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To my parents, Joanne and Frank Chiarella, and my brother, Christopher Chiarella
“He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
—Kate Chopin, The Awakening
August
Hannah
Maybe it’s like being born. I don’t know. It’s impossible to compare it to something I cannot remember. When I finally come back to myself, it takes me a moment to realize I haven’t died. I choke my way back to consciousness, my eyes full of milky brightness, my heart a seismic pulse of energy inside me. I reach out, fumbling for something to anchor me here. I am lost, panicked, and adrift with the idea of death, when the room begins to take shape around me. Details sharpen, forms appear. It’s a small room with a window. Everything is colorless, washed-out, and overtaken by light. Unfamiliar. Then I register the smell, the metallic bite of antiseptic in the stale air, and I know I’m still alive. It’s a hospital smell. And even though I’m disoriented and sleep-addled and half-blind, I know for certain that Heaven would never smell like this.
I take a breath, try to slow my heart and pay attention. People will want to know what it’s like, how it feels, being born for a second time. They will want it to be tunnels of light and choruses of angels, messages from the other side. They will want God to have something to do with it. But it feels more like waking from a night of heavy drinking than anything profound. I feel wrung out and groggy. Dehydrated. I blink against the brightness of my room, breathing deep the acrid hospital smell, and realize that I’ll probably have to lie to them.
Sam is sitting by the window. He looks older in these shades of white and gray, gaunt and worn and sapped of blood. As if all of his lingering boyishness has been finally wrung out of him, and suddenly his dark hair and sharp nose, the unshaven shadow around the calm fullness of his mouth, all of these things serve to make him look hardened. Even from here I know it’s his eyes that have changed the most, lingering somewhere far off, the pain in them. I think of my first drawing class in high school, how the teacher taught us always to begin a portrait with the eyes, how you can map a whole face once you get the eyes right. The sight of him brings with it a relief that is so potent I could cry. He’s here.
I try to say something, but the words are hot little barbs that stick in my windpipe. Sam glances up at the small sound I make, as if he is shocked to see me there. He moves toward me and reaches for the side table, retrieving a cup, and offers me a spoonful of ice chips.
“You’re okay. It’s the respirator. They took it out a half-hour ago.”
I accept the ice, and it’s shockingly vivid, the taste of it like cold chlorine, blunting the soreness as I swallow. He glances down, taking my hand and squeezing it, almost to the point of pain. He looks afraid. I wish I could tell him that I’m all right, but I can’t speak, and I’m not even sure if it’s true anyway. Has the transfer worked? Is it supposed to feel like this?
Sam pushes a button next to my bed, calling a nurse. I shake my head, wishing I could tell him not to. I need a bit more time, to wade into this like the waters of an icy pool, slowly, so as not to shock the system. But then I notice my hand, the right one, the one he’s holding so insistently, and for the first time my eyes register a color. Red. My hand is bleeding, the IV catheter hanging loose, a piece of medical tape curling where it was pulled free from my skin. Great work, Hannah. I haven’t been awake five minutes and already I’ve managed to draw blood.
And my nail polish is gone. Penny came by yesterday afternoon and painted my fingernails a slippery wine color when the nurses weren’t watching. Harlot, she’d said, showing me the label on the top of the bottle, giving me that crooked smile of hers. I’d told her there was no point. After all, what did a discarded body need with red fingernails? But she’d insisted, and I was too weak to even consider arguing. Now my nails are bare. It hits me, the certainty that I’ve shrugged off my former self and taken root within something else. I think of a snake shedding its skin, leaving the dry, crusted remains to the whims of the sun and desert sky.
A nurse hustles in, stopping briefly to shine a tiny light into my eyes that feels like it’s piercing my brain, and then attends to my damaged hand.
“She pulled it out when she was waking up,” Sam explains, as if we’ve accidentally broken something very valuable in someone else’s house. “She seems disoriented.”
The nurse nods. “It takes a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the light,” she replies, packing the back of my hand with gauze and fastening it in place with medical tape. “Some of the others have said they couldn’t see anything at first.”
“But she can see now, right?” Sam asks.
“Of course,” the nurse replies, peeling her gloves off and tossing them in a waste bin. “She can hear, too.”
“I know that,” Sam says, reddening. It’s habit for him now, managing me and my care and my disease with little input from me. I’ve been a passenger in my own illness ever since the beginning, with Sam squarely at the helm.
“The doctors should be by in a few minutes,” the nurse says, scribbling something in my chart and heading for the door. “When they’re done I’ll be back to put in a new IV.”
Sam sits next to my bed, his fingers around my wrist, sparing my damaged hand. It is quiet again, quiet but for the beep of the machines next to my bed, and all of a sudden it’s too much. I want Sam to say something, to look me in the eyes, but he does neither.
“You’re here,” I whisper through the rasp in my throat. Sam glances up.
“Of course. Of course I’m here.”
“I was afraid you’d be . . .” Gone, I think. “Sick. The flu.”
Sam shakes his head. “I only stayed away because the doctors told me to, you know that. But nothing would have kept me away from you today.”
He looks so sincere when he says it, and it’s just what I want to hear. Sam believes in the truth the way my grandmother believed in the Holy Spirit, as an intangible force of righteous power, worthy of lifelong devotion, and I feel sick for doubting him at all. I want to kiss him, to dig my fingers into his hair, to use what little strength I have to erase this fault line that has split us from each other since I was diagnosed. But instead I reach forward and touch the crease between his eyebrows with the pad of my thumb, wishing I could smooth it out, as if I were working with wet clay. That crease, which appeared almost simultaneously with my cancer, has grown deep during the past few months. It is so unfair, that Sam should have to carry a mark of my illness on his forehead while I can start over fresh. It feels like walking away from a terrible car wreck without a scratch.
I begin to register the torn puncture of the IV, the low, aching pulse of it, and that’s when I know that if this second birth was meant to be profound, if it was meant to be something rare and overwhelming, then I’m certain I’ve done it all wrong. Because it’s only that small, insignificant pain in the back of my hand that makes me realize all of my other pain is gone.
It’s impossible that I haven’t realized it until now. I’d wished for this specific mercy every moment I was in pain, and I’d been in pain for months. Worse, too, was imagining what caused that pain, the dense, parasitic tumors cropping up along my spine. Sam and I both became well acquainted with each other’s powerlessness in
those months; mine in the face of my own body’s betrayals, and Sam’s in the face of the medical establishment that had become the sole governor of our lives. His inability to negotiate for an increase in my morphine or his futility in protecting me from the barrage of small, necessary agonies that accompanied each of my days in the hospital made the pain that much more difficult. His powerlessness undercut my own. Now I’ve forgotten, it seems, those months of hot wire tightening inside me, those months of chemical burning through my bones, metal puncturing my skin. How easily a body forgets, I think. But no, not this body. This body has never known such pain at all.
“You look like you’ve gotten about twelve years of sleep,” Sam says. “How do you feel?”
“I can breathe.” I exhale the words, drawing them out. I feel like I’m describing a lover, something illicit.
“I know,” he says. “Your pulse ox is above 95. That’s the first time in ages.”
I smile, glancing over at the readout on the monitor beside my bed. It would have been a mystery to us a year ago, that machine, but now we are experts in the weights and measures of my illness. Sam has a particular knack for memorizing numbers and the dosages of my medications and the names of all of the nurses. He’s the one who takes the notes, asks the doctors questions. He says it’s the journalist in him, but I know better. He’s particularly skilled at this, at being the caretaker, because he had a lot of practice with his father.
“It’s amazing how afraid I’ve been of that little number,” Sam says. “I keep waiting for it to drop. It seemed like I’d come in every morning and it’d be lower than the day before. That fucking number used to ruin my whole day.”
I nod. I wonder if I’m allowed to kiss him. I decide it’s better not to try, not right away.
Sam leaves to check his messages when the doctors descend. Dr. Mitchell gives a quick knock on the door as he enters, less a request for permission and more of an announcement of his presence. There’s no stopping anyone in a hospital; you’re on their turf, a supplicant. The doctor is an older man with bright silver hair and an oblong birthmark on his right cheek. Dr. Shah follows him, and the contrast of her youthful exuberance could not be starker against his measured, practiced calm. She practically skips into the room, teetering in her high heels, looking more like an extra in a Bollywood movie than the scientific savant that she is. The third man is less familiar to me. He’s tall, middle-aged, and has a certain bureaucratic exactness to him. I wonder if he’s from the government, one of the doctors who will be reporting on all of the SUBlife patients during the next year before the program goes up for FDA approval. The three of them close in around me.
“How are we feeling today Hannah?” Dr. Mitchell asks, taking a penlight out of his pocket and shining it in my eyes. I smile because he always speaks about me in the plural and because, of all my doctors, I like him best.
“The pain is gone,” I reply, a bit afraid to say it out loud, lest I tempt it back with my words. A nurse elbows her way between Dr. Shah and the other doctor, unceremoniously grabbing my arm for a blood test. She plunges a needle into the distended vein in the crook of my arm. It’s almost a welcome sight; my old veins had been so shot in the last few weeks that the nurses in the ICU had to draw blood from the tops of my feet. Dr. Mitchell checks the glands in my neck as the nurse removes the full vial of blood and tapes a lump of cotton to my injured arm, then disappears without a word. The brusqueness and efficiency of the hospital staff has become commonplace for me, and I long ago surrendered any resistance to their needles and catheters and tubes and relentless prodding. It’s been a long time since I felt that my body was in any way my own. But this is the first time that I wonder if this body is mine at all, if I even have the option to refuse any of the medical demands they will make upon it.
I answer Dr. Shah’s questions and read the flash cards she puts before me as Dr. Mitchell listens to my heart and lungs, tests my reflexes. I recite the words they asked me to remember before the transfer. Glass. Curtain. Snapshot. When she holds up a card with a blue box in the middle and asks me what color it is, the smart-ass in me wonders what would happen if I tell her that it’s yellow. I feel like a seal with a ball balanced on my nose, clapping my flippers for their amusement. But I give the correct answer instead. My guess is FDA guy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.
“What did you do for your seventh birthday party?” Dr. Shah asks. The question surprises me a bit, because I haven’t thought about any of my childhood birthdays in years. She must have gotten her information from my sister.
“Horseback riding,” I reply, recalling the coarse feeling of the horse’s mane beneath my hands. The memory brings with it a flood of relief. It must all still be there, I think. All of my memories must have transferred over, even the ones it wouldn’t occur to me to remember on my own.
Dr. Mitchell presses on my stomach. FDA guy looks bored. I wonder how many times he’s been through this before. I wonder how many of us there are in the Northwestern pilot program. Or maybe he has to fly around, go to all five of the hospitals that were approved for SUBlife trials. How many times can someone watch a human clone wake up for the first time before it becomes boring?
Dr. Mitchell pulls out a pen and scribbles in my chart. “Everything is looking great, Hannah,” he says. “You should expect some differences at first. Your muscles are still underdeveloped, so we’re not going to get you up and walking just yet. And we’re going to work our way up to solid food to make sure your digestive system is in good order. But none of that is out of the ordinary for this stage post-transfer.”
“Has anything gone wrong with any of the others?” I ask. Dr. Mitchell glances at Dr. Shah. She’s the one who answers.
“We only have data for our SUBlife patients here at Northwestern. But so far, everyone has responded very well to the transfer.”
“How many have there been?”
“You’re the fourth. You’ll meet the others next week when you start attending your support group meetings.”
“And you’re sure—” I swallow hard against the lingering dryness in my throat, trying to get the question out. “You’re sure the cancer isn’t going to come back?”
There’s a slight pause in the room. FDA guy looks at me like I’m an idiot, probably wondering why his taxpayer dollars are funding a study to save someone like me, someone who can’t even grasp the most basic of concepts. But if I don’t ask the question, here, out loud, I know the lack of an answer will plague me forever.
Dr. Mitchell is kinder than his counterpart. He takes my hand, leaning forward a bit. Maybe he knows how badly I need to hear it again now, even though I’ve heard it a hundred times before. “We were able to isolate the defective genes, Hannah,” he says, smiling a bit, a kindly old man calming his grandchild after a nightmare. “We removed them completely when we began developing your SUB. No, the cancer is not going to come back.” He squeezes my hand.
Now I start to cry, which clears the room pretty effectively. Sam steps back inside as the doctors leave, and he brings me a handful of tissues, but doesn’t sit back down. I wonder if his instinct is also to flee at the sight of my tears. Maybe he’s finally reached his limit, too.
“Penny left three messages. I told her I’d call as soon as you woke up, do you mind?” He holds up his phone.
“No, I’m sure they’re going crazy,” I say, drying my eyes as he steps back out into the hallway.
I wad up the damp tissues and toss them in the direction of the wastebasket. They fall short, of course. I take a deep breath, revel in it, and decide to take stock. I haven’t been alone yet, in this new body, and it feels a bit like waiting to become acquainted with the body of a stranger, a new lover. It’s something that must be done in private.
The skin of my arms is very pale, dusted with a fine down of dark hair, unbleached by the sun into its usual golden invisibility. Trails of cerulean veins stand prominent beneath the skin of my wrists. I can’t tell if the patterns are
still the same as they were before. I don’t remember, and it scares me how little I memorized of the body I’d lived in for twenty-seven years. All of my freckles are gone, giving my skin a strange, placid sort of appearance. As if it’s not quite real, as if I’ve pulled on a pair of perfect, silken gloves that reach all the way up to my shoulders. There are dark, damp thatches of hair in my armpits, and I begin to feel itchy as soon as I discover them.
My hands look small, their joints thin and supple, and I move them experimentally, testing to make sure my synapses fire with the same precision as before the transfer. They are foreign objects now, like the pale, delicate petals of a lily. These hands have endured none of the years I spent scribbling on sketchpads or being sliced up carving linoleum in a printmaking class or trying and failing to learn the piano. I wonder if I can hold a pencil. Or a paintbrush.
I flex my feet, stretching my legs under the bedspread, then fumble a hand under my hospital gown, taking care not to detach any of the EKG leads fixed to my skin. I laugh a little to myself when I find the soft dent of scar tissue in the middle of my stomach, testing it with my fingertip, wondering at the thrill of familiarity in provokes within my chest.
“What?” Sam says as he reenters, noting my reverie.
“For a second I was afraid I wouldn’t have a . . .” I motion to the middle of my stomach. “I mean, does a clone need an umbilical cord?”
“I guess there were one or two things we didn’t think to ask, huh?” he says, leaning close as I tuck the hospital blanket around my waist and draw up my gown, revealing the pallid skin of my stomach, with the little knot of my navel in the center. “Looks the same to me,” he says. I smile.
“What did Penny say?”
“She called me a very nasty name for not updating her sooner,” he replies. The thought of Penny’s famously quick temper hits me in a tender spot somewhere in my chest. I turn my head as Sam settles back into his chair, so he won’t see that I’m on the edge of tears again. I feel as if I have no skin, as if every emotion that wells up inside me will immediately spill out. I can hold nothing back, not in this new body; I can’t control it like the body I remember.
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