Chain Gang All Stars

They broke their little legs. They bloodied their little hearts past the point of exhaustion. The rats. The rats ran themselves dead. This happened, and then it happened again, and then Dr. Patricia St. Jean found herself feeling a pressure she’d never felt before. Feeling was her specialty, the science of sensation was her whole bag, but this was not what she’d imagined, and she knew, as she looked down at the rats who’d felt such pain that they’d ended their own lives to avoid its ever happening again, that she had stumbled onto something powerful and precisely evil. It was a long way from where she’d started.

When she was eleven and still in Trinidad she’d watched her father wither away. He’d been struck by a cancer of the bone. Deep inside his hard parts something had begun to eat him. During the panels she would chair many years in the future, she’d warm the crowd by saying, “Running and fetching his water, listening to him groan, I developed a pretty good bedside manner for an eleven-year-old.” And the crowds would do something between laughing and awwing and she’d know she had their attention.

But as a child, she had watched him wither. And she had fetched glasses of water and taken note of the exact day he could no longer bring the glass to his own lips.

“Patty, Patty-Girl, I’ve dropped the damn thing,” he’d said.

She cleared the glass from the wooden floor with a broom. The shards were still slick with water as she dropped them into the bin. She kept the largest shard for herself and wrapped it in a dishrag. Then she returned to her father, who was propped up by pillows on the bed. She held her hands around his and helped feed him fresh water that quenched his thirst, yes, but did nothing for the pain he felt constantly.

“Thank you, Patty-Girl,” he said. He took two gulps, then vomited on her and his hands and his chest. She wiped him off, helped him get another two gulps down, then he told her to go so he could rest.

She washed her hands, then went to her room, where the glass dressed in a dirty rag was lying on her bed like an invitation. It said, Pain for pain. It asked her to join in a communion of feeling. Her father groaned anew, and she pulled her right foot up and let it rest on her left knee. She chose her leg because her father, in the state he was in, the two things he could survey well were the hands and arms that fed, clothed, and bathed him. She’d already begun doing push-ups daily to better shoulder the burden of carrying her father to and from the bathroom for each of his four weekly bowel movements.

He made another low sound, then finally released into a full “Ah aye,” loud even in its breathlessness. She preferred when he didn’t hold back his hurt for her. To know that he was trying to keep anything at all from her made the depth of his pain too unimaginable. That is, he already seemed to be suffering as much as a human might; to know that even a small fraction was mitigated so that his daughter might feel as though he were okay—

“Ahhh, fuck,” she heard her father say. And that was when she made the first cut. She cut along her right calf with her glass in a straight line. Surgical and simple. She fought to watch it happen, refused to close her eyes as her father’s pain sang through the hall. Pain, she knew from a young age, had echoes. Pain was in the body, but pain also seeped into the walls. Pain started in the body, but it latched to a soul and tried to take it. Pain could disappear people; her father’s pain, for example, had disappeared her mother. She drank the feeling in, pressed deeper. Pain for pain. His pain needed something to bounce off of. Her father’s pain alone was swallowing them both.

As she dragged the glass the few inches across her calf she watched as the skin opened and saw the pink beneath before it flooded with red. She did not panic. She took her shard, her cutting glass, and placed it back in the rag, then she put the suddenly sacred parcel under the bed. She palmed the blood coming out of her and went to find a fresh towel to cover the new wound. She paid attention to the feeling she had with each step. The stretch and hurt as she flexed her foot. She passed by the living room, the place that had become her father’s, as she went to grab a new towel. She felt the tickle of blood spilling down past her ankle as she peeked in to check on her father.

“Need anything, Daddy?” And it hurt to ask this, because of course he needed a new body, a new mind, a new soul, one not so tarnished by the pain he’d been drowning in for so long. He needed everything.

“Thank you, Patty-Girl,” he said behind gritted teeth. “I’m okay.”

She looked down. There was a shallow smearing of blood. She pressed her toes just a bit, hiding her leg, only her head peeking in, and felt the pull, the re-tearing of the cut she’d made.

“You don’t have to say that, Daddy,” she said.

He didn’t look back at her. His eyes were closed. But he took a breath that felt like a deep interrogative glare.

“Okay,” he said.

And then she walked off, her footprints pressed and dried behind her. She got a towel for herself, then cleaned the floor as her father approximated sleep. He continued to groan and even weep until many hours later he fell asleep for real.

—

They said he was in remission.

She understood that was something to celebrate but when she looked at her father his pain was still everywhere. It stuffed the air completely, leaving no room for jubilee. Patricia, her aunt Lottie, and her father had been waiting for the new nurse. They had twenty-six hours of home care to spread through the week. They needed, of course, far more, but the insurance companies had made it clear that was not going to happen. She was thirteen and it was her job to manage her father’s health.

“Allyuh doing well?” the nurse asked.

Patricia sat in a chair beside her father, who was whimpering. She imagined the glass in her room and took a breath.

“Ogosh,” Patricia said under her breath, then louder again. “Does he look well?”

Her aunt, who checked in on them twice a week, pinched her arm and then nodded as the nurse explained that the treatments had done the job of killing the bone cancer, but unfortunately, they’d left him in this terrible state of health, an unintended side effect.

“It’s a neuropathy,” the nurse said. As the nurse spoke she looked at Patricia’s father with a kindness that made Patricia want to strangle her. “The damage to his nerves is what causes the discomfort.”

There was such a wide chasm between words and all that they held. This nurse was calm, a new face to a continuing issue. She had heard these terms before, but something about that day, the ease of the woman’s words, the fact that she seemed completely unbothered by her father’s dying right there beside them. She felt a searing happening. She didn’t know then that she was being handed the keys to her life.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Auntie Lottie said.

Patricia had wanted to say, No, this woman is not a doctor, but she needed Lottie to give her money for groceries, to keep visiting her twice a week.

“He says it’s like fire,” Patricia said instead. “I know it’s the neuropathy, but what can we do?”

The nurse looked at Patricia, and her aunt told her to go to her room. She almost ran there, grateful because she knew the answer to her question was a simple one. There was nothing that could be done. All the science and doctors in the world had no idea how to help her father. She opened a box full of long-abandoned dolls and took out her glass. She pulled her leg free of the stockings she wore as part of her school uniform. Underneath them her leg was lined like a zebra. She was deliberate and immediate as she cut herself. She sucked the feeling in. Felt it and knew it and let it flow through her. The feeling of being cut open was what she knew best. The feeling of being cut open was her best friend. The feeling of being cut open was the feeling of her life. The feeling of being cut open was—

—

When her father died she was, of course, the first to see it. And after the heat and the terror and the cutting open, she felt relief. She felt a surge of relief that she’d feel guilty about, she knew, forever.

—

In her first meeting of her anatomy lab class, before they had the cadavers in front of them, the leader of the lab class asked them a question that many doctors would ask them over the years they’d spend in school. This was the icebreaker, and because she was not afraid Patricia learned early on that she was often the one who would cleave through first.

“Because I want to end suffering. I want to change how we feel. I don’t want people to feel pain.”

The professor was a white man in his sixties. He smiled warmly. Condescendingly, yes, but a warm fatherly condescension.

“One thing I can promise you is there will always be pain. There will always be suffering. But we will try our best to mitigate it. We try our best to help. How does that sound?”

Patricia blinked at him.

—

“I liked what you said” were the first words she heard out of his mouth.

He was a year or two older than her and his greenish eyes seemed honest. “My name is Lucas,” he finished, and offered a hand. “Lucas Wesplat.”

They were both just starting down paths that everyone had told them were necessary. Still human essential. Real doctoring was a work of creativity. They’d make someone proud. They’d save.

“Hello,” she said.

“Where are you from?” he asked, still smiling, still trying to be friendly. “I love your accent.”

She had perfected her American accent long ago and regarded him closely.

“I’m Trini,” she said. Short ’n’ sweet was her way. “Short ’n’ bitter” was how her auntie called it.

“I love the islands. I’ve been with my family a few times.”

“ ’Ave you?” she said with a smile. She was human too.

—

After they were done Lucas ran his fingers over her body. He worshipped her skin with his hands and lips, and she took it in. When he caressed her thigh down past her knee she was so consumed in the reverie of herself as presented by this man that she didn’t stop his hand from traveling down her tibia.

“What happened?” he said. And the smoother pace of his fingers became staccato and clinical, even as he tried to be sensitive. It sounded as though he was genuinely concerned, and that made her furious.

“Please leave,” she said.

“What? Why? What is it? I’m sorry?”

She said nothing. She remained perfectly still in the room and imagined all she’d had to be to get there. To be in the exact same spot that Lucas had been carried to.

“It’s a lot of life,” she said.

She meant that her leg was a reminder that she was still working on. A reminder that pain was still rampant in the world and despite how far she’d come, she’d done nothing to change that.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. He didn’t chuckle but he smiled, she could tell, even though her eyes were still closed.

—

She’d graduated at the top of her class. Lucas had graduated. And yet this was the conversation being had.

“We have a chance to do something beautiful,” Lucas said. They met for lunch in an E-diner. A rolling contraption that looked older than her brought them trays of American breakfast foods. Eggs and pancakes and strips of bacon. They had dated on and off during medical school and had residencies in different states. He rode jets back and forth from his residency to hers. He didn’t mind that his carbon footprint was more than ten times that of an average person. He’d hold her close and say, “It’s worth it for you.” And they’d joke about it the way people joke about a coming cataclysm, right until the point when it swallows their own and suddenly it isn’t as funny in the same way but is also, in some ways, funnier.

“Just think about it,” he continued with a face full of pancake. “You’ll have your own lab, resources up the asshole. You won’t have to ask for anything.”

“I won’t have to ask anyone except you,” she said. She didn’t touch her food but could already imagine the floor plan of station one. She could already see how she’d model the axon stimulation process so that the rest of the lab could re-create it. She could see herself changing the world.

“You already know you don’t have to ask me for anything.” He reached past his orange juice and touched her hand. “You know me.”

Patricia sipped her water.

—

And though she understood the body so well, she had learned to accept her brain’s tendency to turn against itself. She decided to go to therapy finally, because one of her lab techs had said it had changed her life. She went to the first session smiling, and three sessions later she had told this stranger things she’d never told anyone else in the world. “What are you punishing yourself for?” the woman had asked calmly. And Patricia had unraveled there in the soft chair. She stopped cutting herself for some time. Then she cut herself again. And then she stopped for a longer time.

—

As she looked at the bloodied rats, she let the feeling of creating something so far from what she wanted settle over her. She had been able to isolate the complete peripheral nervous system of the mammals. She could influence the small fibers, the body’s pain receptors, while simultaneously increasing the brain’s ability to receive signals. She had known this for some time, and in the sterile white and gray of her sprawling lab she often rested in the knowledge that she understood those fiber sensory nerves in ways no other human had before, or even could. The lab had all but eliminated Parkinson’s, she’d found courses that quelled violent Tourette’s, but those weren’t her project. Those were not her purpose, and every honor she was awarded felt like a growing hole that could only be filled by her cutting glass.

—

Without lab coats and only covering their faces with masks, completely eschewing lab protocol, Lucas and his father, Rodger Wesplat, walked in. She took a breath and summoned a smile for them so that even though her face was covered, her eyes would lie the feeling.

“Hi, Rodger,” she said.

“Heya, Patty.” Even at his age, Rodger was a bulkier, broader man than Lucas. Though they had the same strong jaw and moved with the same air of ease, the product of many generations of familial wealth.

“Hi, Patricia,” Lucas said, and he seemed almost to struggle to look at her as he did. “How’s it going?”

Given the circumstances, she did not bother answering his question. The thrum of her machines whetted her silence further.

Finally, Rodger spoke. He wore a suit that cost several months’ rent for the apartment she’d slept in during her residency those years before. “Patty, you’ve been doing some groundbreaking work, I hear.”

“We’ve worked hard. Yes.”

“And it shows. If I’m understanding correctly, you’ve already made some breakthroughs that can be used out in the world.”

She smiled at this. “Oh no, Rodger. If you think anything I’m doing right now can be used out in the world you are not understanding correctly at all.”

She pulled her goggles so they sat on her forehead.

“Is that right? Why don’t you help me understand? And don’t sell yourself short. I think you’ve done some important work here. From what I understand you have a powerful nonlethal deterrent. A new kind of behavioral fixer. There’s a huge market for that kind of thing.”

She wanted to say there was no way he would ever understand.

“What we’ve done with the canvas project is try to mimic the peripheral nervous system, the nerves that connect the brain and the spine to the rest of the body, and in doing so, we’ve been able to study the extent to which we can stimulate feeling and sensory responses. We’ve only just scratched the surface with live testing and we know for certain that we can get coordinated neuron responses of some kind, but at the moment we lack the facility to be”—she paused for the word that would fit best—“selective regarding the exact nature of the response.”

“What she’s saying, Dad, is we’ve been trying to think of the body as a canvas for feeling and we understand the borders of that canvas but can’t control the paint yet. We can’t control what happens. Not yet anyways.”

“I understand what she’s saying. It’s an incredible thing already is what I’m saying. Having limited control thus far has led to repeatable responses, no?”

“Right now it isn’t ready.”

“No great problem is solved on the plane of its original conception. You’ve created something powerful and useful already.”

“It isn’t ready.”

“Well, we’ll let the board see and we’ll talk it through.”

“There’s nothing to see. It can only destroy the nervous system. Make pain you couldn’t imagine. You aren’t understanding what I’m saying. It is the opposite of what we are trying to do and to not push farther—I won’t allow it. When you force things, pain comes first. The worst you can imagine. Ease, pleasure, those take nuance and time and understanding. I will not allow you to disrupt this process.” Her composure had escaped her, and she was yelling now. She regretted how clearly she’d said the truth.

“Patty, you’ve done beautiful work here,” Rodger said, and began to turn around, “but remember, it’s ArcTech that decides when and how what you do here will see the world.” He turned and left. She thought of pulling a scalpel from one of the motorized dissection arms and planting it into Rodger’s neck.

“Don’t worry, Pat,” Lucas said, then disappeared, trailing his father as he had for his entire life. Don’t worry, he said. As her life’s work was being stolen from her. As she was being used to do the exact opposite of ending pain.

—

When the soldier-police came to her door she was ready for them. She sat in a comfortable outfit, sweatpants and a crewneck. She was barefaced and had braided her hair. They knocked hard, then broke through her door, and she was sitting on a chair waiting for them.

“Are you Patricia St. Jean?” the man screamed at her, pointing a rifle in her face. Three more men flooded into the apartment.

“I am,” she said.

“You are wanted for arson and attempted murder regarding the lab located at One Hundred Olier Way. You’re coming with us.”

Yes, she had done it. She’d burned the seeds of the most astonishing work of her career. She hoped she’d destroyed enough.

She paid attention to the feeling. The sinking and more sinking. The dread. The knowing she’d done her best to do what was right.

She stood up. They rushed her into clanging metal handcuffs.

“Miss,” one of the officers said, “is your leg bleeding?”