Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  “Hole Girl!” a man shouts.

  “Are you excited—”

  “How do you feel?”

  I spy at least three different network logos, five cameras, a multicolored flurry of blazers. Beyond the primped and powdered anchorpersons are a clump of unmistakably ordinary people, holding cameras and iPhones aloft. I cringe, unconsciously hollowing my body around the Hole. For a fleeting moment, I think I can turn my whole self inside out, disappear into it and never have to feel anyone’s eyes on me again. But Caro grips my arm and surges forward through the knot of reporters until we stumble through the front doors of the clinic, the cameras behind us clicking greedily.

  “Jesus,” Caro mutters as we take the elevator up to the third floor. “You didn’t tell me it was this bad.”

  “It wasn’t.” I slump against the wall. “I can never go outside again.”

  “God, I just want to go out there and punch somebody.”

  I try to imagine Caro throwing right hooks in her yellow sundress and daisy-printed flats. All I want is to spend the morning riding up and down with my best friend in these few square feet, listening to canned soft jazz and existing in a place between floors. But the doors slide open with a gentle ding, and that’s when I know I’m dying.

  Because my mother is here.

  She has her back to us, but it’s unmistakably Mother: hip cocked in an expensive charcoal suit, arms crossed, rapping out words to Dr. Takahashi that make him look like he wants to disappear into the floor. She looks taller than ever, and handsomer, with a physicality that might be called lanky if she were younger and more boyish. At thirty-six, she solidly owns the spaces she inhabits, her energy spilling over the edges of her body, her confidence and height making her seem even more severe. As though, given the burden of carrying around these few inches of bone, she has no patience left for you and yours.

  She turns. On camera, my mother smiles with a terrible ferocity, telling unseen housewives through clenched, perfect teeth that they’re doing excellent squats.

  She is not smiling now. I resist the urge to step back into the elevator and mash the door close button.

  “Keep your back straight, Morgan,” Mother says brusquely, crossing to me. “You look like a bonobo monkey. Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

  “Mother—ow.” I shift away from her as she presses her thumbs into the balls of my shoulders, pushing them back. “What are you doing here? If this is about the news crew, then I’m sorry, you were right—”

  “The what?” she asks. She brushes a perfunctory hand through my short hair, examines the results and sighs. “Oh. Them. No, that was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “Then what—” I begin, but she shushes me, her eyes on the doctors. I turn to Caro, who raises her eyebrows in a silent question. Over by the empty reception desk, Dr. Takahashi huddles with a redheaded woman in a white lab coat. Small clusters of people in casual dress dot the waiting room, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. I’m surprised at first that none of them are approaching Mother—I’m an old hand at idly browsing Tumblr on my phone while she gets mobbed for autographs whenever we go out. But then I realize with a chill that they are all, with varying degrees of subtlety, staring not at Mother but at me. There is a sharpness in their gazes that belies medical training. The cuts of their multitudinous jaws are crisp. Clipboards perch in their hands; there are small mics, visual recording equipment.

  My guts tighten like a drawstring. Caro’s hand reaches out, and I lace my fingers with hers as the red-haired woman in the lab coat steps forward. Her smile looks uncomfortable, straining at the cage of her cheeks. She extends a hand, and, reluctantly, I drop Caro’s to shake it. The woman’s grasp is firm, almost hard. She holds on just a minute too long.

  “Morgan Stone,” the woman says. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Dr. Parker Morse. I head the genetic abnormality team at the Crestfield Medical Group out of New York.”

  If you’ve had as many doctors as I have, you learn pretty quickly to identify good ones and bad ones. Dr. Morse confuses me. She has the vibrating passion and energy of a good doctor. But also a way of looking through me, like all she sees is a chart.

  I glance at Dr. Takahashi for a cue, but the light glints off his glasses, rendering his expression unreadable.

  “Who?” I ask, but the woman is already reaching backward, ushering someone forward.

  She says, “And this is Howie.”

  There’s a rustle of motion as a boy about my age rises from his chair and comes over to join us. He’s slender-faced with thick, honey-brown curls and a baggy yellow T-shirt. I blink at him, the memory of adrenaline beginning to claw through my veins as it clicks into place: it’s the boy who jumped in front of my bike.

  My eyes jump from him to the red-haired woman and back again. “What are you—”

  The boy lifts his shirt, and behind me, Caro gasps.

  Sitting squat as an egg on the left side of his lower abdomen is a lump. An oblong protrusion of unmistakable smooth skin. I stare at it and know it immediately: it’s exactly the shape of the Hole.

  It’s like my missing piece.

  18

  “I’ve been working with Howie since his adolescence.” Dr. Morse stands too close to me as she speaks, leaning slightly forward, as though to peer through my eyes and see where in my body this information lands. “His is a unique deformity. We’ve tried multiple excision procedures, and the lump grows back nearly overnight, to precisely the same size and shape. Core extractions, chemical burns and freezing produce the same effect. As you can see: no scarring. As though the flesh is untouched.” She reaches out, handling the Lump with a cool professionalism. The boy flinches. But he doesn’t move.

  “I don’t see what this has to do with Morgan,” Caro says, chin set. But I’m beginning, through my shock, to guess what this has to do with me, and I suspect Caro is, too. Dr. Morse’s smile jumps back onto her face, straining around her teeth.

  “And who is this?” she asks.

  “Her best friend,” Caro says.

  The doctor nods and smiles. “Ah,” she says, eyes flitting to Mother.

  “Caroline is practically family,” Mother says, but something in Dr. Morse’s face makes her own close like a purse. She turns to Caroline. “Would you mind giving us a moment?” she asks, voice low.

  Mother never concedes to anyone.

  For the first time, I become truly frightened.

  Dr. Morse begins walking away, leading us out of the waiting area and toward the heavy door that leads to the exam rooms. I glance back to Caro, but she is standing by the window over the reporter-filled parking lot, looking away from me. The closing door eclipses her as she magnificently flips someone the bird. And then my best friend is gone, and I’m alone with the doctors, the researchers, my mother. And the boy.

  “I realize this must come as a bit of a shock,” Dr. Morse says smoothly as we glide down the hall. The researchers crowd in after us, filling the space with a hushed cloud of rustling, the sighs of fabric. “But rest assured, Morgan, the DNA sequence of your genetic material, juxtaposed with Howie’s, is rather stunning.”

  I shoot the boy a sidelong glance, but he doesn’t meet my gaze. His skinny arms stick out of the sleeves of his baggy T-shirt like wings.

  Dr. Morse continues, “We’ve prepared a short presentation on what this extraordinary DNA match might mean, and the subsequent series of treatments we would like to propose for you and Howie. Morgan, I’m confident we can persuade you that your participation in this process would be highly beneficial. Howie’s already agreed. Everything hinges on your consent.”

  “Consent to what?” I ask.

  “Cure you,” Mother breaks in. “Morgan, they think they can finally fix the Hole.”

  The gnat-cloud of research scientists buzzes back to the waiting room under the frigid gaze of my mot
her. Dr. Takahashi unlocks an office door, and we file in and sit around a table while Mother prowls behind me, her excess energy pouring off her powerful frame.

  Dr. Takahashi: Cure is a hasty word.

  Dr. Morse: Okay, treat, but we have great optimism.

  Dr. Takahashi: The methods aren’t proven.

  Dr. Morse: Yet.

  Dr. Takahashi: We will be one hundred percent certain before we make any moves.

  Dr. Morse: We will be pioneers.

  I grip the edge of the table. My traitorous pulse is pounding hope, no, hope, no, hope.

  Dr. Morse throws charts and graphs up onto the wall, shows us the MRIs. Howie’s organs are clustered around his Lump the same way mine are around the Hole, squished up and around, neatly circumnavigating our respective irregularities. I can feel Dr. Morse’s eyes on my face as she clicks back and forth between the two slides that demonstrate our complementary nature: one torso with its darkened, eggy blob on the left-hand side, the other with a bright, clear bubble on the right.

  “The physiological similarity is striking enough,” Dr. Morse says, and clicks again. “But the truly remarkable finding is on the genetic level.”

  Taka taps a few keys. The screen goes black, then begins to populate with white letters, piling like bad teeth: A, T, C and G, tumbling over one another in countless iterations, white on black. I recognize the letters from freshman biology: the lettered pairs that make up DNA: A, T, C and G. For every A, a T. For every C, a G. Forever and ever, replicated into eternity within the confines of our everyday breathing bodies.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “You’re looking at the DNA sequence of a human gene,” Dr. Morse says. She speaks less to me and more to the screen. She seems to vibrate with excitement. “Specifically, the ICF-3 gene, as it appears in a common, nonmutated patient, where ‘common’ indicates the absence of physical deformities such as Morgan’s and Howie’s.” She leans across Taka and presses a key, and two more lines of letters appear below the first one. They blur together before my eyes. I can’t make sense of them.

  Taka leans back from the keyboard, letting her have it. “It’s a gene responsible for controlling immune response in the body.”

  “Immunomodulatory control factor,” Dr. Morse cuts in, punching keys.

  “Yes,” Taka says, with what might, on an emotive human, be a hint of a smile. “Dr. Morse has been studying it for the past decade, and she believes she’s isolated—”

  “If you look here,” Dr. Morse cuts in. She taps a few keys, and the screen zooms in to one section of the code. “In the common—that is, nonmutated—patient, the four hundred and sixty-third base pair is an A. In the two of you, a slight genetic mutation throws each of you off balance, with Morgan expressing a C and Howie expressing a G.”

  My head spins. I wish I hadn’t spent most of freshman bio drawing comics of sexy noir-style bacteria. (Actually, I take it back; I regret nothing about Staphylococcus, Private [Pink] Eye.)

  “What Dr. Morse means is,” Taka says, gently, “we can trace your genetic mutations to the same gene.”

  “If we have the same mutation,” I say. “How come he has a . . . not a Hole? Like me?”

  “Because you don’t have the same mutation,” Taka says. He looks up at the screen, and I follow his gaze. Two different letters are circled there, in two otherwise identical strings of letters.

  One C, one G.

  “C and G are a complementary pair,” Taka says. “It’s always one or the other.”

  “So our mutated DNA—”

  “Complements each other. Just as your physical mutations do.”

  I stare at the stranger across the table. He stares back, something tangled and complicated struggling behind his eyes: want, hope, fear. Recognition.

  Both of us are eternal outsiders.

  On the deepest, most fundamental level, we’re a matched pair of doesn’t belong.

  Taka lets this all settle over our heads. The quiet in the room stretches out into a gray hush, marred only by the ticking of the clock.

  Dr. Morse clears her throat. “This mutation is very, very rare. I’ve been working on the ICF-3 gene for over a decade now, and you are the first human cases I’ve encountered.”

  “This is crazy,” I say, looking to Mother. I want to pass my doubt to her. I want her to take it up and rally for me. But she’s looking past me, at the projection. I squeeze the bones of my wrist, feeling alone.

  Morse key-taps to another slide.

  “I’ve worked with mice for years,” she says. “These have been genetically altered so that their ICF-3 gene, like Morgan’s, expresses a C. It produces an overactive immunoresponse, causing the body to attack itself.”

  In the center of the screen is a mouse with a hole carved through its abdomen, just to the fore of its hind leg. I gaze, transfixed, as she clicks through the pictures: mice missing paws, missing tails.

  She clicks again, and we flash to the image of an infant mouse carcass, pinned, translucent belly painfully exposed. A perfect hole pierces its neck like an exquisite bullet wound. Light shines through the tiny, bloodless pinprick, a glow in the mouse’s hairless pink throat.

  Behind me, Mother makes a noise.

  “Morgan was very lucky,” Taka says, voice low, “that the Hole manifested for her in a relatively harmless location. It seems Dr. Morse’s test subjects were not always so fortunate.”

  “It’s the first human case in history,” Morse says, brightly. She clicks again, and I glimpse a mouse in a jar, perfectly preserved, with a hole corkscrewing through the center of its skull. The room swims a moment, and I focus on the table, on breathing.

  “What about the boy?” Mother’s voice asks.

  Dr. Morse smiles at Howie. For the first time, her smile seems fond, unforced.

  “Their mutations correspond,” she says. “Physiologically and genetically. A436C and A436G. C and G. Morgan is, literally, the other half of Howie’s complementary base pair.”

  My cheeks burn for a reason I can’t quite explain. I look up at the boy and find his eyes on me. Our gazes skitter away from each other, singeing.

  “It will take many more years of study to even understand your conditions,” Dr. Takahashi says. “Perhaps longer.”

  “We’re making rapid strides in gene therapy,” Dr. Morse says. She is obviously fighting to contain her excitement, her mouth jumping all over her face as she speaks. “The sequencing technology alone has come a long way. Every day there are breakthroughs—”

  “So you don’t know for sure,” I say.

  Dr. Morse looks up sharply, as though she has forgotten that around the Hole there is a girl.

  “The unique features of the ICF-3 gene in particular suggest a great potential for success,” she says. She looks to Mother. “Given your consent for treatment, I’d like to try to utilize the genetic material of each patient to positively affect the other.”

  “Did it work in the mice?” I ask.

  Morse clicks to the next slide. A sleek, healthy mouse.

  “Testing has not been done on humans,” Taka says, his voice curt.

  “Only for want of subjects,” Dr. Morse answers.

  Nobody speaks.

  “I’ve prepared a packet of information for each of you to consider before we move further,” Dr. Morse says. She slides three fat black binders across the table. Mother’s hand closes around my shoulder, and I jump.

  “Morgan, I want you to keep an open mind,” she murmurs.

  I twist up to see her face, surprised. “Mother, this is insane,” I say. “She can’t even prove it works on people.”

  She bites her lip, and underneath her hard veneer I catch a glimpse of the mother who has wanted nothing more for me my entire life than a cure. Hence the doctors. The skin grafts. The miracle diets. The Tibetan crystal retrea
ts in which my entrepreneurial Full Body ShredTM mother traced my lips with amethysts, humming, her fingers tense with concentration. I want to say, This is a joke, right? We’re both in on this joke? But all I can see is myself reflected in the orb of her eye, small and warped and whole.

  “We’d like to begin as early as next week,” Dr. Morse says.

  Mother shifts her weight, and suddenly she is solid again, impenetrable.

  “There’s the matter of the press,” she says. “Although my daughter certainly hasn’t helped by gallivanting topless through nightclubs.” My heart shrivels in my chest. “Someone in your organization must have tipped them off that she would be here today, either without or”—she fixes Dr. Morse with a lead-lined gaze—“with your knowledge. I’ll ask you to respect that my daughter’s condition is a sensitive family issue. We won’t proceed in a media circus.”

  Dr. Morse’s face turns to cement. Dr. Takahashi clears his throat, a scattering of pebbles.

  “Ms. Stone, we should speak to you about this in the hallway,” he says.

  Mother frowns and tightens her grip on my shoulder for a moment. She and the doctors leave the room and close the door behind them.

  I sit in the semidark with the Lump boy. He stares at the table as our shared genetic flaws flicker across the far wall.

  “It was you,” I say. “You jumped in front of my bike.”

  His eyes jump up to his brows, meeting my gaze and then falling again, nervously. I notice details about him in small, intense bursts: a freckle on his nose, his delicately pointed ears. It’s too hard to ignore the swell poking at the cotton of his shirt.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” he says. His voice is softer than I remember, with a mellowness that curls up from his tongue and into the air, yellow. Distantly, I realize I could mix that exact shade: cadmium yellow and titanium white, creamy and lilting. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You chose a hell of a way to do it.” I’m surprised by how bitter I sound. “How did you even find me? Did you just jump in front of girls’ bikes all morning and hope for the best?”