Autobiography of a Face (6 page)

This particular Sunday coincided with the first uncomfortably warm day of spring. All the windows were open, but they offered no relief. My T-shirt clung to my back as I slipped off the bed. Whenever possible, I dressed in street clothes. Wearing pajamas during the day, even though everyone else was wearing theirs, made me nervous and depressed. It brought to my mind the old practical joke of getting someone to show up in a chicken suit for a formal ball.

Once assembled in the hallway, Derek, the candy striper, the two other children, and I headed for the elevators. I knew there was a basement beneath the ground floor, but I didn't know there were levels even beneath that. Our bodies were transported through space to the very bottom, the terminus, SB2, subbasement level 2. The elevator doors opened on a long hallway with concrete walls, illuminated intermittently with bare light bulbs cradled in bell-shaped cages of wire dangling from the ceiling. It smelled cold. You could clearly see the imprints of the wood used as forms for the concrete, like vast slabs of petrified wood.

Derek leaned over and whispered in my ear, "This is where they keep the dead ones."

The notion that at any moment we might see a white-sheeted body being rolled down the hall made my fingers fall asleep. I shook them, bewildered by the effect. The candy striper walked forward authoritatively. But only fifty yards further, faced with an intersection, she faltered. We scanned the walls for signs pointing toward the building that housed the animal labs.

For days I'd been looking forward to this. Once or twice a year a traveling petting zoo was set up inside the local mall. For a small fee you could walk around the sawdust-filled pen and pet the obese goats and sheep. For an extra ten cents you could buy feed out of a converted bubblegum machine. I couldn't get enough of the animals, their smell, the clicks their cloven hooves made on the tile floor showing in patches through the sawdust. I was crazy for animals. Any book or television show or movie about animals I consumed greedily, though I shied away from the ones that anthropomorphized the animals. I thought it degraded them to be too closely aligned with the human species.

Uncharacteristically, Derek allowed me to walk in front of him. Normally there was a silent battle between us about who was in charge, but this morning he seemed distracted, or perhaps he wasn't as excited as I was. There were things about Derek I didn't understand; he could get sullen like this sometimes. Though I never would have admitted it to him, I envied the fact that he lived in the city year-round. I thought it made him exotic. Once I awakened to find him standing over me and two other boys peering in from the doorway: he'd kissed me. Perhaps they had wanted to watch, thinking I'd be grossed out, but my reaction obviously disappointed them. All I felt was somewhat confused as to why Derek, who looked equally confused, would want to do such a bizarre thing.

Eventually we found the tunnel that led to the correct building. We piled into the elevator and took it all the way up. The doors opened onto a large foyer. Open windows with spectacular views of the city took up most of two walls. A cool, strong wind came through the windows, whose unbarred expanses struck me as dangerous. With the unpainted ceiling and concrete floors, they gave the place a tenuous feeling. On either side of the foyer were sets of swinging doors. We went through one set and down a hallway, realized it was wrong, turned back, and went through the foyer again. As we opened the second set of doors the stink hit us head on. The tang of natural urea and ammonia mixed with the chemical fumes of disinfectants burned the inside of my nose. This probably should have been an omen, but we continued on down the hall, following the smell, until we saw the doors:
Authorized Personnel Only.
There wasn't an authorized human in sight.

We pushed open the doors and found ourselves in a large room. Equipment of various sorts lined the walls, and in the middle stood four interlocking pens with metal poles for sides. In two of the pens were pigs, and in the other two, sheep. They had no bedding, and the concrete floor, dribbled with urine, sloped downward toward a system of drains. My first thought was, how can they sleep on concrete? The animals had been lying down, but our entrance startled them. They stood up, the sheep bleating hoarsely and the pigs harumphing, very human-sounding, and circled the tight interior of their pens. I'd never been so close to pigs before, and these were enormous. Pigs have human eyes, blue, with round pupils. After staring at you they look away, and you can see the whites of their eyes. Counter to every feeling I'd ever had about an animal before, I had no desire to go nearer.

We all just stood there in the doorway. Surely things were said, but I don't remember any conversation. As the sheep paced around I noticed that patches of fleece had been shaved away in raw geometries, framed for recently sutured incisions. One of the sheep had what looked like a plastic bag sewn into her side. We stepped back out and went into the next room, where dogs had started barking. Haifa dozen beagles in reasonably large cages greeted us joyously. One of the dogs looked unhappy and sick and ignored us, but the rest pushed with all their weight against their bars as we approached. As I neared the first one's cage, however, he stopped barking and growled at me. The candy striper heard and warned me not to get any closer to the dogs, most of whom looked desperate for attention. All of a sudden I hated her, with her stupid outfit and shrill, silly voice.

Desperation saturated the room in those loud, whining cries pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I was overwhelmed. On each cage door was a sign with handwritten details about the dog, filled with alien words. Instead of water dishes they had bottles with tubes they could lick, giant versions of what my gerbils used back home. Despite the warning, I let the dogs lick my fingers through the bars.

The tenor of the expedition was shifting rapidly, taking on a slow, almost viscous quality. Out teenaged grownup tried to hurry us along, now aware that she'd made a mistake. The next room was lined with cages. The wall directly across from the door was filled with cages of white mice, and to our right was an entire wall of cats, cage after cage stacked upon each other. Most were tabbies. I'd never seen so many cats in one place, and yet it was eerily silent. They crouched in their cages and stared at us, every single one of them, as we filed into the room. As we got closer, some of them came up to the bars of their cages and rubbed, opening their mouths soundlessly. Years later I learned that it is not uncommon to cut the vocal cords of laboratory cats, especially if there are a lot of them. They had the same water bottles and handwritten signs as the beagles, but their cages were smaller. A number of the cats had matchbox-size rectangles with electrical wires implanted in their skulls. The skin on their shaved scalps was crusty and red where it joined the metal.

It was too much now. There was a sound of monkeys in the next room, but we turned and left. In the elevator no one spoke; in the tunnels no one spoke. A sad, groping presence accompanied us all the way back to the ward, where the lunch trays were just arriving and the aroma of spaghetti filled the halls. When asked where we'd been, our candy striper replied casually that we'd gone for a walk, and not one of us said anything to the contrary. Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to name our own private losses, but then we just stood there in front of the nurses' desk, speechless.

NO ONE CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO ME WHAT WAS
about to happen. Mary, the head nurse, did call me over at one point. Derek tagged along. The floors had just been polished, and the lemon scent of wax filled the air. Mary was one of my favorite nurses, always kind and always the one most likely to crack a joke as she walked into the room with that dreaded basin, the one they carried needles in. Though I didn't mind blood tests, I'd developed a fear of preop injections.

By now I'd had three operations, including a bone biopsy. Usually they gave two injections before taking you down to the O.R., one for each thigh, and the shots hurt like bad leg cramps for several minutes. Most nurses offered the hearty and useless advice of
Rub that spot hard! or Squeeze your toes!,
but not Mary. She'd stand over you, needle poised, and announce her own joking version of comfort, mimicking the syrupy tone neophyte inflicters commonly resort to:
Now this isn't going to hurt me one little bit.

I specifically asked Mary if she'd give me the injection before my fourth operation, the one that involved removing the tumor and no more than one third of the jaw. She seemed disappointed when she told me that she wouldn't be on duty for it. Late that afternoon, before she left, she called me over. "This is a big operation you'll have tomorrow, you know that, don't you?"

I'd been told it would take a whole four hours, which was certain to elevate my social status on the ward. Though I'd felt sick after my other encounters with anesthetics, I didn't comprehend what a four-hour surgery would mean. Somewhat chagrined at being spoken down to, I told her I understood everything perfectly, unaware that I hadn't a clue how sick I was or what was going to happen.

She looked me right in the eye. "Do you know you'll look different afterward?"

For Derek's sake, I made a joke about bandages, about looking like The Mummy. Horror movies were a major source of entertainment for Derek and me. Between us we'd seen every bad monster movie ever made, and we had serious arguments as to whether or not Camera, a giant Japanese turtle, could win over Rodin, another Japanese creature with a pterodactyl look. Mary realized she wasn't getting anywhere with me. She shifted her weight, looked down, and let her shoe slip halfway off her foot to dangle on the edge of her toes. After a few moments of contemplating this effect, she put her weight back on the foot. I could hear the stockings rasp together on her thighs as she left.

The next afternoon, when I woke up in Recovery, I couldn't quite figure out where I was or what had happened to me. My entire body ached, and when I tried to speak, nothing happened. An elderly, overweight nurse approached my head from time to time with a long, clear plastic tube, which seemed to disappear just as a deep ache appeared in my lungs. I didn't realize I had had a tracheotomy. There was a constant loud sound of machines, and at one point I amused the nurses, who showed me how to speak by placing a finger over the hole in my throat, by asking if they could turn them off so I could get some decent sleep. My parents came in together for a minute, stood at the foot of the bed, and considered me from what seemed a long, long way away.

With no room in ICU, they decided to keep me overnight in Recovery. I held my hand over my throat, over my newest orifice, and felt my breath brush warm, almost hot, over the moist plane of my palm. The steady flutter didn't seem to have anything to do with me. For the first few hours I vomited up large amounts of blood I'd swallowed during the procedure. I began to welcome the deep, lungy urge to release the sweet-tasting fluid from deep within me. It tasted almost pleasant. Drainage tubes drifted down onto the pillow beside me, displaying the slightly shifting red and golden fluids of my body. An IV hung over me, dripping steadily and endlessly, producing a hypnotic effect similar to that of the watery chaos I'd been drawn to off the stern of the
Queen Mary.
If I lay perfectly still, I felt no pain. I dozed and woke, dozed and woke all night, slept my half-sleep with an image of myself as swaddled.

 

Bizarrely, after they removed half my jaw, I limped. It was my first day up out of bed, and I was going to traverse the entire four feet to the bathroom. This required a certain amount of preparation, of disconnecting tubes and wires.

"Why are you limping? They didn't do anything to your legs, Chicken-chops."

My mother was watching the nurse help me. I liked it when she called me Chicken-chops, the name she used with any of us when we were ill. I was back on Ward to, not only in my own room but with my own nurses around the clock. Most of them simply sat beside my bed and read, but the one that day liked to turn the television on without volume and chuckle at it continuously. Underdog wavered on the screen behind my mother as she put down her knitting to view the spectacle of my first journey out of bed. I placed my finger over my throat.

"I don't know."

It was everything I could do just to say those three words. My non sequitur limping seemed to amuse the nurse and my mother, and eventually it amused me. None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.

 

Fluid was the major issue. I refused to drink enough. Or, rather, that's how they perceived my inability to down more than a quarter of a glass at a time. Every swallow left me breathless, two swallows exhausted me, three and then four made me feel I should be congratulated. Instead they made an embarrassing chart and pinned it on the door, a Magic Marker record of every cc I consumed. They thought the threats to never take out my IV would impel me, but they misjudged. I gladly would have spent the rest of my life on an IV if they would just leave me alone.

Day after day passed, and still I could barely manage a fraction of the ten glasses a day they wanted of me. Ten glasses! An unimaginable sum! Couldn't they see that? I knew my mother was getting annoyed with me, beginning to take it personally. How could I explain that I just wanted to lie there, becoming ever more intimate with my body?

I knew all of my body's rhythms now, all of its quirks. The smell of my wound was sweet and ever-present, the skin on my elbows and heels as sore and red as holly berries. Though at first I'd dreaded the daily injections, now I didn't even mind them, welcomed the dozy contentedness they offered. I learned that all I had to do was relax, that fear was the worst part. I became a machine for disassembling fear. Even the worst pains could be rendered harmless if you relaxed into them, didn't fight. I grew lazy about speaking, and even after I was given a full-time plug for my trachea, I put little effort into speaking, reducing my vocabulary to only syllables at a time, passing them out as cautiously as I did my attempts to drink the most minute amounts of water. I grew weaker and weaker.