Rust and Bone (11 page)

I awoke two days later. The hospital room's every ledge festooned with flowers in frosted glass vases, plush white teddy bears, balloon bouquets bump-bumping in the AC flow. Condolences: family and friends and co-workers, old high-school acquaintances, ex-girlfriends softened by my pathetic state, a War Amps rep, the morbidly curious. A summer intern conducted a brief interview for the
Standard
.

“Tell me what happened, in your own words.”

“In my own words? A whale bit my leg off.”

“I see.” Scribbles on a notepad. “Did you see this coming?”

“What?”

“Was there, well, any …
hostility
… between the two of you?”

“Yes. I was envious of the whale's career.”

“Is that so?”

“Insanely jealous, yes.”

“Will you be suing?”

“Who—the whale?”

“Is that possible?”

“Get out of here.”

Animal rights protesters held a rally on the hospital's front lawn. They toted placards bearing slogans: FREE NISKA and CAPTIVITY + MISTREATMENT = MURDER. They had a boombox playing “Freedom Calling” and a huge inflatable whale with shackles over its pectoral fins. My father got into a fistfight with the ringleader, a dreadlocked grad student from the local university. They rolled across the grass throwing punches until a groundskeeper broke them apart. Dad got in one good shot: it landed with the sound of a hatchet halving a cantaloupe, splattering the protester's nose.

The car is my mother's. Slender and composed in jeans and a heavy sweater, silvery hair cut short in bob style, she sits ramrod straight with both hands on the wheel. Radio tuned to Light 98.1, Kenny G blowing a soulful sax. I reach over to change the station. She slaps my hand.

“My car, my music.”

“Oh, god,” I say. “Gonna slip into a coma, here.”

“You'll survive.”

My mother is a palliative care nurse. She passes each shift in a ward strung with shattered, hopeless, bedridden bodies, victims of voracious and uncaring diseases, kids with inoperable egg-sized tumors latched to their brainstems, infants born with horrible genetic defects. As a matter of basic survival she's developed a professional detachment to the frailties, grotesqueries, and fateful idiosyncrasies affecting the human body.
Emotional scar tissue,
my father calls it. This brusqueness carries over to her family life. As a child, I dreaded the most minor cut or abrasion: she'd break out the iodine and cotton swabs for an unsympathetic clean and dress, slapping my hands away from the wound as I wailed. When I once complained of mild constipation, she insisted on giving me an enema. I recall leaning over the toilet, hands braced on cold porcelain and pants wadded around ankles, penis flapping between trembling legs as she inserted a greased plastic tube, followed by a spurt of warm, bung-loosening water. The whole experience was seriously …
oedipal
.

“What do you think about me running across the country, like Terry Fox?”

“You wouldn't make it to the end of the block. And don't compare yourself to Terry.”

“Why not? He lost a leg, I lost a leg.”

“Terry Fox had cancer.”

“So what, you got to have cancer to do something noble?”

“It's a start.”

“What if I donated all the money I raised to support the eradication of marine mammals? Fill the oceans with drift nets. Capsize oil supertankers. The
Extinction Foundation
. Once all the whales are gone we could get to work on the manatees.”

“That's an awful sentiment, Benjamin. Just …
awful
.”

The highway cuts sharply west, spanning a narrow inlet splitting into a spider's web of iced-over streams. Back in high school, me and my friends took a rutted track to the mouth of the inlet, searching for chinook salmon that'd swim up the swollen tributaries to spawn. The spring runoff slackened and the streambeds dried up, leaving thousands stranded in shallow pools. They swam in restless, agitated circles, throwing themselves at the slippery mud banks. We'd tie triple-barbed hooks to our lines and jig them through the water. With a quick jerk, we'd snag a fin or a gill flap, a belly, a tail. The salmon were so plentiful it required no real skill at all. We hauled them thrashing to the shore and checked the sex; we squeezed the females' guts, emptying their eggs—orange globes in thick, briny liquor—into a gallon ice cream tub, for sale to a local bait shop.

One time my friend Joe hung a big female on a rotted fencepost; the fish had bent his last hook out of shape, and Joe held the thing's stubborn will to live against it. A few minutes later the fish was still bucking and thrashing. Joe picked up a stream-polished stone and chucked it. The stone struck with a heavy wet thud. The rest of us found rocks and hurled them. We hit the salmon's head and gut and fins, missing often, rocks sailing into the brush or bouncing off the post with a hollow
wok!
All of us laughing: the horsey, trollish laughter of teenage boys. Stones smacked the salmon's ugly sloped head, smashed its hooked jaw and gouged luminous flesh to reveal the stark contour of its skull. A shard of flint cut its belly and the pressure of our assault forced the pink of its gut through the slit. The post slick with blood and burst roe and incandescent scales winking in the pale spring sunlight. We became bored and returned to our rods. The fish continued to flop and flap, not quite alive, not entirely dead.

I think of these things. Casual brutalities, unthinking and profane. Think of them often.

DR. ALEXIS VITIAS'S CLINIC
is located on the seventeenth floor of the Hunts-Abrams medical complex in downtown Toronto. Mom gets my crutches from the trunk and trails me as I clump to the elevators. She attempts to straighten the hem on my jeans: with one leg rolled up and safety-pinned to my ass they don't hang right. I slap her hand.

“Jesus, stop touching me. It's not right.”

“What's not right? I'm molesting you?”

“Christ, like you've got that Munchausen's syndrome or something.”

“Don't be an idiot.”

“You're one of those mothers who convince themselves their kid's sick so they can hold on to them. Soak toothbrushes in drain cleanser. Sprinkle arsenic in oatmeal. All kinds of sick shit.”

The whole time I'm talking, she's tugging at my pants. “I'm helping you look presentable, Benjamin, not poisoning your breakfast. You wouldn't eat oatmeal, anyway—it's good for you.”

“Munchausen's syndrome. A chronic case. One sick puppy.”

“I don't care if you grow up.”

“Sure you do. You've still got my baby foreskin in a jar of formaldehyde.”

“I don't,” she lies. Rifling her drawers for loose change as a kid, I found it tucked behind some balled socks: a wrinkly gray tube floating in a vial of piss-yellow fluid. Looked like a calamari ring. Years later, dad told me she'd bullied the doctor into handing it over. “You're imagining things.”

“Imagining my ass. You keep my foreskin in a jar. A piece of your grown son's anatomy in a
Gerber babyfood jar
—”

“Settle down, you're getting all worked up—”

“—Gerber Split Pea and Carrot, you bizarre woman, would you please to Christ
stop touching me
?”

“Alright Mr. Hands Off,” she says—then, with a sly tug as the elevator doors open, straightens the hem.

The waiting room's decor adheres to a design concept glimpsed on high-class porno sets: thick white carpeting, white calfskin sofa draped in a faux-leopardskin pelt, glass-legged endtables piled with glossy magazines. Vitias's receptionist sits behind a half-moon desk.

“I'm here for a fitting.” Offer her a look I privately think of as the
Panty Melter
. “This horse needs a new shoe.”

A pitying expression crosses the receptionist's face; perhaps she's trying to picture me before the missing leg and the extra forty pounds, result of four months spent in bed—the first month medically mandated, the remainder elective. This trip marks the first time I've ventured from my parents' house since what my mother refers to as The Mishap.

She consults her appointment book, frowns. “You're early.” I get the sense I've committed a slight but shameful faux pas. “Take a seat. I'll find the doctor.”

Dr. Vitias's body conjures up images of an ambulatory fire hydrant: thick and densely muscled, a vague flaring at his shoulders the only anomaly on an otherwise unvarying frame. Eyes the hue of antifreeze dart above the wiry unkempt beard of a Macedonian bull god. There is something in the palpitations of his tapered fingers indicative of a barely contained vitality, a
potency,
that he's constantly struggling to keep in check.

“Hello!” His exquisite right hand envelops mine, left gripping my elbow, shaking as though my arm's the pump-handle on a village well. “Here for a leg, yes?”

I acknowledge his brazen statement of the obvious.

“Okay, okay. Let me show you what I've got.”

He leads us through a pebbled-glass door. I feel as though I've been ushered into a medieval torture chamber, albeit a sanitary and amply lit one. The room's dominated by a trio of lab benches strewn with all manner of equipment: chromium screws and shiny servo motors and stainless steel tools whose purpose I cannot fathom, a bolt of artificial skin threaded on a wooden dowel, curls and corkscrews of buttery latex overflowing the trashcan below. Two Rubbermaid bins: the first contains articulated fingers and toes, the second full of garishly painted finger- and toenails. An unfinished leg bent across the near bench, all pistons and hinges and metal tubes, skinless, cyborgean. Artificial arms and legs dangle from the ceiling like pots and pans from a chef 's rack.

“I take it you've had time to flip through our brochure.” Hoisting himself onto a stool, Vitias swivels to face me. “Anything catch your eye?”

Badgered by my mother, I'd chosen the Campion P5 endoskeletal leg with titanium pyramid couplers, ballistic silicone sheathing, spring-load dynamic ankle. Vitias nods at my selection as a sommelier might at a diner's choice of vintage.

“Excellent, very nice.” Rooting through a drawer, he comes up with a conical alloy plug. “This is the P5's female coupler. We attach it to the end of the tibia and, once everything's healed, you'll be able to snap the prosthetic on and off with ease.”

“Snap on,
dum dum,
snap off,
dum dum,
snap on snap off—the Snapper.” I snap my fingers. The joke's lost on them.

“Pay attention,” my mother says. “This is important.”

“On second thought, do you have anything in a peg?”

Vitias says, “A peg?”

“Y'know, a lump of wood—oak maybe, or ash. A pegleg. Like a pirate.”

Vitias curls his lips into his mouth, nodding as though vaguely embarrassed. It's a variation on the look I've received from an endless cavalcade of friends and relatives and well-wishers: a remotely detached sentiment that, translated into words, would mimic the sappy schmaltz found in condolence cards:
With Deepest Sympathy and Sorrow for Your Loss
.

“A peg?” Vitias says. “Sure, we can do that. Some leather straps, maybe, lash it to your leg? Very swashbuckling.”

“Stop being childish, Ben.” To Dr. Vitias: “He's just being silly.”

“My leg's gone, Mom. It's … shit. Whale
shit
. Why fake it?”

“But don't you want to look normal?” She's genuinely baffled. “Don't you want to … fit in?”

A wave of resentment rises within me, so all-consuming that for an instant the profile of my world, every angle and parameter, is etched in cold blues and greens. I reach for the nearest bin, dumbfounded with rage, shoving it off the bench's edge. Fingernails spill across the polished tiles with a roachsounding clatter.

“Stop it.” Mom grabs my arm. “You're embarrassing yourself.”

“Fuck …
you
.”

I've never spoken to her that way. Not ever. Her hand falls away, then rises, with the other to cover her face. She utters a wail of such resonant grief, loud and ongoing like a bestial moan, that it frightens me.

“Mom?”

She rocks softly. Again that deep animal moaning, horrifying in its immodesty, rising from behind her hands.

“Mom, I'm sorry. Mom,
please
.”

Dr. Vitias pinches spilled fingernails between his long delicate fingers, dropping them carefully into the bin.

WATCHING A LOT OF PORN
these days.

Download it off the Internet to spare yourself the embarrassment of face-to-face purchase. Back in high school I drove my father's minivan all over town in search of an out-of-the-way smut peddler. A Korean deli received the bulk of my trade on account of its fine selection of filth and a proprietor who avoided all eye contact. I'd drive home in a lustful frenzy, boner pushing against my trouser leg, to jerk off in my bedroom or, if my parents were around, a locked bathroom. Sometimes I tried to achieve release without masturbating: flatten palm to crotch, cock skin stretched to a thrillingly painful tension,
will
myself to come. This required intense concentration, which my mother disrupted by banging on the door, enquiring if I'd drowned. Once, adventurous and low on funds, I bought a vacu-sealed fourpack for $6.99. Safely ensconced in the bathroom, I tore the plastic open and recoiled in abject horror:
Suckin' Grannies, 50 and Nifty, Old Farts,
a ratty paperback entitled
The Well-Spanked Farmgirl
. I beat off to a mildly erotic charcoal etching on the book's cover. The whole episode was anemic and dispiriting.

Now, thanks to the World Wide Web, a wondrous panoply of pornographic imagery is mere keystrokes away. It's amazing, the stuff that's out there: big tits and big cocks and big asses, Asian and Black and Latino, Lolita gangbangs, barnyard bestiality, pissing and shitting, fisting and spanking, catfighting and trampling, sites dedicated to corsets and chastity belts, to plush animals (
For those who truly love stuffed animals, in a PERSONAL way),
to ballbusting
(Hey, you Pencil-Necked Geek! Submit to Mistress Adrianna and she'll crush your puny weakling SACK!),
orthodontic braces, robots.
Balloon Buddies
features naked women astraddle giant sausage-shaped balloons;
AquaGirl.com
has smiling girls in scuba gear, diving bells, bathyspheres;
She-Wolves of the SS
pictures women dressed in Nazi regalia beating masked supplicants with riding crops;
Santa's Little Helpers
caters to those who get off on pointy-shoed, striped-stockinged midgets satisfying women of Amazonian carriage.