by Jim Nelson
“That’s not far enough,” Arch said.
“It could be.” The woman approached Hanna. She put out a hand to warn Hanna of her intention to touch her. Her candle-wax fingers made gentle contact with Hanna’s forearm, then moved up to her shoulder and neck. “What are your plans there?”
“I’m going to work at the flower market,” Hanna said, uncomfortable at the woman’s probing touch.
“Why flowers?” the woman asked, still probing.
“I love flowers,” Hanna said. Then she said something she’d never said before, not even to herself. “They’re my only real friends.”
For all the discomfort the waxy woman instilled in Hanna, she found her hands surprisingly warm and nurturing. Her touch drew the poisonous anxiety out from Hanna’s body.
“I’ll pay you back,” Hanna said to them. “I can work here in the city. I’ll help you! I can help you until I’ve paid off what I owe.”
“You can’t stay here after this,” Arch said. He snapped the stack of bills. “And like I said, you’ve got enough for us. You need money for yourself.”
“Let me stay with you,” she said to the woman. “I’ll work and save and then I’ll go. I’m good at a lot of things. I’m a hard worker.”
“Oh, honey.” The woman pressed a palm to Hanna’s cheek. “You’re so precious.”
“How old are you?” Hanna asked without reservation.
“Thirty-one,” the woman replied.
“Lenna beat the odds,” Arch said. “I bet you’ve heard people say girls with bi-grafts can’t live past thirty.”
The new information took something out of Hanna. “No one’s told me much of anything,” she said.
Lenna patted Hanna’s cheek and squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll do this one for nothing,” she announced to Arch.
“Why?” he said.
“This one’s the first one not to beg for our money,” she said. “She’s a worker. And I like flowers too.” She winked at Hanna.
Arch studied the stack of money in his hands. “She is different than the others.” He removed bills from the stack one at a time, again making each snap as they left the group. “Since Lenna’s dropping her fifty dollar fee, I’ll lop fifty dollars off mine too.” He offered the remaining money to Hanna, the bills folded in half and pinned between his fore and middle fingers, like a magician presenting the Ace of Spades. “One hundred forty-five dollars comes back to you,” he said. “Diamond Jim Brady launched an empire from less than that.”
“Is that enough for her?” Lenna asked.
“It’ll have to be,” he sighed.
Arch tossed the mystery tarp aside. Underneath was a collection of equipment Hanna did not recognize and a stack of flimsy cardboard boxes stained with oil. A white plastic case the shape of an oversized briefcase rested on top of the boxes. Arch unlatched it and in two quick motions extended it to a long surface with six legs clicked into place. It was a portable examination table with stirrups bolted to one end.
Stored in a cardboard box, along with other items, was a stack of white pressed sheets. He snapped the top one open and lay it on the floor, like a picnic blanket. He moved the examination table on top of it. Then he snapped open another sheet and draped it over the table.
Lenna started the sink in the corner. Soon hot water jetted from the tap. Steam smoked in the cold air and humidified the sealed room.
Arch said, “You’ve been seen by a gefyriatricist, right?” Hanna nodded. “Well, this is sort of like how your gefyriatricist examines you. I’ll be doing some cutting, though. And there’ll be some blood.”
In all of Hanna’s imaginings, she’d never considered blood as a part of the procedure. “Will it hurt?”
“This is a medical procedure,” he said absently.
“You’ll be sore for about forty-eight hours,” Lenna said.
“What about anesthesia?”
He smirked and extended his arms to present the room in toto. “We’re not a hospital.”
“He’ll do the absolute best he can, honey,” Lenna said. “I’ll be holding your hand the entire time.”
Hanna, bitten by Arch’s scoffs, shrunk a bit. Maybe she didn’t want to go through with this after all. But where else could she go? Who else could she see? He was right, after all. This was no hospital, there was no staff anesthesiologist, she would have to accept her circumstances and trust him to do his best.
She still wanted Arch to turn around while she undressed. She almost whispered the request to Lenna, her ally here, but Hanna thought twice. What would Maureen do? This was a doctor, Hanna reasoned, and the time to grow up was now. She shrugged off her backpack and pulled her sweater up over her head.
Lenna offered some privacy without her asking, however. She held the hospital gown wide open before Hanna and stood between her and Arch. While disrobing, Hanna peered over Lenna’s shoulder. She saw Arch was entirely disinterested in her, focusing on assembling more equipment and tying on a surgeon’s smock. So collected and businesslike, Hanna sensed Arch approached the bi-graft no differently than her father’s mechanic repairing their car.
“Can I ask a question?” Hanna said.
“Ask all you need to,” Arch said.
“What is a bi-graft?” Hanna asked.
“An intrauterine bi-graft,” Arch announced, “freezes the gemellius’ cortical functions, fastens its mass to the uterine wall, and cauterizes key vascular pathways. The gemellius’ automated functions remain operational. Otherwise, its development is arrested.”
“Do you understand?” Lenna asked. She was tying the back of Hanna’s gown in place.
“It’s like an abortion?” Hanna ventured.
“Not in the least,” Arch announced again. “I am not an abortionist. Our government in its grand wisdom has made that procedure legal in all fifty states while keeping intrauterine bi-grafts punishable to the full extent of the law.”
“Don’t worry about all that,” Lenna said to Hanna.
“What I will do,” Arch continued, “is place your double in a coma. A persistent vegetative state. This sustains the symbiosis but terminates the progress of the fetus. It lives, you live.”
“She stays inside me?”
“For the rest of your life,” Lenna said.
”Some time in the next month or two, you’ll suffer birthing contractions,” Arch said. “Your body will attempt to fulfill its end of the bargain and expel the gemellius.” He went to the sink, still spurting steaming hot water, and began soaping up his arms and hands. “A key step of the procedure is to affix the gemellius to your uterine lining. That prevents delivery.”
The boiler in the corner, only grumbling up to this point, banged twice, just like the steam radiator had in Uncle Rick’s and Aunt Azami’s apartment when she spent the night.
“Affix?”
Arch, his back to Hanna, called out over the running water. “Surgical staples. They’re permanent.”
“Staples!”
“Under no condition can the gemellius exit your body.”
“But what if she does? Do I call a doctor?”
“Don’t go to doctors,” Lenna said. “Doctors call the police.”
“If it exits your body,” Arched called from the sink, “it’s all over.”
Lenna helped barefoot Hanna to the folding table. The concrete floor was so cold it make her soles burn. Hanna lay back while Lenna placed her feet in the stirrups.
“Are you being prescribed anything?” Arch called. “Any drug at all.”
“Gefyridol,” Hanna said. “I brought it with me, just in case.”
Arch snatched up a white starchy towel and buried his hands in it. Lenna turned off the faucet. Drying his hairy, muscled forearms, he stood over Hanna.
“You just saved yourself a lot of money,” he said. “You’ll need to start taking gefyridol.”
“When?”
“Today,” Lenna said, “after the procedure. Then once a week.”
“For how lo
ng?”
“The rest of your life,” Lenna said.
Hanna sunk her head to the surface of the folding table. “I don’t have that much of it. Just one box.”
“There’s a low-dosage gefyridol tablet you can buy over-the-counter,” Arch said. “But the acetaminophen in it is hard on the liver. Lenna can show you a way to separate the gefyridol.”
“When you’re older,” she said, “you can try and get a prescription. That’s a lot easier. But if you ever see the pharmacist dialing the phone, you get out of there.”
“And in a hurry,” Arch added.
“Don’t even ask for the prescription back,” Lenna said. “Just go.”
“Who will give me a prescription?”
“Hagar’s water jug.” Lenna drew the symbol in the air. “Find women who can help. They’ll get you gefyridol. Or a place to sleep. Or a job where they don’t ask too many questions.”
“And you need to start acting like an adult,” Arch said. That bruised Hanna until he continued. “Start wearing makeup. Buy some grownup clothes at Goodwill. Talk like an adult. But don’t overdo it. When someone looks at you funny, say your mother was small too.”
“Tell them you’re Irish,” Lenna said, whispering Irish as though it was fatal.
“Eat well,” Arch said. “Stay healthy. Your immune system will be compromised, so avoid hospitals. Hear that? Don’t work at a hospital. Don’t go to one unless it’s an absolute emergency. You catch a cold, you get a fever, make yourself some chicken soup and sleep it off. Do not go to a hospital.”
“And don’t sell your body,” Lenna said, whispering body the way she whispered Irish. “There’s always a better option.”
While Lenna washed her hands at the sink, Arch stood over Hanna on the table. Eyes on Lenna’s back, he added, voice lowered, “And don’t do heroin. Never.”
Arch reached into an oil-stained cardboard box and produced a half-empty bottle of American vodka. He poured three glugs into a Pyrex beaker and drank it all in two swallows. The beaker shivered as it was pressed to his lips. Then he poured another two glugs, filling the beaker a quarter way up.
Lenna finished drying her hands. “You’re smart, you’ll learn.” Lenna’s waxy hands, gentle, wrapped around Hanna’s right hand. “All of Hagar’s sisters have to learn. You’ll learn about medicine, about nutrition, about finding work and a place to sleep.”
Is that what I’m to become? Hanna asked herself. Hagar’s sister?
Arch said, “You still want to go through with this?”
“I don’t want to die,” she said.
“The whole world is waiting for you,” Lenna said. “You deserve a chance to see it.”
Arch plunked stainless steel medical instruments into the beaker of vodka: scalpels, calipers, forceps, and more. The boiler banged once and groaned.
“It’s not fair,” Hanna said, tearing up.
Arch positioned himself between Hanna’s extended bare legs. He sat in a metal folding chair, the kind her parents would set out for a backyard party. He placed the beaker on the concrete floor beside his feet. The first instrument he drew was one Dr. Mayhew had used, a clamp that kept her privates open. Hanna gripped Lenna’s frail, waxy hand. A moment later, the clamp locked in place. The cold of the room crept across Hanna’s bare skin.
Lenna snapped on the lamp attached to Arch’s forehead. He peered into Hanna’s body, his unforgiving gloved hands on her legs and groin.
“You’re well through ponte amplio,” he said. “If you’d waited two more weeks, a bi-graft would be impossible. You’d have no choice but to commit to delivering the fetus.”
“Is there really no way I can have the child and live?” Lying on her back, she felt she was talking to the concrete ceiling.
“Absolutely not,” she heard Arch say. “That’s how the ballgame’s played.”
“I can’t have the baby and leave the cord in place?” she said up to the gray ceiling. “I know it sounds weird—“
“You’re not the first to ask,” she heard Arch say. “You want to have the baby attached to you like a leash.”
“Is that wrong?”
“It’s not possible. The funiculus occludes when withdrawn from the body, like picking a banana from a tree.”
His hands continued to grip her thighs and probe her insides. He coughed. She hoped he was being sanitary about it. Then she heard a tinkling of metal against glass. He was taking another instrument from the Pyrex beaker.
“Why do I die?” she said to the ceiling. “Why doesn’t it die?”
“Because God and Darwin got together in a room and agreed that was how things would be,” Arch snapped.
“Arch,” Lenna said softly. “Be nice.”
“I don’t mind answering medical questions,” he said, “but don’t ask me, of all people, why life is unfair.”
The metal folding chair scraped on the concrete floor. Arch stood over Hanna again, his hands clad in powdered surgical gloves and a surgical mask over his mouth. Lenna tugged it down, making it a cloth chin strap.
“Do you want this or not?” he said.
“I don’t know…”
“I’m not here to sell you something you don’t want,” he said. “You say ‘no,’ I stop.”
“Absolutely,” Lenna said, stroking Hanna’s cheek. “But you know what you want, don’t you.”
“You say ‘yes,’ then let’s go,” Arch said. “We can’t waffle around down here all day.”
Hanna said softly, “My parents lied.”
“Most do.”
“They keep calling it their baby,” Hanna said. “Like I borrowed it from them.”
“It’s your baby,” Lenna said.
Arch forced a skeptical smile. “It’s not your baby,” he said. “Not genetically. But you never agreed to be your mother’s surrogate, either.”
“My mother said she can’t have any more babies. They cut out her womb.”
“Her cervix?” Arch said. “Or her uterus?”
“I don’t know,” Hanna admitted. “But she said the doctors took me away from her. When I was born.”
“Butchers.” Arch shook his head dismissively. “The doctors back then, back in the Sixties, they pumped pregnant women full of drugs they didn’t need and then cut them up at the first sign of trouble.”
“So you think she’s telling the truth?”
“You have any younger bridge sisters? No? Then she’s probably telling the truth.”
“They’re going to be alone after I’m gone,” Hanna said.
“They can adopt,” he said.
Arch was grim, his nostrils spread as though something foul was leaking into the air. Lenna offered Hanna warm, generous eyes and a soft smile. The boiler groaned and rattled, then went altogether silent.
“But if I give birth,” Hanna said, “there’s nothing little Hanna will remember about me?”
“Only in science fiction books,” Arch said.
“Nothing about me survives in her?”
“Nothing.”
Hanna, face hot and swelling with fresh anxiety, said, “Maybe my parents will take me back. I can do this and be their real daughter. Right?”
Arch said, “It never works out that way. All they care about is their baby inside you.”
“Your baby,” Lenna said again.
Twenty-two
A small brass bell tied to the door announced Hanna’s entrance with a tinny tinkle. Her jaw loosened at the sights within the store. Colored and patterned paper everywhere, some folded under glass, others sorted into reams on racks. Long shaggy sheets hung on wood poles like the newspapers at Concord’s public library. Paper and craft goods went all the way to the rear of the store. In the center stood shelves of instructional books, some in English, some in Japanese, some in both languages.
A display case magnetically drew her close. Behind the glass stood origami the likes she’d never seen before or even imagined possible. A dragon twelve inches tall reared on its h
ind legs. A red-and-orange belch of paper flames emerged from its mouth. Beside it stood a knotty, arthritic tree, ancient looking, with a bushy green top and a whippoorwill resting on one ponderous branch. Smaller origami figures were displayed in the case as well, some with blue or red ribbons beneath indicating honors in origami competitions in the United States and Japan.
Taped to the case glass, in bold black ink:
NO CUTS, NO TEARS, NO GLUE
A woman behind the counter said, “Are you looking for something in particular?”
Hanna, awestruck, turned and shook her head. “I just wanted to see.”
“There’s more in the back.” The woman indicated the far end of the store.
“How do they do this?” Hanna turned again to the tree. It was huge, the size of the doll house her parents gave her when she was seven. “Is this really one piece of paper?”
“Not at all.” The woman stepped through a small swinging gate between the counter and the shop floor. “That took three sheets of paper.”
“Three?”
“One for the tree trunk,” she said, “one for the leaves, and one for the bird.”
Even the bird, not terribly larger than her cranes, seemed far too intricate to be composed purely of folds and creases.
“How do you fold the trunk like that?” she said. “Those knots look so real.”
“Wet-folding,” the woman said. “With the paper wet, you have a lot more control. When it dries, it holds its form. Wet-folding makes origami more like sculpting. Some purists look down on it,” she confided.
“But did they really not use any glue?” Hanna tapped the glass near the dragon. “His eyes and nostrils, those holes, they weren’t cut out of the paper?”
“Just folds,” she said. “That would be cheating otherwise.”
“I can do a crane,” Hanna said. “But that’s all.”
“That’s a good start.” The woman led Hanna to the bookshelf. “There’s so much more you can learn, though.” She picked up a book and flipped to a random page. The color photographs demonstrated the steps for folding a sunflower.
“I’m trying to fold a thousand tsuru in one year,” Hanna said. “I’m almost finished.”
