State Champ, page 7
All day every day you’d sit on a stool with a hole cut in it. You’d trickle. You’d smell and you’d burn.
Usually the baby has died.
Dr. Sims—“father of modern gynecology”—had a little backyard hospital, if you could call it a hospital. His patients were all Black women who were slaves. They couldn’t leave. You get fistulas from bad nutrition. If he could keep the women alive and locked up long enough, cheap enough, he could invent a surgery he could sell.
Like if you already are so messed up you can’t work, you can’t have more babies for your owner to sell, then maybe your owner gives consent. For some experiments, which the doctor says will be a treatment. After a couple years the doctor gets less popular. It’s taking too long, the women are screaming too loud, and his assistants all quit. The women, enslaved, become his assistants, he says. They want the surgery, he says. For the operations they hold each other still. According to him. The women don’t leave any records. 3 names—Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy—though there were more than 3. No anesthesia. It took years. Over 4 years Anarcha had 30 surgeries, his records say. No anesthesia—that’s the main thing I remember.
Picture, like, the think-therefore-I-am guy nailing a spring through the paw of a dog. I learned about it. Because animals have no souls (he said), their screams were just mechanical (he said) reactions.
Sims killed babies, for real. Over and over he tried to fix tetanus (he said). He believed the skulls of Black people grew too fast. He took an awl to the skulls of new babies. Tetanus kills but he killed faster.
Then one day he stitched shut a fistula. For the first time the stitch held. Silver thread. The body healed. Anarcha healed. His records don’t say if he ever cured Lucy or Betsey once he learned how. He didn’t bother to record it or didn’t bother to do it?
No way to picture all that. You can’t. When I try, I picture the women as us—all of us here—which is all wrong. When I picture it, I never picture Dr. M as the doctor. I picture her with the women, as a woman, one of us. That’s not what she’d choose, I think, for someone to imagine. But guess what, she doesn’t get to choose.
Day 12
You need me to say it?
I wasn’t dealing. Never have. I don’t touch pills.
Drunk driving, of course. That’s my record, that’s all there is, just like a lot of it. The last one was a big one, DUI-extra-plus, and everything that ever happened before counted against me. Sometimes it’s not about how much you drink but how little of you there is. If you weigh 92 pounds it’s not hard to spike the old BAC. 30 days in jail, 2 years probation. And I wasn’t even 21. Huge-ass fine and my aunt had to help me out. Lost my license again—and I’d just gotten it back after all the high school shit—this time for a year. As long as we’re being real, since then I don’t drive. I can now but I don’t. I take the bus. I walk. I do not like bikes. You’ve seen me walking. I think like one out of three times we hooked up it was just because you saw me, somewhere in the city, walking. Or we’d both be somewhere—some party, or that one time, a couple years back, at a fundraiser thing for my aunt—and you’d give me a ride home. You just assumed. “I’ll take you home,” you said, not a question. Those were probably my favorite times.
Anyone could kill someone. If you want to kill someone without admitting that’s what you’re jonesing to do—well, drunk driving is how. Me, that last time, I thought I’d killed someone. I couldn’t figure it out. I could have. There’s nothing I could have, in the moment, changed. I hit a tree but if it had been another car, like with three kids lined up in the backseat. Boom. I’d have hit them. Simple. When I was sitting next to my car, fucked-up by airbags, windshield smashed up and hood crumpled, big flesh wound in the tree, a cracking open that smelled fresh and woody, I kept picturing three kids, in a backseat. I kept thinking—it didn’t line up—you killed her. I tried to throw up but I couldn’t. Ironic? I could have run. I could have left the car where it was and run. Then they couldn’t have tested me, I get that now. They couldn’t have got their cop hands on my drunk blood. The evidence. Without that it was just an accident, dummy hits a tree. Sad girl dummy, just lost her shot at the Olympics. Not even. Her shot at what, like one season All-American? I sat there, not-puking. You killed her. Those kids those kids, I thought, even though I knew it was just a tree. I could smell it, I could hear the leaves of the cracked branch sweep against the busted glass. The woods were forever. I was pretty far off the road. You’re all alone, I thought. I didn’t run.
I was remembering—I remember remembering—a girl I knew. She was dead. We weren’t friends when she died. She was 15—we were both 15, but she stopped there. In sixth grade we’d been friends but then she’d gone to a different junior high. Anyway we probably wouldn’t have stayed friends. She was good at school, she got called out of normal class to go to the special invisible classes. In sixth grade we were in some normal science class with a bitch teacher. One of those teachers who, when you look back, seems like pure evil, like she took that job just because then she could make kids cry. I don’t think she cared a lot about, what, volcanoes or whatever she was supposed to be teaching. Rocks making younger rocks. Marie and I would sit together in the back. I don’t think Marie had ever hated someone like she hated that teacher and it was like, in that rage, I was her coach. No, not even, we were together in this mission. She was willing to give up on being a good student just to prove this was the worst possible teacher. What was our resistance even? Passing notes. Talking back. Encouraging anyone who talked back. Once when Mrs. Miller had screamed so hard and so long she’d made a girl cry again—when she, an adult getting paid, watched in silence as this girl, a little kid, was sobbing in public almost too hard to pick up the bathroom pass (the only escape possible) from the blackboard tray, Marie stood up and followed the girl straight out of the room, no pass, breaking the rules, just to go comfort someone, just to be on their side, just to say with her back as she walked out the door, fuck you. I was proud. As Marie walked out Mrs. Miller was screaming her name but she didn’t turn. That’s right.
But then all that was over, we got older, off to different schools, different fates. And one day in tenth grade in study hall I was listening in on some convo. I didn’t have a goal, I just liked eavesdropping, I would put my head down on the desk and hear everything around me. People thought I was on something but I wasn’t, I was just creepy. Two girls were talking about a girl who’d died that weekend, from the next school over. Someone’s cousin’s friend. Then they said her full name. I looked up.
My mom always got the local paper and when I got home I looked through it, I checked every day and searched online till the obit appeared. Remember her? I asked my mom. Remember, I went to her birthday party, in like 6th grade? Marie, my mom said, she had nice eyes and a drinky mom. My mom read the obit and then said (everything was a fucking lesson): her boyfriend was 19. That’s a bad age gap, 15 to 19. Promise me you won’t date a 19-year-old, not till you’re that age.
Why is everything a fucking lesson? I probably said. The point is just that she’s dead. For no reason. She’s dead.
People said that the guy—her boyfriend—had been driving and crashed. He’d gone off the road hard, and somehow she’d flown—through the glass?—out of the car. Unbuckled? She died. Her body was on the ground, found there, alone. Beneath a tree her body had hit. There was no car. He’d driven away. Because he was drunk, you had to figure. But they’d never prove that part. They couldn’t prove it because he ran. He drove off, he took the fucked-up car and he left. She died there alone. People said it took hours, however they know things like that. She was 15 and all alone when she died.
So I guess that’s why, that night, five years or whatever later, I didn’t run. I got everything confused and I sat there waiting. You killed her. Things never got clearer. I’d already run from something once that night so in my mind I was done. Running a second time would be like waking up from a dream into a worse dream. No way back. I think I thought something like that. I’d gotten in the car to run from the party. It was an actual frat party at my actual college. After break, after I got my license back the first time, I’d brought my mom’s piece-of-shit car back with me to school, and now that was done. I hadn’t planned to drive home that night. I’d thought things through. I’d drive to the frat, good outfit, good shoes, then at the end of the night I’d grab sneakers from the trunk, walk the hour home. Run out there the next day and pick up my car. Not rocket science. And the long walk helps block the hangover. But things went sideways. Or they went normal and I had to get what normal was. It’s a frat party, what did you expect? You killed her. But I’d seen—we’ll say L, let’s call her L—I’d seen her, like exactly how you’d picture, draped on a bed in a room. 3 guys in there. Hockey. Hockey, I’d said earlier that exact night, is the fucking worst. L and I, teammates, freshman year we always hit the same times, it was eerie. I’d fucking die to clip her at the end of a workout but we’d come in together, stride for stride. Sophomore year, when I lost the last 8 pounds, down to 92, then I could drop her. You killed her. L was a little bulky, real strong. Coach kept giving her shit about it, why couldn’t she lose 10 pounds, look at me, dropping her. Leaving her in the dust. That night in the frat house I could see her strong thighs, through the half-open door to the room, like a movie. The skirt ridden up or flipped up. What did you expect? What are you, surprised? I was going to scream, outside the door, but I just ran. I didn’t have one single thought, I just got downstairs, using the railing, using the wall, found the door of the house, found the door of my car. I put my hands on the wheel. My arms were nothing. I could see them, for once, clearly. They were little twigs a cartoon bluebird could break. The house had been kind of empty. Almost empty. I didn’t want to scream because I didn’t want the 3 of them to turn and see me, grab me, drag me in. I was too drunk to actually stand, to actually run. 93 pounds, counting the vodka. 3 of them, hockey. At least she was passed out, I thought. Is that a thought? If I’d screamed there could have been help, I could’ve helped, the house wasn’t totally empty. I want to be clear that driving like that is like nothing people do in the actual world. It’s a little death tour, a preview. I don’t remember seeing but the feeling of seeing. I couldn’t tell what anything was. Everything was kind of working, I was on the road, then I wasn’t. Everywhere glass was broken, breaking through the whole fucked world. Later I learned a sliver just missed my eye. I listened to the tree branch, sweeping against the face of the night. You killed her.
And L? I never saw her at practice again because I never went to practice again. I got arrested, I was banned. At first I was just arrested, but then once everyone was looking at me, once the athletic director met with me and looked at me, I got shipped off to bitch doctors who announced I had a sick heart. And that was that, no more team, the end. Back then I thought the problem was street clothes, that they’d seen me in street clothes, because that’s when you look skinny. As long as you’re in running clothes, it all kind of works, they don’t notice how they can see like the freaky ball of your hip joint or the exact line where your tricep hits bone. But on reflection it wasn’t the street clothes, it was the heart scan that finished me, also the scale.
Honestly L was the only one on the team who’d made sure to loop me in, to invite me to things, to check in. She had this low-key way to her. Like whatever nice thing she said was no big deal. Women in my family are really not like that. I don’t know what happened to her that night. I don’t know what happened to her any night since. When I could have helped her, I didn’t. When I could have helped myself, I didn’t.
I ran, I didn’t run. That’s it.
I always thought one day someone would ask me one follow-up question. About dealing, I mean, this story I always told like it was better than the truth. Name one pill, one price. And just like that, my cover would be blown. Dealing seemed like a better story because it was, like, active. You were just a temporarily failed businessman. But actually I don’t have some cool story. More like I used to be a cool story but I fucked it up, the one thing I was good at, forever. But anyway no one asks. Maybe everyone already knows. They’re, like, sorry for me. To my face they don’t say it. Maybe everyone just thinks I’m a liar. So nothing I say even matters.
* * *
“I’ll take you home,” you’d say.
“Need a ride?” you’d say.
You knew I didn’t drive, but you never asked. Back then I thought this was nice. Now I think maybe you didn’t want to get into it. What would happen if we got into it?
You knew I liked fucking you. What if I told you what I liked about it? Not just what I wanted one night or another. What was particular to you. Between us something like that—if I’d said something like, how you moved my hair off my face so you could see my expression—that would have been treated like a big declaration. No one could say the first thing. If you’d said to me—I know it’s true—that what you liked was to get up after, fill my water bottle at the sink and bring it back to me in bed, make fun of how you’d never seen me without it. Standing behind me at the bathroom mirror, running the back of one finger slowly down my high spine. Fucking was the path to this place. Turned up high the fan was a wild wind. You’d hand me the controller so that in the game—very late, naked—I could drive hard off the highway into a desert twilight, in the pixel shadow of stucco condos, get out and run, hop on some video-game Ferris wheel and dive off at the peak of its turn into a video-game sea. You were laughing. I remember you laughing.
* * *
Dr. Park returned. Noon, on the button. She looked at me and said, “I’m going to come every day from now on.”
“That was fast,” I said.
“Is this a good time for you? It’s my lunch break.”
* * *
She set me up on a table, stethoscoped a little.
“I see you’ve had other visitors.”
“What?” I looked around.
“There’s photos,” she said, “online.”
“Good,” I said. “I mean, are they good?” I reached for my phone.
“Artsy,” she said.
“These will help,” I said, scrolling. I figured out what you were up to. Put a couple up on Instagram, shop the rest. Were you shopping the rest?
“If you want my opinion,” Dr. Park said, “they’re a little glamorous. Like you’re a model and this was some kind of fashion shoot.”
“What should I look like?”
“In my experience,” she said, “a protest like this works best when people know exactly what they want and who can make that happen.”
“OK,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve seen some highly effective people starve themselves to death.”
I think Dr. Park’s patience is in a love-hate relationship with her lack of patience. She paused then said: “If a hunger strike goes well, no one dies. But if you’re asking if I’m here with you because of my professional experience, the answer is yes. It was some time ago, but I helped treat undocumented workers, refugees in Europe, who went on hunger strike to try to gain legal status, work and residence permits. The strike was in Brussels, and I went there from Berlin, where I was doing research at the time. It was intense, medically, since a number of workers participated, in a few waves.”
“Did they get what they wanted?”
“Some did and some didn’t. Some of the gains were temporary.”
“But it didn’t change things like for everyone. For every refugee in the future.”
“No.”
“And no one died?”
“Not while I was there. But people got very sick. One man from Morocco fell from a construction crane, which a group of workers on hunger strike had been occupying. Others had failing kidneys, intestinal blockage, serious problems.”
“Still an OK record, for you.”
“My role only lasts a few weeks. It’s a question of people’s whole lives.”
She did the blood pressure thing.
“You were underweight when you began fasting,” she said. “So the dangerous part may start a little sooner for you. You may have less time than people you’ve read about. If you did research to prepare.”
“Not really,” I said, “or not like you’re thinking.”
She asked: “Have you heard from Fatima?”
“Dr. M?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I was lying flat on my back on the table. Dr. Park lay the back of her hand briefly on my forehead, as if to check my temp, which she’d already, with a thermometer, officially read.
“I exchanged messages with her,” she said, “through the prison email system. I suggested she communicate with you through her attorney or her son.”
“Dr. M is usually pretty direct with me, so.”
“She doesn’t seem hopeful right now. I would say she’s lost hope. But I knew her best when we were young—about your age—on a fellowship together, a long time ago now. So I don’t know her well anymore. And not everyone needs hope. It doesn’t seem like you do.”
She smoothed my hair off my forehead, twice.
“I guess not,” I said.
“She said to thank you, but she said it’s not necessary. Meaning your protest. I thought you should know she said that. Those were her words. It’s not necessary.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”
I said: “And what was Dr. M like when she was my age?”
“She was very focused.” Dr. Park paused and I heard a sound like a roach getting bold in the light. “She was volunteering a lot, traveling to places where sexual assault was used as a weapon in war. When I met her she was just back from the former Yugoslavia. She used to say she was following the path of the crime. And it was always ahead of you or beyond you. For any assault, you could help with the effects of it, you could train people and help set up clinics, postpartum care, contraception access, all that, but you could never come to terms with what had happened. She used to say she had been summoned there by the criminal.”
