Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  I wasn’t born in Treemont but I’ve lived there most of my life. I was away for college and I’ve been to NYC and San Francisco and a bunch of places a bunch of times and I thought I might live in one of them for a while but it hasn’t happened and honestly it turns out that’s OK with me.

  Treemont’s not tiny. I’m a walker. That’s how I like to get around. And even after all this time I still keep finding new parts of the city I didn’t know existed. As long as that can happen, I don’t think I’ll be unhappy there.

  I met Tor at a party four years ago. We had a couple of friends in common. Tor told me we’d been at high school together, although I don’t remember that. She’s a little bit younger: we didn’t overlap socially.

  At the time I was working on a big bridge upstate. She asked to see a photo. I said no because no one’s really interested, but she insisted, so I flicked through one or two, explaining what she was looking at and telling her she didn’t have to pretend to care, but she kept looking. Then she showed me pictures of herself as Feste in an all-woman production of Twelfth Night, and it turned out I knew Malvolio so we got talking about that.

  My parents are both gone and I live in their old house, which some people find weird, but honestly just makes financial sense. Tor moved in a few months after we started seeing each other. A year after that we had a big celebration because she got a part on a TV sitcom about a meathead high-school wrestler who’s secretly a genius. She played this kooky bookshop owner who runs a poetry night where the wrestler performs in disguise but she recognizes him.

  She was in a couple of public information films after that, and nearly got an ad. She has an agent, she got calls and did a ton of auditions. She did a bunch of theater, which she loved, and even though the money wasn’t great we were OK because I’m well paid and we’re neither of us what you’d call extravagant. Sometimes you look up and realize how many months have gone by.

  Tor said that when she turned thirty if she wasn’t making a living at it, she’d give up. She didn’t want to.

  I’d been poking around for this mall job I’d heard rumors about. I came home one night and Tor had spread a bunch of papers across the kitchen table.

  “You remember Joanie,” she said.

  “From The Mousetrap? Sure.”

  “I saw her today. You know what she’s doing?” She waved a sheaf of documents. “She’s a standardized patient.”

  People pass our little coffee place in the hallway, some in suits, some in casual clothes. There are several conferences going on at the same time and I can’t read who’s here for what.

  I read the titles of the sessions and the biographies of the participants in the one we’re here for. “SP Training and Methodology.” “Debriefing End-of-Life Conversations.” “MUTAs and the Problem Simulation.”

  I mutter something and Jonas looks up and says, “Huh?”

  “I said, ‘Once More on Epoxy-Fixed Overhangs,’ ” I say.

  “Of course you did,” he says, and looks down again.

  I was never super-close to my mom but we did totally bond over specialist magazines. There are a couple of big bookshops in town which stock a bunch of them, or used to—maybe everyone subscribes online now, I don’t know. Me and mom would stand together in Malley’s and pick up some publication, the only rule being that it had to be about something neither of us had any interest in or knowledge of.

  We weren’t just sniggering. Sure we were laughing but it was actually oddly respectful. It was more awe than scorn.

  It’s incredible how fast you can pick stuff up. Within seconds of browsing we were learning the jargon and terminology, we had a sense of the big controversies, the pressing issues, even the micropolitics of a hobby. You could figure out which publications were in some company’s pocket, which were run by Young Turks. I’d snaffle favorite terms from whatever field I was reading about for my idiolect: refugium (fishkeeping); dado (carpentry); fiddle yard (model trains). I’d become a firm supporter of one side or other in a debate the existence of which I’d had no clue seconds before. I bet anyone looking at an engineering journal would experience the same phenomenon.

  Whenever my mom or I was obsessing a little too much about anything, or we had too strong an opinion about something that objectively was really beyond our bailiwick, the other would say, “Once More on Epoxy-Fixed Overhangs.” It was the title of an article we’d found in Tropical Fishkeeper. Should you or should you not rely solely on gravity when arranging coral in your heated tank?

  I was with the epoxy-advocates. It’s not like any of it was natural.

  Treemont has a university, and one of the hospitals, St. Mary’s, is a teaching hospital. I think I had some vague idea what standardized patients are, but of course it was too simplistic.

  “A lot of actors do it,” Tor said.

  When she did the training, her class was fourteen people. Not all of them had acting experience, but more than half did. At the end of the training period, everyone had to pass an audition.

  “So the medical students come in and you’re sitting there in a gown and you tell them your symptoms?” I said.

  “Well yeah,” she said, “only we’re supposed to be like real patients, so sometimes the trick is to not tell them our symptoms.” She showed me the notes she’d been issued. Ms. Johnson is twenty-six years old and suffering from hypertension. She has a great fear of doctors. She is fearful about the health effects of her smoking and does not like to admit to herself how many cigarettes she smokes. Miss Melly is a thirty-year-old woman who is presenting with weakness of her left side from the early stages of undiagnosed MS. Mrs. Dowell is diabetic and pregnant.

  Tor had notes for the male characters in her folder too. Mr. Smith is a truculent insurance salesman who has bowel cancer.

  She told me it wasn’t just reading symptoms from a list, and it wasn’t just acting as these people, her job was helping to evaluate the med students afterwards.

  “You have to be the same patient with exactly the same set of symptoms ten times in a row. Standardized,” she said, “not simulated. Although we are simulated too. Some of these characters are drug-seeking, some don’t know what’s wrong with them, some are in denial, some know but don’t want to admit it to themselves.”

  “What’s the pay?” I said.

  “Seventeen dollars an hour.”

  “Seventeen dollars an hour to get felt up?”

  “Nice. There’s no touchy-touchy. Although I tell you what, if I do the GTA training—”

  “Genital?”

  “Mm-hm. If I do that, which means they do exactly what you think, then I get paid a lot more. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

  The night before her first performance—she called it that—she asked me to test her. She gave me character spec and a list of symptoms.

  “I’m not a doctor,” I said. “I’m not going to ask in the right way.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can make sure I’ve got the symptoms down. Go go go.”

  She stood formally in the doorway.

  “Action,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “Good afternoon, Miss Baker,” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I’m having the most awful aches and pains.”

  I remember her clothes surprised me. I knew I’d seen all the items before, but she’d put them together in a new combination, with a different vibe than I was familiar with. She walked tentatively. She wore one of her pairs of clear-glass spectacles.

  Of course I’d seen Tor act a ton of times. I liked her TV stuff but I don’t love her onstage, to be completely honest. Not that I’d ever tell her that: I think it’s the medium. So, not being a theater guy, it was startling to see her like that. In a way I’d never been so impressed with her acting as I was in that moment: it was so intimate and subtle. She shifted her whole self with tiny little mannerisms, tiny tweaks.

  “You killed it,” I said afterward.

 
When she walked to the car she did it in her new guise.

  There are thirteen of us on our committee, back in Treemont. As you’d expect, almost half work in the hospital. Jonas and two other doctors—Jonas I knew socially, had met through Tor’s work—a couple of nurses, a tech, and Thoren the pharmacist. The rest of us are friends of theirs, or friends of Tor’s, or, or and, of the other affected SPs.

  You might wonder why the committee isn’t bigger, given everything. Thoren will tell you it’s because of conspiracies and secrets, and that is not crazy. Another, Janet, a radiologist, has a different explanation.

  “It’s all about plausibility,” she said. “There’s no proof anything systematic’s going on. It doesn’t happen all that often, and it’s not unprecedented for there to be chokes and fuckups and so on. And for a long time, you know, it was only, it was only Tor.” She didn’t break eye contact when she said that. I guess she’s used to talking about bad news.

  “Still though,” I said.

  “Oh sure,” she said. “There’s also that river in Egypt.”

  Tor didn’t have a gig every day by any means, but she sent her CV around to all the teaching hospitals in driving distance and soon had enough to make an OK income. An SP CV is an interesting thing. She would list the hospitals where she’d performed, and under each one, the condition or conditions she’d simulated there. Gastrointestinal bleeding. Hyperthyroid. End of life: metastatic pancreatic cancer.

  “Ms. Bertram,” she’d tell me, getting ready to go. “Leukemia. Undiagnosed.” She’d give me twirls with her new temporary body language.

  I started guessing.

  “Abigail Sully. High school teacher. Mumps.”

  “Ooh, close,” she’d say. “Melissa Styles. HIV.”

  “How are you supposed to give them feedback?” I said. “You talk to the administrators, right? And the students? I mean, presumably they either got what was wrong with you or they didn’t.”

  “Don’t be obtuse. There’s bedside manner. They might get the diagnosis right but be total jerks about it. They might ask inappropriate questions. They might misjudge Ms. Bertram’s capacity for full disclosure. I’m an actor,” she said primly, taking a sip of her coffee with her pinky out, “and as such, I am tremendously empathetic.”

  “Yeah, you are. Empathet me, baby.”

  “I can tell which of these little snots is going to be a good doctor. I can help them. I deserve a medal. Or a lollipop.”

  “Stick out your tongue and say, ‘Aaah.’ ”

  “Aaah.”

  I didn’t know she’d joined the Association of Standardized Patients until I saw their logo on her mail, ASP.

  “What’s the slogan?” I said. “ ‘We’re Pretending to be Sick’? Tell me there’s a magazine.”

  It didn’t take long for most of the local SPs to start repeatedly overlapping at work, and getting to know each other. We went for steak with Donna and Tam, a couple in their fifties, who both did that work. I met Sam and Gerald and Tina. Sometimes when they got together they’d swap anecdotes. Very occasionally a doctor—usually Jonas—might come.

  “I was on with Brian,” Tor said. We were in a loud bar. The others groaned at the name. “He was a perforated ulcer. And they didn’t clock that because he just doesn’t tell them properly where it hurts. And then he blames them.

  “ ‘Young man,’ ” she said in a swaggery voice, “ ‘I’m not interested in excuses. It’s your job to take the history. As in his story. You did not listen to his story.’ ” The SPs all laughed and I laughed with them.

  “I know,” she said afterwards. “Epoxy.”

  “What can I say? I’m a specialism voyeur,” I said.

  For the first year or so, Tor still went to auditions for regular acting jobs. She got a little role in Candide, and she was OK in it, but she wasn’t as happy about the gig as I’d thought she would be.

  “I can make enough money doing the patient work,” she said, which took me aback.

  She started doing a little part-time copyediting and basic layout stuff for the SP publication.

  “I didn’t know you know how to do that,” I said.

  “Student newspaper.”

  She wasn’t overjoyed with the way things were going but she wasn’t depressed either. She was focused, and seemed OK.

  I would meet her near the hospital, while she was wearing the clothes of her roles, and watch her slowly come out of these microplays. The way she held her fork would alter over the course of supper. I think the food she ordered depended on how much of the character still clung to her.

  She liked the serious stuff. She liked occult blood, hidden traumas. Backstory, shame-obscured symptoms.

  Tor was performing a series of interrelated pieces, or one piece with very many scenes. She was collaborating with young performers who’d never asked to be actors and, but, bund, didn’t have any choice, who were just shoved onstage without even knowing the script, and her job was both to say her own lines and to elicit theirs—which they didn’t know. That’s a pretty intense collaboration.

  She was teaching with each performance. If her plays went well, a few years down the line, someone would get healed. The most important performance works in history, in tiny rooms, between two people.

  I waited for her outside the hospital one time, and a guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty approached me.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “You’re that SP’s husband, right? I saw you with her. She’s amazing, man.”

  He didn’t sound like he was macking on her. He sounded more like he was considering something strange.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, and he shook his head and shrugged so helplessly and so guilelessly it was hard to be furious. “Walk away, man,” I said.

  “No, look,” he said. “I’ve learned more from her than …” He shook his head again.

  I started reading theater history and theory. I wanted to understand more—and of course I enjoyed the vocabulary too. The cheat out, when an actor takes a slightly unnatural position upstage to improve sight lines. The aesthetic distance, which Tor’s job was to collapse. The bastard prompt, when things are reversed, when the prompt corner’s stage right, the opposite of what’s usual. I read up about improvisation. Comedy stuff, at first, but pretty quickly I was on Chaikin and Spolin and Chilton and people like that.

  How do you interpret an improvised script? An improvised performance?

  The flowers were coming out. I don’t know what they were. Tor was into gardening and we had baskets of things hanging outside our door. I was in the kitchen when Tor came home, and she entered in a waft of plant smell.

  She was in a floral dress the same color as those flowers outside. I didn’t bother saying, but I thought, Ms. Something-or-Other, little bit older, nervous, neurological damage. Tor walked across the room like she was sleepwalking. It wasn’t the body language of her character, I realized: she was deep in something.

  “Babe?” I said. She blinked and came back. “What’s up? Bad day?”

  “Not bad,” she said. “Busy, and kind of intense.”

  That was when I started feeling jealous.

  I tried not to. I felt stupid and ridiculous and mean. I’d never been that kind of guy, and Tor had never given me any grounds for anything. But there was just something in how zoned she was in that moment, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids, the baby doctors. I remembered the guy who’d spoken to me. I imagined him and Tor making out in cupboards after he’d diagnosed her with whatever imaginary thing it was she had.

  A couple of times I left work early and waited where she wouldn’t see me, watching the hospital from the diner next door. I’m not proud of any of this. She only ever left alone. I’d see her wandering through the car-park.

  One windy day I saw a whole bunch of students trooping out, chatting with excitement, and I immediately knew, I don’t know how, that some of them must have talked to her that day, in character. “Oh my God!” one of
them shouted about something. And I was jealous, again, I realized, but not of what I’d thought.

  I started imagining Tor in a little room opposite some flustered young student. Wearing that floral dress, or her pantsuit, or a T-shirt, showing her clavicle tattoo, whatever. The young woman or man in a big white coat would be staring at her, at Tor, right there. Forget front row: it would literally be all for them.

  If history had been done differently, theater might have been an eternity of one-on-one performances. I was envious of her audiences.

  She’d walk through our room wearing clothes I swear I’d never seen before, so I’d say, “Is that a new sweater?”

  “No,” she’d say. “I’ve had this for ages.” It was how she wore it.

  I think I’d started making crazy plans, like I was going to follow her, or listen at doors. I’m relieved Jonas called me when he did.

  He came to my work. “What’s up with Tor?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  We were standing in a wild field at the edge of the building site ripped through with tire trenches. There was a pool in one corner where some heavy machinery had been. The water glimmered under a sheen of oil, and thrushes went over it.

  “You know we’re going to have to stop using her?” he said.

  “What the fuck? What are you talking about?”

  “The first couple of times shit went down I felt like I was going mad,” he said. “Because I was all, what the hell was that? And everyone else seemed kind of like, ah, it’ll be OK, just a little snafu. Or sometimes nothing, man, they said nothing, it was like they didn’t see there was any problem.” He shook his head. “I could totally lose my job over this,” he said, “but listen, I want you to see something. You know her, man. So, you know we video the sessions?”

  I told him no, then. That it felt like a violation.

  Being with Tor I’ve seen a fair amount of what I guess you’d call experimental theater. Some troupe from Chicago had taken over an old office in town and made what they called “an interpretation” of some old book. You wandered through all the rooms and they’d be standing there in weird poses and wearing wacky clothes and maybe saying things, lines from the book or whatever. You could pick stuff up, whatever you wanted, look through drawers, all that.