Don't Disappoint (Ch. 20)

by Martin van Cooper

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next three weeks, we’ll be serializing the remaining chapters of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand).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).

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

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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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Well the impeachment is basically over now, he is saying, they lost, and the middle east momentarily uneventful, and so the media is giving nonstop stream of conjecture and speculation on the worse case scenarios for the spread of this Wuhan virus, raising the collective expectation of millions of deaths and causing Amazon and Walmart and Costco to run out of hand sanitizer and, bizarrely, toilet paper and bottled water as though we were expecting an earthquake and disruption of public services instead of a communicable disease, Bryant Wilson is saying.

Can you expect a communicable disease? Imagine what it must have been like during the Spanish flu 100 years ago, when you didn’t know the thing was coming until all of a sudden the whole town was sick? But then you also wouldn’t have to listen to minute-by-minute updates from CNN and Drudge, either. At least if there’s a quarantine and we can’t leave our homes to shop for food I can still wipe my ass. I’m reminded of the build up to one of the hurricanes in 2016-2017, maybe it was Maria or another Hispanic name, that was so built up that everyone was disappointed when the thing didn’t kill like 10,000 people or at least render a couple million homeless. Can I just say I hate the phrase slap happy? I hate the whole concept, it makes me borderline physically ill. Alright I have to go. Meet me in my office in 30 min.

The Brownian reorganization to maximize interpersonal space when someone leaves the elevator. For years the university had practiced a model where new buildings were constructed in expectation of future investigators being hired, writing and receiving grants for extramural funding, mostly from the federal government, and occupying that space to do their work. A grant written to the federal government has a budget to do the work but also an additional fee, so-called indirect cost, that goes to the host institution to keep the lights on and empty the trash bins and pay for the secretaries and the support staff who serve in a supportive role to the work described in the application, as well as contributing to their health care plans and retirement plans and sick days and vacation days. These new buildings were thus mortgages against future indirect costs of to-be-written grants written by to-be-hired investigators.

Wilson’s office and modest lab space was in one such building, a newer building on campus that made gratuitous use of glass and metal, according to the 21st century religion that making spaces open and full of natural light and amenable to random interaction and laden with constant noise and distractions would somehow promote, rather than stifle, creativity and focus and productivity. Jessica met him here and after he made her sit in his office for 10 minutes while he scrolled through the day’s emails—let me just see if there’s anything I need to volley real quick—he looked up, walked through the lab for a quick perfunctory hello to his post-doc whereas his grad student, defending later that month, was nowhere in sight. They walked outside across the courtyard to the old dental school building, the basement of which housed the vivarium. Mice are nocturnal, so ideally all animal behavioral experiments and certainly invasive surgeries, should be done at night, which is a problem because the majority of humans doing the experiments are diurnal—probably one of the most glaring of many unspoken foundational problems with all biomedical research and why no discovery from a mouse has ever led directly to a drug that worked in humans. The surgery suite and the echocardiography room were deserted, as they expected. He had logged on to reserve the machine in his student’s name when she called him the day before.

Standard practice for first term vacuum aspiration abortion involves local vaginal/cervical anesthesia and insertion into the uterus of a suction-enabled hard plastic straw like device, kind of like the tube the dentist puts in your mouth to suck up all the water and spit and tartar and blood during a sonication cleaning, which is used to mechanically disrupt the fetus and subsequently remove it by mechanical pump suction. A speculum is deployed to gain access to the birth canal. If a mechanical pump is unavailable, manual methods are suitable—think of a long, curved turkey baster but with a mincer function upgrade. She was thinking of tartare. Experienced practitioners can complete the process in a half an hour without the aid of imaging tools, but this was a procedure neither of them had witnessed first-hand in residencies at major academic medical centers. Hence the idea of using the echo machine to guide the insertion of the curette he managed to procure. She was going to have to do it in two stages, first the mechanical disruption, kind of like scraping an oyster out of its shell with a pair of forceps in the dark through a rubber tube, and second the manual aspiration with a plastic syringe they got from his lab and outfitted with silicon tubing which she planned to advance past her cervix with the help of the curette, which meant she forewent anesthesia because she was confident enough with her own anatomy and was certain the two-way tactile cues would be important to guide placement. He said he already had a speculum he could bring from home. She did not pursue the details behind this disclosure. He didn’t pretend to look away while she removed her scrubs and underwear and sitting on the floor applied some KY (also procured by him) to the thing and inserted it.

They’re saying 90% of the country shut down completely for a month, Bryant is saying. People were told to stay home from work. Only medical staff allowed into the hospitals. This is coming our way they’re saying. The economy’s gonna take a huge hit with all these supply lines. Foxcon just getting back online now, everyone’s gonna pay a little more for that next iPhone. My buddy in Xi’an, sending me all this patriotic shit on WeChat, he’s paranoid they’re watching for people to badmouth the regime. She slid it home and prised it open two clicks. He noiselessly puffed his cheeks and made a face like someone had just put too much mustard on his sandwich.

It’s a video of a procession of vehicles, he says, a bunch of goose-stepping guys in white hazmat suits and one of them is spraying the outside of the vehicles with what one imagines must be some kind of disinfectant. Now it cuts to another scene of a bunch of blue suit clad people standing at attention in a large ‘60’s communist block looking courtyard, filmed ostensibly by some low flying overhead drone, I’m guessing something high level consumer grade based on the quality of the editing, at something that looks like the side of a major highway of some kind, all saluting as the group leader addresses them from a megaphone and this music plays over the speaking, which is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, this painfully earnest, canned patriotic sounding fare of cascading flutes and lutes and xylophones and whatever that is piped into hotel lobbies and conference centers all over the country. A smaller group in front is holding a red banner with yellow script that the communists use to announce things all over the country. My friend, he fucking kills me, this guy who had no love, let me tell you, no love whatsoever for the communist party or the government as recently as last week and is about as westernized as you can be, he texts me, I can read it for you, I want to share with you this record moving moment, he says, showing volunteer medical doctors returning hometown from Wuhan after completing the mission. I love these people with greatest respects! Ok, the questionable grammar aside, this is clear propaganda. I mean it’s laughable. He was quiet for a second and then looking down at her, I would go two more. Not looking up at him, she opened it two more clicks.

There’s no way quarantine is going to fly here, he goes on. We just have to anticipate several million people getting it, a couple thousand end up in hospital and die. They don’t need to freak everyone out. Walking around with gloves on in the hallways and at the grocery store. Only Asians are wearing the masks. Are you ready? He placed some of the monopropylene glycol on her abdomen and positioned the probe, usually used for measuring the chambers of the rodent heart, on her belly and moved it around until the mass was in focus and the machine started to emit the rhythmic, scratchy, alien, liquid sounds, motion turned into sound turned into image and then back to sound, amplified. Sonographic imaging, by definition, involves sound, the waves of which can travel through solid matter and liquid—the body’s mostly water—and be converted into images based on the ultrasonic waves reflected back to the piezo¹ electric transducer and converted in the computer into a reproduction of anatomical features and movement thereof. When you think of the heartbeat that accompanies ultrasound in the movies and medical dramas, the EKG: this is something totally different. What we’re talking about here is sound produced by the matter and detected by the device. The point is, there’s no need for an audible sound, the actual sound waves can only be heard by dolphins and cockroaches and so she told him to turn the volume on the console down to zero.

There was a small prick of pain that told her she was in the right spot and then when she advanced it further, there was no resistance, meaning she had breached the cavity. They say anesthesiologists learn how to perform epidurals by practicing on bananas. It was then she looked up at the echo screen to proceed. He started talking again, one hand holding the probe on her belly and the other scrolling something on his phone. Slurry. She ignored him, sweating a little but focused, methodical. Mastication. There was a smell of iron like a bloody nose and she was worried for a second she had cut herself but then she looked down and it was. He handed her a towel and some iodine but she looked down at herself for 30 seconds and decided she didn’t need it, reaching instead for the 70% ethanol spray bottle and then a black plastic bag and some bleach and more towels for the floor. Disintegration. He wiped off the probe, stowed it, shut off the echo machine and discarded his glove, again picking up his phone.

The man doesn’t have it. He referred to his wife as his sister in the super Tuesday acceptance speech, Bryant is saying. He forgot the first lines of the Declaration of Independence. He’s confused. I just don’t think they are thinking straight. She had a fleeting moment where she thought she might faint and he sensed it, looking up from his phone at her, but she placed a hand on the back of the chair and it passed. She saw his eyes linger for a moment on her shorn crotch, slightly wet from the alcohol, and the KY and the remnants of. They betrayed no emotion. His eyes. Whisking an egg, she was thinking.

The mouse can be sacrificed by cervical dislocation under inhaled anesthesia, i.e. separating the skull from the spine by placing your index finger and thumb behind the occipital bone and using your other hand to pull the tail. There’s a slight wet pop, like cracking a toe joint, and then paralysis. It is a controlled movement that makes death near instantaneous when properly performed and is thus classified as humane euthanasia. For mice. One time as an undergrad Jessica pulled too fast and too hard and the mouse tried to bite her and then she pulled again and the tail came off in her hand. Still alive. The body, not the tail.

Warren is out, he’s saying. Drudge led with, this is a quote, Bloomberg spends half a billion and wins American Samoa. My uncle actually stumped for him. First time for a Democrat since high school. Texted me a pic. The towels went in the bag. She felt down there with two hands. Four clicks back and then out. Checking his pager. Biohazard. Sometimes they go limp other times they are still twitching but either way, basically dead. Not dead but paralyzed. Killed then by thoracotomy and exsanguination. The mice, that is. Cells can be alive in culture for years, decades in the -200 F nitrogen dewar.

May cancel the Final Four games. Still play them but no one in the audience. LeBron says they won’t play with no fans. Mike Pence did the terrorist fist bump that got Michelle and Barack in trouble. More of an arm bump. Not from the hood so he’s still ok in his circles. Trump setting him up to be the fall guy, Pence that is. A really heavy flow, like for a day. Stock market crash, Vegas in trouble, no one gambling. Maxipad. Even the hookers are out of work. Not really. End of days. Like stockpiling iodine after Fukushima. Diechi. Why did some broadcasters drop the Diechi? Japanese names in general much easier to pronounce than Chinese and Korean. Forget Vietnamese. More phonetic. Chicken thighs, boneless chicken thighs. Like a boneless chicken thigh with some fibrous tissue but no bone. An octogenarian running the country for the next few years, no way around it now. Depends on your definition of alive.

Jessica walked into the building the next morning and a bird was trapped in the hallway. It bounced again and again off the windows attempting to exit and it was almost enough to make her turn around and leave and never come back. The cover of the Oprah magazine in the women’s changing room had the following leads: The Books I Can’t Wait to Read this Summer; What Your Therapist Really Thinks About You (A Shrink Tells All!); My Favorite Drinks for My Favorite Guests; Could You Leave Everything You Know and Everyone You Know (Women Who Did); Does Your Vajayjay Need a Vaycaycay? How to Keep Her Healthy and Happy Straight Through Labor Day. Zina Portnova poisoned more than 100 Nazis during WWII. She was captured in 1943, killed the Nazi interrogating her and another two while trying to escape. She was executed at the age of 18 in 1944. What have you done so far?

If you don’t think about the virus, you can’t get it. Jessica’s neighbor’s son told her this and she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or correct him, whether this was dangerously wrong or the only levelheaded thing she has heard about the thing all day. It’s Super Tuesday 2.0—she can’t remember there being a second version in elections past, but…hey—and it looks like Joe Biden could win Michigan and run away with things. You have to try to not watch him on TV, walking around a car factory in Dearborn this morning, looking confused, amused, happy to be there, like a grandfather being shown around a college campus or walking around the grandson’s new house wondering when it’s time to sit down for dinner and then open Christmas presents. She has a bad feeling watching Biden like this, like he’s going to be elected and then things are going to come off the rails, fast. Maybe he hands off to a VEEP. Kamala? Booker? He looks like your grandfather would look if he tried to take his iPhone to the Apple store to sort out a problem with contacts syncing from the desktop, or automatic backup to iCloud or why his grandkids complain when he texts them to their email and how he can stop doing that. Out of his element, fundamentally. Could she bring herself to vote for Biden? Certainly no one could be feverish for—or really against, for that matter—him, or his policies, which are vanilla and fluid and opaque and poorly articulated. He’s a decent man but someone of whom neither love nor hatred seem possible.

Is being a socialist that bad? Could she pull the trigger for Bernie? So, it’s re-elect the man. Would Sanders or Uncle Joe really be any better than Trump who has actually been really good for the economy and other objective measures of life in the empire, although the virus may still get him. If you ignore everything he says and just pay attention to what he does which is what everyone who doesn’t collect a salary based on their Twitter feed is doing at this point. No one born after 2000—that there were actually people born after the year 2000 passing themselves off as adults was still hard for her to contemplate—drinks Diet Coke. What is the age at which you say fuck it and just walk around the gym locker room with no flip flops? Sitting your bare ass, no towel, on the bench in the sauna. Your snatch on the bench. Quit using those tissue doily things for the toilet seat. They showed images of hospitals in Italy, she saw that morning at grand rounds, and there was a warning in advance, viewer discretion, and they show the photos and people are just lined up, like a war zone, and they are just a couple weeks ahead of us. I mean just seeing that gets my anxiety going through the roof, the HR lady is saying.

And Costco is still out of toilet paper. She got an email today telling her the 1995 movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman (Donald Sutherland got second billing and she remembered Cuba Gooding Jr. being in the movie although he didn’t make it into the trailer) about a kidnapped monkey unleashing a virus in the USA that kills all infected and how in the trailer Sutherland is in front of a map of the USA and he’s showing the spread cover the whole country in 48 hours. This morning, the news had a laughably similar map, colored red for the states reporting infection cases and how the trailer is dark and portrays a drama, global crisis, mobilized military, Hoffman (!) and Freeman taking decisive action, whereas she remembered the movie being 90’s camp with Gooding having to fly the helicopter in the fog and he’s only read about it and some closing scene where Russo and Hoffman with a remark about antibodies as a double entendre for the monkey virus and their relationship, freshly rekindled, by the global extinction event. All I know, the HR lady is saying, is 100% of the people walking around with surgical masks before this coronavirus business were Asian and now that the virus is here in America 100% of the people walking around with surgical masks are Asian.

Jason is wondering whether his flight back will be cancelled even though he’s checked in and sitting on the runway. The idea is that despite all the left wing politicians and bleeding heart activists, he still thought of abortions as something teenagers got, usually in minority communities because, he assumed, due to parenting issues and or lack of birth control, or in upper middle class white suburbia due to bad parenting and failure to tell him to put a hat on it, as an out of town extended weekend never to be mentioned or hinted at or even nonverbally acknowledged for the rest of your life around family or friends. This was not something well educated people over the age of 30 did. There was just no reason, unless there was a chromosomal situation or something. Some guy next to him is in a flannel and rugby shorts, loafers with mismatched athletic socks looking like he rowed crew for BU and cuts his own hair and summers in Hyannis Port and is feverishly bouncing his knee as he scrolls his Instagram feed.

That at the end of the day, 99% of the American population—notwithstanding all the enlightenment literature and frontier spirit of free enterprise—is staunchly deterministic, even though they would never consciously admit this, believing they have no control over their lives and certainly no control over the country and just wanting someone who makes them feel good when he talks. Or at least a little less bad. That no one will just come out and say that whatever you think about Trump, grab ‘em by the pussy is undeniably bold. The attendant is reminding everyone of allowable inflight behaviors. Jason was amazed at the astronomical volume of intestinal gas he could produce and if you really thought about it, it made no sense how it got there, another thing that convinced him to never again try and understand the inner workings of the human body. He understood bacteria had something to do with it, but how could something create something that takes up more space than itself?

He’s scrolling, the signal always weak, inexplicably, once you are on board the plane for departure. Peak MEME was probably early 2019. They were clever, well made, topical and layered. Mid-to-late 2019 self-referential MEMEs peaked and then the beginning of a slide into derivative themes, esoteric references without broadly recognizable pop cultural resonance. Filler. And then recycling, reproduction, pseudo bad, faux bad, intentionally bad editing. Alice sent him, unironically, the one of the Indian dude looking irritated in 2020. Way past expiration. Sent him a starter pack MEME for the gym with a girl in yoga pants and a bottle of Fiji water and long nails and painted on eyebrows and high wattage knockers and the phrase the guys in this gym are such creeps in early 2020. As though it was hot off the press.

Go back and try to find some of these old ones. What would you search for? Someone must have been cataloging these things. There’s someone doing everything. If you shut the library during a virus outbreak, where are all the students going to go to find the right mental space to take naps and scroll social media? In college, when you had to go to the computer lab, before everyone had laptops, and hand your 3x5 floppy to the unshaven, BMI~40, lab monitor who was wearing a flannel—to be fair, you probably were too—over a Skinny Puppy shirt, ensconced in a thick, humid, yeasty smell of epidermis and denim, and he would put it in his machine, extravagantly punch a few keys, declare your disk clean, ejecting and returning it to you and assigning you to an empty computer, hopefully not one of the ones with the janky mouse or a hoary-looking mouse pad or the older keyboard with missing keys and weird recoil and the blackish blue mucosal halos on the frequently used tab, delete, shift the worst of all. Don’t talk to me. Sit down and punch any key or move the mouse to wake up the monitor, the guy sits down next to him, punches the spacebar, and the screen erupts into a close up profile of a woman being, the only appropriate term can be skewered, by two guys, her on a table with her head back and throat distended and legs up in the air. The classic yoga pose. It’s only a second or two on a loop and it plays maybe twice or three times, Jason only catches a glimpse but there’s a lot of sweat and some serious anatomy, and the guy yells oh god, the guy sitting at the computer next to him yells this, and hits the spacebar again at which point the DP scene vanishes and he gets up and says I can’t stand when that happens and Jason’s wondering how often this happens to people. Now you just take your laptop to the library or coffee shop and double team the hotspot with the laptop and phone at the same time. The WIFI hotspot. What happened to all these old computers? How about the files on all those old disks? He still has some in his garage, never transferred to the cloud.

This much can be said: being alive is most likely more interesting than the alternative. There’s more happening as far as we know. Sleeping in their seats waiting for departure, shoes off and headphones on. One sneeze would clear this whole place out.

1. From the Greek piezein, to press.