Heat in tiny lasers breaks the synapses, until all those bad thoughts disappear. Memories fade, and are gone. First Lulu, then school, then the pills, then her father, then her soul. She can't remember them anymore.
When the stream ends, she nods off. In her dream a little person lives inside of her, and that person is so angry she's eating her own fingers until all that is left is a pair of opposable thumbs. She holds them up, bloody and ragged as the coast of a beach.
The table jiggles as it rescinds. She falls to the floor. The needle in her arm tears her skin on its way out. Blood squirts. The needle in her port, still attached, yanks her head back. 'Cripes on a cross!' she mumbles, then with an eye half-open, looks at her watch: 11:15. She's been sleeping for two hours. A personal best. She twists the tube from her port, and starts out just as the sprinklers and ammonia pour from the ceiling, to clean the room for another patient.
Except for the headache that longs for more morphine, she's as light as air when she opens the door to the waiting room. The world is like a flat desert, and she sees nothing for miles. Wings, sparkly and slender as silk threads, are attached to her back; they'll fly her away.
In the waiting room, her father is sitting next to the woman wearing the garbage bag. The woman is really fat, so maybe it's a contractor bag. You could roll her, Trina thinks, and then she giggles. The doctor has made her so happy!
Her dad stands to greet her. He's tall, dark, and skinny. Long, long ago, her mother used to call him beanpole:
He's frowning like he's worried, and suddenly her stomach turns. Something is wrong. What could it be? She knows, even though she can't remember. She did something bad.
Her temples throb. She cradles her head like she's wounded, because she wants him to know that she's hurting. There's a bruise on her cheek, but she doesn't know how she got it. 'Daddy,' she says, and she doesn't know why, but she's crying.
It smells like metal out; another explosion in midtown. They walk with their shirtsleeves over their noses to the car. His legs scrunch in the seat, and he has to bend into the steering wheel.
She thinks maybe he's going to hit her, which is stupid, because he's never once hit her in her life. But he only raises his hand to make sure her sleeve stays over her nose. He holds it there, so she doesn't have to talk for a long while. He takes care of her, which, come to think of it, he's always done. After a long while, he takes his hand away, so she raises her own hand to keep her shirt in place. Out the window, ashes fall like rain. If you think of them as black dandelion wishes, they're almost pretty.
She was mad at him, she realizes, so she told the doctor something very bad. Now he's is in trouble. To keep from sobbing, she puts the heel of her hand in her mouth and bites down. 'I'm sorry. I told,' she whispers through a mouthful of bone.
He closes his eyes for just a second. 'Remember me,' he says.
In her mind, a bomb explodes where she sits. Its fire swallows her, and her father, and the car, and the doctor, and her apartment in Queens, and her city, and her country, and the whole world. All ashes, falling down.
He's not yet gone, but already she remembers something as if she is reminiscing at his funeral: before the war, her dad never drank.
'Where do they go?' Trina asks her best friend Lulu the next day at lunch. They're on line in the school cafeteria. She can't remember what she said to the doctor, except it feels queasy, like spoilt milk. It feels gnawing, like missing fingers.
'Where does what go?' Lulu asks. She's got a voice like Darth Vader because her mechanical lung needs a tune-up. When Trina's feeling left out, she takes tiny breaths like hiccoughs until she feels loopy, because Lulu says that having a mechanical lung is like being high on nitrous all the time.
'Where do our thoughts go after we visit the doctor?' Trina asks. In her mind, doctors across the country collect the worries into a giant vat. They're extracted one at a time by the people in charge, who best know what to do with them. Why should the whole world worry, when you can give the job to a select few?
'That's stupid!' Lulu giggles. ' there are no problems! that's why we go to the doctor. To get adjusted. It's a throwback from early evolution. Our species worries even when nothing is wrong. ' It's a line from a commercial for the doctor that Lulu's quoting but Trina knows better than to argue, so instead she shrugs.
Lulu scoops up a ladleful of lard-fried iceberg lettuce onto her Styrofoam tray. She used to be one of the pretty girls, but over the last few years, she's gotten fat and dim-witted. Trina caught her on the way down.
Trina bypasses the lettuce for a vitamin-fortified fluff sandwich, and they sit in the back of the cafeteria by themselves because, except for each other, they don't have any friends.
There are about twenty television screens all set to the same program, 'Brick Jensen's Health Challenge. ' they hang from hooks in the ceiling and descend to eye level at the middle of every table. Lulu is fascinated. Brick Jensen, also known as Mr. Fit, is explaining that five minutes of exercise each day is enough to keep in shape, so long as you do it correctly. You can squeeze your butt while standing, for example, and do three sets of mechanical lung lunges. For perfect arms, you hold your backpack over your head.
The show is interrupted by Mr. Mulrooney, the school principal. He's got a tiny black moustache, so everybody calls him Hitler. The moustache is pencil thin, though. So maybe it's Gay Hitler. Eccentric Hitler. Hitler Lite.
'Two days until Patriot Day!' he announces; a small man trapped inside twenty small screens. It'll be July 4, 2076. The 300th anniversary of the Great Emancipation. 'Remember to wear your school colors,' Hitler Lite adds.
'If they weren't maroon and orange, maybe,' Lulu mumbles. Her wilted lettuce looks like green poop, but she keeps eating it, like she's punishing herself for getting ugly.
'If everybody wears maroon and orange I'll go blind,' Trina adds. 'Seriously. It's a health concern. I'll get dizzy and puke and go blind, not necessarily in that order. ' Lulu is wheezing, so Trina punches her backpack until the battery starts humming. She's done this enough times that it no longer requires acknowledgment. They're best friends, and that's what friends are for.
'For those of you without ports, remember to bring your insurance cards. ' Hitler says. 'And if you've got private insurance. Well,' he smiles tightly, 'Nobody here has private insurance. '
Patriot Day is the same day that the law goes into effect, and everybody who can't afford a private doctor has to get a port. She used to be really happy about that. What progress: adjustments for the masses! Better yet, poppies for the masses! But that means her dad will have to get a port and she knows he doesn't want one. Her stomach feels hollowed out again. Like somebody scooped away her insides with a metal frozen yogurt spoon. She thinks about the Cyclops eye, the list she crinkled into a ball instead of reading. And the morphine. She thinks about that, too, because she misses it already.
Hitler makes a final announcement. He's the third principal in two years. They keep getting fired for embezzlement. The last guy partnered with Milk of Magnesia, so everybody got free laxatives after lunch. The bathrooms stank, but at least the school colors were blue. She liked that a lot better than Hitler's pick: who wants free Tang? Everybody knows that trip to the moon was a hoax.
'Ozone levels are too high. No after school sports today,' Hitler says before signing off.
'Bees knees, shit up a tree!' Trina moans. Unless it's video games, sports are for lesbians and stupid people. Everybody knows that. It's the running joke on the show everybody's watching lately: 'Will Brick Jensen Get Laid?!?!' People keep remaking it with their own video cameras, and posting it on their personal television channels. It's the joke that won't die. It's pulling its decaying corpse down the hall with its thumbs. Still, she
Because of her natural lungs, Trina is really good at running. She even laps the boys. It's showing off, but she can't help it. She loves to run. When you go fast and long enough, it's like being high, only better. It's like living, only good.
Most people in this neighborhood get the operation by the time they hit grade school. Stores all over the mall take out your bronchi, and replace them with plastic tubes. That way you never cough when the bombed buildings fall. But so far, Trina doesn't need the surgery. Thanks to her dad and the time she spent in Westchester, her lungs are clean. Even if it makes you popular, fake lungs look like a bad idea. Sure, you won't get cancer, but what happens when they rot? Still, she's an outcast at this school. When she volunteers in class, she doesn't pant like the
