Authors: Jessica Chiarella
Nobody comes to visit me in the hospital that first week. And that’s fine because nobody was really around for the past five years when I was sick, either. They were around at first, before it got really evident that I wasn’t kidding. People seemed to care when I told them. I feel like the percentage of people who cried upon hearing of my condition was pretty impressive, especially considering the only friends I had were paid to be on set every day. But the minute it started to show, within weeks of that first KS lesion on the side of my neck, bleeding purple through all the makeup I slathered onto it, the orbit of friends and industry players around me seemed to loosen and widen. The minute people could see the disease, they began to care a whole lot less. People stopped looking at me. Which was strange, because people had been looking at me my whole life, people I didn’t even know. But the sicker I got, the more people saw the disease instead of me. It got to the point where my own mother couldn’t look me in the eye.
Looking in the mirror now feels like revenge. I’ve always had good bone structure, the kind of thing talent agents can spot in a pre-pubescent schoolgirl at a mall, the straight nose and high cheekbones and pointed chin that grows up with you no matter how much weight you lose or how deep the lines around your eyes become. Now my skin is no longer sallow and lined, my eyes aren’t ringed in deep, sucking sockets of shadow. My hair isn’t gray and sparse; my lips aren’t cracked or pocked with sores. I look like I did at twenty-five. Better, even. I’d been smoking for ten years by my twenty-fifth birthday, and my skin never looked this pristine, like
polished stone, even when I was at my best. My hair is thick, back to its shining honeysuckle blonde. My lips are soft and full of blood. I smile at my reflection, winking an eye ringed with long lashes. Give me a pair of tweezers and a good blow-out and I’m Grace fucking Kelly.
Let them try and show their faces now. Those hangers-on. The agents and managers and makeup artists who fled so quickly when they realized their paychecks would fade along with my looks. Let them try and flock back now that I’ve been reborn, fully-formed, like Athena springing from Zeus’s skull. Excitement brims within me. I trace my fingertips down the perfect column of my nose, over my chin, an eyebrow, circling my eye. Checking to make sure it’s all real, it’s not some illusion brought on by whatever they’re putting in my IV. But it’s me, or at least the version of me who used to leave talent agents and directors and teenage boys slack-jawed and gaping. I’d watched this woman shrink and wrinkle like a raisin during the last five years, giving way to age and disease and despair. This woman, I think, looking at my reflection, this woman is afflicted by none of those things.
It’s a nearly breathtaking thought. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to blot out the version of myself who came before, first the long-limbed girl in cutoffs from the trailer park in Illinois, then the teenage catalog model selling trashy clothes and bubblegum, then finally the up-and-coming soap star who contracted the A3/02 strain of HIV the week her first independent film premiered at Sundance. Now I’ve got all that time back. I have no past. I was born from nothing, conceived in a tube, and grown in a lab. And show-biz has the memory of a goldfish. All I’d have to do is pick a good stage name and no one would remember the blonde girl who won a Daytime Emmy a decade before. No one would want to remember, not when I look like this now.
I’m up and walking without assistance by my second week in the hospital, though at times it still feels like my joints could flop out of place at any moment. The first thing I do is tiptoe my way
down the hall when the nurse’s station is clear and Google the number for Val, my building’s maintenance guy, on one of their computers. It takes much longer than I expected. My typing is slow and dreadfully clumsy. If I close my eyes, I can imagine the placement of every letter on the keyboard, but my fingers refuse to fly over the keys like they once did. I must tell each finger where to move. When I finally find the number, I’m almost certain one of the nurses is going to catch me, but still I pick up the phone and dial.
“Yeh?” his voice comes over the line.
“Yes, this is Connie from apartment 537? I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“You put in a maintenance request?” Val’s accent is thick and Eastern-European, all of his consonants feel earthy and guttural over the phone.
“No, see, I just want you to knock on apartment 538, Dr. Grath’s apartment? Could you let him know that I’m away on vacation, and not to worry?”
“Vacation?” Val says it as if he doesn’t understand the word.
“Yes. Tell him Connie, from apartment 537, called and told him not to worry. Okay?” The nurses won’t be gone for long. I glance down the hallway to the door with the light flashing above it. I sort of hope someone isn’t dying in there. Seems like a bad way to score a free phone call. Though, I wouldn’t have to resort to such methods if they let me use my cell. The rules in this place are starting to get on my nerves.
“Sure, sure,” Val says, though I’m only about forty percent sure he’ll actually do it. Considering how long it took him to fix the leak in my bathroom ceiling, I might be home before he actually gives the message to the old man.
I’ve been thinking about Dr. Grath a lot during the past few days, and I am feeling pretty bad that I didn’t tell him that I’d be gone for a few weeks. I imagine him tapping on my door with the top of his cane and getting no answer from within. I wonder if he’s frightened, thinking that maybe I’m lying dead in my apartment
like the doomed heroine in one of his Hitchcock films. But no, Dr. Grath is sharp enough to realize that if I were dead in my little studio, he’d probably be able to smell my corpse from across the hall. Still, I wonder if he’s lonely.
I’ve been traipsing down to his apartment a few times a week for years now, because I burn through my medical marijuana much quicker than he does, and he’s always willing to share. He says it doesn’t do a lick for his glaucoma anymore, everything has been a dark blur for him for years now, but his ophthalmologist just keeps prescribing it for him. Probably out of pity. It was always our joke, mine and Dr. Grath’s. Because we both know that anyone who pities Dr. Grath is just wasting his time.
It was a mistake, not to mention my impending hospital stay to the old man. I simply said good night to him one evening and left for the hospital the following morning. If I died when they cut into my brain during the transfer—which had been a risk, according to Dr. Mitchell—I would’ve preferred Dr. Grath to think I just disappeared. I talked a lot throughout the years about hopping on a plane to Bermuda or Iceland or Brazil and never coming back. If I had died on the operating table, I would want him to imagine me on a beach somewhere instead of holed up in my moldering, poorly heated studio.
Even now, I don’t know how I’ll explain what’s happened to me. I think of his eyes, those cloudy blue eyes that look like milk billowing into a cup of tea. If I lied, told him I was visiting family or on a bender, or that Bermuda wasn’t really all it’s cracked up to be, he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was lying. He wouldn’t know that I’ve been cured, while he must still live out the rest of his life looking at the world and seeing nothing. It doesn’t seem fair.
I go back to my room, steadying myself on the doorjamb before stumbling through, and flop back onto the rumpled sheets of my hospital bed. And I barely have time to register my mistake, to see the unfamiliar book on the side table and the sagging balloons in the corner and hear the flush of a nearby toilet, before a small Asian
woman emerges from the adjoining bathroom. She stops where she is, and we stare at each other for a moment.
“Sorry,” I say, sliding off the bed and onto my already-exhausted legs. “I guess I got the wrong room.” She looks peculiar, strangely ageless. Her hair is dark, her eyes wide-set and topped with sparse eyebrows. Perfect teeth peek out from between her full lips. Her skin is dewy and placid, totally without texture, baby skin. There is a maturity in her features; seen from afar I might peg her somewhere around thirty. But up close, she has all the signs and markers of youth, of girlhood, and I see in her so much of myself that the recognition is immediate. “You’re another one, aren’t you? In the pilot program?” I lower my voice a bit. “SUBlife?”
“Who—” the woman says, still gaping at me as if I am some foreign creature, something unnatural, an intruder.
“I’m Connie. From the room next door. I think. I never figured that they’d put us all on the same floor. But then again, why not, right?” The woman says nothing. Maybe something has gone wrong with her transfer, maybe they weren’t able to get all the data mapped correctly into her brain. She looks at me like she’s got a screw or two loose.
“It’s weird, right?” I say, trying to help her along, buying time to pause and get my balance before starting to walk to the door. She nods a little in reply, and then makes her way to the bed in two unsteady strides. She sits down gingerly.
“Are you Mary Jane Livingston?” she says, finally. Her eyes are a pretty color, gray ringed with brown. Her question makes me laugh.
“I am,” I say, delighted that she recognizes me.
Stratford Pines
was the first real acting gig I landed when I moved to Hollywood, a bad soap opera but a good jumping-off point for a film career that never materialized. Still, it’s gratifying to be connected to my former self. “At least, I was. In another life.”
“I don’t like the woman they replaced you with. She’s not as pretty.”
“Susanna White. She plays Mary Jane all wrong, much too
emotional. I mean, I know you’re a soap star and all, but Christ, have a little artistic integrity, won’t you?”
The woman smiles awkwardly, as if it is an uncomfortable expression for her.
“What’s your name?”
“Linda.” She looks like she’s about to say more, so I wait a moment. But the smile fades from her face and her lips press together.
“So you’ve been watching for a while then, huh? It’s been, God, about five years since I was on the show.”
“I used to watch it every day.” She has a strange conversational style; she stops talking just when it seems like she’s picking up steam. Maybe I make her uncomfortable. I should really leave. I’ve barged in on this nice, unremarkable woman as she’s recovering from a traumatic medical procedure. But the idea of going back to my empty room makes me tired in a way that is not wholly physical.
“Who was your favorite character?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation going by sheer persistence. Again, her teeth appear in a shiny stripe between her lips, as if she’s trying to remember how to smile.
“Jake.” Her eyes drop when she says it.
“He’s very pretty, isn’t he?” I’d gone home with Bradley Jennings, who plays the character of Jake Westerfield on
Stratford Pines
, more than once for a little post-production. I consider telling Linda this, and then decide against it. She looks like she might shock pretty easily. “I haven’t really kept up on the story since I left the show. It’s funny, you work with the same people every day for years, and you think that you’ll all keep in touch when it’s over. You’d be surprised how quickly something stops being a part of your life.” I think of Dr. Grath again, how easy it was to check into the hospital, to disappear for weeks, without even wondering about him.
“I have a TV,” Linda says. She motions toward the television mounted on the wall. “I could tell you what’s happened.”
“In the last five years?”
Linda nods emphatically. Who was this woman before the transfer? There’s something painfully disjointed about her, the way she looks and the way she talks. After all, not many Rhodes scholars are watching
Stratford Pines
every day for the past half decade. But she has an earnestness that I find endearing, particularly so, given the weight of my loneliness.
“Maybe,” I reply, because I’m still wary of committing pieces of my future to anyone else. I have been, ever since I got sick. It’s why Dr. Grath never invites me over, I always simply stroll down the hallway and knock on his door, unannounced. I hated plans, and appointments, things that need to be scrawled on a calendar. It felt like handing over bits of time, time that no longer belonged to me, without knowing how much I had left.
My sister visits the week after the transfer. She’s called a couple of times during the past few days, and I’ve been putting her off. Lucy is particularly high maintenance when she’s trying to get pregnant, and I’ve been telling Sam that I don’t have the energy to contend with her yet. In truth, I’m a little afraid of what she’ll think of me now. I run my fingers through my hair and it’s heavy, unwashed, thick with grease. I wonder how I’ll look to her.
She starts crying as soon as she enters the room, with one hand over her mouth. I glance wide-eyed at Sam, a silent plea for help. He’s always been good with Lucy. Better than I am, at least. She blubbers in the collar of his shirt as he envelops her small frame, rubbing circles along her back. It used to be that way with Sam and me, back when I was first diagnosed. I remember crying on our bathroom floor, the force of his arms gripping me, the damp press of his face into the back of my neck. Now, it seems like whenever I cry, he finds an excuse to leave the room.
When Lucy releases Sam she descends on me, her face wet against my cheek, her curly hair soft and fresh-smelling as it falls into my line of vision. She has the same fair features as I do, though her hair is a shade lighter brown, her eyes a bit smaller. She looks tired and very lovely.
“God, you look fabulous,” she says, groans really, sniffling and releasing me, wiping her face with her palms. “Think I could get a new body after I have another kid?”
“What if you want to have more?” I ask.
“I swear, three is enough. Too much, probably. The next one
won’t get breastfed at all, I’ll need a cocktail so badly,” she says. “But what about you? How are you feeling, honey?”
“Good, I’m good. Sam is taking excellent care of me.”