“A Congenital Life” is a fictional story from the collection called Holidays: Stories by Darcy Rhyno
At the start of the second visit when Carson entered the examination room alone as she’d requested and crossed the floor to sit in the big comfy chair in front of her, Judith was left with a closed door to stare at and the inevitability of Carson’s eyes. She started with his hair—fawn and fine as a baby’s—skipped his eyes, followed the parallel ribbons of his scabbed lips and jumped when they parted and he spoke.
“I know what doctors are for.”
“What are they for, Carson?”
“They’re to make me say things I don’t want to say.”
“So, what is it you don’t want to say to me?”
“I’m going to kill myself before I die.”
Judith grunted aloud like she’d been struck. Took a breath.
“What makes you think you’re going to die?”
“People like me die. My mother told me she’ll die before I grow up because we aren’t any good at living.”
“What do you mean? Everybody dies sooner or later, and most people wait until it comes on naturally, usually in old age.”
What else could she offer this boy? He was right. He would die, and likely sooner than most. She felt as impotent as she had when she clicked on the video of the tsunami that washed into that Thai resort, unable to move the cursor to the stop button once she got it started. There was the ocean floor as if parted for Moses and safe passage. And here came the water, rushing into the shore and swallowing everything in a brown stew of death to the wordless noises of horror coming from the person holding the camera.
The pale boy before her seemed so delicate, a drop of rain might dissolve him. “Don’t you think that would be a selfish thing to do, taking your own life? You could hurt a lot of people. What will your mother do without you, for example? You’re the one person in the world who really, really understands her.”
Carson looked at her, the fair eyebrows raised on his waxy face, his eyes wide in a gesture of surprise. But he said nothing. Had she made an impression? Was he reconsidering? To get him talking again, Judith asked,
“What made those scars on your legs?”
The boy looked down and up again, his eyes still wide. “My mom read me a story about Joan of Arc. They killed her.”
Judith didn’t understand. “Did someone do this to you then like they did to Joan of Arc?”
“No. I sat in a campfire to see what it was like to burn at the stake.”
He tugged the legs of his shorts higher to show the roiling scar tissue on his thighs, traced the ridges and valleys with his index finger.
“What did you feel?”
“Warm.” Carson’s finger stopped. He looked at her. “Here.”
He jumped out of her big, comfy chair and grabbed the stapler from her desk. He opened it and pushed the business end into one scarred thigh.
“No!” Judith shouted and lunged for the stapler.
He’d already punched the thing, shooting a staple into his flesh. Then he plucked it out. Two beads of blood sprouted from the vampiric wound.
She handed him a tissue. As a doctor, it was the best she could do.
“Why did you do that?”
He accepted the tissue, but held it loosely in one hand away from him. With the index finger of his other hand, he dabbed a pattern of red dots along his leg.
“How do you plan to kill yourself?” Judith asked. Because she already knew, she waited until she was sure Carson wasn’t going to reply before asking a second question to which she knew the answer. “Where will you get the gun?”
“Can you tell me if something is true?”
“Maybe. What is it?”
“A friend told me your brain is so fast, it can think about a bullet as it’s going through. Is he right?”
“I suppose theoretically, yes, but it would be a short thought, wouldn’t it?”
Carson said nothing. His face took on that flat look he’d perfected. Flat, but not empty. Judith was learning to read him. The expression said, you can’t touch me. Even if I wanted it.
That’s how Carson’s visit ended because he refused to say anything else. She led him to the door—not into the waiting room because she was still avoiding her receptionist’s tan—and asked him to wait outside while she spoke with his mother. She told Joy her son was suicidal—a statement that went virtually ignored—and asked her to bring Carson back in a week, time to allow Judith to bring a psychologist on board. In the meantime, she shouldn’t let him out of her sight.
“And no, his distress does not tell me he’s going to recover,” she said. She wanted to add, how does one recover from a congenital life?
Joy smiled and thanked her for her help.
Judith watched her go, knowing she wouldn’t be back. In the days that followed, she wanted to post messages on every medical bulletin board on the internet not because she could help them, but because she had learned to be the best in her field and no longer knew another way. She wanted to post signs as if she’d lost a kitten. Loves warm milk. Enjoys a nice ball of string. Craves affection. Answers to the name…. Don’t let him sit too long. He could die of sitting… or of walking. Carson only wants deliverance from this. If she could have him back again, she would tell him… she knew what to tell him now, what to say to ease the pain. There is no treatment for living is how she’d start. But… she wanted there to be something more. Because there wasn’t, she was left devastated by the relief she felt when, as she knew they would, they missed their appointment.
Just a few years from now, Judith will close her laptop on the news of Carson Taylor’s death and return to her room where she will stay for the rest of the evening. The next day, she will change into her swimsuit and go down to the beach. She will lift first one foot, then the other when she steps onto the hot sand in front of the resort, drop her sandals beside her feet and slip into them. “The sand was so hot, it burned my feet.” This is how she will make a story of her pain and pin it to the larger narrative of her Jamaican holiday like she’s hanging an ornament on a Christmas tree. There it is, she will imagine, up there. I’ve put it up there, that little pain, within sight but out of reach.
Down at the sea, the sand will be cooler and she will remove her sandals and leave them behind with her sunglasses. Because her pupils will not adjust immediately to the stabbing light, the sea and sand, the point of land off to the south, even the palm trees to her immediate left will appear drained of colour, but the moment she steps into the sea, the landscape and the water will darken as if the shock to her feet traveled via some nervous route previously unmapped by science straight to her eyes. She will wade deeper, the cool of the water filling her up until at last she will push off with her toes and struggle in the sea.
~ End part 5 of 5 ~
Photo Credit
Angle Wings by Leo Fourdraine (with permission)
“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
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