Suicide Med (18 page)

Nobody at school likes Patrice. I don’t know why exactly. There’s something kind of patronizing about her—it’s hard to put my finger on it. But Adamsky wants her to sign off before I have my surgery, so I guess I’m going to get my head shrunk.

Patrice is in her early forties with brown hair in a pixie cut and long legs.
I guess she isn’t bad looking, but I don’t find her remotely attractive. Her office consists of several shelves of alternating books and dolls. (Why dolls? We’re not children. I swear to God, if we do any role playing with Raggedy Ann, I am out of here.) She has a small desk in the corner of the room, but she sits in a chair that faces a sky blue sofa. When I sit down on the sofa, I feel myself sinking down into the cushions to the point where I worry escape might be difficult. Maybe that’s the point.

“I want you to put yourself at ease,” Patrice says.
“I want this to be a safe environment for you.”

I nod.
I wish I were anywhere but here.

“Tell me, Abe,” Patrice says.
“Why are you here?”

Because
Adamsky made me come. But I can’t say that. I have to tell her the truth—I can’t do anything to blow my chances of getting the eye removed.

“I’ve been thinking about having… surgery.”

“Surgery?”

“Plastic surgery.”

Patrice’s eyes widen.
She looks me over, probably wondering what kind of surgery I’m going to have. If she guesses liposuction, I might lose it.

“I don’t really believe in psychology,” I admit.
“The surgeon, Dr. Adamsky… he made me come here.”

“Well, thank you for being honest,” Patrice says.

I try not to roll my eyes.

Patrice crosses her long legs, “Tell me, Abe.
How long have you been considering having plastic surgery?”

“My whole life,” I say.

“Then why now?”

I hesitate. I nearly lie or make something up, but then I figure what
’s the point. I’m here, so I may as well tell her the whole story.

“Because I met the girl I want to spend the rest of my life with,” I reply.
“She’s in the class. Heather McKinley. And this is the only way it’s going to work.”

“She can’t accept you the way you are?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Patrice frowns and writes something down on the little pad of paper on her lap.

“Abe, would you feel comfortable sharing with me what your surgery is for?”

I know from experience that if I simply tell her, she’ll think that I’m trying to fool her.

“Why don’t I just show you?”

Patrice nods. “If you’d like.”

I struggle to my feet, losing my balance a few times on this stupid couch.
I see Patrice’s eyes widen as I loosen the belt on my pants. I’m a big guy, and for a moment, she looks frightened. Then I turn around and pull my slacks down a few inches. I hear the sharp intake of air being pulled into the therapist’s chest.

“Oh my God,” Patrice breathes.
I hear her clear her throat. “Uh… well…”

I pull my pants back up, buckle my belt, and flop back down on the couch.

“So go ahead,” I say, raising my eyebrows at her.
“Cure me.”

_____

The soonest I’m able to get the scan of my back is at the end of the week.
I schedule it for the end of the day, so I won’t miss anatomy lab. I feel an urgency to get this over with, knowing that now Heather and I are dating, she’s going to want to see me with my clothes off at some point. I don’t know how long I can put her off for.

As I sit by the CT scanner, waiting for the technician to enter the room, I try to think positive thoughts.
Soon this
thing
will be off of me for good.

The tech is a guy in his twenties with spiked blond hair.
He’s reading my requisition form when he walks into the room. He stops in mid-step.

“No
way
!” he exclaims. He looks up at me. “You really got an eye back there?”

I grit my teeth.
“Yeah.”

But from experience, I know that’s not going to be enough.
The tech isn’t satisfied until he actually gets to
see
the eye. He proclaims that his girlfriend is going to flip when she hears about this. I half expected him to pull out his phone and request a photo.

I’m doing this for you, Heather.

I lie down on the table and the tech instructs me to remain very still. I close my eyes, wondering if the eye on my backside is open or closed. Most of the time, I can’t tell. It functions completely separately from me.

Maybe it looks like an eye and has some vision properties.
But is an eye really an eye if there is no brain to perceive its vision?

_____

My next appointment with Dr.
Adamsky is first thing on Monday morning. I expect to be kept waiting in the examining room another two hours like last time and I’m rather disturbed when the plastic surgeon shows up right on time with a big smile on his face. Moreover, there is another physician with him: a gray-haired man with a thick, white beard that looked like it might be fun to stroke thoughtfully.

“Hello, Abe,”
Adamsky says. “This is Dr. Petrov. He’s a neurosurgeon and I’ve asked him to consult on this case, if that’s all right with you.”

Alarm bells go off in my head.

“Neurosurgeon?
Why do I need a neurosurgeon?”

The two
doctors exchange glances. Petrov speaks up with a slight eastern European accent, “Abe, Dr. Adamsky tells me you are in medical school, yes?”

“Yes…”

“Allow me to show you something then.”

Petrov
goes over to the computer in the corner of the room and points the screen in my direction. He pulls up an image for me to see.

“Abe, do you know how to read a CT scan?”

I shake my head.

Petrov
toys with the mouse until he reaches the slide that he wants me to see. He then points to a round gray structure in the middle of the film.

“This is your bladder,” he says.
He points out several other gray structures flanking the bladder, “And these are muscles. Do you see this white triangular structure here? This is one of your lumbar vertebrae.”

I nod.
Where’s he going with this?

Petrov
uses the mouse to outline another gray structure behind the vertebrae. It’s gray like the muscle, but somehow looks different, less homogeneous.

“Do you see this mass, Abe?”

I nod and swallow hard, “What is it?”

“We’re not absolutely positive, but we think it may be brain tissue.”

I nearly choke.

“What?
Are you saying I’ve got a brain in my behind?”

“Well, believe it or not, it’s not completely unheard of,”
Petrov says.

“You mean there are other people who have this?”

He nods. “Have you ever heard of something called vanishing twin syndrome?”

I shake my head.

“It’s actually quite common,” he says. “I’m sure you didn’t know this, but about one in eight pregnancies is a twin pregnancy. However, the incidence of twin births is much lower than that. More like one in eighty. That means about 90% of twin pregnancies result in a single birth. So what happens to the rest of those twin babies?”

I shrug.

“Some of them are miscarriages, most likely,” says Petrov. “But some percentage of them are most likely absorbed by the other twin, the more dominant twin. Abe, were you a large infant?”

“Yes,” I confirm
.

I actually weighed over
ten pounds when I was born. My mother had to have a cesarean section to get me out of her. When you see a picture of me next to the normal-sized babies in the newborn nursery, it’s almost comical how big I am.

“I’m willing to bet that your gestation was a twin one,”
Petrov says. “And you absorbed your twin brother in utero.”

Great.
I’m such a fatass that I ate my twin brother.

“So it’s not that weird?” I say.

Petrov shakes his head. “It is unusual to find such a perfectly preserved organ in the surviving twin. It’s really quite amazing.”

“Great,” I say.
“So when can we take it out?”

“It’s not so simple, Abe,”
Adamsky says. “This isn’t just like removing a skin growth. This is
brain tissue
. A significant amount of it too. What if we take it out and you can’t move your legs anymore? Or you become incontinent?”

“I don’t care,” I say.

“Or what if you become impotent?” Petrov adds.

I stare at him.
Okay, he’s got my attention.

“You see now,”
Petrov murmurs, “why this is not so simple.”

I’m losing hope.
It seems like all these doctors can talk about is how dangerous the surgery would be.

“So what am I supposed to do?”
I ask.

“Have you ever heard of Positron Emission Tomography?”
Petrov asks. “A PET scan?”

I shake my head.

“It’s a nuclear test where we can form images based on the detection of radiation from the emission of positrons,” Petrov explains. Huh?
“PET scans can detect areas of the body where there is increased oxygen. In the brain, this correlates with the areas that are most active. We use the scan to see, for example, what part of the brain is most active when you’re trying to access a memory or work on a math problem.”

“Okay…” I say.

“What we would like to do is try to stimulate that brain tissue,” Petrov says. “Identify what parts of the tissue light up, if any, when you’re doing different activities. If the brain tissue seems inactive, then I would feel more comfortable about removing it.”

It’s beginning to feel like this is all a tease.
Every time I come in here, there’s going to be some new test that they have to do before they can help me. And then after they do every test they can think of, they’ll end up telling me no.

But God, if there’s even a chance that they could take out that damn eye and let me lead a normal
life, it’s worth all this bullshit.

I nod.
“Yeah okay, schedule the test.”

“Tell me about Heather.”

Patrice is looking at me as she taps her pen against the notebook on her lap.
It is really, really annoying me. I want to tell her to stop, but instead I just try to ignore the persistent
tap tap tap
.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, you’re having a major surgery for her,” Patrice points out. She crosses her legs. “She must be very important to you.”
Tap tap tap.

I sink deeper into the sofa, which I’m already practically drowning in.
It’s hard for me to articulate what I like so much about Heather. Yes, she’s pretty and my initial attraction was physical. But there’s a whole other level to it now. I just like Heather. A lot.

For example, on Halloween, we were walking around a neighborhood by our dorm and we saw a little trick-or-treater walking around in a skeleton costume.
He was knocking on doors but it was too early and nobody was home yet. Heather called him over and pulled like five pieces of chocolate and candy out of her purse and handed it to him. I don’t know what I found more endearing: how sweet she was to the little kid or the fact that she walks around with a bunch of chocolate in her purse.

“I like that she sings,” I finally say.

Patrice shakes her head at me like she doesn’t get it. “What does she sing?”

“Well, mostly these annoying pop songs,” I explain.
“Whatever is on the radio. She’s always singing and she’s really off tune. It seems like it would be annoying, but… every time she does it, somehow I love her a little more.” Patrice is frowning, so I add, “I guess it’s hard to explain.”

I know that the Heather line of questioning is far from over.

“Have you ever considered telling her the truth?”
she asks.
Tap tap tap.

“Absolutely not,” I say without hesitation.
“She’d be disgusted.”

“You don’t give her much credit.”

“I’m realistic.” I raise my eyebrows at her. “Would you date a guy who had a…?”

Patrice
hesitates a beat too long and I know she is getting ready to form a lie. “Yes, I would.”

I snort.
“I’m sure.”

Patrice uncrosses and
recrosses her long legs, “So what if Dr. Adamsky doesn’t do the surgery?”

I’ve considered that possibility.
On the first day we moved in to our apartment, Mason brought with him a full set of knives for the kitchen. We never cook, so the knives are all razor-sharp. They’re just waiting for me.

If Dr.
Adamsky isn’t willing to do the surgery… well, one way or another, I’m going to have two eyes left.

_____

The popcorn is popped and I’m waiting for Heather to come over with a movie.
We’re watching some chick flick with Natalie Portman. No, I don’t really want to see it, and no, I haven’t grown a vagina. But Heather seemed excited about this movie, so we’re watching it, end of story. Being next to her—that’s enough.

I make an effort to clean up the coffee table.
I toss the half-eaten pizza slice from last night in the trash, and brush crumbs off the futon. Our place is a mess, I know it. I’m a slob and Mason’s spent his whole life having maids pick up after him, so we’re not in great shape. For a while, we had a pretty bad ant problem. They were making trails all over the living room, and Mason was spraying them with Fantastic. It was pretty disgusting, but now that the weather is changing, the ants seem to be gone.

These days, the fruit flies are vying for dominance.
The first time Heather came into our bedroom, she discovered our “fruit fly cup.” It’s this cup that used to have soda in it and I guess we never washed it, and it somehow evolved into a fruit fly breeding ground. That cup was literally covered in flies.

When Heather first saw the fruit fly cup, she announced that we had to get rid of it ASAP.
Mason argued with her for a while.

“The fruit flies are our pals,” he said.

Heather didn’t find him amusing.
Finally, Mason tipped the cup into a plastic bag I was holding, then we quickly put that plastic bag in
another
plastic bag, and took the whole thing out to the dumpster. But we still have fruit flies—they’re just more spread out.

Heather arrives at my door right on time.
She’s wearing a tank top and jeans and just looks so cute that I want to forget the goddamn movie and ravage her right now.

She grins at me, “Got the popcorn?”

I nod. “Got the movie?”

Heather holds up the DVD with the photo of a love-struck Natalie Portman on the box.
Damn. I was hoping she wouldn’t be able to find it.

Heather catches the look on my face.
“Abe, what’s wrong? Don’t you want to see this movie?”

I force a smile.
“Yeah, definitely.”

She puts her hands on her hips.

“Okay, fine,” I say. “I don’t want to see it. But I’m willing to watch it.”

Heather blinks at me.
“Why?”

“Because,” I say.
“I want to be close to you. I don’t care what we’re watching.”

Her eyes soften.
“Tell you what,” she says. “Let me go grab my purse and we’ll go out and see that zombie apocalypse movie that’s playing in the theater.”

I stare at her.
“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“You really want to see that?” It’s hard for me to believe any woman would want to see that movie.

“I just want to be close to you,” Heather says and she winks.
“Besides, zombies are awesome. No?”

I love this girl.
I really, really love her.

“Heather,” I say.
“I love…” Crap. I can’t say it. “I love seeing movies with you. A lot.”

Her brown eyes twinkle.
“I love seeing movies with you too. A lot.”

And that’s why I’d do anything for Heather McKinley.