And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Looks like you’re only the second most important person in the room this week,” I say, giving him my best faux campaign-ad smile.

  “Thanks for warning me about the coffee,” David replies, his voice gruff in my ear as he passes my chair. He takes the seat next to me. “That first sip ended up down the front of my shirt.”

  I stifle a laugh with my hand, and my stomach hurts at the effort. I wonder if I’ve laughed before this moment, since the transfer. I can’t remember. But the image of David spewing coffee all over himself is too good to keep a straight face. He scowls at me.

  “I really appreciated that. I thought we were supposed to be in this together.”

  “And I really appreciated you voting to cut funding for the NEA,” I reply.

  “Ah,” he says, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms. Triumphant. “I see you Googled me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I know a few people who lost their grants after that vote. Really talented people, ones who are better than having to work at Starbucks to pay their rent.”

  “Maybe they should have gone into something more useful to society.”

  I feel young and whitewashed under his gaze, stripped of the signs and markers of my roughness, the hard edges I’d chosen and cultivated so specifically. I think of Sam, the way he looked at me when we met again in college, with my dyed hair and my nose ring and my tattoos. He looked at me like I’d been melted down from the girl he knew and forged of something harder and more brilliant. Some shining metal. Now I feel like clay, barely formed.

  “Like garbage collection. Or politics,” I quip.

  Dr. Bernard enters before David can say anything else. The good doctor is a full eight minutes late, all apologies, waving his hand in the air as if batting away all of the obligations that have trailed him into the conference room. Connie winks at me.

  “So to begin this week, I think we should explain a little about what brought each of you into the program,” Dr. Bernard says, clicking his pen and preparing to write on the legal pad that’s balanced on his knee. “David,” he says, turning toward the other man, “would you like to start us off?”

  David seems less than pleased at Dr. Bernard’s little show of authority. “I can give it to you in five words or less. Metastatic brain cancer.”

  “And a little about yourself, please,” Dr. Bernard replies, coaxing him like a professor in a room full of bashful freshmen.

  “Well, I work for Uncle Sam. I have a wife, Beth, and a son who will be eleven in October.”

  “And how are they coping with what you’re going through?” Dr. Bernard asks. David pauses, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and then shakes his head.

  “They’re fine. Beth is, well, she’s used to handling chaos. She’s excellent at it. And she knew I wasn’t going to die. She knew, one way or another, that I wouldn’t let something like that take me down.”

  “And your son?”

  David is silent for longer this time. “He’s fine. He’s a strong little kid. Takes after his old man that way. Right now he’s in Wisconsin with his grandparents. Beth, she thinks it’s better to keep him away from the hospital, you know?”

  “And what do you think?” Dr. Bernard asks.

  “I think a kid has to grow up sometime. I was never protected from anything as a child, and I don’t think my son should be either,” he says, all hard authoritarian bluster, but then something shifts in him. I can almost see the set of his shoulders soften. “Anyway, I’m his father. He shouldn’t need to be protected from me.”

  I want to tell him that he’s wrong, that we are capable of such great damage, that it’s only by the grace of God or modern medicine that we haven’t ruined the lives of the people who love us. But he looks so angry, and so vulnerable in his anger, that I’m sure he already knows. It’s a startling feeling, to look at David Jenkins and see something familiar.

  “That enough?” he asks. “Did I sing enough to earn my supper this week?”

  “I appreciate your willingness to share with us,” Dr. Bernard replies, and I’m still too distracted by David to realize that I’m on deck. “How about you, Hannah?” Dr. Bernard says. I straighten in my chair, fumbling with all of the things that I no longer know about myself.

  “I’m a graduate student at the Art Institute. A painter. I live with my boyfriend, Sam.” I falter, thinking of Lucy’s visit. “Well, I guess he’s my fiancé, now. Since I didn’t die.”

  “Congratulations,” Dr. Bernard says. “What was it that brought you here?”

  “Lung cancer,” I reply, trying to keep my face impassive, even as the words still feel so dense with agony that their shape is strange in my mouth. “Not the kind you get from smoking cigarettes. The kind you get from a really bad roll of the genetic dice.”

  “What was that like? To be diagnosed and be chosen for the program so suddenly?”

  “One minute I was dying, and then I wasn’t,” I reply, as if it is a trifle. In truth, I’ve been thinking a lot about the beginning, as if pinpointing the genesis of my illness will hold the key to how everything went so wrong so quickly. It was spring, and it was windy. I was heading home from a class at the Art Institute as dust and dead leaves skidded along Michigan Avenue in a series of wild gusts. Hurrying, I think. Late for dinner with Sam. My large canvas portfolio was catching the wind and propelling me at odd angles as I struggled down Harrison, heading for our apartment. I ran across the street during a gap in the rush-hour traffic, the pressing itch accumulating in my chest, gaining in heaviness as I fished my keys out of my pocket. I coughed hard, breathless, doubling over. Trying to force the feeling out of my lungs. Trying to clear them of whatever had taken root there. It was the first time I wondered if it was not a lingering cold that was keeping me up at night, soaking me with sweat. It was the first time my body became a source of fear.

  “I’m fine.” I smile at him, the fake smile, my first new trick in this new body. Thinking of riding the L home after the diagnosis, the SUBlife brochure in my hands, trying to read the pages through the glassy swell of my tears. And later, crouched on my bathroom floor, making the profound mistake of hyperventilating while having lung cancer, when Sam came home and found me. “I’m dealing with it fine,” I repeat, so Dr. Bernard will move on to someone else.

  Dr. Bernard nods. “All right. And you?” He motions to Connie.

  The bombshell fixes him with a slightly weary look. “What’s there to say, doc? I was an actress with a hell of a promising career when I shot up with the wrong people. Spent the last five years living off my Social Security checks in a rat hole of an apartment in Uptown.”

  “You contracted an aggressive strain of HIV,” Dr. Bernard says.

  “Lucky, right? Though,” she motions to the rest of us, “I guess I’m in good company when it comes to the luck department, aren’t I? We’re all either very lucky or very unlucky, hell if I know which.”

  “And how does it feel, now that you have a second chance at the career you thought you lost?”

  Connie sits back in her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle, her feet almost reaching Dr. Bernard’s.

  “Peachy,” she replies.

  Dr. Bernard adjusts his tie, pulling it away from the skin of his neck. “Linda. Could you tell us a little about your situation before the transfer?”

  Linda is still wide-eyed and twitchy, but some of last week’s terror seems to have left her. She swallows.

  “I was in a car accident. Eight years ago.”

  “And what happened as a result of that accident?” Dr. Bernard prods.

  “I couldn’t move. I could blink, but that was all.” She blinks now, as if to demonstrate.

  “I read about a guy who had that same thing,” David says, nodding, his face a phony attempt at gravity. “He wrote a book by blinking the letters of the alphabet. Or something like that.”

  “I guess I didn’t make good use of my time then,” Linda replies,
looking at her feet. I can’t tell if she’s trying to be funny.

  “Linda, last week you asked us a question that we couldn’t answer, about your family, about whether they still love you. What made you ask that?” Dr. Bernard leans forward in his seat, his hands steepled in front of his mouth, his eyes intent on her.

  “I don’t know,” Linda replies, simply, her voice devoid of emotion. “I guess I wouldn’t love someone who left me like that.”

  Her words hit me in the stomach. Not because her situation is awful, though it is, terribly. But because in that moment I think of Sam. Like a reflex. I think of waking alone in that hospital room, of Lucy’s explanations. As if part of me knows a secret that the rest of me is trying, desperately, to unlearn.

  David

  I follow Hannah up to the roof after the support group disbands. It’s curiosity more than anything. She sat there like a stone for the last twenty minutes of the session, unmoving, her eyes fixed in middle space. It was something in Linda’s story, I think, that sunk her so far into her head that she only resurfaced when Dr. Bernard repeated her name, twice, before we finished.

  Hannah has fascinated me ever since our little tête-à-tête near the coffee cart. Some part of me must have feared that I’d been lost in the transfer, too changed to return to my old life, until this girl turned all of her wrath in my direction. It’s amazing, how familiar it is to be hated, almost like coming home.

  I follow her up five flights of stairs, pausing at each landing to regain the strength in my lungs and my legs, listening as she does the same a flight or two above me. She must hear me panting below her, but she doesn’t wait, and I wonder if the mood she’s in has divorced her from any hint of the world outside her own mind. She reaches a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and walks through with such unflinching confidence I wonder if she’s ever gotten in trouble for breaking a rule in her life.

  Following her out onto the roof feels like summiting a mountain, all fresh air and endorphin-filled exhaustion. I’m sweaty and drained, and when I find her collapsed against a brick wall with her legs stretched in front of her, I drop like dead weight next to her. Street noise—the honking of horns, the squeaky breaks of city buses, and the rumble and jostle of traffic—wafts up around us, like music being played in a faraway room. It’s sunny, but gusts of late-summer wind drive heavy, fast-moving clouds above us. Their shadows crawl their way across the concrete of the roof.

  “I did Google you, actually,” she says, as if continuing a conversation we’ve already been having.

  “I knew it,” I reply, feeling a small swell of triumph beneath my sternum.

  “You were one of seventeen congressmen congratulated by a group called American Evangelicals for Life. For your opposition to, among other things, abortion and stem cell research.”

  “I’ve been congratulated by a lot of people for my opposition to those things,” I reply.

  “I wonder what American Evangelicals for Life would think of you taking part in a medical study involving human cloning.” She kicks off her sandals, flexing her feet. They are the color of frozen milk, so white they are almost blue. “Think they’d be cool with it?”

  “Stem cell research takes a life in the name of medicine. I’ve done no such thing.”

  “So you believe in God?” she asks. I venture a glance at her. She’s looking at me with such earnestness that I wonder if she’s fucking with me.

  “Of course I believe in God. Don’t you?”

  She shrugs. “I did when I was a kid. I guess I sort of grew out of it.”

  I bristle a little at this, the way I do when faced with any sort of atheism, the people who believe they are superior and enlightened for believing in nothing. As if closing your eyes to the light is somehow the braver decision. “Believing in God isn’t like believing in Santa.”

  “How does someone like you take part in this study? If there is a God, I think SUBlife is tantamount to laughing in his face. How do you believe in God and also choose to defy everything you’ve been taught to believe?”

  “I’ll tell you and anyone else the same thing. That God put a gun to my head and asked me what I was willing to do to save myself, to save this life that he gave me. And I answered that I would do anything. Because life is that precious to me.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” she says, nodding. “But I’d bet you that congressman’s salary of yours that the AEL won’t.”

  “Maybe not,” I reply. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they’ll never find out.”

  “And what if they do? Have you thought about what you’d do if you can’t go back to who you were before?” she asks. Her arm is brushing against mine. I wait a moment to see if she’ll move it, and when she doesn’t I press a bit more toward her.

  “I haven’t thought about it much. There’s a lot about me that my constituents haven’t ever found out.” I want to shock this girl, because I think maybe she’s the type who is impressed by things that shock her. “You know, I used to steal cars as a kid.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” I reply, “there was this dealership in our town with a real shitty security system. We’d break in at night and get the keys, joyride around. I think to this day Mr. Beecham is wondering why the cars on his lot were always low on gas.” My body is suddenly drunk on the recklessness of being seventeen, punching through the darkness of rural routes without streetlights, hollering into air that was empty for miles. The thrill is so sharp, even in memory, that gooseflesh erupts on my skin. “And you? What will you do if you can’t go back?”

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shifts, and I feel her arm pull away from mine. Her mouth tastes like heat when she kisses me, like the muggy, asphalt-baked air of summertime. It’s an appalling taste, and wholly intoxicating, like so many things I’ve experienced, a muddling confusion of attraction and revulsion. Coupled with my lingering memories, it’s overpowering. But she pulls away before I can give myself over to it. I move a hand to my mouth, wiping away the sheen of wetness there.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do. Reckless things, probably.”

  “I can’t afford to be reckless anymore,” I reply, trying to temper everything that is rioting inside me. There are a lot of thrills to be had down that rabbit hole. I’ve been so marooned in this new body, so diminished and altered, that to be recognized by this girl feels like a small bit of salvation. But I cannot be that boy again. I cannot be this man. “I’m married.”

  She nods, eyes downcast. But she doesn’t apologize. “You know, you look married.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, endlessly curious about how others perceive me, especially now. Especially her.

  She shrugs, settling back against the wall. “Comfortable, I guess. Like you’re interested in the world, but not too interested, because you’ve not supposed to be looking for anything anymore.”

  I’m not sure what to say to this. I’m not sure, not exactly, what it is I’ve found in Beth. A woman of great beauty, certainly. A political wife of the highest order. A competent, if not always exuberant mother to my son. I try and remember what it was I wanted on those nights, flying through the darkness, just careless enough to be free. I don’t remember wanting any of those things. And the thought scares me a little, scares me in a way driving ninety on a marginally paved road in a stolen car never did.

  Hannah motions to my hand. “No ring?”

  “Too big.” My fingers are tapered, almost feminine, when I’m used to seeing hands that belonged to a laborer, rough and calloused. Knuckles that had been cut and bruised in fistfights. Palms that never grew clammy, no matter how nervous I was. The broken thumb that gave a baseball the perfect bit of spin when I threw it. Hands that had shaken those of presidents and union leaders and billionaires, and demonstrated that I was just as formidable as any one of them. These hands are not mine. They are not the sum of my experiences. These hands belong to someone much weake
r. “What about you?” I ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be engaged?”

  “Sort of,” she says, playing with the hem of her scrub shirt. “We agreed that we’d get married after the transfer. If everything went the way it was supposed to.”

  “So why are you up here being reckless with me?”

  “Because you followed me up here at the wrong moment. Because nothing feels the way it’s supposed to,” she says, turning toward me, fixing me with those huge eyes of hers. “Can’t you tell? Nothing tastes the way I remember, everything is so bright it hurts, everything feels so . . .” She stops, and I understand it now, why the doctors brought the four of us together. It’s because I understand what she means, exactly what she means, and no one else in the world will. “How can I be the same person,” she asks, “when nothing feels the same?”

  “Maybe we’re not the same people. Maybe we’re better than we were,” I reply, though I know it’s not the answer she wants.

  “I guess we’ll see,” she says and rises, steadying herself on the brick wall, stepping over my outstretched legs to get to the door. I have to tamp down the sudden impulse to follow her, again, to make her stop, to keep her here. I think of Beth, flawless Beth, who never really tastes like anything I can discern, who is so familiar to me that the smell of her hair is as inconsequential as my own. Hannah opens the door and then pauses, turning back to face me.

  “We’re not really off to a great start, are we?”

  Linda

  The world outside of my hospital window feels so huge I expect the air to be too thin to breathe. One morning last week a flock of birds blew around the sky like a swarm of bees. I watched for an hour as they gusted around, breaking and reforming like sea foam riding a wave. I sat there wondering at how full the world was, how huge, to include flocks of birds that do nothing but spend an afternoon riding the air. It reminded me of looking out my window at home, with Cora dozing in the chair next to me.

  Connie visits one afternoon, a few days after our support group meeting. It’s just as jarring this time as it was the first time, to see Mary Jane Livingston step out of Stratford Pines and into my hospital room. It’s as if a wall between my two worlds has been breached, and one is leaking into the other. I want to ask her everything, ask what her secrets are, she who has seen so much more of life than I have. But it’s difficult to say anything, because what is the right thing to ask a person like her? I’m afraid of saying something silly, of scaring her away like a skittish bird landing on my windowsill. So I stay quiet because this is the best way to deal with people, from what I can tell.