The Mutations Read online

  Eduardo’s specific aim in going to therapy was to learn to endure the ordeal of his college classes. He was studying at the National Autonomous University, whose campus, in his opinion, looked more like a low-budget prison than a UNESCO World Heritage Site. His plan was to graduate as soon as possible and get a job as a copywriter, editor, or translator—anything that would allow him to work from home, without having to be exposed to the contagious hordes of his peers.

  He arrived late to therapy only once, when his mother’s car broke down and he had to walk for over an hour to Teresa’s house. He entered her office panting and red in the face, his clothing soaked in sweat. Teresa knew he hadn’t taken a bus or a taxi, because he was incapable of boarding any form of public transport without having a panic attack.

  The chemotherapy that had cured his leukemia had also temporarily destroyed his immune system, and the twilight of little Eduardo’s childhood consisted of an endless succession of protective antiseptic measures. Teresa believed that beneath the manifest cause of his germaphobia lay a repressed attachment to his illness, an unresolved and unspeakable grief for his cancer. This symptom, which she had observed in several young patients, was analogous to Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage develops an unhealthy affection for his captor.

  “Why do we have to carry something foreign inside us that isn’t us?” Eduardo had asked her once, when discussing his intestinal flora. Teresa, astonished by the psychoanalytic resonances of the question, quickly scribbled it down in her notebook. Eduardo also had an aversion to all that was white. “That color turns my stomach,” he would sometimes say, a remark Teresa found curious, since white generally symbolizes all that is pure, and good, and clean. In Eduardo’s case, the essence of the Lacanian Other was the danger that lay in wait, the invasion of the leukemia that threatened to poison his blood with whiteness—with abnormal cells that were, precisely, white. The sheet Eduardo used to cover Teresa’s couch was sometimes blue and sometimes green, but never white. Sheets, gloves, surgical masks … his identity depended on those barriers that shielded him from the contagious, pathogenic, life-threatening Other.

  Eduardo’s mother had nurtured her son’s neuroses. The fear of losing Eduardo, her only child, the result of a brief affair, had made her a stickler for diet and cleanliness, and indulgent in all other matters. By catering to his every taste and whim, she had allowed Eduardo to become accustomed to getting his way. When Eduardo asked Santa Claus for an industrial air purifier made in Japan, his mother spent her entire Christmas bonus acquiring it. Eduardo was a voracious reader who detested bookstores and libraries and sent his mother out to buy him books, which had to be new, since he’d reject any that didn’t come wrapped in plastic. When Eduardo decided to start keeping kosher, his mother was forced to adopt all kinds of dietary restrictions, though neither she nor anyone she knew was a practicing Jew. Her son proclaimed the wisdom of kashruth’s prohibition of pork and shellfish, genuine vectors of bacterial sin.

  And though he never raised the subject during their sessions, Eduardo’s celibacy was clearly tormenting him more and more. His frustration was obvious to Teresa. But how was he ever going to sleep with a girl if he wouldn’t even let his own mother give him a hug? When would he ever be able to penetrate a mouth or a vulva if he felt such revulsion toward bodily fluids? The challenge was great, but so was the reward, Teresa thought. If anything could save him from his phobias, it was the persuasive power of Eros.

  Yet Eduardo despised his college classmates, and usually referred to them as “Neanderthals.” He was already about to finish his first semester, and still hadn’t made a single friend.

  “I think they’ve infected me,” he said with deathly seriousness on the first Saturday of December.

  “With what?” Teresa asked him, keeping her expression neutral.

  “Some kind of fungus. Candida or aspergillus. I don’t know which, but I have symptoms of fungemia.”

  “Such as?”

  “Chronic fatigue, memory loss, anxiety, hot flashes. I don’t have any respiratory or GI symptoms, though. I probably have fungi in my bloodstream. I’ve started taking fluconazole, but it’s not working. It’s my mother’s fault, she made my coffee too strong one morning, and since it’s a diuretic, I had to go to the bathroom at school. You should’ve seen how much yeast and mildew is growing in there—it’s horrific. I’d already told her to use only two spoons of coffee on days when I have class, so I don’t have to go. ‘I forgot,’ she said. But whatever, I had to use the bathroom and breathe in all the filth in there. Staph bacteria, spores … The humidity disperses the microbes. It’s horrendous. It’s not just my hypochondria, I swear I’ve been feeling terrible. And the problem is, it’s really hard to detect fungi in a blood culture. And you know how much I love getting my blood work done … This is a disaster.”

  “Why didn’t you just go home?” Teresa knew that in the past, as soon as Eduardo had needed to pee, he’d called his mother to pick him up and take him home, which wasn’t far.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d agreed to help a classmate study linguistics at one, and I didn’t have her number to cancel. But then I started feeling too ill to stay, anyway. I told her I had a family emergency and then I left.”

  “And did you arrange to meet some other day?”

  “No. I felt like throwing up, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the urine and microbes I’d stepped in. They put cardboard under the urinals to absorb the splashes, but it’s so disgusting. Cardboard is the perfect fungal breeding ground. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the filth on my shoes. I could feel the flagella tickling my legs, creeping up my leg hair, getting up into my—”

  “You didn’t realize the bathrooms would be so dirty?”

  “I knew they would, but I had no choice. My class ran over and didn’t finish until one-fifteen, and I’d agreed to meet this girl in the library at one.”

  “When did you agree to meet?”

  “Monday. She asked to see my notes because she’d missed a class, and I told her someone else had already asked me. Obviously, that wasn’t true, but I wasn’t about to lend them to her … so I told her if she wanted, on Wednesday, I could explain what happened in class.”

  “And do you think she got hold of the notes?”

  “Yesterday we had a literature class together, and at the end she asked if everything had worked out with my emergency. I said yes, thanks, everything was fine, and asked if she wanted to do the linguistics stuff, but someone else had already lent her the notes. That’s all. And it’s just as well, because that’s when I started feeling worse, right when finals are coming up. It’s a disaster. I can’t focus on anything. I keep thinking about all the fungi in my bloodstream, and whether they’re crossing the blood-brain barrier … I can’t handle it.”

  “I remember studying with a friend when I was in college, and it helped a lot. We took turns explaining the topics and then quizzed each other. It worked out really well.”

  “Emilia isn’t my friend, she just happened to need some notes, and then I had to go use the bathroom just because I tried to be nice to her, and now I have a fungal infection that could turn into a generalized septicemia.”

  Teresa felt a special kind of sympathy for Eduardo. In her own therapy sessions, she had talked about him and the maternal instinct he aroused in her. She would have liked to ask him, “Why don’t you invite her out for coffee?” but the suggestion would have put him on the defensive. Eduardo’s body had let him down too early in life, and he couldn’t get over that betrayal. In one of his first sessions, he told her that he took so many hygienic precautions because his body was incapable of taking care of itself, and he had to do so on its behalf. “Aren’t you your body?” Teresa had asked him, and Eduardo had responded, “The body is mine, but it isn’t me.”

  Denied the blessing of a healthy childhood, Eduardo set out on a mission to safeguard, through a strict regime of nutrit
ion and hygiene, the life of which the symbolic Other had threatened to deprive him. He had accepted that task as his destiny, the meaning of his existence. It was unthinkable to part with such a treasure—even when its care turned out to be a nightmare. Leukemia had determined the course of his life, had promised him its cure would be paradise, but then, when he was finally given the all-clear, Eduardo found himself abandoned to the mercy of an uninspiring adolescence, an overprotective mother, and a world indifferent to his health. His disillusioned mind found refuge in his phobia, in the unrelenting struggle against germs and the ghost of leukemia, foes that allowed him to keep believing in the happiness that lay ahead. In this way, the order signified in the Lacanian metaphor of the “Name of the Father” could be preserved.

  * * *

  Teresa wrote down the name Emilia in her notebook. The night before, she had smoked some marijuana, and her memory was still hazy, slippery. She grew the plants herself on her rooftop, in a locked room illuminated by high-pressure sodium lights and ventilated by an extractor fan. She had started smoking pot to counteract the nausea, loss of appetite, and headaches caused by chemotherapy. The experience had made her a fervent promoter of marijuana, as much for recreational as for medicinal purposes.

  Whenever her patients needed help coping with the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy, Teresa would offer them, in a whisper, a session with Mary-Jane, the miraculous herb that soothes pain, heightens the senses, stimulates the appetite, and even inhibits the cancerous maggots that gnaw away at our health … Eduardo, she thought, would benefit from giving it a try. Most of the buds she harvested in her greenhouse were intended for use by her patients in cancer treatment. She kept a small amount aside for her own spiritual benefit.

  5

  The night before the surgery, Paulina went online to ease her uncertainty. She typed “total glossectomy” into the search field, read the paltry Wikipedia article, then proceeded to view the images Google produced. Ghastly. She was forced to interrupt the consumption of her second Twinkie of the evening. Ever since she was small, Paulina had curbed her anxiety by bingeing on sweets, but the sight of those pictures killed her appetite. She lasted less than a minute in front of that grisly collage of mutilated mouths, stitched-up wounds, and mishmashes of bloody oral tissue. She closed the tab quickly and took refuge in scrolling through Facebook, where life went on uneventfully amid retouched photos, inspirational quotes, cartoon memes, and music videos. Once she’d regained her composure, she bit into the Twinkie, opened another window, and swiftly typed in the word “cancer.” She clicked on Wikipedia again and began to reread the article, as if preparing for an exam on the subject. “Cancer is the name of a group of related diseases involving abnormal cell division.” The hyperlinks were displayed in blue. “It can begin in a localized manner and spread to other surrounding tissue. If the patient does not receive adequate treatment, cancer often results in death.” There were three hyperlinks to choose from. She decided to start with “death.” “Death is the cessation of the homeostatic process that sustains a living organism and is therefore the end of life.” If death was a hyperlink, where did it lead? Paulina had trouble believing in the Beyond, but it was comforting to believe in ghosts, since that would mean her father could never completely vanish, unlike his tongue, which would the very next day. She went back and typed “tongue cancer,” her fingers flying like lightning across the keyboard. She had already skimmed all the most popular entries, and this time clicked on “Epidermoid Carcinomas,” unaware that these had nothing to do with her father’s case. Still, she read in terror, “50% of such growths are fatal.” A dreadful word, which, when typed into Google, produced a page about the eighties stalker movie Fatal Attraction. A reminder of the Internet’s vast indifference to Paulina’s hunger and fear.

  Only one Twinkie was left in the box. She decided to use it as an excuse to go see Mateo, who was probably still up and would be just as nervous as she was. She took the Twinkie and went out into the hallway, bending down to see if Mateo’s light was still on. When she saw through the crack under the door that it was, she approached and knocked. The only discernible sound came from the TV news in her parents’ bedroom. She knocked again.

  “Mateo,” she called.

  Paulina pictured him sitting in front of his laptop, surfing the Internet with his headphones on. The scene was accurate, though incomplete, since she failed to include his unfastened pants, his erect penis, his hand moving back and forth, and the eager stepsisters in the swimming pool. Mateo preferred to watch lesbian erotica, since male porn actors diminished his genital self-esteem.

  Mateo felt vaguely guilty when he masturbated. Lodged in the depths of that feeling was a slightly absurd but effective image invented by a priest during a sex education talk: “The body of a young Catholic is the Lord’s dwelling and a temple to Christ. Touching ourselves with impure intent is like going to a friend’s house and bouncing up and down on their bed with muddy shoes. It might be lots of fun, but their bed isn’t for bouncing, but for resting, and for celebrating, at the appropriate time, the supreme reward of marriage, which is procreation.” But Marisa Johnson, Mateo’s favorite porn actress, had an irresistible, angelic moan that matched the two impeccable wings tattooed across her back. Watching her, he enjoyed earth-shattering orgasms that soaked right through the tissues where he spilled his unfruitful seed.

  Halfway through a video of Marisa frolicking with her nominal stepsister, Mateo heard the knock on his door, and mumbled a frustrated, “Fuck!” He hurried to close the porn site, pulled up his pants, hid the unsullied Kleenex, shouted, “Coming!,” wiped his moist hand on his sweater, stood up, adjusted his penis to hide his erection, walked across the room, and opened the door to his sister.

  “Do you want a Twinkie?”

  “What?”

  “I brought some Twinkies up to my room. Do you want one?”

  “Seriously, Pau? I was doing my homework.”

  “Whatever. Come on, I bet you were chatting.”

  If Mateo didn’t take the last Twinkie in the box, the temptation would be too great for her to resist.

  “No, I ate a bunch at dinner … thanks,” said Mateo with forced politeness, trying to disguise his annoyance at the interruption.

  “You could eat it later.”

  “No, really, I’m good. Thanks. You should go to bed.”

  “I’m scared, Mateo…”

  Paulina started to cry. Mateo, ashamed of wanting to go back to Marisa, gave her a hug, taking care not to let his pants brush up against her.

  “Don’t cry, Pau. You should get some sleep.”

  Paulina felt like showing him the photos of dissected mouths and amputated tongues she’d found online, to make him realize the full extent of the tragedy awaiting them the next day. She cried tears of anger and terror. Mateo patted her impotently on the back with the affection of a robot. She would have been more consoled by an autistic cat.

  After a moment, Mateo broke their embrace, insisted that Paulina go to bed, said good night, and shut himself back in his room. Paulina was left alone in the hallway. She looked toward her parents’ bedroom door but didn’t approach it. They had too much to worry about; they didn’t need her to bother them.

  She went back to her room and lay down on the bed. From the posters tacked to her wall, the cutest boy bands of the moment gazed down at her with smiling indifference. She felt a curious mixture of childish fear and womanly desire. She wanted to hug her father and have sex with Justin Bieber. Her adolescence was a strawberry milkshake of instinct and loneliness. With its golden sheen and sweet, creamy filling, the last Twinkie called to her from inside its transparent package. Eat me, it said, and she obeyed.

  * * *

  After a long period of insomnia in solidarity with her husband, Carmela succumbed and was now snoring like a Viking passed out on grog. At her side, Ramón lay sleepless, imagining a tongueless life, the pity of his family, the confusion of his clients, the impatience
of his fellow lawyers and judges. He was about to embark on an eternal game of charades, but with movie titles replaced by legal arguments.

  Night slid viscously on. The tumor throbbed in his mouth like a tiny, misplaced heart. Ramón disguised his fear as impatience to get into the operating room, then leave again, maimed but at least having settled the score with his cancer. He counted up all the cancer victims he’d known until then. He’d never paused before to consider just how many there were, which he put down to the excesses of modern life.

  At around 3:00 a.m., he finally nodded off. Tell them not to operate, he murmured in his sleep. As he was wheeled into the operating room on a gurney, panic seized him. It was no longer a dream. He was about to be mutilated. A wave of cortisol surged through his body, preparing him to defend himself or to flee. The nurses stationed the gurney next to the operating table and lifted him onto it in a single motion. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses in surgical gowns, caps, and masks. He recognized Dr. Aldama and the surgeon as they greeted him. He could tell they felt cheerful and festive and eager to start carving him up.

  A minute of confused preparations went by. A distant voice told him to take a deep breath. He was awake and completely lucid. He was afraid that the anesthetic wouldn’t take effect, that he would wake too soon and feel the scalpel, his flesh split open, the spurting blood, the doctors’ laughter, the suddenly bare, white bone.