My Ngoc To

I.



Love is an act of collision. Two bodies come together and react. When things go well, a mutual bond will form between the two. They can each maintain their prior self while remaining attached. A healthy relationship takes the form of two stars colliding, forming a binary system in which they dance in a shared orbit.



But many things can go wrong with collisions. In some cases, both bodies will explode.



There are other, rarer instances, in which one object travels at such feverish high speed, and is so much more massive, that it will devour the other.



One such collision almost came to completion five years ago. On Monday, December 7, 2008, the Texas police ran into the home of Christopher Lee McCuin to find him sitting at the kitchen table preparing to eat dinner. He had an ear boiling on the stove and a chunk of raw meat on his plate with a fork set neatly beside it.



Upon seeing the police enter, McCuin bolted towards the door and managed to escape from the house. They chased him down shortly afterwards.



He had put much preparation into his meal. He had caught the food on Friday when he asked his girlfriend, Jana Shearer, 21 years old, to discuss some matters regarding their relationship.



When they had finished talking, McCuin beat her repeatedly with a blunt object. It only took a few collisions for her to fall dead to the floor. After that he spent the weekend further mutilating the body, carving out pieces from various parts of the carcass.



After an entire weekend of work, he went to seek out his girlfriend’s mother. “I want to show you what I’ve done,” he said. She followed him into the house, and he told her to look into the garage.



The mother put her hand to her mouth and ran screaming out of the house to find a policeman.



In the meantime, McCuin prepared his meal, setting up his last act.



Perhaps McCuin carved out even more pieces from the body after the mother left. Maybe he already had the pieces sitting in the fridge. But the collision had already happened, and the reaction was now in full speed. With the police’s entrance, though, the completion of McCuin’s task was foiled: The reaction was cut short.



II.



There is a predator in every ecosystem. When it comes to chemistry, water is like a piranha. It is designed to rip apart whatever it lays its hands upon. Two hydrogen atoms are posed like guns on either side of the oxygen atom. With their slightly positive charge, they will stick to any sort of negative charge. The negatively-charged oxygen, which is twelve times more massive than hydrogen, floats like a giant. It is drawn towards any positive mol- ecules in the vicinity. With just three atoms, the water molecules are fully equipped to tear apart both spectrums of charges.



But water never acts alone. Rather, it hunts in packs.



Take, for example, the dissolution of sodium chloride in water. This molecule is simply one sodium atom bound to a chlorine atom. The sodium carries a negative charge and the chlorine a positive charge. The moment this molecule comes into contact with the aqueous environment, the water molecules swarm the foreigner and prepare to attack. The ones on the chlorine side reorient themselves so that the hydrogen molecules bond to the negative charge. On the other side the oxygen atoms stick to the sodium ion.



In an instant, everything is set.



With their teeth clenched on the skin of its prey, the water molecules start to pull apart in opposite directions, tugging until the carcass is ripped in half. The remains float off in the water, and the water molecules move on, satisfied with their meat.



More than seventy percent of our body consists of this water. We are carnivores.



III.



Of all the senses, touch is by far the most intimate, for it is the only sense that causes our bodies to change.



The least penetrating sense is vision. Light simply hits the eye. Smell penetrates the body a bit more: Little bits of the environment enter our noses, and some particles bind to the appropriate pore in our nose. The tiny hairs inside the pore are pushed to an angle, triggering a neural response. In order to taste, tiny hairs in our taste buds spark a nerve impulse. Sounds are perceived when the hairs in our inner ear vibrate from the sound waves.



But this is all superficial. It’s simply hairs moving or bones vibrating. The actual shape does not change.



Now take touch. We are able to feel the world thanks to Meissner corpuscles, tiny oval-shaped organelles. They are located everywhere in our bodies—underneath the skin, on the linings of internal organs. Whenever our bodies come into contact with another surface, the corpuscles in that area compress and immediately fire back signals to the brain, as if information was being squeezed out of them.



When our bodies are still, there is no contact, and the Meissner corpuscles in these areas start to lose their sensitivity. They stiffen, become less responsive, and eventually stop working.



When we finally do give them the stimulation for which they were designed, they immediately light up and send joyful electric pulses to the brain. Just as glow sticks only glow when they are bent, our bodies slowly light up as we move each individual body part. After a full session of stretching, every part of the body is stimulated: The internal organs have massaged each other, and bone and muscles are twisting and turning and rubbing, as if reciting an old song thought to be forgotten. By the time we have finished exer- cising our entire body, we are glowing.



Every action has an equal and opposite reac- tion. A transaction happens when two things touch. That is why newborns that go for too long without being touched will die. That is why we can tell if someone is alive or dead just by putting our hands to their skin. It is through touch that the body is able to live. If we stop moving, the body will forget that it is alive.



IV.



In the movie *Perfume*, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is overtaken by love. Born and abandoned in a fish market and raised in an orphanage, he grew up as a strangely detached boy with a superior nose, which led him to seek out the best of aromas.



One night, he smells something particularly beautiful and follows the scent until he finds its source: a redheaded maiden selling strawberries in the local market. He follows her, unable to resist.



Jean-Baptiste startles the woman and tries to quell her screams with his hands. Having never touched or been touched by anyone in his life, he clenches her neck too hard and kills her. She falls to the floor. He touches her again, but she is not alive. He smells her, but the smell is gone.



From then on, he can think of nothing but that marvelous odor: he seeks to create the finest perfume in the world. After seeking the ap- prenticeship of a local perfume maker, Jean uses the perfume boiler in the basement to extract oils from various objects.



He begins with roses. But even with the finest flowers, he cannot find a scent anything like the maiden’s, and so he starts experimenting with objects more like her body. One by one, the girls from the town start disappearing. Naked bodies of beautiful women appear around the city. From each of these bodies, the hair has been removed.



It is this hair that Jean uses to extract the finest scents.



Over time the town is flooded with the fear of a serial killer. Jean flees from the city and goes to the country to work in a perfume factory with better scent preservation techniques. On his way there, Jean realizes that he has no scent of his own.



Once there, he continues to kill in secret and eventually obtains the perfect prey: a most beautiful redhead who he believes will bring forth the magic scent. By that time, however, the town has exposed him as the murderer and plans to hang him for his crimes.



Just before his hanging, Jean takes the perfume from his pocket and lets a single drop fall onto his skin. The scent expands like an atom bomb in the air, and the town is stunned by the heavenly smell. A calm, golden spray settles on the citizens and they advance into a massive orgy. Skin touching skin touching skin—the people are engulfed in love and forgive Jean for his murders.



The perfume has given him the power to rule the world, but Jean still has no scent. He realizes that he has nothing to give to the world: He can never be loved. He heads back to the fish market where he was born and decides to end his life. He pours the perfume over his body. The nearby crowd surrounds him and devours him, piece af- ter sweet-smelling piece.



All the love in the world, condensed into a single collision.



 

*For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone.* –Virginia Woolf, “Street Hauntings ”



 



The bike ride from Harvard to the East Campus of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center takes approximately half an hour from the Square. To ride a bike is to be in perpetual motion. The moment we hop on, the ground beneath us evens out, and the world transforms into an infinite landscape, no longer sectioned off into red lights, pedestrian crossways, or emergency stops. Rather, it is a continuous flux of scenery that flows together as images do in daydreams.



 



The bike ride to lab takes us from one world to another. One has to navigate past the chaos of the Square, past the hordes of pedestrians standing on the brink of the curb, past the taxi stands in front of the Harvard Coop, away from the traffic jams caused by construction, over the steep incline of JFK Bridge, across the intersection, onto the main bike path, and then finally along the Charles River for the next three miles.



 



On some days, when the journey starts at rush hour, this first part becomes particularly difficult, as there are twice as many pedestrians, twice as many cars, and twice as many ambulances rushing forward to overload one’s senses. The bike path, which stays mostly empty, is suddenly full of joggers and bikers also making their evening travels. With the onslaught of winter, the evenings are now shrouded in darkness, and the headlights of the cars travelling in the opposite direction are so blinding that they conceal the shadows of people in the distance.



 



On a good day, though, the ride there is utter beauty. On a good day, the weather is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the trees are all shades of warm, popping out against the azure light of the sky. There are joggers, but they all smile slightly as they huff by, and the smiles somehow enter our expressions too. Or perhaps the smile we see in others is just a reflection of our own. The path twists and turns, widens and shrinks. On one part it becomes so narrow that we’re constantly afraid of hitting the pedals of other bikes when we cross, but it never happens—the disaster is averted, and we utter a small prayer of gratitude.



 



Every time we go, in the fall, the trees change color, first from a deep green to yellow, then to a brighter and brighter orange, until becoming a vivid tunnel that engulfs us. The next time we enter this part of the bike path, the leaves have started to fall off, and their crimson-blood color spots the black pavement. The wind feels inviting and crisp on our skin. We bring a jacket but don’t wear it. The weather reminds us of Halloween all those years ago, when the weather was just as brisk and reached through the thin costume fabric of our disguise.



 



Remember that time we went apple picking, and you were wearing that blue navy blazer with the gold buttons along with that worn black corset, and you were pleased because it was the second time you’d been in an orchard since you picked strawberries and peaches when you were ten years old?



 



Yes, yes, I do remember. And that year I was a ninja for Halloween.



 



To the left, on the side facing the river, couples, families, and those dreamy walkers, wrapped in their silence, admire the river. We can’t help but look on too, at the skyline, at the bell towers in the distance, at the occasional solitary rower. We once tried to scull, remember? And you got that swim card but never ended up going? 



 



Yes, yes I do remember. And when I took that swim test I remembered how I love to swim.



 



The turn is coming soon, but right before it is the bridge. It is made entirely of wooden planks. Often people will stop here to lean over the railings and look at the view of Boston, to the right, and of Harvard, to the left. It is always quiet here—the water beneath the bridge is calm. This wooden bridge passes under a larger, square bridge, perhaps part of the railroad; above it is an even larger bridge that carries cars over the river. But at ours, below these crossing paths, the planks make gentle clucking noises under the wheels, and our motion is indicated, not just by the wind, or the change in landscape and shadow, but also by the shift in noise. We are moving—forward.



 



We have almost reached the end. Head straight off the bridge, and be sure to look both ways for cars before crossing. Turn left onto Common-wealth Avenue, and right onto Brookline: the East Campus of Beth Israel will be on the left. Enter the main entrance, up the elevators to the eighth floor, make a left, and go inside room 864. The sleep subject has finished the third session and is waiting in the Solarium.



 



This is a sleep lab. The head of the lab prefers to be called Bob. He is an ancient man with bright eyes, white hair, and a gentle voice. In his office is a plant that is almost bigger than a small child. It is an exotic plant, a spider lily, with two-inch stems that rise three feet and then end in a firework-shape of white flowers. There are three of these stems, and the base is adorned in thick, wavy leaves. In 1991, when he went to Mexico on a lab convention, Bob stood on the beach and found a seed washed up on the shore. He snuck it back to America and planted the thing, curious to see what it would become.



 



Spider lilies only bloom at night. This ability is called nyctinasty, and it occurs because nature has matched a specific set of flowers to nighttime pollinators: bats, moths, and rodents. Color is of minimal importance at night, so these flowers tend to be light colored. To attract their pollinators, the flowers wear strong fragrances. Their petals stay closed during the day to prevent the perfume from evaporating, but when the sun has set and the pollinators have awoken, they bloom.



 



It takes less than two seconds for a spider lily to bloom. The petals are held together by a little locking leaf, and when that leaf releases the whole flower springs open. In the entire time that Bob has had the lily, he has only seen it bloom twice.



 



It’s amazing what can happen in a day. We wake up every morning new, the trouble and anxieties of the night before having dissipated along with the dreams. Something happens during sleep that renders them less important, as belonging to a different world; something that refreshes the mind, restores the brain. Since this is a sleep lab, people come here to dream, to be deprived of sleep, to nap. Some will stay here for several days, sometimes an entire week, to participate in a particular study. Ours is less costly—the subjects don’t have to stay overnight and instead stay at lab from morning till night. Sometimes, when they take naps, we record the activity of their brains.



 



There are four stages of sleep, and each one has its own special pattern. At a waking state, the brain waves are tiny and dense, jittery and sporadic. When people close their eyes, however, the pattern immediately sooths out, and a wave-like image starts to form. When the brain waves even out enough, they have officially entered the first stage of sleep. If they were to be woken up now, they would not recall ever being asleep.



 



After roughly ten minutes, though, something strange starts to happen. The spacing of the waves becomes a bit wider, loosening up, becoming slower, until suddenly, they spike up into an enormous tsunami and then sinks into a trough. This is a K-complex, and it is a major indicator of Stage Two sleep. Occasionally, the smaller waves will seem to condense, as if a hand is squeezing them together. This is a sleep spindle, and it is another defining landmark of Stage Two.



 



The rise and fall of the K-complex will grow more frequent until the reading screen becomes filled with only these large waves. They come much more slowly, like gentle, rolling giants, and once the brain activity is composed entirely of these, we know the person is in slow wave sleep.



 



The final and most fascinating part of sleep is Rapid-Eye-Movement. All at once, the canyons and peaks shrink to tiny, fast, schizophrenic waves that resemble those of the waking state. Yet the subjects are asleep, and at this point their eyes are rolling in synch, and their bodies have absolutely no muscle tone. They are dead yet alive at the same time. This is the point at which dreams occur.



 



Every person, no matter how old, how sleep deprived, or how intelligent, will go through these exact sleep stages in the same order. A full night’s rest will exhibit multiple cycles of these sleep stages, each with its own unique chemical make-up and function.



 



At ten at night, the subjects have finished the last session for the day and can be checked out of the clinical research center. We’ve forgotten to do this a few times, to the consequent scorn of the night nurses, but today we remember.



 



The ride back at night is quiet. Back down Brookline, only now we turn left onto Commonwealth Avenue, right onto Silber Way. 



 



This bridge crosses the main highway. At the top of the crossing, one can stand and look at the six-lane highway from either end, wondering where all these cars are coming from and where they are headed next. We are at the point between two worlds, the space between night and day, but instead of choosing one over the other, we simply continue heading home.



 



We leave Silber Way behind, biking ahead of a slow couple walking down the same bridge, and join the bike path once more. 



 



By now the Hyatt hotel has its lights turned on, and the red zigzag of its outlines ripples along the river to the right. We are alone on this path. The trees line up on either side of the road, and their branches reach across and hug each other under the sky. Cars drive past along the left, and we feel pity for the drivers stuck inside their metal containers, unable to feel the night against their skin. We pass through the tunnel of trees and ride past the sailing house, now with its doors closed and boats harbored to the shore. We slow down to make the sharp right turn onto the wooden bridge under the bridge under the bridge. Again, the wheels of the bike make clanking noises across the wooden panels. Halfway across, we pause to look at the water. It is especially calm tonight and shines like obsidian under the moonlight. With eyes closed and hands cupped and resting on the balcony, we close our eyes, our brain waves soothing out.



 



After an entire day of seeing and looking, of observing, distinguishing, choosing, our perception has become twisted and unfocused. Our brain is like an offset scale, and to restore it to normal, we will have to sleep. Dreams will first flood our brain with exaggerated simulations of reality, testing the springs of our scale. After dreaming will come slow wave sleep that realigns the spring bit by bit. These two stages of sleep will work together to test and adjust, test and adjust. After several cycles, the brain will be fully recalibrated, and we will wake up again, reset.



 



When we open our eyes—the world is still there. Up above, the moon glistens. The water shines with globes of blue, green and red from the land lights. Somewhere, a night flower is blooming.

 



I. 



I had expected my first bike accident to be much more loud and drawn-out. But it happened in less than one second. There was no glory. There was no sound. I had simply ridden my bike and fallen off, landing twisted among the sand and metal juts.



I felt no pain, only a tingling in my left knee. I looked down and saw a large gash at the center of my knee. This porous stretch of skin contained little pink craters, each one containing a grain of sand, surrounded by multiple walls of flaking skin.    



I stared at attention, fascinated at the transformation of my body, when something began to happen.A thick, bright red liquid seeped out from underneath, coming out from all the pores. Once it reached skin level, it bubbled out in the form of tiny flowers, which I intertwined until that hole in my knee turned red. It poured over the sides and trickled down my leg. The tingling turned into a sting.  



I started to limp quietly towards the front door of my house, whimpering as I went, for I had just gone through the experience that every little girl must go through, of witnessing her own blood for the first time.



II.



Since then, I have watched blood flow from my body countless times. I am consistently taken aback by its color, its silent movement across my skin, its slight saltiness against my tongue. Most of the time, I am not expecting it or the events causing it, unless I need to have it drawn. Even then, my own blood remains quarantined inside tubes and I am not called to interact with it.



But once I was, in my sophomore year in college, in a basic science class in which we studied the structure and nature of certain molecules essential to life. We often studied associated diseases, so when we reached insulin, we turned our heads to diabetes.



In a class lab, we had to measure our blood sugar levels before and after eating a glucose tablet. To do this we would have to prick our fingers with a tiny needle, wait for the blood to come out, and then insert that droplet onto the test strip of a machine for measurement. It was quite simple, really.



There were only a few pricking machines, so I had to wait my turn. I sat at my desk and watched ten other students play with their blood. The class, which generally stayed apathetically silent, had suddenly erupted into giggles and shouts of delight. I watched a tall lean boy next to me grin and stare cross-eyed at his finger as the blood came out. Another girl in the back yelled to the class that she had a lot of blood in her finger.



I prayed that I could get a lot of blood too.



The machine finally came to me. With the needle poised and ready to shoot, I counted to three and then pressed down hard on the release button. Before I could make sense of the pain, it was gone. I looked down, and to my delight, a small drop had already formed at the side of my finger. The drop swelled to twice its size and turned slightly darker in hue. I let it drip onto the testing strip of the machine, and once the machine was finished reading, I handed it to my friend.



Barely anything came out from his fingers. I watched him scrape the side of his finger against the plastic strip in order to get any few drops in, but it was not enough, and the machine showed a failed reading. He tried again, pricking himself from a different finger, but only a scant amount went out. The machine revealed the same result: FAIL.



I stared more than I should have—I found myself pitying him. Not because he couldn’t draw blood, but because it seemed as though his body did not hold any blood, as if his body had failed to keep itself running.



In the meantime, a giant drop of blood had already swelled on my skin and was threatening to slide down my finger. It wouldn’t stop coming out, and I continually wiped the drops away only to find them quickly replaced by another. 



I was amazed at how much blood I had. More so, I was surprised at the vividness of its color. I stretched out my hands and imagined my hand without its cover, just a contained current of gushing blood. I felt pride. 



III.



Human skin is not very thick—just two to three millimeters—and yet it manages to hide the color of our bodies. If we peeled off our skins and threw them in the corner, all that would be left would be piles of meat and bone, complete with a set of eyeballs and spilling organs. And surrounding that would be blood, expanses of blood in all directions. Each human body contains up to five quarts of blood, enough to cover and stain the hardwood floor of any kitchen.



IV.



The next time I pricked a finger it was not my own. I’d taken up a part-time job as a research assistant in a geriatric clinic. I first started out dealing with just paperwork, but as I finished my trainings, I began to run the patient visits.



For a particular study about atrial fibrilation, we were required to measure the thickness of their blood by giving an INR, short for international normalized ratio, blood test.



A sweet old lady dressed in pastel floral patterns sat smiling at me from her chair. I fumbled around, gathering my necessary tools for my first real operation.



I slowly put on gloves and sat down on the stool in front of her. Everything happened very quickly. I sanitized her hands, took out the gauze and a Band-Aid in preparation, removed the stinger from its packet, and before I could think, I had already punctured a hole in her—the sweet red nectar was seeping out of her body.



My nervousness vanished the moment I saw the blood. It grew from her finger, forming a perfect round droplet. As I milked her finger for more, collecting it into the cup as I went, it began to spread to different parts of her finger, collecting in the small rivets of her skin, and it left behind the same familiar crimson stain. I no longer felt like I was dealing with a foreign object. Her skin became my skin, her blood my blood.



Once the cup was properly filled I inserted it into the cuvette, which drained the blood and simmered it inside the machine. The blood was boiling when I took it out.



I thought that her blood looked normal, but when the test results came back, we learned her INR had climbed up to almost five, while the normal range was two to three. I didn’t know what that meant at the time—her blood could have either been too thick or too thin. If it was too thin, I thought, there would be blood running like liquid through her body and seeping out of every little hole—through her eyes, her ears, her pores. If it was too thick, it would clot and stick to the vessels. Perhaps her high body temperature would have warmed up the blood, just like the machine did to the sample, and simmer it softly, just until it was cooked and brown like the coagulated pork blood that gets sold in Vietnamese grocery stores. I could not believe she was so close to death.



V.



Whenever one of our patients had a bleed event or was hospitalized for any reason, we would receive pages and pages of lab results measuring almost every imaginable chemical in their blood. I had to enter each value into the computer: the time and date the blood was collected, the chemical being measured, and its normal range. This took hours and hours to finish. Once, when an event came up, I sat in front of the computer for two days entering almost three hundred labs.



That was my first time looking closely at any medical terms. Some terms I could understand, such as uric acid, glucose, or sodium, but I also encountered combinations of letters I had never seen before. Gradually, I came to understand that rbc stood for red blood cells, wbc for white blood cells, and hgb for hemoglobin. But there were still others that, even today, I do not know, only that the values recorded were almost all out of range.



One patient was in the hospital for one week, from December 28 to January 6. When I paid attention to the dates, I saw that his levels were mostly normal in December, but come January 2, almost half of his lymph%s and MCVs and MPVs were slightly abnormal, and then by January 6 his glucose levels had jumped to five times the normal amount.



But I was finally done, and I thought no more about it. I simply assumed that everyone was off in some way or another. 



Later on, as I handed the paperwork back to my boss, I mentioned how a lot of this patient’s labs were abnormal. She paused for a second, and then explained that this patient had been in the hospital for quite some time for a serious bleeding event. She had been quietly watching him die.



I realized then what I had just done. I had documented the slow death of a man by watching his blood go berserk.



Blood holds within it the history of an entire life, and as long as we live, it flows through our bodies carrying evidence of our past, making us bleed and clot and cry until that history dissipates, and blood withers away with the life it once carried. Like how the lights on a switchboard go out one by one in a crashing plane with increasing speed until all the lights suddenly vanish, I was watching the levels of each vital fluid in his body shoot off in dangerous directions—until one day, when his entire blood system completely loses its balance, the last light will turn black, and he will have hit the end.



And I would sit in front of the computer with no more blood to enter. And a few days after, we would receive a safety notification letter from the International Review Board, saying that the cause of concern was, in cold, bold letters, DEATH. I would punch holes in that document and file it away in the binder used specifically for study correspondence, and then put that stark white paper away until it was time to move on to the next life.



 

I.



There have been only eight reports of self-cannibalism recorded in scientific literature. The most recent case occurred in 2011 when a 28-year-old man from Australia, in a pit of depression, cut off one of his fingers and ate it. The most historic incident dates back to 1964, when a psychotic male from the U.S. ate copious amounts of skin, subcutaneous tissue, and blood from his shoulders. 



The concept of self-devouring, however, goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks. Erysichthon, the arrogant king of Thessaly, had plans to build a great feasting hall. Only the finest oak trees would be fit for such grandeur, he thought, and marched his servants to the sacred grove of Demeter. There, he found a beautiful oak tree grow- ing at the center and ordered his servants to cut it down. They refused, however, to bring down the tree of a god. 



So the king took the task upon himself. He picked up the axe and swung it, making a deep indentation from which bright blood poured. Erysichthon ignored this ominous sign and continued hacking at the tree, each swing widening the red puddle at his feet. In time, the oak fell to the ground, and he carried the blood-soaked wood home, sure that it would be enough to raise his visionary hall. 



When Demeter discovered the death of her tree, she decided that Erysichthon would be haunted with an insatiable hunger no matter how much he 



ate. She ordered Famine to breathe into his stomach every night and day. Famine did as she was told, and the following day Erysichthon woke up feeling hungrier than he had ever been. He went to the great feasting hall and demanded the largest meals of lamb and egg. Yet the end of every meal left him wanting even more. Each day passed, and food became Erysichthon’s greatest desire. He did anything just to get more food, selling his land, his animals, and his castle. When his riches were exhausted, he sold his own daughter into slavery. 



Yet the hunger persisted, and Erysichthon only grew weaker with each passing day. The hunger finally drove him insane, and in a final act of desperation, he ate his own body. He chewed first at his fingers, then his wrists, licking the sweet blood that poured down his elbows, and then ate his elbows, too. When his arms were gone, he curled up to tackle his toes, sucking each one off one by one. He then gnawed on his shins, taking off the kneecaps from their tendon source and crunch- ing them between his teeth. Death walked by this debacle and took pity on Erysichthon, who was at this point nothing but a head and bleeding torso. With one sweep of his hand, Death put an end to Erysichthon’s suffering right as he was about to eat his own tongue. 



II.

In order to survive, a cell must eat itself. Sometimes proteins are born misfolded and misshapen, presenting a threat to the system, and at other times an organelle will come of age and fail to function. These misfits are dangerous and marked as good candidates to be destroyed. 



The hunter is the phagophore, a U-shaped membrane whose only function is to find the inept proteins. Once it binds to one, it wraps it arms around the cargo and encapsulates it. This newly formed vesicle, called an autophagophore, then delivers the trapped proteins to the lysosome, the mouth of the cell. Once inside the lysosome, the proteins get shredded to pieces. The remains of the dead are recycled into new organelles to carry the cell’s functions forward. 



This process is called autophagy. Some small amount of self-digestion is needed in every cell for quality control. In times of starvation, how- ever, when either oxygen is low or nutrients are scarce, the rate of autophagy increases, and the cells will devour themselves. 



III.

The Dictyostelium discoideum, or dicty, is a type of slime mold. Under natural conditions, it exists as a single amoeba meandering and sliding through its moist home. It enjoys feasting on bits of bacteria that fall in its path. When food is scarce, however, something magical happens. Within six hours of starvation, as if a conch shell had been blown to signal battle, hundreds of dicties from other lands march in and gather around a single point—the dicty that made the initial call. Once enough warriors have gathered, the mass begins spiraling counterclockwise, like an infant galaxy discovering its core. Streams of dicties flow into this mass until it becomes a mound-shaped colony. The mound bubbles and morphs, throbbing with the lives of a million hungry dicties. It stretches and widens and becomes a slug, with a head and a tail and fake little feet that then send it lurching forward in search of food. 



The slug knows to search for heat and light, both of which promise a feast of bacteria. When it senses that it has arrived at a good place, the slug flips over and rams its head into the ground. The dicties at the head—the most starved of them all—die, and their wet bodies, smashed against each other, anchor the slug. It then comes time for the ones in the middle to sacrifice themselves. Their bodies pile and crystallize on top of each other to form a stalk, growing increasingly higher. Once it is high enough, the remaining dicties join together into a little sphere and become spores.

And like this the mass of dicties, in this fruiting body, wait for rain to come. Eventually a drop falls hard enough on the tip of the fruit, and the head explodes, releasing the spores to the wild, where they may grow in some merrier home. 



IV.

There is no law against cannibalism in Japan, which is how 22-year-old Mao Sugiyama got away with cooking and serving his own genitals to five guests at a Tokyo banquet. 



Sugiyama, an illustrator, considered himself asexual, and before his 22nd birthday had surgery to remove his penis, scrotum, and testicles. Following the procedure, he asked the surgeons if he could keep his excised genitalia. They handed him his frozen organs in a small plastic bag, which he kept in his freezer at home for the next two months, free of infection. 



His original plan was to eat his own penis, but after careful deliberation, he decided on a different course of action. Two months after the surgery, on April 8, 2012, Sugiyama posted the following announcement on Twitter: “...I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen.... I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” He also announced that the organs were free of venereal diseases, that they had previously functioned normally, and that he had not been receiving female hormonal treatment. After much interest, Sugiyama also announced that he would take care to follow Japanese food safety and medical waste regulations. 



With the help of three event planners, the Ham Cybele Century Banquet was hosted on May 24, 2012 in the Suginami ward, a residential area in western Tokyo. Seventy people showed up for the exclusive event. From among them, the highest-paying bidders were chosen to dine on the fine meats; each paid 250 dollars for the experience. The first was a 32-year-old male manga artist who thought the gross act would be good research for his own work. Following him was a 30-year-old couple who just wanted to know. Next came an attractive 22-year-old woman. The fifth was 29-year-old event planner Shigenobu Matsuzawa, who wanted to take part in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The sixth person did not show up. 



A short piano recital marked the start of the event. Sugiyama emerged soon afterwards, adorned in a crisp white frock and chef’s hat to greet his applauding audience. A small rectangular table with a red tablecloth greeted him at the center of the hall. His cooking materials lay waiting on the surface: a single portable gas burner, a small metal pot, a steak knife, a container of soy sauce, a napkin, and a single lemon. The room of people watched intently as he sliced up all six inches of his penis, cut his scrotum in half, and sautéed them with cooking wine and a bit of parsley. Those who weren’t able to eat his genitals were instead served crocodile meat. 



 



Sugiyama finished within minutes and served his carefully sliced manhood to the five chosen diners, who all signed a waiver relieving him of any responsibility if they became ill. The meal came with a side of button mushrooms. One of the diners later commented that the meat was rubbery and tasteless. 

 



My dad was the first in the family to get plastic surgery. He lost the tips of his fingers sixteen years ago in an accident at the paper factory where he worked when we first moved to America. My dad arrived on time and never made trouble with the other employees. Every morning saw him stepping out of our apartment in the same outfit: a tucked-in collared shirt with a small hole or two hidden in the armpits, faded dress pants, and a belt to hold up his pants on his skinny body. The clothes were all from Goodwill, just like his lunchbox, which was blue and white and had frayed plastic on the edges. Eventually, they promoted him to a management position, in which he had to watch over the cutting machine. It had a huge blade that cut giant cylinders of paper into smaller, more usable rolls. 



One day, the machine broke, and my dad was responsible for fixing it. While he was poking his hands in and out of the machine, something released, and the blade dropped down, slamming its edge onto his hands. It sliced off the tips of his four left fingers, cutting cleanly through the bones of the first metacarpals. What was left behind were bloody stumps with shriveled, blue skin at the tip and glistening hints of bone somewhere in that mess.



The doctors took chunks of meat from his thighs and sewed them on as fingers.



My middle sister came next when she decided to get a nose job and eyelid surgery. Then followed my eldest sister with her tummy tuck. Now, my mom is about to fall under the blade. 



 



* * *



We sit in the waiting room as the nurses shuffle around us. They wear heels and tight pink shirts emblazoned with jewels that spell out “BOTOX” across their over-sized breasts. The receptionist flashes us her abnormally white teeth and greets us with a face that is evenly powdered with thick, matte make up. All the nurses wear similarly sculpted faces. They maintain eternal smiles and speak with a tone too soft and sweet, like preserved cherries. I help my mom fill out the paperwork and translate some of the brochures into Vietnamese for her. We pass the time flipping through albums of Befores and Afters, page after page of magically shrunken bellies and tightened skin.



A nurse comes and escorts us to the screening office. A large mahogany desk takes up the far left corner of the room. On top of it sits a computer monitor set to a solid blue screen. A single bookshelf stands against the opposite wall, and a full-length mirror leaned casually adjacent to it. A few green plants dot the tops of the furniture, and certificates and paintings of flowers decorate the cream-colored walls. If it wasn’t for the breast implants lining the shelves of the bookcase and the examination chair sitting ominously at the center, the room could have passed for any middle-class family doctor’s office.



I remember such offices. I had gone with my middle sister to a consultation before she had her surgery. 



I think my middle sister chose the knife because my mom called her ugly all the time. Every time they met, my mom would criticize her nose or compare her to our ugly aunt, saying that they had the exact same face. Or sometimes she would joke, “Your nostrils are so big, you’ll never be able to be rich. Any money that you find will just slip right out of them.” 



Usually my sister doesn’t believe in superstition, but the jokes had some truth in them—of the three sisters, my middle sister was always the one who spent her money most lavishly on clothes and perfumes. Towers of shoes and once-worn gowns filled her closet. It didn’t matter that her boyfriend thought her nose was cute. It didn’t matter that she won a beauty pageant. It didn’t matter that my mom said she was just joking the whole time. These words entered my sister and tore her apart from the inside.



Of course I didn’t know how hurt she was until she told me late one night that she wanted a nose job, and I stayed up until morning trying to hold her back. I thought I could save her, but then I looked at her. Something in her eyes had already glazed over. I imagined her body being cut up into pieces by my mom’s words and reassembled into a different person by a stranger. I saw that my sister had already chosen to go down this path, and I cried.



 



* * *



That was four years ago. Now, I try my best not to let my emotions seep through as my mom and I go on with the consultation. We sit down in leather chairs, and the same pretty nurse with the BOTOX shirt sits down in front of us. My mom conjures up her best English and explains that she would like a facelift, tummy tuck, and perhaps eyelid surgery. The nurse smiles. She selects a few videos for us to watch on the computer and then excuses herself from the room. My mom and I go through them. The videos take us through a step-by-step methodology of each type of surgery. To perform a facelift, the surgeons make a long U-shaped incision that starts from the temples, reaches the base of the ear, and curves backwards to the hairline. This makes a pocket in the face. The surgeons pull up the skin, disconnecting it from underlying tissue, and scrape away any excess fat within the pocket. The skin is then pulled back to the ears. Any excess is removed, and the wound is closed. In cases when there is too much fat beneath the chin, they will also make a small incision at the base of the chin to suck it out.



To perform a tummy tuck, surgeons make three incisions in the body: a smile along the pubic line extending towards the hips, a frown below the rib cage, and a circle around the belly button. They cut the frowns and the smiles so that the ends meet each other, making an eye-shape on the stomach. This eye covers the areas of skin that will later be removed. The belly button is set free by the incisions surrounding it, so that it will not be ripped off from the body when the skin comes off. After these first three cuts are made, the doctors take a pair of clamps and peel off the skin starting from one corner of the eye. 



The videos present us with clean, spotless skin without any fat residues; seamless, bloodless cuts; and smooth, pink muscles in every diagram. When surgeons actually perform surgery, they have to tug hard because the skin is still alive and clings to the muscle throbbing underneath.



Human fat is yellow and clings to the skin in tumorous clumps, like gelatinous stalactites. All of the fat is removed, sucked out with tubes, cut away with knives. A considerable amount simply rips away along with the skin. Muscle is red, and its sinews run parallel to each other, forming tiny grooves in between the fibers of the meat. Blood sometimes gets stuck inside these grooves and clots, forming brown puddles during surgery. It looks as if someone threw embers onto the body, turning the flesh to ash in areas where the skin was burnt the most. 



Once the eye on the belly is removed completely, the surgeons lift it off the body. It looks like a sagging hide of road kill, though everyone knows that it belonged to something human. To finish the procedure, they pull the flap of skin above the gaping hole down, over the belly button, until it meets with the bottom lid of the recently removed eye. The skin is held in place as they suture the flaps back together. Finally, they locate the belly button hiding beneath the skin and cut a hole around it so that it can reemerge. To finish the operation, they secure the bellybutton with a few last stitches.



 



* * *



My eldest sister recently went through this procedure. I found out about it when I was roaming around Argentina. Sitting at an internet café, I opened an email from my middle sister explaining how she would be taking my eldest sister home after the operation. It would have been so easy if I could have just been mad. I wanted to place my sister into the paradigm of an insecure, needy middle-aged woman who complains too much. I wanted to be mad at her husband for agreeing, at my sister for being an ally. I wanted to have screamed in protest and written a long email in response. Then it would have been simple. But I couldn’t. Instead of words of rage, I found only sympathy.



I couldn’t blame her—not after having seen her real stomach. 



I had come to her house and found her lying down breastfeeding her youngest son. It looked as though she had taken a nap with the baby because the sheets were rumpled, her hair was tousled, and her shirt was pulled back from turning in her sleep. It revealed a small triangle of skin at her stomach. We started talking, and at some point during our conversation she saw me looking and lifted her shirt up to reveal the entirety of her scarred stomach.



It looked like a balloon that had been fully inflated and left to slowly deflate on its own, with wrinkles and dents and strange craters all over its sides. Stretch marks covered everything below the ribcage, and a smiling scar ran across her pubic line, the result of multiple caesarian sections. The skin sagged. It sank down the base of her pubic line. This was all the extra skin that her body had no use for after giving birth to three children. There was so much skin that when she clenched it with her hands, blobs rolled out from between her fingers, as if she were squeezing Play-doh. After her pregnancy, the skin realized its unnecessary role for the body and, on its own, willed itself to die—and turned brown, the color of rotting bananas. 



 



* * *



When my mom and I finish the videos, the nurse comes back and asks if we had any questions. We don’t. She smiles again, sweetly mutters some cordial phrases, and then leaves.



The doctor comes in, introduces himself, and asks us if we had any questions. My mom asks him about neurological dysfunction, which happens when the nerve endings are destroyed after surgery. In such cases, she would lose the ability to smile. He comforts her by saying that these cases almost never happened. 



My mom then asks if he could also do a brow lift and eyelid surgery. These were simple: a small cut above the temples along the hairline, a little tug to pull the skin up and lift the eyebrows. I watch him scan my mom’s face for a few seconds. His eyes give two quick glances over her eyebrows. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple—and to be honest it’s not that necessary in your case.”



In the prescreening, he asks my mom to sit on the examination chair. She is short—only five feet tall, so it is a bit difficult for her to get on. She wiggles onto the chair, sits, and then looks at him in anticipation. None of us spoke much. The doctor kneels down a bit to match my mom’s height, and then directs his professional attention to her face. With his left hand he guides my mom’s face up or down, left or right, depending on what he needs to examine. With his right hand, he places his thumb on her chin for support and uses two of his fingers to push skin back and forth in certain areas. After a few minutes he delivers his verdict:



“So in your case we would have to cut behind the ears and at the base of the chin.” He saw the puzzled look on my mom and directed his attention to me, “Your mom doesn’t need that much on the face. Just a bit of work on the chin should do it, and she doesn’t have that much in the first place. Here is a really extreme case on an elder lady who could not have surgery on her face.” He shows both of us a Before and After of an extremely old lady who got a chin tuck. The woman originally had so much fat beneath her chin that she had no neckline, only a large, sagging flap that formed a triangle where her neck should have been. The surgeons made only one incision on her chin, but they managed to suck out enough fat to give her a neck. My mom is impressed. 



The surgeon is now ready to examine her for the tummy tuck. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. For now, you can undress.” He hands her a white smock that opened up in the front. “Wear this, and you can keep your underwear on.”



When the door closes, my mom slowly takes off her clothes. She is slightly plump, with a bit of fat resting on her thighs, around her arms, and surrounding her waist. Her stomach swells out a bit, and it carries a few stretch marks and scars in it, the aftermath of carrying four children. After she finishes undressing, she wraps the smock around her body and climbs onto the examination chair again. I realize that this was the first time I have seen her this naked. She looks so soft. Her skin is pale and almost translucent, and I can almost map out the veins running up from her feet. She is sitting silently on the chair, dangling her feet, and staring expectantly at the door, and I have a sudden urge to cradle her in my arms. 



The door opens and the doctor returns. My mom opens her smock, exposing her little white belly, and he begins his second examination. After a few minutes of silence, he gets up and explains that my mom only needs a medium-size tummy tuck. “Again, it’s not that bad. After the surgery, we could reduce it to about half. You’ll definitely still be able to tell the difference though. The results will still be good. As for the rest, we can’t get to it because it’s located behind the muscle frame. But you can easily fix that by losing … maybe five pounds. It’s not that big, and that should do it.” With that, he shakes my mom’s hand and then leaves. My mom scurries to the door and put her clothes on. She avoids looking at the mirror as she passes it.



 



* * *



Perhaps my mom will someday be able to look at herself. My middle sister, after her surgery, claims that she, for once, feels beautiful in front of the mirror. She knows that the changes were very subtle, and that people can’t really tell the difference in most cases. She knows that being slightly prettier doesn’t affect her performance at work, but it doesn’t matter. She can smile at herself now. 



When my middle sister got her tummy tuck, she went to a family wedding dressed in a strapless, cream-colored gown that flowed to the ground. Small ripples of fabric ran across her torso and emphasized her curves. Her waist was tiny, and from the side, her stomach was completely flat. She hadn’t worn that dress in five years—not since she married and had kids. I told her how fantastic she looked. She smiled sheepishly and said, “Oh come on. It wasn’t like I exercised or anything.” That night we took many family photos, and my eldest sister gladly volunteered herself to take full-body shots. 



I thought of my dad, who never shows his hands. 



After his surgery, gravity pulled the meat to the sides as his fingers healed, and the tips look like they are about to slip off. The fingernail grew back on only one finger—the others have dents where the nails should be. They never regained their flexibility. They bend only slightly back and forth from the first joint, and when left unflexed, stick out like sock puppets craning their heads in jumbled directions. It’s almost as if the accident never happened because he hides his hands in every photograph. 



After his surgery he unwillingly joined my mom in the business and became a nail technician because there wasn’t anything else he could do. Work is more manageable now that he runs his own nail store. At first he started out working as a regular employee, performing basic manicures for customers. One time, he sat down to do a manicure for a young lady, but she recoiled and screamed when she saw his hand. Then she got up and left without a word.



Both he and my mom agreed that plastic surgery might be necessary if my mom was to continue working in the nail business. Her customers, when they come to the store, don’t know   that she works thirteen hours a day and comes home at eleven after thirteen hours of work, only to start cooking for tomorrow and do her accounting. They don’t know that she climbs into bed at two in the morning and wakes up at seven, and has been repeating this routine six days a week, all weeks of the year, for the past twelve years. They don’t see that she barely has time to put on her lipstick in the morning, never mind doing cardio exercise for half an hour three times a week. They only know that she has wrinkles, over-sized pores, white-hair, and pockets of fat forming at the base of her cheeks. Seeing this, how can they trust her to make them beautiful when she doesn’t seem to value her own beauty?



 



* * *



The last person to see us in the office was the manager of the clinic. Perhaps she thought I was stunned by her beauty, and perhaps she has received the same reaction many times. Her body had been cut, sewn up, altered, covered, pulled, twisted, and inflated in almost every possible place: a nose job, breast implants, facelift, hair-dye, heavy make-up, Botox, and a tummy tuck. She was around sixty years old, but packaged to be twenty. She looked neither old nor young. Her beauty wasn’t the sort of ageless beauty that some women gather as they age, when they manage to carry their gravity with grace. Her taut, flawless skin looked as if it could suddenly snap and spew out her contents. She turned out to be a sweet lady though, and an excellent businesswoman. She had been a patient at the clinic for sixteen years before she became its manager. Her surgeon was our surgeon.



She handed us the papers. The tummy tuck would be $6,000, and the facelift would be either $8,000 or $11,000, depending on whether my mother chose general or local anesthesia. The conversation drew to an end, and the lady asked us if we had any final questions. My mom wanted to see her scars. The manager stood up and showed us her belly, and we could see a very faint scar at the pubic line where they had performed the surgery years ago. Then she bent down and showed us the scars on her chin and face. My mom’s eyes lit up when she saw how faint they were.



In the car, my mom asked me, “Wasn’t that lady pretty?” I looked at my mom. She was looking at me. I turned my head back to the lines on the road, unable to say anything because of what felt like a knife in my throat. Instead, I kept on driving. 



 

 I.



 



When I was about six weeks old and still inside my mother, my milk lines formed. This happens in every mammal: the skin of the fetus suddenly thickens along two parallel lines that run diagonally from the groin to the armpits. Then, just as quickly as they form, the mountain ranges collapse back onto the skin. Within just three weeks they have disappeared almost completely, leaving behind only two small peaks at the chest. These are the buds from which future nipples will form. Other mammals have different rates of milk line recession, resulting in more nipples later on. Pigs, for example, can have as many as eighteen nipples from which little piglets can suck.Humans would ideally have two nipples, and in some cases where the recession does not happen properly, third nipples will grow out from the improperly reduced milk line. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily for me, I came into the world with the correct number of mammary seeds planted in my chest. 



I felt them when I was nine, sitting in front of the computer after dinner and playing Snake. Something compelled me to reach under my shirt. Perhaps it was just natural childhood inquisitiveness—students in my class that year had started to whisper things they somehow knew should not be heard by our teacher. Or perhaps it was an odd new sensation of my shirt rubbing against something that had not been there before. 



The giggling curiosity that compelled me, as well as all the other blushing boys and girls, was a byproduct of having new chemicals inside my body, in all of our bodies. My ovaries, having received some very specific chemical inclinations, had begun seeping estrogen into the bloodstream. When the signals reached my chest, the seeds started to grow, evolving into a lump of milk, tissue, and glands, otherwise known as a breast bud. The more precise term is *thelarche*, which derives from two Greek words: *thele*, meaning nipple, and *arche*, meaning the beginning, or onset.



I made sure that no one else was close by and slid my right hand up to my chest, massaging the area under the left nipple. A hard lump, like a little stone, was lodged underneath the skin. At first I was unsure if it truly existed, but each trial resulted in the same discovery: a nickel sized lump nested right under the left nipple. It hurt when I squeezed it too hard, and I kept pinching, as if in a dream, the pain affirming its existence. I checked the right side, and sure enough, it had its own bump. It was smaller, but it ached the same. The stones were real. I could not excise them from my body, and I could tell no one. 



What I did do, however, was observe. I figured whatever happened to my older sisters would inevitably happen to me. My middle sister, seven years older than me, bore the biggest breasts, the most slender neck, and the daintiest wrists. Her unique combination of beauty traits made her a pageant queen many times over, but we will not get into that.I knew that my neck was shorter and that my bones were thicker than hers, so there was never any hope of competing with that. However, I gauged that there was potential in my breasts. On the weekends I sat on the bed examining the way she applied mascara and lipstick, brushed on rouge and eyeshadow, and put every hair in place. Most of all, I admired the portion of fabric that stretched between the two mounds of her chest, wondering when the day would come that my body could impose the same physical effect on the fabric surrounding me. 



 



II.



 



I came home from the fifth grade one day, and my mom handed me my first bra. “You’re a big girl now,” she said, “You need to wear this.” This first one was a simple sports bra, with the most intricate part being the elastic band that clung like death to my chest. I could not see any practicality in wearing it, only that it helped me fit in with the other girls in the locker room. It still seemed possible, perhaps, that these things were temporary, and by tomorrow we would be free of them. That same year, I was taught that the sun would someday die, and I, feeling the pressure of the contraption beneath my shirt, realized that my childhood, too, would eventually dissipate just like the sun.



The sports bras turned into slightly more shaped training bras, where the cut and design suggested something a bit more feminine. The day came when my two sisters took me to Victoria’s Secret to buy my first real bra, like the ones my mom wore. “See the numbers? That’s for the diameter of your chest.” They said. “You’re a 32.” They explained the meaning of the letters, the clasps, the straps, and how the cups should never ride up when I raise my arms to the air. If they do, then I should loosen the straps, and they taught me how to do that too. We settled with a black bra with no metal reinforcement or padding, frills or laces. It was a polyester and spandex breed that sat smoothly on my skin, invisible to anyone but myself. “You’re an A cup,” my sisters said. I repeated that in my head. My breasts seemed so inadequate next to theirs, but at the end of the day, I was glad to have my letter.  



Aside from the excitement of having something that all the other women in my family wore, I still could not see the purpose of bras. And so, inevitably, there were times when I neglected to wear one. This happened when I was ten and traveling back to Vietnam. My grandfather was a monk, and we visited him at his temple. When we arrived at the ornamented gates outside his residence, my eldest sister looked at me, furrowed her brows, and asked me why I was not wearing my bra. I had simply forgotten. Though I asked why it was so important, she did not explain her concern and instead just told me to keep my arms folded over my chest. 



The temple had a courtyard at the center with statues and bonsai trees. When we had finished drinking tea outside my grandfather’s dormitory, I ran to the courtyard, sat down beneath a Bodhi tree, and posed as the meditating Buddha. Then we all lined up along either side of my grandfather and smiled at the camera. When we came back from the trip, I looked back at the photographs and was shocked to see that my nipples were very clearly protruding through the shirt in every picture. It then became clear why my sister had told me to cross my arms. I learned that nipples were something to be ashamed of, and since then, I have worn a bra every single day of my life. 



 



III.



 



It turns out that the body carries its own natural brassiere. Coopers ligaments, a set of connective tissue, are accredited for maintaining the shape and position of breasts. The ligaments descend from the clavicle and stretch through and around breast tissue. The clavicle thus becomes the line demarcating the beginning of breasts, and this may partly explain the sexual allure of that bone. 



Cooper’s ligaments are named after Sir Astley Cooper, a British surgeon and anatomist who first described these ligaments in 1840. He also named many other anatomical parts, including Cooper's fascia, a thin film covering the spermatic cord; Cooper's pubic ligament, the superior [pubic ligament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectineal_ligament); Cooper's stripes, a fibrous structure in the [ulnar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulna) ligaments, and a variety of diseases. 



Cooper is not the only man to insert his name into various aspects of the female body. Roughly a century after Cooper coined his ligaments, a pediatric endocrinologist by the name of James Tanner, who was also a Brit, came up with a system to measure breast development. Aside from breasts, he also demarcates stages in the development of genitals and pubic hair for both girls and boys.His scale, appropriately called the Tanner scale, defines five stages of physical development based on external sex characteristics. 



In Tanner’s world, Stage One features nothing but the nipple floating on a sea of skin. There are no glands, ducts, or lobules, only the remnants of the milk ridges from the fetal landscape. Stage Two, and the thelarches form; I am playing Snake, feeling the buds. Stage Three, a continuation of Stage Two as I sit with my nipples exposed underneath the Bodhi tree. In Stage Four, the nipples start to protrude from the surrounding breast tissue, and I have sex for the first time. During those years, my left breast was frequently bigger than my right, as is common in many women, but my boyfriends didn’t seem to mind. 



 



IV.



 



At this point in my life, I have reason to believe that my breasts are mature, and that if Tanner, were he still alive and could analyze them, would surely place me in that fifth and final stage. But for several years, from when I was nineteen to twenty-two years old, I put no thought into my breasts. They seemed inert and happy as they were, and I conducted my relationships fairly confident in my body’s ability to allure. 



It did not occur to me that they had grown silently until I went to Victoria’s Secret to replace my old bras. The sales representative asked me what size I was looking for. I told her 34B, at which point she made a face and said, after glancing at my chest, “Really? No, you’re definitely a C.” I felt a bit violated that she could look through me like that, but also flattered. A part of me also questioned my feeling of flattery as a product of her attempt to sell a bra, knowing that Victoria’s Secret sometimes uses vanity sizes to make women feel more accomplished about their sexual development. Nevertheless, I tried the C’s, and they fit better than the B’s. 



I remained incredulous for quite some time. I never thought that I would someday be able to match my sisters in breast size, but since then multiple incidences have me think that my breasts have become substantial. My boyfriend, whom I was in a long distance relationship at the time, told me each time we met that they were bigger. They were also more or less the same size which suggests that they had reached beyond the growing phase of Stage Four. At one point, out of the blue, he also told me that I had nice breasts. I asked him why they were nice, and he explained that they were very round and full, and the nipples pointed in the same direction. Though the relationship did not last, I will always remember him fondly for those words.



More recently, a young man asked me while we laid in bed if my breasts were fake. I sat up, wide eyed, and exclaimed that they were real. “Are you kidding me? Fake boobs are hard and cold, and not nearly as sensitive.” I said. “Mine are soft!” 



I said these things with confidence because my aunt has fake breasts, and she let us touch them. A week after her operation, she sat with us at dinner, and the topic settled on her implants. “Do you want to see?” She asked. Before anyone could give a response, she unbuttoned her shirt halfway and pulled out her left breast. My mother, father, sisters and I took turns pressing down on the engorged organs as the food grew cold on the table. They felt stiff and plastic, nothing like what their roundness implied, and judging from the blank expressions on my aunt’s face as we probed her chest, they were not very sensitive either. Nevertheless, they were beautiful.



After telling him that story, I cupped each breast in my hand, as if checking that my assertions were true. Each one filled up my palms with heavy, soft flesh that bulged out between the fingers. They felt solid and warm on my body. The weight of my womanhood suddenly felt very clear to me.



 



V.



 



The baby looks a lot smaller than he does in the pictures. “Be prepared for flashes of nudity,” my sister says. “The boy has to feed every two hours.” She paused, as if thinking about something, and a look of vague revulsion creeps onto her face. “My breasts are huge now, look.” She lifts up her shirt. 



I stare, wide-eyed. They are immense. I feel inclined to look away but cannot stop staring, as if her mammary demanded worship. Both breasts have inflated to about twice their size before pregnancy. They sag with the weight of milk and hang from her body like ripe papayas, dripping with sap, from the tree. Fresh veins, which have grown to supply blood to the glands now in full operation, decorate the surface of her pale, smooth skin. The nipples, once small and innocent, have darkened and grown into long, meaty tubes that now give milk. 



The source of this milk comes from deep within the breast, inside little chambers called alveoli. Like underground caves with dripping stalactites, the alveoli are lined with secreting cells that trickle milk into little holding places called lobules. Bunches of lobules congregate to form a lobe, which empties its contents into a lactiferous duct that flows all the way to the nipple. Each breast contains ten to twenty of these lobes arranged like flower petals around the center. I can see the ends of those ducts clearly on the surface of my sister’s skin. They appear as little elevated dots that sprout in a circle much like the way mushrooms grow around in a fairy ring. 



“This is a good learning experience for you,” she says as she breastfeeds the small, squirming child. He clings to the softness of her chest, and I think of Henry Harlow’s monkeys. 



The experiments started in the 1950s. Harlow used Rhesus monkeys. He took the babies away from their mothers at birth and raised them on two types of surrogates: a bare wire mesh monkey and another one covered in cloth. They were both equipped to dispense milk through a nipples at the chest. Harlow found that the baby monkeys held onto the cloth mother for longer periods of time. In modified experiments, both surrogates were available, but the cloth mother no longer provided milk. Despite the wire monkey’s ability to feed, the baby monkeys still spent most of their time hugging their fuzzier option. If they were hungry, they would clamber up the bony frame of the metal mother, feed themselves, and then run back to the softer mother, their eyes wet with need.   



The way these monkeys held onto the cloth surrogate is not too different from the way Joseph lies on my sister’s body. His head fits perfectly into the crevice of her breasts, and his arms splay out comfortably on top of her milk-filled pillows. It is as if everything beforehand, the bras, the beauty pageants, the cleavage, attraction, and the buildup of glands, all existed in order to build up to this one moment when the breast, engorged to its limit with milk, can expunge its contents into the hungry mouth of an infant.



It is two in the morning, and I tell my sister that after witnessing her sleep deprivation and hearing of the rips and tears and screams that occurred during her fifteen hour labor, I do not want to have kids. She doesn’t respond, but I know she is listening. When she finishes feeding, she asks me, “Does Auntie My Ngoc want to hold Baby Joseph?” 



I nod excitedly, and pick him up with both hands, making sure to support his neck. The baby lies cradled in my elbow, gurgling. He looks like both his parents. He has his dad’s long torso and limbs, his eyes, and his lips. He has the tip of my sister’s nose perched on a bridge that resembles that of his fathers. My sister goes to get some rest. 



I rock Joseph back and forth. His mouth points towards my breast, and I am painfully aware of how incapable my body is to nurture him. His eyes start to close for longer periods of time, and I can tell that sleep is settling. Something gives me the idea to hum jazz melodies to him, for they are the only melodies I know at heart these days. I start with Stardust, then Someone to Watch Over Me. By the time I am halfway through Misty, the baby is fast asleep. I hold him for just a bit longer, even though his tiny body was starting to feel heavy against my chest.

I.



I’ve always wondered what kind of lifestyle it takes for someone to grow fungus on their body. I used to think that these people were the exception, but I have touched too many feet with clumps of dirt scrunched up under the nails to continue believing that the majority of the population keeps itself clean. 



I especially loved thick, yellow toenails hiding years of bacteria between layers of keratin. Heels covered in calluses. Toe hair. Sores. A fine layer of dead, crusted skin running from the heels all the way up to the knees.    



This is the world of a nail technician: flakes of dead skin and cuticles, bits of nails and hair, dirt squished into balls nudged into the corners of spa chairs. Anything that could get filthy got filthy, and three years of subjugation to this law taught me to wash my hands. 



 



II.



In the back of the salon, behind the television, nestled in the corner between the heaters and the water fountain, was a small room equipped with a toilet and a sink. There were little decorations as well: a plunger, a scrubber, and a dusty fake plant that had claimed its territory on top of the paper towel dispenser for the past ten years. There was also a mirror above the sink. It was covered with toothpaste, grease, spit: every imaginable form of human matter. There was a sign above the door that said “Restroom” for all those who desired to use it as such. I never paid much attention to that sign though. To me, it was the washing room.



 



III.



Once, when I was in the third grade, I fell asleep on the bus and missed my stop, so my bus driver drove me home last, after she finished dropping off the other kids. It was a long drive and she talked for most of it. Towards the end she asked me what I planned to do when I got home. I wanted to say that I would take a shower. I suddenly thought about how wonderful it felt to be clean after a long day of school. I imagined that there was water pounding on my head and clear blue shampoo that I could pour on my hands and then lather into my hair. I imagined opening the shower curtains and seeing my bathroom mirrors, fogged up from the steam and the heat, and suddenly I wanted to take a shower right then and there. The bus was so hot—and my clothes were dripping with sweat from my hour-long ride. I wanted so badly to tell her everything, but I couldn’t. 



I didn’t know how to say “shower.” 



My cheeks turned red. I hung my head trying to think of the word, but, after a long pause, when it still hadn’t come to me, I lifted my head and said, “I wash myself.” 



 



IV.



It started with two bags. Back then we didn’t have enough money to buy a washing machine for the store, so we just brought all the dirty towels home with us. Every night, my dad hauled these sacks with him. Whenever I heard the garage open, I ran downstairs and waited to see him come through the door. It was always the same order: the buzzing of the door, footsteps, a bang as he kicked the door open, and then the crackle of thin plastic as the bags flew through the door and slid across the linoleum floor.



Sometimes I helped him wash them. I would hand him the towels, five at a time, and he would carefully place them in the washer so that the weight was evenly distributed. Most of the towels were only slightly damp. But on occasion, I would pluck out a sopping wet one covered in slimy green mucus—the special aloe vera scrub that we slop over people’s legs in a deluxe pedicure. Other towels had bits of hair—perhaps from the workers—or bits of nail or skin that had latched on during the pedicure. But most of the towels were relatively clean. I was secretly thankful every time I could pick up just the towel itself. After we washed the towels, I washed my hands and then helped my mom cook dinner. My parents always ate quickly. Twenty minutes was more than enough to finish a few bowls of rice, enough time for the towels to wash. Once we finished, I scurried to the laundry room and helped my dad unload the towels into the dryer. 



In the morning, I would come downstairs to find a pile of fluffy, white cotton towels folded neatly and arranged into piles, already fitted into a bag that was squarely tied at the top. And then it was that same order again, except backwards: when I would hug my dad, watch him pull the bags through the door, and then stare at the door as the garage grumbled onwards and into silence. 



 



V. 



It was inevitable that I work there. All of us had to do it—it was the family business. My mother stopped being my mother and turned into my boss at the nail store. My two older sisters spent their high school days marching back and forth between home and the store. They called it war, and working at the store meant killing off customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. They would be called up for service when the boss didn’t have enough troops to handle the army. We would be playing Goldfish on the kitchen table, or stepping out the front door to walk to the park, and then the phone would ring. 



Sometimes we pretended it hadn’t happened. Sometimes, we waited to see if it would start again, for only then would it be urgent. But the verdict always came, and it was a silent statement. I saw my sisters pick up the phone, drop their smiles, drop the phone, and then drop me—they had to go. 



Days like this passed by gradually, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly, it was my turn. 



 



VI.



I eat three times a day: once in the morning before I go to work, once six hours later when I’m at work, and again when I come home. At the store, I eat between customers. I finish with one pedicure, run to the backroom and pop in a bowl of instant noodles, and then run back one pedicure later to slurp down the entire bowl in five minutes. I have to because I have another customer waiting outside. If my boss doesn’t see me in five minutes, she calls the intercom and tells me to run back up to the front because the customers are starting to squirm in their chairs. The moment I finish my last noodle, I sprint to the washing room and wash my bowl. Sometimes I am in such a rush that I accidentally splash the broth or I leave soap marks on the mirror, but I don’t care and I don’t have enough time to wash it off because I have to go. 



 



VII. 



Each of her toenails had to be the exact same length and shape; a millimeter off made her scream in protest. She glowered over me the whole time I was cutting her cuticles, pretending to be in pain and squirming at the lightest suggestion of pain, and, when I scrubbed her feet, she made me scrub them again because a spot on her heel still felt a bit rough. Her legs were fat and heavy. I tried lifting them up to massage her. She saw me struggling and didn’t even make an effort to help. She wanted white tips on her toenails, which meant that I had to paint a thin layer of white at the edge of every nail and then take a brush and meticulously shape them into whatever shape she wanted. She then asked for a design. I gave her the design. She made me change it twice. When I did it for the second time, she bent over, made a face, and said, “Oh whatever I’ll just have to live with it.” 



The other employees have first pick of customers; the good customers—the clean, polite, considerate, and generous ones—are given to employees according to their seniority and skill. Not only was I the youngest, but I had no experience with acrylic nails, waxing, or any other service beyond the basic manicure and pedicure. I could only rub feet and squeeze hands. I only knew how to cut people and scrub their parts. 



This left me with a splendid selection of customers ranging from the dirty to the impolite, the indecisive to the cheap. At times, I found all these traits in a single customer. Like the lady whose nails I labored over for two hours. 



She ended up not giving me a tip. When my boss came and saw my work, she apologized to the customer, “Please forgive this girl—she is new.” I cleaned up. My boss continued, “I won’t charge you. Tell you what—I’ll redo the pedicure for free.” My boss never looked at me. That was my mom. That was my first pedicure. 



I finished cleaning. I gathered my basket. Then I went to the washing room, where I washed my face. And then I stayed there until my eyes were dry and white again.



VIII.



One day my boss told me to do a pedicure at the first spa chair. I went to the back and grabbed my work basket, two towels, and a pair of gloves. I came back up front to find an old black man, probably in his late fifties, soaking his feet in the tub at the foot of his spa chair. I asked him how he was, and he replied, without looking at me, with a single nod. Trying not to think about his silence—perhaps he couldn’t understand what I said—I put on my gloves. When my boss saw that I was getting ready to start the pedicure, she came over and, without saying a word, gave me a mask to put over my nose. I gave her a quizzical look. She sighed and said, “Just use it.”



I put on the mask and asked the man to lift his feet from the now murky water. They rose up from the whirlpool bath like two creatures sprouting from the sea: huge and brown, covered in scales and barnacles and disease. I looked at my boss. She met my gaze firmly, and by the look of her eyes I immediately knew that I was to stay quiet; that, although this pedicure would take me three times as long as usual to finish, it would cost as much as the basic pedicure; that she gave me this pedicure because none of the employees would touch his feet. 



There are four basic parts to a pedicure: shaping the toenails, cutting the cuticles, scrubbing the calluses, and massaging the leg. 



His toenails were a quarter-of-an-inch thick. They had the texture and hardness of wood. They had grown to an incredible length and, as they grew, curved inwards. They were infected with fungus, green in some areas and purple in others. The man avoided eye contact. 



I looked back down and grimly got to work. Even while wearing the mask, I could smell the bacteria on his skin. I had to think of a way to cut the trunks of toenails into stubs. I found my answer in the cuticle cutter, a pair of scissors with short, chubby blades. It was smaller than the nail clipper, but its blades were far enough apart for me to cut down his nails. So I went to work, starting with the little toe. It took me dozens of cuts to whittle each nail down to size. I made sure to cut them as short as possible—right down to the skin, so that no filth could accumulate underneath his nails. As I worked, little pieces of skin would sometimes fly out, and I’d duck as they nearly hit my eyes.



Fifteen minutes later, I finished and could move onto the cuticles. Most people clean the cuticles around their nails, which makes it easier to tell what’s cuticle and what’s tender skin. But this man’s cuticles were so thick that they grew in layers, forming a white gelatinous wall around the sides of his toenail, leaving me terrified that I would accidentally prick him.



Nevertheless, I started cutting, feeling my way around by judging the softness of what my blade was touching; if it was too elastic, then I knew it was skin. I was working on his big toe when I saw blood—I had cut a small part of his skin, and it was bleeding and spewing blood onto the rims of his toes. 



I have cut people before, and every time I apply a clotting solution that makes the blood shrivel and dry. What disturbed me was his silence. When I had finished treating the wound, I fearfully looked up at him, but he had not noticed a thing. At first I thought it was because he was very tolerant of pain, but then I realized that he could not feel any pain; the bacteria on his toes had long ago killed the nerves in the skin, so that the cuts and wounds and festers on his toes were completely unknown to him. I was glad that he did not notice my shivers. 



Now came the part that I dreaded most: the heels. The whole time, his feet had been completely flat down. I asked him to raise his feet up and prop them on their heels. He did, and in doing so revealed an entire topography of canyons, plateaus, and rivers that ran the length of his foot. It was a landscape made completely out of dead skin, dirt, and calluses. 



By now I was trembling and fighting the urge to cry. I grabbed the callus remover. This is a liquid that, when applied to the bottom of the foot, will dissolve the layers of dead skin and calluses. I smothered his feet in this substance, and then I waited five minutes as it started eating away at his skin. When it had finished soaking, I got the razor and started shaving away his calluses. By the time I finished, there was a small mountain of brown foot flakes on the floor. 



Scrubbing time followed. I scrubbed, and I scrubbed, and I scrubbed. I lifted his feet into the air and scrubbed every single nook and cranny of his foot. I scrubbed the sides of his toes, I scrubbed around his toes, and I scrubbed between his toes. When I had finished with one foot, I looked down and realized that the dissolved, dead skin that I rubbed off had accumulated into a fine layer of mucus that covered the entire pumice bar. It was so slimy it couldn’t scrub anymore; in order to finish the procedure I had to get a new bar. 



Thirty minutes later, I could go on to the last part of the pedicure: the foot massage. Before I could begin, however, I had to wipe off the chemicals so they wouldn’t keep dissolving his skin. If the chemicals sit on the skin for too long, the customer comes back with a lacerated, bleeding foot and a less than cheery attitude. So I made sure to clean them well. I told him to put his feet back into the water. 



Something immediately felt strange when my hands touched the water. My fingers were wet, but I was wearing gloves. I pulled my hands out of the water and saw that there was a hole in each glove, and that they were both dripping wet with pedicure broth. I checked the box of gloves, but there were none left. 



Keeping the ruined gloves on my hands, I winced my way through the rest of the pedicure. The massaging part was not as difficult as it was grueling. I wanted to give this man a good pedicure, but the more I touched him the more I wanted to run away from him. The whole time, I could only think of the filth that was slowly multiplying on my hands. His legs were hairy and his skin so dry that the lotion would not absorb and I had to rub it off with a warm towel afterwards. Usually the massage was only five minutes long, but his lasted half an hour. By the time I finished, the towel was brown. 



The man was quiet for the entirety of our session. I thought he was mad at me. I thought that, perhaps, any of the other employees would have handled his feet with far more clarity and precision than I had. I waited for him to leave the spa chair so that I could clean up the tub. But he didn’t. Instead, he leaned over and slipped me a five dollar tip. 



Later on, the boss told me that he never tipped. 



I slipped the five into my pocket and started to clean up. I got rid of the pumice bars covered in dissolved skin, swept up the piles of callus on the floor, scrubbed away the thin line of brown bubbles that dried to the walls of the tub, threw away the towels, sanitized my tools, picked up pieces of toenail that had flown across the room, and, when all of that had gone in the trash, I went to the washing room and washed my hands again, and again, and again.

 



I had not touched a puzzle in eleven years. Now, here I was, perched on a red and cream striped sofa next to the window, slowly sorting my way through a five hundred piece jig-saw of a beach scene: a wooden boat beneath two palm trees. It was about 9:30 in the morning. I had just finished interviewing with my team, which consisted of Laila, a social worker, and Dr. White-Bateman, a young, thin doctor who wore fancy silk blouses and pronounced every word with care in her tiny, raspy voice. They repeated their list of questions. How have you slept? How is your appetite? Do you hear any voices or have speeding thoughts in your head? And, of course, the Biggie: Have you had any thoughts of hurting yourself or others recently?



Have I been thinking of suicide lately?

Of course not. I have a puzzle to do.

I ran my hand over my cheeks. They were a bit dry, but smoother than ever. Everything here at McLean was clean. The ventilation system sucked everything out of the air, including the moisture.



This is a safe place, I thought, as I flipped over the pieces.



I hate this part. Whenever I pour out the pieces I want to fit them all together immediately. I have to force myself to turn them all over before I can start.



Soon, I had the border finished. I started working on the sand at the bottom – the light pieces were easiest to spot. From there I worked my way up, watching the picture slowly form itself.



 



On the first morning, I asked a nurse if I could use my makeup. He came with me to get my leopard makeup bag from the closet and walked with me to the restroom. While he waited outside, I stood in front of the mirror, the door open behind me, and rummaged around my bag. The little bottles clinked against each other, loud against the silence of the hospital. I skipped some of my routine—I did not put on liquid black eyeliner because it took too much time, and I did not put on as much eyeshadow because I did not want to keep the nurse waiting behind me. I stepped out of the restroom, my face freshly covered in powder and my eyes smothered with purple eye shadow. I shyly handed over the bag and scurried away.



The next morning, I asked for my make- up again, only this time, the nurse didn’t have to accompany me. One successful night in the hospital had raised my privileges up. They had erased the “s” next to my name on the whiteboard in front of the nurse’s station, which meant I could use sharps without supervision. I walked down the same corridor towards the same bathroom. On my way I passed a patient talking to his nurse. They spoke in low tones, seated across from each other. “How are you feeling today, Tom?”



He stared at her with the look of the dead. “Good.”



“Have you been sleeping okay?”



The same blankness. His muscles didn’t seem to attach together correctly. “Yes.”



“Have you been having any thoughts of hurting yourself?”



A pause. “Yes,” quieter than ever.



I felt bad for listening and slipped into the bathroom. I did the same procedure again. Dab on the nose. Dab on the cheek. I started to put on my eyeliner, but paused and stared myself down in the mirror. I washed off all makeup from my face and decided then that I would store it away for good.



When I left the bathroom, the room was empty except for all that remained.



 



I made some friends. Five kids about my age. There was Sarah, a pretty young blond who has panic attacks; Neil, a cheery, chubby high school drop-out who was temporarily homeless, and is now taking courses at the Courdon Bleu to be- come a chef; Jess, a BU student who voluntarily came to readjust her medications, which had suddenly stopped working; Tom, a Tufts senior who woke up one morning and swallowed too many pills; and James, a college student who drove his car eighty miles an hour into a tree and emerged from the accident without a single scratch.



We found ourselves idling in the kitchen at around 8:30 in the evening. Someone suggested that we play a game.



Breaking the hesitation, I suggested hide and seek.



Ten minutes later, I was hiding behind a curtain, giggling. The last time I played hide and seek was on a farm in Argentina. And before that, when my family had just moved to America and I was but a tiny toddler prancing through the crumbling apartment buildings of our refugee complex. Ever since I realized my childhood deeply lacked attention, I filled in the years of solitude the best I could in random places, even if it had to be a psych ward.



I had been there for almost two minutes when my nurse came through the door to my side and shrieked when she saw me hiding behind the curtain.



“My Ngoc! What are you doing?” she screamed. 



My answer didn’t satisfy her.

The game quickly broke up as we tracked down all the participants. The five of us collected in the hallway as the nurses told us in strict, maternal voices that we cannot play hide and seek because the staff would not be able to find us for the fifteen minute checks. We hung our heads low, but we were all smiling, eyes, mouths and all. Looking back, I was pretty sure we were the best patients to have graduated from McLean.



 



We gathered on the bed and held hands. My oldest sister, Julie, asked if she could pray for me. My middle sister, Kellie, started to sniffle. When the prayer finished, we all looked up and around. Something special had just happened.



Julie rose and put her hand on my head. She had not flown in almost a decade but left her three young children behind to visit me here. I hugged her, placing my head on her stomach. She felt so warm and calm. When I looked up, I saw her smiling down at me, the gentlest of smiles. There was something about the white light coming through the window and how it hit her face. Something about the bright fluorescent lights of the room. She looked like an angel, and I told her, “I think I believe in God.”



When they left, pattering down the hallway, I sat down on my bed and starting writing. In an instant, I began to cry. My ears heated up, my face went flush. My entire body felt warm, as if blanketed. In that instant, I felt all the good things in this world at once. They poured into my body like nectar. I’m still not sure what happened.



I called my father with the last five minutes I had left on my track phone and told him that I loved him and that I was sorry. He didn’t ask me any questions, and I told him I had to go because my phone was about to die. My phone had only two minutes left.



After that, I took a long shower and then fell asleep.



 



I told my nurse for that day that I wanted to write a book about my depression. I didn’t tell her about thinking that my sister was an angel, however. I didn’t want them to think I was psychotic. Her eyes bulged and her voice oozed out with joy. “Oh my God, you need to go to the creative writing workshop we have today!”



I told her I would. After we talked, I retreated to my little cozy and worked some more on the boat.



Soon the same nurse returned. The workshop was starting.

“I want to work on this puzzle, instead,” I said. I received my medical record a few months



after I was discharged. Towards the end of my report was a line that read, “several of the nurses had reported that My Ngoc sometimes has grandiose thoughts about her writing.” I grunted, laughed, and then filed the paper away.



 



Patients often stroll around the ward as a form of exercise. Nick came by and sat down beside me. As he approached, I felt like an animal, watching another come from a distance. I eyed him up and down, watched his body movements, and found no harm in him coming. We chatted, shared a few sex jokes. “Are you purposefully not looking at the box?” he asked. I didn’t realize that I was doing that, but after he left, I made a conscious effort not to look at the solution. I liked suspense. It seemed more like real life.



Tom came by soon afterwards. He offered to help with the puzzle some, jamming pieces together. We then started making animal noises and awkward tunes together. He didn’t really contribute much, only trying to squeeze together pieces that didn’t fit. I solved the rest of the puzzle, and let him place the last piece. He looked very proud of himself. Two days later, he was discharged.



 



William came that evening. He entered my room slowly and saw me lying in bed. He dropped his bags next to my bed and lay on top of me, with his cheek on top of mine. We stayed like that for a long time. I told him what had happened earlier that afternoon and showed him my journal entry, but we didn’t talk much. A nurse came by and saw us, and quietly left. His cheeks were wet now from being on top of mine. After a while, he lifted his head and cradled my head in his hands. “I’m just glad you’re doing better,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t get better in just a normal way.”



My sister came an hour later. She had just finished dropping off Julie at the airport. I finished rehearsing my story to her. Like William, she didn’t say much. “I’m glad you’re doing better.” A pause, and then “I’m exhausted.” She lay down to take a nap. William had already been sleeping for a while. His back was curled at an uncomfortable angle. He barely fit on the bed. Even in his sleep, he was clutching my feet in his hands. I looked at both of them and lay down too. Snuggled between the two of them--my sister, who made up so much of my past, and William, who is such a big part of my future--I knew I was exactly where I needed to be--in the present. This time I knew what the feeling was. I fell asleep.



 



I did little the first month I was home. When I felt it was time, I emerged from the house and bought three puzzle sets of disparate difficulty. When it was late at night and I was too tired to write anymore, I went to my desk and sorted out puzzle pieces until four in the morning. Some people prefer mornings. I prefer the late nights, when there is nothing, not even sunlight, to disrupt my thoughts.



Now that I am back at school, I don’t really have time to do puzzles. One night, however, I saw passed a girl in the dining hall working alone on a circular puzzle. She was gone by the time I came back, but I was glad to see that the puzzle was still there. The circular borders had just been pieced together.



Slowly, I put away my coat and sat into the chair, feeling like a traveler who had just arrived home. My goal was to finish the entire puzzle. By midnight I had put together a third of it, but it was time for me to go. There was an anatomy quiz tomorrow, and I had a far bigger and more complex puzzle to study before the morning came. Besides, the night guard would have sent me to bed by this time anyways if I were back in the hospital. And so I left, patting myself on the back for all those pieces I managed to put together.



Two days later, I saw that someone else had finished the puzzle in the dining hall. There was something wholesome in seeing the circle in its completion. I smiled and wondered if it was the same girl who put in the last piece. If it was her, I hoped that she found whatever she was seeking and that when the final picture came together, it was beautiful.