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During those weeks animals came up to her on the street and pushed their soft muzzles into her palm, and she always said the same two words, never wondering whether they were a lie or not, the words that dumb things depend on us to say—because when a dog runs to you and nudges against your hand for love and you say automatically, I know, I know, what else are you talking about except the world?
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At night, to take their minds off things, they watched a show called River Monsters. It always started with the blue-eyed British host arriving in a village where the fishermen were disappearing, dragged down, thrashed to death, swallowed by the biblical unknown. For the rest of the episode he would track sinuous ripples in the water until sometimes he hauled up something monstrous and prehistoric, with a crisp eye that breathed the moonlight like a gill, and he would call it beautiful and then let it go.
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At night, to take their minds off things, they watched LeBron James. The soles of his feet were geniuses. The pink tips of his fingers were geniuses. In his hands, the basketball became a genius; the hoop, as it received his arc, became a genius; the air that he sliced through was the breath they were holding, aha, aha, aha, eureka; he traveled down the court, outrunning everything they did not know; the rusted city unbent and rose to the moon; the whole world was a genius of watching that man.
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The doctors’ specialized faces were alive with interest. In front of her sister they fought over their future shares of the placenta, the cord blood, mother’s blood, baby’s blood. “I have never seen anything like this,” the geneticist declared almost hysterically, “and I will never see anything like this until the day I die.”
Messy bench who loves drama, she thought, the words rising into her head like a warding spell, for whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these moments.
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The exome test had found the misspelling, the one missed letter in a very long book. The family sat at the conference table as the entire dictionary was shot at them through pea-guns. The words the doctors said were Proteus syndrome, the words they said were one in a billion, the words they meant were Elephant Man. She thought of the bare Victorian rooms with clocks ticking in the background, of the splendid dignity and dialogue and makeup of the movie—which must have understood something, but no, did not understand this. Of the words on the poster: I—AM—A—MAN!
At the end of his life, the Wikipedia entry said, the Elephant Man laid down his head so that he could sleep like other people, and suffocated under the weight of it. But that bit of the Wikipedia entry, the end, was always the most suspect.
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Oh, she dared the geneticist to try to tell her who Proteus was. She dared him to hold out his thick, miracle-roughened, eminent hands and mime the changeable water slipping through them, there and then not there. If he did, she would slap the table with all her might and say, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I was a mythology girl.”
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The baby was the first and only case that had ever been diagnosed in utero. The excitement in the room was as palpable as an apple, for the tree of knowledge had suddenly produced an orange. “Still,” the doctors urged them finally, “don’t go home and look this up.” That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.
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“But the simulation is 3% more efficient when bad things happen to good people!” a user named BaconFetus wrote on a forum where they were avidly discussing another Proteus case, this one a woman whose legs had grown back after being amputated. “And look on the bright side,” someone responded. “Like hey! More legs!”
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People went to pinewood shacks at the edge of town, she told the baby, as she played brass music to her sister’s stomach. People went to nightclubs and slouched together between palms, and slid silver flasks out of their back pockets. It was a terrible age, she told the baby. The best players were black and it was Jim Crow. The best players were Jewish and it was World War II. But the horns played past some eternal curfew; the horns lasted as long as anyone wanted to dance. The horns seemed to say, I am here, I am here.
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An art therapist showed up at the house, sat at the kitchen table, and began unpacking her pens and pastels and watercolors with the pretty irrelevance of a girl poking a daisy into the barrel of a gun. “Art?” she wanted to cry out. “You think art can help with this, you fucking hippie?”