“As a matter of fact,” Wayne said, “I should probably go see a doctor.”
“Are you sick?”
Wayne had a feeling you could present Steve Keating with any problem and he would look at it without moral or social judgement.
“Steve, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”
“Yeah. Black sea bass are hermaphrodites. Me and my dad catch them every fall. They don’t come this far north any other time. But that’s what black sea bass are. Half male, half female.”
“Did you ever hear of a person being that?”
“No.” Steve took a mouthful of beer and lifted his eyebrows and made great big eyes at the sky as if to say to the clouds, Here’s a good one. But there was no judgement or ridicule in him. He looked at Wayne with real interest, dying to see what he would say next.
“Well, I am. I was born like that. And I didn’t know for a long time because no one told me and they did surgery and I was on a lot of pills. But now I’m off the pills. And the one thing I’m worried about is something you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’d believe it if it was true. I’d have to, wouldn’t I?”
“The one thing I’m worried about is, my body apparently has everything it needs inside itself to make itself pregnant. I bet you never heard a guy say that before.”
Steve looked at him, impressed. There was a sound coming from down on the docks. Night crane workers were lifting containers off a ship that had come down the St. Lawrence from Quebec. There were two cranes. Wayne loved seeing their lattice booms lit against the dark, and he loved how slowly but surely they moved, lowering the containers on their hoist lines. The lattice design was like the bridges he had loved and sketched as a child; there was something about the sight of the cranes that reminded him of the beauty of bridges, and of the slow music Wally Michelin had wanted to sing. Sitting here, now, on the makeshift veranda with Steve Keating, reminded him too of the summer he and Wally had spent on the bridge that he had made with his father. It was intimate, and there were lights strung nearby, and the world was held back a little bit, so it did not encroach on the two people who sat together, set back from ordinary things such as Jack’s Corner Shop and the van and Frank King, and everything to do with loneliness and with selling meat.
“We have a fake baby in human dynamics class,” Steve said. “You want me to see if I can borrow it? It’s supposed to show us how bad it is having to get up at night and look after it. It’s supposed to scare us to death.”
“I’m scared without the fake baby, Steve.”
“Moira Carew was five months pregnant and she didn’t even know. Want me to buy you a pregnancy test? Mr. Caines has them hidden in his shop, down under the pork chops in the back freezer. When Moira had her baby, Miss Tavernor — she’s the human dynamics teacher and the gym teacher too — she made Moira take the fake baby home even though she already had a real baby.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Well, she made her. And Moira killed it. It registers dead if you don’t treat it right. It’s electronic. Would you keep yours?”
“My what?”
“Your baby, if you had one. Would you keep it?”
“Jesus.” Wayne began to regret telling Steve Keating what he had told him. Steve was too young, and once he got excited it seemed as if he could not stop talking.
“Would you give it up for adoption? Do you get periods?”
“I don’t have a place for the blood to run out. I had surgery, which I think I’ve got to get undone. I’m petrified, if you want to know the truth.”
“So she’s all backed up in there.” Steve touched Wayne’s abdomen. It was the first time anyone had touched his body since he had come to St. John’s.
“Yeah.”
“Plus you could be pregnant.”
“I’m hoping that’s not the case. But that is what I’m afraid of.”
“I can take you to the hospital. I take my mother’s car all the time when she’s down the shore at her sister’s. You know what you do? You put chalk marks on the driveway smack up against her back tires. Park her in that same spot when you get back. Right to the molecule.”
“I have my own van, Steve.”
“You do? I’m your man, then. Pass ’em over.”
“What?”
“Your keys.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on.”
“I wish you were a bit older.”
“How come?”
“So I could talk to you sensibly.”
“You know what you should do?”
“What?”
“You should take down that hood. Take it down and clean up your face and get some new clothes that fit. It’s weird — you had the same jacket on that other time I saw you, and now you look fatter but that jacket is way too big. It’s like you got bigger and smaller at the same time.”
“It’s muscle mass, Steve. The hormones gave me muscle mass like a man, and now it’s going away and everything is softer.”
“Take the hood down off you so I can have a look at your face.”
Wayne did not want to take the hood down, so Steve took it down for him. Wayne was glad there was darkness, though he knew Steve could see his face because he could see Steve’s, in the light from the ships and the dock lamps. Steve looked at him and frowned with the effort of trying to examine his face objectively.
Wayne had delivered a duck on Old Topsail Road earlier and a little girl had looked up at him from the doorway while her mother went to get the money. The little girl had stared at him, then shouted along the corridor, “Mommy, is that a lady or a man?”
Now he felt the fluid in his abdomen, accompanied by an ongoing ache, and he remembered the fetus that had formed in him before. He imagined its eyes and he easily imagined its face looking at him now. If it had happened before, what was to stop it from happening again? What was to stop him being haunted by one pair of eyes after another, just the same as that first pair?
“The thing I’m most worried about right now,” he told Steve Keating, “is not how my face looks.”
27
Lotus
WAYNE DID NOT EXPECT, when he went to the Grace General Hospital, that the doctors would treat him as a model on which to train their students. He understood it in retrospect, but that did not make it any easier.
The Grace General was close to downtown. It was on a part of Military Road that sat on the descent to the harbour. It had black railings like the churches and it had impressive smokestacks with white smoke belching out, and a thousand blank, dark windows, narrow and small like the windows in a castle a child would draw, but not a beautiful castle. There was a Subway restaurant across the road, and a taxi stand, and a corner store and other one-storey businesses that looked hovel-like next to the big cream-and-soot-coloured building. What was the hospital burning, Wayne wondered, that caused all the white smoke? Gracie Watts had once told him that hospitals were constantly getting rid of dangerous waste, and he wondered if that was what was going up in smoke now over the traffic lights and the hamburger stand with broken clapboard. He wondered what kind of dangers were in the smoke.
He had a lot of explaining to do when he tried to tell the receptionist and the nurses why he had come in. He had to make not one but seven trips to the hospital before they understood his case, or thought they understood it. He brought in the forms his father had forwarded to him, outlining the medications he was supposed to take and their cost, and he gave the names of the doctors who had treated him in Goose Bay, or at least those whose names he remembered. Several times during this process he lost his courage and thought, These people are never going to be able to help me. He watched other patients in the corridors, and that made him want to run away. There was a man whose mouth sat perpetually open lying in a cot next to a bucket of grey water that had a mop standing in it. From a cafeteria somewhere in the bowels of the building came the smell of alphabet soup and meat pies. When doctors finally did listen to Wayne, sitting in an admission room holding clipboards, he realized they were not doctors but people who interviewed you before a doctor did. They interviewed him at length, then left him to wait a long time alone in the room.