Amiss

Tony Sinclitico

I noticed two things about her or maybe it was three if you count her face. It was the face of an Egyptian funerary goddess—angles and planes and knife thin lips, a severe face, a judging face. Later, when I was thinking about this instant, I didn’t count her face. It was only two things I remember noticing.

The first thing—she was reading a medical book. I couldn’t see the title but I knew it was a book about diseases because of the pictures and the skin-of-a-new-tattoo colored cover. The actual body part she was looking at was hard to make out. But I recognized the combination of boiled-ham reds and soft yellows of infection even at the acute angle between us. I was sitting at the wood counter below the open-shuttered windows of the Del Mar Cafe. She was at the same counter, two seats away. Only a yard and the remnants of my Greek scrambled eggs (brown-singed onion scraps, green olive chunks and a drip of uncooked yolk) and half-eaten poppy seed bagel separated us.

The second thing—she was looking at the pictures in the book, not reading it. Her fingers moved the glossy pages quickly, stopped for several beats then moved on. She’s cruising, I thought.

I do a lot of cruising myself. My favorite text is The Color Atlas of Infectious Diseases. The book. It’s the size of a large ACCESS guidebook—the kind with faux 3D slices of the Louvre or the new Tate. The left side page of Color Atlas describes causes and course. Nothing. It’s the right side; the lovely right side that makes me feel like I’ve just scraped a shoulder itch against a door jam. The right side pictures. Not all are good. Some are through a microscope. The dyes are the magenta and rice-white of the meats in Indian food. Nothing to me except a reminder of disgust with sauce of nausea. But the others. The pustules, the plaques, sores, and crusts—all there on shiny stock in the drenching candy-apple colors of a Hustler centerfold.

I’ve thought a lot about the excitement. What it is? Where does it come from? I tried to pinpoint some instant or incident that caused me. Paraphilia—Greek—love amiss—”the unusual object choice becomes the central focus and sine qua non of the person’s arousal and gratification so the pattern is deemed abnormal.”

But there’s nothing. I wasn’t raised on Molokai among lepers’ lost nose tips and virus-eaten black toes. Color Atlas features photos of blacks and Malays, or at least they’re my favorites. I’ve never been to Africa or Southeast Asia.

So the usual suspect of childhood conditioning shouldn’t be an explanation for me. Except this. Pictures. My only contact with disease was pictures. From the age of about 11, I was a consumer, even a voracious consumer, of National Geographic photo-essays of disaster. Earthquake, hurricane, typhoon, fire and flood produce corpses and corpses produce pestilence and infection on a grand, stimulating scale. The suppurating eye, the scrofulous lesion and the piece d’resistance, the Pollock of disease, parasitic infestation.

I know. I know. These photos aren’t a staple of the magazine. But they’re there. In among the enlargements of blowfish teeth, radioactively glowing potatoes, vomiting volcanoes, ads for station wagons, pre-Taliban Bamian Buddhas, tattooed Texans and mummies from Greenland, they’re there. I’ve wondered why the more frequently photographed subjects didn’t do any imprinting—photographs of planets for example or bare-breasted pigmies. But it’s only disease—only the polka dot purples of Karposi Sarcoma lesions or tear drops of parasites clinging to eyelids and the like that interest me.

But what about her? How does she fit in? I saw her once before. I’m a medical malpractice defense lawyer. I represent hospitals mostly. The average patient at the average hospital has a one in seven chance of mishap—as in left in sponge mishap; as in wrong leg sawed mishap; as in hives from the wrong antibiotic mishap. I hardly ever see this kind of case. They settle.

My business is bad results. I try to persuade that people die or are crippled even when they get good care. Doctors are healers not magicians is my theme. But if your wife is middle aged, or at least not tottering, you don’t buy this twaddle and you sue because you weren’t really thinking her uterine tune-up would leave her face sagging like a melted candle and her eye tearing all day.

One thing I do to defend the lawsuits is gently daub the jury with a light coat of humanity lacquer. To most people, hospitals feel like minimum-security prisons or the DMV. I treat this poisonous view with a purge of nice-folks—candy stripers, nurse’s volleyball, visiting wide receivers and the like.

I was looking for some new material at Sherwood Hall—the auditorium/theatre of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LaJolla. The relatives of some corpse donors sued Southwest Medical School. The executive director of the foundation that supplies cadavers to the school’s gross anatomy classrooms had a sideline—selling leftovers [lung—$300] to educational supply companies. “Bucks For Brains” was the San Diego Union headline. I was defending.

The school was liable, of course. The gross anatomy docs were stupid about refuse—left scalp and gray-hair spackled skulls and the odd liver or lung lying around. But it should be a nothing case. After all corpses are, well, dead and these got cut up and sawed because that’s what they wanted.

The paper was pretty good too. Anatomical Gift Program Donors is their official title. Everyone at the med school called them AGPs. The tri-color AGP pamphlet got the school at least partly off the hook. It said, “ a portion of the donation may be retained and archived for teaching purposes.” No one’s heart got eaten and educational supply shops were involved (sort-of) with teaching. Non Vulnaro/ Non Turpis—no harm/no foul was the relevant legal principle. On the other hand, the image of Mom’s large intestine being sold like tripe for menudo was worth worrying about—preparing for. Looking for a little pink gingham bow to put in the hair of the med school brought me to Sherwood Hall.

Sherwood Hall resembled giant mahogany pliers with a stage for a nose. It could seat 500 but that morning there were about 80 people clustered in the first ten rows, most wearing starched white and clean (for a change) medical smocks. This was The Nightingale Morn. Every year the med school staged a faux memorial service for the dissected AGPs. Attendance was mandatory for every medical student. To blow this fiesta off was to risk a campdoc label as in concentration camp doc. Bad for one’s chances at a glitzy resident slot.

The theme was the engraving on the marble headstone at the communal burial site the med school purchased in Westminster—the local WASP cemetery. That’s where the leftovers were supposed to go. “ Dedicated to individuals who have donated their bodies for anatomical study so others might live,” said a calligraphy banner below the podium.

When I walked in the speaker was my future cafe goddess—Eurasian, Hawaiian maybe, petite, with a sheet of black-sheen hair framing the ancient angles of her face and draping her shoulders in a way that accented the tips of her breasts. She was talking into a silver microphone. The mike created an echo so I didn’t hear the beginning of what she said. “Wei-Li, I named her Wei-Li.”

Who? I thought.

“Wei-Li was also my great grandmother’s name,” she said, “ She never left our family’s village near Luoyang. She was a plain woman, uneducated, maybe a bit simple but my family thinks, believes, she had a warrior’s heart. She was cut to pieces by the hooves of the local bandit chief’s mare while protecting my grandmother. Like my great grandmother this Wei-Li will be a savior. I’ll never touch a scalpel, never look at an operating site, never put my hands into a wound without thinking of Wei-Li’s sacrifice.” Clapping.

So Wei-Le = corpse/great-grandmother. Now her great grandaughter was drinking coffee and cruising two arms lengths and a scattering of crumbs from me.

As I peeked, she wet her lips and stirred her excellent ass. I’m not normally much of a lady’s man. My predilections make it difficult for me to effectively ah relate to a woman.

My only real long term [non-photographic] sexual interest was Wendy. She was a dope fiend and ultimately died of AIDS-related complications. But for a while when she was in the florid stage [I love florid, flowers, the lovely blooms of lesion], we were a couple. I loved her for a while. It was only for a few weeks. She had thrush. In the mouth. Her tongue and the roof of her mouth were laved in off-white, crumbling pus that looked like the hardening icing on a yellow birthday cake. Exquisite.

But most of my... my commitments were photographic. I’d never met anyone like me. I looked in Krafft-Ebing’s, Psychopathia Sexualis but there was no name for people like myself. Sex with birds has a name and sex with holes in bags of garden fertilizer has a name and passionate cannibals can find themselves, but not me. Nothing, until now.

I’ve tried some other things besides research into sexual addictions to find a... lover. I made discreet visits to web sites that feature accident photos and pictures of amputees. I attended an opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art where the artist decorated a faux surgical theatre with mural-sized pictures of a bowel resection. It was pleasant but the women all wore black turtlenecks to hide neck-wattles. I even entered the chat room of an amputee site, with the Nom d’Ether, CUTUP. I wrote, “SWM, 51, professional fella, likes pics of infected sweets and Bach, wishes to meet athletic SWF age 25-37 who feels left out of the candy store: object our own book of treats.”

I thought that this was elliptical enough to excite interest but protect me from police scrutiny but the only response I got was from two pedophiles who wanted to trade candid pictures of 10 year olds.

I hate crime and criminals. After all, I’m an officer of the court. So I printed out the e-mails (sans addressee of course) and sent them to the S.D.P.D sex crimes unit. I’d met a woman Assistant DA from that unit. Weclicked. But one night, over dinner, she said,  “Mine’s... I use bumble. How about you?”

Confused I said, “ What’s bumble?” I thought it might be a designer drug. She seemed the type. Sort of hip. Cool in a showy kind of way—black skirt with fake tatters, a deep violet see-through blouse with nipple tug, three ear-piercings one of which held a silver and glitter African tribeswoman’s hoop and a blue-black crown of thorns ankle tattoo.

” My safe word,” she said, “ You know. Don’t tease.”

I tried to be gallant and said, “ I confuse people. They see, feel something odd in me or about me. Maybe it’s the shaved head or the Vandyke or the three-piece suits. Some people say I look like a biker Freud. I don’t know what it is, but my weirdness, it’s not that. What you think.”

She flashed embarrassed then angry then worried. I looked down at my veal chop. She actually blushed. A woman who’d seen it all blushed. The flush moved from her neck into her scalp and then into her crew cut black hair.

” I... I... ,” she stuttered.

“It’s... “ I started but she said, “ Don’t please, please don’t... . you can’t.”

I said, “ I’m... I’ll.”

She said loudly, “ NO. Don’t say it. Don’t say anything. Just promise me you’ll be discreet.”

I almost laughed. Me be discreet? I’m more discreet than the priest in the confessional at St. CouponClipp in BelAire. I know what can happen. I think about it every day. It’s a good day when I only once imagine myself being disgraced or locked up. Lawyers love gossip the way junkies love smack and they adore, truly adore sex peccadilloes. Maybe “Perverts are People Too!” is a motto that works in some professions but not with lawyers and not with institutions like the DA’s office or a medical school. The job apps for those places don’t have a deviance question but they might as well have. Any move from the missionary position and you’re fired.

“ I’m very discreet,” I said. She sighed, resignation. I sighed, deflation.

That day at the Del Mar Cafe, I was practicing my legendary discretion by not staring at Wei-Li’s great grandaughter. Peeking, sure. Leering maybe but not staring. She was oblivious to me. She seemed fastened to a particular page in the Color Atlas as if the photograph (polio, botulism, fluke worms?) was an eyelet and her gaze a silver hook.

I imagined us as a couple. In a year or two, off on a vacation or a mission. Sleeping in a tent, a safari tent. Hyena screech. Making furious rough love. Aroused in the aftermath of an afternoon encounter. Glaring sun, dung-spattered floor. Black legs blown huge with elephantitis. Or naked on yellow silk hotel sheets beginning, slowly beginning while still wearing the white gauze masks from our trip to a Zimbabwe children’s hospital. Lolling gray tongues, kennel scent, tiny wet chests cast-iron hard with cholera.

I imagined an anniversary. Our love and loving matured, settled but still compelling, consuming. Perhaps a special gift. Of me. A few tiny beetle-shaped scars on my forehead reminded me every day of the chicken pox I enjoyed as a boy. The virus stays in your body. So I was qualified. A touch of luck and a moment alone with the Southwest Hospital computer was all I needed.

It’s a VA hospital so there’s variety. A smorgasbord. But I knew, knew already. A fifteen-year anniversary. The ruby anniversary—so something red. Shingles. It had to be shingles. I’d find a donor. Stress and alcohol is its petre dish. Plenty of that among the VA’s patrons, so lots of shingles. The beautiful scarlet splash of savaged nerves and the elegant, perfectly round cigarette-burn blisters. The pain’s supposed to be tres, tres horrible and there’s always a danger of blindness. But I loved her. I knew it would send her (and me) into frenzy. I was just thinking about how she might reciprocate when she closed the Color Atlas and reached for her briefcase.

She’s going, I thought. Now. It’s got to be right now. I tried to compose myself. The anniversary fantasy gave me, made me... disconcerted.

I got up knocking my chair over in the process. She turned. I picked up the chair and smiled. She looked puzzled. There was a slight arch to her right eyebrow. I stepped over to her and smiled again. She said, “Do I know you?”

I said, “ Maybe. I’m Micah Reed,” and held out my hand. What could she do? She took it. Her skin was moist. The back of her hand glistened slightly. I shook her the ends fingers in the traditional male to female handshake and held on for an extra beat before I let her hand ease out of mine. I resisted the temptation to sniff my hand.

” I’m Susan. Susan Yaoshifo,” she said a little coyly. A come on, I thought.

” You’re Wei-Li’s great-grandaughter,” I said.

” What? How... “

” You sliced up Wei-Li the second,” I said.

” That’s it,” she said relieved, “ The Nightingale.” She seemed to take a close look. Interested, attracted. I thought about what I’d seen in the morgue at the hospital a week ago hoping the power of the image would ooze out of me and subliminally stroke her.

” What’s your specialty?” she asked.

” Infectious diseases,” I said letting my mouth and tongue whistle the last two syllables.

” Really. Infectious diseases. Me too. But epidemiology. Infectious Epidemiology,” she said, “Same string, different yo-yo I guess.”

I couldn’t wait. I needed to be sure about her. “The book,” I said, “ what were you checking out?” My breath seemed to be stabbing me. The book. My book. The Color Atlas. I must have looked odd because she moved back. I should have known then but she didn’t step back just straightened at the hip and swayed away from me. I pointed at the book.

She said, “ Gonorrhea. There’s been an outbreak in the Sub-Sahara. New strain.”

I knew it. The white mucus on the eye-lid. The skin lesions that looked like the residue of a burn from a hair curler. I knew. I heard my voice say, “ Incredibly sexy, don’t you think?”

” What? What do you mean?”

There it was again. Coy, I thought, but I suppose I was wrong.

” Come on,” I said, “I know. It’s OK. It’s right. We... we’re the same.”

” You’re interested in STD’s too?” she wondered.

” Yes. No. You know I am. But I’m not a doctor. I’m the lawyer for the hospital. That’s why I heard you. At The Nightingale. My interest’s the same as yours. It’s... it’s... recreational.”

“Recreational?” This time she did step back.

I wondered? Sure, briefly only briefly, but I did wonder. But I couldn’t stop. “ The pictures,” I said pointing to the Atlas, “ They’re the finest. Ever. Don’t tell me they don’t get you. Work you up.”

” Well the photos are OK, I guess but it’s the data on cytogenesis that’s unique.”

I could have stopped. But I thought she was just saying no when she meant yes. Deliberately disingenuous is the legal term. So I said in a whisper, “ Arouse. OK, Turn on. Turn on!” I touched the hair on her forearm with the back of my hand.

Getting it,” You sick fuck!” she said loudly, very loudly. When she said it the second time it was a scream.

You know the rest. Stupid. Sordid. She told the medical school dean, who told the State Bar who told the managing partner of my firm. After that a cliché fall from grace.

Fired. Open own shop. Coke. Embezzle. Disbarred. Probation. Broke. Lose house. Six months in County. Halfway house. The streets.

I’ve got nothing now. Nothing. Except the Color Atlas. I do have that.

Copyright © 2009 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.