Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  It all gets weirder from here. Flat on my back, my left leg the size of a 747 hangs in the air at an agonizing, inhuman angle, as if its wing has broken free of its socket. Surely they do not expect my leg to dangle like that, suspended in pain, throughout the surgery. “Doctora Garcia! My leg! It’s killing me. Please, put it down.”

  She can barely see over my cadaver table, but I see her. She is all business. No nonsense. The sheriff of Lilliput. “Your leg is not in the air. Both of your legs are straight and on the table.” She does not smile. She does not give away any concern that her Gulliver has gone mad.

  “Oh,” I say, and as part of trying to trick myself into believing her, I begin a silent mantra. You must calm down. You must get hold of yourself. You must calm down. You must get hold of yourself. Your legs are on the table.

  The tubed oxygen they position at my nose simultaneously burns and tickles. My diaphragm is partially immobilized by the spinal block, so I can’t sigh, I can’t take a deep breath, I can’t cough. I try to fight off the drowning sensation, summoning strength I didn’t know I possessed in order not to scream, “Help! I’m suffocating!” Although I do—in a desperate attempt to stay alive—wail, “Doctora, my heart is beating too fast.”

  “No, it’s not,” she squeaks, and the only thing that comforts me is that she seems very certain. In fact, she has taken on the air of a drill sergeant who has just about had her fill of my shenanigans.

  Steady your mind. Shallow breaths. The Lilliputians are very good at medicine. And also This is all a big, big mistake. I do not know what the surgeon is doing. Removing my womb? Dissecting my womb? Tossing it high in the air like a pizza pie?

  I do not exist from my rib cage to my toes. I’m all neck and head, which means the fact that I have no power over what they are doing to me from the neck down seems less important than it once did.

  And time? Nothing more than a trickster. So I leave it behind, drifting to places where gravity is an outmoded notion clung to by people who don’t know how to think.

  Lilliputians caress me—head, hand, shoulders. I am grateful for their gentle laying on of warm palms, for I am very, very cold. They whisper into my ear, “How are you doing, Anita?” Sometimes people yell and I’m not sure if they are yelling at me or at one another, so I drift further and further into a soft, feathering darkness.

  Every time I float into full immersion, someone wakes me. I am at their mercy. Anita! Anita! My womb is the star, and the Lilliputians are damned and determined that I shall be awake for its curtain call. My hidden planet, this determiner of my destiny, this source of things unknown, I realize, is displayed for all of Lilliput to see. Monday at the Movies. But I do not look. I do not want to know. Blood and organs and the surgeon’s tools are not a trinity I can presently cope with. Why, womb, hast thou forsaken me? A howling from far shores.

  I float in and I float out of amniotic waters of my own making. A desire morphs into wishful thinking: I will be rebirthed not as Gulliver the Trapped or Connie the Detested but as Anita the Beloved, a woman free of childhood baggage and whose two grown, fine children are extra special because they are twins. The Scientist and The Surfer.

  This wishful thinking ferries me deeper into my cold, strange amniotic tide. I float along, unaware of anything the Lilliputians are doing. I like the not knowing, the ignorance that resembles the sweetest sleep.

  But peace is not my destiny.

  “Anita! Look! Look!” The surgeon’s booming voice cuts through the darkness, scattering feathers and water everywhere. With one quick tug, he pulls me from the abyss. “Anita! Open your eyes!”

  My lids slide open.

  “You have given birth to a niño!”

  Though I see this world through a mist, I make out his giant hand, hovering inches above my face. He holds an immense gray mass (my memory says it’s gray, but this is an uncertain moment), and from the grotesque sphere trail many tails. I shut my eyes against the evil.

  “Your son, Anita! You have given birth to an ugly son!” and all the Lilliputians laugh.

  I watch from the ceiling as the surgeon slips the tumor and its trailing polyps into a clear jar. Someone writes my name on it. Constance. I mumble a heartless rosary, and my words fall like black rain upon the village. Es un niño. Es un niño. ¡Qué mala suerte tengo!

  I do not realize tears have escaped the corners of my eyes and are meandering down my cold cheeks until one of the sweet, sweet Lilliputians wipes them from my face, whispering, “Everything is okay, Anita. You’re doing good.”

  And the surgeon, perhaps catching on to my sadness, bellows, “Anita, look! Isn’t she beautiful!” The Lilliputian guides my face to the right and points to a large monitor. I am not allowed to look away. I blink against the mist, and my heart gasps. There, blooming across the screen, a moon—golden and bronze—glows.

  Why the moon? Why now?

  “That, Anita, is your uterus. No more tumors. No more polyps. As gorgeous as the sun.” The surgeon’s voice quivers with pride, with notions that this is his uterus. He made it beautiful again.

  I gaze at that golden planet, that distant celestial body radiating a Buddha’s strength inside me, its curvature suggesting galaxies neither I nor Gulliver nor my surgeon will ever see. And then I think about my mother and how, for her own good reasons, she never wanted me. And how I will never make sense of her random cruelty. And how her children can attach labels all we want—bipolar, schizophrenic, sociopathic, incurably broken—and none of them will erase what she did, not the names she called us or the beatings we endured or the exile she banished us to. Yet still, I love her. Look at that golden orb, Anita, floating with perfect gravity and grace within the sacred center of your body.

  The Lilliputians are quiet now, putting me and the room back in order. My surgeon and Doctora Garcia study mi muchacho malo floating in its clear jar, whispering to each other with curious intensity. I gaze across the length and breadth of the operating room. Giant contraptions that held my legs aloft and others that assisted in the exploration of my insides and hunks of metal edged in plastic with functions that escape me and machines on wheels studded with keyboards and screens—it all seems prehistoric—lie strewn hither and yon, as if a great battle has taken place. A battle for what? And who is the victor? The monitor that displayed my uterus is now a black rectangle, switched off, deprived of current, wheeled into a corner.

  Do not forget.

  I have been to the dark side of my own moon. It glowed like quicksilver, like gold, like a vast sea illuminated by hope’s infinite mysteries. I gaze once more at the irony that is mi muchacho malo. What evil curse or stroke of bad luck or incompetent medical care or rational decision making resulted in my womb giving birth to a gray tumor with a corona of polyp-riddled tentacles… instead of a rosy-cheeked child?

  Remember, Anita, you never wanted me.

  As they wheel me out of the operating room and into recovery, my mortality pulses. It is this acknowledgment of death and, perhaps, its inevitability, that draws a faint outline of new thinking, of earned optimism burnished by the pain of past travails: maybe all of this, every single moment, the good and the bad, is a miracle. The seas and the forests and the animals and the humans and the planets and births that give way to deaths, and deaths that give way to life. We will never solve the puzzle, the why of our being or the minutiae of our hours that tattoo the map of who we are on our souls.

  The recovery-room nurse lifts my blanket—though I have returned to my normal size, I remain bone-cold—and places on the bed a hose blowing warm air. The heat flows over me like a sheet of summer water, and within seconds my body and its shaking ease.

  “Hola, Anita. My name is Alex,” the nurse says, straightening the blanket over my feet that do not yet exist.

  “Hola, Alex. Gracias.” I watch as he takes my vitals. He records them with grim efficiency, not because there is a problem or because he doesn’t care but because he is doing a good and thorough job. I am, after all, hi
s charge for the next several hours.

  “Alex?”

  “Yes, Anita?”

  I reach toward my legs, which also do not yet exist. I don’t know how long it will be before the anesthesia ebbs and they return. “When I get out of here, after I’ve healed up? I’m going to live. I mean really, really live.”

  “What will you do?”

  I pause, thinking about precisely that.

  “Dance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Karaoke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take lovers?”

  I blush.

  “Travel the world? Maybe see Mars? Venus?”

  I giggle and close my eyes, conjuring the image of my freshly razored uterus. There is nothing bad there. Nothing sad or shameful. Only me, hovering like Buddha above a lotus blossom, Buddha accepting of the fact that many of the mysteries of life are not only not fatal but are destined to remain beyond the powers of mortal deduction. I look at Alex, who is looking at me, waiting for an answer. Behind him, over his left shoulder, awash in that lovely, golden uterine light, I see them, concerned and full of love. Lydia and Jack.

  THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM

  (and Other Military Mysteries)

  – Martin Limón –

  WHEN I FIRST HOPPED OFF THE PLANE AT KIMPO AIRFIELD in June of 1968, I had heard of Korea only in reference to the war that had ended fifteen years earlier, a war that left three million people dead, an economy smashed to smithereens, and a peninsula divided into a brutal communist dictatorship in the north and an authoritarian military oligarchy in the south. But despite this history of conflict and suffering, I was happy to be here. I’d been in the army almost two years, and while serving stateside, I’d watched as one buddy after another had been shipped off to Vietnam. Just four months earlier, the Tet Offensive had enflamed that country, and fighting had engulfed even the capital city of Saigon. There were ten times as many GIs in Vietnam as there were in Korea, so when I received orders for an assignment at the headquarters of the Eighth US Army in Seoul, I felt as if I’d won the lottery.

  But my relief was soon tempered as I faced a number of mysteries involving both the US Army and the country that my nineteen-year-old mind would, in short order, begin to struggle to unravel. The first mystery was how to survive the unexpectedly high crime rate. Most of it GI-on-Korean crime. Some of it GI-on-GI crime. Much of it brutal. Occasionally deadly.

  Korea claims a proud five-thousand-year history with language, art, and culture that not only have evolved independently of the West but also have largely differentiated themselves from its Far Eastern neighbors. Into this ancient stew, for some mysterious reason, the US Army saw fit to drop a gaggle of knucklehead teenaged GIs (me included) without any preparation, cultural training, or apparent forethought. Mayhem, as you might imagine, ensued.

  But if the army is good at anything, it is good at counting beans. The chaos of the clash of cultures between the GIs and the Koreans was monitored daily by the brass via the military police blotter report. I know because I was one of the minions who did the monitoring. Near American military bases, of which we had over fifty scattered around the country, crime was rampant. Simple larceny, such as refusing to pay a Korean cab driver or, worse, beating him up and robbing him of a hard day’s receipts, was common. Domestic abuse, also common, mainly targeting the uneducated and economically exploited young Korean women who made their livings in the nightclubs and bars and brothels that sprang up like poisonous mushrooms around the US compounds. Rape was endemic, happening not only to the prostitutes the GIs called business girls but occasionally to innocent farm women in rural areas where military units were performing war games. Fights and even muggings among the GIs themselves occurred more often than the generals wanted to admit, resulting in wounds and stitches and broken bones and lost time in the performance of soldierly duties.

  A friend of mine once got into a fight with a Turkish soldier. Turkey had a very small contingent in Seoul as part of the UN Honor Guard. My friend was from Chicago and a pretty tough guy, and he kept reaching into his back pocket, threatening to pull out the switchblade he always carried. The Turks were known to also carry knives, and supposedly honor required, whenever they pulled their knife, that blood be drawn. Fortunately, the MPs arrived in time to break things up before someone’s spleen was excised.

  But sometimes things were worse. Sometimes there was murder.

  One case in the late 1960s that made international news involved a GI accused of strangling a Korean bar girl. Pubic hair and other forensic evidence found in her bed convinced Korean authorities that a Caucasian male had perpetrated the crime. But in those pre-DNA-analysis days, they couldn’t be sure of the identity, and according to eyewitnesses, the young lady had been known to entertain more than one American GI. Still, the most likely suspect was identified. Routinely, Korean authorities turned miscreant GIs over to the US Army for trial by court-martial on an American base. But in this case, public outrage demanded that the South Korean government try the American in a South Korean courtroom. Even though the evidence was thin, and many Americans thought the GI was innocent, the mystery had to be solved in order to assuage public opinion. After a highly publicized trial, the GI was convicted of first-degree murder.

  Now, the first question was, what would the Koreans do about this outrage? The South Korean government, beholden in those days to US military support against the tangible threat of another devastating attack by the communist North Koreans, didn’t really want to punish him as any regular criminal would be punished—by hanging by the neck until dead. The resulting publicity would mitigate against good US-Korean relations. The second question was, What American mom or dad would want to send their son to defend a faraway Asian country if the young soldier was subject to being convicted of a murder that many contended he didn’t commit and then being hanged for it?

  Quite a conundrum. But the South Korean government found a way out of the dilemma. They compromised. When the sentence was passed down, it was for a mere four years in jail. Four years for a crime that even in America in those days might’ve resulted in his being shoved inside a gas chamber to watch potassium cyanide pellets sizzle and then dissolve in a vat of sulfuric acid. The last thing he’d ever see.

  Besides crime and punishment, another mystery that I had to deal with was figuring out what was seen as good for the Eighth Army versus what was seen as good for the rest of creation.

  The Eighth US Army was the overall command that ruled the US military in Korea. It was insular; it did things its way. Often, it operated on the basis of what was called an “Eighth Army Supplement to the Army Regulation.” In other words, once I arrived in Korea, I was told to forget everything I’d learned previously. We did things here in Korea our way, not the regular army way. Which is why GIs often referred to the Eighth Army as the Eighth Imperial Army, harking back to the Japanese Imperial Army, which held sway on the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until the surrender at the end of World War II in 1945.

  The most glaring example of a restriction that seemed to make no sense was ration control. In the United States, we live in a society drenched in capitalism. Buy, buy, buy is the constant refrain we hear from birth to death. So I was disoriented when I landed in Korea and was told that I couldn’t buy things. Or not many things, anyway. In the PX, which is like a small department store, and the commissary, which is like a small grocery store, the honchos of the Eighth Army had imposed something called “ration control.” A young, single serviceman such as myself was allowed to purchase only ninety dollars in goods—total—for an entire month, from the PX and the commissary combined. Also, certain items such as TVs, stereo sets, and other electronics were called “controlled items,” and we had to prove that we still owned them when we left the country. The ostensible reason for these restrictions was to stanch the flow into Korea of duty-free—and tax-free—American-made goods. That way, fledgling Korean industries would have a chance to compete and grow. Othe
rwise, GIs would sell everything they purchased on the black market to the growing Korean consumer base, and those start-up companies would fail under the pressure of unfair competition. These rules were given the weight of law and strictly enforced, and miscreants could find themselves punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  I once bought a girl a tape recorder. Small, made of plastic, it was about as cheap a model as one could imagine. When we broke up, I lost sleep at night wondering how I would explain that I no longer owned it. In the end, I wasn’t punished, but only because I was leaving the country, and the GI clerk who was processing my paperwork glanced around, saw that no one was watching, and waved me on impatiently.

  Another mysterious rule was even more powerful, unwritten but ironclad: never embarrass the command. If you couldn’t figure out what would make the Eighth Army commander look good and what would make him look bad, you’d better put your brain in gear because if you embarrassed the brass, your ass was grass, as we used to crudely say.

  When something went wrong, especially something as embarrassing as GI-on-Korean crime, the edict was deny, deny, deny. Until, of course, you were forced to admit it. I was often told that GIs were guests in Korea and therefore ambassadors for our country. These admonishments lasted all of about ten seconds once we raucous American soldiers were outside the military gate, parading down the streets toward the bars and nightclubs and red-light districts, free at last on an overnight pass.

  But when we did get caught doing something wrong, the Eighth Army did its best to keep it quiet. All crime reports, known as serious incident reports by the MPs, were for official use only. This meant that they were kept on base and distributed on a need-to-know basis, and the information they contained was absolutely denied to civilians or outsiders of any kind. Especially reporters. Although no American civilian reporters ever poked around, as far as I could tell.