(Writers @ Work Contest Winner, selected by Tessa Fontaine)
Specimen
When Denver police officer John Sampson arrives, he blocks traffic for the bureau detectives to process the scene. The crime lab photographs a totaled Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo that has been lofted several feet into the air by the lever of a Ford Focus and slammed into a cottonwood on the corner of Evans Street and Clarkson. Detective Voitel notes paint transfer high on the tree where the Jeep’s roof hit and concaved. He snaps shots of the yellow Ford Focus that T-boned it at the intersection.
Before emergency personnel arrive, William, a witness to the accident, asks the Focus driver if he is okay. “Yes,” he answers, a white, fifty-one-year-old former real estate agent from Los Angeles named Dennis, who will be released as unhurt and later go on to serve on the Board of Directors for the Rose Bowl.
The other driver, in her twenties and barely breathing, is pinned inside the Jeep, unconscious and hanging from her seat belt. Rescue personnel who arrive with the Jaws of Life to extricate her contact the trauma center most experienced with brain injuries. There she will be given the name Oscar, like a hurricane, real name unknown.
*
In the early third century, a time of crisis and potential collapse for the Roman Empire, Hippolytus of Rome compiled the Refutation of All Heresies. This ten-volume work, of which eight volumes survive, catalogs some of humanity’s early inquiries. In Book I, Hippolytus recounts a poet born in Colophon, one of the oldest cities in ancient Greece, nearly six hundred years before, circa 570 BC, who had deduced from fossils of seaweed and fish found far inland that earth was once covered in water.
*
After the hydraulic jack pries open the mangled door frame, emergency personnel brace the young woman’s neck, lift her onto a stretcher, and slice her black wool coat from her body with her dress. In an ambulance photograph, her open eyes glaze over, not tracking the caregivers, her face weeping blood. Electronic monitors dangle from a sheet pulled over her bare chest.
Unseen from that angle is the hand my brother Jeremy holds, although there is no me to consciously stake possession of this form.
A paramedic works a tube down each nostril to empty the stomach in preparation for a breathing tube—a procedure usually not risked in the field, but they cannot trust that she will make it elsewhere without oxygen. An EMT wraps the crushed arm in gauze, as gingerly as an archaeologist, the elbow in countless fragments he records as comminuted, meaning “v. to reduce to minute particles; to break, crush, or grind to small fragments or to powder.”
*
For my brother’s twentieth birthday, I bought us a local caving expedition. Limestone flecked our drinking water, so we knew our home topped a karst landscape that is interlaced with caves, but we had only ventured before into tourist-prepared underbellies like Luray Caverns.
Our guides, Pete and Dave, loaded our group into a van and drove us over a winding network of rural Virginia roads. The eight of us included a few retirees, a teenage couple, and several boys younger than my brother.
Jeremy told me that when he and his friends got bored they would go on “roadies” over back roads like these, taking turns as dictated by those in the backseat until they got lost. Once they found a back road named Back Road. “I laughed so hard we almost hit a church,” he said.
Pete pulled over and parked by a dip in the hills surrounded by trees. “We got permission from the owner to take a group down today,” he said, and we believed him because there was no other indication that anything was here. “There will be no floodlit cathedrals,” Dave said, “but everything you’ll see will be just by your lights, and that’s pretty cool.”
We tightened our boot laces, shoved into our packs extra bottles of water from the cooler they had brought, and trooped behind them, flashlights in hand, along the edge of the road. At a low bluff, we squeezed through a crevice in the limestone and found ourselves at the top of a muddy rock slide.
“This is why I told you to wear old pants,” Pete said. We slid down, one after another, on our backsides.
“Great gift!” Jeremy said, as the cave air sliced through a pelt of July humidity. With my hand against his back, we pushed into the fifty-five-degree darkness.
We wound through passage after passage, as subterranean arteries opened up and ended, as above ground, following the course of water. After our eyes adjusted, we could see bats asleep on the highest walls. The beams of our flashlights bounced off the bats and into each other. The only sound was a faint trickle I could just make out beneath our breathing. We wended forward like the spine of a single organism.
Underground, time lost its scale. After what might have been an hour, Dave stopped us and said, “We’re coming up on the tightest crawl. You’ll need to be flat on your backs awhile. Just like working on a car, you’re going to shimmy under it.”
We pushed through headfirst. The rock jutted so close at one point that I had to exhale to make my chest small, turning my face sideways not to scrape my nose. It was a relief to emerge in a grotto where we could stand.
“Check out the cave bacon,” Pete said, aiming his light toward slices of flowstone that appeared to be encrusted with salt. “Just don’t touch it,” he warned: “The oil from our fingers will dry it out.
“Mmmmm, bacon,” Jeremy said, making us laugh.
“There’s one more keyhole,” Pete said, and we edged through a long narrow crack that widened into a twilit chamber, which opened into a forest. We broke apart and spread out beneath a stone arch to eat the sandwiches we packed. Jeremy pointed out fossilized coral embedded in the rock we propped ourselves against, and we each pocketed a loose piece by our feet.
*
The poet Xenophanes was right that the stranded marine fossils indicated that the mountains where they were found were once under water, but he doesn’t know why. He followed the reasoning of his pre-Socratic predecessors, who looked for an archê, or principle substance, underlying all things. For Thales, all things originate from water. For Anaximenes, all things arise from air, and for Anaximander, all things come from a boundless unknown substance called apeiron. Xenophanes proposes that all things arise from cycles between earth and water. Although overly simple, his use of specimens to justify his logic later credits him with founding scientific methodology.
*
In the Intensive Care Unit, Jeremy looks at me hard. How had it come to this? His eyes ask. He has only been gone sixteen months, and I was the one he trusted to be okay somehow without him. He can’t hold my hand anymore, because my arms are restrained by the bed to prevent me from hurting myself, as is common in head-injury patients. He makes his way to the corner to wait, and I imagine that we are back in his room at Duke University Hospital where I am the bystander and his chest aches from surgery to remove the tumors that had metastasized to his lungs.
A CT scan reveals a skull fracture in my temporal bone is pushing a popcorn kernel’s distance toward my brain, which is hemorrhaging. Dozens of capillaries spring into fountains from the pressure and flood the surrounding tissue. My brain is awash. Thought sinks into a dark pool, as if into the mouth of a cave.
A follow-up scan in the morning will reveal that I am being stroked, to use Ram Dass’s verb. A lifeguard in college, I associate the word with swimming and picture blood cells back-stroking through my arteries. They bang one after another into a clod that has appeared in the middle of their lane, startled. Water wears canyons in earth, over centuries, but for centuries prior earth simply halts the flow of water.
After I am identified, my housemate Jayne traces a number for my parents, who live several time zones and fifteen hundred miles away. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” a resident physician wakes my mother at three a.m. to say, “but you need a medical release to catch the next flight to Denver. Your daughter has been in a very bad accident.”
*
In a nearly straight line coming down the slope in the badlands of Afar, Ethiopia, paleontologist Donald Johanson spotted bones gleaming from the same skeleton he just identified by a single elbow jutting out of the ground. The elbow didn’t have a flare on the end as monkey ulnas do, he recognized, meaning that it would have belonged to a hominid. Its size and location in the excavated layer date it to be a 3.2 million-year-old female. The Beatles were playing on a tape deck, so a young woman in their expedition suggests they name the skeleton Lucy, after the song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
*
The stroke occurred in my middle cerebral artery, likely from a hematoma that formed when my head cracked the driver’s side window. Since the mid-cerebral rises from the internal carotid, this vital artery is now in danger of rupturing or filling with additional clots. The medical team sends a crystal-clear stream of anticoagulants into my IV and waits.
The trauma team tweezes windshield fragments from my skin, where they shine like solitaires. A kind nurse braids my hair to prevent it from matting into a permanent knot against the pillow. I talk incoherently while my face swells, eyelids stretched tight as football laces.
I had been on a date with a law student I met recently on campus. The first time Josh and I went out, he told me about a high-performance driving course he had taken, whipping his Saab down a side street. My brother had died the previous year. My mother spent the time Jeremy was undergoing surgeries and chemotherapy receiving her own treatments for breast cancer. I had succumbed to magical thinking, imagining there to be some statistical limit to the hardships one family could endure.
That afternoon I sat at my desk writing a story for my graduate fiction class about a dauntless character named May who swam against a current of despair and worked for a wealthy widow named Miss Cushing.
When Josh called, he wanted me to meet him downtown for dinner. When I arrived, he threw his arm around me and squeezed us into a booth with a domineering gesture I wanted to think of as protective. The times I had been brave enough to try, I could not touch the bottom of my grief. I was learning to live someone else’s life, someone like Josh who did not have any siblings.
“Have you read The Master and Margarita?” I asked him, because my college boyfriend had also gone to law school and loved the novel.
“Nope.” he said. Josh was ordinary looking—not particularly fit or outdoorsy. His hair was hay-colored, but he had never been to a farm, unlike my brother who wanted to raise cattle like our father and grandfather. I studied him, this specimen of humanity who presented “n. A means of discovering or finding out; an experiment.”
*
“We can’t do anything for three days, until we see if she’s going to make it,” Dr. Chang, the Neurosurgery Chief Resident, tells my parents when they arrive.
They sink deeper into a gritty bed of fear and sorrow. It crusts their eyelids together and coats them each night, so they have to chip and pry at the cracks to open them each morning. Their stomachs are geodes buried inside shale. If you run into my mother in the hospital hallway in route to the cafeteria, she will flake and unsettle, but she cannot shatter. Someone needs to double-check my medicines. During one of my brother’s many hospital stays she prevented a nurse from putting drops into his eyes intended for a patient with intraocular melanoma.
She cannot allow herself to doubt that her remaining child will recover. When the graduate program administrators say they can find someone to cover the classes I am scheduled to teach in November and December but will need to give my teaching scholarship to someone else when the new quarter begins in January, my mother says, “She will be back by then.” The doctors disagree, providing photocopied instructions of what to expect after brain injury. “Give her time,” she asks Dr. Whitt, the professor in charge of the Composition program.
*
Finding Lucy was a watershed moment in Johanson’s career, but Lucy’s fossilized skeleton is only one of many specimens that together trace human ancestry, now dating to the nearly seven million-year-old Toumai skull found in Chad, meaning “hope of life” in the local language.
Every new find has the potential to revise human evolution. In 2010, the tip of a pinkie finger from a child dated to have lived over 40,000 years ago revealed an ancestor that scientists are still positioning. They have not yet determined whether the child belongs to the species Homo denisova or the subspecies Homo sapiens denisova, because the criteria historically used to answer such questions does not exist for Denisovans, the first hominid to be identified strictly by their genetic code.
Evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo mapped the genomes for Denisovans after finding strange sequences in a fossil thought to be Homo neanderthalensis. Later supplementing the bones found in Denisova Cave in Siberia with finger bones from another limestone cave in Croatia, Pääbo was able to sequence both human ancestors.
His efforts revealed that a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA lives on in modern humans from Europe and Asia, or who migrated from there. People from Melanesia also retain roughly 5% of Denisovan DNA. This disclosure generated expected resistance, but finding extinct species scripted inside our cells is more irrefutable than bones.
Comparisons between these ancient chromosomal sequences and contemporary hospital records illustrate their legacy. One specific genetic variation encourages proteins in the blood to clot easily. The predisposition that once helped close wounds and reduce infection today increases the risk of stroke.
*
“Mama,” I call out once transferred to a hospital room, “I can’t move my hands. Please will you untie my arms?” My mother explains that the doctors have put these straps on my arms to protect me.
“When you get better, they can take them off,” she says.
“Okay,” I agree. Minutes later, the way my grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease would forget what was just said, I repeat myself and she has to refuse again.
My friend Rogelio loans my parents his white Cutlass Cierra so they can drive to the scrapyard where my Jeep has been towed. My mother puts her hand to her mouth when she sees its collapsed frame crushing the driver’s compartment.
She is still in shock when the doctors explain that my left elbow crumbled like a saltine cracker against the door frame. My left ankle also splintered and would need a titanium pin to be reconstructed, but the medical team cannot risk either operation.
“She may walk with a limp,” the orthopedic surgeon says, “but given that she may never wake from anesthesia, our best option now is to let the ankle heal on its own.” The elbow will fuse if they don’t operate, but it too has to wait.
My brother takes in this information with my parents. Both my parents see him standing with the team of doctors wearing the burnt-orange Abercrombie t-shirt I saw him in earlier. My mother says later that she sensed she couldn’t talk to him, but she was processing too much information to question his presence. When it does occur to her, she thinks, He wanted us to know that he is still here with us.
*
When a surgeon pins an x-ray of my elbow to a light box and circles its fractures, I nod. Although this part of myself has previously been hidden, I do not question him when he highlights fragments of my ulna with his pen tip and says, “The bones will need to form bridges to reestablish the joint.”
But if another expert were to enter with a greater magnified specimen on which are written letter combinations in repeating helixes, I might not follow as readily. I might not see, as a geneticist does, the blueprint inside my elbow of a human elbow as the angles of flexion and pronation developed over millions of years. I may not comprehend how hundreds of thousands of ancestors padded, cartilage layer by cartilage layer, a notch so the radius could glide from sixty to forty to twenty degrees and back to one hundred and eighty. I may need him to repeat why my own will never again be that fluid. I may deny his rude suggestion that this crooked, primitive limb belongs to me.
*
Before Xenophanes pondered fossils from the mountains of Syracuse, there was the human body. Thus, the very first specimen—from the Latin specere “to look at—” is likely to have been by an injury. Perhaps a girl fallen on a trail touched her forehead and found it to be glistening red. Hurt? Heat? She would have asked herself, perhaps tasting the blood, taking her questions in hand like a child. She would have looked hard at this scarlet altering. Now she was not like the others. She was not like herself a moment before.
Every specimen begins with a split. In looking, one becomes other than the “n. An example, instance, or illustration of something, from which the character of the whole may be inferred.”
*
When my friend Juliet and her dance partner Mark come to visit me in the hospital before going to a milonga, Mom says, “Tell them what happened to Winnie the Pooh.”
I launch into a story from The House at Pooh Corner, a favorite childhood book I had recalled the previous day. “Pooh was so busy not looking where he was going that he stepped on a piece of the forest that had been left out by mistake,” I say. “He was looking for Piglet, who had gotten lost, when he fell. ‘I’m flying—’ he says while tumbling through the air, ‘like Owl does! I wonder how you stop…..’ ‘Eek!’ Piglet squeals when he lands on him. Oh, dear, Pooh thinks, Now I’ve gone and done something to myself inside, because my voice works before I’m ready for it. To see if he can still say things on purpose, he says aloud: ‘A Very Bad Accident to Pooh Bear!’” Juliet and Mark laugh with my parents.
Still grinning, Juliet offers to demonstrate a tango for my parents. After moving chairs aside, they gather in a close embrace. Mark begins to hum La Mariposa. Juliet’s hips swivel and her skirt glitters under the fluorescent lights. Her eyes close, to better sense his movements, as he leads her in a figure eight. He glides forward, and she slides toward him on the ball of her right foot, her left stretched behind her like a long-handled paint brush. They stir the tiles like oil paints. Then, as if signing the corner of the hospital room, she flicks her ankle behind her with a flourish. We clap. “That was good practice for a crowded dance floor!” she says.
I called Josh the next day, and he came to the hospital. I didn’t remember that we had broken up the night of the accident. When he told me he still didn’t want to learn tango if I could dance again, I said, “I just don’t think we’re good for each other.”
“That’s exactly what you said that night,” he said.
*
Once I stabilized, the neurosurgery team performed an angiogram to examine my arterial damage. I would be awake for the procedure, but they numbed my groin to insert a catheter in my femoral artery, which carried a tiny camera up the length of my torso to my brain.
I watched the image on the screen, which Dr. Chang later drew in pencil for my parents. My internal carotid bulged like a snake digesting a rabbit. My eyes must have widened at the sight because someone turned the screen away from me. Dr. Chang wanted to insert a stent to support my stretched carotid walls, but my heart rate elevated when he attempted it. He abandoned the effort for fear of doing further damage.
“You’re lucky,” he told me: “Your brain rerouted the flow of blood around the clot.” He held up a dark film of my brain mapped with bioluminescent streambeds. “When we release you, we’ll provide a prescription blood thinner to continue for several months to reduce the risk of another stroke,” he said. “It will be a shot, but afterwards you can take a daily aspirin for the rest of your life.”
He and the neurosurgery team tested my injured brain in less invasive ways by giving me word problems and various puzzles to solve. I answered questions about current events and freed plastic cars from gridlock, but when they left I also tested myself. Mentally I recited Wallace Stevens’ poem Landscape with Boat:
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue…
Yes, still the sky was blue and despite the risks I had for aphasia I knew what blue was. I teared up remembering the lines later in the poem:
…He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself.
At that point I had lain in the hospital bed for two weeks. My muscles were so atrophied that my legs looked like an eight-year-old’s, but I stood with the help of a walker onto my right leg, my left in a plastic boot, my elbow in a sling, and went to Virginia to convalesce. Jeremy came too, but invisibly. We had to trust that he was there.
*
Smaller than a BB, the specimen that diagnosed Jeremy’s osteosarcoma shot into his narrative arc with enough force to warp it. Alone, that fragment could not determine whether surgery would vanquish cancer from his body, but it did suggest chemotherapy so aggressive it disposed him to future malignancies. Or, perhaps that biopsy was a book in itself, since the machine used to section bone thinly enough to scope is called a microtome. Taken from the Greek mikros, meaning “small,” and temnein, “to cut,” the word conjures a tiny magnum opus composed on sheets of bone. The magnified body is a library. I wander its stacks in search of volumes about Jeremy now that he is gone.
Is the most important specimen in anyone’s life the one that foretells your death? Or, is it the CT film that shows your brain is functioning well enough to go home? Perhaps it is the knot in your breast that presents a bargaining chip to offer your life for your son’s, but it could also be the blood test required to marry the man who will help you survive the loss of him.
We gawk at spectacles but peer into specimens as into crystal balls. We look to them to map fault lines and extract meaning from errors. Some of us swab ancient craniums or study the shape of the larynx as it developed the capacity to sing. Others sing. Without them, we can only look inside without comparison.
*
I returned to Colorado on crutches that January, as my mother said I would. My friend D.J.C. picked me up from the airport and drove me to my house. Because my room was on the ground floor, I descended the stairs slowly, sitting down. I washed my hair in the sink with one hand, but returned to classes and teaching that quarter, thanks to Rogelio, who drove me to dozens of physical therapy appointments and helped me get groceries on the way back.
When I could walk again, Dietrich, the owner of the chocolate store where I had waitressed on weekends, let me come back to work. I served breakfast with my left arm in a bionic brace all of the customers asked about, including Rosemary, the widow who had inspired Miss Cushing.
“Aloe,” she told me, “Aloe heals from the inside out. Drink two ounces of it every morning. I do.” She shone as if dipped in solution. I took her advice, but it didn’t make it into the May stories. May was lost to me, as if there had to be a casualty.
After the accident I could only write poems later published as There Are No New Ways to Kill a Man. I sat at the kitchen table tugging my left palm back and forth on a dish towel to loosen my stiffened elbow joint. “Sometimes all there is to do is notice,” I typed with my right hand. I pulled a ruby sliver of stained glass from my wrist when it worked its way back to the surface the following spring. “My body is what’s left of me,” I wrote, turning each line over like fossilized coral under language’s bright field microscope, until I was the only one remaining from the team assigned to my case still scribbling notes, still examining this sapient figure from whom the whole might be inferred.