That was the moment I came untethered from myself, a horse cut from its hitching post. My body went through its motions, but my mind was jettisoned bulk, left to drift in dark and churning waters. I lowered my arms to my sides, fists curling, as Dr. Bakay moved his hand over my left breast. He squeezed it tenderly, then cupped it, as if judging its heft. With his forefinger and thumb, he pinched my nipple.
“Papa,” I said, my gaze clouding with tears.
“Quiet,” he said. “Let the doctor do his work. Ordinarily he charges dozens of rubles for these types of evaluations, and here he is paying us for the privilege. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course,” said Dr. Bakay. “I’m thankful to be able to test the methods of phrenology on a witch for the very first time. I’m sure there are quite a number of medical journals that would be happy to publish the findings.” But he had not been making any notes in his logbook or on his thick prescription pad.
From then on he spoke to Papa animatedly, about the particular color and size of my nipples, about the weight and shape of my breasts. He stroked my nipples to hardness and asked me to describe the sensation.
I do not remember what I told him. I was staring at the far wall, eyes fixed on the place where the damask paper was peeling away, exposing the yellowed plaster underneath. Finally, Dr. Bakay drew himself up to full height, narrow shoulders rolling.
“Thank you very much for the opportunity,” he said, and then Papa rose too. As I was pulling my corset back up over my breasts, Dr. Bakay shook Papa’s hand. He packed up his doctor’s bag, his tiny black vials of laudanum and pots of leeches, his arsenic in porcelain urns. Before he went through the door and out into the garden, he gave me a cheerful wave, winking one brown eye.
I stood in the foyer as the grandfather clock made its metered rotation, thinking of nothing but peeling wallpaper. The sun glanced off Dr. Bakay’s silver hair as he swung open the gate. I began to think about the bulge of fabric I had seen when I looked down, the swelling beneath the dark buttons of his trousers.
I should have known by the way Papa had fingered his rubles that he would happily welcome Dr. Bakay into our house again, and he did. Several weeks later the doctor was back with his black bag and more theories, a different prognosis, a new set of questions and an arsenal of clever methods.
For the first few times Papa sat in his chaise longue and looked idly on, chattering airily as Dr. Bakay jerked my corset open with surgical precision. Eventually he grew weary of talking and watching, and so Papa left the two of us alone in the sitting room with the door shut.
I memorized the wallpaper’s damask pattern, counting each whorl and flower while Dr. Bakay asked me whether there were any men that I had eyes for. I do not remember what I told him, only that it made him smile and thumb a gentle circle over my left nipple, as if it were an amulet to polish.
Once he wanted to see if the nature of organs was affected by Wakefulness, so he gave me a sleeping draught and I laid down on the couch, my vision fuzzing and then going savagely black. When I woke my corset was gone and Dr. Bakay was perched beside me. He was breathing hard; through the fretwork of my lashes I saw the staggered rising and falling of his chest and the dew of sweat on his brow, and at last the rumpled lap of his trousers. His hand moved under the band of his loosened belt with a grasping, jerking motion. I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep again. Later, when he stood up to leave, he tried only vaguely to conceal the damp patch on his trousers.
The very last time, he wanted to test what was inside my skin. I was seventeen and unmistakably a woman now, my breasts blooming under his hands. Dr. Bakay took a small blade and cut two smiling wounds beneath each of my nipples, blood welling in red pearls. He caught my blood in clear vials; I watched each droplet slide languidly down the glass and puddle at the bottom, half a fingertip high.
He capped off the vials and tucked them neatly in his doctor’s bag, right next to the porcelain urn of arsenic. Then he told Papa that he had everything he needed, and handed over his final sack of rubles. Papa’s face was as blank and stupid as a boiled ham, but he took the rubles and held them in his fist, the bag rolling and swaying with their weight.
Dr. Bakay tipped his hat to us and went through the door. I watched as he swung open the gate, sunlight clinging to the silver of his hair. I drew my arms over my chest and felt a bite of pain, twin wounds crying out like I was giving suck to a thing with very sharp teeth. In truth I never figured out why Dr. Bakay stopped coming to our house. Perhaps he had exhausted all of his medical curiosity, or perhaps my transforming body had exhausted him.