by T Cooper
A great variety of cripples are now allowed in polite company, and marriages these days are constructed of firmer stuff, are they not? The treachery of a woman such as is described in the poem is not oftentimes seen in our day. And in your case, dear sir, stories of your wife’s devotion have reached Paris, I assure you.
But let us look upon your potential disfigurement another way: Think of the level of solidarity you will have achieved with the soldier who is now waging war in your name against the insurgency. These are facts of history: Two years after the First War of Rebellion, your government authorized the purchase of 4,095 prosthetic legs, 2,391 arms, 61 hands, and 14 feet—all for the exclusive use of Union veterans.
I’ll be clear: Add them up, Mr. President. More than 6,500 voters, dear sir, and their grateful families. With the advances of modern war, we can only assume that these figures will rise. The infirm, irrevocably disfigured veteran will see in you a picture of himself. And in the pensive quiet of the voting booth, their steadfast women will marvel at how much you resemble their courageous husbands.
And what of the Rebels? History is clear: They were stripped of their suffrage. They hobbled about for years, without succor from their government, in what was surely just punishment for their transgressions. If you allow me to operate, Mr. President, you will carry your wound with you throughout this great land, a testament to your sacrifice. You will be the nation.
The President asked that his leg be brought to him. “One way or another,” he said. The order shivered its way through the great brain of government. The next day, Secret Service agents were kicking in doors in Brooklyn, rousing migrant farm-workers from their sheds in the fertile valleys of California, tearing through rustic mountain cabins in Appalachia. They looked in schools and factories, patted down office workers cubicle by cubicle. The newspaper offices were bombed. While the great cities of the nation fell into protest and chaos, the army marched through the forests of Oregon with chainsaws. They cannot hide, Mr. President.
But the subversives had vanished. The leg as well. There was a network of sympathizers, people said, all over the West. Denver was theirs. They were preparing to bring the war East. Forget your leg, the President’s advisers told him, it could be anywhere in the vast hinterland. In a cave, they said. Anywhere.
The President despaired.
“You’ll feel better once you execute the African,” his advisers said.
“I thought he was French,” the President said.
That evening, the Eastern power grid failed. There was looting in New York, riots in Boston. In a White House lit by candles, the President lay with his wife. Who was he kidding? The country was quite obviously falling apart. The government army was in disarray, camped outside Denver awaiting orders. In the West, parents had begun keeping their children out of school. The subversives were forcibly conscripting boys as young as ten, snatching them from Little League practice, from shopping mall parking lots where they congregated to smoke cigarettes. The disasters were multiple and hideous. He felt a pang in his right leg and his heart leapt, but he looked down on the stump and felt the terror of recognition.
The White House was stifling, even with the windows thrown open.
The President’s wife massaged his stump. She wrapped it in warm towels. He fought back tears. The room shone orange in the candlelight. “I am a failure,” he said.
Oh, dutiful First Lady! “Mr. President,” she purred. “Mr. Commander-in-Chief! You’re the next Lincoln!” she cried.
It was 1860, Mr. President, when Dr. J.J. Chisholm, in a manual of military surgery for the use of Southern medical officers during the First War of Rebellion, observed the following:
Amputation at the hip joint is born of an unfortunate ambition—one might even use a stronger term for it—a criminal desire on the part of overzealous medical technicians. These hooligans traffic in cruelty when it is more humane to abandon the languishing patient to inevitable death than to subject him to a mutilation that is so rarely successful.
He further remarked that hip-joint amputation “should be expunged altogether from the military practice. It is savage and not fit even for Indians or Negroes.”
I take issue with this final remark, of course, but choose to see hope in the final outcome of that first war: Dr. Chisholm’s retrograde philosophies were roundly defeated. The Union was preserved so that it might serve as a beacon in the world. Not only has human society advanced, Mr. President; medicine has as well. In the nearly hundred and fifty years hence, medical progress has made amputation fit for men and women of all races and creeds, dear sir. Fit for a king. Fit even for you, Mr. President.
Céphas was received in the Lincoln bedroom. Guards stood at the door. The First Lady lay on the bed reading. “It was good advice,” Céphas said, when confronted. “Sound medical advice and I stand by it.”
In his wheelchair, the President registered pure hatred.
Céphas felt his face flush. “No, no,” he apologized, “a clumsy choice of words, Mr. President, I beg you. My English is not so good.”
“Your reports have arrived,” said the President. “Your English is fine.” He threw a stack of papers at the African. They spilled like confetti over the carpeted floor.
In his cell, Céphas dreamed of Paris, and his jailer dreamed of Salisbury steak. The jailer’s name was Jackson and he liked to tell everyone that his wife Mae “could really hook up dinner.” Um-um. Céphas wandered along the empty streets of Paris, city of tombs. Hate vegetables though, Jackson thought to himself. His mouth watered.
Jackson got hungrier as the night wore on and so to pass the time, he and another guard pulled Céphas from his cell and beat him. Jackson liked to beat prisoners and imagine himself being videotaped, starring in a television special on rogue cops, and maybe have the videotape set to music, something dark and bass-heavy. At the oddest times—in the shower, during sex, on his morning commute—he liked to roll his r’s as if he were emptying a clip from a machine gun.
Figure 3: Jackson
Céphas wailed as they kicked him. Jackson tried out soundtracks in his head: the taut snap of a snare drum, the metallic splash of a cymbal! Bongos, congos, juju music! Jackson shouted at his prisoner and felt he was flying. He rolled his r’s in a cascade of bullets. Céphas’s pain was also a song: syncopated, atonal, the music of the murdered. Jackson wasn’t hungry anymore: the music was in his head, in his heart; he was an animal. His soul was stirred beyond all reason and he could walk on hot coals or handle poisonous snakes—surely he could!
He pulled his gun instead and shot the African doctor. The loud clap of the weapon echoed in the cell and silenced the music.
Céphas was dying. Up two stories was the White House and its administrators, the bureaucrats and figureheads who made the country great. Ahead of him was a vast and turbid sea, and beyond that, waves cresting and crashing on a distant shore. Paris went black.
The room was thick with catastrophe. Jackson’s partner was already on the walkie-talkie, calling someone to do something about what had just happened. “Well, what’s happened?” the voice on the other end asked. Jackson could barely hear his partner. “I don’t know,” he was saying. “Hurry up and get down here.”
Now that the Second War of Rebellion has begun, Mr. President, it may be instructive to review a case history from the first such war. Again, you will take solace in the outcome. Case #3354, 1863: Private Henry Robinson of Louisiana (Rebel) Regiment, aged thirty-five years, was wounded at the confluence of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha Rivers on March 13 by a fragment of a twenty-four-pound shell fired from United States gunboats. Surgeon William M. Compton was standing near the wounded man when he fell. Hastily exposing the wound, Dr. Compton found that the immense projectile had buried itself in the upper part of the left thigh, smashing the trochanters and neck of the femur and wounding the femoral artery. The necessary preparations were made on the spot. The patient was desirous that an operation be practiced. He was of a hop
eful, buoyant nature and was sanguine of a favorable outcome. Chloroform was administered. Dr. Compton made an irregular incision just above the lacerated margin of the wound and dissected upwards, retracting the skin and trimming away the muscles. Strangely, Private Robinson evinced scarcely a symptom of shock. Soldiers in those days—even Rebels—were hardened men, unafraid of death. When the anesthesia had passed away, the patient was cheerful, even jocular. Febrile reaction was slight. The patient was placed in a shelter tent and given a dose of opium. On the fifth day, Robinson was sent by steamer to Yazoo City, where the stump was covered with yeast poultices. Beef essence, stimulants, and anodynes were also administered. However, within two days there was yellowness at the surface and pus of a very offensive nature, though the lips of the wound were united in nearly their entire extent. Need I say the patient did not rally? Smile, Mr. President: another Rebel dead, a victory for human progress: first came delirium, then coma, and then death!
There is an argument on the floor of the Congress. Listen: “If the good gentleman from Arizona has no further answers for the Committee, will he kindly yield the floor?”
“I will not,” said the Engineer. He was red-faced and angry. The President and First Lady were in attendance, seated in the upper gallery of the Capitol. “I will not,” he said again, and bared his teeth. There it is, he thought, I’ve done it: I have growled at the Speaker of the House on national television. It’s about fucking time, he thought. A flurry of cameras flashed and clicked. They were asking him questions about things he knew nothing of: Who were these supposed suicides? Did he know anything about the death squads that had been dumping bodies in the lake? Had he ordered the killings himself?
The dam had been bombed. The lake had grunted and spilled. Who cares of the death squads? Isn’t there a war going on?
How did the President’s leg wind up in your lake, Senator?
“It’s not my lake,” he said.
The leg had been found that morning in the drying sludge of the lake bed. It had been rushed to the lab, badly decomposed, for DNA testing.
The Engineer wondered where it had all gone sour. By today, of course, it was far too late to salvage anything from the sick nation. But yesterday? Last week? A year ago? A decade? Or was the moment of our fatal turn buried somewhere farther in the distant past? When the nation was only an infant, learning to crawl? Who were these people questioning him, and by what right? He could feel the President’s eyes on him. His inquisitors did not smile. Did they want contrition? Did they expect groveling? They’ll have their spectacle if they want it! His teeth were still bared.
“Senator, please!” they shouted, but he couldn’t stop: He felt a blood vessel might explode. His teeth poked like fangs from his open mouth; he dreamed them sharp and ferocious. He sprouted hair werewolf-like and prowled around the Capitol, yellow-eyed, a feral beast, something savage. “In a moment the power will go out,” he shouted, “and I’ll bite the first man who lays a hand on me!”
The guards swarmed from all sides. The President, with help from the First Lady, rose to the edge of the balcony to watch the commotion. “That man nearly killed me,” he whispered to his wife. The Engineer was an animal, after all, bounding from table to table on all fours, his hands bent into claws. He attacked the Committee, tore the legs and arms from the Speaker of the House. The Engineer’s suit seemed to come apart at the seams, his chest swelling. Beneath the gilded dome of the Capitol, he roared like a lion.
Figure 4: Dr. Céphas Diem
What did these men dream of, Mr. President, when death eclipsed them? When they marched a full winter’s day with a rotting wooden crutch? When they joked, legless, with their doctors in an opium daze? When they swallowed in suicidal mouthfuls the blue waters of Arizona’s artificial lake? Did they dream of love and women, of family and friendship? I submit that if they were soldiers, true warriors, they did not waste their dying moments with such maudlin concerns. If they were warriors—indeed, if they were men—they dreamed only of vengeance. This is the lesson you must take with you, the lesson you must weave into your heart. It will lead you forthrightly into battle. Now ask yourself: Do I trust this doctor? You must and you will. Everything will proceed like this: The first incision must be precise, or else all is lost. I cannot hesitate even for an instant without risking hemorrhage. I will take the scalpel and press its blade firmly against your skin, and slice as if I were cutting into an apple or a steak. Like a warrior, I must be merciless. Infection and disease are the enemies at the gate. Yes, there will be blood, but am I not a surgeon? Presidential blood is the same as any other, dear sir, the same shade of red, the same sticky consistency between the fingers. It can be spilled, as surely the earth can soak it up. Only joking. I will take the scalpel and I will cut you. Really, it isn’t so dramatic. Don’t worry over the blood, and never mind the bone. It will be sawed through, disarticulated. Your femur is destroyed, there are no options. See how easily the skin pulls back? Surgery is a species of murder. You must be calm. I will finish and go home, and leave you to lose your war. Godspeed. Inshallah. I will finish and marry three wives. You will feel no pain, not until later, but then, aren’t you a man? You have suffered for months with this wound and I will relieve you of it. You will be sedated, asleep and dreaming in Technicolor, eyes darting about beneath the lids, beatific as I cut you. And, of course, no one will know anything, Mr. President. These are state secrets.
___________
[Note: Some material adapted from Amputations at the Hip Joint: A Study, published by the War Department, Washington D.C., 1867, and Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs, by Alfred J. Bollet. Tucson: Galen Press, 2002.]
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS VOLUME
DANIEL ALARCÓN is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. His first book, War by Candlelight: Stories, was published by HarperCollins in 2005.
AMY BLOOM is the author of two short story collections, a novel, and a book of essays. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale.
KATE BORNSTEIN’S groundbreaking My Gender Workbook and Gender Outlaw are the principal books used in college gender studies courses. Her latest book is Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws (Seven Stories, 2006). Bornstein lives in New York City with her partner, two cats, two turtles, and two pugs.
ALEXANDER CHEE was born in Rhode Island and grew up in South Korea, Guam, and Maine. He is the author of the novel Edinburgh, and his second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a NEA fellowship in prose, and has taught writing at the New School and Wesleyan University.
T COOPER is the author of the novels Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Dutton, 2006) and Some of the Parts (Akashic, 2002). T lives in New York City.
VINAY GANAPATHY (Illustrator) grew up in Connecticut and attended Syracuse University. After graduating, he moved to New York City, where he continues to live and make art.
KEITH KNIGHT is an award-winning San Francisco cartoonist and rapper. His comic strips can be found in over thirty-five alternative, ethnic, political, and college newspapers across the country. He has authored five comic-strip collections, and his latest book is The Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Art. Knight’s hip-hop band, the Marginal Prophets, won a 2004 California Music Award for their latest disc, Bohemian Rap CD. For more information, visit www.kchronicles.com.
RON KOVIC is the author of the American antiwar classic Born on the Fourth of July. He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War and was paralyzed from his chest down in combat in 1968. Along with Oliver Stone, Kovic was the co-screenwriter of the 1989 Academy Award–winning film Born on the Fourth of July, based on the book (Tom Cruise stars in the role of Kovic in the film).
PAUL LA FARGE is the author of two novels, The Artist of the Missing and Haussmann, or the Distinction. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s
, Fence, STORY, and elsewhere. He was the 2005 recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize. He is also the translator of The Facts of Winter by Paul Poissel, recently published by McSweeney’s Books.
FELICIA LUNA LEMUS is the author of the novels Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (FSG, 2003) and the forthcoming Like Son (Akashic, 2007). She lives in New York City.
ADAM MANSBACH is the author of the novels Angry Black White Boy (Crown), Shackling Water (Doubleday), and the forthcoming The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau/Doubleday). He lives in Berkeley, California.
VALERIE MINER is the award-winning author of twelve books, including Abundant Light, A Walking Fire, The Low Road, and Blood Sisters. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio and in the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, Ms., and many other journals. She teaches at Stanford University and her website is www.valerieminer.com.
THOMAS O’MALLEY was raised in Ireland and England. Author of the novel In the Province of Saints (Little, Brown, 2005), he is the recipient of the Grace Paley Endowed Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. O’Malley has published fiction in various magazines, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, Natural Bridge, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, New Millennium Writings, Vanguard, FRiGG, and Mississippi Review.
NEAL POLLACK is the author of three books of satire, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, and editor of Chicago Noir (Akashic, 2005). His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, and he’s a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and Nerve.
DAVID REES is the author of the comic strip “Get Your War On,” which appears in Rolling Stone, and “My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable,” which appears in the Guardian (UK).
SARAH SCHULMAN is the author of eight novels, most recently Shimmer (Avon, 1998) and The Child (Carroll and Graff, 2006), and two nonfiction books including Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. Her plays include Carson McCullers and Manic Flight Reaction.
