Don't Disappoint (Ch. 12)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next six weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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She pulled into the driveway, killed the engine and sat motionless until the dash lights went out. No, their therapist (their Coach) had gently corrected her, it’s more than just playing his role. She was like the Scandinavians who view sex like sleeping or eating or grooming and even the temporary absence of it evidence of some physical or mental dysfunction. Self-diagnosis was always suspect, but Jessica saw in herself a simple failure to empathize, so why didn’t this woman just come out and say it? Epidemiological studies showed failure to thrive and failure to empathize almost never occurred in the same person. Their Coach, at minute 43, circled the three of them up for the circle of trust or whatever and said why didn’t they, the two of them, work to connect this week. To help her partner, her best friend, to feel, not just see, life through her eyes.
Access to chemical means of making your period come back have an interesting history stemming from the use of a stomach ulcer drug called misoprostol which is most effective when taken with mifepristone, a.k.a. RU-486, a.k.a. a progesterone receptor antagonist, blocking the effects of progesterone on the endometrium—which include local suppression of immune response—and thereby disallowing implantation of a fertilized egg.
Alright. She could go first. It’s called ablation. A small incision is made in the groin to access the femoral vein, under local—or general, for the skittish—anesthesia. A catheter is advanced up the vein through the thoracic cavity and into the right atrium. A needle is passed out of the end of the catheter to create a hole in the septal wall (clarification: I cut a hole through the fucking middle of the beating human heart…stay tuned), enabling access the left atrium and then through the mitral valve into the left ventricle, the source of the most acutely dangerous fibrillatory activity, after which a separate cauterizing light saber-like thingy is advanced out the end of the catheter and, guided by real time contrast dye enhanced x-ray imaging (and in most modern tertiary care centers like ours this is complemented with magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] of electrical depolarization to map, in real time, electrical heterogeneity with really awesome spatial resolution in 3D), the interventionist (that is, me) ablates, that is, she kills the offending regions of myocardial tissue responsible for the aberrant electrical activity. Warfarin, a.k.a. Coumadin, a.k.a. rat poison is administered in some cases prophylactically to prevent clotting (via its actions to inhibit vitamin K epoxide reductase), thereby reducing the incidence of stroke and deep vein thrombosis but increasing the risks of internal hemorrhage. This is a several hour procedure, during which risk of various new emergent arrhythmias, in particular repeated episodes of ventricular tachycardia, a.k.a. chaotic electrical activity that uncouples depolarization from contraction, causing circulatory collapse, a.k.a. VT storm, a.k.a. a shit storm, must be unerringly guarded against and/or mitigated, basically.
So, ok. Now I do you, right? Imagine for a minute it is Saturday morning and you’ve had a cup of Joe and a bagel and scanned the Times and Post and maybe raised your systolic blood pressure a little with a glance at Drudge and you decide to get off the couch and throw in a load of laundry. You of course have an energy efficient front-loading washer which has to load sense to allow precise volume control and thus does not immediately start filling with water like the top loaders of the last century (ownership of which, I get it, is a human rights violation in the present day). This is relevant because it gives you time to walk back to the living room, maybe get another cup of coffee and grab a magazine or maybe—hell, go for it—a novel to, along with the simple but satisfying physical task of loading and starting the washing machine, expunge the digital bolus from your cerebrum. To basically unwind. Let’s say you get 1,000 or so words in when you hear water. Trickling or running or something. The dog lays at your feet and thus is not urinating on the house plant, there is no one else in the house, so you surmise it must be—and leap up, disturbing the dog who lets out a short plaintive bark, to find that it is!—the washer’s drain pipe, which exits the back of the machine and makes an immediate 60 degree turn into the wall, that has become occluded with a vigilante sock, handkerchief, lint ball, hair ball (your wife, we have established, has thick hair, no need to cast stones), or paper receipt from an unpoliced pocket. The water is draining onto the floor under the washer and dryer. Your systolic shoots back up (it’s stress-induced catecholamine release, BTW). You leave your coffee cup and novel on the kitchen counter and, fucking goddammit, shut off the machine. You put on your shoes and go out to the garage and get your pipe snake, a.k.a. your cable drum, a.k.a. your drain auger and head around the side of the house to the access point just where the washer efferent articulates with the pipe that runs to the sewer which, when you remove the pipe-strapped rubber stopper that covers it, promptly ejaculates two gallons or so of soapy hot water on your shoes. Mentally picture how you then advance the metal tipped (perhaps if you had plumped for one of the models with crab-like pincers at the end or the corkscrew…) pipe snake into the pipe and—since you did pony up for the drill powered version and you did purchase a cordless drill which miraculously yes is charged—then proceed to advance the writhing metal auger snake cable into the pipe to extirpate the culprit sock/hankie/lint/hair/Taco Bell receipt. Imagining this? Got it? This is absolutely nothing like catheter ablation.
When the drain is clogged and your shoes are wet and you’ve fetched the stale Newports out of your underwear drawer and you realize you have to fix this problem. That the possibilities have narrowed and despite any of the day’s quote-o
n-stunning-sunrise-photo MEMEs, they will continue to narrow and you will have to continue to get more serious and more focused or the world will fucking devour you. I get it, she had said. She realized she was not the type of woman that other women felt comfortable with their husbands being alone with, but this was not her problem.
She couldn’t remember the last time she said how much she loved her life. This was something he once professed to so cherish about her. She no longer fell for it. The fear of what happens if you stop. The fear of the thing you have created and the momentum of emotional violence visited on people, some of whom remain and others who have left, all of whom are weaker than you and now all you can do is fear for their survival. She drew the key from the ignition, opened the car door and walked toward her house.
