And Again (2 page)

I answer Dr. Shah’s questions and read the flash cards she puts before me as Dr. Mitchell listens to my heart and lungs, tests my reflexes. I recite the words they asked me to remember before the transfer. Glass. Curtain. Snapshot. When she holds up a card with a blue box in the middle and asks me what color it is, the smart-ass
in me wonders what would happen if I tell her that it’s yellow. I feel like a seal with a ball balanced on my nose, clapping my flippers for their amusement. But I give the correct answer instead. My guess is FDA guy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.

“What did you do for your seventh birthday party?” Dr. Shah asks. The question surprises me a bit, because I haven’t thought about any of my childhood birthdays in years. She must have gotten her information from my sister.

“Horseback riding,” I reply, recalling the coarse feeling of the horse’s mane beneath my hands. The memory brings with it a flood of relief. It must all still be there, I think. All of my memories must have transferred over, even the ones it wouldn’t occur to me to remember on my own.

Dr. Mitchell presses on my stomach. FDA guy looks bored. I wonder how many times he’s been through this before. I wonder how many of us there are in the Northwestern pilot program. Or maybe he has to fly around, go to all five of the hospitals that were approved for SUBlife trials. How many times can someone watch a human clone wake up for the first time before it becomes boring?

Dr. Mitchell pulls out a pen and scribbles in my chart. “Everything is looking great, Hannah,” he says. “You should expect some differences at first. Your muscles are still underdeveloped, so we’re not going to get you up and walking just yet. And we’re going to work our way up to solid food to make sure your digestive system is in good order. But none of that is out of the ordinary for this stage post-transfer.”

“Has anything gone wrong with any of the others?” I ask. Dr. Mitchell glances at Dr. Shah. She’s the one who answers.

“We only have data for our SUBlife patients here at Northwestern. But so far, everyone has responded very well to the transfer.”

“How many have there been?”

“You’re the fourth. You’ll meet the others next week when you start attending your support group meetings.”

“And you’re sure—” I swallow hard against the lingering dryness
in my throat, trying to get the question out. “You’re sure the cancer isn’t going to come back?”

There’s a slight pause in the room. FDA guy looks at me like I’m an idiot, probably wondering why his taxpayer dollars are funding a study to save someone like me, someone who can’t even grasp the most basic of concepts. But if I don’t ask the question, here, out loud, I know the lack of an answer will plague me forever.

Dr. Mitchell is kinder than his counterpart. He takes my hand, leaning forward a bit. Maybe he knows how badly I need to hear it again now, even though I’ve heard it a hundred times before. “We were able to isolate the defective genes, Hannah,” he says, smiling a bit, a kindly old man calming his grandchild after a nightmare. “We removed them completely when we began developing your SUB. No, the cancer is not going to come back.” He squeezes my hand.

Now I start to cry, which clears the room pretty effectively. Sam steps back inside as the doctors leave, and he brings me a handful of tissues, but doesn’t sit back down. I wonder if his instinct is also to flee at the sight of my tears. Maybe he’s finally reached his limit, too.

“Penny left three messages. I told her I’d call as soon as you woke up, do you mind?” He holds up his phone.

“No, I’m sure they’re going crazy,” I say, drying my eyes as he steps back out into the hallway.

I wad up the damp tissues and toss them in the direction of the wastebasket. They fall short, of course. I take a deep breath, revel in it, and decide to take stock. I haven’t been alone yet, in this new body, and it feels a bit like waiting to become acquainted with the body of a stranger, a new lover. It’s something that must be done in private.

The skin of my arms is very pale, dusted with a fine down of dark hair, unbleached by the sun into its usual golden invisibility. Trails of cerulean veins stand prominent beneath the skin of my wrists. I can’t tell if the patterns are still the same as they were before. I don’t remember, and it scares me how little I memorized of the body I’d lived in for twenty-seven years. All of my freckles are gone, giving
my skin a strange, placid sort of appearance. As if it’s not quite real, as if I’ve pulled on a pair of perfect, silken gloves that reach all the way up to my shoulders. There are dark, damp thatches of hair in my armpits, and I begin to feel itchy as soon as I discover them.

My hands look small, their joints thin and supple, and I move them experimentally, testing to make sure my synapses fire with the same precision as before the transfer. They are foreign objects now, like the pale, delicate petals of a lily. These hands have endured none of the years I spent scribbling on sketchpads or being sliced up carving linoleum in a printmaking class or trying and failing to learn the piano. I wonder if I can hold a pencil. Or a paintbrush.

I flex my feet, stretching my legs under the bedspread, then fumble a hand under my hospital gown, taking care not to detach any of the EKG leads fixed to my skin. I laugh a little to myself when I find the soft dent of scar tissue in the middle of my stomach, testing it with my fingertip, wondering at the thrill of familiarity in provokes within my chest.

“What?” Sam says as he reenters, noting my reverie.

“For a second I was afraid I wouldn’t have a . . .” I motion to the middle of my stomach. “I mean, does a clone need an umbilical cord?”

“I guess there were one or two things we didn’t think to ask, huh?” he says, leaning close as I tuck the hospital blanket around my waist and draw up my gown, revealing the pallid skin of my stomach, with the little knot of my navel in the center. “Looks the same to me,” he says. I smile.

“What did Penny say?”

“She called me a very nasty name for not updating her sooner,” he replies. The thought of Penny’s famously quick temper hits me in a tender spot somewhere in my chest. I turn my head as Sam settles back into his chair, so he won’t see that I’m on the edge of tears again. I feel as if I have no skin, as if every emotion that wells up inside me will immediately spill out. I can hold nothing back, not in this new body; I can’t control it like the body I remember.

“I told her that they can come by as soon as visiting hours start. And, of course, she ignored me and said they’re coming over now. I didn’t see any real point in trying to argue with her.”

“Smart man,” I say, though I’m grateful that my oldest friend is dragging her boyfriend into their car and heading toward me, probably at blinding speeds. I need Penny’s eyes, and her honesty, to tell me if I’m the same as I was before. Sam has been so wrapped up in the mechanics of my disease, and the day-in, day-out of my life at the hospital, that I’m not sure he’d be able to tell. Maybe I’m afraid that he doesn’t remember what I was like before I was sick, even though it’s only been a handful of months since I was diagnosed. Or maybe, despite his righteous honesty, the journalistic ethics that have seeped into every bit of his life, I’m still afraid he’d lie to me.

Penny breezes in like a wash of winter air, crisp and bracing, the tiny dark ropes of her braids animating around her as if caught in a wind that belongs to her alone. She strides over and clasps my face in her hands, the silver of her rings cool against my skin. She studies me, her heavy eyebrows furrowed above the dark scrutiny of her eyes. I hold still, feeling very much like I’m showing her one of my paintings, watching her eyes scan with passionless appraisal. I’m about to interrupt her concentration and demand a response, when she breaks into that lovely smile of hers.

“There you are,” she says and kisses both of my cheeks, releasing me.

“Am I?” I ask, still internally bracing myself. I don’t doubt Penny’s judgment; I’m just unaccustomed to walking away unscathed by it.

“You look pretty decent, actually,” she replies. I grin, because to Penny, decent is just this side of tremendous. She turns to Sam, who is sitting by the window reading something on his laptop. He’s been on a leave of absence from the
Chicago Tribune,
where he covers national politics, though it hasn’t stopped him from working during every spare
moment. I wonder what it’s costing him, these weeks away from his job, and wish I could signal to Penny to lay off him, at least for today. But I’m already out of luck. “You, however, look dreadful,” she says.

“Thanks, Pen,” Sam replies, barely glancing up from his work. Penny’s friendly dislike of Sam is nothing new, and he’s as familiar as I am with the smooth clarity of her whims and the depth of her candor.

“Connor’ll be up in a minute. He stopped downstairs to get coffee,” she says, flopping down into the seat next to my bed. Every time she moves there’s a dull clatter of bangles and beads. I’m sure I look bare and unformed next to Penny’s intricate, well-curated beauty. “So how do you feel?”

“Good. And really strange. A bit naked.” I roll up the thin cotton sleeves of my hospital gown and show her the pristine skin underneath. My arms are spindle-thin, broken only by the joints of my elbows like dense knots in sapling branches. They are as unmarked as porcelain.

“A waste of good artwork,” she replies, and sends another pointed glance in Sam’s direction. “Better for the country club though, I guess. Finally smoothing out all of those pesky rough edges, aren’t we?” Sam isn’t listening, or he’s choosing to ignore her. Either way, changing the subject is best.

“I keep feeling like I should have my glasses on.” My battered frames sit on the table next to me. I grabbed them out of habit a few minutes ago, sliding them on and recoiling at the warped blur that clouded my vision.

“What happened here?” she says, motioning to my bandaged hand.

“Pulled out my IV,” I reply. “Accidentally.”

“See,” she says, making a soft tsk-ing sound in mock reproach, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

“Do you have a mirror?”

Penny goes fishing in her bag, an old gray corduroy satchel that seems to hold a good portion of her worldly possessions at any
given time. I’ve seen paintbrushes, lace underwear, antacids, spools of thread, condoms, even bottles of perfume produced from that bag at a moment’s notice. And yet somehow, magically, Penny is always the first one to dig out her ID when we go to bars together. She hands me a tortoise-shell compact with a circular mirror inside.

“You haven’t seen yourself yet?”

“They won’t let me out of bed,” I reply, peering at my right eye, which is huge and bright and the color of coffee under a shapeless, overgrown eyebrow. I move the mirror down, trying to glimpse more, to get a sense of my face as a whole. But it’s too small, that scrap of reflection. I can only see one feature at a time.

The freckles on my nose and cheeks are gone. My skin is poreless, scrubbed of its ruddiness and even the barest hints of sun damage, like a doll’s face. The small dent of an old piercing is gone from the right side of my nose. The mirror reveals hollow cheeks, a chin that is more pointed than it was before. I am all bone structure, a skull that has been dipped in wax. My upper lip sports dark fluff, a shadowy contrast against the muted pallor of my face. I’m a bit mortified by this discovery. I think of Sam and the waxing strips I hide behind a bottle of lotion in our medicine cabinet. Such petty dishonesties that have always existed between us, where our bodies are concerned. How piteous it is that they linger still, even through the worst of circumstances. I snap the mirror closed, handing it back to Penny. It’s too close, too fragmented an image to satisfy me.

“So here’s a question,” Penny says, dropping the mirror into her purse and sitting back. “I know they supposedly have the genetic side of this all figured out. But what happens if you take up smoking? All bets are off?”

I shrug. “I guess. They can’t do much about environmental risk factors.”

“Actually, you can’t take up smoking,” Sam says, glancing up from his reading. He’s been listening after all. “It was in the paperwork you signed before the transfer. You’re not allowed to do anything unnecessarily dangerous to your SUB.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Penny asks, before I have the chance.

“Smoking, skydiving, driving drunk, things like that,” Sam replies. “That’s an expensive bit of medical research you’ve got there.”

“And what are they going to do, take her body back?” Penny’s crisp diction holds the slightest hint of her father’s thick Parisian accent.

Connor interrupts Sam’s answer by appearing in the doorway, flush-faced and jubilant in his thick glasses, a tray of coffees in his hand. The three of us cheer as he distributes the spoils, kissing me on the forehead as he passes, his patchy attempt at facial hair prickling against my skin.

“You look gorgeous, Han,” he says, handing me a steaming cup. “Are you allowed a little jolt?”

“Who cares?” I reply, popping open the cup’s lid and blowing a ripple of steam across its contents. I inhale the scent of dark-roasted beans. That smell used to immediately conjure the frosted mornings Penny and I spent in the coffee shop across from our first apartment, eating sticky Danishes and sharing the discarded sections of other people’s newspapers, flirting with the baristas. But the memory doesn’t come easily now. Something is missing, some connection that I can’t place. I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s so shocking, so appallingly bitter, that I spit the hot mouthful back into the cup.