Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “You,” he says, bowing his head over his hands briefly, as if to let me and Julia know that he’s not too proud to beg—in fact, that he relishes this opportunity to beg.

  “Reverend,” our mother says, without much force. “It’s been decided. And this is family business.”

  Ignoring her, he looks at me and says, “You know there’s still time.”

  I should be cringing away from him, but I’m so tired of the sympathetic looks from nurses and my parents that his energy fascinates me.

  “Time for what?” I ask him, propping myself up onto my elbows.

  Don’t ask! Julia says. She has understood immediately what sort of man he is. Why would you encourage him?

  “Time for ev-er-y-thing.” (That’s exactly how it sounds.) “You’re a young man now, a person.” He’s gripping the railing of the bed in his zeal. “If you do this thing, Evan Weary, you will become something that’s not meant to be.”

  His voice and his certainty are mesmerizing. I feel as though he has pressed something sharp into my malfunctioning heart. The Reverend Tadd-not-sure-if-it’s-his-first-or-last-name sees that he’s gotten to me, and he follows up immediately.

  “Do you want to turn yourself into a demon? A life-devouring creature?” he asks me, his face getting close enough to mine that his minty breath washes over me. “Is that your goal?”

  Do you know the sensation when you’ve been injured but the pain hasn’t reached you yet? I am having that feeling now. I think it was his use of the word life-devouring.

  I know resistance is called for. “Um…I don’t know if I even believe in demons—” I begin, but he rides right over me.

  “You don’t want to be one! That’s the answer. No good person wants that!”

  I can feel Julia’s outrage that I’m taking these insults lying down. Roll over and kick him in the nuts! she tells me.

  But I don’t have to, because our mother has finally found her courage, and she grabs the Reverend Tadd by his shoulders.

  “You have to leave now,” she tells him, her voice quavering but firm. When he doesn’t budge, she puts her hands on her hips and says, “If you don’t leave, I will call the nurses—and security! I mean it, Reverend.”

  He stands up, unrushed, as if he were done anyway and is leaving only because it’s his own choice. He brushes off his pants and stares down at me and Julia, calmer now that he’s succeeded in calling me a demon—or, I guess, a soon-to-be-demon. The full demonification hasn’t happened quite yet, as he has thoughtfully pointed out.

  “Reverend!” our mother says, warning him against further pronouncements.

  Close-lipped, Reverend Tadd walks to the hospital room door, yet before we’re rid of him, he looks back at me and takes another stab. “You don’t have to do this selfish thing,” he says.

  Selfish. It’s the word that’s always there, in the back of my mind. How did he know?

  Sensing that I have become paralyzed before this man, Julia steps in. Can’t you see it’s already eating Evan up? she yells at him. If Jesus were here, He’d slap you! You—you—creep!

  But Reverend Tadd, of course, has not heard her, and he’s already left the room.

  “I’m so sorry, Evan,” our mother says. “I said he could say a prayer here, that’s all.” She’s leaning against the closed door and has dissolved into tears, which, actually, has been her most common state over the past few months.

  What’s Mom crying about? Julia asks, still half yelling. She’s the one who let him in here. Oh, Evan…are you crying too?

  * * *

  I wake up and know that my parents have tricked me, or rather, that they had the nurses drug me. I’m in my own hospital bed, even though I don’t remember moving back. Sunlight is pouring in my window. It’s morning. The Day.

  “Julia,” I say as my eyes open.

  The room is full, but empty of her. Nurses are crowding in with prep carts and rubbing alcohol and IVs. They’re checking my vitals, slipping tubes into my veins, talking to me with that impersonal friendliness they must learn in nursing school.

  I catch sight of my father, so tall that it feels like he’s in the way, even though he’s standing in the corner to stay clear of the bustle. He smiles benignly at me.

  “It’s okay, Evan. She’s gone on ahead of you.”

  “Julia!” I say again, louder this time.

  The nurse closest to my face makes little noises that are half shushing, half consoling. Well, mostly shushing.

  I hear Julia very distantly. Evan. Evan. That’s all there is, only the ghost of her voice from somewhere far below me in the hospital. Evan…

  * * *

  It is…I’m not sure how many days later. Maybe four?

  They took Julia’s heart while I was unconscious, and then, inside my chest cavity, they used her “compatible tissue” to rebuild my own heart, and then they jolted the super-heart into action, and (I heard later) they all clapped when it began pumping blood. Pictures were taken. A day later they did the kidneys, the liver, and everything else that required renovation.

  I have a line of metal staples down the middle of my chest. They look pretty badass, like Dr. Frankenstein was given free rein to close me up. There are stitches and staples in lots of other places too. Supposedly, modern medicine is excellent at minimizing scars, but my nurses assure me that mine will still be amazing after they heal. I’ll look like a scattered train track for the rest of my life. It feels like the train on that broken track hit me, then backed up to finish the job. Except…even with all the pain, I actually feel better. My heart is beating strongly and regularly, my body seems lighter. How crazy is that?

  “Here I am,” I say.

  The hospital room is empty except for me, so I can get away with talking to myself without drawing frowns from the nurses. I lay a hand across the mess of staples down my breastbone. “And here you are,” I tell Julia. “Keeping me alive.”

  She doesn’t answer. It’s rainy today, and the only response I get is the patter of raindrops on the hospital window. Even if you’re one of those people who love the rain, I think you’ll agree that the things it says are, at best, extremely boring. At worst, they’re only raindrops, which are no substitute for your dead twin sister.

  “Dead,” I say, trying out the word that I haven’t let myself think. I’ve shied away from it since the operations. Now that I’ve said it aloud, though, I have to ask her what I’ve been afraid to ask.

  “Julia, were you dead when they took out your heart? Or did I steal it from you while you were still alive?”

  She doesn’t answer. Of course, she doesn’t need to. Everyone—the doctor, my parents, the nurses—danced around this question. But I always knew the truth.

  * * *

  I am growing again.

  It’s been twelve days since the last surgery and there’s enough oxygen in my blood, and my digestive system actually gets nutrition out of the food I eat, and and and and, you know, all the things the doctor optimistically suggested would happen, are happening. I’ve grown an eighth of an inch and gained three pounds. That eighth of an inch, by the way, makes me as tall as Julia was, though I’ll keep growing, they assure me. I might even get as tall as my father.

  “Fortune has been smiling on us all this time, Evan,” my father is saying. Did I mention he was in here with me? He is. He’s helping me get into my clothes. I’m strong enough to dress myself, but I’m letting him feel useful.

  My mother’s here too, though she’s outside the room, to give me privacy while I get dressed, and probably also because she feels guilty about letting Reverend Tadd crap all over the last few minutes I had with my sister.

  They’re releasing me from the hospital today. Over the past several years, Julia and I have spent a combined total of over five hundred days here. During those five hundred days, I’ve imagined thi
s final day many times. In my favorite version, we walk out the front doors, and shortly afterward, the hospital is leveled by an earthquake, and then ripped apart by a tornado, and then set on fire by roving bands of zombies. After that, if “fortune keeps smiling on us,” packs of wild dogs will urinate all over the rubble as a warning never to rebuild.

  “It’s nice to see you smiling, Evan,” my dad says, when my head emerges from the sweater he’s pulling into place over my Frankenstein torso.

  I decide to let him in on the daydream. “I was thinking that after we walk out of the hospital’s front doors—”

  “You know we’re going to wheel you out in a wheelchair, right? No walking just yet. But soon!” he tells me cheerfully.

  “Oh, right,” I say. He is so literal.

  Every doctor and nurse on this floor is lining the hallway as I’m wheeled toward the elevator by my parents. Even some of the more mobile patients are standing in their doorways to watch us, the medical pioneers. My father waves and smiles at all of them. My mother is soundlessly mouthing thank you, as though she were always one hundred percent behind this whole cannibalize-your-sister’s-organs scenario.

  I’m dying to hear what Julia would say about this sad parade to the elevator. Would she tell me to feign a stroke? Or clutch my heart?

  “That’s right, smile,” my father says quietly. “Let them see how grateful you are.”

  Am I grateful? I haven’t heard her voice for two weeks.

  In the main lobby, and the world outside is visible through the huge glass doors. My mother’s gone off to pull the car around, and when we see her driving into the pickup area, my dad says, “Here we go,” and pushes me out through the doors.

  “Oh!” I cry out, because the strangest thing happens the moment I cross the threshold: the super-heart stops. There’s a heartbeat, and then there is nothing, stretching out from one instant to the next and the next and the next. I cannot breathe, I cannot move. My super-heart has walked off the job without giving notice.

  My father’s smile falters, and then, in a panic, he shakes me. “Evan? Evan! Is it your heart?”

  There’s a thunk! in my chest as the heart starts up again. Then, thump-thump, thump-thump, it’s going—as if nothing at all went wrong. If anything, I feel a new surge of vitality.

  “Evan?” he says again, frantically.

  I wave him away. “My heart…is fine,” I tell him.

  “Are you sure?” He looks back through the doors, ready to flag someone down.

  I nod, give him an emphatic thumbs-up. My mother has pulled the car up right in front of us, so I push myself to my feet, and before he can even catch up to me, I’ve opened the back door of the minivan and climbed inside. In moments, we’re all in the car and my mother is driving away.

  I watch the hospital growing smaller as we get to the end of the street. When at last I can see only a sliver of the hospital’s upper floor above neighboring buildings and it’s about to disappear from sight entirely, I think, Cue the earthquake!

  Julia should laugh at that, but she doesn’t. I’m sitting in the back of the minivan alone, looking past my parents at the road ahead. Traffic and life are out there, ready to take me in.

  It’s not until we are stopped at a long traffic light that I hear it. Very quietly, a voice asks, Do you want to kill all the other patients? The voice sounds not so much upset as curious, and it’s as soft as the murmur of an insect or a mouse.

  I’m so startled, so unsure of what I’ve heard, that I can only bring myself to whisper an answer. “I don’t mind if they’re all evacuated first,” I breathe. “But the building has to go.”

  There’s silence in response and I sit there, holding my breath. I’ve imagined the voice; it’s nothing but my hopeful ears playing tricks on me. The quiet stretches on as we travel through the city. My ears strain for anything besides the noise of the traffic, and they are disappointed.

  But when we’ve gone a very long way and the hospital is nothing more than an anonymous mass far behind us, I hear this:

  I agree. The hospital building has to go. The voice is growing as it speaks. It’s not a mouse’s voice anymore, it’s a kitten’s. So…, it says, growing into a child’s voice, what were the results of the operation?

  “Just the usual,” I whisper, for fear of scaring her away. “You know, new heart, liver, pancreas, blah, blah, blah.”

  No new brain? she asks. Her voice has become her real voice.

  I shake my head.

  So they screwed up the one thing you actually needed?

  I nod. And smile.

  Did you hear about that kid who was taken into the operating room, but then he had a change of heart?

  “He didn’t know if he was going to liver die,” I whisper.

  Aorta laugh at that.

  “Like me—I’m in stitches.”

  I don’t mean to cry, but tears spring to my eyes and a bunch of them are pushed out by a sudden burst of laughter that is incredibly painful to all of my recently sutured parts, which doesn’t make it any less magical.

  “You were so quiet,” I whisper.

  That was on account of being dead, she tells me. By the way, I heard you call it “your heart.” That was a little cold.

  “I didn’t mean it,” I say, squirting out another set of unstoppable tears. “I meant our heart.”

  I’ve said this last part loudly, and my father and mother both turn back to look at me.

  “Our heart!” I say again to her.

  “That’s right, Evan. Our heart,” my father says.

  Is he serious? Julia asks. Are they going to take credit for everything forever?

  “Probably,” I answer.

  Julia sighs. Eventually she says, I guess it doesn’t matter what they think. What do we care?

  There.

  She has said it: we.

  And I am happy.

  I invite you to look beyond the current capabilities of tissue and bone repair. Those will soon become unremarkable. In a very short time, we will be able to create novel structural elements, forms that don’t naturally occur in the human body—forms that we haven’t yet imagined. I find myself a pioneer, daunted by the infinite size of the frontier.

  —Dr. Emily Brownstone-Naik, at the British Medical Association symposium on genetic engineering, London, 2029

  1. GO GET ’EM TIGER

  How can I tell you what happened in the right way? If I explain it wrong, you’ll probably hate me. But if I can tell it right, maybe you’ll understand.

  I knew he saw me inside Go Get ’Em Tiger, which serves coffee so good I actually tingle all along the border of…parts of me. I knew Gabriel saw me inside, even though his eyes slid past me, as though he were just looking, just browsing, just checking out the bags of coffee beans and logo mugs for sale on the shelves along the walls and not seeing Milla sitting right there, staring at him over the top of my newspaper. Before you ask, I’ll answer: Yes. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl who gets the newspaper, by special order, delivered twice a week, because I do the crossword puzzle, because it focuses me, and when I focus, I relax, and when I relax…well, things work right—like my lymph system and most of my hormones. The doctors all agreed that I needed to find calming techniques, and this is one. Plus, holding a newspaper is deliciously retro; it makes me feel like a girl from the year 2015, to whom nothing catastrophic has ever happened.

  But back to Gabriel. He ignored me. It was so crowded, he had plausible deniability, and I had…I had the echoes of thirty people laughing at me the week before as I shoved my lunch into the trash can and ran out of the school courtyard. Not crying. If I could have cried, that would have been awesome.

  But why had the laughing bothered me so much? There was a story in the newspaper I was holding about a teenager beaten into unconsciousness in th
e stands of his high school football stadium in Ohio. He’d had one of those partial spinal replacements where he could walk, but not a hundred percent properly. His assailants had been watching his gait when he got to his seat. They’d waited out the whole game, and then they’d attacked him at the end and spray-painted the word WRONG across his chest. They were drunk teenagers, but still, it was an example of the way some people were offended by anyone who’d been severely damaged and then put back together. “Fanatics Behaving Badly” was practically a regular newspaper column. In my case, you couldn’t tell what had happened to me. I walked normally, I spoke normally. You wouldn’t know, unless somebody told you. And I’d only had to put up with laughter.

  Gabriel left Go Get ’Em Tiger and I watched through the window as he stood on the sidewalk outside, rooting around in the brown paper pastry bag he’d gotten with his cappuccino. He’s kind of tall, and I could keep an eye on him easily among the crowds of passersby. He had those headphones that hide behind your ear, and he idly tapped his right ear to turn them on—just a guy eating a scone and listening to music.

  He didn’t spare a glance back to see if I was watching him. And he also wasn’t trying to get away quickly. Maybe he hadn’t seen me after all. But that was worse in a way, wasn’t it? That would make me just wallpaper or something, not even enough of a presence to ignore. Anger made my heart beat faster. It was necessary to go after him.

  Gabriel took another bite of scone and I drained my mug, already feeling the tingle of the caffeine along the meshline and furious that he’d ruined my coffee time by being there. (Okay, I’ve said it. Meshline. There’s a meshline zigzagging through my body. It’s why I’m here now instead of in a grave or cremated or whatever. Fair warning, zealots: you can turn away right now if my existence offends you.)