Culture Bound
by Kirsten Kaschock
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
conclusion
The work was going slower than we had time for, no matter how many tasks we farmed out to the other sectors of the Tunnel, how many hours we put in. I had this eerie urge, especially at night, to keep going. I read up on it. Anorexics often get, at the beginning of restricting, a boost of energy, and later — a sense of general lethargy plus insomnia. I was wavering somewhere between the two stages, though I hadn’t yet reached the recommended weight for my height.
In the wee hours of week twelve, I started poking around on some pro-anorexic websites. That’s some horror show there — a whole other kind of deepweb. Odd, given my work on regulated caloric intake, I’d never before delved into its psychological effects on humans.
Of course, anorexics don’t do it right. They don’t get enough nutrients, not even enough calories. They may be disciplined, but they lack the big picture, killing themselves when they could be extending their lives. Of course, that’s part of the point. They act as if control is an end and not simply what is required for predictable results.
Some, too, do it out of warped vanity. On the pro-ana boards, they post personal stats and pictures constantly, shots of their disappearing bodies — almost always from the neck down. There is a certain anonymity in emaciation, although at least two pictures of hipbones reminded me of a set I knew.
After a while, I became fascinated by the variations in bone structure. More pronounced, at that level, than one might imagine.
One morning, after maybe four hours of sleep in my spartan dorm room above the Tunnel, I came down to find Fitch eating.
Eating.
He was standing in the hall outside the lab with a bowl of cereal. I could smell the milk. I was furious. Calm.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m eating, Park. What’s it look like?”
“It looks like you are eating.”
“I’ve got to get some strength back. We’re going to use your shit for a while, until I gain enough weight to go back on the regimen. I’ve been losing functionality. I thought we’d have it solved by now.”
It was actually logical. Correct. We could get by with my waste for a few weeks. I still had weight to lose. The supplements I was existing on had everything I needed to stay sharp. I felt sharp.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
And we got to work. That day Fitch was playing Jackson Browne. It was “Somebody’s Baby” I think that drove me to the surface. I told Fitch I needed some Vitamin D, and he waved a hand. It was late July, so there was always light, even at night, but it was midday, so I’d also see sun.
I got into the elevator and headed to the surface. It was a warm day, well over freezing. The quad was populated with summer-term students, enjoying the sun and blue sky, most in shorts and sweaters. An American in Finland, I didn’t understand the dress code, but I’d never worn shorts in my life, so it didn’t matter. My own clothes were hanging off me, and I admit I enjoyed the feeling of being hidden well inside my pants rather than struggling against them as I moved. I had no desire to buy new ones. A belt worked fine. When a girl came up to me and handed me a flyer for what looked to be a heavy-metal house party, I smiled back at her and took it. She had braided pigtails. She looked like The Sound of Music. She looked like spring.
I spent maybe two hours in the sun. When I got back down, Fitch was in a state. “First death,” he said at me, accusatorily. My break had been terribly timed. He’d been crying.
“Crap,” I said. It was not the right word.
We worked feverishly those next six weeks. Fitch had gotten his weight back up in four and was on the regimen again. I weighed sixty-one pounds less than when I’d arrived. So, slightly underweight. I could spare another twelve pounds — potentially up to sixteen — before I’d need to eat something of substance.
We hadn’t yet managed to grow from our waste something non-toxic. Twice in that time, we thought we’d found the right bacterial mix, and twice we’d killed the mice I helped supervise and had in fact set up with the techs in the next lab over. Ms. Durham visited; five more miners had died. She looked less self-assured, more haggard.
“There’s no more time.”
Fitch said, “We know.” Fitch always said “we” to Ms. Durham. A way of adding weight to his own voice, muscle. I was used to how he saw me — as ancillary, a font of specialized information he could google when necessary, to flesh out his own theories with fact.
Ms. Durham said to him, “You were supposed to be this genius.”
I felt Fitch wince. He didn’t speak, so I did: “It’s not him. I don’t think I’ve worked out how to distill the bacteria from its products effectively, not without removing what’s essential.”
She looked over at me, maybe for the first time. “I thought that’s what you did: purify, calculate.”
“It is.”
“Isn’t it time you got to it, then?”
After she left, Fitch came up to me. He grabbed at me, my shoulders. He pulled me to him and pushed his tongue into my mouth. I had been expecting this and it felt awful. Sickening. Part of me had been expecting that, too. I pushed him away. “I’m gay, Fitch,” I said. “Probably.”
“So what?”
“We need to get back to work.”
* * *
It took three and a half more weeks. Ms. Durham informed Fitch that there was no more life on the ship; the last man, gone. Fitch had taken to Skyping Ezos from a private room. He stumbled into the lab to spit out what she’d said next. That all was not lost. That the miners had secured their work for the company — professionals to the very last. That Ezos would still be able to retrieve it.
What “it” was didn’t really matter, never did. Not to me and Fitch.
He raged then like some roided-up goon, breaking every agar dish in cold storage. We’d ordered glass ones because in them — as opposed to the polystyrene — it was easier to sterilize the culture media. He left a trail of shatter from the lab into the hall. When he reached the lounge, he yanked opened the refrigerator, grabbed and slurped down an entire pint of one of the mouse-tech’s yogurts, labeled in sharpie with the mouse-tech’s name, Mikko. No spoon.
He left, and I stayed behind to clean up his mess.
The next day, Fitch didn’t calm down and he didn’t come down. I wasn’t going to go looking for him. Let him stew. It was a hard blow. I hadn’t accepted it yet. I knew that I hadn’t. It took time for me to process that kind of information. I didn’t truly begin to manage my mother’s death until after I’d passed my quals more than a month after her funeral.
Around noon, I looked up his room number. The night before had been the first truly frigid night — it was October — and snow had fallen in the early hours. The quad dazzled. I made my way across the white field to his dorm, up the flight of stairs and down a warm hall. I’d never visited him there. We weren’t friends.
I knocked. He didn’t answer. I tried the knob. It turned. The cold air hit me like a wall. Wedged in an open window, a fan was sucking weather into the room. Fitch was naked on the bed. Dead.
Dusting the floor between bed and window — a dandruff of snow. It was quiet, except for the fan. Tacked on the walls were the profiles of the miners, with photos, copied from the dossier we’d been given on the first day. Onto each profile, Fitch had taped the miner’s first name written big in his own block-lettering.
RICK. GUSTAV. NGUYEN. JOSEF. HECTOR. SASHA. DALLAS. SEBASTIAN. KEMAL. HENRI. KYLE.
I made myself look hard at Fitch’s body. His stringy flesh hid little of the architecture beneath. There was a tattoo on his inner thigh — a miniature lightning bolt and, on it, the word Shazam.
I undressed.
I carefully draped my pants, shirt, sweater, and coat over the chair by the small pine desk. Shivering, I touched a book lying there, The Most Beautiful Girl in Town. Bukowski. I turned back to Fitch. I crossed the space. I stretched myself out on the bed beside him. It was a narrow bed. I had to press up against his icy skin, which didn’t feel like skin. Functionally, the semi-permeable barrier was now pointless and, I knew, already beginning to break down.
I stared up at the shape of the plane above us. Not quite rectangular. My own ceiling had a long, interrupted crack in the plaster I knew by heart. Me and Fitch. We’d failed, utterly. I inhaled the frozen air and cupped one hand around the top of my hipbone where it jutted out, my other around his. I exhaled.
Condensed water vapor, suspended in my breath, spread and dissolved into the room. The miners’ bodies would not so disperse, not sealed inside a broken ship on a cold rock. They were still trapped. Unless something set them loose or brought them home, it’s how they would stay.
I got up onto my side. Shivering, I drew my fingers across my own ribcage, felt for my recently-emerged collarbone. I traced a path along Fitch’s ribs. The spaces between the long bones dipped like valleys under my newborn fingers. His eyes — a nowhere-staring blue — I reached to close. I let my fingers skim over the hollow between his cheekbone and jaw. My face, like my mother’s, was round. No loss would ever sculpt it into less. “My Moon,” she called me. Fitch, not knowing this, not knowing anything really, came up with “Moonpie” on his own.
Fitch’s black hair had thinned too, and it lay across the pillow like wet feathers. Our hair was the same color, but mine was still thick, still coarse, still smooth. Paintbrush hair. My one sign of beauty. Incongruous.
Me and Fitch. What is it you do when all you are is not enough? When it’s too much?
I know what most people would say. They would say... Not that. You can’t, you must not do that. It’s what my father said. How could anyone be so deeply selfish? So cowardly? She could not have loved you, he told me, not like she claimed. How could she? You went away and you never came back. You just left us. Alone together.
These things — true things, cruel things — are the things people say. They say them without hesitation; they say them with righteousness. And this is why it is imperative to go out and find your people.
In Korean culture, there is a myth that death can come from sleeping in a closed room while an electric fan runs. My father had all the ceiling fans in our Carbondale home dismantled before he and his young bride set foot in the house with an infant me. Twenty-four years later, my mother hanged herself in a closet with a sliding mirrored door that faced out, her too-small body put away for days, leaving the air of my bedroom untroubled. Unstirred. That is, until the creeping smell of bacterial putrefaction prompted my father to look. He was surprised. He thought that she’d left him — but just him.
Fitch knew, at least, to open the window.
Copyright © 2018 by Kirsten Kaschock
