The Convulsion Factory

stout straw through his lips, and he can suck up water and thin broths. Apparently his internal metabolism has slowed, for this meager diet seems sufficient. His resultant messes she cleans without complaint. Defecation is a thing of the past. The occasional spout of urine is all.

Nurse and keeper she may be, but she is also mistress, and he lacks even the physiological cop-out of impotence to deny Connie her satisfactions. Strong in the beginning, now hate is no longer in his remaining psychological framework. For further irony has not escaped him: She has her own design firm — this he remembers — and owns her own home. Isn’t this the dream of every guy teetering on career burnout, to kiss it goodbye and become a kept man?

Stefan still contemplates the why of it all. Vengeful wrath of some newly stirred deity? It’s crossed his mind, though this seems extreme. He’s been no saint, but no plundering cocksman, either. In terms of callous usage and abandonment, he has known far more deserving of punishment. Which is no excuse, Stefan supposes, but in this day and age, it seems as if the women he has known have been equally handicapped at making some genuine connection. All of them, male and female, fumbling in emotional darkness like blind, mad children.

Which, in retrospect, made his own heartfelt numbness seem quite normal. Apathy has just never seemed very important.

He’s had time to think himself through quite well.

And if he were to be run past a physician and a psychiatrist, what would be their diagnosis?

Patient exhibits symptoms of new, as-yet-unclassified social disease afflicting, in order: heart, soul, and finally body. Emotional rigidity and isolation seem to stimulate sudden massive production of osteoblasts and fibrous matrix. Accumulation of calcareous deposits continues until intramembranous ossification is complete.

And the prognosis? More of the same, perhaps, no cure and no preventative. He finds himself almost insane with curiosity: Is this scenario being repeated in other homes, other bedrooms? The lonely and the battle-scarred, awakening to find their night’s lover gone stiff beside them. The callous, rising to morning pain and finding surrender more attractive than fighting joints in protest. This city of men and women, one by one and two by two, sculpting unwilling new bodies of bone.

He wonders. It’s a theory, at least.

But if Stefan is anything, he is adaptable. He has adjusted to this new life, new flesh. A part of him now feels entirely divorced from that carnal Stefan of the past, he of curly dark hair and thrice-weekly health club workouts. He now knows the harsh ascetic rapture of the penniless holy man, the vow of silence and the wisdom that comes from motionless meditation. There is much to understand once the barrier of self is broken.

It’s not so bad, really.

Except those infrequent nights when he hears Connie readying to go out, smells the perfume, the hair mist, the very scent and essence of her need. Stefan, lying awake for hours, recognizing the key in the latch when she returns, and he swears even the lock sounds different when she’s not alone.

For hours, he listens. For hours, he prays.

These nights he hates most of all. Because he knows she’ll be coming to him in the morning.

To finish the task of satisfaction.

Connie fears, above all, the same solitude he so desperately craves.

iv. contagion

She has always hated autumn. Autumn brings sad change and a cyclical melancholy. Rains and chills, the false beauty of trees that will soon enough show their true colors, stark dead etchings against gray skies. Connie has always taken for granted that she will die in the fall.

Never has she considered it might be her time to nurture within the bud of new life.

Of sorts.

The cessation of her period four months ago did not seem undo cause for alarm. This has happened before, unintentional metabolic tampering through extremes of diet and exercise and stress, and the menstrual flow is dammed. That she never missed a single morning pill was more weight to her belief that this was simply another one of those episodes.

But tests, run and rerun, don’t lie. Nor does the blatant concern on the face of her gynecologist. But what, she’s not entitled to a mistake now and then? She’s human.

Unlike the thing in her womb.

He’s told her that it’s rare, but it does happen. It’s a documented alternative to successful pregnancy; one of the many biological missteps that can occur early on, through no fault of her own; one that did not happen to spontaneously abort. Just one of those things.

If he only knew.

Her gynecologist, of course, has never seen the father.

“Embryos can ossify, Connie. But it’s nothing you could have foreseen, nothing you could’ve prevented.”

Sure. Tell me some more fairy tales.

Connie drives home on autopilot, hands and feet independent of thought. Having left the doctor’s office before he can get her to agree to another appointment, chip this calcified lump of child off her uterine wall. No, she’s told him, she’ll have to think about this, the doctor dogging her footsteps, insisting it will not, repeat, will not take care of itself —

She would’ve liked nothing better in that moment than to have whirled upon him, let him know just what a shitty deal their six-year patient/doctor association has been from her point of view. Connie’s own thousand points of spite: you think you know me, think you know how i feel? i can hang my feet in those stirrups and open wide and you can poke and probe and name every part in English and in Latin, but you have no idea what it’s like inside my heart and my soul, no idea how hard it can be for some people to fall in love, so don’t you try to heal what you don’t even understand.

Of course she did not say this aloud. Public spectacle is public embarrassment. And later demands public apology.

Connie arrives home with the past twenty minutes of transit in blackout, forgotten or never registered. Her quiet street of century-old oaks and two-story homes, dignified, shutters and curtains aplenty behind which to hide their iniquities and secret shames. She keys off the ignition and sits behind the wheel in her driveway. Hands gently resting across her stomach.

Look into the rear view mirror and what does she see? The dark mascara runoff, so-blue eyes filled to overflowing with too many fears, too many questions, and a lower lip left ragged by nervous teeth. Hello young mother.

Hasn’t she known all along that something has been growing inside her? Something white and chalky and hard, this child of her own isolation, its skull a smooth dome of rock. She knows it never had a chance — it was never right and proper to begin with, and as such, what about its gestation period? How long will it take to come to term? And when its moment of delivery arrives, will it be like trying to squeeze a boulder from her body, and tear her in half with a rush of blood and chalky limewater flood?

There are no self-help books for this, are there?

Connie steps from the car with a deep breath, and at last prepares to live life according to her deepest instincts.

v. anastomosis

Standing in the doorway of Stefan’s room, she now sees him with new perception. Connie sags against the doorjamb, suddenly tired, exhaustion having found a home in her muscles, her bones, her soul. The climb up the stairs was an expedition.