Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum

Author:Naben Ruthnum [Ruthnum, Naben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Undertow Publications

4

It’s taking in my back now, the way it did my eyes. You remember, the nose came off, but my eyes went in? That’s happening now to the flesh, to the structure back there. My ribs—after this I will bend forward and ask you to look, just to look for a few minutes without stirring. You’ll see them bend, you’ll see the pull. I cannot explain to you how it feels because I am too cowardly to feel it. I don’t understand how it would be tolerable without the morphine.

I know this is a disordered telling; it will have to be. It was that Garnier, with the clicking pastilles in his mouth and the cold little metal probes to explore my new openings, who confirmed it, who made me sure that it was her and none other.

Not my disease, he said. What a phrase. A true specialist’s credo. It is why I am a generalist. He saw something he didn’t know, he didn’t hazard a guess, he left. I could say it was simply lack of interest, the inability of the cardiologist to see a gunshot wound to the temple as he massages the heart of a dead man, but it was more than that with the Frenchman. He smelled something else in my wounds. Something beyond the pus and rot he is paid and fêted to deal with. He did not leave my case, he fled it. I understood then that my notes, my ideas of having Brackden memorialize my decomposition in an article for my peers, were useless. What is happening to me isn’t pathology. It isn’t a disease to be learned from, to be followed to other bodies, to be conquered.

She told me what would happen, Louise. This is the important bit. I ignored her then, ignored her well enough to forget that evening until a lazy doctor reminded me with his perfect hopelessness.

When we met she told me her name didn’t matter, and I laughed. I told her that many of the women in places like this started out saying so, used that same tired phrase, until they had a proper employer who explained to them that men didn’t like it. That men liked to test a name on the tongue and use and own it first, that it was an important première étape, and she explained that she wasn’t employed and never intended to be but that her name was Jean. The name was a lie, but it was acceptable, because it marked a compromise. She was doing what I had described, testing and owning the name, when she used it for the first time. This meant that it was always hers, would never be mine to have, only to borrow. You’ve never had these kinds of transactions, Louise, but you know what taking my name was for you: you have a sense, a notion of the degraded play on proper love and commitment that exists in these conversations. A word can have such force, and a name is an entire incantation.

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