A Knight came over. Red fez cocked on his skull at a jaunty angle, face like a bowl of knuckles.
“One hell of an arm you’ve got, son. Too bad they aren’t a matching pair.”
His face shattered in laughter. The old prick.
“State your name for the record.”
“Dr. Jasper Railsback.”
“Place your right hand on the Bible and repeat after me: I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth . . .”
Niagara Regional Courthouse. Youth Services Court. Three pewlike benches. Penny Tolliver, a Children’s Aid Society worker, the only spectator. One Crown attorney, one for the defense. The object of discussion: a ten-year-old boy with slight facial malformations. I sat in the witness box, having been summoned by the Crown.
“You operated on this boy shortly after he was born, Dr. Railsback—is that correct?”
“It is.”
“Explain the nature of the operation—what did it address?”
“The boy’s mother is a meth head.”
“Objection,” the defense council said. “Irrelevant.”
The judge cocked her head at me. “Sustained.”
“I operated on the boy, Randall, because his mother suffered a placental abruption. She suffered this because she smoked methamphetamine for the duration of her pregnancy.”
“Objection. Conjectural.”
“Sustained. Dr. Railsback . . .”
I returned the judge’s look evenly. “Due to the placental abruption, the boy was delivered early. He exhibited tremors, sleeplessness, and muscle spasms, which are symptoms consistent with infant narcotic withdrawal.”
“Objection. Conjectural.”
“Overruled. Could these be symptoms of other conditions, Doctor?”
“It’s doubtlessly possible. Due to his being delivered early, Randall’s brain was not properly formed. He suffers from lissencephaly—smooth brain. His lacks the normal folds and grooves. The most common side effect is severely retarded motor skills. My procedure split the corpus callosum, severing the hemispheres in hopes of addressing those issues.”
The Crown said: “Was it a success?”
“Most children with lissencephaly die before they turn two. If you’re asking if the operation cured Randall, then no.”
Crown: “Doctor, you mentioned his mother’s substance abuse.”
Defense, tiredly: “Objection, your honor. What bearing?”
“I’ll allow it.”
“In your experience, Doctor, what are the—”
I said: “My mother was a juicehead.”
Crown: “I’m sorry?”
“You must understand: a mother will never have more direct physical contact with her child. What she eats, the baby eats. What she drinks or smokes or inhales. They share the same blood. The fetus’s circulatory system is patched into hers. My mother was—is an alcoholic. My father too, though that has less bearing.”
The defense rose. “Your honor, what bearing does any of this have—?”
“Yes, Dr. Railsback,” the judge said. “Where are you going with this?”
I rolled up one sleeve, then the other. Laid my bare arms on the witness box. The judge eyed them with interest. We’re all rubberneckers, deep down.
“My mother drank enough to float a coal ship while I was inside her. What people fail to grasp is how sensitive it is. A billion chemical reactions. A trillion tiny hurdles to clear. What happened to me was hormonal. A hormone is a key, you see: our cells are locked doors. If you’ve got the right key to fit the lock, the door opens. Well, one side of my body is all locked doors.”
The judge said: “And this was a result of . . . ?”
“Of my mother pickling me in the womb. And listen, I’ve . . . surmounted. I’m a surgeon. A healer of men! But there’s that line where love and basic concern butt up against weakness and addiction.”
“Your Honor, could we please—”
“This being a custody case,” I spoke over the defense attorney, “my opinion on a personal and professional level is that anyone who falls on the wrong side of that line ought to forfeit their child. Simple math.”
Afterward I stood on the courthouse steps in the ashy evening light. Penny Tolliver stepped out with Randall. The boy’s facial features were consistent with lissencephaly: the thin lips, temple indentations. His arm was wrapped around Penny’s thigh, his head vibrating on the swell of her pregnant stomach.
“Thanks,” she said simply.
“No prob, Pen. Part of the job.”
I knelt before the boy. His left eye was foggy with cataracts.
“You grow funny,” I told him. “That’s what a girl in elementary school once said to me. Greta Hillson with the golden curls. What a jerk, huh? But you know, she was right. I grew funny. But guess what, Randall? It’s OK to grow a little funny.”
Literal truth? Truth is twisty. The boy pressed his face into Penny’s belly.
“Can I see you tonight?” she said.
“My door’s always open.”
I left Penny sleeping while I got up to medicate. My bare feet slipped across the hardwood to the window overlooking the city. The Falls rumbled ceaselessly down the streetlighted thoroughfares, into Cataract City’s pocketed dark: the sound of earthbound thunder. Clifton Hill shone like a strip of tinsel. Tonight at honeymoon haunts with names like Lover’s Nest Lodge and Linked Hearts Inn, couples would bed down on motel sheets with the texture of spun glass. I liked the idea—that people I did not know, strangers I’d never meet, were happy and in love in the city of my birth.
To the south I could make out the oxidized metal roof of my old elementary school. In grade six Ernie Torrens busted my left arm. Yanked it between the bars of the bike rack, held me there as I squirmed. Took just one good kick. Ernie was a pig-ugly, brutish creature—fingers constantly stained Popsicle-orange. Nowadays he’s a grease monkey at the Mister Lube on Stone Road; he stands in the pit, eyes webbed in grease-smeared flab, as my Volvo’s chassis blots out his sun.
As I’d sat on the crinkly butcher paper with a doctor setting my arm bones, I knew I’d have to act. Lie down too many times—make a habit of showing your soft belly—and you forfeited the spine it takes to get up. I brought a tube of airplane glue to school and ran a thick bead around the toilet seat Ernie always sat on just before recess. His confused bellowings were auditory honey to me. He tore skin off his backside trying to stand. The firefighters were called, but before they arrived the janitor attempted to loosen the bond with some manner of chemical solvent; it reacted with the glue, scalloping Ernie’s thighs with a first-degree heat rash. The firemen unscrewed the seat from the bowl and led him out to the truck. Ernie didn’t get a chance to wipe.
We were both summoned to the principal’s office. Ernie glared at me, eyes reflecting dull, smokeless hate. I whispered: “You’re strong, but I’m smart. I’ll hurt you worse.”
Ernie laid off, but others didn’t. My childhood was a procession of bowl-cut, feeble-minded tormentors who earned harsh, quixotic reprisals. Eventually the message disseminated among our city’s bully population: Don’t bother with Jasper. Seek easier meat. But it was a message writ in blood, as much mine as theirs. The hospital’s staff psychologist had once asked, during my mandatory annual appointment, if the years of bullying had compelled me to make one side of myself as powerful as possible.
“Look at Ziggy Freud over here,” I’d said. “You’ve pinned my id to the wall.”
I turned from the window, headed into the kitchen. I always medicated on the polished granite of the butcher block—clean and sanitary like the OR. My pills were in the fruit bowl. I popped four Nolvadex, an anti-estrogen med, two Proviron, two Fludara.
I cracked open the fridge, found the pre-mix of HCG behind the cocktail olives. I was unwrapping an insulin needle when Penny came in. The harvest moon fell through the east-facing window to gloss the swell of her stomach.
“What’s that?”
I said, “Truth serum
.”
“Oh?” she said. “You’ll tell me all your secrets?”
“It’s human chorionic gonadotropin,” I said. “Testosterone regulator.”
“I love when you talk shop, Jazz.”
“It’s derived from the urine of pregnant women. I take 250 IUs weekly, spread out in 50 IU doses. The synthetic testosterone I inject converts into estrogen. Aromatizes is the word.”
“I like the sound of that. Aromatize.”
“Gotta take my meds so I don’t get gynecomastia. Buildup of breast tissue, yeah? Otherwise I’d develop a lush set of man-cans. Except I’d only get one, on my right side.”
Penny cupped her own breasts. “Mine are huge.”
“They’ll get bigger. Wait until your milk drops.”
She took the needle. “Where do you want it?”
“Deltoid. Medial head.”
She swabbed my shoulder with rubbing alcohol, jabbed the needle.
“It could be yours, Jazz.”
“Pen, please.”
“What?”
“You may as well be fucking a eunuch. I’ve been playing silly buggers with my body chemistry and I still produce barely enough testosterone to put hair on my nuts. Plus I was tested. You know that.”
“You say so, but—”
“My swimmers are not viable, Pen. Mutation levels sky-high. Two-headed swimmers. Or no heads at all.”
Put my sperm under an electron microscope and you’d see platoon on platoon of headless, legless, useless soldiers. Sometimes an image hits at the instant of release: a flood of broken-limbed bodies and horribly mutated forms sheeting over an austere landscape. Unmuscled arms and sightless eyes and corkscrewed appendages divorced from their husbanding bodies—no connectivity, no purity of form. A tidal stew of sexless, mismatched parts.
If I’ve somehow been robbed, karmically speaking—well, then only if considered in juxtaposition to normal people, the average life possibilities. But I’ve never been normal. Not one moment of my life. The word “miraculous” has tagged too many of my life-markers. Since birth, every second of my existence has been borrowed against fate. We’re all on extinction vectors anyway; some vectors are simply more acute than others.
“It only takes one,” Penny said. “You’d make a good dad.” Her fingers traced her belly. Her bellybutton had popped out. “Anyway, I could lose it.”
“Don’t talk that way, Pen.”
I’d met her when she’d lost the first one. Then later, when the second one passed. A third survived a few days. Gastroschisis: born with its organs outside its body. I never got a chance to operate. It would’ve taken an act of God anyway.
“You’d make a good dad,” she said again.
I plucked an orange from the fruit bowl, squeezed it convulsively. The rind ruptured, spilling juice down my forearm. A funny trick I pulled out at parties—I’d get drunk, pulp a whole sack of them. The Juicer.
“You know who else’d make a good dad, Pen? Your husband.”
“Cruel.”
Why dispute it?
The Arm Wars Classic Finals took place in the parking lot of the Americana Motor Lodge, a hop-skip from the flesh pits at the ass-end of Stanley Avenue. The night was humid. I felt the high-hat beat of my heart where my throat met my jaw.
I’d been training on a jury-rigged pulley system in my garage: one end of the cable was attached to a U-handle, the other to a milk crate. I’d loaded the crate with weight plates, gripped the handle, and pinned it down. I worked out after my graveyard shifts at the NICU, inching my way to nearly three hundred pounds and only quitting when my wrist made poppy-grindy noises.
I bought a Labatt Blue from an old Mexican selling them out of a picnic cooler, and scanned the contestants. Everybody was wearing yellow T-shirts that read I’M PULLING FOR YOU. I milled with the crowd, relishing the tightening sensation inside my chest: a thousand disparate threads pulled from each muscle group, gathering toward a singular purpose.
My opponent was a cask-bellied brute in a John Deere cap. He set his elbow on the pad, tendons protruding from his neck. Didn’t matter if a guy had sweeping back muscles or a striated chest—arm wrestling required a specific kind of strength, concentrated in the wrist and fingers, the biceps and shoulders. I had that. Beyond that I had a grinding, golemlike power to demoralize my opponents.
I dusted my hands with chalk. We locked up. The guy grooved deep into the webbing between my thumb and fingers, trying to preemptively break the plane of my arm—if he could peel back the wrist and come over the top, the match was won.
I disengaged, shaking my arm out. The adrenaline was jacked into me now—that familiar ozone tang at the back of my throat. We locked up. The grip was pure. Spectators clustered round. The ref straightened our wrists.
“Go!”
My opponent pulled hard, sank in the hook, dropped his thumb, and came over in a smooth, quick move. My arm bent back. The cartilage in my shoulders shrieked. My hand was two inches from the pad, but it held. The big bastard torqued his shoulder, bearing down, screaming: “Reeeeagh!”
I hissed between my teeth, popped my opponent’s thumb, and broke the hook. My biceps were spiderwebbed with veins, flushed pink with pressure. I jerked my arm in a series of hard upward pops, each one budging the guy’s arm. I shifted instinctively, slipping my thumb over his first knuckle and finding my own hook, bearing down with ceaseless pressure. This was my element: the slow and steady grind. The big man’s wrist folded back, steel gone out of it. His shoulder gave out next. His whole body went from a power posture to a crumbling one. I worked steadily, inching him down.
A comber of teeth-splitting coldness broke over me, something awful happening in my chest, as if each organ was unlocking itself from my body. The big guy folded his wrist back over and cranked my arm back. I let out a pitiful yelp.
“Winner,” the ref said, holding up the big man’s hand.
I wiped spittle off my chin. “Good pull,” I told him.
Ten seconds later I was humping across the road, squinting against the glare of onrushing headlights, over the crushed gravel of the breakdown lane to The Sundowner. I tipped the tuxedoed bouncer and settled into a seat on Pervert’s Row.
The girl on stage had rudely chopped dark hair and lean, articulate limbs that seemed to swivel on finely tuned servos. She had an android’s aura: a futuristic pleasure model—all ballistic rubber, frictionless nylon, and silicon grease. As she rode the brass pole, her expression was one part boredom mingled with two parts existential despair. When the song ended she stepped off the stage and took the chair next to mine. Her hand fell on the baguette of flesh and bone that was my left thigh.
“Buy a gal a drink?”
The waitress took my twenty and returned with a glass of water for the girl.
“Pricey agua,” I said.
“It’s from a glacier.”
“I don’t normally come to places like this.”
“Nobody ever does, man.”
She asked if I’d like to have sex. I said yes without giving it much thought. She disappeared behind the tinselly curtain and came back in a tracksuit. The night sky was freckled with clear, cold stars. We walked to the Double Diamond motel, past its leaf-strewn swimming pool hemmed by a waist-high chainlink.
Her room was small and neat and smelled of carpet freshener. She threw herself on the bed in a childlike way: her butt hit the mattress, bouncing her up. She sloughed her sweatshirt off in a manner some might’ve found simply unpretentious but to me seemed sloppy and careless.
“Three hundred bucks,” she said.
“For what?”
She explained what it would buy. Seemed reasonable enough.
I said: “What do we do now?”
“Do you need a refresher on the birds and bees? You can tell me what to do if you’d like.”
“Just give me the usual.”
“Ah. A traditionalist.”
She gripped my hips. Unbuttoned my pants, slid them down.
“Your legs . . .”
She seemed fascinated rather than horrified—either that, or she was the consummate pro’s pro. I slid my shirt up to show her my stomach.
“You’re like that all the way up?”
“To my neck, yes.”
She fished her hand through the fly of my boxers. Her touch was dry but gentle. “Feels like the standard apparatus.”
A fragile voice said: “Mom?”
The boy had stepped through a door that connected to the adjacent room. At first sight I understood he’d been dealt a common genetic indignity. His chest had that telltale shrunken quality. The girl snatched up her top and went to him. I pulled up my trousers.
“What’s wrong?” she asked the boy, who was perhaps six.
“Thirsty.”
She gave me a tight smile and held up one finger—give me a minute.
“Take your time,” I said. “In fact, I could use some water myself.”
I walked into the next room, which clearly they shared. Open suitcases, the smell of cough syrup and body butter. In the bathroom I unpacked two motel glasses from their paper wraps. I smiled at my reflection. Blood climbed the chinks of my teeth. I swished water around in my mouth, spat it red-tinged down the drain.
The boy rubbed sleep-crust from his eyes and accepted the glass. He drank, coughed a little, breathed heavily.
“CF?” I asked his mother.
“How can you tell?”
“I’m a children’s physician. Saw the medicine bottles on the nightstand.”
Cystic fibrosis. A gene mutation. Hallmark symptoms: poor growth, low muscle tone, high incidence of infertility. The boy and I were practically brothers.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 14
