“A Congenital Life” is a fictional story from the collection called Holidays: Stories by Darcy Rhyno
In the intervening week, Judith cleared her mental desk of everything but Carson. The professional challenge excited her in a way she hadn’t felt since her first day out of medical school and slowed the passing of the days to a crawl. She pushed the time along before she could see Carson again by downloading medical studies and personal accounts of congenital analgesia, the first recorded case, she told Richard over the baked sole with asparagus and saffron rice he’d prepared for Sunday dinner, the only dinner of the week they ate together now, was of one Edward The-Human-Pincushion Gibson. Audiences paid twice a day to stick fifty pins into him and watch him pull them out again. A crucifixion act in which he wouldn’t suffer in the least for the sins of others came to an abrupt halt when a woman in the audience fainted at the sight of the first nail driven into his hand.
Richard said yes, the freakish nature of congenital analgesia and its rarity qualified it as Ripley material and dismissed the subject with a dab at the corners of his mouth with his linen napkin and a sip of Sauvignon Blanc, the wine he’d selected for its spicy lemon aroma and the bright acidic finish that would balance the fish in its cream sauce. For years, arguments over Emily had sustained them, after a time to the exclusion of all else, but with Emily gone, there were few subjects one could raise to excite the other, including work and wine.
“What do you think of the wine?” He asked as he picked up his silverware, sliced a morsel of sole with his knife and pushed it and the head of an asparagus spear onto the tines of his fork.
A headache took Judith from behind so suddenly, she winced. In her mind’s eye, she watched it crawl like a spider across the underside of her skull until it reached her temples where it intensified into a silent throb that commandeered the beating of her heart. She recognized it as referred pain located in one part of the body and felt in another like a heart attack that sends hot needles shooting down the inside of the left arm. Damn it, she couldn’t blame him. He ate the way he ate, but tonight she gritted her teeth against this formality that stuck and rubbed beneath the shell of their life. She wanted to tell him, I married you because you held the fork in your left hand and the knife in your right—I could imagine us comfortable on holiday in Paris, you in easy conversation with the natives. I don’t feel anything like love for your fork and knife tonight. I’d rather you grabbed your rice up in fistfuls and licked the plate clean, stuck pins up and down your arms and pulled them out again, anything but this unpleasant absence of anxiety.
Later, after taking a generic painkiller, washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen—house rules said since he’d prepared the meal, she would clean up—she stayed up late to email Emily, her very own human pincushion. Self-inflicted torture in the form of multiple piercings all over her face and body (in anger, Emily used to persecute Judith with graphic descriptions of piercings in places only the boyfriend she happened to be dragging along behind her at the time would ever see) and a Goth exterior so contrived, it made Judith alternately laugh and cry, got Emily through teenagehood. When Judith read over the email, she realized she’d turned it into a treatise on the grotesque wonder of a life without pain. Then she wrote on because she realized she wasn’t writing to her daughter at all.
It’s not even the eerie way they walk around like they’ve been through a war and tortured. They’ve got this aura about them, this way of gliding through a room or a conversation. They’re like ghosts. Maybe that’s why they haunt me. Especially the boy. You know what dreams are like. The elements that don’t make sense are the ones that stay with you and it’s silly but people are always trying to interpret the thing that’s most absurd. Like with this boy and his mother I’m thinking now that they are a sign I should be able to read but I can’t. I suppose this is professional frustration I’m expressing here. The boy is a challenge to the occupation I’ve chosen. I went into medicine thinking I could stop people feeling pain, especially children born into it. First I discover the best I can do is to teach people how to live with it. Now it’s like I missed the mark completely. This boy should be the happiest person in the world. He’s guaranteed to live a life without pain and he’s free to pursue pleasure wherever he chooses. He is what life should be like with all the pain removed. Except he wants to kill himself.
Out of the blue, she added:
Your father and I are separating. He doesn’t know it yet so don’t say anything.
Love Mom
Instead of clicking the send button, she stored the email in her draft folder. Why did Emily live so far away? England for Christ’s sake. Why had Emily rebelled so damn thoroughly? It was pointless and far too late to do anything about it, but Richard’s nature clashed with Emily’s from day one. He drove all three of them to exhaustion with his insistence on set bedtimes when she was a baby. Then all that about recognizing her boundaries—she agreed with his reasoning at the time but the punishments… taking away anything that made her happy like desserts, her CD player, overnighters at friend’s houses, friends and finally permission to leave the house—only pushed her to cross these boundaries and new ones she invented in anticipation of new ultimatums.
“Now Richard,” was all Judith managed at first as a counter to the violently logical defense that inevitably followed the passing of a new household law like the close-the-door-gently policy and punishment—fifty times for every slammed door, twenty for every one left open. The security camera installed after she went Goth and brought boys, booze and the reek of pot into the house.
“Obviously, you can’t be trusted, so we’re treating you accordingly.”
The more the changes in Emily hurt Judith, the more defensive she became of them until at last she found herself screaming at Richard, desperate to shatter his detached demeanour, but all she ever got was a headache that lasted through the night and well into the next work day. When Emily quit school and Richard decreed that he had disowned her, Judith registered at all five MPQ affective pain descriptor levels. She would have described her pain as exhausting as well as suffocating, equally terrifying and punishing and at times even blinding. But then she quit fighting back because she’d gone numb because Emily was gone and not coming back. The headaches went away. She lost interest in her husband. These days, irritation alone remained between them.
If he ever hurt because of Emily, it never showed.
She closed Outlook, opened Powerpoint and to procrastinate so she wouldn’t have to go to bed, typed in her opening slide for her guest speech at the AGM of the Chronic Pain Society local, “Pain: face it, you’re obsessed because it’s the only way you know you’re alive.” After closing Powerpoint without saving the file, she opened Explorer to search through the on-line medical databases she subscribed to, this time for any mention of either Carson or Joy Taylor. Nothing turned up. Were they hiding?
On to the few congenital analgesia case studies, only one completed with any rigour. Back to the little research she could track down. There is no cure. Joy knows this. So does Carson. So why ask if he’ll recover? Surely she hadn’t resorted to miracles? What use could either of them have for faith? Their prognosis, like the handful of others who have – inaccurate to use the term “suffer from” – the disorder is death by living. They walk, they sprain an ankle. They walk some more and compound the injury. They sit and forget to shift their weight. Joints and vertebrae are strained, damaged and destroyed until the inflicted need steel rods implanted to stay erect. Injuries easy to come by when you’ve not learned to fear fire or heights or knives or your parents or even your own teeth go ignored and never heal. The curious probe their wounds, aggravating and infecting them until they necrotize. Operations and amputations lead them through a death by parts.
~ End part 4 of 5 ~
Photo Credit
Paris by Darcy Rhyno
“A Congenital Life” is a story in the collection called Holidays: Stories by Darcy Rhyno
To purchase the collection, visit darcyrhyno.com
Recent Darcy Rhyno Articles:
- Kindness Goes Viral
- The Children Are Dying
- Mother Canada Could Die
- A Mother of a Monument
- The Detox Myth: How Celebrity Culture Sells Us What We Don’t Need
Please Share Your Thoughts - Leave A Comment!