Nervous System, page 7
That excavation should not be your responsibility, Ella insisted, not that pit or those dead people, even if your boss isn’t there. El raises a pair of anguished eyes and places a finger over his lips while he looks around the room. The walls could have ears.
✷ ✷ ✷
Traces of stitches scoring his face. Marks from scabs he’s picked off his forehead, leaving scars. El is down to skin and bones. But he hasn’t lost the tan from the blazing sun that beat down on him and through everything, helmet uniform sunscreen, his anthropologist’s short gray hairs. But his eyes are sunken from the attempt to find out who had conspired in that massacre, which repeated in his own city what was also happening in others. Who had blocked the investigation and murdered part of his team? Who had untrained the bees used to detect explosives on-site? El wondered, unhungry.
El had led that operation. El had believed he’d implemented an efficient tracking technique, as discreet as a buzz, because bees were easier to transport than dogs and cleaner than rats and had equally refined senses of smell. They didn’t have noses but they did have antennae that responded to minuscule molecules, subtle vibrations, variations in temperature and changing degrees of humidity. They recognized one another because they carried the smell of the hives they inhabited.
Bees were able to detect a micron of pollen and pick it up with their hairy feet charged with static, and they could locate other particles present in the air. They’d been trained like dogs or rats: made to associate the smell of explosives with that of sugar water. Instead of salivating, they extended their crops as if to extract nectar from a flower. But the area of that mass grave was too big, and it was surrounded by gardens that perhaps distracted them. That had been their mistake.
✷ ✷ ✷
A 404 error indicated that the search term could not be found or didn’t exist. The bees were lost or unavailable, but to exist and not be accessible was a 410 error.
✷ ✷ ✷
The tension was simmering. El was getting threats, anonymous ones slipped under the door. More than his hearing hung in the balance, but he couldn’t say that to Ella, and so he stopped speaking to her.
Speech was in the left hemisphere of the brain, but the right one wasn’t mute; it had something to say about fear.
The stomach filled with acid, its way of expressing itself.
✷ ✷ ✷
Go to a doctor, Ella pleaded, knowing it was her Mother speaking through her mouth. Everything had been said already, but it was going to have to be repeated.
So as not to see his frown, Ella sent him text messages. Are you going to see a doctor? She dictated that question and waited for her phone to transcribe the words, but she trusted too much or got distracted and sent the text without checking how it had rendered her phrase. It transcribed wrong. Ahí going ciudad. She repeated the line, rounding out consonants and vowels, but it was even worse: Ahí Cohen Chuck ciudad.
But El didn’t make an appointment with the doctor, because he always got home late or too tired and collapsed immediately onto the sofa. His eyelids swollen with exhaustion.
✷ ✷ ✷
Carbon 14 disintegrates slowly, leaving a residue that allows time to be read in bones, El explains while he watches Ella down a chupe de locos and a soda. As if she didn’t know about that isotope’s radiometric properties. As if she didn’t know that inside its atoms are six protons and eight neutrons charged with nuclear energy, plus the six electrons in the shell. As if she had no idea that its slow destruction allowed for the measurement, in any kind of matter, of the time Ella once dreamed of reformulating.
✷ ✷ ✷
In its etymology an atom is indivisible, but in science an atom could always explode. It had to burst in order to give rise to something new.
An old cosmologist conjectured that after the big bang there must have been other, smaller explosions that produced infinite pocket universes scattered through space. Some empty and others saturated with matter, some eternal, others ephemeral, others that were expanding too quickly and violated the human laws of physics. But why would they be so different? Ella thought. Why was it only humans who were lucky enough to live in a space specially designed for them? A space, a planet, that humans seemed intent on destroying.
Life on earth was composed of 82 percent plants, 13 percent bacteria, and the remaining 5 percent included everything else. Of that everything else, only 0.01 percent was human. And still, that 0.01 percent was finishing off the other species. It was even finishing off itself.
✷ ✷ ✷
The impact of the explosion had been distributed over his whole body in small wounds that were destroying him from the inside.
✷ ✷ ✷
Do you have a nervous temperament? The doctor ran through his checklist of questions, looking out of the corner of his eye at El’s forehead, crossed by a scar, El’s still-wounded cheeks, his sliced ear. Nervous? he asked. Not especially.
I can see that you and I, says the gastroenterologist, reading the file through his glasses and peering at El over their frames. That you and I, he repeats, producing a startling smile, his fat cheeks crowding his eyelids from below. You and I. He starts over again, this doctor of astute eyes, because he keeps looking for the rest of the sentence among the words he has stored away in his cerebral archive. A phrase that doesn’t sound ready-made. One that doesn’t sound like he uses it with other patients. And this is the one he finds: Both of us, you and I, study the depths. You search beneath the earth for remains of bones, and I look in human cavities for the causes of your discomfort. It’s the food, El ventures. It’s heartburn, an ulcer about to start bleeding, insists Ella, who is there to translate what the gastroenterologist says, but El throws her a furious look and she goes quiet. Work has gotten very intense, El says, and again Ella interrupts, his job almost killed him. Now El squeezes the hand he is holding and Ella holds back a whimper. El coughs. The doctor raises his eyebrow, widens his almond-shaped eyes, and blinks quickly, as though thinking something is going on between these two but he doesn’t know what, and he doesn’t know how to reply. Although maybe his compulsive blinking is nothing but a nervous tic, the visual proof that he’s hiding something or will have something to say only once he’s peered inside El’s digestive apparatus.
✷ ✷ ✷
Composite sketch portrait. Lips that cover teeth pharynx trachea marrow. Separated by the epiglottis, the esophagus down to the stomach’s upper sphincter, the cardia, the incisura angularis, and the lower orifice that regulates drainage toward the narrow duodenum, then the thick colon followed by the last of the sphincters, the anus.
✷ ✷ ✷
Idea for an ending. The philosopher refused to penetrate her darkest cavities. He would be forever convinced that Ella had left him for his lack of daring. That guy wasn’t right for you, her Mother assured her, pleased without knowing why.
There were others who weren’t right for her, but they were able to evade the maternal radar.
When El was about to meet her parents, Ella felt the need to tell him about the Mother’s intractable vetos. To confide in El before introducing them. They were leaving customs, El exhausted by fever, faint from tiredness, wanting to throw himself into a bed after the trip. Now that we’re here you’re telling me this? and his question sizzles in the air, his eyebrows curl in displeasure. Those were other times, Ella says, sheepish. It was another existence of mine, other fears of my replacement Mother’s. It wasn’t necessary to defend that Mother who wasn’t genetically hers, but she defended her anyway to save herself from the judgment El must be passing on them both. With his lips still twisted, El made her swear that never, not even after he died, would she tell her Mother what his defect was.
Let truths fall into black holes.
✷ ✷ ✷
It’s a reflex: El raises his hand to caress her cheek and Ella dodges it. She can’t help it, her body has learned to sense an incoming blow. I’ve never laid a finger on you, El says, offended, shouting at her as if he were still deaf.
Blows, no. Shoes against the walls, very close to her face, when he loses his head. When the shoe gets too close to Ella, he throws it to the floor and locks himself in the bedroom.
El had dedicated his life to identifying bones in order to put an end to violence. That assertion, far from scaring or dissuading her, shone for seconds in her mind. It would be some time before she understood that he’d been referring to his own violence.
✷ ✷ ✷
She spoke to the nighttime students, at that school that was only for boys, about the violence of galaxies that cannibalized one another, leaving only ruins. The milky way once had a sister galaxy that met an unexpected end when it was devoured by andromeda. Only the crumbs of the previous galaxy were left, she said, catching the students’ attention.
✷ ✷ ✷
When the semester ended, her shy thermodynamics professor drove her home, and on the way there he described his daily enemas. She still wonders if sharing about his hygiene habits was his way of wooing her.
✷ ✷ ✷
If only she’d studied the periodic table hung in her classroom when she was fifteen. If only, instead of carving the chemical elements with a pin into the hexagonal sides of her pencil, or into the polystyrene pen tube. If only she hadn’t copied on tests. But how could she have known then that each element corresponded to a solution to the quantum mechanics equation?
Did you know that the hole in the side of bic pens helps regulate pressure? Did you know they added a hole to the plastic cap so a person wouldn’t choke if they swallowed it? El looks at her in horror.
✷ ✷ ✷
She assumed El would rather not know, so she called her Father to tell him about the camera the size of a pill that would soon replace all those exams that ended in oscopy. The article didn’t say whether the camera, once its intestinal voyage was over, would be reused.
And she spoke to her Father about an extraordinary asteroid that not only contained the most primitive matter in the universe, but also was completely curiche coal black, full of amino acids. And how do they know whether it’s carbon or not? asked the Father, and Ella replied that they’d subjected the asteroid to a spectroscopy.
✷ ✷ ✷
Together they read the instructions and dispel doubts as to how to prepare for that double exam that the cavity specialist is going to perform on him. Colonoscopy, below. Endoscopy, above. Together they understand that it isn’t copy, but scopy, a visual examination.
And Ella wonders whether El’s defect insult catapult boot would be seen in the exam, if it would be revealed or would remain forever a secret.
The instructions glued to the jar of that whitish concoction announce that the evacuation will be a process neither short nor simple but that, when followed to a T, the intestine will be left impeccable for observation. It sounds like a plumbing job, Ella comments with an impertinent smile. More like archaeology, El replies, as he scrupulously cleans his glasses.
✷ ✷ ✷
His preparation consists of thinking back to torturous past procedures.
When they tied him to a cot and six hands held his head while the surgeon inserted a long anesthesia needle through the nostril of his pointy nose. When his body tensed up as if it were receiving an electric shock. When his lips twisted into a grimace. When his fallen face. When he shed theatrical sideways tears over the gloved fingers of the people who were holding him down. When they cut off the protuberance that had grown in there. When it smelled like burned meat.
Worse had been the operation on his herniated groin: to climb five flights with the freshly sutured cut and collapse into bed. The sharp saber wound when he sat on the toilet and confronted the task of pushing. High score on the scale of extreme pain.
But much worse was the free extraction of the four wisdom teeth embedded in his gums. They offered to enter him in a double-blind experiment, a painkiller and a placebo. Fifty percent likelihood of coming out of it unscathed. He didn’t have a choice: he couldn’t afford the surgery with painkillers and he agreed to have them strip him of his molars, the slight crack each time, the cotton in his gums. And they watched what happened without perceiving that he’d gotten the placebo, because El had signed a document in which he agreed to endure a little pain. And he wasn’t sure how much was a little, but El was a man of his word.
Repeat the word pain a hundred times.
Repeat a hundred times: endure without a word.
Seventeen is the painful sum of all the operations he’s accumulated in his record. If he had to return to those halls of martyrdom he would mark a 64 on the fear scale.
✷ ✷ ✷
He had left that dentist who’d asked him to endure just a little bit more to avoid giving him anesthesia. With his mouth wide open and a buzzing machine inside, El was unable to defend himself. Since then he’s brushed his teeth zealously, until his gums bleed, and he slides the dental floss between his molars as if committing hari-kari. In the future, he thinks, he’ll never have to open his mouth for anyone.
Ella recommended his next dentist, though it’s not so much a recommendation as an assurance that there will be anesthesia without any need to ask for it. That dentist now observes the molar enlarged on the screen. Now here’s something I don’t like, says the specialist, comparing the swollen root with one that is not. With a minuscule metal hammer he taps lightly on each of the molars and asks El if he can tell a difference. El feels none. He doesn’t know. Doesn’t answer.
That same dentist had shown Ella, on the screen, the infected nerve of her molar and a root curved ninety degrees that looked difficult to reach, even with fine tools and kung fu moves. He’d never seen anything like it, he exclaimed through his mask. An anatomical variation like that. It could be left alive and dying, and he was referring to the crooked root but also to the molar’s owner, who was Ella. Alive but dying. And he asked her permission to use those photos at some dental conference. He filled her with anesthesia and while her gums lost feeling the dentist wanted to know what her previous dentist had done with the coiled angle of that still-living root. He put arsenic on it to kill the nerve, Ella stammered, feeling her tongue swelling and her voice thicken. Arsenic? The dentist of the present knew nothing of such outdated practices. And how did the arsenic work out for you? She described a jaw whipped by electric currents.
To think that the Twins slept, snored, laughed with their mouths open in the dentist chair. They were immune to the noise of the machines and the torture they supposedly inflicted.
✷ ✷ ✷
Ella didn’t doubt her colleague, the math teacher, when she told her during a break how many dentists she’d had to pay to free her from a toothache. The x-rays didn’t show any alteration and three dentists in a row told her that the throbbing pain would pass. If the image didn’t show the ache it was because it wasn’t there. She was clenching her teeth too much, they were worn down. The dentists gave her muscle relaxers that kept her from articulating her complaints. They stuck a nauseating paste in her mouth to make a mold of her teeth, a mouth guard that brought no relief either. The fourth dentist sent her to the psychiatrist, but Ella’s colleague didn’t give up: hers was no psychosomatic or psychiatric problem; it was eating away at her gum. Overcome by the extreme reality of her pain, she demanded that the umpteenth dentist pull the molar. It came out easily: the roots were rotten, and so was the piece of jaw that went with the tooth into the garbage.
Was it her Mother or Father who said that only after ruling out physical causes could one venture a cause of another origin? Was it her Mother who warned her that doctors tended to distrust the pain of women? That many died because a doctor sent them home without attending to them? And which parent had assured her there was a high percentage of healthy people in every waiting room insisting they were sick? Their complaints exhausted the doctors, who couldn’t ignore them anymore, now that the patients could sue them.
✷ ✷ ✷
Hypochondria story. In ancient times it referred to an area beneath or hipo the rib cartilage, or condria, and was a digestive disorder of the liver spleen nervous gallbladder. Centuries later the same hypochondria was used to describe a melancholy disorder marked by indigestion and stomach ailments that were hard to pinpoint.
It was her Father who told her that highly educated people did nothing but complain, and that those in poverty, on the other hand, could stand more, much more, or maybe they felt less. He also said that distraction could be the best medicine, but that same medicine could be lethal if one denied all symptoms. Because pain is the awareness of being alive. One has to be a little dead or a little deaf in order for the body to rest.
✷ ✷ ✷
Find out whether El had kept the teeth his gums had lost over the course of his lifetime. El gives her a questioning look. He kept teeth only from the cadavers he had to identify. But Ella saved hers, the ones that had fallen out and the ones that had been extracted, the many molars with cavities; she wanted to see what would happen to them later. She also kept the molds of her jaw taken by the orthodontist at the clinic her Mother had taken her to in order to straighten her crooked smile, which never did get in line. The orthodontist stuck his bare fingers into her mouth, fit braces on, and tightened the screws on her jaw, though Ella felt that the metal thread stretched out through her bones and ended coiled in her spine.
She couldn’t chew for days.
✷ ✷ ✷
Now she looked at the food growing cold on El’s plate. His fork turning over the rice that he never raised to his mouth. What are you thinking about, Posi? Ella asked, trying to be supportive. Are you at the dig site? He laid his silverware on the table. I’ve got a gut feeling I can’t get rid of, El answered, and he lit the cigarette that was his only food. His stomach’s intuitive intelligence was telling him that the government was protecting the extremist groups that were implicated in the mass-grave investigation.
