Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“Looks like there’s a new bad boy on the Hill,” Jackson says. He’s in a good mood; he’s grinning like he’s done something really disastrous this time and no one can pin it on him.

“Hey, he’s pinch-hitting. I won’t be out for long. Speaking of which, where are we on the polling?”

Jackson pulls a manila folder from under his arm and hands it to me. “You’re not going to believe it.”

I glance over the data, a breakdown of percentages and their corresponding questions. My eyes catch on a number. “Rehab? You’re kidding.”

“We pitched everything from autoimmune diseases to exhaustion to sex addiction. Turns out, Wisconsinites think a man who has to get dried out is more trustworthy than one who is sick or tired.”

“Or balling prostitutes,” I add, and then catch a look from Beth. “Sorry babe. Jackson is a bad influence on me.”

Beth leans over to squeeze my hand. Her blonde hair pools in front of her shoulders and the silk of her blouse whispers as she moves. She’s wearing red lipstick. She always wears lipstick, even on international flights and while playing tennis and during midnight trips to the pharmacy for baby aspirin. I seem to remember her lips were a particularly bright shade of pink when she was in labor with David Jr.

“How about I get you something from the cafeteria, hmm?” she says. “Leave you two to talk?”

“Great, babe. Anything with chocolate, right?”

“Right, because you need junk food in your condition,” Jackson quips.

“Eat me.”

“Don’t kill each other while I’m gone, please,” Beth says, giving me a brief kiss on the lips, not enough to smudge her lipstick. I realize a moment too late that it’s a first kiss, of sorts. But then she’s already heading for the door, her heels clicking on the tile of the floor in a perfectly measured rhythm, and I don’t even have a chance to savor it. It’s already gone.

Jackson sits down in her chair once we’re alone, leaning back with a stack of files balanced on his knee. He waits for me to speak, to ask the question. I try to wait him out, to see how long I can stretch the silence, but after a few moments my resolve crumbles.

“So what’s the real damage here?”

Jackson chews the inside of his lip, the way he has ever since we were kids, the way he did the time we dented his father’s truck playing baseball and tried to think up a good excuse to keep from getting throttled.

“We’re going to take a hit, no matter what. But if we can make the rehab story work, it might buy us enough time for things get back to normal before SUBlife goes up for FDA approval. The public has a short memory, and a year is a long time. If we do it right, they won’t connect the dots when the word ‘cloning’ starts to get thrown around.”

“And if they do?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Jackson shrugs.

“You’ll have a lot of time to perfect your hook shot, I guess. Or hey, I could run for your seat and you could be my chief of staff. That could be fun.”

“Right.” I scratch at the prickle of thick hair on my neck. My fingernails are trimmed short, and for the first time I realize that someone had to have trimmed them for me. Someone was in charge of maintaining this body as it was being grown, before my memories were transferred in. The idea makes me feel a little sick.

“And the support group?”

“Apparently nonnegotiable. But there will be iron-clad confidentiality agreements all around. The others can talk all they want about their own experiences, but the minute your name comes into it, we’ll be taking fifty cents of every dollar they make for the rest of their lives.”

“Good. Hopefully they make enough for that to be a motivating factor. Get me the background information on them, will you?” I say, picking up my cup of water from the side table and toasting him with it, wishing it were three fingers of Scotch.

But the more Jackson and I talk, the more this seems possible. I could wake up next year and be back to the man I remember. Better even, the man I promised Beth I would be when she came back and began wearing her wedding ring again. I could quit drinking altogether, quit smoking, spend more time in my district, even live at home with Beth and David Jr. for most of the year. Yes, this will be a beginning. I polish off the water in a large gulp and then crush the cup in my fist, tossing it at Jackson, who deflects it with his forearm.

“You must be feeling better.”

“I feel like a million dollars, brother. But tell me, who do I have to blow to get a shave around here?”

It amazes me, sometimes, how small a world can be. Not the world as a whole, from horizon to horizon, but the world as it exists for a single person. Sometimes it feels like a person’s world can shrink to a size that would fit within the shell of a walnut. I think of prison cells and agoraphobic poets and people who are born and live and die inside the limits of the same small town. It must seem impossible to them that highways actually lead anywhere. A person could believe that airplanes are the size of flies, if she only ever sees them from afar, trailing their way across the sky. If she can even see the sky.

I envied all of those people. People who drove from one side of their little town to the other. Prisoners pacing in their cells. Poets who watched birds through their windows and wrote about them from behind large wooden desks. I hated all of them for the size of their worlds. Because mine was much, much smaller. What I wouldn’t have given for four walls and a window.

Since the transfer, wiggling my toes has become my favorite pastime. It’s the simplest of pleasures for me; I could spend hours this way, peering down and watching the sheet twitch and flutter over the twin mounds of my feet. It’s always what you see in movies after a car accident, when some poor bloodied actress is being strapped into a neck brace, her face wet and vacant in the red light of the road flares surrounding the wreck. The paramedics ask her to move her toes, and she can’t. And that’s when you know it’s all over for her.

That’s not how it was for me, of course. After my accident I didn’t regain consciousness for eighteen days. And, by the time I did wake up, there was no question of the damage my poor body had sustained. I would never wiggle my toes, or move my fingers, or even lick my lips, not ever again. I could blink. That was it. One for no. Two for yes. An entire language distilled down to two words.

So having movement now, even the smallest of muscle twitches, feels like such an immense gift I dare not ask too much of it. Sometimes I lie still, afraid of the crushing disappointment, a blackness so deep I’m sure I would never recover, if I were to try to move and fail. I do not dare to imagine walking, or writing, or going to the bathroom on my own. I barely dare to speak. It’s been my experience that life has a way of ripping the rug out from under you just as you’re finding your footing. And I have no fortitude to withstand disappointment, not anymore.

In truth, I never thought any of this would actually work. It sounded absurd to the point of comedy when the doctor first described it to me, sitting on the edge of my bed, detailing the Substitute body they would clone from my DNA and the hormone treatments that would accelerate its growth, from infancy to adulthood in a matter of months. The way they would open my skull and remove a few precious bits of my brain, like seeds, that would take root inside the SUB. It took me a very long time to realize that the nurses hadn’t accidentally hooked my IV up to some fantastic narcotic, something they give to hospice patients to make them numb with euphoric, hallucinatory happiness before the end.