Woo-jin whispered, “Patsy? Is my face my own face?” but she didn’t seem to hear, and if she could she couldn’t hear words, just squashy sounds of a choking variety muffled by the rubber half-circle stuffed into his mouth. Besides, she was primping for her case worker Hattie’s visit, rearranging the bow on her head, bored by now with this kind of activity from her trailer mate/foster brother, still smarting from her unbegotten burger. Patsy pressed her thick thumb to the remote control and changed the TV from sequences of slo-mo artillery to Fashion Tips for the Beautifully Obese, on Discovery. Onscreen a naked woman was being prepared for her fitting, rolls of fat obliterating any view of adult content regions. Like a rivulet of suffering feeding into the tributary, this new source of sad humanity bled from the TV into the empathetic response portion of Patsy’s brain then amplified into Woo-jin’s ennui attack, which had previously begun to level off in terms of the intensity. As it picked up again, Fashion Tips for the Beautifully Obese’s host measured and marked the TV woman’s arms with a felt-tip marker. Chewie, where were you when you were needed most?
Woo-jin fell out of the hammock, which was no surprise. This happened all the time. Which was why underneath the hammock there were throw pillows and gold shag carpet into which had been ground bits of bark, hair, a gum wrapper, toothpicks, the bitey plastic clip from a bread bag. The peak of the attack had definitely passed and he slid into a numb, thrumming part, quiet and immobilized. The door seemed to knock itself then Hattie let herself in. She was a mom-looking woman with glasses and frizzed hair, wearing a brown artificial-fiber pantsuit, encumbered by a gaudy purse overflowing with notes, nicotine gum, and half-drunk bottles of water. Her assistants, two younger guys in white jumpsuits and latex gloves whom she referred to as Thing One and Thing Two, trailed her burdened by equipment in sturdy metal cases, which they began to unload.
“Patsy! You look fabulous!” Hattie said, hugging part of the woman. Patsy got kind of quiet and blushed. It amazed Woo-jin every time that the same Patsy who gave him such ball-busting moments for cutting her toast wrong turned into this meek mouse of a gal once the extractions went down. Hattie spread her belongings out on the kitchenette dinette table, pulling out a stethoscope, cramming a VHS tape into the mouth of their VCR. “You’re really going to love this week’s installment,” she said, pressing PLAY. As the tape started, she took Patsy’s hand in her own and rubbed the dimples of her knuckles.
On the TV appeared the boilerplate intro, the same thing they saw week after week. There was a beach with silhouetted lovers hand in hand, a waterfall, a rainbow over a field where a tractor tilled in the distance. The music was solo acoustic guitar, plaintive yet uplifting. A title materialized over an image of a grainy sunset: YOUR GENEROSITY AT WORK and beneath that the Bionetics logo. After which the music picked up tempo, into a we’re-getting-things-done kind of deal. Shots of busy streets, a race car driver flashing a thumbs-up, a human pyramid of enthused cheerleaders. Then into the meat of the program, the part that had been changed from the month previous. There was a dark-skinned kid playing trucks in a preschool with other kids, making the usual truck noises. Over this came recorded narration from a confident-sounding man. “Juan was born without thumbs. Many of the activities we take for granted he just couldn’t do. Now, thanks to your generosity, he can open jars, climb the rope in gym class, and even high-five his friends. No more high-fours for Juan. Thank you so very much—” Here the audio cut out for a second. Hattie’s voice came on and said “Patsy.” Then it returned to the man’s voice, saying, “The reconstructive surgery we were able to perform with tissues you provided made all the difference. Thank you!” Then followed three or four more segments such as this, each showcasing a person who owed their new livelihood to Patsy. There was a blind guy who could now make out shapes, a quadriplegic who’d begun taking baby steps. Patsy sniffled through the reel, moved. Woo-jin had never watched one of these reels during an ennui attack before. He felt no empathetic response to this sequence of vignettes. Where he should have been soaking up these folks’ suffering he felt a blankness. Different from nothing, blankness had a border around it, edges where he felt something. He circled around the feeling as Hattie rubbed one of Patsy’s shoulders and offered her a tissue and Things Two and One plugged all manner of instruments and monitors into sockets and laid a tarp on the living room floor. This was all prep before the part with the blood and freaky noises, the part Woo-jin hated most. Hattie helped Patsy disrobe and sit on a fold-out carbon microtube chair. The assistants orbited her, swabbing, lifting curtains of flesh, pressing various equipment against unidentifiable parts of her anatomy. Hattie slipped in another tape for Patsy’s enjoyment, a live music concert by the singer Michael Bolton.
Here goes, Woo-jin thought. Went it did. He turned to the wall, making himself not see, but his hands couldn’t block the high-pitched dental whine of the saw and the vacuum’s irregular sputtering. Worst was when it smelled like burning hair. As they removed kidney tissue from her knee, Patsy quietly sang along to Michael Bolton’s ballad about a man loving a woman so much that he’d sleep out in the rain if that’s the way she said things oughta be.
Woo-jin woke in his hammock. There were talking people in the next room. He was killer hungry. Always happened this way after the ennui attack, the ravenousness, and this time it was worse because he’d projectiled his burger at the sight of the dead girl’s buggy face. Woo-jin crawled out of his hammock and peeked around the doorframe into the living room, where the Things were finishing their cleanup, rolling the tarp, stuffing bloodied paper towels into a garbage bag. Hattie sat with Patsy on the couch, petting her hair. Patsy was covered with bandages and doing her usual postextraction crying bit, while on TV once-thumbless Juan was playing Wii with the best of ’em.
“It hurts,” Patsy said. “It hurts worse every time.”
“Oh, you dear, sweet girl,” Hattie said. “You just take your medicine and think of Pegasus, riding free through the clouds.”
“A winged unicorn is not a pegasus,” Patsy sniffed.
Woo-jin crawled to the fridge as though his stomach was propelling him across the floor. Nobody seemed to notice him even though the trailer was hardly eight feet wide. One Thing was saying to the other, “Yeah so like I heard this one guy down in Argentina or whatever grew a whole human head in his abdominal cavity.”
Woo-jin at last arrived at the fridge and upon opening it to the jangle of condiment jars everyone’s head turned and considered him in silence while on the screen commenced a racquetball tournament for recent transplant recipients. Inside the fridge were red-bagged specimens of biological valuables, a picked-over turkey carcass, some Pabst Blue Ribbon, celery, a jar of Tom & Jerry’s hot-buttered-rum mix, fake sausage oddly enough made out of meat, one dead banana, ketchup, muffins, a lone pizza roll, and what Woo-jin was really looking for, peanut butter from Trader Joe’s. Barely able to stand, he leaned against the counter and found a spoon, then retired to his corner.
He heard Patsy say, “My foster brother never does nice things for me. He just has his attacks and eats the last of the cheese. I always tell him to bring me things from the store and restaurant but does he? All I ask for is a free hamburger or maybe a slice of pie? Something to show he cares?”