He had been coming to the nursing home for nearly two years now, and so it had become as familiar to him as his mother’s home had been. The Puerto Rican nurses, the Ghanaian orderlies he greeted were like stepsisters and stepbrothers, siblings he had inherited through some unforeseen and disorienting restructuring of his family. He knew the bulletin boards he passed so well that he could peripherally spot a new flyer tacked there. But the one familiar feature he wanted to see was the small, Vietnamese nurse’s aide he had been attracted to from the first day his mother had been interred here. He didn’t spot Mai, however, by the time he had reached his mother’s room.
He didn’t rap before he entered. He was afraid to disturb her sleep. And more than likely, she wouldn’t respond to his knock, his entrance, his voice, even if she were awake.
As it turned out, she was sleeping. She was asleep more than awake these days. She was lucky in a way, he thought. He wished he could achieve so deep and long a sleep. These days, he was getting less and less. Four hours. Sometimes only three. It wasn’t that his body could get by on less sleep, now that he had almost reached forty-six. Daily, he felt like an animated corpse, the living and walking dead, his brain fizzing with untuned static. It was just that the longed for sleep wouldn’t come. A receding surf, an ocean slowly evaporating.
Lee sat beside his mother. After staring at her for several moments, he took her withered hand with its flesh so soft it seemed almost gaseous. As he touched her, he heard a little moan behind a mostly drawn curtain, as if his mother’s roommate in her shared delirium felt the misdirected energies of the contact instead.
Holding his mother’s small hand across his palm, he stroked the top of it lightly with his other hand. It looked like the hand of something not yet born, the brittle bones and fat blue veins still knitting together, the flesh spotted with pigment that had yet to spread into a healthy tone. Five fingers that had once cupped his head to her smooth young breast. Five fingers that had held his own the first day she walked him to school. Fingers that his father, having drunk too much again, had once crushed in his own hand until his mother sank to her knees on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, Lee standing in the threshold, crying but helpless to intervene. He leaned forward, and planted a kiss that was as light as a whisper on this disfigured star of flesh.
As in some fairy tale, the kiss seemed to rouse her ever so slightly where his touch had not. She began to mutter in her sleep, her voice far away, tiny, and higher in register than when she was awake. It was almost as if she were singing the words, and Lee felt gooseflesh rise on his arms inexplicably.
“He’s coming out of the water,” she sang. “He’s coming to me. Coming...”
Lee hovered closely over her. “Who, Mum? Who’s coming?”
“Bill?” It sounded like a question. Bill had been his father’s name. In her delirium, was it Bill she thought she saw coming toward her? Was her brain, realizing it was nearing the terminus of its mortal span, finding a merciful way to prepare her...by conjuring her late husband as a spirit guide to lead her to some illusory afterlife?
“Do you see Dad?” Lee asked her, feeling lame, inadequate. He was no priest. She couldn’t really register his words, his touch, as comfort. Please, he thought, don’t tell me you see a white light – don’t tell me you hear angels. As much as he wanted her to be at peace, not just now, not this moment...
“Bill,” she whimpered timidly, like a child having a nightmare, “are you Bill?”
“It’s me,” her son told her. His voice fractured minutely. “It’s Lee.”
“The Crooked Man,” said his mother. “Bill...it’s the Crooked Man...”
“Who, Mum? Who is it?”
His mother’s fingers curled tighter around his own, with whatever ghostly strength they could muster. “The Crooked Man is coming out of the water...he’s coming for me. Coming...” Her voice trailed off utterly, a last wisp of smoke.
“Mum?” Lee’s heart lunged, and he put a heavy hand on her bony chest. She was still breathing. A presence behind him made him withdraw his hand sharply, as if his touch had been too intimate. Lee turned in his chair to see a nurse’s aide in the doorway behind him. It was another woman, not Mai. She looked apologetic for having come in on them.
“She was talking about the Crooked Man yesterday, too, Mr. Todd,” she told him. There was a reluctant tone in her voice. “When I came in to check on her, about seven, she was sitting up in her bed – she had pulled her IV out. She was painting on the wall.” She pointed past him, to the left of the headboard. Lee glanced there.
“Painting?”
“Um, with her excrement.”
“Jesus,” he breathed. There was no stain there now. “What was she painting?”
“The Crooked Man, she said. I’m sorry, Mr. Todd – we keep an eye on her, we never neglect her...we just didn’t expect her to do anything like that. She’s been so out of it for weeks. And after we cleaned her up, she drifted right back to sleep like nothing had happened...”
Lee stared down at his mother’s face again. Placid. If her dreams continued, and if they remained fearful, she gave no outward sign. “I don’t know what she might have been talking about,” he muttered. “What did her painting look like?”
“Um. Well.” The nurse stepped into the room, and folded over a sheet on her clipboard to sketch something on its reverse. Lee let go of his mother’s hand and rose so he could look over the young woman’s shoulder.
The crude figure the nurse rendered (he was certain his mother’s drawing had been no more refined) showed an elongated human-like figure, its hands blurred and indistinct, the whole of it dark and uncertain. At about its waist, or maybe higher up at the chest, the figure seemed broken, to jut at another angle, though this might have been his mother’s or the nurse’s inadequate attempt to convey a partly crouched or forward-moving posture. The only really striking feature was its head; it was shaped roughly like a tilted boomerang, or that of a hammerhead shark with a broken neck. Maybe, a crescent moon.
“At the time I wondered if maybe she thought she was seeing an alien,” the nurse said, taking in her own handiwork. “Out of body experiences, near death experiences, angels and aliens...I think it all comes from the same part of the brain.”
“Mm,” said Lee, momentarily taking the sketch from her. Then he handed it back.
“We’ll keep a closer eye on her now, I promise, in case she does something like that again.”
“Thank you,” he told her.
The nurse left. Lee sat. His mother slept on, and he watched her. After a little while, peripherally he saw another white-uniformed figure appear in the doorway, smaller and with darker skin. He looked up at Mai and they smiled at each other. She came to him, he stood up – over a head taller than she – and after a glance over her shoulder at the hallway, she pressed herself against his chest.
5: Tissue Constructs
The company for which Lee Todd worked was called ManuCel, though he joked that it should be called SellCell. Once, working for a company that sold human tissues to customers via a worldwide computer network would have seemed the stuff of the science fiction he had loved as a boy. Now, it was merely the job he dragged his bleary body to every day, like his father had punched into his job at the shoe manufacturing company that had once occupied this very same brick factory building in downtown Salem – which housed ManuCel on its top floor and other businesses, such as a gym and a day-care center, on the floors below.
Most shoes were now made overseas, in Asia, by poor laborers for an hourly wage that wouldn’t buy a grande latte over here. American companies justified these slave wages with the magnanimous notion that they were providing job opportunities...the way American servicemen overseas used to hand out bubble gum. The relatively few factory jobs surviving within America’s own borders were largely filled by Hispanics, with the same reasoning. Lee wondered what kind of work his rough-palmed father would be doing today, if he were a young man. Surely not the kind of work his son
was doing – employed by a company that produced bio-engineered in vitro human tissue models. Human cells derived from live, noncancerous donors – and sometimes donors who weren’t alive – were the foundation for all of ManuCel’s cultures. An alternative to animal testing, ManuCel’s tissue constructs of human buccal (oral) cells, ocular cells, epidermal cells and ectocervico-vaginal cells were used for everything from testing cosmetics to HIV and cystic fibrosis research. And naturally, Lee had joked to many a friend and family member that his job was to clone vaginas. One of their epidermis products, created from human keratinocytes and melanocytes, replicated human skin in a variety of shades – from Caucasian to Black to Asian. Lee felt a weird kind of fondness, lately, for the fact that his company could produce Asian skin cells. It was also more disturbing to him, lately, than it had been since he had first started working here a decade earlier. He had taken these products for granted for so long, until he had recently come to touch his lips to actual Asian skin for the first time in his life.
“Good morning, Lee,” Liz greeted him from behind her desk as he let himself into the strange triangular space that served as ManuCel’s reception area. Lee loved the old building, found it fascinating how this little high-tech company had integrated itself within the shell of an antiquated brick factory. Walls had been partitioned off in strange ways, thick pipes crisscrossed above their heads (duct-taped here and there, and Liz had once told Lee that she wished the company would paint them in various pastel shades of primary colors instead of all this white on white). He supposed the final result of this chaotic marrying of the old and new was improper feng shui, but he found it fascinating nonetheless. Yin and yang. Computers gave off their soft colored light as steam radiators gave off their heat in the winter. One radiator, in the reception area, was oddly positioned just beneath a skylight set into the high ceiling, the sort of detail that he found so strangely gratifying.
White lab coats hung by the door where he came in. He slipped one on. He noted that a plant on a shelf above the receptionist’s desk wasn’t looking too green. “Liz,” he told her, pointing with his paper coffee cup, “you’d better rescue that poor plant or buy a new one. It doesn’t look good to our customers if we can’t even grow a healthy-looking plant in this place.”
Liz glanced up at it and smiled. “Yeah...maybe I should just buy a plastic one, huh?”
Lee let himself into his little office, just off the carpeted reception area. He closed his door softly behind him. Sat in front of his still-dreaming computer. Sighed.
Last night he and Mai had left the nursing home in their respective cars, then met again in the parking lot of a local restaurant. Lee had been looking forward to eating at The Pier, where Mai’s daughter worked, so he could finally meet her. Mai had suggested this herself earlier, but changed her mind when the time came. He didn’t try to change it back. She was not ashamed of him, he knew, but of herself. For one, she was a Catholic. For another – though she told him men had asked her out many, many times, both before and after her marriage, and recently two male orderlies had asked her out in the same day – Mai had never so much as kissed a man other than her husband. In Vietnam, she told him, a man might have sex with as many women as he chose, before he married – but his wife must be a virgin. Any woman known to have had sex before marriage would be a pariah. No quality in a woman was more vital than that of chastity. A woman, Mai told him, existed to care for her man, her master, and his children. And children were preferably boys. A woman who gave her husband only daughters might be cast aside for another woman.
Mai had given her husband only one daughter, and no sons, though she suggested that was only one of the reasons he treated her so badly. It was culture. It was the way of men, of male animals, and thus of a cruel, harsh Nature. And it was simply the way of this one angry man as an unhappy individual, perhaps so mystified at his own unhappiness that he could only control this nemesis by seizing hold of its slippery body long enough to thrust it into the arms of others like a malformed child.
So they had met at this other restaurant, and joined hands in the parking lot as they walked toward the entrance. It had grown dark, and Lee halted to call Mai’s attention to the brightest star in the sky, which was not a star at all but the planet Mars. She had not heard, so he told her, that this summer the Red Planet was closer to the Earth than it had been in 60,000 years...“only thirty-five million miles away,” he said.
“It won’t keep coming and smash the Earth?” Mai asked.
He laughed and squeezed her hand. “No. The worlds won’t collide. Well – our worlds will.”
“What?” She hadn’t gotten his joke about the two of them.
“When I was a boy,” he told her, “two of my favorite writers were Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. They both wrote about Mars. Pure fantasy stuff. But I used to wish I lived on the Mars Burroughs wrote about. Fighting sword battles with giant green men. Rescuing and falling in love with strange, exotic women.” And he slipped his arm around her shoulders as they continued on to the restaurant. “This is a magical time,” he told her. “And Halloween is next month, too. That’s when the world of the dead grinds up against the world of the living...”
“Don’t try to scare me,” she chided him, digging her long painted nails into his palm playfully, the way she would bite his earlobe, or seized his tongue with her teeth when they kissed.
While he remembered their dinner, still reluctant to rouse his computer, he found himself sketching a replica of the sketch the nurse had in turn copied from the memory of his mother’s painting, done in her own waste. The Crooked Man, as she had called it. Oddly, Lee found himself wishing he had asked the nurse to let him keep the sketch she had done. Anyway, his own sketch was very close to what she had shown him. The elongated figure with its broken back...the boomerang-shaped head, like a circle that a great mouth had taken a huge bite out of.
Last night, while Mai was in the ladies’ room, he had begun sketching this deformed figure on a napkin...but he had crumpled it up when he saw her returning to their table.
They had sat shoulder to shoulder as they went through one menu, as Mai preferred. When the food came, she would sit opposite him, but would still press her ankles around one of his under the table. She always ordered precisely what he ordered. It was endearing to him.
He and his wife, Margaret, had eaten in this restaurant, probably at this very table, countless times. He couldn’t recall if they had ever entwined their legs under the table, or even if they had ever ordered the same dish as each other.
Mai didn’t wear her wedding ring. She said her husband didn’t, either. But Lee did. He had never once taken it off, in fact, during the sixteen years of his marriage. Margaret had taken hers off, once, to throw at him. He had been too superstitious, as if they would no longer be married if he did such a thing.
He would have to remove it soon. Margaret wanted to marry Dennis, with whom she had gone to high school, and whom she had recently, accidentally run into again. Lee felt sadness, when he thought of their annual vacations in Bar Harbor, Maine. He supposed she would want to take Dennis there, now. But he couldn’t be angry; he dreamed of taking Mai there, seeing Acadia National Park fresh through her eyes. He felt regret. He even felt guilt, because he had started dating Mai before Margaret had started dating Dennis. They were very open about their relationships. There had been no screaming, no fighting; ironically, they were getting along better than they had over the entire span of their tumultuous marriage. Still living under the same roof, for now. And Lee still wearing his wedding band, which he would not remove until the papers of divorce had been fully inked.
He wondered if Margaret would have begun dating Dennis if she hadn’t found out that he was going off for coffee, then lunch and dinner, with the nurse’s aide from the home where his mother resided (if it could be called residing). But his wife had been far less accusatory than she might have been. This had been a long time coming. It didn’t have to be messy.
There were no children, not even a dog to fight over. They were still friends, had even gone out for dinner together last Saturday evening. They were honest with each other. After a few drinks, he had admitted to Margaret that he had already kissed Mai. She admitted that she had already kissed Dennis. A minute later, she was confessing that she and Dennis had already been intimate.
Lee and Mai had not. She was reserved, and he was shy. He felt that Margaret had always been stronger, more aggressive than he. That night when he and Margaret returned home, he shyly asked her if they could go to bed. She had seemed hesitant, but had politely gone along with it. He had noted that her lower body moved with more passionate, more forceful gyrations than he had experienced from her in years. And her eyes remained tightly closed. As she obviously envisioned it was Dennis making love to her, so he began to imagine he was Dennis, too. Oddly, the feeling was both very melancholy and perversely arousing.
Later, they had vowed to each other never to make love again. Neither wanted to cheat on their respective boyfriend and girlfriend by having sex with their spouse.
At dinner, holding Mai’s hand, Lee had whispered to her, “Honey...I know you’re not scheduled to work tomorrow night. But could you still tell your husband that you’re going to work? Dress up in your uniform and everything?”
“Why?” she had asked. “Where do you want to go?”
He tried to look at her evenly. “To a motel.”
Mai had giggled uneasily and looked away. “Lee, I’m Asian girl...I’m not wild...you know? I can’t talk about thing like that when you looking at my face.”
“I’ll look another way,” he joked nervously, twisting in his seat to face the antique tools, posters and decorative trinkets hanging all over that and every wall in the restaurant.
“I can’t talk about that...please...”
“I’m sorry,” he said, swiveling around again but dropping his eyes to the fizzing gold depths of his beer. “It was just an idea. I...”
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