Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“Actually, you can’t take up smoking,” Sam says, glancing up from his reading. He’s been listening after all. “It was in the paperwork you signed before the transfer. You’re not allowed to do anything unnecessarily dangerous to your SUB.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Penny asks, before I have the chance.

“Smoking, skydiving, driving drunk, things like that,” Sam replies. “That’s an expensive bit of medical research you’ve got there.”

“And what are they going to do, take her body back?” Penny’s crisp diction holds the slightest hint of her father’s thick Parisian accent.

Connor interrupts Sam’s answer by appearing in the doorway, flush-faced and jubilant in his thick glasses, a tray of coffees in his hand. The three of us cheer as he distributes the spoils, kissing me on the forehead as he passes, his patchy attempt at facial hair prickling against my skin.

“You look gorgeous, Han,” he says, handing me a steaming cup. “Are you allowed a little jolt?”

“Who cares?” I reply, popping open the cup’s lid and blowing a ripple of steam across its contents. I inhale the scent of dark-roasted beans. That smell used to immediately conjure the frosted mornings Penny and I spent in the coffee shop across from our first apartment, eating sticky Danishes and sharing the discarded sections of other people’s newspapers, flirting with the baristas. But the memory doesn’t come easily now. Something is missing, some connection that I can’t place. I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s so shocking, so appallingly bitter, that I spit the hot mouthful back into the cup.

“Jesus, where did you get this shit, Connor?” I ask, meeting three pairs of startled eyes.

“The coffee stand downstairs. Did you want cream and sugar?” Connor asks.

“No, of course I didn’t…” There was an ancient coffee maker in the School of the Art Institute’s Fine Art building. It produced sludge so thick you could almost stand a paintbrush on end in a cup of it, and I was infamous for drinking it with religious devotion. Now I glance at Sam. “Yours is okay?”

He nods, the crease between his eyebrows deepening.

“I can get you something else,” Connor offers, but it doesn’t do much to diffuse the sudden wary tension in the room.

“That’s all right,” I say, unable to brave anything else from the coffee cart at the moment. But I do need something, something to get the burnt, tarry taste out of my mouth. “Maybe just some water.”

Sam goes to get it for me, and no one says anything while he’s gone.

Within an hour of waking up, all I want is a shave and a cigarette. Through all of it — Beth’s tears and the stop-and-frisk from my doctors and the Skype conversation with my son — my beard itches. Politicians don’t grow beards, at least not unless they want to look like hippies, or worse, Communists. I haven’t gone more than three days without a shave in my entire adult life. But here I am with a half inch of thick brown hair rooted to my face. I look a hell of a lot like a teenager when I wheel myself into the bathroom to take a piss. Under the green flicker of fluorescent lighting, I see an overgrown kid, like those pock-marked hipsters who always show up to protest at town hall meetings, scrawny boys in tight jeans with perfect teeth and long eyelashes who bitch about the evils of free trade or the plight of the polar bears. The kind of kid who has to grow a beard so he won’t be mistaken for an ugly, broad-shouldered girl. I only hope my real face is waiting for me underneath the facial hair.

My slightness is the biggest surprise. I’d almost forgotten what I looked like before college, how small and inconsequential I once was. And here he is again, that wisp of a boy, with his thin frame and bony arms. My skin is chalk white and shows none of the lines that sprouted from my eyes or parenthesized my mouth during the past few years. I never minded the wrinkles, even when Beth did her best to talk me into getting them injected with Botox for the sake of the cameras. They made me look older, more distinguished, like I’d worked for what I’d earned in my life. For a congressman, that kind of perceived credibility was worth its weight in gold. I run a finger over the skin on the outside corner of my eye. It’s smooth and tight, flawlessly supple. Fuck. The last thing I need is to look like I took this leave of absence to get some work done at a fancy spa somewhere.

It’s ironic that returning to this particular body has actually saved me. It’s a body that looks spindly and wan compared to the one I had yesterday. I’d spent years cultivating and maintaining the muscle mass I had, enough that GQ ran a cover story on me for their fitness issue. “The Best Abs in Congress,” it read, and the guys in my caucus ribbed me constantly for it. But privately, I was damn proud. It was part of my dogma; hard work and personal determination had literally shaped me into the person I was. And now all of that effort has been wiped away.

I want a cigarette. It’s a Pavlovian impulse, like an itch you don’t know you have until scratching it feels delicious. Smoking in bathrooms has become a habit for me. During session breaks, in the middle of black tie events, before press conferences. Blowing smoke out windows or into exhaust fans. Hell, I once smoked a cigarette in a bathroom on Air Force One. After all, the vice president can only bum so many smokes during a flight before you realize that the smoke detectors in there are mostly for show.

The sudden gnawing of the craving pisses me off. The doctors all but guaranteed that I’d be rid of my chemical dependencies in this new body. They were as gleeful as doctors get about an untested theory, a mix of earnestness and lustful salivation over the idea of it. A body that has never tasted nicotine, never had a sip of Scotch. And yet, the memory of that long-suffered impulse has me patting the pockets of the scrubs I cajoled from a cute nurse, looking for cigarettes I don’t have. I bang my way out of the bathroom, startling Beth where she sits, watery-eyed and still breathless with exultation at the miracle of it all.

“Where’s Jackson?”

“Camped out in the hallway, I think,” she says, spinning her wedding ring around her finger. She started wearing it again when I got sick, and she plays with it now like she did when we were first married, as if it is something new and not quite comfortable. “It’s the only place he can get cell service.”

I wheel my way to the door, which takes considerable effort, and bang the side of my fist on it in three jarring beats. I’m halfway back to the bed when Jackson steps into the room behind me. He’s grinning, his mouth full of teeth that are one size too large for his face, and combined with his orange hair he looks a bit like the kid from MAD magazine.

“You rang?”

I use the last of my upper-body strength to haul myself into bed and slide back between the covers. I try to hide the fact that I’m winded when I speak. “What am I missing out there?”

“There’s going to be a floor fight on the farm bill. Apparently the Democrats have some issues with the rider the minority leader attached. The Dow is down, but it’ll rebound as soon as we vote on the budget. And the AP is reporting that Keith blew a point-one-five last night during a traffic stop and then tried to show his ID to get out of it.”

“What was it, some crusader cop?”

“A rookie. Second week on the job, if you can believe it. Had Keith in handcuffs before his partner even realized what had happened.”

“Bad luck for Keith,” I say. The worst that usually happens is a cop with an oversize conscience makes you leave your car and drives you home in his squad. But most just send you on your way when they see the seal on your badge.