Different Animals

The man called first thing on Mondays. The clinic was open every day except Sunday, and the day off had nothing to do with God. Every week, Virginia unlocked the glass doors, wiped down the countertops, and took her seat at the front desk. She booted up the computer and waited for the man’s call because he talked only to her, and if anyone else picked up—the nurse or the listless temp—he would hang up and dial again. “Listen,” he said when she answered, “I’ve got a disease.”

“I’m listening,” she said, because she knew exactly what the man needed to hear.

“It’s on my nose,” the nose man said. It always was.

“What are the symptoms?” she asked, which was a standard ques- tion.

“Bumps, itching, redness,” the man said. Virginia knew the man’s nose intimately. She knew that it was smooth to the touch and pale white, without bumps or scars. She was not supposed to touch patients, but when she pressed the skin around this man’s nose with her rubber- gloved fingers, he sighed with such relief, and she wanted a piece of that relief for herself.

“What do you think it is?” Virginia said into the phone, which wasn’t a standard question.

“Probably herpes,” he said.

“That’s a legitimate concern,” she said, and then, like every week before, she made him an appointment.

Virginia knew the nose man waited all Sunday for the week to start. She imagined him on his sad couch with the phone in his lap, ready to dial. For him, Sunday dragged its slow feet while the first part of the weekend trailed behind shamefully like a misbehaved child. For her, Sunday was a day to drink Bloody Marys, to forget the girls from the clinic, so many of them so young, although the tubes of blood she took from them were thick and dull.

“When did you schedule him in?” said Mimi, the clinic’s nurse practitioner, suddenly standing above Virginia in starched scrubs.

“Last slot for the day,” Virginia said, pointing to the scheduling book, and then, “Looks like rain,” to distract her. Mimi rolled her eyes.

“That man is nuts,” she said. The nose man didn’t have herpes, and they all knew it, but they saw him each week anyway.

The rain never came, but the protesters did, around midafternoon. Monday was their favorite day because they were riled up from week- end church services. Today they’d brought their kids, who had nowhere else to be during summer vacation, and also a painting of the Virgin Mary, seven or eight feet tall in an ornate and heavy frame and glowing like a bright idea. They were always trying creative new tactics. Once, they had blocked the door with a horse, which had, admittedly, been an effective disruption, especially when the town’s animal-rights contin- gent showed up to protest the protesters, the two groups in a face-off with the old horse slumped between them. Now when Virginia got back from lunch, two tall men were standing in front of the clinic door with the painting, blocking the entrance, while the rest stood in a line along the outside wall, storm clouds looming above. Here on the Kansas flatland a summer storm was a real threat, the Kansas River easily over- flowing, overwhelming the tenuous sandbanks, and flooding the town. “Lucifer!” a woman yelled at Virginia as she stepped around them toward the door.

“Come on, Elaine,” Virginia said to the woman. “You know you have to move.” She was familiar with some of the protesters, especially those who had been coming for a while. Elaine spat on the sidewalk just in front of Virginia’s shoe.

“Elaine,” Virginia said. “You know the rules: ten feet away from the door.”

“Ten feet won’t save your soul,” Elaine said, but they filtered across the street in a quiet line. The law protected their right to protest, although they could no longer picket funerals after they had beaten a young gay man nearly to death steps away from a gravesite he was visiting. The clinic was one of the last in Kansas, so they demonstrated there most days of the week. From a grassy strip on the other side of the road, the two tall men aimed the Virgin toward the clinic like a laser.

As Virginia took her place at the office desk, Mimi, who had finally had it, threw open the clinic’s front door.

“We don’t even have the right facilities for surgical abortion here!” she yelled at the protesters. “We just sell pills!”

“Heathens!” they yelled back at her.

“I love Jesus!” she yelled. “He’s my savior!”

“Satan worshipper!” they yelled.

Their signs read Baby Killers! or God Knows What You Do In There! printed largely in childish scrawl. Virginia kept her eye on the win- dow in case she needed to call the cops. Her ex-husband’s father was a minister who once beat his son almost unconscious with a tin lunch pail. She and Paul had divorced unceremoniously this spring, just after the tulips in the parking-lot planters had jubilantly opened their jaws for the season. Fools, Virginia had thought of the flowers’ unchecked enthusiasm as she sat inside the law office, located in a shopping center beside a fried-chicken joint.

“Tulipa negrita,” Paul said as he signed away their union. Virginia bought a bucket of wings afterward and ate them in her car, needlessly breaking the brittle bones with her teeth and throwing them into the flower patch. Now summer raged and the tulips were dead. The protesters’ kids would spend their summer breaks holding signs too, even though some of them likely couldn’t yet read. Their faces had nothing behind them, no love or hate, no feeling at all; it was a look Virginia had seen in her own reflection during her short-lived marriage. In the line of protesters, one could see the entire progression of a human life: a baby strapped to its mother’s chest, eager children, budding adolescents, fearful young parents, weathered seniors. “Homo sapiens,” Virginia thought.

That day there was a new girl with them. She was at least a decade younger than Virginia, who was thirty-seven, and she wore a strange hat with earflaps despite the heat. As Virginia watched from the window, the girl looked back with eyes so clear they could cut.

“Why don’t they see that I’m the same as them?” Mimi asked, back inside.

“Because we’re in here and they’re out there,” Virginia said.

The protesters gazed silently at the building, unblinking stares directed someplace far within its doors, the pumping heart of sin that they hoped to still with their collective efforts. A teenage girl passed before the crowd, rousing them to life, and they began to shake their signs and yell. The girl pulled an unseasonable hoodie over her head and walked quickly into the clinic, where the door chime announced her entrance. She was young, less than fifteen. Virginia slid back the glass.

“If I get help here, will you tell my parents?” the girl said. She wore rings on each of her fingers.

Mimi stared blankly at her, like this scene wasn’t normal, like it didn’t happen every day—but it did. She stared at the girl as if she were something totally unidentifiable, a different species or a different animal.

“Take this one,” Mimi said to Virginia and left for her office in back. “No,” Virginia said to the girl. “I won’t tell a soul.”

Before the end of the day, Virginia drove to the dollar store for more pregnancy tests while the temp manned the desk. She took Mimi’s car to save on gas. Mimi’s husband had found Jesus, and Mimi hadn’t, but she had tried to, for him. Since he found Jesus, he didn’t feel like having sex, even when Mimi begged him. He wanted only to read Psalms aloud together in bed. When Virginia started up Mimi’s car, hymns exploded from the speakers, at a volume that told you someone was trying to convince themselves of something. Virginia rushed through the errand. She wanted to make sure she was back in time for the nose man’s ap- pointment. His name was Richard S., but she preferred not to think or speak his name because she wanted to maintain a strictly profes- sional rapport with the patients. She wanted to exclude patients’ lives from her imaginings, to see them only as the medical or psychological problems that they posed—problems that she, Virginia, could solve. The nose man arrived fifteen minutes early and took his usual seat directly across from the intake window. Virginia called him up for paperwork: symptoms, consent, sexual history. A pinkish wall, a door, and a sliding-glass window separated them now, but she knew his medical record well enough that she could have filled out the forms for him if he’d asked. He always wore a suit jacket, and he had a handsome, heroic face—every piece precisely in its place—even as he was clearly ashamed.

“Okay,” she said when she was ready for him, and propped open the waiting-room door. The nose man trailed behind her down the narrow hall and into the examination room where he sat on the paper sheet while Virginia pretended to review his forms. “What seems to be the problem?” she said, and the man looked at his shoes.

“Well,” the man said, “please don’t share this with anyone.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s just you and me here.”

Then, as he did every week, the man confessed to Virginia. He confessed to the weekend strip clubs and to where he put his nose: the thin strip of thong, purple or pink or black lace, wedged between strippers’ generous butt cheeks. He confessed about his wife, who had died, and about how he sometimes forgot she was gone, her absence having become familiar and reliable. He confessed the same feelings: his guilt, his desire, his grief. While he spoke, Virginia gently pressed the sides of his nose and face, as if checking for signs of disease. She kept her fingers there as he closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth. She breathed along with him, and in that moment she felt unspeakably powerful. When the man’s breathing became anxious and shallow, she slowed hers, and he would follow her lead. She smiled as she watched the tension in his brow release and his eyebrows return to their rightful place. She had done this: She had put everything back where it belonged. Order, she thought.

“One more thing,” the man said after admitting the usual indiscretions.

“Go on,” Virginia said.

“I’ve been following one of the girls,” he said.

Virginia removed her fingers and assessed his face; this new confession was a breach of their unspoken agreement, and he knew it. He was the once-faithful, now grief-stricken husband with a bad habit, and she was the nursing assistant who could help. The man shifted on the examination table, and the paper crackled beneath him. He tried to meet her eyes but could hold the gaze only briefly. Virginia felt unsure of what he expected from her, since he had deviated from their rehearsed script. She knew, too, that he was in breach of one of the Five C’s of Confidentiality, as he was admitting to illegal behavior: stalking. The man kicked his shoes together, and they thumped loudly. Virginia could see that they fit improperly, a size or two too big. He was like a child, she told herself, and she could fix this problem as well. She placed her gloved hands gently on the man’s cheeks.

“Following her where?” Virginia said.

“To the store, to her boyfriend’s house,” the man said, refusing to look at her. “To the gym.”

“You won’t hurt anyone,” Virginia said, using her hands to tilt his face up so his eyes met hers. She decided that this man, a widower, was not capable of real harm.

“I won’t hurt her,” the man said.

“Promise me,” Virginia said.

“I promise,” he said.

“Okay then, I forgive you,” Virginia said. The man smiled as she held his cheeks, and for a moment, there it was between them, so real and recognizable that she swore she could touch it, as if she herself had breathed it into existence: not quite commitment or trust, but something very similar—something like faith.

Virginia called Mimi in when she was done, and went back to her desk. A few minutes later, the man trotted out of the room, alive and renewed. Mimi followed him, mimicking the man’s grin. Her husband was going to leave her, and everyone knew it. Mimi closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, feigning a look of peace.

After he left, Virginia saw that the protesters had stopped the nose man. This was not unusual; they often asked the clinic’s patients to describe, in detail, what had been done to them, as a way of exposing sin. Most of the patients, young girls in twos or threes, would walk quickly past, but today the nose man lingered. As he spoke, he smiled and gestured back toward the clinic, pointing inside to Virginia’s desk.

Virginia put all the labeled tissue and blood samples in a lockbox that hung from the front door for pickup. She and Mimi walked to their cars together, and in the parking lot Mimi asked whether or not Virginia was seeing anyone new.

“You need to move forward,” Mimi said when she answered, “No, not yet.” Mimi got into her car and turned the key, and Virginia heard a thousand-voiced hymn rise up, all the singers pushing for the highest note, a note beyond them, all at once.

She sat in her parked car, alone now. She wanted to find someone, anyone, and tell them about the day. She didn’t want to go home to her damp apartment and the despondent cat, which had always loved Paul best. He had wanted a baby, which she had been unable to give him even after enduring the nightly hormonal shots that Paul, a neurolo- gist, deftly administered with a syringe to her butt cheek. “Attagirl,” he would say, slapping her rump and then unceremoniously mounting her. Back then she hadn’t worked because she hadn’t needed to. She spent her afternoons roaming their ample house, she and the cat avoiding one another. She pointlessly wiped the granite countertops and wondered whether, this time, a baby had taken root within her. Back then she had had little to tell Paul when he returned home from work, so she reported on the state of her modest flower patch, Paul’s idea for her, the asters that burst forth despite her negligence—Aster alpinus— or on the drastic turns the weather would take. As she spoke, she noted the quiet hostility with which Paul regarded his tuna melt or hamburger each night before biting in, holding the sandwich in front of him as if to threaten his supper into submission. She realized then that true violence occurred in the moment before aggression, in the instant of calculation, rather than in action. She had been empty then, a person incapable of either malice or affection, a vessel waiting to be filled with everything around her that blossomed and gained force despite, in spite of, her.

There was a rap on Virginia’s window. Startled, she saw the girl with the strange hat crouched beside her car. The girl rotated her hand in small circles to indicate that Virginia should roll down her window. Virginia did so, scanning the lot for the other protesters, and was about to say that the clinic was closed when the girl said, “I’m pregnant.”

At Virginia’s apartment, the girl sat primly on a barstool while Virginia prepared buttered toast and coffee. The girl explained that she still lived with her parents, her father a minister himself, and had told them she was leading a youth-group meeting that evening. She had only a few hours. The ruse was easy for the girl, as she used the excuse to meet up with her boyfriend, an exotic fish expert at the town’s pet store. “But he’s a believer,” the girl said, blush rising into her cheeks, beautiful in her impiety. She began to say the boy’s name, but Virginia stopped her.

“No names,” she said.

“So you’ll help me,” the girl said.

“What makes you think that?” Virginia said.

“A man at the clinic today said you’re a real angel. I thought it was a sign,” the girl said.

Virginia thought about the girl as she drove back home. While they had headed toward the girl’s neighborhood, Virginia imagined she could feel a heat radiating from the girl’s abdomen, inside of which the baby lay curled and unfinished. As if she could sense it, the girl placed her hand gently on her own belly. It was a feeling that Virginia would likely never know, and she felt a brief rage at the girl and her carelessness— her luck. She dropped the girl off a few blocks from her house, so that her parents wouldn’t see their daughter emerge from an unfamiliar car. The development in which they lived was quiet and orderly, square lawns littered with children’s toys. In the setting sunlight, the neigh- borhood glowed an unearthly pink that radiated downward from each house’s pointed peak, and two women power walked down the sidewalk together, arms looped, an eager Labrador in front of them straining against its leash. Before she shut the door, the girl leaned her head inside and said, “My name is Rose.” Rose, Virginia repeated to herself now. Rosa carolina, Rosa chinensis, Rosa virginiana. Virginia would save the girl.

In the parking lot after work the next day, Virginia and the girl agreed to meet again the following Monday. Over the week, Virginia prepared to end the girl’s pregnancy. The plan they would follow was clear because Virginia had originally formulated it for herself. Toward the end of her marriage to Paul, when it was obvious he no longer loved her, she realized she would have to terminate a pregnancy if it occurred. She settled on the abortion pill, since its effects resembled a natural miscarriage and since it could be administered at home in a few hours. Now Virginia stole the pills—mifepristone, misoprostol—from the clinic while Mimi and the temp were at lunch. They were worth hundreds of dollars and required a good deal of paperwork, but this was important. The girl was further along than the instructions recommended, but only by a month or so. After work each day, Virginia collected the other things she would need: cleaning supplies for her bathroom, bottled water and extra ice, over-the-counter painkillers, fresh sheets for the pullout couch.

Virginia felt pleased completing these small tasks, like she was preparing for a houseguest. At the clinic, she proudly observed the girl in the line of protesters, convinced that she was giving her back her life, doing for her what no one else could. “They’ll kill me,” the girl had said of her family and the church congregation, and Virginia believed her, having read about such cases in the local paper. Kansas was a brutal place, formerly Native territory and a land of bloodshed where, on the silent plains, under the boundless sky, it was easy to believe that God beckoned you to commit terrible acts.

But Virginia was truly saving the girl, easily the most important task of her own life. Sometimes she questioned her reasoning, that she was taking a potential life in order to save one, but then she reminded herself that, as Mimi would have said, the girl’s baby was not yet a life, certainly not yet a human being. At night she dreamed that the girl birthed a bloody litter of puppies or a school of disfigured fish. Once born, they slipped out of Virginia’s hands and disappeared under the apartment furniture while the cat pursued them and Virginia scrambled to save them. When she woke in a panic, her sheets soaked with sweat, she told herself that this was a good deed, her true calling perhaps, and that fate had brought them together: a woman pregnant before her time and a woman who would never become pregnant herself. There was, Virginia had to admit, a certain symmetry to it, some greater logic that escaped coincidence. She wasn’t sure if she believed in God. Paul, an atheist, had talked her out of it, but now she felt sometimes that a momentum buried deep within compelled her forward although she could not yet name it. Over the weekend, she cleaned her apartment thoroughly and then, spent, waited on her couch for the week to begin.

On Monday morning, Virginia arrived early. She and Rose would go to Virginia’s house to complete the task. As Virginia pulled up, she noticed that the protesters had arrived early and were lined up directly in front of the clinic rather than across the street in their grassy patch.

“Satan!” Elaine hissed at Virginia as she approached the door to unlock it.

“Ten feet,” Virginia said.

“You will burn for eternity in the hellfire, Lucifer,” Elaine said.

“Elaine, come on, ten feet,” Virginia said.

“Our Lord knows no rival,” Elaine said. “No one can stand in the Lord’s path.”

“All right, Elaine,” Virginia said. This rhetoric was not new, but Elaine usually relented more easily. It often seemed like they were playing prescribed parts: Elaine the angry protester, Virginia the half- hearted nursing assistant. But this time there was real malice behind Elaine’s words, her voice louder and her syllables more deliberate. The protesters gathered around Virginia, enclosing her in a half circle by the door. She noted that the girl was not among them.

“‘Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God,’” Elaine said. The others joined her. “‘They shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.’”

“Where’s Rose?” Virginia said.

“Where the Lord intended,” Elaine said, taking a step toward Virginia. “‘For Thou didst form my inward parts,’” she began again, and again the others joined her. “‘Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.’”

They were close enough now that Virginia could distinguish, for the first time, the small differences in their faces: They were no longer simply churchgoing children, parents, and grandparents. She noticed that an older man had overlapping yellowed front teeth, partially rotten, and that he self-consciously shielded his mouth with his hand when he spoke. Elaine had sunburned skin dotted with freckles and minor discolorations—spots of red and white—evidence of a life hard lived. “‘I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful,’” they chanted. Virginia realized that she had no idea who these people were or of what they were truly capable. She felt the heat of their bodies close in on her, their warm breath married with the hot summer breeze. A small child from the crowd reached out and touched her arm, neither violently nor kindly, but as if Virginia were something inhuman: an animal, or a statue, or maybe a rock. He slid his fingers along her forearm curiously, and, when she flinched, quickly withdrew his hand. His father slapped it, and the boy began to cry. Then Virginia heard a hymn rise up behind her and knew Mimi had arrived. The protesters quieted and filed across the street.

Inside, Virginia took a seat at her desk and tried to decide what to do. She was worried about Rose and wanted to call the police, but surely Elaine had a good idea what Virginia’s part had been in all this. Virginia knew the laws well enough to understand that she would be tried, and likely jailed, for plotting to perform an illegal abortion, especially in Kansas. The police would find her apartment ready for the task: the stolen pills neatly arranged on her kitchen counter, a plastic sheet laid across the bathroom floor, a bottle of bleach and rubber gloves waiting in the tub, all intended for the blood that she, Virginia, had agreed to spill.

“You look terrible,” Mimi said, appraising Virginia before retreating to her office. Mimi’s hair was poorly arranged, a limp bun on top of her head, and she looked tired.

Virginia struggled to assess what the protesters might be willing to do. She knew they could hurt someone, since they had done so with the young gay man at the cemetery, but they had never killed anyone. Surely there was a line between harm and kill. Outside the glass door, the crowd moved and motioned with more liveliness than usual, their arms waving and their mouths popping open and shut with words that Virginia could not hear, a single undulating mass, some unfamiliar beast with dozens of eyes and legs. Rose was one of their own, she reasoned. They wouldn’t hurt her. She was probably at home, enduring a lecture from her parents. Maybe they would force her to marry her boyfriend, but that wasn’t the worst that could happen to a person. Virginia herself had tolerated a less-than-ideal marriage, and she was okay. No, she thought, these people were not capable of real harm. Those who murdered, those who did real damage, were different from her or them, lacking some basic human instinct and thus easy to spot.

The phone roused Virginia from her thoughts, and she found a familiar voice on the other end. “Forgive me, angel,” said the voice.

“Richard?” Virginia asked. “Is that you?”

“Forgive me,” Richard said. “I let you down.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I broke our promise,” he said, his voice unsteady.

“What promise?” Virginia said. And then she remembered: He had promised he wouldn’t hurt anyone. “What have you done?” she asked.

“I’ll always say that you tried to help me,” he said.

“Richard,” she said, but he was gone.

Virginia placed the phone in its cradle, hoping it would spring to life again, but it didn’t. Hands shaking, she picked up the receiver and called back the last number, but it rang endlessly. She righted the items on her desk, putting them where they belonged: the stapler, the stress ball, the paper clips, and the patient folders. She knew that sometime soon, she herself would have to confess, and she wanted to be ready. The police department would get word of whatever Richard had done, and she would have to divulge every secret she had agreed to keep. She had been wrong about Richard, who, on the phone, had seemed ba±ed by the wrong he had committed. Some hard object hit the clinic’s storefront, thrown by one of the protesters. Virginia noted a small spider web in the glass.

“What was that?” Mimi called from her office.

Unable to answer, Virginia watched the crack burst open as one brick hit it, then another. Mimi emerged, and Virginia saw that she had poorly applied an alarming red lipstick that bled around the rim of her mouth and stained her teeth, which, as she yelled out, appeared more purely white and sharper than they ever had before.

Read more from Issue 15.1.