Geno and his stomach reached cordial relations and the feeding tube was removed. The stoma to his colostomy could be capped for short periods of time. After weeks of bedridden sponge baths, he finally got a hot shower.
A private shower.
The nurse gave him soap and a washcloth and he wished it were bleach and steel wool. He felt dirty at a cellular level. Lathering up again and again, he remembered terms from tenth-grade biology and felt their lament in every particle of his body. He was tainted to the mitochondria. His Golgi complex stained. His ribosomes ruined. He once heard that in seven years time, every cell in a human body replaced itself, essentially making you a new person.
In which case, he’d be twenty-five when the last cells of this experience were out of his body.
He leaned a hand against the wall and vomited into the drain. Then he turned the water as hot as he could stand. Eased himself to the cold tile floor, wrapped his arms around his knees and let himself be scoured.
We will address it later, Mos said, taking over all thought and feeling again.
A psychiatrist from Mount Sinai’s adolescent health center started coming to Geno’s room. To talk about things that didn’t happen.
Geno refused to be alone with Dr. Stein. Not because he didn’t like the guy, but Geno had so little control over things. Being able to say who got to be with him was a scrap of dignity he clung to. And Stein respected it. So Vern sat in a chair by the window with his noise-reduction headphones. In view, but out of earshot, he worked on papers while Dr. Stein talked and Geno said nothing.
Stein honored Geno’s right to say nothing. He was a decent guy. Geno overheard him telling Vern bad jokes. Gags so cornball, you had to laugh while you groaned.
Vern laughed hardest when he found out Stein’s first name was Franklin.
“Franklin Stein?”
Stein turned up his palms. “Go ahead. Take the next step.”
“Dr. Frankenstein.”
“My grandfather’s name was Igor. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Stein didn’t joke around with Geno. He was easy and gentle and attentive, even in the silences. He used words like anxiety, depression, anger, flashback, nightmares. He mentioned Prozac, Zoloft and Clonazepam. A word he really liked to throw around was feel.
How are you feeling, what are you feeling, how do you feel about that, how did that make you feel…
Annoyed, Mos waved copies of local ordinance NOS-34726: “Feeling is prohibited by law.”
Leave him alone, Mos thought. Geno was working hard to feel nothing and all this talk wasn’t helping. The poor kid stared at Vern’s headphones like they were the only thing he wanted in the world.
Mos wanted them, too.
So much noise.
He finally understood how sound made Analisa so crazy when she was nearing the end of her life. How the music and talk shows she always loved became a distraction, and finally a torment.
So much to process. So much not to think or feel.
Sometimes it was hard to be a good citizen of Nos.
“It’s exhausting, man, carrying around a secret,” Chris Mudry said the night of the party. Now so long ago, it seemed a past life.
Because it is, Mos said. It’s someone else’s past life.
Sometimes, though, Mos had to let Geno let a few things out.
He told Stein about the notes he found in Carlos’ jeans pocket. How he thought they were from a girl. Until the night of the party, when Chris hit him with a right, then a left hook.
“You must have been stunned,” Stein said.
“I had no idea,” Geno said.
Stein looked down at his hands, twisting his wedding band around his fourth finger. “Carlos never hinted anything?”
Geno shook his head.
It is not our concern, Mos wrote on his clipboard, but not with his usual strictness. He was tired. Even Stein seemed tense and drained, at a loss for words. Unusually, it was Geno who filled the silence this time.
“I don’t know why he didn’t tell me,” he said. “We told each other everything. Well. We used to. Things changed after my mother died.”
“Can you talk about that?”
Geno’s chest expanded as he filled his lungs with air and courage. “It was hard,” he said. “Everything hurt.”
Stein slowly nodded. “I was sixteen when my father died. I remember feeling like I had the flu for about a year.”
For the first time, Geno met the doctor’s eyes and held on. “It was like getting beat up every day. It was hard. For all of us. We kind of…drifted. I don’t know how else to say it.”
We don’t like to speak of it.
What else could be said? Their little red hen died. Life got hard. Nathan was broken-hearted and distracted. He buried himself in work and emerged blinking and squinting, as if expecting to get mowed down in the glare of headlights. Geno was broken-hearted, but he picked up his common sense and figured out how to cook, clean, shop and keep order in the nest Analisa left behind.
Carlos took his broken heart where he wasn’t supposed to be. He walked out of the henhouse and left the door wide open, letting the Fox in. Giving him access to little chicks.
I said I wanted you and your brother brought you to me.
Mos cleared his throat. We know nothing and feel nothing about this. It is inconsequential to the case at hand.
“Do you think your brother had an idea what Anthony was planning?” Dr. Stein asked.
Geno’s fists clenched and his anger splashed against the walls of the hospital room.
Feeling is against the rules, Mos reminded everyone. Feeling is illegal in Nos.
“I know he did,” Geno said.
“How?”
“Because Anthony told me. I was a fucking present. Carlito lured me into an ambush. He fucking sold me.”
Stein only nodded, his face haggard. He and Geno fell silent. Frankenstein and his broken, wretched creature. The unspoken questions circling between them.
Why? Why’d he do it? How could he do it? What made him do it? What drove him to do it?
Geno didn’t know.
Only Carlos knew.
And Carlos would never say.
Despite the laws of the land, Mos felt terrible. This job was exhausting. Geno was vomiting again. Would it ever end?
Mos let his clipboard fall to the charred, smoking ground of Nos. He waited until the bed linens were changed and morphine was starting to close like a loose fist around Geno’s mind. He crept to the bed and got in. He snugged up against Geno’s back. Close. Closer. Pressing and easing. Until finally, he slid past the boundary and dissolved, oozing through the fingers of the morphine fist, floating away like fog.
Geronimo Caan slipped between the stars of Nos and back inside himself.
And slept.