EDITOR'S NOTE
BY AARON CROSBY
“You should have seen the size of it! It had tusks as thick as my leg, I swear.”
“You are such a liar! There was no mastodon. I bet you just spent the last four days sleeping in an old saber-tooth den and drinking fermented berry juice by yourself. Seriously, man. You smell like the time I forgot the deer carcasses in my cave.”
“Shut it! Let me finish. So I was crouched down real low behind this bush, and my arm was cramping up real bad ‘cause I was keeping my spear at shoulder level, just like you’re supposed to. And this thing, this beast! It was a beast I tell you. It was huge. This beast lifts its head, with these – these”
“Massive tusks, I know.”
“Massive tusks, that’s right. They were monstrous! Well, he must have caught sight of my spear out of the corner of his eye, because he let out one big grunt, just like a snort, and he turned to come right at me.”
“And?”
“And he was coming at me. And the tusks, and…”
“So?
“So I was passed out on the other side of the valley. Guys I think I’m still drunk.”
And so went mankind’s first story, or at least I would like to think so. It sure beats a diatribe on the finer points of huntering and gathering, or a series of grunts, clicks and hand gestures communicating the location of a hippopotamus herd. From the very first time that mankind squatted in the dust and set out to describe his experience of the world to another, we have written ourselves together as a race, creating a pooled experience from which each of us can draw to evaluate our perceptions – the way that light falls on photoreceptors, and I recognize shapes. The way that camphor alights on olfactory neurons, and you describe the Vaporub your mother smeared on your chest as a child. The way that countless synapses, firing with reckless abandon in countless brains, have formed memories and constructed narratives powerful enough to create and mold senses from words, sending eruptions of ideas, emotions and triggered actions bucking and careening down the slope that is human history.
Our words are what make us human. To be human is to be story and poetry and argument. With our fellow animals we share many abilities. Chimpanzees use tools to fish for ants. Dogs most certainly show signs of emotion and happiness toward their masters, as anyone who has had their face lapped sloppily will attest. Bees perform intricate dances, telling the other members of their hive where to locate the choicest flowers. However, none of them can use language as an inducer of sensory experience, of emotion, of thought. Stories are our most precious gift, as the shared nature of human experience is what makes it unique.
Medicine is arguably the most humanistic of all professions and callings, as it requires the utilization of all of the powers of post-Enlightenment scientific empiricism combined drop for drop with water from man’s deep well of compassion and empathy. Thus, if mankind is built of stories, and medicine is a jewel in the crown of humanism, then should medicine not be the most narrative of professions? I would posit that it is. Fundamentally, what is medicine based upon but the history? Every day, across the entire globe, millions of physicians begin millions of stories with, “Patient presents with…” – medicine’s “once upon a time.” Indeed, every hospital visit is itself a collision of stories, those of patients, and families, and workers, and science. Don’t forget science, who will continue down its lackadaisical, meandering path long after we have lain down to rest.
So, what does this mean for us? As future physicians, we should seize our humanity. Self-expression is not just a hobby or a release from stress. It is what makes us human, and keeps us human, and is a lamp that must burn as long as our profession toils and sweats against sickness and sadness.
Perhaps this has gotten a little too heavy and philosophical, so I will leave you with this: continue to share your experiences with each other, both via this forum and anywhere you are given the opportunity. I know it’s a little scary, sharing something personal with the world, but if you need some encouragement – I hear there is some berry juice on the other side of the valley. It’s supposed to be really strong stuff.
A PUFFER FISH
BY HO-SHIA THAO
The brisk morning air suctions from behind me with the closing of the bus door and I feel the sudden change of temperature on my face as I shuffle to the nearest seat. Snot drips down to the tip of my nose while its frozen hairs thaw. I wipe it with my mittens and greet the driver with a stiff, polite smile. The smell of wet, muddy cotton suffocates me and I suddenly wish my nose were still clogged. The bus begins to move after I swipe my wallet and I stumble to sit behind the driver in a handicap-reserved seat, conspicuously evading the eyes of everyone on board. I glance out the windows behind me. The mounds of snow banking on the side of the road are dingy and grimy, not much better than the floor. Melted water ebb and flow with the acceleration of the bus, carrying the trash and debris left from former passengers with it. My iPod plays loudly and I initiate the ritual of meditation to withdraw from the public into the warmth of my coat.
Reaching to change my melancholic music, appropriate for such a dark, sunless sunrise, I notice a grocery bag full of ramen noodles across from me. Searching for its owner, I spot the young woman sitting a few seats away, looking out the front window of the bus. She is a stranger to me, and in all the mornings that I have taken this bus I have never seen her before. She is not much older than I am, and we share a common ancestry, one that displays by the color of our skin. Her round glasses are frosty with tears of dew, her eyes lost to the moving scenery reflected in them. Her black hair is straight and shoulder length. It’s uncombed and covering the top of her thin colorful jacket, unsuitable for this Minnesota winter. I wonder why she is not better prepared for this weather. It’s fucking cold in China, too.
I close my eyes and try to refocus, sifting through my schedule for the day. My agenda is interrupted with the lyrics of Ray LaMontagne.
If it’s a friend you need…
I open my eyes. I’m forgetting something.
Let it be me.
Shit. My coffee mug.
Let it be me.
And my white-out pen. I must have left it on my desk. Shit.
Let it be me.
The woman glances in my direction, but when I raise my eyes to meet hers, she throws their direction back to the window. I raise an eyebrow and search her. My eyes land on her boots. They are wet and black, their edges caked with white and brown slush. They drip and squeak when she moves her feet on the rubber floor of the bus. I wonder what brings her here to Minnesota, to the University. Graduate school, probably. Most likely in science. Typical.
I close my eyes once more and for a moment feel their heaviness begin to sink back to sleep. My chest rises and falls with a deep breath. Damn coffee mug. Damn caffeine-dependent body. Damn medical school with their 8 AM lectures. Ray LaMontagne.
I hear a squeak and am startled by the opening of doors. Fuck. More passengers. She clutches her purse, fidgets, and looks at her feet as a large man squeezes into the seat next to her. She’s uncomfortable and her hands turn red as she folds them into herself. Her face is pink and her glasses slide down her nose, now pointed to the ground. What the hell is wrong with her? It’s a public bus.
The man grunts and shifts in his seat, urging her to make more room. Her tiny frame tilts away from him and she picks up her bag of ramen noodles. Why doesn’t she just move to the next seat? The plastic grocery bag rustles and ramen wraps crackle from their sleep.
More people waddle by, restricted from free movement by the full-length coats they don. I make myself look bigger than I am to divert passengers from sitting next to me. My elbows jut out and I open my knees wider to take up more room. I am a puffer fish, stretching my body to deflect my predators. My space is private. Do not enter. Do not cross. Do not pass Go and collect two hundred dollars. I am determined to ride the next ten minutes to school without having to share. Unfortunately, an elderly woman sees through my guise and excuses herself into the adjacent seat. As I sigh in surrender and deflate my persona, I sense the strange woman’s eyes peering over those frosty glasses. I want to wave and make her feel like a fool for staring, but my hands rest on my backpack, restrained in the warmth of my mittens. My eyebrow rises.
Who are you?
Her stare is broken by the man who asks her to move to the next seat. He says please. She does so, timidly and without a sound. What is wrong with her? Does she not understand the law of entropy? Does she not study science? Does she not want her own safe space for her and all of her stuff, not crowded and far away from this heaving man breathing in all her oxygen? Does she not want the freedom to take up as much room as she wants? To enjoy her ramen noodles in peace? Does she not understand that rubbing against another person will make her smell like them? Does she not want to be left alone? We capitalize on privacy here. The space around us, around me, is my home. It is to be respected. Do Not Disturb, Please.
And then I realize I have seen this mute, foreign woman before. Not only on this bus, but everywhere. And I have seen her all my life, greeting her with the same raised eyebrow. She was the woman at the gym who exercised on the elliptical in sandals, her body wrapped in her religion’s dress code. She was the woman who yelled at her children at the mall, too loud and too alien for the spectators to understand. She was the quiet girl at school, whose tongue could never pronounce the letter R and sent to the ESL room every morning. She was the grandmother who paid for my bag of candy with a single dollar bill when the cashier spoke in a language she did not know. She was my mother who struggled to find her license and registration, when the unforgiving police officer pulled her over for running a red light. She was on the road to the hospital that day. A loose nail lodged in the bottom of her son’s bloody foot. Even then I raised my eyebrow, my eyes full of tears.
I am not the friend you seek.
The bus takes off again as the new passengers settle in, and I take another look at this woman sitting in front me, no longer a stranger. She is a woman I have wanted to save from my own judgment. A judgment rooted in self-hatred for the mark that constantly reminds me that I am just as foreign to this bus, to this place, to this hegemony. I feel for her, this woman, but it is a gut wrenching empathy, casted and disguised as sympathy. A prettier name for pity. Born to immigrants, facilitated by an American dream, I was bleached and washed until my hair turned blond and my tongue tamed to entertain in a language not my own. And yet, I wear it proudly, this mark. I wear it without shame, without hesitation. I choose to wear this mark so that I may fend off the intruders who wander on this bus with a twitch in the arch of their brow.
I look to my own feet. I am a fish out of water. I am both a foreigner to foreigners in this country and to those who claim to be native. A pseudonym for Asian, hyphenated to join the word “American” so that the space I carve out for myself is delineated from that of my ex-refugee parents. Though a simple term, I am torn. Am I the Asian Americans see, or the American Asians see riding on the bus? Where do I draw the line in my skin so that they see both of me, all of me, in one body? How do I reconcile the self-hatred from the self-loving, the friend they seek from the stranger, the poisonous spikes donned on my scales from the vulnerable pink flesh that it protects?
And that is why she looks at me. And that is who she is. And that is why she wonders who I am, where I come from, and where I am going.
FEAR OF DROWNING
BY ANONYMOUS
The funny thing about reexamining the past is that I always find something new. I have a hard time remembering, and so the me of yesterday never seems familiar. I might as well be going through the personal documents of a stranger. Besides, I’ve changed so much that it’s hard to get a grasp of who I was or wanted to be at any given point in time. It’s a good thing that I do a better job than most of keeping track of feelings and thoughts in the moment or else my account of my life would begin somewhere at 17. Luckily, I’ve maintained multiple blogs for the past five years in which I have a record of everything from my adolescent sexual experiences to college admission anxieties to freshman year disillusionment to first loves and last loves. The girl preserved reads like a fictional character to me. Whoever I was then is always too far removed for me to get a good hold on her now. And it’s sad. It’s tragic that I forget.
It’s tragic because forgetting means throwing out the good along with the bad and though I think leaving behind the latter is a matter of self-preservation, it’s the former that makes life worth living, isn’t it? Besides, there are lessons I could learn from myself if only I had the will to remember them. I must admit that there are some things I did better at 15 than I do now. Somehow, things seemed clearer then, even when it came to what I wanted to accomplish with my life. There are other things I’ve simply stopped knowing how to do, like letting myself fall in love without worrying about what risks it might entail.
Last night, while trying to dig up resume drafts from my inbox, I found an old email exchange with an ex-boyfriend I dated two summers ago. In it, Summer Guy said one of the most important things anyone has ever told me: “You showed me that life is too important to be taken too seriously.” The rest of the emails were about our relationship, about falling hard and fast, about — as I called it then — “love … or its short-term equivalent.” We were writing at the height of our passion for each other, and I found what I said to him remarkable because for once, reading the old me brought about a feeling of nostalgia, a sense that I had indeed felt that way in that moment. I remembered her. This hasn’t happened in a long time for me. Recognition of my former self, in place of embarrassment at who she was — or even worse, bafflement — has largely been rare, and yet last night, I could recall what it felt like to love someone.
I don’t love him anymore. At least not in the way that I used to. And though I consider us good friends, I enjoy Summer Guy’s company most from afar … or preferably in short spurts with breaks for good measure. But despite only harboring platonic feelings for him nowadays, recalling how much I once loved him made me smile. It reminded me that relationships are great, and believe it or not, I need the reminder. I’ve been spending the past month trying to convince myself that relationships are the precise opposite of great. Instead, they are emotionally precarious, troublesome, and unnecessary. Maybe I’m clinging desperately to my independence for fear that I will lose some part of myself in the process of falling for someone else. Maybe I simply don’t know how to respond to someone who exceeds the expectations I’ve habitually lowered in light of attached suitors and so-called liberal lovers who later balk at my ideals. Maybe I’m not willing to run the risk of abandonment. But though I’ve been afraid for weeks to make this concession, I must say: by and large, love is worth it. The fact that an email from a former boyfriend can conjure up this rare spark of recognition of the feeling is proof enough.
Love didn’t used to terrify me, and I certainly didn’t think I was scared of it. Because unlike the community pool, love is more like swimming in the ocean. Once you’re far out, there are no lifeguards or railings, and more often than not, your final destination is not forward but back from where you came. For the girl who used to throw herself headfirst into the water without hesitation, it seems like I’ve taken one too many steps away from the sand to remember that the view is worth it, that drowning is more fear than real possibility, that even those who never properly learned how to swim — or who have long forgotten — are capable of staying afloat.
Why Love Is Like A Staph Aureus Infection
By Jennifer Day
Your villainous spheres search over me,
My skin, flushed, yields to your exploration
Seeing what so many have seen and passed over
You decide to stay awhile
There you sit, waiting in the entryway,
Ignorant to your power
Unaware that every utterance is a potent toxin
Drifting along the vessels of my soul
Overwhelming the very same bricks that
Block the others’ advances, over and over
You persist, resistant to the infallible mannerisms
That have caused so many to flee
You stay, loyally infiltrating my being
Thus, I fall, succumbing the virulence of your love
INSTRUMENTAL
BY NEIL SIEKMAN
Below, is something I played and recorded while I was jobless at my parents' house after graduating from college. It was recorded solely with the microphone in my laptop. (Also, because the microphone in my laptop was very lo-fi, I had to record the bass drum, snare drum, and cymbals all as separate tracks.)
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY LINDSAY ZHAO
BUDESTI, ROMANIA
BY NEIL SIEKMAN AND DAN MAHON
The following is based on a screenplay written by me and my friend Dan. It's based on a true story and has been modified a bit for the body electric. Enjoy the first chapter of Budesti, Romania.
Theo is leaning on counter eating cottage cheese out of the container. Margaret paces around the kitchen.
Margaret
Why can’t we ever go out? You know, to a movie or to dinner or something? Kyle would have taken me. He wouldn’t just sit at home all day eating from a can…
Theo
It’s not a can. Yeah, it’s more like a plastic tub.
Margaret
Ohh, is The Room still playing at the Theater downtown? Kyle wanted to see that one I think.
Theo
Getting a little sick of hearing about Kyle. You know, sometimes I still can’t believe you dated that meathead.
Margaret
You know he was your friend too.
Margaret takes a bite of the cottage cheese, slightly disgusted, she continues.
God knows what’s happening to Kyle and here you are just…. You know he’d never talk guff about you like this
Theo
…Well I’m not Kyle!
Margaret
Kyle wouldn’t have said that.
BEAT
I’m going to bed.
INT. THEO’S APARTMENT – AFTERNOON – THE NEXT DAY
Theo enters his apartment and notices a red flash coming from his answering machine. He drops a bag of groceries and a stack of letters from the Dead Letter Office he works at. Unpacking the bag as he listens, a message from Margaret comes on.
Margaret (V.O.)
Hey Theo, it’s Margaret, I just received a letter from Kyle saying that something’s come up. I just wanted to tell you I’ll be out of touch for a couple days. It came from this address…1309 W. Bronson Street in Budesti? Not sure I’m pronouncing that correctly. Anyway, it’s in Romania. I love you.
BEAT
Oh by the way could you stop by my house and water my plants for me?
Theo
Damn.
EXT. STREET – AFTERNOON
Theo drives his station wagon towards Margaret’s house. We hear small faints of “Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and The News.
INT. MARGARET’S HOUSE – CONTINUED
Theo opens the door to Margaret’s house except that she has an almost comical amount of plants.
Theo begins watering the plants around Margaret's apartment -- some are really high up, several tucked under tables. After watering the plants, Theo puts on a record and opens the closet to find a large hat one might see being worn at the Kentucky Derby. He puts the hat on. Theo begins playing the game perfection at the kitchen table but doesn’t complete the puzzle in time -Theo then smashes the game out of his view.
Theo then starts walking around the house. While doing so, he sees the draw-string for the attic, he pulls the string opening the attic door.
INT. ATTIC – CONTINUED
Theo walks around the attic, exploring the random awards and gifts that Margaret has received over the years. Theo sits in the desk that Margaret uses to write her scripts and plays. He then notices a couple letters on the desk from Kyle. He holds up one to see the date: it's dated 1984. He picks up another: it's dated from 1985. He picks up one more to find that it was sent in 1986. Theo begins reading these letters and finds that many of them are romantic in nature. Although Theo is currently dating Margaret, he is not too alarmed by these letters because they were sent before him and Margaret were a couple. Theo continues rifling through the letters, and to his horror, he finds that the letters are becoming disturbingly recent. Theo continues to check the dates of the love letters, "1987... 1988... 1989". Finally, Theo happens upon a letter that was sent only a few weeks before. Theo reads the letter...
Theo
“I can’t wait to see you again, I realize now what I gave up by joining the military, but I know that you’re the person that I’m supposed to be with. Growing old with you will be worth this terrible time apart
Love,
Kyle”
Theo
What?
Theo sits for a moment, completely stunned; he has just learned that his girlfriend Margaret has rekindled a romance with Theo's childhood friend, Kyle. Theo leaves Margaret's house and heads home slamming the door behind him.
INT. THEO’S HOUSE – CONTINUED
Theo paces around his kitchen, reaches into the fridge and reaches for his cottage cheese. He then throws the cottage cheese against a wall. He moves into the living room and, although Theo knows that Margaret is not available by phone, he calls her house cathartically and leaves a message.
Theo
Hey Margaret, this is Theo, your boyfriend. I found some interesting literature in the attic today while watering your plants. The fact that you’ve been hiding this relationship with Kyle behind my back? Brassy, quite brassy indeed! Anyway I just want you to know you won’t get away with this. Enjoy your little vacation, but plan to be back in love with me in about a week. You pretentious documentarian – can you hear me all the way up your ivory tower? I’m coming to Romania, do you hear me?
SLAMS THE PHONE SEVERAL TIMES
Huh? Do you?
SLAMS THE PHONE AGAIN
Do you? I’m coming.
HANGS UP
