And Again (3 page)

“Jesus, where did you get this shit, Connor?” I ask, meeting three pairs of startled eyes.

“The coffee stand downstairs. Did you want cream and sugar?” Connor asks.

“No, of course I didn’t . . .” There was an ancient coffee maker in the School of the Art Institute’s Fine Art building. It produced sludge so thick you could almost stand a paintbrush on end in a cup of it, and I was infamous for drinking it with religious devotion. Now I glance at Sam. “Yours is okay?”

He nods, the crease between his eyebrows deepening.

“I can get you something else,” Connor offers, but it doesn’t do much to diffuse the sudden wary tension in the room.

“That’s all right,” I say, unable to brave anything else from the coffee cart at the moment. But I do need something, something to get the burnt, tarry taste out of my mouth. “Maybe just some water.”

Sam goes to get it for me, and no one says anything while he’s gone.

Within an hour of waking up, all I want is a shave and a cigarette. Through all of it—Beth’s tears and the stop-and-frisk from my doctors and the Skype conversation with my son—my beard itches. Politicians don’t grow beards, at least not unless they want to look like hippies, or worse, Communists. I haven’t gone more than three days without a shave in my entire adult life. But here I am with a half inch of thick brown hair rooted to my face. I look a hell of a lot like a teenager when I wheel myself into the bathroom to take a piss. Under the green flicker of fluorescent lighting, I see an overgrown kid, like those pock-marked hipsters who always show up to protest at town hall meetings, scrawny boys in tight jeans with perfect teeth and long eyelashes who bitch about the evils of free trade or the plight of the polar bears. The kind of kid who has to grow a beard so he won’t be mistaken for an ugly, broad-shouldered girl. I only hope my real face is waiting for me underneath the facial hair.

My slightness is the biggest surprise. I’d almost forgotten what I looked like before college, how small and inconsequential I once was. And here he is again, that wisp of a boy, with his thin frame and bony arms. My skin is chalk white and shows none of the lines that sprouted from my eyes or parenthesized my mouth during the past few years. I never minded the wrinkles, even when Beth did her best to talk me into getting them injected with Botox for the sake of the cameras. They made me look older, more distinguished, like I’d worked for what I’d earned in my life. For a congressman, that kind of perceived credibility was worth its weight in gold. I run a finger over the skin on the outside corner of my eye. It’s smooth and
tight, flawlessly supple.
Fuck.
The last thing I need is to look like I took this leave of absence to get some work done at a fancy spa somewhere.

It’s ironic that returning to this particular body has actually saved me. It’s a body that looks spindly and wan compared to the one I had yesterday. I’d spent years cultivating and maintaining the muscle mass I had, enough that
GQ
ran a cover story on me for their fitness issue. “The Best Abs in Congress,” it read, and the guys in my caucus ribbed me constantly for it. But privately, I was damn proud. It was part of my dogma; hard work and personal determination had literally shaped me into the person I was. And now all of that effort has been wiped away.

I want a cigarette. It’s a Pavlovian impulse, like an itch you don’t know you have until scratching it feels delicious. Smoking in bathrooms has become a habit for me. During session breaks, in the middle of black tie events, before press conferences. Blowing smoke out windows or into exhaust fans. Hell, I once smoked a cigarette in a bathroom on Air Force One. After all, the vice president can only bum so many smokes during a flight before you realize that the smoke detectors in there are mostly for show.

The sudden gnawing of the craving pisses me off. The doctors all but guaranteed that I’d be rid of my chemical dependencies in this new body. They were as gleeful as doctors get about an untested theory, a mix of earnestness and lustful salivation over the idea of it. A body that has never tasted nicotine, never had a sip of Scotch. And yet, the memory of that long-suffered impulse has me patting the pockets of the scrubs I cajoled from a cute nurse, looking for cigarettes I don’t have. I bang my way out of the bathroom, startling Beth where she sits, watery-eyed and still breathless with exultation at the miracle of it all.

“Where’s Jackson?”

“Camped out in the hallway, I think,” she says, spinning her wedding ring around her finger. She started wearing it again when
I got sick, and she plays with it now like she did when we were first married, as if it is something new and not quite comfortable. “It’s the only place he can get cell service.”

I wheel my way to the door, which takes considerable effort, and bang the side of my fist on it in three jarring beats. I’m halfway back to the bed when Jackson steps into the room behind me. He’s grinning, his mouth full of teeth that are one size too large for his face, and combined with his orange hair he looks a bit like the kid from
MAD
magazine.

“You rang?”

I use the last of my upper-body strength to haul myself into bed and slide back between the covers. I try to hide the fact that I’m winded when I speak. “What am I missing out there?”

“There’s going to be a floor fight on the farm bill. Apparently the Democrats have some issues with the rider the minority leader attached. The Dow is down, but it’ll rebound as soon as we vote on the budget. And the AP is reporting that Keith blew a point-one-five last night during a traffic stop and then tried to show his ID to get out of it.”

“What was it, some crusader cop?”

“A rookie. Second week on the job, if you can believe it. Had Keith in handcuffs before his partner even realized what had happened.”

“Bad luck for Keith,” I say. The worst that usually happens is a cop with an oversize conscience makes you leave your car and drives you home in his squad. But most just send you on your way when they see the seal on your badge.

“Looks like there’s a new bad boy on the Hill,” Jackson says. He’s in a good mood; he’s grinning like he’s done something really disastrous this time and no one can pin it on him.

“Hey, he’s pinch-hitting. I won’t be out for long. Speaking of which, where are we on the polling?”

Jackson pulls a manila folder from under his arm and hands it to me. “You’re not going to believe it.”

I glance over the data, a breakdown of percentages and their corresponding questions. My eyes catch on a number. “Rehab? You’re kidding.”

“We pitched everything from autoimmune diseases to exhaustion to sex addiction. Turns out, Wisconsinites think a man who has to get dried out is more trustworthy than one who is sick or tired.”

“Or balling prostitutes,” I add, and then catch a look from Beth. “Sorry babe. Jackson is a bad influence on me.”

Beth leans over to squeeze my hand. Her blonde hair pools in front of her shoulders and the silk of her blouse whispers as she moves. She’s wearing red lipstick. She always wears lipstick, even on international flights and while playing tennis and during midnight trips to the pharmacy for baby aspirin. I seem to remember her lips were a particularly bright shade of pink when she was in labor with David Jr.

“How about I get you something from the cafeteria, hmm?” she says. “Leave you two to talk?”

“Great, babe. Anything with chocolate, right?”

“Right, because you need junk food in your condition,” Jackson quips.

“Eat me.”

“Don’t kill each other while I’m gone, please,” Beth says, giving me a brief kiss on the lips, not enough to smudge her lipstick. I realize a moment too late that it’s a first kiss, of sorts. But then she’s already heading for the door, her heels clicking on the tile of the floor in a perfectly measured rhythm, and I don’t even have a chance to savor it. It’s already gone.

Jackson sits down in her chair once we’re alone, leaning back with a stack of files balanced on his knee. He waits for me to speak, to ask the question. I try to wait him out, to see how long I can stretch the silence, but after a few moments my resolve crumbles.

“So what’s the real damage here?”

Jackson chews the inside of his lip, the way he has ever since we were kids, the way he did the time we dented his father’s truck
playing baseball and tried to think up a good excuse to keep from getting throttled.

“We’re going to take a hit, no matter what. But if we can make the rehab story work, it might buy us enough time for things get back to normal before SUBlife goes up for FDA approval. The public has a short memory, and a year is a long time. If we do it right, they won’t connect the dots when the word ‘cloning’ starts to get thrown around.”

“And if they do?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Jackson shrugs.

“You’ll have a lot of time to perfect your hook shot, I guess. Or hey, I could run for your seat and you could be
my
chief of staff. That could be fun.”

“Right.” I scratch at the prickle of thick hair on my neck. My fingernails are trimmed short, and for the first time I realize that someone had to have trimmed them for me. Someone was in charge of maintaining this body as it was being grown, before my memories were transferred in. The idea makes me feel a little sick.

“And the support group?”

“Apparently nonnegotiable. But there will be iron-clad confidentiality agreements all around. The others can talk all they want about their own experiences, but the minute your name comes into it, we’ll be taking fifty cents of every dollar they make for the rest of their lives.”

“Good. Hopefully they make enough for that to be a motivating factor. Get me the background information on them, will you?” I say, picking up my cup of water from the side table and toasting him with it, wishing it were three fingers of Scotch.

But the more Jackson and I talk, the more this seems possible. I could wake up next year and be back to the man I remember. Better even, the man I promised Beth I would be when she came back and began wearing her wedding ring again. I could quit drinking altogether, quit smoking, spend more time in my district, even live at home with Beth and David Jr. for most of the year. Yes, this will be
a beginning. I polish off the water in a large gulp and then crush the cup in my fist, tossing it at Jackson, who deflects it with his forearm.

“You must be feeling better.”

“I feel like a million dollars, brother. But tell me, who do I have to blow to get a shave around here?”

It amazes me, sometimes, how small a world can be. Not the world as a whole, from horizon to horizon, but the world as it exists for a single person. Sometimes it feels like a person’s world can shrink to a size that would fit within the shell of a walnut. I think of prison cells and agoraphobic poets and people who are born and live and die inside the limits of the same small town. It must seem impossible to them that highways actually lead anywhere. A person could believe that airplanes are the size of flies, if she only ever sees them from afar, trailing their way across the sky. If she can even see the sky.

I envied all of those people. People who drove from one side of their little town to the other. Prisoners pacing in their cells. Poets who watched birds through their windows and wrote about them from behind large wooden desks. I hated all of them for the size of their worlds. Because mine was much, much smaller. What I wouldn’t have given for four walls and a window.

Since the transfer, wiggling my toes has become my favorite pastime. It’s the simplest of pleasures for me; I could spend hours this way, peering down and watching the sheet twitch and flutter over the twin mounds of my feet. It’s always what you see in movies after a car accident, when some poor bloodied actress is being strapped into a neck brace, her face wet and vacant in the red light of the road flares surrounding the wreck. The paramedics ask her to move her toes, and she can’t. And that’s when you know it’s all over for her.

That’s not how it was for me, of course. After my accident I didn’t regain consciousness for eighteen days. And, by the time I did wake up, there was no question of the damage my poor body
had sustained. I would never wiggle my toes, or move my fingers, or even lick my lips, not ever again. I could blink. That was it. One for no. Two for yes. An entire language distilled down to two words.

So having movement now, even the smallest of muscle twitches, feels like such an immense gift I dare not ask too much of it. Sometimes I lie still, afraid of the crushing disappointment, a blackness so deep I’m sure I would never recover, if I were to try to move and fail. I do not dare to imagine walking, or writing, or going to the bathroom on my own. I barely dare to speak. It’s been my experience that life has a way of ripping the rug out from under you just as you’re finding your footing. And I have no fortitude to withstand disappointment, not anymore.

In truth, I never thought any of this would actually work. It sounded absurd to the point of comedy when the doctor first described it to me, sitting on the edge of my bed, detailing the Substitute body they would clone from my DNA and the hormone treatments that would accelerate its growth, from infancy to adulthood in a matter of months. The way they would open my skull and remove a few precious bits of my brain, like seeds, that would take root inside the SUB. It took me a very long time to realize that the nurses hadn’t accidentally hooked my IV up to some fantastic narcotic, something they give to hospice patients to make them numb with euphoric, hallucinatory happiness before the end.

The doctor wanted my consent to do it, even though Tom still had power of attorney over my medical decisions. The risk of death was too great, I guess, for them to cut into my brain without my permission. I gave it readily, blinking twice even before the question was complete. It seemed like the best choice possible. I would either be cured, or I’d be dead. Both options were preferable to remaining as I was.

They had to put me under general anesthesia for the transfer. It was ironic, really, because they could have sawed my legs off and I wouldn’t have felt a thing. But cutting into my skull, that was a different story. That was one of the only places I still had any feeling.
Tom was there, in the operating room, hovering over me and eclipsing my view of the packed gallery above me. I watched him, from flat on my back, the slice of his eyes that showed between the gauzy scrub cap he was wearing and the mask over his face. Maybe he held my hand, I don’t know. It would have been for his own benefit, if he did. All I could do was lie there and watch his eyes and wait for the drugs to stretch everything like taffy and then blot all of it out. Wait for death if it was coming. Tom looked so afraid in those last moments. He couldn’t know how I welcomed anything that would come next, even if it was death, even if it wasn’t. All I could do was blink until my eyelids became thick with weight, and even then, again and again, yes, yes. Yes.