Second Nature (21 page)

In those first eight weeks, Kit also insisted I go out, pointing to the obvious irony. “Out,” she said. “Not to someone’s house. Out. We’ll start slowly. With the deli.”

So we went to Myzog’s, where the wreck I had been before was as familiar to patrons as the henna on the waitresses’ shellacked updos.

People stared at me more than they had when I was the girl who had no face. My face
now
made people uneasy in a different way. With my swollen cheeks and the big dewlap of skin under my chin, which was not removed until July, I looked like I had neurofibromatosis—and, yes, I know how that sounds. Once, back in college, for a life-drawing class (we did have to be able to render perfectly from life, despite the fact that the sixth of seven generations of Illustrator and Photoshop were up and running), I used charcoal to draw a woman who had neurofibromatosis, which is commonly known as Elephant Man Disease. Her tumors were like tentacles, burrowed and bursting under the skin of her face and neck and back. She insisted that she would not risk neurological damage by having them removed. It was better for her to have a face that looked like a kind of root vegetable than a mouth that wouldn’t close. She brought her grandson, and I heard other students—right in front of me—marvel that somebody had married her. The boy was about three. After he laid waste to all the pens and sketch pads we weren’t fast enough to grab, my professor put him on the floor with some old Cray-Pas and a sheet of paper as big as he was. Professor Arneson told him if he could fill the whole thing with different-colored squiggles, there would be a giant Kit Kat at the end. (Arneson weighed about eighty pounds and ate supersize Kit Kats all day, washing them down with cold black coffee. I’m sure she threw it up or had some disease like pica that made her eat strange things because her body needed trace minerals.) The little kid was diligent. He took forty minutes to cover that page with snakes and lightning strikes, but he did it. The drawing of his grandmother, with her strange fairytale-creature face, looking down at him is one of the only pictures of my own I’ve ever framed.

Until the surgeons removed the flap of skin that was left over under my chin, I wouldn’t go shopping with Kit—or almost anywhere in daylight. Which was nuts. I’d gone shopping at the freaking Mall of America when I looked like a baseball that had been whacked once too often. Now, however, I wanted to be … not transitional. When I went out into the sun, I wanted to be finished.

Loyally, Kit took me to the Green Mill and listened to Nicky Hixon sing Ella in the darkness that smelled of salt and vodka. We did not go to Slicker Sam’s or Jimmy O’s. I had unreasonable fears that I’d run into Paul LaVoy—or even worse, Neal. What would I do? Scream? Slap them? The one open-range outing Kit and I took, to a street fair near my hometown, was just terrific. We did encounter several high-school friends. They could not have reacted with more dignity or enthusiasm.
Sissy!
they cried.
We heard your voice and knew it was you!
Or,
This is so amazing … You look like … yourself! You’re beautiful, Sicily!

They were right. In some eerie way, the more time passed, the more the swelling subsided, the more I looked like I would have looked. When the excess skin under my jaw was removed, it was a cursory procedure by an ordinary cosmetic surgeon that left a tiny line of a scar. The swelling subsided within what seemed days, revealing my strong, firm jawline. And I was pretty, as pretty as I would have been, as pretty as sweet lost Emma deserved to grow up to be.

My art-major professor at UIC had been Gary Gottfried, which is like saying I was taught to be a medical illustrator by Walt Disney. Dr. Gottfried was a real artist, whose medical paintings hung in museums and public buildings—the one tracing the history of ophthalmologic surgery took up a whole wall at the Eye Institute in Philadelphia. The program at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle accepted only twelve candidates a year. Some of Professor Gottfried’s best had gone on to be movie animators, biomedical engineers, and fine artists, although none, I think, ended up doing what I finally ended up doing.

In the second week in September, he asked me to visit his senior class for a small seminar.

“When Sicily began her studies here, I knew she was one of the few who would actually be a medical illustrator,” Dr. Gottfried said. “Because of her history, she had a passion for helping to show the how and why of the mysteries of the body, in sickness and in health, the macro and the micro, the beautiful and the fearsome. She was the illustrator’s illustrator, with an eye for precision and beauty and a knack for speed.”

I was blushing. Blushing was one of the new weird sensations that accompanied this perfect skin, along with no visible pores.

“But I never knew that my personal destiny would intersect with Sicily Coyne’s in the way it has.” It was Dr. Gottfried, back in the 1980s, who had created the software for age progression, which was originally used to help the FBI find missing children, based on how they would have looked years after they were abducted. At UIC, the transplant team used that software to design the way that my face, last seen at thirteen, would look at twenty-five. In fact, it was also used with Ben Cappadora, when he turned up, nine years after he was kidnapped, with the husband of the nut-job woman who’d taken him—a nice guy who never knew that the little boy he adopted as his own was stolen from someone else.

Identity is a weird thing.

Now in the mirror I began to see Sicily—but it was a Sicily I had never seen. Sicily a woman. Sicily with Emma’s turned-up little Irish nose.

When I had coffee with Mrs. Cassidy after Dr. Gottfried’s class, she asked if she could touch my skin. She started to cry, and I held her while she did. She said, “Emma … Emma.” That very night—I could have predicted this—I woke up screaming, so loudly that my aunt came pounding on the connecting door between our apartments. I dreamed I opened my eyes and Emma was standing there in her long lace nightgown, and she had no … well, you can imagine. She said, “Bitch, give me back my face.”

That week, Polly finally had to do her job as it was construed. Something was finally not a normal reaction. I was certifiably depressed, more than I had been after my parents’ deaths. I didn’t get excited when I woke up. Music didn’t set me in motion. Polly said that if it lasted too long, she would refer me to a psychiatrist who could prescribe something.
Why
, I asked Polly?
Why now?
I had been sad. I had been frightened. I had been fiercely angry. But never, ever, until I looked like a pretty girl with a barely visible necklace of scar in the curve of her neck, had I been depressed.

“I’m not a directive kind of psychologist,” Polly said. “But I would guess you feel guilty.”

Well, there you have it. I had outlived everyone, and I looked good too.

Emma was innocent. She died and I survived and then I thrived. Her mother had nothing but this bittersweet satisfaction for the sacrifice of Emma’s body to the whole tortilla. My father had died and he could not see me restored. His last glimpse of his only little girl was alive but who knew how damaged? My poor mother would never see me except as the human equivalent of a boiled potato.

I began sleeping too much. As in, noon was early.

Whenever I hauled myself out of bed, I worked on this project for Frank Bom, the TV doc who had the show
The BOM!
about
health topics that concern you
. I was making an animated presentation of the way flu antibodies captured and fought off the H2N, what everyone called the Zoo Flu, to be projected on a green screen that Dr. Bom could move around with his hands. It was a cool-looking project, if I do say so, because, of course, nobody knows what color a virus is—and so we can imagine they’re anything we want. We can make them yellow and purple and neon-blue, like spined sea creatures, and set them moving in the artistic version of an acid trip—although that was another thing I hadn’t done. I was still a recreational-drug virgin.

It was when Beth saw my preliminaries for that up on my screen that she invited me to come along with her to California.

“How would that move?” she said. I showed her.

“Get out of here!” she said. “That’s amazing!”

“It’s not that difficult,” I told her. “Medical illustrators believe that God’s middle name is Mac.”

“That’s like digital photography. Sometimes I use my medium-format camera just to prove to myself that I’m still human. If you can erase your mistakes, you start believing you never made them.”

“But the results look different,” I said.

“Nowadays, with that,” Beth gestured to the computer, “you can make anything look like a painting. But, yes, really, you can’t replace the large-format-camera or a medium-format-camera look. When you look at a picture by Richard Avedon or Alfred Stieglitz, that painterly thing that’s going on … For our thing, I want to mix it up, black and white and color, snapshots and set-up portraits. But tell me about this computer-drawing thing. Aren’t there people who are better than others? Software can’t make an artist out of a dud.”

“No, but it can make a working graphics designer from somebody who just knows what she likes.”

“Vincent should see this,” she told me. “Vincent is my son who’s the filmmaker?”

“Beth, I still had eyes and ears. And my aunt is a TV news anchor.”

Beth shrugged and made a pistol out of her hand, which she fired at me.

“Vincent is making an animated film now. It’s about this guy who shrinks to the size of a cell or something to go after this bacteria that a terrorist has voluntarily put into his own body, and he’s spreading it all over the Midwest, at county fairs and zoos …”

“How original,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Beth said. “It’s so cool!”

Obviously, Beth had not seen
The Fantastic Voyage
, the corny old classic about the ultra-miniaturized submarine
Proteus
, which carried two surgeons through the bloodstream to do microcosmic surgery on a brilliant scientist, who had a secret that could save the world but was unavoidably detained by a coma. Back in the day when that movie was made, Beth would have been a kid. But all movie culties knew about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell Beth that somebody had more or less had the same idea as Vincent, and back when his mom was eating crayons. I liked Beth. Sort of in the aunt-ly way I didn’t feel about my own aunt. I didn’t want the little goldy lights in her green eyes to go dull.
The Fantastic Voyage
was based on a famous Isaac Asimov story. Remakes happen all the time. Probably, Vincent’s twist (in our terrorism-obsessed country) would be a big hit anyhow. People who remembered
The Fantastic Voyage
and
The Abyss
and those other wacky sci-fi medico things would take their grandchildren to see it. The computer animation would be over the top now.

I thought about it for a moment.

“If they know who the guy is well enough to send this molecular inner space guy after him, why don’t they just take a gun and shoot him?” I asked Beth.

“There’s a reason,” she said. “I think that it’s either two guys or that he’d blow up and infect everyone for fifty square miles if they did that. In fact, yeah, I think he’s like a human time bomb, going around infecting, and then he’s going to blow up in Times Square. Or something.”

“It’s always Times Square. Terrorists are just drawn to it.”

“Filmmakers are just drawn to it. Times Square is always there,” Beth said. “Anyhow, why don’t you come with me to California? I’m going out there because the Ossum Tate Gallery wants the photos for a show, after the magazine piece runs in
Sense and Sensibility
. I’m demanding a main gallery, and they agreed. They’re going to have to do it up big, a whole reception thing and the right press.”

“I don’t go places, Beth. The thought of getting on an airplane makes me want to throw up on your shoes. I would have to be sedated.”

“Don’t,” said Beth. “I like these shoes. But come on! Vincent lives in Venice Beach. It’s this cute town haunted by old Hollywood types, gorgeous lioness faces on these withered-up bodies. He has a cute little house. He used to live in a house—I’m not kidding—that was a guy’s garage.” She stopped and got out her camera and began to circle me, shooting close in. “He sold that garage for about two hundred grand. Life out there is nutso. It’s Halloween every day. Maybe he would want you to work with the computer animators as an adviser.”

“He’s probably got plenty of advisers.”

“Not advisers who are real medical illustrators, I bet.”

“He could probably find one.”

“You’d probably be cheaper than anyone who’d ever worked in the movies.” Beth stopped shooting. “What? What’s wrong? I didn’t ask
you
to blow yourself up in Times Square. You could stay at a bed-and-breakfast if you feel funny staying with him and me. It would be interesting—your first trip as a person who looks just like any other person. Are you afraid to visit my family?”

“No, I visit your family all the time. I like your family.”

At least half a dozen other times since that first dinner, Eliza and I had gotten together. We’d taken Stella to the Brookfield Zoo. But now, her pregnancy advancing, Eliza was literally dragging, with barely enough energy for her patients. Kit wasn’t so attentive anymore either, although I expected her back momentarily. Fall had come, and Kit’s romance with Marc-Until-Labor-Day had inevitably entered decline. Soon she would be by my side, as I rode shotgun and tried to see if there was more than one black Toyota Camry in a dark parking lot behind wretched Marc’s ex-wife’s apartment building.

I thought about Beth’s offer. I wanted to see California, the ocean, and Vincent. I’d never met a filmmaker. It might even lift my general misery, for which I now honestly considered needing medication.

“I can’t get on an airplane,” I told Polly Guthrie. “It’s out of the question.”

“Well, easy does it,” Polly said. “At least you’re identifying your fears. You’ll do what you need to do, in your own time.” My sigh of relief was genuine. I had Polly’s official permission not to go to California. I had a medical stamp that permitted me to be … something I had never imagined myself being. A coward.