Something was sitting on my chest. Soft, heavy, feathered, rancid-breathed. I opened my eyes to a dizzy, overheated world, my throat filled with jagged glass.
I couldn’t speak but Linda sensed my distress and went to my parents’ bedroom to rouse Mom, who shuffled into the room, yawning and shaking a thermometer. When she read my temperature, her eyes widened.
“One hundred and four point five.”
I stared up at her. I was going to die on the day after Halloween, the Day of the Dead, despite the U-shot. This made no sense. The cover of a LIFE magazine on our coffee table showed a close-up of a hypodermic needle angling into the tender skin of a kid’s shoulder, with block letters asking: “THE END OF DEATH?” The story was about how the Universal Vaccine had turned sickness into a Technicolor cartoon witch, all jagged bones and black-and-purple robes. If you ate her poisoned apple, a handsome prince with a stethoscope would wake you with an antibody kiss.
The doctor came that morning and immediately diagnosed tonsillitis. He said I’d need an operation and a short hospital stay.
“Dying of a viral infection is a virtual impossibility. The U-shot’s pretty well eradicated polio and all strains of influenza,” he assured Mom, patting her shoulder. “Her tonsils were probably inflamed before she got her shot.”
Dreamy and hot, propped on pillows and rolled into a blanket, I lay across the back seat of our station wagon with my Wonder Woman comics. I was brought to the Children’s Ward and rolled into a room full of girls in beds that looked like giant cribs.
One girl marched over to peer at me through the bars of my crib, as if I were a zoo animal. With her blonde pageboy and chenille pink bathrobe, she looked like a dwarf version of Doris Day.
“I’m Cindy. Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
I shook my head; it hurt too much to talk.
Cindy sighed theatrically. “Gosh, another deaf-mute. Who’da thunk it?”
I whispered, “Tonsils.”
“Oooo, big hairy deal, daddy-o. You know how many kids have come through here to get their tonsils out? Millions. Don’t be a sucky baby. This time tomorrow, you’ll be sitting like a fairy princess with a big bowl of ice cream, lucky you. Now get out of the crib, we’re playing Deaf-Mute Teacher movie.”
You’re not the boss of me, I said inside my head, but when Cindy lowered the bars of my crib, I got out, my bare feet cramping on the icy floor.
One of my roommates really was deaf and blind — Suzy, an eight-year-old with long blonde hair and huge blue eyes like a baby doll. We were three Annie Sullivans to her Helen Keller, leading her around the room, forcing her to touch things so she’d learn their names. Cindy kept mashing Suzy’s fingers against her lips as she spoke.
“Let’s play fallout shelter,” said Cindy, pushing Suzy under my crib. Even though the other girl, Yvonne, and I, were too old for “let’s pretend,” we followed Cindy, Suzy’s stuffed animals standing in as the household pets we’d eventually be forced to eat. Cindy made grown-up conversation while we were down there, waiting for the all-clear. “Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. The Jews and the Catholics are ruining this country.”
“If you’re not Catholic, why are you at Sacred Wounds?” asked Yvonne.
Cindy sneaked a look from side to side, as if about to reveal a secret, then said in a low voice, “The government put me here. It’s all part of a secret plan to stop the Communists from getting hold of the best female specimens to breed with Russian men after they take over. I’m actually one hundred percent normal, not like the rest of you sicko Twistie kids.” She poked Yvonne. “Show us what’s under your hair.”
Yvonne shook her head and moved away from Cindy, who grabbed a hank of her hair and twisted it up to reveal a seashell of lumpy pink flesh below her ear. It looked slightly obscene, as if Cindy had pulled down Yvonne’s pants to expose her private parts.
“See that? It’s her third ear. They’re going to fix it,” crowed Cindy, as if the word meant something dirty, like fixing a cat. Yvonne yanked down the flap of hair, mumbling something in French that sounded nasty.
“And she’s not the only Twistie. There’s a whole bunch of girls with cockie doodles who they’ve stuck in the boys’ ward,” said Cindy. “Hermaphrodites. Like worms. Yech. There are even a couple of monsters down the hall.”
I shook my head and managed one word. “Liar.”
Cindy put her fists on her hips. “Am not! Come with me and I’ll show you.”
“Better not,” said Yvonne. “Sister will skin you alive if she catches you again.”
“I don’t care. I’ll take the new kid with me after lights-out, if she isn’t too scared,” said Cindy.
Later, after the nurse turned off the lights and the sound of her steps had disappeared, I heard my crib bars sliding down. Close to me, Cindy whispered, “We’ve got to move fast while Sister’s on rounds.”
We went to the door and peered around the corner. At the far end of the hallway, nurses’ white caps bobbed like sails. We could hear their crepe-soled shoes sucking against the waxy linoleum. When the coast was clear, Cindy said, “They’re in the boys’ ward now. Let’s go.”
She took my hand and hurried me down the hall to a door with a large black-lettered sign: NEGATIVE PRESSURE VENTILATOR. Cindy pushed open the door.
The room was dark except for a pool of light at the far end. I could make out two bomb-shaped objects, side by side, giving off a rhythmic whooshing and sucking sound, like the inhale and exhale of a giant. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw that the two objects had human heads sticking out of them. Girl on one side, boy on the other.
Cindy whispered, “They’ve been in there for years. They knew each other when they were little kids, so they stuck them together for company. Now they’ve gone through puberty. The boy must be getting all the urges boys get, but he can’t touch the girl. They’re paralyzed.”
“Who’s there?” The boy’s voice was thin and high. “Come over here where we can see you.”
“It’s me and a friend,” called Cindy in a sweet voice. “Sister said to come check and see if you two were still breathing.”
Cindy grabbed my hand, dragging me closer to the monsters. A pink bow was pinned to the soft-looking brown hair of the girl’s head, which rested on a pillow.
“Don’t touch us,” the girl said. She sounded as afraid of us as I was of them.
I managed to twist my hand free of Cindy’s and was backing away when I bumped into something warm and soft. A hand gripped my shoulder hard.
“Mon Dieu. Not again, Cynthia,” said a woman.
I turned to see a nun dressed head to foot in white, like a ghost: white veil, white robe, white beads around her waist, white wimple under her jutting chin.
“The new kid made me do it,” whined Cindy. “She said she’d let me read her comic books if I took her to see the monsters.”
Sister tsk-tsked as she gripped my shoulder and guided me out, Cindy following.
Back in our room, Cindy climbed snuffling into her crib while Sister tucked a thin coverlet around me and locked the bars in place. “If you get out of bed once more, God will give you polio, vaccine or no, and you’ll wake up in an iron lung, just like Mathieu and Anne-Marie. Comprends?”
I lay under the thin cover, shivering with cold, my throat a furnace, my stomach empty, staring into darkness. I was afraid to sleep for fear that if I closed my eyes, I would wake up without a body, imprisoned for all time in a bomb-shaped metal coffin, my head protruding into a world I could see but couldn’t touch.
First thing in the morning, while the others got their breakfast trays, a nurse in a cap as stiff and white as a restaurant napkin came to our room. For an awful moment, I thought she was the Pat Boone nurse. But this one’s hair was darker, her body, thicker. “There’ll be ice cream afterwards,” she promised as she slid a needle into my arm.
Cindy, nibbling on toast and strawberry jam from space-age plastic packets, said in her know-it-all voice, “See? Told you so. Let me read your comic books while you’re gone.”
Before I could say yes or no, the nurse grabbed my comics and dumped them into Cindy’s crib. Then she wheeled me into a large bright room with blue-tiled walls that looked like the girls’ washroom at school. Eyes smiled at me over white masks.
“See you soon, sweetheart,” said a doctor, just before another needle pushed me down through the bottom of the world and out the other side.
I hadn’t been dropped into the afterlife, or what you think of as sleep, but a drugged half-life where the body surrenders itself to a surgeon who can slice and dice without his patient making a fuss. They even breathe for you. That’s why they call it “going under,” as if you’re falling into water. For most people, it’s a short plunge to nowhere from which they quickly surface.
I’m not most people.
* * *
The first clue that something was wrong came when I didn’t wake up. As I drifted on a dreamy ocean of painkillers, flutter-kicking in and out of wakefulness, the sounds of the recovery room washed over me — the chalkboard squeak of bed wheels on linoleum, the whooshing of the breathing machine, the cries of little kids coming to from their own surgeries, all of them wanting their mothers.
A woman’s voice, comforting as honey on toast, said: “Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”
A man’s voice answered: “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be emptying bedpans.”
The woman sighed. “She’ll probably sleep through World War Three.”
The man said, “’Scuse me, Nurse, I got a mess to clean up. One of the little darlings just woke up puking.”
I opened my eyes. Instead of the recovery room, I was in the wide empty street of a black and white city. Not Shipman’s Corners, but a cartoon metropolis, a Little Nemo nightmareland where skyscrapers swayed like noodles and searchlights swept the sky. In the distance, a speck ran closer and closer. Me. The only one left alive. Overhead, the sky seethed with iron sharks, metal jaws clanking as they swooped to the attack. I tried to lift my hand to swat them away but I couldn’t move. I was awake but paralyzed, like Cindy’s monsters. As Sister had warned, God was punishing me with polio, and now I was locked away in an iron lung for eternity. For one despairing moment, I wanted to die.
A male voice lowered itself into my dream: You aren’t dying.
You can’t die now.
You are on a quest to save the world.
Time to wake up.
I sniffed something spicy. Cinnamon toast. My eyes fluttered open on a blurry face. A woman — no, a man, with peeling pink skin, wearing a nurse’s cap. The Trespasser. Or Dr. Duffy. Or both of them.
“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty.”
He sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned close to the bars.
“I have an update for you. Your friend Bum Bum took the liberty of improvising after he left you on Halloween. He stumbled over an unlocked car on his way home and tried to rescue Kendal on his own. Things didn’t go well. Cops caught him with the stolen car and someone’s extension ladder. But don’t worry, no scholarship for him, just a stint on a reform-school farm.”
Tears came to my eyes. The Trespasser patted my hand. “Hey, hey, don’t get that way. Probably the best thing that ever happened to Bum Bum. Fresh air, sunshine, new friends. A second chance.”
He stood up and busied himself with a tube leading from a metal IV stand into my arm before stepping out of view. I tried to turn my head to catch sight of him again but the world beyond my bed was a blur.
I don’t remember being taken off the breathing machine. I do remember throwing up all over my pillow, the pain in my throat unbearable, the promised ice cream never materializing.
“It’s either pseudocholinesterase deficiency or malignant hyperthermia. Both very rare,” the surgeon told my parents at the side of my crib. “She’ll need to be tested before she ever goes under again. Be sure to warn her dentist, too.”
I spent two groggy days in my crib while Cindy read my Wonder Woman comics aloud; she never gave them back despite my weak protests to Sister, who told me that Cindy was here long before I came and would be here long after I left, so I should be generous and Christian and let her keep my comics. “Even the Cynthias of the world serve a higher purpose,” she said.