Читать книгу Yield - Lee Houck - Страница 9

My high school chemistry teacher was also a forensics investigator. He specialized in arson, burned bodies, and flammable chemicals, and he entertained us with sometimes-gruesome stories from more than twenty-five years of duty. There was the skeleton of a woman, average height—which is to say five-foot-four—somewhere around thirty years old, reduced to blackened bones and cinders in a house fire. He gave us two clues: “For example, the middle finger on her right hand has a large calcification on the top section, like you might have if you wrote heavily with a pencil, for example.” He said “for example” at the beginning and end of everything. “For example, she also has a tiny indentation, a notch, in her front tooth, also the right one, for example.” It was our job as eager students, wound up by the grisly details, to figure out her occupation.

Work changes you. It shows itself on your body. In the same way that a carpenter’s hands are tuned to the nuances of hammer and nail, the way wood can talk to you through your arms, my hands listen to numbers on files, to injection records and saturation levels, to painful and courageous histories. I filter through the hundreds of thousands (could be millions) of dead medical records at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and line them up in ascending order by year of admittance.

The files begin with a complaint. Something like “My back hurts and I don’t know why,” or “My leg is broken,” or worse things—usually only one sentence, typed up by someone in Admitting. Then a social and family history, which is dictated to the nurse by the patient, and handwritten. This is where the nurses fill in what’s really happening, the stuff that doesn’t show up in the complaint: “Woman claims to have walked into door,” or “Child has bruises on back and legs, father says they are from falling off the bed.” Then a medical history, a list of procedures performed, if any, and finally billing information. Sometimes there are X-rays, sometimes there are sonograms. Sometimes there’s hardly anything—a blurry carbon copy and illegible signature. The files are stored vertically on shelves in thirty-two rows. They’re accented by six different color-coded stickers (green for first-time emergency visit, orange for same-day dismissal, red for DOA, yellow, brown, and light blue for what I haven’t been able to figure out yet).

My fingertips are tough, callused by the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork and paper clips, removing the tiny staples, and my cuticles are often rubbed red and raw from jamming my hands in between two folders, cut open on the sharp edges of the files.

I work alone. I don’t talk to anyone, don’t see anyone. I don’t know who deposits the manila folders into the wire in-box. I only know that when I arrive, the box is full, and the files are sometimes spilling over into two or even three stacks on the carpet. I work when I want to, so long as I’ve made a hefty dent at the end of the week. I don’t make enough money to get by on this job alone, so I hustle. Truthfully, I was hustling before I took this job, and if you ever see a documentary film about strippers, or prostitutes, or hustlers, they always say something like: “I couldn’t make enough money waiting tables, so I started turning tricks and here I am.”

With me it was the opposite.

The fact that I work alone also means that, in some ways, I have no proof of the work at all. I have no product. Other than my fingers, I have nothing to show for it, no physical manifestation of time passing. Hustling is the same. If I flatten myself out enough (in my head, I mean) then it’s easily forgettable. And because it’s a secret, an almost invisible transaction between strangers, it doesn’t really exist. But I will—reluctantly—say this: all the anonymous numbers, all those forgotten histories, the injuries and surgeries and remarkable recoveries, they hide in my fingers. Where the sex work goes, I don’t know.

The burned woman? She held a pair of scissors that pressed on that knuckle, and she tucked bobby pins in that tooth, where over the years they carved out a little nick in the enamel. She was a hairdresser.

Right now I’m sucking this guy’s cock in his rented BMW, and as he starts to fuck my face his balls tighten up like he’s going to explode, and it’s shoved too far down my throat for me to practice my practiced technique.

When I look over at my hand holding the armrest of the door, my fist is clenched tight around the brown leather and the dust starts to settle over my eyes. I reach down and start rubbing my finger across his asshole, then pushing it up until I can’t get in any farther. He squirms, then moans. Not pleasure or pain. It’s a moan of not knowing, of losing control. There is no before and there is no after, there is only now, like the queasy instant just before you sneeze.

He shakes, stops thrusting, grabs my ears, presses my head down. His cum squirts in three short bursts into the back of my throat and it’s sour and acrid and awful.

I swallow.

Tomorrow, I think, it won’t be so bitter.