Permanence (17 page)

“No,” he says, with a strained voice. Then he is silent.

The people gather around us. Doctor and I have become a spectacle. The entire world seems silenced. I try to speak but the sound of my crying fills the silent space where a voice should be. I pull doctor into me, tighter, his face pressed against my breasts. I am crying. The people form a circle around me.

“Do something,” I beg. “Do anything.”

But no one moves.

Everyone stares, as though doctor is already dead. So many people around me, but I am all alone.

Helpless…

Book Three

Fire

In the last analysis, what would become of us without abortion?
—Max Frisch

November

Inception

The ceramic walls of this box-shaped room are antiseptic white, the floors a glossy, battleship gray. The light that emanates from the stainless-steel umbrella fixture stings my eyes when I stare into it without blinking. The light leaves a black hole in my mind that even pierces the darkness.

The injection is local.

I wait on my back for the moment when all feeling will abandon my stomach. When it does, I have not gone without feeling my stomach in two months. Being in the first trimester, I am able to undergo a suction process which involves a tube and a stainless-steel attachment. I can see this doctor applying the device from behind the large square of green curtain they have installed around my midsection. The doctor (I am not even sure he is a doctor, although I address him this way) says few words to me, going about his work with a mechanical indifference, leaving me alone with my thoughts. But he asks me if I feel sleepy and tells me not to worry about nodding off if I want to.

How can I sleep?

The curtain blocks the view of my legs harnessed and spread wide inside stirrups. Despite the injection, I feel the air of this room like I am standing waist-deep in cool water. I hold to the pillbox wrapped about my neck with my fingers and try to block all thoughts of doctor’s child from my mind. I block out the possibility of this child having ever lived inside of me. I block out the possibility that this child might have ever taken the place of the baby Jamie and I made, so long ago. Perhaps along with this mechanical procedure, so too can my guilt be erased, as though it never existed. The low hum of the machine is surprisingly quiet, the feel of the components warm, but tight up against my insides. The process runs for a few moments, the noise of the machine low and steady at times and then suddenly high-pitched and intense and then low again.

The sound is the antithesis of conception.

This doctor positions and repositions the stainless-steel device and I feel the shift in pressure inside my body. When doctor removes the hose device he hides himself behind the curtain. I think,
That wasn’t so terrible
.

Then I feel it.

The cold, steel feel of the instruments, the rough scraping and the red-hot pressure against the interior of my abdomen. The pain that no anesthetic can hide (“Sleep, if you can,” repeats the doctor). The feel of the scraping is like sandpaper rubbed against rough wood. I feel scraping throughout my body. It feels as though he has stuck sewing needles into my belly button.

How could I ever sleep?

My abdomen is on fire.

When the operation is finished I am fitted with a pad for the bleeding. I am shuffled through a small hallway where I lay prone on a cart dressed in nothing but a baby-blue dressing gown. The gown remains open in front, with only the small ties to bring the thin fabric together to conceal my body. Although people shuffle in and out of rooms, they avoid eye contact, as if I do not exist—as if they do not exist. We are here to erase ourselves, what exists inside us.

I am dead tired.

I am placed inside a room with soft flowers and a television connected to the ceiling by a metal bracket. The television is on, but there is no sound (I did not pay to have television in the recovery room, but I may watch the picture). I ask the black man who wheels me into this room to turn off the television. I tell him there is a tingling, burning sensation in my stomach. He is wearing green scrubs, a matching surgical cap, and latex gloves. He attributes the tingling to the anesthetic wearing off. He makes a small joke, saying I will really feel it later, as if we have been talking about an extracted tooth.

But how does it feel to abort doctor’s baby?

I feel clean. I feel relieved.

Now there is no evidence of doctor’s child having ever existed. My memories of baby—Jamie’s and my baby—will remain intact. I could never share the memory of baby with another, despite my need for doctor, despite the love I might have for him and the love I know he has for me. What is love?

But here’s how I also feel: I feel horrible, as though having been emptied of my soul and my life. I feel as dead as those grisly, white plaster castings doctor and I discovered in Pompeii—clean, but so very, very dead.

This black man in surgical scrubs rubs my head with a damp washcloth. Already he changes my padding, applies fresh, clean material. He smiles a friendly, feeling smile. He is here to help me. Like the doctor before him, he wants me to sleep.

Doctor’s frown becomes a smile

Doctor assures me his cancer has not spread.

He also tries to assure me of this: there is a bright side in all of this. According to doctor, there is a 94.4-perccnt chance that his cancer will never spread beyond his mouth and throat (he claims that the remaining 5.6 percent is up to providence or fate. But I know this: doctor relies on the miracle of science now for saving his life). I have no reason not to believe doctor. Trust is an integral part of our relationship. I believe him whether I want to or not.

This is life and this is death.

Listen: this is not the same doctor I traveled to Italy with only weeks ago. The damage caused by the cancer is considerable. I know this is difficult to picture, but the jaw on the right side of doctor’s face has been removed partially, almost completely, and replaced with nothing; the comer of his mouth is sewn closed and seems in danger of tearing if doctor opens his mouth wide enough; the scar from the removed tumor begins from behind his left ear and wraps like a pink snake about the entirety of his neck to an area beneath the opposite ear.

I look at doctor for a long time without saying a word.

Then I turn away and try to avoid his face.

The scar doctor now possesses is not the result of providence or fate.

The scar is clearly the result of survival, the postponement of dying.

Listen to this: what doctor has lost through surgery is not the thing that makes me avoid his face. What makes me avoid has face is what doctor has gained. His missing jaw and scar are not as difficult to look at as is his grin. Doctor’s usual, emotionless expression that had been hidden beneath a thin, salt-and-pepper beard is now clean shaven and exposed.

This is not a bad joke, but since his operation, doctor’s perpetual frown has become a smile. The edges of his mouth, where his lips join at the comers, have been perked up to make this man look happy.

But I know this: doctor is not happy.

Doctor is dying.

His weight is so far diminished, his usual dark gray suit has become even baggier and ill-fitting—ridiculous. His hair is cut so short, he resembles a prisoner of war. The shape of doctor’s skull is completely visible, as are his discolored teeth and gums.

I know this: we will no longer make love when I make my once a week visit. We will not talk about love. Love is out of the question.

I need doctor, but I am repulsed by him too.

We will not talk about anything. Doctor cannot talk. His voice box has been partially removed—extracted—as has a portion of his tongue. With the aid of a machine he forces against his neck, above the Adam’s apple at the underside of his chin, doctor is able to produce a mechanical, robotic-sounding voice that is utterly inhuman. But he refuses to use the voice machine. Naturally. He uses instead a note pad and hand gestures for communication. He expects me to know what to do. He expects me to communicate with him.

“After all,” he writes, “it’s your problems we’re here to listen to, not mine.”

I smile, but my smile is as false as doctor’s.

Missing

What was inside of me, here, near my stomach, is no longer there, but like a missing limb, I can still feel it. The scar will be forever invisible, but there, on the inside. Of course, I will have no more children. Like the voices inside my head, my scars are both real and imagined. Doctor will never know about the scars. But then, I wonder, does he bear the least suspicion I have destroyed our child?

Lies

Doctor told me nothing of the cancer or of his operation until it was too late. Doctor said nothing until it was all over. Less than two days after our safe arrival by jet plane from Italy, doctor admitted himself into the Albany Medical Center for the life-saving operation. Doctor’s convalescence was comprised of one week at the hospital and another full week at home, alone.

Doctor’s receptionist, Wendy, lied when she called me about the normal Friday appointment doctor would not be able to keep. She told me doctor had a routine cold, nothing to be alarmed about. He just couldn’t get over it.

Then she called again the next week. Doctor was still not up to seeing me. This was not like the doctor I knew.

I knew something was wrong.

Doctor hadn’t called me since we returned. Doctor wouldn’t answer my calls—messages left for him on his answering machine. When I went looking for doctor at his home, he wouldn’t come to the door. There was no sign of doctor anywhere.

This is what I learned later from doctor himself: doctor was a liar. The psychiatric conferences he had attended in Venice were not psychiatric conferences at all. The conferences were medical appointments for him—fourth and fifth opinions for a disease doctor had been diagnosed with four months earlier. He had been diagnosed by at least three different medical specialists from around the United States, the last of whom suggested a Venetian physician who, apparently, was doing amazing things with throat and mouth cancer patients.

Doctor had been deceiving me all along. Venice only proved to confirm what the American physicians (and fate) had already diagnosed, and in this doctor had deceived himself. Doctor possessed acute cancer of the throat and mouth. There was no doubt about an operation if doctor wanted to survive. There was no doubt about doctor wanting to survive. Doctor didn’t want me to know, that’s all.

Honesty

Doctor and I communicate now with the aid of a notepad strung about his neck like a necklace. The notepad is like the tiny silver pillbox doctor bought for me in Venice that I keep wrapped about my own neck where it dangles against my chest, near my heart. The pillbox has become my most precious keepsake from a man who is just a shadowy reflection of the person he once was—the doctor I came to know seven months ago after the loss of baby.

I tell doctor honest things.

I tell him that I missed him terribly for the two weeks we were apart while he was recovering from his operation. I tell him of the anger I feel from his having deceived me. I could have helped, I tell him. Doctor says nothing. He sits motionless in his usual chair—the great leather chair behind his desk. Doctor smiles a tight-lipped smile, but this is not a real smile. Doctor is always smiling now, whether he wants to or not.

I feel my stomach, but there is nothing there.

I tell doctor I have fallen in love with him.

For the moment we stare at each other as if stunned. But it’s true—I honestly know now, how much I love doctor, as though the prospect of his death has confirmed my feelings.

Doctor lifts a pen from his desk and scrawls against his notepad as rapidly as possible. He tears away the sheet of paper from the pad. He hands it to me, wide-eyed, reaching across the enormous desk with trembling fingers. I lean up to the desk from where I sit on this patient’s couch. I take the paper. I read the few words that say it all:

“You can’t love me anymore.”

Not ever, I admit silently.

Then there is a pause between us when I do not speak and doctor does not write. But then I ask him this: “Do you still love me?”

Doctor writes. He tears away the paper and motions for me to take it. It reads, “I’m sorry. Truly sorry.” And this I understand. Doctor is sorry for himself and for me. You see, I already know how much doctor loves me. But we both know the truth: doctor does not have long to live.

Like a doctor again

Doctor is acting like a doctor again. I will see him once a week, whether I want to or not. The visits are not necessarily voluntary visits. I need doctor; doctor is there for me now that Jamie and baby are not. Doctor has helped me get through the loss and, in turn, I have fallen in love with doctor. But the appointments we share should have nothing to do with love.

Plain and simple, the appointments are for understanding my apparent “gross negligence” for the time I left baby alone in his bath. And now there are the voices that speak to me inside my head—demons that tell me doctor does not have long to live.

Listen: seeing doctor is intended to make me feel better.

So here’s what I do to get my money’s worth. I ask doctor to finish what he and I have started together. But now I am overcome with an emotional contradiction: even though I love doctor, I can’t stand looking at his face—the false smile, the pale skin, the dying body, the notepad hanging from his neck.

I dread the thought of doctor leaving me, yet I want to know when I can stop seeing doctor so that I no longer have to look at his face.

I feel my body tremble, the voices in my brain mumble incessantly. My mind works overtime.

Here is the prescription doctor writes for me in his notepad: we will meet only four more times.

Doctor continues writing. He does this by bearing down on his pen, allowing his gray tongue to protrude from between his elastic lips. Another note reads this way: doctor says I will be doing most of the talking (he follows with a cynical “ha, ha,” but unlike doctor, I am not in a laughing mood). What he wants from me, he says, are assessments and conclusions concerning the relationship that is no longer a relationship between baby, Jamie, and me. Listen, writes doctor, no matter what has occurred between the two of us, I am still his responsibility, in the eyes of psychiatry and God. In short, I must learn to get over the loss of baby so that I might live a normal life.