"Paisley Girl"

An excerpt from a powerful novel about how disease affects body and soul.

By Fran Gordon

Oct 20, 1999 | Word has spread of my body, painted in the grotesque but of a shape more pleasing than that of any cafeteria-fed college girl. The students come in ever-increasing numbers. They're just starting out, and have yet to experience the endless cadavers that will numb them to flesh. I make eye contact and the cadets, all male, blush with a heady mix of lust and revulsion. They're back to their boyhood, caught in the bathroom with their father's medical journals. I shiver from stainless steel and observation, nipples hard as gravel. My breasts, as if worth sparing, have remained free of marks. I hold arms close to my sides to cheat them of these dadaist grottos, focus on the face of a freckled boy, and offer him my own. The dim purpling and slight swelling around my lips and eyes make me look beaten. I've noticed that this elicits sympathy from women, while men are reminded of some sagittary within that they don't like being made aware of. The boy quickly averts his gaze to study instead the linoleum that peels up from the floor. There is rot beneath the shiny surface. An ambush of decay. The blood doctor, bland as rice, asks if I'd like to come downstairs later to a staff cocktail party -- "guest-of-honor," he adds, matter-of-factly. Im too weak to decline verbally, so I offer my eyes as response. He sees in them the threat that they will hold his image indefinitely.

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"Paisley Girl" is how they see me, what they call me, though never to my face. Pity. I prefer it to the slam of "sweetie," "darlin'" or when they err, when I ache -- "champ." I am not the aloud but what is whispered. Paisley: it's my nom de grrl. The shape of my marks. Abstract, infinite. Unnatural as woman. And while the doctors look to delineate causes -- I see chaos. The geometry between dimensions. Steroids keep me in this interstice; each day I am injected and embalmed.

I'm stuck, but if God is in the spaces in between, then mine has fallen, like a much-needed sock, or a grandmother's earring, behind an empty bureau that I'm too weak to move.

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The walls are whitest at four -- forlorn hour before dawn, intemperate hour of burnt fury. Hour of little blue light batting zero. It's then my angel appears, blue as the blink of that clock come unplugged -- and stinking, like vomit. His blue is regulation, the vomit varies. This time it's from the post-op next door, I can tell by the chemical smell -- though he could just as well have been doused with the contentless bile of chemo, an old mans urine, or the tsunamied sea of a preemie. I call him Gil, because he breathes so easily beneath the stench of so many fluids. He calls me Paisley. Aloud.

"Oh man Gil, you smell," I say. "Light a match," and he does. It's our ritual, my only relief. He smiles and removes a joint from the only pocket sewn for orderlies, the one atop his heart. He lights peppermint paper, burns a sweet-smell, kneels beside my prostrate body.

"The docs treating you all right?"

"'They're treating me, all right. Domo even invited me to a staff cocktail party as the 'guest of honor,' but I wasn't sure I could take all that publicity."

"You mean to tell me you missed hapless hour? I bet the elevators were going full blast."

"Well, I'm sure it was a fjte, but I hadn't a thing to wear, what with my tea-length paper gown still at the cleaners and all."

Next Page: "So -- am I dying?"

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