Three neon-blue binders labeled ‘1995’, ‘1996’, and ‘1997’ were thick to bursting on the foldout conference table. Momoi watched Jake, one of many case managers at West Side Housing Commission, flip them open and slide them toward her. Mounds of photographs, medical records, activity logs, and stakeholder meeting minutes in laminated sheathes. 10AM light through tall windows. Momoi sifted.
Jake put on reading glasses. “Howard Norcutt, prefers Howie. Thirty-nine, male, on disability, janitor eight hours a week for a club on the seedier side of Wickenden.”
The reading glasses made Jake look uncharacteristically serious. Momoi passed a hand over her fresh-buzzed hair and settled in.
***
Howie contracted xenoadsorbic dermatitis sometime in high school, multiple sexual partners so it was unclear from whom. Symptoms appeared in 11th grade, fall semester, on his morning commute. As his hands fused to the wheel of his ‘93 Ford Taurus and his torso and legs to his clothes he hit a lamppost.
XAD protocol in 1995 was to sear still-forming tissue from the extracorporeal objects with what, as Momoi looked at a stock photo of the gizmo in Howie’s file, looked suspiciously like a crème brûlée torch. The paramedics kept this up all the way to the hospital as Howie’s skin tried to adsorb the gurney he was strapped to.
Photocopied Kodak instants, nine to a page. First year’s progress. They’d kept Howie in XAD quarantine, a pressurized room coated in copper, the only substance known to resist adsorption before electrified textiles became standard-of-care in 2000.
“Grisly, I know.” Jake leered over Momoi’s shoulder. Listerine breath.
Antihistamines and steroids did nothing. Antiretrovirals made him vomit, which his skin adsorbed if not promptly cleaned. He had a recurring rash from the intravenous antibiotics, ruled worthwhile to prevent infection from the detritus fusing with his skin.
Once a week surgeons came by to excise inflamed or particularly obstructive adsorptions. They preheated their surgical tools with butane until they glowed.
Howie went from acknowledging the camera at the start of the photos to actively hiding his face from the flash. By the third page of Kodaks he was pale, scarred, puffy. Like veal.
During his second month in the hospital Howie suffered tonic-clonic seizures. The team rushed sedatives and anticonvulsants into him, red-hot needles at the ready as old venous lines were ripped out before they could be adsorbed. The seizures stopped, Howie spoke nonsense for a few hours, then he fell into a coma. Each time they reduced his dosage of sedatives or anticonvulsants he’d seize again, so in the coma he stayed. His school gave him medical leave. His class mourned. A photo showed bouquets of flowers and small crosses with his school photo day portrait taped to their intersections laid against the hospital room door. Momoi thought of highway memorials.
Blame for the seizures fell on the coagulants meant to minimize blood loss during excisions. An infectious disease consultant’s note in the binder: ‘likely thromboembolism that led to middle cerebral artery ischemia, partial damage to motor cortices based on EEG.’ Even if Howie woke, neurologists concluded, he would likely be paralyzed.
“At this point,” Jake said, pointing to the photo of Howie supine on the copper floor labelled ‘POSTICTAL’, “his parents divorced.”
‘1995’ was over. ‘1996’ began.
Howie, with the right combination of drugs, time, and luck, came out of the coma. He’d lost muscle and most of his fat. At age 18 he looked like a rough sleeper in his fifties. His left arm and leg were mostly limp. After months of physical therapy he only required a cane.
That he was alive at all was considered a miracle by the healthcare staff. Active XAD mortality rates back then were high. A series of Kodaks of Howie in bed posed with doctors, nurses, classmates, their thumbs up, his drooped smile and drooped mustache atop a cartography of pockmarks. Things removed.
Howie returned to school and failed out. He couldn’t hold a job so went on disability. He moved from his mom’s house to a cramped apartment down the street from the Social Security Administration building by I-95. After incidents in the parking lot he lost his driver’s license. He smoked before XAD and smoked more after. He watched baseball, he went to the Providence Mall, he ate fast food. He had girlfriends who looked like sex workers even though, if Momoi remembered correctly, before targeted XAD therapy it, meaning any sex as a XAD-positive individual, was considered a felony. He gained weight. What friends from high school he had left stopped coming around. He became a creature of habit. Kodaks of broken cell phones. He was on a regimen of time-sensitive drugs that kept him tied close to home. His life, what was left of it, was to be a cage of pharmaceuticals.
***
“So what do I do?”
“Be his friend.” Jake poured creamer into the coffee. Swirled admixture. “You will take Howie out on the town three times a week. Doesn’t matter how or what you do but he has to go out to receive our services. Howie’s contract with the Commission is paid through grants by the city and those grants have quotas for client-community engagement. If he doesn’t want to go out, the contract will be cancelled.” He sipped. “He’s been difficult to work with in the past and won’t work with men. He had a situation with his last caretaker, which is what led to his mother contacting us.”
Third and final binder, ‘1997’. A smiling blonde white woman in blue scrubs, cursive ‘RN’ stencilled on her patch pocket, with a partially-tanned arm around Howie’s shoulders. Her and him again, her pushing him around in a wheelchair. The two of them in the park, Howie with his cane. Their contrast was viscerally jarring. Howie didn’t belong there. He didn’t fit in. Yet in these photos, with the nurse, he and she seemed to actually smile.
Momoi turned the page. Empty laminates.
***
Momoi’s title at the West Side Housing Commission was Community Support Specialist. A contract position, entry-level, minimum-wage, and in its vagueness her superiors found cause to give her tasks that ran the gamut from filling out weeks’ worth of insurance paperwork to wellness checks to Excel data entry to chasing clients in the midst of manic episodes around the Federal Hill promenade. Howie was another in a long line of morally and legally questionable indignities the Commission pawned off on her. She told herself multiple times a day that (one) rent didn’t pay itself and (two) a job less than a year would look suspect to the social work masters programs worth a damn.
Flat slate sky on her drive back to Olneyville, back to the apartment, with big cumulonimbuses like tumors over the bay. Rain slicked the windshield.
She hadn’t come to this lot out of the kindness of her heart. Momoi was a failure. Fairly sure she was, at least. Her success at failure– painting, then 3D rendering, then animation– shocked even her professors. What’s an art teacher to do with a bad artist? The Rhode Island School of Design had only one answer: ignore. Giving a bad artist the gift of post-crit angst or the thrill of exile would only serve to inspire outside the bounds of the institution taking credit. No profit there. Loss, in fact. Time and energy invested without a return. She’d received cold shoulders, excuses from prospective mentors, Stevia-sweet sympathy from her classmates. Her final project, a graphic novel about a struggling three-piece noise band touring the east coast, attracted praise but was too late. The social mold was cast. She was not in its cavity.
Momoi took all this in stride and decided to look into the more steady, maybe less soul-scalding career of social work. She had always been vaguely interested in poverty.
Momoi had never met anyone XAD-positive but Jake’s presentation had her curious. She’d heard stories, seen the tabloid photos of that one C-list MTV celebrity that got it back in the Bush era. If anyone at RISD had it she hadn’t been told. There were articles in the fancy magazines about how the newer meds made it so that you could hardly tell. You could live a normal life. These same magazines sometimes discussed how close some scientist or other was to a cure. There were non-profits, 5Ks, charity auctions, concerts. She’d never gone to these, but none of the ads featured anyone that looked like Howie. She could understand, in theory, the reasoning. There was still a shock to those images but, Momoi was turning over in her mind, also a thrill. I shouldn’t be seeing these, Momoi had thought, which had become, I can’t believe I saw those, which was becoming– as in her memory the Polaroids flickered, of things merged with flesh, of flesh made un-flesh, of the reorganization of the border of the self– I must see more.
Teens filled the sidewalks by the brutalist high schools. Money curled taut in rubberbands passed surreptitious. Crossing guards menaced traffic. The rituals of a West Side weekday.
***
Jake joined Momoi for the initial meeting at Howie’s place, a ground-floor apartment in a development behind a strip of outlet stores, Social Security a short walk away. The next apartment down had an emblem hanging from the doorknob, a black-golden eagle with the Iraqi flag on its chest. The apartment before had a fumigation notice held up by tape. Howie’s door, blank, smelled like Marlboros. On the floor, partially under the door, was a postcard advertisement with a stylized map to whatever venue it was hawking. Jake rang the doorbell.
Five hurried thumps. The door yanked back. Before them for a moment was Howie, hunched, mustached, leaning heavily on a cane. Then, he turned into the apartment. “Come in.”
Most of the apartment was one dingy common area, with the kitchen and a television by the windows and a dining spot close to the entrance. Howie circumnavigated a square table that held a pile of wet, unopened Big Man frozen dinners, a see-through pill organizer, and opened mail in a basket. Beige carpeting with an exception of blue linoleum for the kitchen.
Toward the back of the apartment by the television Howie practically collapsed into a recliner chair.
“Howie!” Jack shouted. “What did the physical therapists say about slow sitting?”
“Piss off, Jack.” With his right hand Howie threw down his cane and took up a still-smoking cigarette from the recliner’s built-in drink holder. The television played ESPN. A baseball game was in progress but kept cutting back to the talking heads.
Jack introduced Momoi as his new helper. Howie took this information without a change, nod, or sound. Momoi tried to catch his gaze. She asked him what he liked to do outside the apartment.
Howie shrugged. “Guy stuff.” When he spoke it was as if through gravel. “Red Sox. Paw Sox. Wings. Burgers. Hot dogs. Smoking. Can’t drink anymore.” He pointed a shaking finger at his head. “And I take my meds.” The shaking finger drifted toward the pill organizer on the table.
Howie’s arm skin held a highway median’s worth of litter and the television remote, its little blue light blinking. It was about halfway down the palm side of the forearm, adsorbed at an angle. To use the remote Howie pulled at it, really stretched the skin, to expose the buttons. Momoi thought of Chuck E. Cheese animatronics.
“Pretty cool, huh?” He was looking at her now with that facial droop. “The stuff in me.”
It was difficult to keep his face in focus. It seemed possible that it wasn’t a face at all, merely an assemblage of the components of a face without some key binding element, and with all that debris, always some other ingredient— a shard, a mote, a fleck— she wasn’t expecting.
Momoi turned to ESPN. “Who’s playing?”
***
The duo developed a rhythm. Momoi would knock on the apartment door, Howie would yell that he was getting his shoes, then they’d amble to Momoi’s Subaru. She didn’t mind him smoking on the ride as long as the windows were down. Then they’d eat, then Howie would pay, then they’d walk around to, Howie’s words, “work it off”, then they’d go back to the apartment. The television still on ESPN, never turned off. The electric bill must’ve dazzled.
The other routine, not so much developed as observed in its continuation, was Howie’s incredible capacity for sexual harassment and the capacity for everyone around him, to Momoi’s increasing confusion, to tolerate it.
Howie loved restaurants and restaurants loved him. Cheesecake Factory, IHOP, PF Chang’s, Louie’s, mall court, food trucks, it didn’t matter. When Howie walked his shabby walk up to the maître d', when he cut his way to the front of a line, when he took a stall to himself before being seated, he was a rock star fresh off a sold-out show. He hit on the waitresses in ways that made Momoi wretch. He displayed his dermal menagerie to anyone who asked with a flourish, yanking the long sleeves of his Hawaiian floral button-downs, rolling up the billowing cargo pants. He always tipped 30% and always covered for Momoi.
“Is this your new girlfriend, Howie?” An Indian buffet’s cashier nodded toward her.
Howie shook his head. “Muff diver,” he said, almost mournful.
Another one for the HR email chain. Momoi had a thought. “Does that mean you’ve had girlfriends, Howie?”
He looked proud. “Even when I wasn’t supposed to.”
When she asked him what he meant by that he just smiled and talked baseball with the cashier.
***
Momoi lived in Olneyville with a neurotic, wiry, and tragically straight medical student, Claire, and a butch journeyman plumber, Ida. That weekend the two roommates were hungry for hookups and Momoi, after an extended bargaining session that seriously threatened the integrity of the apartment chore wheel, was appointed the reluctant wingwoman and designated driver for a Friday night expedition to College Hill. Claire was hoping for marriage material. Ida was looking for fun. Momoi, at a nadir in her up-and-down dating life, was mostly bored.
The night began with promise at Seaweed’s until a prospect’s offhand comment about “the blecks” revealed him as a covert Afrikaner. Things rebounded only to be thwarted by college crowd juvenalia as regards innuendo at Firehouse 13. The situation was further worsened with unwanted advances from a clutch of off-the-clock soccer dads slumped at The Tulip & Rose. Crestfallen with disappointment after disappointment, the trio retreated to the safe haven of the mostly quiet, mostly gay bar just off Wickenden named, in pink-blue-white block letter font from the default stock selection of Photoshop, TranSylvania. It advertised monster-themed burlesques and imported Warsaw Pact beer on tap. It was also Howie’s part-time employer.
As Ida consoled Claire over the shock of a hot revanchist Boer and again suggested Claire dip her toes into the fairer sex, two of the broadest men Momoi had seen that calendar year emerged in lockstep from the bathroom. Camo pants, combat boots, skin-tight white v-necks that accentuated their pectorals. They either were military or backup dancers for a USO style drag number yet to be announced by the bar, though their nipple piercings favored the latter. They each held glow-in-the-dark postcards which looked familiar but Momoi couldn’t place.
“Norcutt,” she heard from one as they passed. “Soda blood,” the other said approvingly. By the time Momoi registered the words through her dissociation, was sure of the precise phrase she had heard and, reeling, sought to stop and interrogate the burly strangers, they had already left.
“Momoi?” Claire mewled— she couldn’t help it, that was just how her voice was. “All good?”
Momoi had stood without realizing. Her hands were shaking. She remembered the postcards. They were the same as the one under Howie’s apartment door. “Yeah, all good.” She handed Claire a twenty to cover her part of the bill then put on her jacket. “I’m going to follow those two guys.”
“Okay,” Claire mewled.
“Okay?” Ida crossed her arms, as she was wont to when she thought something was stupid.
“Okay.” Momoi headed for the door. “I’ll text.”
***
The military guys hustled east. Momoi hung back a block and pulled out her phone whenever she thought they had an angle on her. From what she could make out they made conversation and shared a vape, passed between them every couple puffs. They kept checking their postcards. Down Wickenden, into India Point, up the bike path of the bridge across the bay to East Providence, its boat dealers and derelicts. They stopped at a gas station. Momoi pretended to peruse the RedBox. Under moth-crusted fluorescents she watched them buy condoms.
They wound past bar after nightclub after closed storefront. They went onto the Providence Bay bikepath, half-illuminated by passing traffic. They cut through a golf course. Sprinklers staccato above the hum of distant music. The grass, trimmed neat, tickled Momoi’s palms when she knelt behind trees to cover her approach. The two men jogged through a sandpit and up a hill, the glow of just-distant light silhouetting them. They descended out of Momoi’s view. She checked her phone. She had service. “You two still out?” she sent. Proof of life, at least.
Beyond the hillcrest was a manor casting shadows all about, three stories, palatial egg-white, the inner light a dull orange, with a screened porch full of people and chatter, syrup-slow chords of synth from deeper within. The military guys were with a hunched man in a corduroy suit on the grass. He nodded, patted their shoulders, ushered them onto the porch, these new guests received with warm chorus.
She must have looked like a wraith coming out of the murk, Momoi thought, trying her best to seem as poised and terrible as she imagined. The hunched man in corduroy turned to her wet steps. “Good evening, madam.” He tilted his head forward and showcased an altered baldness, intricate twirled designs of bright-colored wool or linen furrowing his scalp like a topographical model. “How can we be of service?”
Momoi swallowed. Best not to mention Howie directly. “I heard about the soda blood.”
The corduroy man blinked. “You’ve arrived in time, madam, for said event, though the preambles have since concluded. You are of course still welcome. Donation box in the foyer.” He looked her up and down. “We don’t believe we’ve seen you at a function. Do you wish to be announced?” Momoi’s panicked look made him hold up his hand. “Of course. Discretion.” He gestured manorwise. “We shall walk you in nonetheless. Are you unconcerned about your clothes? We offer ponchos.”
The jabbering crowd on the porch gave way before the corduroy man, into the fog- and coat-filled foyer– Momoi dropped a tenner in the donation box with an approving nod from corduroy– then into a room with a conversation pit lined with extravagant people, seated and standing, scantily clad men both muscular and rotund, scattered women in avant eveningwear, liquor in ice buckets on the table, a bong passing among them, neat lines on the table. From a corner seat an androgynie stuck a forked tongue out and waved. Of course there was a fog machine. The music was live and pumped from a stack of amplifiers. A shirtless gaunt man in swimming trunks behind an electronic drum kit and three keyboards stood leaning heavy into a chord, torso over the drum pads to reach the synth, eyes up in ecstasy as he added a seventh to it.
The corduroy man stood before a spiral staircase and pointed up. “Bathrooms and showers.” Then down. “The event space. Verbal consent is prerequisite to seroconversion. We have a zero-tolerance policy for violations.” His smile held teeth patterned with off-white paisley motifs.
Downstairs rows of seated, variously undressed onlookers surrounded a raised boxing ring with its ropes removed, stretched canvas stained with shades of red and bile. Fog machines again cloaked the proceedings but Momoi could make out copulation among the gathered dozens as she sidled to a seat in the back. PAs overhead pumped the live music from upstairs. After a few minutes a crowd seemed to be coming down the stairwell behind her.
Lights came up, hot blue. A woman, muscular and veiny in a loose tanktop, with rigid blockshape tattoos, mounted the stage. She held a filled syringe up high and the crowd applauded. “Behold the key!” She held out her free hand and, from the seats in the dark and fog, came Howie Norcutt, draped in women and a shimmering, bronze-colored robe. His trunk was a mess of scars, deep invaginations, utensils and buttons and plastic combs and pretzels set in varying depths of his skin. Three of his fawns, their hands tugging off the robe, helped Howie onto the stage. He was nude and smiling as he hobbled toward the woman. She smiled back as she said, “Behold the lock!”
Momoi remembered from the Polaroids that this woman was Howie’s nurse.
Howie put out his arms and looked up. The room stilled. The synths cascaded in three-four time above soft drums. A waltz. The nurse injected the contents of the syringe into his deltoid. Blood trickled down the muscle into the groove of his armpit. Howie began to dance.
As Howie moved, as his muscles made themselves apparent against the sag and weight of his flesh festooned with its additives, the trickle of blood changed. It boiled. He kept dancing. From the PA, a voice lilted above the synths:
They asked me how I knew my true love was true, oh, I, of course, replied…
As Howie brought an arm over his head it seemed to split open along the curvature of his bicep and bloom as he flexed. The muscle sheath was blinding. Steam and hot blood oozed from the opening onto Howie’s face. At this he smiled and the creases from the sides of his mouth split, revealing white-yellow sinews and globules in lines up to the angles of his mandible. Polite applause. The blood didn’t gush, didn’t spurt, but sizzled. Howie bowed slightly, then lunged one leg out. The skin rippled then opened to reveal the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the whole heaving machinery of the limb as he clenched and unclenched it to vigorous applause. “Old favorite,” Momoi heard someone say.
Howie held up his unflayed arm with a single outstretched finger and the crowd quieted. The skin peeled back from the nail, small bubbles of blood as it went back like a candy wrapper, to gasps and murmurations. He twirled the hand as his palm opened, cracking its multitudinous lines. A few audience members stood as they clapped.
So, I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed, to think they could doubt my love…
Howie waltzed romantic. He beckoned the nurse, who slid across to him to put her arm around his back. She let him lean and kick out his leg, then pivot around to put her into a deep dip. She righted herself and they bowed to one another as she returned to her corner spot. He put himself into a plié to display his openings and turned for the crowd.
The nurse held her hands up, smeared with still-bubbling blood. The music stopped. “Tonight, Howie wanted to try something new in his necrobatics.” The nurse turned to him. Howie closed his eyes. His shoulders both wrenched forward with a pop and lines ran down the pectorals, met in the sternum, and hurried down the center of his abdomen. He took, with his unflayed hand, the skin gingerly off his ribs and abdomen. The sheen of the bones, the bubbling of the blood, the recti abdominis. There was hardly a sound but the sickly tearing of dermis. Momoi could see his ribs rattle.
The nurse was beside him. “The living autopsy.” Rapt applause, calls for encore. “And now, the reversal.” From a pocket she produced another syringe, flicked the plastic needlecap into the crowd (which a gaggle fought over), and injected it into Howie’s other deltoid.
The music restarted. When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes…
Howie laid himself down onto the mat as his body wracked. The flayed skin peeled further, then wrapped back, morphed and molded itself against the flesh. His arms seemed to adsorb then un-adsorb to his trunk. His hands, fingers woven together, blurred. His exposed belly and chest heaved. How much was real and how much was performance Momoi couldn’t tell, didn’t care to know. The nurse threw the bronze cape over Howie’s pitiful form and led the crowd in a countdown from ten. At three, the cape rose. At zero, the nurse whipped the cape back and Howie stood, whole, haggard, violet with caked blood. The remote in his arm caught the light. He laughed. The triumphant body, undone and cobbled back together. The crowd roared. The music ended. The hot blue light dimmed.
Momoi’s nausea was transcendent.
***
Back at TranSylvania Ida was doing karaoke (‘In The End’, Linkin Park) when Momoi walked in. Claire, face-flush drunk, rushed from the bar to hug her. “I thought I knew them from school,” Momoi said. “It was a nice house party. Different.”
Ida came down from the mic, nu-metal instrumental ongoing to scattered boos. “Is it still going? Is it cool?”
Momoi laughed. The three stayed out a few more rounds, chatted with passersby. The evening fizzled. Momoi drove home. Her roommates slept against one another in the backseat. As she passed under the harsh lights of the Providence River Bridge, she took out the luminescent postcard from her pocket and admired it against the steering wheel, heavier than it should be, suffused with something more than the sum of its parts.
-- Jay Gee is an American writer of fiction and doctor based in New York City. He can be found outdoors during inclement weather.