Narrated in turn by each member of the Russo family—grandmother Linda, mother Hope, father Rich, fifteen-year-old Macy, and twelve-year-old Kyra—The Human Slice combines fable, science fiction, and family drama to create an all-too-realistic tale of tragedy and that malleable substance called human nature.
Excerpt from
THE HUMAN SLICE
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING
LINDA
It’s been a year now since Hope walked into the living room and asked if anyone had seen Jonah. A year of being the only one in the family who knows anything about Jonah’s death. It’s starting to become a little bit lonely for me in this house.
We have a name for this thing now, at least; an international group of doctors have gotten together and settled on a few terms. The winning name for this act of forgetting, of losing oneself in layers, is Widespread Selective Amnesia (WSA). People are calling themselves “Ammies.”
As for the Heavies, we’ve been renamed NAs: the Non-Afflicted. (The joke, of course, is that we’re more afflicted than anybody.) We’re not as small a group as it seemed at the beginning; doctors estimate that NAs make up 3 to 5 percent of the population. But we’re enough of a minority that the switch in terminology doesn’t seem particularly urgent to the general public. Most people still call us Heavies, though I’m still not sure whether it’s because of the weight they imagine we must feel all the time or the damper we seem to put on any lighthearted conversation.
RICH
Honestly, I’ve never been happier. I’m more productive at work than I’ve ever been, and when I leave at the end of the day, I can’t wait to walk into my house and see my family. Hope and I are getting along the way we were when we were first married, at least first thing in the morning, when she’s had a good night’s sleep and a chance to forget whatever my mother was putting into her head the night before. We’re even starting to talk about having another baby.
The four of us—me, Hope, and the girls—are all doing great, but my mother is running around like some kind of reverse Cassandra, insisting we try to regain some hold on the things that used to torment us. Uh … thanks, but no thanks, you know?
MACY
Today at school, Ryan comes up to me and tells me he thinks we should get back together. And I want to say yes—I’m standing here looking at him, and all I want to do is reach out and put my hands on him. But I keep thinking, “How can I do this when I don’t even know why we broke up the first time? What did we do to each other that was so bad neither one of us can remember it?”
KYRA
School has gotten crazy. Kids are bailing on tests, saying, “Oh, sorry, I tried to read about the Holocaust, but it made me too sad, it wouldn’t stay in my head.” And this one kid beat someone up and got sent to the principal’s office. His defense was, “What does it matter? He’s not going to remember it anyway.” Even teachers are forgetting stuff. Mrs. Kantner, my English teacher, told us she had to reread Romeo and Juliet, even though she’d been teaching it for sixteen years. She said she didn’t know what kind of past experience she’d had with Romeo and Juliet, but it must have been pretty bad.
And as for the Heavies, people either ignore them or pick on them. Most of us, at least as far as I can tell, just aren’t admitting it. Even my mom still hasn’t figured out about me. Even my grandma.
HOPE
There’s a laundry tip I know, a little piece of household alchemy passed down to me from my mother: if you ever need to get blood out of a piece of clothing, hold the item over the sink and douse the stain with hydrogen peroxide. It’s like magic. The liquid fizzes and bubbles. The fabric turns hot, as some unseen chemical battle takes place within its threads. And then the blood is gone—all of it, every trace. Sometimes the item feels a little stiff after it dries—peroxide is harsh and can wear down material over time—but the stain is gone. The liquid runs clear, and the fabric is clean and wet as spring.
I keep trying to tell myself that it’s a relief that I don’t remember anything about Jonah’s death. But part of me doesn’t want that spot to be gone.
Rich is fine with a few gaps in his memory, but I don’t like this hungover, what-did-I-do-last-night feeling. Doesn’t this make us vulnerable, this inability to remember our pain? A world of clean, bright-eyed innocents—that wasn’t the way things were meant to be. A world of babies with no adults to warn them that fire is hot.
I think: a woman whose husband has beaten her twice a month for the last thirty years will no longer know that when he starts talking in that particular tone of voice and examining his fingernails with the most casual air in the world, it’s time to go lock herself in the bedroom and dial the first two numbers of 911. According to a new study, laboratory rats are no longer able to learn that pressing a certain lever will give them a shock. I imagine them jolting themselves over and over again, looking for rewards and finding only pain, until their fur is singed and their paws have lost all feeling.
MACY
One of the things I still haven’t gotten used to is the way that not everyone forgets the same things. It can be useful—like when I was thinking about getting back together with Ryan, I asked my friend Lauren if she could remember what happened the first time around, and she told me this whole story about him cheating on me with some girl when his family was on vacation. It didn’t sound familiar—it was like she was talking about someone else—but it was bad enough that I decided this reunion wasn’t going to happen.
But it can also make you feel kind of lonely and almost scared. Like, why do you know these things about me that I don’t know? And why didn’t that hurt you so much that you forgot it, too?
RICH
So tonight Macy comes home with a tattoo on the nape of her neck. I’m not particularly happy about it, but I’m trying not to make it into a big thing. The thing I don’t entirely get is the picture she chose: it’s a figurehead, like from an old ship. You know, those busts of women jutting out from the bow? Well, this is a head-on view of one of those. A wide-eyed woman with flowing hair and a pale face, pointing one finger out to sea. The artwork’s pretty good, actually. But when I ask her why she picked that particular image, she doesn’t seem quite sure how to explain it.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just think those things are kind of creepy and interesting. They give me the chills, you know? And also I like the idea that there’s someone looking behind me, keeping an eye out on the things I can’t see.”
“Watching your back,” I say.
As is so often the case these days, I have this feeling that Macy and I are just on the verge of some connection, but our hands can’t quite reach.
“I like it,” I say. “I think it’s cool.”
Macy rolls her eyes. “God, Dad,” she says. And she walks out of the room, her second set of eyes watching me as she leaves.
KYRA
The tattoo comes close to being the thing that pushes me over the edge. I’m really tempted to tell Macy I’m a Heavy. I mean, for God’s sake. She doesn’t have any idea why she’s picked that thing. But I’m managing to stay low-key.
“Yeah, I’ve seen those before. We saw some at the museum, right?”
“Which museum?” she says. Oh, come on.
“The Museum of Science and Industry. We …” My voice starts to crack, but I save it by clearing my throat. “We saw them when we went there with Mom a while ago, remember?”
“Not really,” she says. “Funny that you remember it and I don’t. Maybe I had a fight with Ryan right beforehand or something.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s probably it.”
“Well, we should go there,” she says. “I’d like to see them again—it’s kind of my new thing. Maybe this weekend. We can get someone to drive us.”
What can I say? She knows I don’t have anything else going on. “Yeah,” I say. “We should go.”
LINDA
For a while this spring, Hope joined a support group for
people who were troubled by the effects of WSA. But it was frustrating, she said, because while they could talk around their vague feelings of loss and identity confusion, they could never really get to the heart of any of it. You could say, for example, “I’m upset that I can’t remember my mother’s death,” but it was hard to maintain much fire when you in fact could not remember your mother’s death.
They tried different strategies. For a while they were doing weekly exercises in which they’d go home and ask friends and families, and sometimes mere acquaintances, to help them fill in the gaps. How did my husband become paralyzed? What happened that Christmas when I was nine? Have I ever hit my children? They’d write down the stories and bring them in to read aloud. But it was as if they were reading a newspaper article or a piece of overblown fiction: somebody else’s tragedy.
Hope eventually stopped going to the group—as I think most of them did. But that little homework assignment ended up helping her. The trick is finding someone who knows your history but hasn’t been personally affected by the same things as you. Or—and this is where Hope is lucky, if you can call it that—you can ask an NA.
HOPE
Usually, before bed Linda reads for a while at the kitchen table and has a glass of wine. Lately I’ve started joining her; we both have books, but from time to time we put them down and talk a little. One night, finally, I asked her to tell me about Jonah. That was how I phrased it, but she understood that I meant Tell me about Jonah’s death.
The ironic thing is, the absence of that one enormous memory has made room for a whole flock of smaller happy ones to come skittering back. I think that before WSA, I had deprived myself of my good memories of Jonah. They were too painful in light of what happened later. But once that boulder had been lifted out, a million little bits of gravel spilled in to fill the hole: the unexpected pleasure of having a baby who was all mine (or so it always feels when they’re tiny) again after so many years; the way he loved strained carrots so much that they turned his nose orange; watching him toddle after the girls in the yard, shrieking and holding out a handful of grass.
I knew that hearing the story of his death would probably take those memories away again, at least until the WSA did its work once more. It was a strange trade to be making, but I wanted to hear the story.
LINDA
“It was a Wednesday in August,” I tell her. “The girls’ summer camp had already finished, and they were kind of at loose ends. So you had told them you’d take the day off and drive them into Chicago to go to the science museum.”
RICHARD
I come in one night, right in the middle of this morbid tête-à-tête, and once I figure out what they’re talking about, I’m disgusted. Why does my mother insist on forcing these things on us? Why can’t she let us move on?
MACY
I know my mom and Grammy have these nightly meetings, and from the way my dad grumbles, I gather they’re talking about Jonah. Honestly, I don’t really get it. I mean, I remember Jonah, too; he was a cutie. But I’m happy to remember him as he was, a cheery little guy, always getting into everything. Why bring up all the dark stuff if you’re lucky enough to have forgotten it?
LINDA
We speak about it every night, and every morning she’s forgotten again. But it’s important to both of us. I think of Penelope, weaving and unweaving. I think of Scheherazade, warding off her own death by telling stories.
“There’d been a lot of back-and-forth,” I tell her, “about whether you were going to take Jonah to the museum with you or Rich would drop him off at day care as usual. You thought he might like the big heart and maybe the whispering gallery, too, but you also knew he wasn’t going to sit in his stroller quietly while the three of you took in the exhibits.”
By this point, Hope always has a wary look on her face, but she never wants me to stop.
“So finally you decided to send him to day care, but I hadn’t heard that part. And when Kyra came up and said, ‘Mom said, can you put Jonah in the car?’ I thought it meant you’d decided to take him with you.
“I put his coat on him and carried him outside. He’d been fussy all morning, and I thought, ‘Good. He’ll probably take a nap on the way.’”
And always I speak this part clear and loud, always, always: “I was the one who buckled him in. I gave him his pacifier and rubbed his head for a minute. He was asleep before I shut the door.”
“I don’t understand,” Hope says every single night. “How could I not have noticed he was there? Or the girls? And if Rich was supposed to take him to day care …?”
And I go through the chain of error. “Well, I was on my way to the dentist’s, so I didn’t even go back inside after I’d put him in the car. I knew you were all getting ready to go and you’d be out in a minute. When Rich got in his car and saw the baby wasn’t there, he figured you’d decided to take him with you after all. So he called day care and told them Jonah wasn’t coming, which is why they never called you when he didn’t arrive.”
“But,” she always says. I know. “But” was the game we all played for months afterward.
“It was the week after Macy’s sleepover, and Rich had moved Jonah’s car seat to the back row so that all the girls could fit when you went to the pizza place. And he was still facing backward, remember, because even though he was almost eighteen months, he was still such a little guy. He slept all the way there. From what everyone said afterward, he didn’t make a peep. That’s all, honey. I’m sorry. That’s all there is to it.”
KYRA
As it turns out, Grammy’s going to be the one to take me and Macy on this WSA-fueled field trip back to the museum. Which makes things a little more difficult, because she knows, you know? She understands what that place means. But whatever. I’ve been faking for a year. I can handle a stupid museum trip.
LINDA
I’m actually glad to be going with them. I wasn’t there the day it happened—the dentist appointment, remember—so my memories of that day have little to do with the locale. They’re precious to me, those memories of horror and grief, locked up safe in the same place I keep all my treasures of birth and laughter and falling in love. This is what people don’t seem to understand anymore: that we need to know all of our extremes in order to know ourselves. I’m happy that I still know I made fun of a girl in grade school because her family was poor and she spoke with a lisp. Happy that I remember the pain of both a broken arm and a failed marriage. Happy even to remember the exact wording of Hope’s phone message, the one I picked up in the parking lot of the dentist’s office, my face still numb with Novocain.
KYRA
So Saturday comes, and we head off to go to this place I thought I never wanted to see again. At least Grammy parks on a different level, thank God. That purple paint is burned into my mind forever.
MACY
We go right to the ship exhibit first, so I can look at the figureheads. It gives me a cool, creepy déjà-vu feeling that I can’t quite put my finger on. I stay there awhile, just looking. There are two of them, a woman and a man. And the woman one looks just like my tattoo. I must have subconsciously remembered the design when I sketched it out for the tattoo guy. I wonder if the gift shop has a postcard or something.
KYRA
She’s just standing there, staring at these statues like an idiot and saying how they’re all scary and mystical, and I just want to scream at her: This is where you were, you moron. This is where you heard the news. And now she thinks she’s some kind of art history student, because her malfunctioning brain has forgotten every detail of the day except this one.
HOPE
“Once you were inside the museum,” Linda always told me as we sat at the kitchen table with our wine, “you all went to look at the Fairy Castle for a while.”
I knew about that, at least. “The girls always loved that.”
“And then you went and looked at the coal exhibit with the elevator and the hard hats, because Macy was supposed to wri
te her family history for English class in the fall, and you’d told her your grandfather was a coal miner. And then you split up, because Kyra wanted to go see the body slices, and Macy thought they were gross. So you went with Kyra, and Macy stayed downstairs to look at the exhibits on the first floor.”
MACY
There’s this horrible thing at the top of the blue stairs that people call “the human slice.” It’s so creepy: it’s the real bodies of two real dead people from, like, the 1930s or something, and they’ve been cut into slices and preserved in plastic. There’s a man and a woman, and they cut one up vertically and the other one horizontally. And you can just walk through and look at all these slices of dead bodies, and see all the cross-sections of veins and organs and teeth and whatnot, and admire the wonders of the human body.
And then you can just go home and kill yourself because you’re such a freak. I mean, seriously, what the fuck?
KYRA
I just think it’s interesting. I mean, yeah, it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s kind of amazing, too. I always used to like walking through that part; I was never afraid of them until afterward. But going to the museum today, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t go up there. Because that’s where Mom and I were standing when the message came on the loudspeaker.
HOPE
“Hyperthermia” is the word; I learn it every day. Even on a moderately warm day, the temperature in a car can get up past a hundred in no time. And this was the middle of summer.
The only thing that ever gets me to sleep is knowing I won’t remember a thing about it in the morning.
LINDA
I tell the girls I’m going to the bathroom, and I go to see the body slices myself. I don’t want to take Kyra with me, in case there’s some scrap of a memory that the WSA has missed. That was the thing she had nightmares about, afterward. Not the loss of her brother, baked to death in his car seat, but the sliced-up people under glass. She was afraid someone was going to do the same thing to her.
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