Thirteen Specimens (5 page)

     “What?” he stammered. “Don’t say that, Linh! Oh my God...of course it happened!”

     “The Viet Cong made that up,” she insisted.

     “They did not make it up. It was Americans that brought it to the public, to the newspapers, to...”

     “They were told to say that.”

     “Told by who? For what? Look, there’s proof it happened. There are photos...”

     “Bob,” she laughed helplessly, knowing she couldn’t convince him now, leaning across the table to squeeze his forearm in both her hands. “Vi-et
Cong
...” was all she could add, simply to excuse why she would even try to debate the issue, how she could hold her beliefs.

     But he went on, “I took photos. I was there. I took the photos.”

     She sat up straight after that, staring at him. “You did?”

     “I’ll show you the pictures. After we eat, I’ll show you my book, at my apartment, okay?” The book was called
By Candlelight: the Photographs of Robert Candle
. It had been released four years ago. Some of his photos hung in a gallery in this city, as part of their permanent collection. He had never seen them there, but he knew that some of his photographs also hung in the War Remnants Museum, previously known as The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

     “Okay, Bob...okay...I want to see that.”

     “How can you say it never happened?” he persisted. “That’s like saying the Guests never happened. But we have evidence, right? All around us. The building you and your boys live in...”

     “I know, Bob, yes...”

     “I was
there
, Linh.” His voice was fragmenting. Tears were blurring the lenses of his eyes. “I saw it. I was there.”

     “Poor my guy.” She reached across the table again and took his hand, held it tightly, rubbing her thumb across his. She could find no pity for the hundreds of her imagined enemy, killed on March 16, 1968, but she felt pity for her new lover. And her touch soothed him, helped stop the tears quickly, but they were the first tears he had shed over what he had seen that day. He tried to smile at her, grateful in some way for it, and she whispered again, “Poor my guy.”

Sympathetic Identity Disorder

    
It was Beclard in his
Faculté de Méd. de Paris,
1815, who was the first to observe – or at least, to document
–
the condition that has come to be known by modern physicians as Sympathetic Identity Disorder. In the case in question, Beclard examined a seventeen-year-old Marie Lambert, who appeared to be in perfect health, but whose family insisted the raven-haired brown-eyed girl had been a red-haired and blue-eyed infant, having gradually come to resemble her deceased mother to an uncanny degree over the years.

     Subsequent cases investigated by
Worbe (
Jan. Et Fev,
1816) and Ward (
Internat. Med.
Magaz., Phila.,
July 1895), among others, similarly document cases in which children – significantly, in every instance born to mothers who died in childbirth – came to so greatly resemble their mothers as they matured as to suggest something more of a physical reconfiguration than simple hereditary similarity. Some have ventured that latent genetic potentialities surfaced with puberty, while others propose a more psychosomatic cause for this change in appearance (though naturally, in some of the earlier cases there were no photographs or even portraits by which a child might imprint upon their subconscious an image of the mother they never knew). In Ward’s case, the young woman had even developed a wine birthmark identical to her mother’s, though she bore not the slightest trace of this until her later adolescence.

     My own personal experience with this disorder was the most marvelous if poignant of the cases I have researched in my many years as a physician. Sixteen years ago I was called upon to examine a young woman by the name of Joan Crestfallen, whom I found to be an exceptionally lovely girl of eighteen, with a commendable figure and delicately feminine airs. Upon interviewing this young woman and her family, however, and viewing photographs of Joan as a younger child, I believed their assertion that Joan had previously been a male, then called John, who had taken on the appearance of the parent he had never seen in person. This radical alteration in form had taken its toll on the poor creature’s psychological state as well, making her (as I regarded the being) exceedingly meek, unwilling to much venture into society for fear of ridicule. However withdrawn and melancholy Joan might have been, however, I found her to be charming and captivating to an extent that made my objective interest in the case difficult and uncomfortable.

     Despite our mutual bashfulness, Miss Crestfallen allowed me to examine her reproductive organs, which were fully and wondrously regular in formation externally, though internally, I determined that there was a complete absence of the ovaries and fallopian tubes (both anomalies quite rare) and of the uterus as well (more common an abnormality). The clitoris did present the possibility of being an atrophied penis, but there were no traces of testicles if I am to believe, as Joan insisted, that she ever possessed them (and again, her birth certificate – if authentic – bore out her claims). The mammae were remarkably and appealingly well developed. She had no facial hair, a feminine voice, would in no way have suggested any masculine trait to me were I to have met her in a purely social setting. And when I was presented with numerous photographs of her mother, I could scarcely believe they were not of Joan herself. The only difference between her mother and herself appeared to be that her mother had of course been capable of giving birth. (There is the case Worbe relates in which the patient was in fact able to become pregnant and give birth – having been a woman to begin with, however. But I mention this fact because the patient herself died in childbirth...and whether her female child came to resemble its mother, and hence its grandmother, in later years is unfortunately not documented.)

     Though shy in the extreme, during one of my examinations Joan rested her forehead against my shoulder, then lifted her face as if to invite me to kiss her, which I did not. She was visibly very hurt by my rejection, and I wonder to this day if I made the correct decision in not accommodating her...because I have never felt quite the same emotion of tenderness for a woman – and while I have refrained from discussing this case for many years because I felt it might call into question my professional ethics, I must at last address it, as it is one of the most unusual – and haunting – experiences of my rather singular career.

     As in many of the cases I encounter, there is no cure where there is no known cause. But I am sad to report that in a sense Joan Crestfallen cured herself of her depression and confusion as to her true identity, when a mere six months after I encountered her, I received the news that she had hung herself in the basement of her parents’ home. There is no question that her melancholy was manifold: Joan was in doubt as to the nature of own physical sexuality, her own identity, in a sense – her own soul. She mourned for a mother she never knew, except as herself. And she mourned for the second great absence in her life – myself. I can say no more on this subject, if I should even have said this much.

American Cchinnamasta

     I saw a picture of the Hindu goddess Cchinnamasta in a book in the library, and I wish I had photocopied the drawing, or stolen the book, because now I can’t remember the book’s title or even the subject matter, and so I can not recall the drawing exactly...it’s like trying to remember a dream. But I do remember that Cchinnamasta had cut off her own head; maybe she had a sword or a long knife in one hand, maybe she had more than two arms. But I clearly remember two things. She was holding her decapitated head in one of her hands, and a stream of her own blood was arcing out of her neck stump, straight into her head’s mouth. Though she should be dead, drinking her own blood was keeping her alive, and beautiful. That’s the other thing I remember. Cchinnamasta was beautiful.

     I’ve looked for that picture on the internet and have been very frustrated. The one picture of her, supposedly of her, I could find showed her with her head attached. Though it was a lovely painting, I could not believe this was the correct goddess to go along with the brief description of her.

     Another site, with no picture but more information, helps me remember details like the two Shaktis who also drink streams of her blood. Though I am half Indian, I don’t know what a Shakti is. My ex-boyfriend Alex used to tease me that I wouldn’t know an East Indian from an American Indian any better than Columbus would.

     It says lotuses decorate her breasts. Maybe I can recall that. It says she has three eyes, like black Kali with her long wolfish tongue. Kali is easy to find. Maybe it’s because Cchinnamasta is less well known, more obscure, harder to search out and find that draws me more to her. It’s like I’m arduously climbing some mountain to meet her at last, face to face.

     She sits above the horny god of love. Why can’t I remember that part?

     A snake is tied around the jewel on her forehead, besides her having that third eye. By jewel I guess they mean bindi. I have never worn a bindi, but I have a small dark mole almost directly between my eyebrows as if Nature or some goddess wants me to acknowledge that I am half Indian even when I would rather not...which is usually. Almost always. So always, in fact, that I am sneaky and guilty about researching Cchinnamasta even though Alex has recently moved out and won’t catch me looking.

     You can get bindis online whether you’re Indian or not. Some years back Madonna and Alanis Morisette went through their Indian thing. Alanis seemed to mean it. I broke down once and bought anklets off a web site because Alex thought they looked sexy; they hooked over my second toe and around my ankles in a kind of beaded lace that from a distance looked like a henna tattoo. I don’t wear them any more, though I like to go barefoot whenever I can, I even slip my shoes off under my chair at work, and Alex reasoned this was my Indian side. I hated him talking about it, but he said it made me exotic. He wanted me to buy one of those kits and put mehndi tattoos on my hands because he thought that was sexy too but I wouldn’t. They’re too conspicuous, like these black spider webs all over your fingers. They wear them on the hands, the feet, even the bottoms of the feet and the palms and around the eyes to protect you from contact with stuff. Why do religions all seem to hate the earth and the things in it, try to buffer you from the icky touch of reality?

    
Cchinnamasta’s six mantras are 1: Shrim Aim Klim Sauh Shrim Hrim Klim Aim Haum 2: Om Krim Strim Krom 3: Im Hum Phat 4: Shrim Klim Hum Aim Vajravairochaniye Hum Hum Phat Svaha. 5: Shrim Hrim Hum Aim Vajra Vairochaniye Shrim Hrim Aim Phat Svaha and 6: Shrim Aim Klim Sauhm Shrim Hrim Klim Aim Haum Om Shrim Klim Hum Aim Vajra Vairochaniye Hum Hum Phat Svaha. Jesus Christ. Maybe my sister Parina would be able to understand or even say all that, but I can’t. Parina is fully Indian. We have the same father, different mothers.

     Well, at least I looked up
Shakti just now on the web and it has something to do with the creative power of male Hindu gods taking the tangible form of goddesses called Shakti. I guess that’s kind of neat. At least Hinduism isn’t as patriarchal as some religions. But I’m no more a Hindu than I am a Mormon, no matter what Alex wanted me to be; I’m not like that woman Anna Kashfi that Marlon Brando married because he thought she was this exotic Indian only to find out she was just from Wales or whatever. I can’t be who I’m not. I’m not your little Parina; sorry, Dad. Can you believe Alex bought the Kama Sutra and wanted to try every position? All that sticking my sweet stamen in your honeyed garden crap. Fuck that.

*     *     *

     Parina’s mother is Indian, so she has the dark skin I don’t. There is a resemblance between us, though, and we’re only two years apart (she’s younger). We both have the long black hair. We’re both short and on the curvy side; I guess she’s a little less curvy than me. Both have the full lips, and these funny shaped ears with big lobes that stick out, ugh, good thing for the thick hair. My left eye turns in a little; Alex said it was cute. We both have big dark eyes like the girls in Japanese anime but something about her lids makes them look more Indian than mine. We first met when I was eighteen and she was sixteen and surprisingly we hit it off, even though I was prepared to hate her. She stayed with us through the summer while Dad was back in New Delhi on business, with his wife. I didn’t want to know Parina but by the time she left we were both in tears and I wanted her to stay with me forever. We’ve seen each other a few times since, for not as prolonged a visit. Maybe I shouldn’t say this but one night we kissed and felt each other’s breasts a little. We’d had a few beers. But I love her as my real sister, I really do, even though I disown my Dad as my Dad.

     My Mom won’t talk about him much but he wasn’t with her long, never married her, and I can tell it wasn’t much more than an affair. He wanted some Wasp ass, but he ended up marrying an Indian woman, making his family from more familiar cells, raising Parina as his daughter but not even bothering to see me until I was ten and then when I was twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and only briefly...maybe because he thought every two years he’d have another chance of sleeping with Mom. The last time I saw him was when I was twenty and I’m twenty three now so I figured he must have given up on Mom. But I missed Parina, even though she had a Dad like I should have had except he wasn’t into me or was even ashamed of me because I wasn’t this perfect and pure little brown
Shakti that jumped out of his forehead, this manifestation of himself.

     Parina is going to school to be a doctor like Dad. I’m a telemarketer. At least I don’t have an Indian accent at all; that might put off the people I call up, who get annoyed enough as it is.

     I had a dream a few weeks ago, the same night I heard Parina and our Dad and her Mom (who I’ve never met) would be in Massachusetts this summer for a few weeks. My Mom said they’d probably drive by to see us. In my dream, I saw Dad come in the doorway after Parina, who was in a sari this time even though when she stayed with me that summer she liked tight jeans and tube tops, and I felt disappointed that her hair was all tightly braided instead of hanging down hippie style like mine all crazy twisty snakes, and her little quiet smugly smiling Mom was in a sari too, but Dad was in a three piece suit and he had a briefcase. When he was in our hall, he set the case down on the hallway table, opened it up, and took out this big chopper-like knife that he used as a doctor, I figured. He raised it up and I screamed because I thought he was going to hack my Mom.

     Instead, he swung it at this awkward angle and lopped off his own head, like a male Cchinnamasta, which was a blasphemy. He caught his head by the hair, his wire framed glasses still on his nose, and three bright geysers of blood shot up and out of his neat neck stump as if from a water sprinkler. One stream arced into the mouth of his own severed head. Parina caught another stream in her smiling mouth, and her Mom caught the third stream.

     My Mom and I didn’t get any.

*     *     *

     Last night we all went out and had dinner together, Indian food, surprise. Mom and Mrs. Dad were pleasant to each other, everyone was pleasant, Parina and I talked a lot but it wasn’t like before which makes me sad, and I hated telling her about Alex’s arrival and departure, the whole relationship covered in ten minutes. She’s seeing someone but I don’t know if she’s slept with him or with anybody. She’s a little thinner now, her cheekbones more pronounced; I preferred her with a little more baby fat, she was smoother in the face. She has a little gem in her left nostril but she wasn’t wearing a bindi. She wasn’t in a sari, even, but it felt like she was.

     Dad kept smiling at me, smugly, like he was proud of me, like I was this possession, a flower he had once planted that had bloomed prettily in his absence, he kept calling me beautiful. Maybe you’d like to fuck me, I thought. The perfect fuck. Both Indian and Wasp. I can see it in all three of your eyes, Dad with your hanging Kali tongue you false goddess.

     I was hoping Parina would want to sleep over instead of at the hotel, I hoped she or someone would suggest it but no one did so I didn’t bring it up. In a way, though, I think I was also relieved. Yes, after Alex left I moved back in with my Mom because I couldn’t swing the rent alone.

     Some of the Indian food was great and some of it was gross. I prefer Chinese or Middle Eastern. The names of the various dishes meant nothing to me. I watched Dad slice some curried chicken with his fork and knife and I imagined him carving open one of his patients. I remembered him with that big bladed instrument in my dream. He sensed me watching I think because he lifted his eyes directly up to mine and I had to look away. But when I looked back he was chewing the chunk of flesh, like he was reclaiming one of the personified Shaktis he had manifested, slicing her up and chewing her up and swallowing her so he could produce another one in her place.

*     *     *

     The third day of their trip, though, which is today, Parina was dropped off to spend with me because I had said I would take the day off from work. Mom went to her job and Parina and I painted each other’s toe nails like teen agers though she just turned twenty one. We decided to rent a video and she picked
Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love
because she’d never seen it before. She was all giggly about it. I said, oh, come on...it sounded like some late Friday night Cinemax movie but she said it was by the director of
Salaam Bombay!
which I guess was supposed to be an impressive bit of trivia. So I said yeah, yeah, okay, and we took it home and made popcorn and watched it on the couch with our bares toes shining.

     I had given us both a Corona, with lime in it and salt on the rim even.

     The beer was a mistake, though I only had two. If I haven’t eaten much I can get a good buzz off two beers, though my perfect buzz is two mai tais, no more and no less. But her mistake was renting that stupid movie. Because it was very sexy, and the actress Indira Varma was so beautiful. I had snuggled up closer to my sister and put my arm around her shoulders and rested my head against her head. She smiled when I did that. But when I reached up very, very gently, very tenderly, and ran my fingers along the outer curve of her breast she pulled away very sharply.

     She looked at me darkly, her eyes so huge, so black, could mine possibly be so black, and Indian women have this kind of pouty sneer which I don’t quite have, and she said come on, don’t do that. It really repulsed her. I could see if she wasn’t into it, fine...I wasn’t even going to go far with it, though I did want to kiss her, but it wasn’t like I tried going down on her. We did this before. It wasn’t like we hadn’t. Did she forget? Or want to forget?

     Right away she got up to use the bathroom; I think just to get away from me for a minute. So I sat there watching the movie alone for that minute, and although it continued being sexy, or because it continued being sexy, I couldn’t enjoy it any more. I got up and went to the kitchen and stood between the fridge and the counter wondering if I wanted another beer. My face was so hot, like a balloon full of blood, all the blood in my body, which made my body feel emptied and weak. I clung to the counter for support. I slid open the drawer by my hand and I took out the bread knife and I walked to the bathroom with it.

     The door wasn’t fully closed so I pushed it open. I saw the strip of a sanitary napkin poking up from the little waste basket by the toilet. Parina was done and washing her hands but when she looked up she seemed angry again that I had come right in without knocking so before she could say anything about it I cocked the knife back and jammed it downward into the hollow at the front of her throat. It went in deep, about half of the blade’s nine wide inches, nine inches like a good sized cock in her throat. I felt like a man, suddenly. She fell back against the side of the tub with her beautiful eyes no longer angry, just more huge, and I loved her then all over again, so I had to stop her right there, before either of us could change again, to seal this moment in time, so I knelt down over her and I took hold of the handle which I had let go of after I stuck the knife in her. I curled both fists around the handle and leaned my breastbone right on the end of it, pushing it the rest of the way in and working it to the side like a stuck lever. For a few moments her hands tried to hold mine but they grew light and faded away. When I removed my slippery palms from the knife, they were red with her blood and looked like they’d been tattooed with
mehndi.