Кейт Браверман: A Good Day for Seppuku

Nurse Kaufman lights a cigarette. The Health Center is the size of a walk-in closet. A real medical emergency is for Medevac. Red Cross choppers fly over camp 2 or 3 times a day, staying in practice in case Dr. White presses the buzzer he wears next to his Rolex. Hypochondriacal disorders are for our own psychiatrists.

The Health Center is the size of a closet because you’re supposed to walk in and walk out. Stray nests of ashtrays constructed from medical supplies sit on the counter between throat swabs and disposable thermometers. An empty jar has 4 cigarette butts mashed inside. It’s symbolically concealed behind rolls of gauze and gallon bottles of iodine. Nurse Kaufman believes iodine is the universal solvent. If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t working. You must feel the bacteria stinging as they die.

“Samples? Quarantine?” Nurse Kaufmann repeats. She expels smoke with purpose, forceful and direct like a bullet. Then she asks me if I want to talk to the Camp Director, Dr. White. I’ll think about it, I lie.

Dr. White is head of pediatrics at Cedars Sinai Hospital where most of Camp Hillel were born. He’s also head of child psychiatry. He’s seen us in diapers and given us Rorschach tests. He’s written our recommendations and testified at our parents’ divorces. He definitely knows too much. He gleams, radiant with intimacies we’ll deny under oath. All Camp Hillel avoids him. Everyone knows, if you’re sent to Dr. White, you aren’t participating effectively. Then your parents will be telephoned for a special conference.

Dr. White’s office was equipped by the Mossad for global computer conferencing. He can talk to the Prime Minister in Tel Aviv and he can summon commandos. He can find your parents in Bali or Capri. He can force your mother to fill the screen with her hair wet from the ocean and her make-up washed into a blue smear. She squints through sun in another hemisphere, disadvantaged by the absence of contact lenses, sunglasses and lipstick. She stares blindly into the camera, confused and disoriented.

Dr. White can freeze the frame where a field of brown hair juts out above her lip like a just chopped crop and ground level stalks rise straight up. It’s the guillotined field no one is ever supposed to see.

Dr. White can find your father and zoom in with one button. Your father seems isolated on a beach without a briefcase, stethoscope or towel. He is overly white and the size of an abandoned child. He’s miniaturized and his tiny black eyes dart up and down the beach and then out to sea. He’s desperate like a small mammal about to be captured. He looks like an albino lemming.

Global conference calls must be avoided. Gangrene and a fever of 105 are better than a televised confrontation your parents will never forget or forgive.

Dr. White can issue an edict that sends you home. In the hierarchy of not participating effectively, this is number 1. Everyone watches your jetlagged parents load your suitcases, backpacks, unfinished crafts projects, bedroll and wicker baskets of tampons and hair conditioner into their car. The trunk slams. You’re put in the back seat and your parents tell you to shut up. They don’t remind you to put on your safety belt. They don’t care if you’re decapitated on the way home. No one waves goodbye. Your bunkmates offer vulgar hand gestures and a chorus of enthusiastic boos.

I’ve been to Nurse Kaufman’s 3 times. A 4th visit generates an automatic interview with Dr. White. I’m on unofficial probation. I find my rock band T-shirts and count them. 14. I arrange them alphabetically, beginning with Aerosmith and ending with Zappa.

Jasmine Weiss already knows Portuguese. Her parents bought a piece of the rainforest in Brazil larger than New Jersey. They own whole villages, including dwellings, artifacts, crops, livestock and people. They’re on the Green Peace wanted list. They own 2 hotels on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, but if they return to Brazil, they’ll be arrested. Jasmine’s uncle parachuted in, professionally disguised by Stephen Spielberg’s personal make-up team, but he failed to get below radar detection. Now he’s in jail and nobody can visit.

I’m on a prison track, too. Even though I left my personality in an alcove at O’Hare, and assumed the identity of a stranger with an embroidered shawl from Malta and ivory hair combs from Mozambique, my camouflage is unraveling.

My mother and Marty will be forced to go to Family Therapy with me. My mother will have to cancel her tennis lessons, Diva Salon appointments and even the gardener. Then she’ll have to change her colonoscopy and mammogram appointments. If rogue cells develop during the delay, if an atypical aggressive tumor appears like a volcanic island out of nowhere, metastasizes and invades her lymph nodes, it will be my fault.

Marty will have to abandon his mixing boards in the midst of a crucial, fertile chorus. He’s generously shared his philosophy of song writing with me. Hook lines are like capturing wind in a sail. It’s a triangulation that happens only once. It’s like getting liquid and putting it all on the line. Then God throws you a 7. Marty’s got his first 7 but Dr. White has ordered him to leave the casino.

His new band from Australia, the Wellingtons, who are actually from Sidney and attending a community college in Santa Barbara, won’t get a Grammy nod. They won’t even get an invitation to a party where the Grammy’s are shown on a big screen in a restaurant in Malibu. They’ll probably lose their green cards and get deported.

Orange coils spring open in my mattress at knee level and ricochet down to my ankle. Bull’s eye. For some reason I think about Surtsey, an island off of Iceland in 1967. I consider how much of the Earth is still unknown. I limp and wrap a damp towel around my forehead. A forest fire burns between my eyes but it doesn’t show in the mirror. I don’t even think about Nurse Kaufman. It’s a conflagration iodine won’t put out. 23 Eucalyptus trees surround Golda Meir. They probably planted 24 saplings, one for each hour, but one died. And it wasn’t replaced. I count the Eucalyptus again at dusk, searching for subtraction. I rub their purported, but unsubstantiated, medicinal leaves on my forehead. I stumble across a hollowed out scrub oak trunk. I trip on a branch. It’s a bark carcass and I crawl inside with my flashlight and canteen, and try to telepathically transport myself to O’Hare.

I don’t bother looking at the sky. Even Mars is gone, hidden by sheets of forbidden cigarette smoke like lead clouds at tree level. I close my eyes and let the glued horizon fall over me.

After martial arts and gymnastics, we have nature hiking with the botanist. The botanist is usually a graduate student from Santa Cruz or Davis, who reiterates, with each brittle leaf, desiccated seedpod, and severed insect leg or wing, that she isn’t a certified expert. A wall of silence immediately encases her. We’re a kibbutz and we don’t indulge neurosis. We asked about bugs, not her existential crisis. We walk ahead, fanning out from our mandatory single line, and leave her behind, alone. She made herself a peripheral.

I am mute in the Main Hall at lunch. Horseback riding and swimming are next. My horseback privileges are suspended due to my undiagnosed limp and I’ve stopped swimming. Chlorine inflames my mosquito and spider bites. My thighs are yellow with scabs like colossal cellulite deposits that should be drained and I have no declared foreign language.

Chelsea Horowitz and the Goldberg twins occupy 3 of the 3 chaise lounges. They’ve been there for hours, painting their toenails fungus green. Chelsea Horowitz removes her gold-framed Prada sunglasses to stare at me.

“Can you say ‘contagious’ in Canadian?” she asks, voice loud and abrasive. The twins laugh on cue.