prospect: an anthology of creative nonfiction,  spring '01

 

 

Things Found Inside of People
  by Sarah Kessler, '03

 
 

1. Things found inside of people.

There is a museum in Philadelphia called the Mütter Museum. I went there once with an old boyfriend. We saw babies in formaldehyde with serious birth defects, two heads, four legs, five noses. Siamese twins. An eight-foot-long colon in a glass case, black, dry, and empty, beside a photograph of its former keeper, a man with a bloated, pregnant stomach. Deformed skulls. The assembled bones of the tallest man in the world, the assembled bones of the shortest man in the world. Model faces made of wax, people with leprosy, noses eaten away, people with real horns growing from their foreheads. Infectious diseases-the results. The dried and preserved veins and heart of a whole man, shellacked and hovering behind a plastic wall. We stayed for two whole hours, until the place closed. At the end we found a set of drawers. Upon opening each little drawer we found something new; there were various buttons, keys, pieces of metal, rocks, hard plastics, coins. My ex-boyfriend asked me what these things were. The sign said, "Things Found Inside of People."

2. The bar.

This morning I listened to Joy Division with my new boyfriend. The song is called Ceremony, and he has the Joy Division version, an earlier, more distorted version of the New Order song later to come, the one that I own. I could describe the song, but I won't. Other than to say that it is very 80s, and it sounds like New York City and steel-beamed skyscrapers, and it is what I hear when I fly in my head.

He had a dream for a few minutes early this morning about skydiving, and he said, "I just had a dream that I had to jump out of a plane. I'll never do that." I said I didn't think jumping out of a plane and flying would be so bad. We were up until six o'clock in the morning again, frustrating each other. I think he thinks about having sex with me too much, and I'm not sure if that's negative or just not important. He's delicate, but he's a guy all the same, and it's a little confusing. He likes Joy Division. He saw me last year with my ex-boyfriend. I was wearing a Joy Division t-shirt, a relic from the 80s, Dan's brother Marc's old shirt. I got it because all the boys had outgrown it and it was too cool to throw away. And I like Joy Division, even though I like New Order better. I was Joy Division girl. That's actually what he called me. There were some other nicknames too.

The thing that makes him new is that he has a metal bar in his chest. I can't tell exactly how he feels about it, but he treats the subject humorously. Apparently one man in a thousand has an indented sternum. So he had a little hollow below his ribs, or, more accurately, between them. The hollow, caused by the indent, caused him to have only sixty-three percent lung capacity. This summer, in August, he was drugged by a team of surgeons who slid the metal bar into his chest, which popped his sternum outwards, so that he could be normal. "They'll take it out in two years," he tells me.

I can feel the ends of the bar through the sides of his chest. I think it is about one foot long, lightweight composite metal. I can touch his scars. One on either side of his chest and one below his left nipple. The ones on his sides are long and reddish pink, not yet white, and they feel smooth and even. The one below his nipple is smaller and more circular. That is where they inserted the camera which fed a live image of his insides to a screen where they could see his inner redness and lung sacs and the white of his ribs and his beating heart, the pulsing of the core of his body, and make sure that the cold metal bar that they slid into his chest would not kill him. After they implanted his new, temporary bone, he was on codeine for a long time, and he's a lot better now, but he still has codeine just in case it hurts.

I visualize the bar. I ask him questions. Do you feel it all the time? Does it hurt right now? How do you sleep on your side? Do you get very cold? Can you run? Can I touch it through your skin again? Will you keep it when they take it out of you?

I want to tell him that I dreamt the other night that I was licking a metal bar. Would he feel objectified?

Two nights ago we rented my favorite movie. I made him pay attention to the scene where James Woods' stomach opens up like a gaping, bloody mouth to receive a handgun, and later, a videotape, closing over the metal and plastic, fusing that cold flesh with his hot innards. We talked afterwards about cyborgs. Maybe the bar will grow into his body, and they will never get it out.

Early this morning the bar was hurting. I came to his room half drunk, he took codeine, we listened to Joy Division. They created emotions on steel strings as the boy next to me breathed, his lungs tasting the tang of metal.

3. The fetus.

My mother once carried me in her uterus. This is a fact. I have seen pictures of her, with long red hair and bad 70s clothing, her stomach enormous and swelling. I was in there, everybody tells me. And I believe them, because my father used her old Minolta to extend the present, which is now the past, to the future, which is now the present, and I contain her and me inside of her on a small piece of square paper that is roughly five-and-one-half inches by five-and-one-half inches and very thin in comparison to most of the matter that typically surrounds me. I could eat it if I wanted to, and no one would be the wiser.

My mother. My other.

My father inserted himself into her and he grew into her and they grew together and that was me, which was her. This penetration happened before it was common practice to put jelly on a woman's stomach, hold a cold metal sensor to that jelly, and see on a small television the feeble movements of something with what we call arms and legs and a head and small beady dark eyes, in order to ensure that there were only two arms two legs one head and two small beady dark eyes as opposed to the possible variations on that theme. So my parents did not know that I would have a cunt or use it or use it with a boy with a metal bar in his chest, and it didn't matter as long as they couldn't see me, and for them to see me I would have to be severed.

So at some point my mother's body began to reject this part of herself and it shot out of her insides and the cord was cut and the bleeding stopped eventually and the thing that got spit out was something else and it was me and not her but for a long time she and I both thought that it was still her.

We were connected via telephone wires two days ago. I called to talk to my brother, and he answered, and I was relieved, until I realized that he was the bait, and I was returning his call only to have to talk to my mother, whose voice on the phone was like a noose around my waist. Or perhaps the pain in the empty pool of my belly button was my life-blood, carbonated and raging, that would burst the knot open and stream along the electrical cables like red and propagating veins, all the way home to Philadelphia.

"William might go to California this summer," she tells me, and the tug of war begins. I am obsessed with California, perhaps because I feel subconsciously that even with current communications technology she will still be able to "reach me worse" if I'm all the way out there instead of in New England. I suppose, though, that umbilical cords are fabricated newer, better, and more resilient each and every day. Metal is stronger than flesh, bone, and blood.

I'll never make it to California, she implies, saying that that is not what she is implying. I have no money, I'm unprepared, she will not pay for me, and I am irresponsible. All those things are true. "I can't live with you anymore," I tell her, "I'll kill myself." "So will I," she says. She'll kill me? She'll kill herself? We'd kill each other, so what is the difference? "What do you want from me?" we ask each other. This time I'm the one to sever. I hang up on her and run from the room; the phone, white, plastic, and sculptural, looks like it will jump off the charger and bite me on the ear, or stick its antenna into my chest and suck the air from my lungs.

I had a boyfriend, this January, and I drove to his apartment to lie in his bed until very late, when I had to drive the car home because my mother needed it the next day. I was taking his penis into my mouth when we heard a loud buzzing noise, and I started, because I am afraid of insects, and it seemed as though we might be sharing the room with a particularly large and mutated member of the wasp family.

It was in my bag. It was the black and chrome piece of plastic and metal that is my mother's cell-phone, and the number on the miniature figure screen was my mother's number. I immediately felt her pulling at me; I sat up and could not touch him. I did not talk to her because I did not need to. We don't have to talk at all, really. She wanted me to come home, and I refused, silently, despite the tightness in my belly.

Driving home, much later, my foot feeling the sharp chill of the clutch through my sneaker, I sensed that, were I in a serious accident, my Organ Donor status would mean nothing. I am shaped wrong on the inside; I am missing some things.

4. Things found inside of me.

I like gum, and have chewed it often, but I have never, to my knowledge, swallowed it. I was never the type to swallow gum. Many of my friends did for various reasons, but I was straight. I would, no matter what the situation, spit the chewy plasticity into my palm and throw it at the nearest waste receptacle.

Obviously, I've thought about gulping it before. There were times when it would have been momentarily convenient to swallow my gum, but fear of its foreignness to my stomach cowed me. It went up and out in the end. I'd think of the small pearly glob lying like a stone in my slippery, red pouch; I'd picture it alive, gobbling at all the loose food and whatever else had plummeted down my esophagus, inhaling it, growing larger and larger, growing into something entirely new, until my body was merely a thin epidermal layer reining in a horrific, doughy, amorphous mass that oozed out through the pores. Then I would eject it.

Hypochondria or paranoia. I've always been terrified of invasions from the inside.

When I was younger I believed my food was poisoned with drugs. Literally, I suspected that poison laced everything I consumed. I also believed I would get meningitis, or leukemia, or some type of tumor. I thought that people with knives would have to cut into me to take something out. I was afraid of riding in cars, and I imagined that, as we drove the curved road into the city, our car would make contact with the steel rails barring us from the river, sparks would shoot up into the air, glass would imbed itself under the skin on my face and chest, and I would fuse with the car, forming a twisted lump of metal and flesh, unable to be categorized, indistinguishable. My father the lawyer told me that a man once died when a buck jumped through the windshield of his car, driving its horns through his chest. My friend with a gynecologist father told me that a girl fell onto the spike of an iron fence and could never have children, ever. People get electrocuted by loose telephone wires, said the television, after the Saturday morning cartoons. I saw a psychiatrist for two years, and my deepest fears were pushed even deeper into me; they tunneled into my subconscious.

I inserted a tampon for the first time when I was seventeen. It had a plastic applicator, and was the shape of an extra long bullet. I remember trying to slide it up in my cunt and hurting like hell. Finally I figured out how to get the absorbent part in, and how to get the applicator out. My fingers were covered with my blood, but that was not disgusting to me. I stared at the plastic tube in my hand, watching the thick, red fluid bead up on its glossy, waxen surface. It was fascinating, that material combination. Natural somehow.

My friend Jess tells me that she once lost a tampon. She slept with it inside of her, and when she woke up it was no longer there. She reached inside herself and could not find it. Her mother rushed her to the hospital, she was exposed to waves and radiation, clear sheets of plastic with the patterns of her body's black bones were held against a buzzing wall of light, and the doctors said that she was empty. Jess says that the gauzy cylinder swam in her like sperm, becoming her body's new protective tissue, a second hymen. She is not scared.

I had sex for the first time when I was seventeen. Inserting a tampon was far more interesting. The boy was someone from the neighborhood, not a virgin, and he bent my legs in an uncomfortable position. The even roar of the television beside us filled my ears and I felt dirty-we weren't watching it anymore, it was the other way around. I made him turn it off, but the experience proved to be mediocre regardless. It would have been more stimulating to straddle the television instead of the boy, to feel its warm, electric vibrations under me, to stare at the gentle membrane of the screen below me instead of at an impassive human face.

Since then I have enjoyed sex more. That is, I enjoy it while it is happening, but I get scared afterwards. Because afterwards I realize that I have exposed myself willingly to fear.

I fear my mother, even though I don't tell her anything anymore, and I know that I fear her because she fears for me, for herself. I can see what is in her mind sometimes-I am in there coupled with pregnancy or AIDS. I get pregnant and have to get an abortion-I am taken to a building, put on a stretcher, given substances. The world is getting blurry around me and I know I'll wake up empty and hurting. When I am completely under, men in white suits with masks, knives and hooks in their hands, penetrate me, scraping something pulpy, bloody and bleeding out of my uterus and into a vessel labeled "Toxic Waste." They are cleaners and I am a messy house. The wrong thing found its way into me and must be exterminated. My mother knows what this is like, to an extent. She had a miscarriage and they scraped her out too, got rid of the excess matter.

Another child died right out of my mother's womb. He was missing some things on the inside, and they did not see this on the television. When they realized that he had no kidneys it was too late for my father to take one out of himself for his son, so the baby died in my mother's hands as she cried that she had killed him. They planted him in the ground, surrounded by a fence of iron.

5. The bar.

The bar is still in his chest; they'll take it out in two years. He's leaving for London tomorrow and wonders to me about the metal detectors in customs. He'll walk through an arch constructed of computer parts and plastic and they'll know that he has been opened and closed because a light will go on and a loud buzzer will irritate many ears in the airport. Including his own.

Maybe he won't hear it because he'll be listening to Joy Division on his headphones, channeling Ceremony into his skull, absorbing it, his bar vibrating. Metal to metal. He'll see the light, remove his headphones, hear the speech and loudspeakers and roar of jets all around him, hear a man or woman asking him if he is carrying anything, a weapon, perhaps? He will say, like he always does, "There's a metal bar in my chest." If they don't believe him, maybe he will lift up his shirt and show them the scars, or maybe he'll ask them if they want to feel it from the outside.

I am afraid that he will never stop hurting, with or without the bar. He says he doesn't think the pain will just go away. He seems to be comfortable with that knowledge.

Before he leaves for London we'll wake up in his bed, to the high-pitched scream of his alarm clock. We will notice for the first time that the plastic on the top of the perfect, black, morning cube, directly by the snooze button, has drawn back its formerly adjoined lips, forming a crudely smiling mouth, revealing the wires, gears, and connections underneath it, the tendons, nerves, and teeth of the device. The small, hot lamp by his bedside melted the clock last night, we will infer, scarring and puckering its impenetrable flesh.

Later that day I will meet with many doctors and nurses, asking them for four little pills to put inside my body. "We didn't mean for it to happen," I'll tell them. "The plastic separating us slipped off and slunk away, like a snake, like a malicious worm."

While he bites his nails in the sky, aboard an automated insect bound for London, I will take the pills that will correct me; they will get him out of me if he is still in there. I will feel like I have smoked lots of hashish, then I will feel as though my ribs, angry and vengeful, will pop out of my chest, and, finally, I will walk onto the tiled bathroom floor and spew orange liquid from my quivering mouth, into a porcelain, water-filled bowl.

At home, in Philadelphia, I will wake in several mornings to the bleating of the phone by my pillow. His voice, distorted by the static, will ask me if everything is all right. "I've been freaking out about it," he will tell me. He'll be standing by some old abbey, or maybe by a huge rock at Stonehenge, and it will be getting dark wherever the place, but I'll still feel a tug in my chest, in my gut. I will tell him that I think everything will work out-it has to.

I can still feel the tug after I hang up. On the floor by my bed lies a postcard that I may never send to his aluminum box-I do not know the number. The picture is from the Mütter Museum, the skeletons of the giant and the midget hang side by side from claw-like hooks. In the background, I can glimpse a chest of drawers. The words scrawled on the other side are, "Philadelphia is a blast, as usual. Hope I get to see the dead babies again before I go." I do not add that I will not feel safe until he flies home, and my hands have settled in the hollows on either side of his chest, feeling through his skin.