5
The cover had the grain, colour and gloss of spilled flaxseed. It still answered with the animal heat of being hidden under my shirt. My fingers moved intently over the Brailleish bumps of its surface, imbibing its report of squid ink. No other old leather binding had ever painted my tongue paella black before. As I lifted the cover, which read, in gold lettering, Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, it made the electric crackle of a loose connection. Inside, a bookplate marked ‘Ex Libris Dr Ungar Sever’ showed a brain under a bell jar. Anyone would recognise the name of the neuroscientist instrumental in the development of the LipService patch. But he couldn’t have been the first to own the book, as the date at the top of the frontispiece was 1869. Below was an inscription:
This book is bound in the hide of an indigent, one Eda-Lyn, who died at the almshouse. On conducting the autopsy, I discovered Taenia solium – the same bladder worm recently proven by Dr Friedrich Küchenmeister to be the juvenile form of the pork tapeworm – encysted in the tissue. Having seen the patient devouring ham and bologna sausage brought by a visiting relative in a singularly undainty fashion, I theorised a connection between her intemperate consumption and her death, and presented my findings as my first humble contribution to the Journal of Medicine. Thus, at least in death the parasitic classes contribute to the improved health of society. I flayed and dressed the skin according to the tanner’s art before handing it to a bookbinder.
Dr Emmet Skinner
I wanted to drop it but I couldn’t just let the last book that my dad gave me – and the only book I’ve ever taken from the repository – fall. My fingernails clenched around it, like teeth holding it away from the tongue, until I could finally release it safely. Trying to wipe away the black staining taste, my hands grazed heavily at my thighs, soothing and satisfying myself on the warm chanterelle mounds of my skin. Across from me was Eda-Lyn – perfectly cured. Why was this afflicted textual body the last thing that Dad put into my hands?
Five months were left before my eighteenth birthday and the rupture was coming some day soon. Even if it’s just a tiny rip in an artery wall, it might as well be one of those portholes – fistulas – they cut in the side of cows so they can keep shoving things in and pulling them out. Swivelling eyeball to the glass, the wearers of rubber gloves make sure the herd has a belly full of trademarked enzymes, which can digest the corporate message good and proper. The only difference is we cover our holes with patches.
Lying on my back in bed at night, I groped for that bulging aneurysm in a cerebral artery. I wanted to probe it and have it answer back with sensation like wiggling a loose tooth. But I couldn’t grasp it. All I ended up with was an impossible-to-pinpoint headache. The rupture is the unspeakable divide – no one’s words live to tell the tale. Ask anyone who has come of haemorrh-age what the bleed is like, and the answer is always exactly the same: For our share of mind we receive brand equity – our place in and piece of the capital. We have our premises; finally, we belong. We can never again be misunderstood. So there is fulfilment in our every fleeting fad. It’s catechism – the social principles programmed into every patch irrespective of branding. Only it doesn’t answer the question. It says nothing about how it feels for the power grid to fail in a whole district of the brain, reducing it to candles and a Primus stove.
I asked Dad about it. He started to rattle off the catechism, then stopped suddenly. Taking one of the copies of Great Expectations, he ripped out pages and randomly stuffed them back between the others before handing me the book. Holding the disordered sheets, a sickbed of incoherent narrative, I felt a cold intravenous drip of fear.
My classmates were all really hyped about haemorrh-aging. Osric was the first to bleed. It happened during a lesson on a day I skipped school to read at the book repository. I would’ve done that more often if I hadn’t been afraid the teachers would notice and start investigating, but I was sorry to have missed Osric’s rupture. The other kids didn’t seem to have been paying attention to the stuff I was interested in. Most of their talk was about how he’d managed to be the first. Some said it was the weird neck stretches everyone saw him doing several times a day – right arm over the top of his head so the hand covered his left ear and his head tilted to the right. Then he’d switch to the opposite side. Others said it was because he had built an affiliation to a non-consumer tech brand – something to do with plant automation – and the company had decided to fast-track him. None of it made much sense, but everyone was incentivised and neck stretches became a real signature move.
It’s not that I didn’t know the signs of haemorrhage – every six-year-old knows those from the symptoms jingle.
A little boy in brands unversed,
wanted to be big so bad he burst,
a vessel and blood dispersed.
Limb’s gone dead,
Lose the thread,
Words unsaid,
Reeling head.
Now he’s brand endorsed.
With all the words rehearsed.
Little kids join hands in a circle to chant it and act out the symptoms – paralysis in the right arm, confusion, impaired speech and dizziness. They all fall down on the word ‘head’ and leap up again on ‘rehearsed’. The day I found Dad in the silo after school, the jingle was running through my head like the music of an ice-cream truck carried on a cold dark night. It was what made me feel sure that he’d had another brain haemorrhage. He had collapsed and I was afraid he wouldn’t be bouncing back up again like a kid.
He was lying among a whole shelf of scattered books that he must have pulled with him as he fell. One volume was spread open under his chin. He pinned it to his ribs with his left hand pressing against the binding. He tried to speak but I couldn’t understand him. He was a small crumpled note among a grandeur of words. Next to the papery pallor of his face, the leather cover had the oiled, taut look of a wrestler sitting on his chest. When I tried to take it from him so I could help him up, he resisted, making strange noises and pushing the book at me, not letting me put it aside. Only when I opened my hazmat suit and slipped it under my shirt did he sink back into the editions around him.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked him. He shook his head but the movement was a grating of gears.
Running up and down the aisles trying to find the book trolley, I felt the leather hide against the skin at the hollow above my hip brushing squid ink into the hollow of my palate. Quickly, a glaze of my sweat started forming on the book’s skin, dissolving the salty ink. I thought about the Tigris turning black with the words of the books of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. The Mongols sacked the city in 1258 and emptied the libraries into the river. I had read about that here, in the silo. Now, as if I were on that riverbank, it was all being swept away from me. I couldn’t staunch the flow – the shelves of writing leaching out of my life, the language bleeding out of my father’s brain, my own haemorrhage.
Getting Dad onto the trolley was difficult. Then I still had to wheel him out the airlock and strip off his hazmat suit before laying him on the floor of his office and calling for help. I needed the paramedics to believe that he had collapsed there rather than in the silo. It was safer for both us and the books. I even went back and hurriedly re-stacked the fallen volumes on the shelf. If Dad didn’t get better, I would never be able to return, but at least if the corporates had no reason to believe the books had been touched, they wouldn’t think it necessary to destroy them.
When we arrived in the ambulance, Mother had already been called to the hospital to begin the admissions process. Hospitals and banks all look the same: glassed-in clerks guard the assets against the desperate and undeserving. As a distant voice hissed through the microphone, Mother became shrill: ‘You’re telling me, plus-sizers. I warn you it’s not pretty when I get my panties in a twist.’ I went over to her, took the plastic ticket from her hand and read, ‘Patient number 000473278RTY: Excluded from care due to high-risk lifestyle’. The paramedics had initially wheeled Dad over to the admissions gate but he had been moved aside to the waiting bay with a couple of other stretchers.
Ten minutes later, a doctor came out to meet Mother and led her to a side office. I followed. He waved Mother to a chair but had started speaking before she was even seated. He didn’t introduce himself. ‘Our records indicate that for a period of three years now, the patient has failed to undergo the required six-monthly post-CVA angiograms, cognitive, psychological and acculturation testing. Furthermore his working environment is rated category five for fungal hazards and he has no brand benefactor. This high-risk lifestyle that encourages pathogenesis is considered a refusal of treatment.’
All that EmPath medical LipService coiled around Mother, deflating her pneumatic curves and making her eyes bulge instead. I saw that she wasn’t going to say anything. But the doctor had to be told that the repository has strict health and safety measures – hazmat suits and airlock access. Even if, like everyone else, he believed books caused librarian’s lung, I had to convince him of that at least. I began to calibrate a medical defence regarding the repository’s lower respiratory risks compared to open-plan offices. It was in a report I had read from years ago when the silos were converted. Then I remembered I couldn’t tell him that – he would know I had read it in the repository. I had to slow down, carefully pull a stick from the pile without disturbing the sleeping logs.
Glancing up, I noticed that the doctor was already standing at the door, saying to Mother, ‘Your brand status entitles you to use a departure lounge. Here’s the access card for 15B.’ Then he was gone. I had become so careful about not saying the wrong thing that I had said nothing.
Mother looked as if a waxing strip had been ripped from her skin. ‘Oh, oh this is too body shaming. How could he leave me with such a visible panty line? I don’t think I can … I must change into something more demure.’ She left and I went back to the shuttered clerks to ask to speak to the doctor again. The only response was a finger tapping at a notice posted in the window: ‘Patient prognosis and therapeutics are discussed with haemorrh-aged next of kin only. Visitors sign in at entrance 3.’ A phonograph voice said ‘No LipService patch, no debate.’
Dad was going to die because I had been mute at the moment that mattered most. He had given me those years sitting reading, seeing language leap like static electricity. But when I needed words to ensnare a doctor, it was my tongue that was tied. I failed him. My fists flew at the window with the headlong certainty of beetles that they could get through to the other side. The clerk pressed an alarm and pulled down the blind. I was sobbing so hard that I couldn’t speak. A guard came and dragged me off to the Departure Lounge where Dad’s stretcher had already been moved.
I tried to tell him that I was sorry I had let him down. He probably didn’t understand what I was saying. They had given him painkillers and he slipped in and out of consciousness, a cat following the sunlight on its tour of a room. I climbed onto the stretcher next to him, still snuffling. With his good left hand, he patted the slight bulge on my belly that was the leather-bound volume and smiled with the left half of his face. The book’s skin and mine had been pursed together for long enough that it no longer felt different from the jostling of my thighs.
An orderly woke me when he came to take the body away. I went to wait in the lobby for Mother. Looking up from my chair, I saw a black satin dinner jacket that parted to reveal the sorrowing underside of a breast. The band of black velvet blooms on her head and the tenebrous netting extending to just over the tip of her nose made her lips glow like a red light in a window. She looked beautiful and pointless. ‘I’m ready to see him now,’ she said. I told her that he was already gone.
‘But he would’ve been so tickled to see me as a Frisson Froufrou angel of death.’ She turned around to reveal a pair of black-feathered wings.
It took a long time after Dad’s death before I could confront the book. It squatted across from me, a mutilated body that was closing in on me without having to move. In queasy sympathy, I imagined my own hide outfitting a book and yet still being able to taste the cloth and board binding of neighbouring volumes on a shelf, or sweaty palms on my back. It was like the compulsion to prod at a dead bird in a gutter with a stick and see its neck flop. I reached out my hand and with a fingertip took a swab of the squiddy leather. My mouth was a seashell carrying echoes of the ocean. That salty marine cleanness can turn so suddenly into the stink of docks. I wasn’t even sure which one was truer of the book. I wanted Dad to explain it to me. I wanted Dad. But Dad was gone. There was only Eda-Lyn.
I picked it up again and noticed that instead of a smooth wall of pages, the fore edge had crenellations, with some of the pages sunk deep and others protruding. As my thumb rode over the notches, fanning the pages, the changing fillips of stiff, thick pages and thin, lispy ones sounded like pins and tumblers aligning in a lock. Whirring past on the carousel of pages were titles and names I knew – The Emperor’s New Clothes, Edward Lear and Kafka. I saw what Dad had done and gave a little gasp of music-box delight. It reminded me of the patchwork book I’d made from the dressing-up clothes, because it was also stitched together from pieces of other works. The original anatomical treatise was gone and in its place was something created just for me. Stories I could keep now that I couldn’t go back to the repository. I didn’t recognise all the names on the page headers. He had kept things for this moment.
After the flyleaf was a text called The Fork in the Medicine Tree. It was a history of medical practice starting from the Middle Ages. The thought of doctors – and of the one who considered my father undeserving of his attentions – tangled impotence and rage in me, like laundry in a spin cycle. When I stilled the throes, I realised that it was just too prescient – as if Dad knew he would be refused care, knew that I needed to understand the men with knives who would slide fingers into my deep, dark crevices when I came of haemorrhage.
The 1163 Council of Tours prohibited clerical physicians from performing any treatment that shed blood. The scalpel’s cunning, dentistry and bloodletting were trades for barbers, bath-keepers and sow-gelders. Work for calloused hands. The physician trained as a scholar, examining books, not bodies. Next to this passage, Dad had written in the margin ‘copywriters & doctors’ – the two powers behind the patch, the two professions that held our tongues.
I read how the power of the church weakened in the Renaissance, and artists began dissecting bodies. Battlefield surgeons followed and gained market share as clerical physicians failed to deliver on their brand promise – to alleviate suffering and heal. The men of letters had to admit the need for the bloody skill of dissection. As for the surgeons, they sought professional prestige and recognition (a quaint way of saying they wanted to brand up to the premium segment) by pursuing book learning and publishing their anatomical findings. Both realised that to capture the market they must have authority over the word and the meat. It’s much the same today.
Now it’s the words, the books, that are in short supply, but then it was apparently the pounds of flesh. Only convicted murderers could be dissected after hanging, as further punishment for their crimes, and there were never enough of these for medical research and clinical instruction. Instead, the poor who died in the almshouses and cadavers stolen from graves by resurrectionists provided the matter for the making of medical men.
I wondered what Eda-Lyn’s relative, the bearer of pork products, had done upon discovering that her corpse had disappeared. The family member was probably about as successful in reclaiming her body from the doctor as I was in getting modern practitioners to care for my father. Maybe Dad never believed that I could convince the doctor of anything after all. Now, just about everyone’s body lands on the autopsy table, and fatal second haemorrhages are automatically assigned for post-mortem. Those who pass on weak genetic material must pay off their debts to future society by contributing to the advance of neuroscience.
Concluding with the nineteenth century, The Fork in the Medicine Tree describes how doctors’ command of scholarly language and a steady scalpel hand came together in books bound in human skin. It was something of a professional vogue. Eda-Lyn was not an exception, then. What’s more, the finely worked binding civilised the doctor’s ‘curing’ of the sick: leather has its place in the library, study and museum. And of course, the book had ended up in Dr Ungar Sever’s collection – the man whose LipService prescription fixes our broken words. I was unsure what I should be more afraid of – the copywriter and doctor castes, or their upmanship as they try to steal each others’ trade secrets.
I thought about Eda-Lyn, who was so hungry and had become a thesis on ravenous worms. I realised that when I went into hospital, I would come out as a leaflet for electric toothbrushes or shoe polish. I traced with a finger over the letters of Dad’s note in the margin – I wanted to revive the movement of his hand and for it to offer reassurance. But it was like rolling over a mattress worn out by someone else. Now that the body was gone, the hollows were hard and empty.
The last clump of pages in the book was the story of Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses. I had read it to Dad; he liked to hear it declaimed, the parable of our time. If I could find a place where no one would hear me, I would record myself reading it so that I could still hear it out loud after the rupture.
Ovid writes that Juno punished Echo for chattering to her on the mountainside and giving the other nymphs who had entwined their limbs with Jupiter a chance to escape. The goddess says, ‘I shall curtail the powers of that tongue which has tricked me: you will have only the briefest possible use of your voice.’ From then on, Echo could only repeat the last words another had spoken – like anyone come of haemorrh-age. I often wondered what the nymph talked about to Juno. She must’ve had words like constellations.
When she sees beautiful Narcissus who ‘was driving timid deer into his nets’ (that says everything about him), she falls in love with him. I imagine Narcissus as looking like the male model in the Ravish pour Homme cologne ad. His perfectly muscled arms are in the press-up position and he looks down into a dark pool. A perfectly blonde helix hovers over his forehead, suggesting flawless genetic material. The next scene when Echo finds Narcissus alone one day was Dad’s favourite.
The boy, by chance, had wandered away from his faithful band of comrades and he called out: ‘Is there anybody here?’ Echo answered: ‘Here!’ Narcissus stood still in astonishment, looking around in every direction, and cried at the pitch of his voice: ‘Come!’ As he called, she called in reply. He looked behind him and when no one appeared, cried again: ‘Why are you avoiding me?’ But all he heard were his own words echoed back. Still he persisted, deceived by what he took to be another’s voice, and said, ‘Come here, and let us meet!’ Echo answered: ‘Let us meet!’ Never again would she reply more willingly to any sound.
It’s a monologue that forks into a dialogue. There is Echo with her Narcissus patch and, despite her second-hand speech, she seldom means what he does. The same words become new. I always paused then in my reading, paused over the possibility. And we knew what happens next. She runs to embrace him and Narcissus rejects her. Brands can’t reciprocate, they can only gaze spellbound at their own image reflected in a pool. Echo withdrew to lonely caves and withered away. Her bones turned to stone and only her voice remained.
Afterwards, Dad and I would sit still for a moment as my last words reverberated in the silo. Neither Juno nor the rebuff of that fragrance pin-up could silence her.
Eda-Lyn and Echo. Two disembodied voices that keep on speaking, but not their own words. LipServants in perpetuity.
I finished rereading the story but there were still a few pages left. The story of Echo and Narcissus had been pasted in a second time. It made no sense until I got to lines 455–482. Pressed between pages were drops of blood, red dandelions crushed in the moment that the seeds broke away. Dad’s nose bled when the aneurysm ruptured. I could see why. The stroke had happened when he was working on these pages. Blacking out many of the printed words and leaving only a chosen few, Dad wrote something that defied LipService. He found a way to echo off Ovid and it shorted his neural circuits.
I had cut a piece from Dad’s shirt before they took his body away. I wrote out his Echo on it, just as I used to write tastures years ago in my patchwork book made of fabric squares from the dressing-up box. ‘Touch dwells in lonely caves.’ Lonely caves like the one the tongue sleeps in? Did he taste textures too? Eda-Lyn had made this book an inescapably tangible object – a corporeal corpus.