind of asshole, is standing there behind us in regulation gloves with plastic over-slips and a counter-contagion mask, waiting to take notes in case one of us faints or passes blood. He coughs but doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t flip to the clock page on his auto-jot and say 1:09 or whatever with that flat, tired voice of his. It’s like he’s watching soup and not two Participants whose blood samples and night sweats pay his wage. If someone like Johnny has an opportunity to tell us the time then he should be happy about it.
It’s been ten weeks now since all of the hoopla at the beginning and I admit that there are times when it’s easy to get a little bit blue, to feel a bit disconnected from everything and taken for granted. It becomes easy to forget—while lying in my cot for an hour, say, waiting for a MedAssist bot to de-intubate the clotthinning thingamajiggy from my neck, or when Dr. Ryan vetoes the anti-nausea meds because of the chance their chemical signature might throw off some particular reading or another— that we’re all part of something bigger here. Front-liners in the war on human suffering. And we’ve all been assigned our particular battles. And just because we spend most days lying by ourselves in a dim room, waiting, it doesn’t mean we’re actually alone. Maybe in body, but not in spirit.
That’s why it’s good that I ran into Polly. Just the sight of him brings it all back to me—the purpose and the meaning of what we’re up to. It’s real warriors like him that help me see it plain. That and the cut-outs on my ward-bedroom wall with all the faces of those kids diagnosed with Post-infantile Explosive Diverticular Cirrhosis—PIED.C—especially the one of the little girl with the big brown eyes and the messy bed-head who (I like to think) looks like me, looks like the sort of kid I’d worry about after I dropped her off at school, even though I saw her walk past the hall monitor at the door and I knew that she was the teacher’s favourite and had lots of great friends. There’s so much that can go wrong anyway. I’d carry her down the stairs until she was six or seven because I’d be too scared of her falling and cracking her fragile little head on all of those millions of sharp corners. If I had a kid I’d care about her so much, too much. A smotherer, that’s what I’d be. She’d always be screaming at me to leave her alone, already, she’s fine.
AtGen Pharma has a lot of contracts for the infant and juvenile stuff since that’s the biggest guaranteed market—that’s where the love is. So it’s them we’re saving, Participants like me and Polly, lab-cruisers like Kelly the vat-queen over in Neuro, Alphonse who runs the oscillator in the blood lab, the guys in Marketing who transit through the facilities every now and then with a flash-cam, all the way up to headquarters where Kasper Silex himself sits on his deserved leather chair looking out the window onto his good work. We’re here for all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and grandmothers and so on, gathered around the kitchen table while their little girl— herself innocent of this diagnosis they’ve all just heard from the doctor—sleeps away upstairs. Thinking, how will we tell her? She’s too little to shoulder all of this weight. Who should have to live through that? Who will help her? Who will help us?
“. . . help us?” I murmur, worked up by the image of that poor family.
Polly cocks a spidery eyebrow but lets it go.
How I imagine myself sometimes is on the shore of the inner harbour in front of the sleeping city—it’s me and Polly and the rest of us vs. these giant things stepping out of the water, lurching, dripping. Lymphoma and Ward’s Syndrome and PIED.C: we’ve got the guns but they keep coming. They’re coming for all the children in their cubic habitables in Grovener’s Grove and Sweetgrass City and the Sour Bun Villages and we have to stop them. Throw a little RT12 in the bazooka, Corporal Cliff, Dr. Ryan tells me, see if that slows them down. No? How about this, then? Or this? I don’t think I can make it, Sarge—I can’t feel my hands. I’m itching under my skin. There’s too much blood accumulating in my vitreous . . . Will you shut up and look at ’em, Cliff! You effing did it. I look and sure enough the hulking corpse of PIED.C is collapsing down into the harbour muck like a deflating blimp.
He’s a fine old codger, that Polly. Tells me he’d probably be getting up to go to the can a couple of times a night even without the YL. Prostate like a buffalo. I laugh back and both of us just stay standing there one hand up against the tiles for five minutes, waiting to see how much we’re really going to get. When I was lying in my cot it felt like I had a grape coming down the pipe but now there’s just an ache in my gut.
“If either of you is feeling dizzy you need to report it,” Johnny says.
As if we were children, and not well past the need for that in either of our trials anyway. 96B is basically market, for God’s sake. I’d like to remind Johnny just who’s front-line indispensable on this experiment and just who’s not. Any jackass can pen-tab his notes into an auto-jot. But who has what it takes to stand between the rising monsters and the sleeping city?
“You hear the latest on the monocytic leukemia thing?” says Polly, ignoring Johnny.
“Which one?”
“M5.”
“Oh man, that’s Jessalyn, right? Who’d she attack this time?” Jessalyn, the longest-standing trial Participant, has seen so many androgen bumps she’s got whiskers growing out of her ears and a libido like a bonobo ape.
Polly lowers his voice for effect. “It’s Andre, the new kid. He doesn’t seem to mind.”
Even though it’s kind of funny, thinking of poor Jessalyn grinding against Andre in an idle blood lab makes me sad. It’s not pretty, but you have to find love where you can.
Polly takes note of my mood. “Seen Violet around?” he says. He’s got a way of cutting through the B.S. and putting his stubby finger right on the heart of things.
“Oh, you know. Not lately.”
“You know what I mean.”
Polly’s voice has that fatherly tone and both of my eyelids twitch involuntarily. They sting. I’m supposed to report quick, unexpected emotions to Johnny but to hell with it. “I don’t know. . . I’m waiting and all . . .”
“She’s coming. Hold on, Cliff.” He turns and looks me hard in the eyes. “Stay the course, Clifferino.”
“You know I will.”
“It can’t be more than days now until they put you on the next one . . . the ’16, right?”
“Just days, yeah. Gotta be.”
At the sani-station Polly does a sly little finger moustache with chest-chop to me in the mirror, which is the Nazi sign— meaning Johnny. His extra thumb bobbles against the back of his hand. Then he shuffles on out.
RT15N being the night formula they switch me to RT15M after seven AM, which has a bit of a kick to it because of the Dex-tromethorphan and the Thoramone. It makes my skin flush and elevates my pulse but when it feels like I have to whiz buckets I really whiz buckets. I catch a few sweaty zzzz’s in the rec room, which is floor-to-ceiling vid-papered. If I’ve got it to myself I always punch in the enviro-code for “Space.” I lean back in the recliner with a pack of Frambroise Punch held over my burning face and the room arcs slowly across the methane lakes on Io.
Noon, Dr. Ryan comes in to take a vial and check my stats with a vital-bot.
“Do you know who I am?” he says. Back on RT06 I had morning dementia and
tried to throttle him with a twist of my IV tube. He overcame me easily—inability to grip being another early side effect (thus the Thoramone)—and we joke about it now, but he’s never stopped asking that before stepping out fully from behind the bot.
“How are you feeling?” He’s got Johnny’s notes on his auto-jot— zapping through them with one hand, taking my pulse with another. A real pro.
I think real hard if there’s anything I need to share. “Itchy, I was itchy last night on my ankles.”
He mutters some doctor-speak into a mini mic stuck into his collar like a gleaming Tic Tac. “Mmm-hm. And . . .?”
“Maybe a bit downbeat.”
Murmur murmur. “And?”
“That’s it. I guess. I’m pretty sure that’s all.”
Dr. Ryan punches some code into the extended arm of the MedAssist bot which spits out a line of paper that he’ll stick to the board outside my curtain when he goes.
“What are we looking at here, Doc?” I say. Basically meaning: how much longer until we’re on to RT16? I don’t think I’ll last much longer.
“Everything’s fine, Cliff. You just keep doing your job. You’re doing great.”
He slides the auto-jot into a pouch on the front of his jacket and sets the bot to dolly up its wheels. He pats me on the thigh. It’s always over so quickly.
“Doc?” I say, “do you think we’re getting close?” I wish that I had more to offer than itchiness, like pronounced and worrisome lymphedema or even just some shortness of breath. “Do you think I’m the right one? You know, did you get the right Participant?”
He’s ready to go but he sits back down on the edge of my cot, which creaks with added weight. He looks me right in the eye. “Cliff, you’re exactly what we need. You test like a dream. From a trials perspective let’s just say you’ve been blessed with the Cadillac of lymph systems. And we’re getting close. I’ll send you the paperwork sometime this afternoon. We’re gonna see big results on this next one. You should be proud.”
He says a few things after that but I can’t remember what. A new permutation for the RT means a new contract. A new contract means Violet.
As part of the purity code we’re not allowed any cosmetics, but a little bit of sugar and water keeps the wave in my hair down nicely. I check the floor for any tissue wads, make up my cot and then sit on it, waiting. I’ve got an assortment of gowns in my locker and I’ve saved the purple one for her because it’s the one I was wearing the first time we met when she said I looked noble, like a gladiator, or an actor in a movie about gladiators and she’s this groupie come into his trailer for an autograph. “Gladdy,” she says, when she’s feeling playful, “my brave Gladdy.” Or: “You know how cute your teeth look when you’re mumbling in your sleep, Gladdy?”—the time I fainted when she came in because I sat up too quickly. Or, just before putting my name to the contract: “What a large pen you have, Mr. Gladdy.”
To tell you the truth, that little girl with the messy hair— it’s mine and Violet’s kid, is how I think of her. Ours from the time after I’ve done my bit here, when RT goes market and we can roll everything I’ve saved into a deposit for a nice little habitable over in Sour Bun Village IV. Let’s say I’m here another twenty weeks or so—it’ll be enough. I’ll come home from the office of my new job and Violet will be asleep on the couch with a baby on top of her—a baby who’s safe forever from PIED.C because of her old man. I’ll make dinner, something steamy and healthy. There’ll be a balcony—doesn’t have to be a big one—and while whatever’s cooking is cooking I’ll step outside to feel the updraft curl off of the cooling concrete and watch the sun sink down on the Pacific. Things will have worked out for me. When, from the vantage point of the fifteenth floor, I see some loser on the Barlow Bridge heading for the noodle shop I’ll feel lucky.
“Ring ring,” comes her sweet voice from outside my curtain around three o’clock. “Anybody home?”
“Why nurse,” I reply, “you seem to have caught me at a moment of indispose.”
She peeks through the slit, her hair is in two loose pigtails held together with bee-shaped clips. In one hand she’s got the contract, in the other she’s got a plate of little pink sugar cookies. “Trust me. I’ve seen it all before.”
Then she comes over to me and kisses me on both eyes, my nose and cheeks and lips. After two weeks of nothing but Dr. Ryan and the bots touching me let me tell you . . . We have to be gentle, since I’ve got a heparin lock plugged into the veins on my left wrist, its IV plug-in held back with an elastic.
“I miss you so much when you’re not around,” I say. “Like, I imagine you and me on this cot floating through space forever.”
“I miss you too, Cliff.”
“Sometimes I wish we could. Just float off into space like that. Just the two of us and our own concerns and that’s that. Together, you know? And not just like this. All Violet, all the time. I’d even take a bit more Violet, a bit more of the time.”
Her face does this hardening where her soft lips get sucked inside and she breathes big breaths through her nose, not looking at me. Sometimes I say the wrong thing and it hurts her and she closes down and what starts as something nice is ruined by my own stupid neediness.
“Me too, Cliff. Absolutely. It’s not easy for me either. But how would you like it if I sneaked off from my job to see you here, and while I was seeing you Dr. Ryan popped by for a baseline med adjustment?”
I know what she means: How would I like it for her to be fired and for Johnny to be the one who presents me every twelve days or so with a contract like this one. Would it be the same to put my fingers under the elastic hem of his nylon slacks? Would I like him to be the one who caresses my tender parts for half an hour while Violet highlights job ads at Tim Hortons?
“No,” I say, chagrined at the image of my beautiful girl being sized up by pimply counter-boys holding giant nougat and almond crullers.
“Then why talk about the impossible? Just,” she breaks off a piece of cookie against the plate with her long blue nails, warm to me again, and raises it to my lips, “enjoy the moment.”
And it’s good. There’s a skin of smooth icing on top of the biscuit. The whole thing crunches honestly in my mouth. Another thing to remember for always. Inside I’m living for the day when I’ll wait out in reception for her to finish her shift, me dressed up in my tan cords and a blazer. When I’ll take her to dinner and I’ll have the waiter bring out a plate of these very cookies with a ring hidden under the mound. The way her eyes will look when it’s me popping the sweet into her mouth.
“Oh! You’ve got crumb on your lip, Mr. Sincere. You really are the messiest little Gladdy I know!” She paws it away.
“But do you understand? Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
She sighs, and sets the contract, its paper and pen, down onto my lap. She taps the dotted line and I scrawl my big loopy “C.G.” When it’s done she takes it from me and pushes it away from both of us on the table. She pulls my head towards her and presses it into her stomach and I can’t see her face but I can hear her sad voice where it travels through her body, “I think I do understand, Cliff. At least I want to.” Then she steps back and unclips her phone from her earlobe, swings her ID badge around the back of her shirt and begins to undo her blouse.
I know I’m not going to get further than a hand on one of her naked breasts, a feel, maybe, of the hole where a bellybutton piercing used to be, before my blood pressure rises above 135 and the monitor starts dinging and Violet shuts us down for another two weeks until RT17. Maybe even three. It’s torture. It’s all torture, but it’s my private battle. It belongs to me.
Come Tuesday morning Dr. Ryan and a phlebotomist administer the first dose of the RT16 right away into my neck. “Take these too.” There’s a small mound of grey and yellow capsules in two different clear-plastic Baggies. “One of the yellow after the shot and two each of the grey whenever your hands get shaky, if they get shaky. You,” Dr. Ryan sa
ys to Johnny, who’s standing by the doorway trying to look important, “help him watch his hands.” He winks big at me and taps the grey-capsule Baggie. “There’s a lot riding on this, believe me. We’ve got high expectations.“
All morning Johnny watches me like a hawk, but the ’16 goes down smooth. Nothing burns. In fact, it’s like I’ve got a line of menthol running under my skin. I shrug my shoulders. Everything is monitored with special attention the first day. I breathe into a plastic pipe mid-afternoon and a bot examines the saturation of the drugs in my lung tissue. My meals are more like tests. I have to wait a full minute after each bite of cornmeal mush and hamburger and let Dr. Ryan listen to my stomach through a stethoscope.
Wednesday I’m back in the rec room flipping through a pile of old Pyrogrrl comics. Over by the games tables there’s a small group of testers who’ve flung the vinyl cover off the foosball table and Nathan and Aretha, both late-stage kidney trial Participants, are twisting weakly at the long rubber handles from their wheelchairs. Andre, the new kid, has both hands gripped around the table’s rubber bumpers, while Jessalyn runs her nails through his hair with long forceful sweeps of both paws. His eyes are closed. When he opens them he’s got a look on his face that’s difficult to read, like he’s afraid Jessalyn will tear out his hair if he moves. Or maybe he’s just flushing from the U450 mini-bump they’ve got leaking into his feed tube. Either way, he looks over at me in my chair at the same time I raise my head from my comic. I think of how much I appreciated Polly the other night as I give Andre the thumbs up. We all need someone to look to for encouragement and support. It’s going to be okay, Andre-ski. Stay true.
That’s when Johnny clears his throat and says, “Grey pill.” Sure enough, my hand has a bit of a shake to it. When I stop flipping the pages the comic trembles in my grasp. Johnny fills a plastic cup with water and hands it to me and I pop two grey pills. Down they go. I’m a pro so it’s no big deal. I even clown it up a bit for Andre who’s still looking. I give Johnny my patented over-the-glasses eyebrow raise like, “That okay with you now, chief?” and with a big exaggerated yawn go back to Pyrogrrl dousing the Finnish parliament buildings with nitro.
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