Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

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.