I am in the doctor’s examining room asking for the impossible. I tell him I have a sickness, a duplicate disease infesting the mechanics of my body. Remove it from me. I am too full. Fix me.
I ask for the knife but they tell me I am incurable. The sinister master plan of genetics infiltrated every cell. The alcoholics in my liver cry for another glass, the stony parkinsonians stoically stare. The atherosclerotic are stifling my vessels and the Alzheimer’s forget why they set up house in my brain in the first place. And every one of them has something to say, their noise incredible.
I turn to faith. Ask the priest for an exorcism to rip the beings from my soul. He contemplates my hands. Reads them like a Danielle Steele novel; “Think more of getting the soul out of your beings,” he says. Like a man holding up a mirror in front of another. A specialist in reflections.
The shrink is my last resort. I tell him there are people inside me that interfere with my life—that are rude and wake me at 3:00 a.m. They make me perform acts I have no control over. He injects me with a quieting poison.
“That should help. Every two weeks, now.”
Close to the end of the two weeks, I hear them yawning and they giggle, waking up. I want them out, they serve no purpose. Years after my death they will take a sample of my bone and culture it in electrified liquid to squeal up in zebra pattern on cellulose film, incubate my eyes in a bloody medium to find my father peeking around the corner and the cells of my cervix will be chattering with the voice of my mother. All of them in the diamonds of white cells and rubies of red blood cells filling the jewelry box that was me.
What a unique and interesting description of the undeniable power genetics has over each of us. Love the last line.