But no, I don’t believe that.
The student moves across the room to take the patient’s arm, and he recoils at first. But she is persistent and he gives in and starts to lean on her, to let her take his weight as he crosses to the centre of the room, where the rug was, and stands there. He says something in a language I don’t speak.
Stanislav replies with, “Right there is fine. Just lie down.”
A long groan escapes him as he does as he is told. He can’t lie flat anyway; the tumour is gathering up his flesh, pulling his organs around itself. But it can’t hide from me. I lower myself to the floor beside him and pull back the woven trousers he’s wearing so I can get a look at it.
The student is close by; I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.
“Go away,” I murmur, without turning around. She’ll know I’m talking to her.
Stanislav says, “She needs to see. I understand your decision, but we agreed she could see, even if you won’t teach her.”
“Not this close. I can’t get started with her this close.”
“What about the prayers?” she says, and I reach behind me to flap a hand at her. She steps back smartly.
Stanislav starts his song. He has always been blessed with a fine voice, low and level, and it has developed a rich, cracked timbre with age. It reverberates around the apartment, makes the darkness draw close around us, holds us in its arms. It is a prayer to give thanks for aid and to recognise that all mistakes carry within themselves the seed of forgiveness, and it visibly relaxes the patient. I don’t know how it does that, but it works every time.
I don’t know how I do what I do, either. All I can say is that the moment comes, in the heart of that prayer, where I am compelled to put my lips upon skin. I kiss the clammy flesh and take it into my mouth, tonguing it, laving it, until it is slick with my saliva. Underneath it, beyond the dermis, deep-embedded between muscles and organs, is the growth. It begins to move towards the pressure of my mouth. It comes reluctantly; I suck harder. The skin grows hot. The patient shifts, and Stanislav is there still singing, putting his hands upon his head to calm him further. The tumour collects and I picture it, complete, ready for me. Then I stretch my thoughts out wide, into every aspect of the body, and I will my strength into the arteries and veins, the heart and the lungs, liver and kidneys, so he will survive what comes next.
Then I eat.
I take small, quick bites and hit the tumour straight away; it is spongy and fibrous, and it is poison. The concentrated plastic-remains of the old life have soaked into the skin, been ingested, collected into an indestructible, indigestible lump. But I can take it. I chew it down. I swallow. I keep eating and eating until I have removed it all from my patient, and then I sit back and wipe my mouth, but of course there is nothing to see. His skin is unbroken. There is nothing on my chin or on my face. It is inexplicable. The lump of poison is inside me now, and he is free of it.
Stanislav’s song changes in pitch. The patient attempts to sit up. The student darts forward and helps him, placing one hand on his back and the other on his elbow. “You’ll be fine,” she says. “Just relax.” Even though she doesn’t speak his language, he seems to understand.
“I got it all,” I say. “It’s good.”
Stanislav stops singing. The woman comes to me and presses a golden ring into my hand. Perhaps a wedding ring? Then she moves around the room, rolling up the blinds, one at a time, and relief floods into the room with the sunlight. The patient smiles and touches his hip, running his hands over the rolls of loose skin. He takes the fat between his hands and pinches it.
“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t do liposuctions.” But that’s a joke and an operation that belongs to the past. He says a word, the same word, over and over again. His eyes are clearer, and he stretches up his arms, straight, to the ceiling. Yes, he can stand up tall once more.
* * *
On the way back, the driver says, “Did you manage to help him?”
“Do you know him? The patient?”
“He’s my cousin. I said to him about you. I told him you could help.”
His sickness is settling inside me, moving into position on my left hip, jostling against the tumours that I have already ingested. I am a mass of wobbling disease. “I helped him.”
The driver’s shoulders slump. “Thank you.”
“What will he do now? Will he become a driver, like you?”
“He’s not paying for your services. His wife has agreed to do that.”
“His wife…?” I think of the small woman in the apartment, drawing the blinds, moving the rug, preparing for the operation with such care. She will work hard for the Red Gathering, and she will age faster than the patient I have just treated. I’ve placed time between them: time, as a crack in their relationship that will widen further every day, until it is a chasm. The driver’s eyes meet mine one last time as he pulls up opposite the house.
“Love is a wonderful thing,” he says.
* * *
I don’t remember love. I barely remember living on Assembly Island; my first memory is being found there, with the others. Nobody knows how we got there – a shipwreck, maybe? Pregnant women and young mothers were being evacuated from the atolls in the days before the first bombs; some ships didn’t make it. Survivors may have swum to the giant pile of plastic in the middle of the ocean. Or possibly people had been living there for generations already, unbeknownst to the world. Marine debris had been collecting for a long time before the war.
Whatever happened, there were no adults, they tell me. The oldest children were caring for the youngest, like myself, upon the brand-new island. Plants and fungi had already adapted and found a way to feed on the detritus, and we were eating anything, everything, to stay alive. The fact that eating fused irradiated plastic was not killing us came as a shock to our saviours, and that is my first memory. A thin woman with such big eyes and open sores, a Red Gathering long-term employee, trying to fish a yogurt pot out of my mouth and realising it was gone. I had sucked it and chewed it and incorporated it.
Learning I could do the same trick on the new diseases, caused by the bombs and the bad air, took a while. I was seven years old, trying to adjust to loud city life as renewable rebuilding was just getting started, when one of my first case workers took me up to the roof of our complex and told me he was dying. I could smell it on him, and I was hungry for it. He had wide eyes too. He never spoke to me again, after, although he sent flowers and a card. To say it was all gone. To say thank you, and goodbye.
Later, I heard I wasn’t even the first of us to suck out the poison. It had happened in a separate house of Assembly Island survivors – one of the pupils had latched on to a teacher during a lesson. Apparently they hadn’t even known they were ill, so it had been recorded as some kind of attack. No wonder the social-care employees of the Gathering treated us strangely, but still they gave us names of such optimism. Blessing. Gift. Prospect. Hope.
When I got allocated to New Foreston, and to Stanislav’s care, I was scared. Of myself, mainly. Of what I might do. Stanislav was a true convert to the theo-organic way of life. He believed in it more than I did. The prayer, the preparation. The idea that I, and others like me, were a miracle.
The student would love me to tell her all these things. She asks often enough, in the evenings, when it’s just me and her in the house and she’s watching the Good News Network, and I’m trying to find a comfortable position on the furniture that was made for normal people. She has tried a thousand ways to lead me to the conversation she wants to have, and I’ve refused every one of them.
I won’t help make her into me.
But this evening is different. Being the first Tuesday in the month, she gets to put in a call to her family, back in Brazil. I pretend I don’t listen in, but as she sits in front of the graphene and glass laptop (cost – I’m guessing three years of a life) and waves at the tiny embedded camera, I feel an ache building inside of me and my ears
strain to catch every word. It’s almost like the hunger I feel for the poison. I could suck up the way she is when she makes that call.
I only know a little Portuguese, but I’m learning more every time. And some things don’t need translation. I can tell she loves them, and they love her. They call her Arama. They gather around their own camera, an extended family of generations all shoved up tight on one old orange sofa that would be banned in this country for its toxicity, and they smile at her as if she is their saviour. Which I suppose she is, having been found to be a plastic eater. They are being compensated generously, no doubt, in goods and services. There is a cross on the wall behind them, one of the new growing ones, sprouting and bearing small red fruit in clusters.
She checks they have everything they want, and they tell her yes. She catches up on their lives, and tells them she is fine. She is happy, that’s what she says. I know the words for that:
Estou feliz de viver.
When she finishes the call she usually goes straight to bed, but tonight she turns to me and says, chin jutting out, “Did you understand any of that?”
“I don’t speak your language,” I tell her.
She raises her eyebrows. She is wiry and well-muscled, with her feet planted firmly in my space. She has taken hold here and she is growing. I realise she has shot up; when she first arrived she barely reached my shoulder, and today she is the same height as me. She must be feeling stable, grounded, to take this new belligerent tone.
“How old are you now?” I ask.
“Fourteen. How old are you?”
I ignore the question and start shifting myself from the sofa so I can go and lie down in my room.
“Do you think God created us to do this work?” she asks.
“I thought we were the new gods.”
“I don’t understand your jokes. I don’t think I ever will.”
“I don’t tell jokes. I thought you would have worked that out by now. Good night.”
“We’re not gods,” she calls after me.
I squeeze into my room and shut the door quietly behind me, so she knows I’m unbothered.
Then I lie on my bed and try to find a comfortable position, knowing I’ll squirm until morning, knowing I’ll feel every growth that jostles inside me.
* * *
When I can’t sleep I always end up back on Assembly Island.
I imagine walking on it once more. This is an impossibility; it has been closed off to all but the chosen few researchers funded by the Gathering who examine the new resistant forms of life that sprang up upon it. I was shown a video by Stanislav, when I asked about the possibility of ever going home, soon after arriving in New Foreston. He said, This will have to be your home now.
The video was filmed by a camera fitted to the protective visor of one of the researchers. The picture wobbled and jerked between sights that I would like to have seen in more detail: the hooded yellow suits of the other researchers; the lime green threads of seaweed that had found a foothold amid the plastic remains; the scuttling crabs that dodged from ragged hole to ragged hole in the heap of detritus. But it wasn’t detritus. It was the place itself. It was the first place I knew.
When I was taken away, I couldn’t believe that a flat floor existed. After I had learned words, I asked, What it is made of? They told me it was pressed and woven from plants, and for a long time I thought plants was one of those words that had several meanings. The green crawling life threading through Assembly Island could not also be the controlled, shaped substance under my feet.
* * *
When I rise, with difficulty, I find the student has made her own breakfast. She is eating from a bowl, dipping in her spoon to pick up the small assorted chunks that Stanislav brings us regularly. Chopped up remains of the old world. She finishes her mouthful, then says, “We had a call. The car won’t be long.”
“Another one? Already?”
“Stanislav says it’s an emergency. He says maybe I could help out with this one, as it’s a big job and you’re still tired from yesterday.”
“I’m fine.”
“You could supervise.”
“I’m fine.” I manoeuvre myself into my hammock and look out of the window. The car hasn’t come yet. I have a few minutes to watch the traffic go by. I have no appetite at all, but I can gorge myself when the need arises.
“Hope,” says the student. “Tell me what I can do to make you trust me.”
“That’s not the issue.” I rock gently from side to side. “That’s not the issue at all.” The cars travel along the long straight road, all facing the same direction, thinking they made the choice to point that way when the road offers no alternative.
* * *
It doesn’t fail to strike me as ironic, after such thoughts, when the car comes to a sudden stop and progress towards our destination in the Undergrowth side of the city is halted.
Through the windscreen I can see that those on road duties are out in force, wearing their reflective blue vests that reveal which organisation they have sold their time to, waving their hands to filter everyone into one long lane in order to bypass a brand new eruption. It’s not big yet; I can still see the top of it, twisting, getting its bearings. It’s perhaps three storeys high. The mutated plant growth will soon begin to accelerate, and by this evening it will be climbing ten feet every hour.
“It’s a pretty one,” says the driver, as we wait to be waved onwards.
The flowers are, indeed, lovely: big and bold, a vibrant pink. The flowering ones usually bear fruit, too – waxy balls that grow from the hearts of the blooms once the petals drop off. They are inedible to me, but they will be prized by the local people, no doubt. An eruption like this will be seen as a blessing. A gift.
“A bad place for such good luck,” the driver adds. “This’ll cause delays until the organic tram link is finally ready.”
But nobody would suggest cutting it down. Nature is so precious, now, wherever it recovers and revives.
“My parents said four more came up in Durango, all around the cathedral, and the vines all joined together in the sky, above the cross, to form a…” The student clicks her fingers. “A place you can stand on?”
“A platform,” I say.
“No, a floor.”
“It’s the same thing,” I tell her, then correct myself. “No, it’s not the same thing. Forget I said that. Can you fetch me a flower?”
“What?”
“Hop out. Fetch me a flower. I want to smell it.”
“But…”
“Quick! Before we move off.”
She opens the door and gets out, then sets off towards the eruption at a jog. I twist in my seat so I can keep my eyes on her through my window, but I talk directly to the driver. “Listen. I need your help. Tomorrow evening. Can you bring the car to the house?”
“Sure, I can clear it through Stanislav and—”
“No, no Stanislav, not anyone. Get there at ten. Can you do that? Not just because of what I did for you. I can make it worth your while.” I keep watching as the student slows, then comes to a halt. She stands there, next to the line of cars, her back straight, her posture rigid.
“You didn’t have to say that. Sure. Sure, I’ll do it. Tomorrow. What time?”
“Ten.”
“‘I can make it worth your while,’” he mutters. “You sound like those old films people used to watch. You sound like the past.”
“Don’t say anything to her.”
He shrugs. The student turns around and strides back to the car. She gets in and closes the door quietly. The people working road duty for the Blue Collective wave us on and we start to creep forward. We draw level with the eruption and I wind down the window to catch its scent; it smells fresh and sweet and juicy. My taste buds respond, and I swallow my own saliva. It’s poisonous to me, but my body doesn’t really know that. It’s only experience that has taught me not to trust what my body tells me.
“I couldn’t do it,” she
says. “To pluck something so precious just to give you a moment of pleasure would have been…”
“I knew you couldn’t do it,” I tell her, and there is that feeling again, that doubt she places in me as she insists on learning lessons I’m not trying to teach her. “Music, please.”
The driver turns on the radio, and the happy songs save us from the silence.
* * *
Stanislav sings.
It reminds me of the first time I heard him sing, and afterwards, when my patient was healed and radiant, Stan hugged me; back when I could bear to hug back. To be touched. He was my father then, and we moved out into the sunlight and held hands for a time that I still can’t describe as an increment of anything, as a minute or an hour or an afternoon. It was freed from all structure, and it still stands apart, in my memory.
He has grown thinner over these years. Seventeen, in total. And nine months. He has wasted while I have swelled, but he’s good, he’s healthy. There’s no sickness in him. His clean kaftan and well-worn sandals only add to the vitality he radiates.
The patient’s breathing slows and his little, filmy eyes close. I didn’t know the song could work on a baby. Or on a person in such pain, newly born, only a few hours old and with every organ crammed with the plastic disease. I would have said – if the mother had not been lying next to him on the matting, the back of her hand trembling against the curve of his forehead – that it was better to let him die.
I will eat. I will eat all of him, every part of him is delicious with disease; there will be nothing left, that’s what scares me. But I put my mouth to his chest and lick the smooth, new skin, and suck. The poison moves through him, gathers just below my lips, and the baby is limp, arms and legs flaccid, splayed. The mother whines, once, and then I bite.
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 16