Three Moments of an Explosion (30 page)

“It’s all about plausibility,” she said. “There’s no
proof
anything systematic’s going on. It doesn’t happen all that often, and it’s not unprecedented for there to be chokes and fuckups and so on. And for a long time, you know, it was only, it was only Tor.” She didn’t break eye contact when she said that. I guess she’s used to talking about bad news.

“Still though,” I said.

“Oh sure,” she said. “There’s also that river in Egypt.”

Tor didn’t have a gig every day by any means, but she sent her CV around to all the teaching hospitals in driving distance and soon had enough to make an OK income. An SP CV is an interesting thing. She would list the hospitals where she’d performed, and under each one, the condition or conditions she’d simulated there. Gastrointestinal bleeding. Hyperthyroid. End of life: metastatic pancreatic cancer.

“Ms. Bertram,” she’d tell me, getting ready to go. “Leukemia. Undiagnosed.” She’d give me twirls with her new temporary body language.

I started guessing.

“Abigail Sully. High school teacher. Mumps.”

“Ooh, close,” she’d say. “Melissa Styles. HIV.”

“How are you supposed to give them feedback?” I said. “You talk to the administrators, right? And the students? I mean, presumably they either got what was wrong with you or they didn’t.”

“Don’t be obtuse. There’s bedside manner. They might get the diagnosis right but be total jerks about it. They might ask inappropriate questions. They might misjudge Ms. Bertram’s capacity for full disclosure. I’m an actor,” she said primly, taking a sip of her coffee with her pinky out, “and as such, I am tremendously empathetic.”

“Yeah, you are. Empathet me, baby.”

“I can tell which of these little snots is going to be a good doctor. I can help them. I deserve a medal. Or a lollipop.”

“Stick out your tongue and say, ‘Aaah.’ ”

“Aaah.”

I didn’t know she’d joined the Association of Standardized Patients until I saw their logo on her mail, ASP.

“What’s the slogan?” I said. “ ‘We’re Pretending to be Sick’? Tell me there’s a magazine.”

It didn’t take long for most of the local SPs to start repeatedly overlapping at work, and getting to know each other. We went for steak with Donna and Tam, a couple in their fifties, who both did that work. I met Sam and Gerald and Tina. Sometimes when they got together they’d swap anecdotes. Very occasionally a doctor—usually Jonas—might come.

“I was on with Brian,” Tor said. We were in a loud bar. The others groaned at the name. “He was a perforated ulcer. And they didn’t clock that because he just doesn’t tell them properly where it hurts. And then he blames
them
.

“ ‘Young man,’ ” she said in a swaggery voice, “ ‘I’m not interested in excuses. It’s your job to take the history. As in
his story
. You did not listen to
his story
.’ ” The SPs all laughed and I laughed with them.

“I know,” she said afterwards. “Epoxy.”

“What can I say? I’m a specialism voyeur,” I said.

For the first year or so, Tor still went to auditions for regular acting jobs. She got a little role in
Candide,
and she was OK in it, but she wasn’t as happy about the gig as I’d thought she would be.

“I can make enough money doing the patient work,” she said, which took me aback.

She started doing a little part-time copyediting and basic layout stuff for the SP publication.

“I didn’t know you know how to do that,” I said.

“Student newspaper.”

She wasn’t overjoyed with the way things were going but she wasn’t depressed either. She was focused, and seemed OK.

I would meet her near the hospital, while she was wearing the clothes of her roles, and watch her slowly come out of these microplays. The way she held her fork would alter over the course of supper. I think the food she ordered depended on how much of the character still clung to her.

She liked the serious stuff. She liked occult blood, hidden traumas. Backstory, shame-obscured symptoms.

Tor was performing a series of interrelated pieces, or one piece with very many scenes. She was collaborating with young performers who’d never asked to be actors and, but,
bund,
didn’t have any choice, who were just shoved onstage without even knowing the script, and her job was both to say her own lines and to elicit theirs—which they didn’t know. That’s a pretty intense collaboration.

She was teaching with each performance. If her plays went well, a few years down the line, someone would get healed. The most important performance works in history, in tiny rooms, between two people.

I waited for her outside the hospital one time, and a guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty approached me.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You’re that SP’s husband, right? I saw you with her. She’s amazing, man.”

He didn’t sound like he was macking on her. He sounded more like he was considering something strange.

“What are you talking about?” I said, and he shook his head and shrugged so helplessly and so guilelessly it was hard to be furious. “Walk away, man,” I said.

“No, look,” he said. “I’ve learned more from her than …” He shook his head again.

I started reading theater history and theory. I wanted to understand more—and of course I enjoyed the vocabulary too. The cheat out, when an actor takes a slightly unnatural position upstage to improve sight lines. The aesthetic distance, which Tor’s job was to collapse. The bastard prompt, when things are reversed, when the prompt corner’s stage right, the opposite of what’s usual. I read up about improvisation. Comedy stuff, at first, but pretty quickly I was on Chaikin and Spolin and Chilton and people like that.

How do you interpret an improvised script? An improvised performance?

The flowers were coming out. I don’t know what they were. Tor was into gardening and we had baskets of things hanging outside our door. I was in the kitchen when Tor came home, and she entered in a waft of plant smell.

She was in a floral dress the same color as those flowers outside. I didn’t bother saying, but I thought,
Ms. Something-or-Other, little bit older, nervous, neurological damage.
Tor walked across the room like she was sleepwalking. It wasn’t the body language of her character, I realized: she was deep in something.

“Babe?” I said. She blinked and came back. “What’s up? Bad day?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Busy, and kind of intense.”

That was when I started feeling jealous.

I tried not to. I felt stupid and ridiculous and mean. I’d never been that kind of guy, and Tor had never given me any grounds for anything. But there was just something in how zoned she was in that moment, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids, the baby doctors. I remembered the guy who’d spoken to me. I imagined him and Tor making out in cupboards after he’d diagnosed her with whatever imaginary thing it was she had.

A couple of times I left work early and waited where she wouldn’t see me, watching the hospital from the diner next door. I’m not proud of any of this. She only ever left alone. I’d see her wandering through the car-park.

One windy day I saw a whole bunch of students trooping out, chatting with excitement, and I immediately knew, I don’t know how, that some of them must have talked to her that day, in character. “Oh my God!” one of them shouted about something. And I was jealous, again, I realized, but not of what I’d thought.

I started imagining Tor in a little room opposite some flustered young student. Wearing that floral dress, or her pantsuit, or a T-shirt, showing her clavicle tattoo, whatever. The young woman or man in a big white coat would be staring at her, at Tor, right there. Forget front row: it would literally be all for them.

If history had been done differently, theater might have been an eternity of one-on-one performances. I was envious of her audiences.

She’d walk through our room wearing clothes I swear I’d never seen before, so I’d say, “Is that a new sweater?”

“No,” she’d say. “I’ve had this for ages.” It was how she wore it.

I think I’d started making crazy plans, like I was going to follow her, or listen at doors. I’m relieved Jonas called me when he did.

He came to my work. “What’s up with Tor?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

We were standing in a wild field at the edge of the building site ripped through with tire trenches. There was a pool in one corner where some heavy machinery had been. The water glimmered under a sheen of oil, and thrushes went over it.

“You know we’re going to have to stop using her?” he said.

“What the fuck? What are you talking about?”

“The first couple of times shit went down I felt like I was going mad,” he said. “Because I was all, what the hell was that? And everyone else seemed kind of like, ah, it’ll be OK, just a little snafu. Or sometimes nothing, man, they said nothing, it was like they didn’t see there was any problem.” He shook his head. “I could totally lose my job over this,” he said, “but listen, I want you to see something. You know her, man. So, you know we video the sessions?”

I told him no, then. That it felt like a violation.

Being with Tor I’ve seen a fair amount of what I guess you’d call experimental theater. Some troupe from Chicago had taken over an old office in town and made what they called “an interpretation” of some old book. You wandered through all the rooms and they’d be standing there in weird poses and wearing wacky clothes and maybe saying things, lines from the book or whatever. You could pick stuff up, whatever you wanted, look through drawers, all that.

One of the reasons I took her is that I read there were rooms where you had to go in one at a time. You’d be alone with one of the actors, and they’d talk to you. One-on-one performances.

“When do
you
get to be an audience?” I kept saying.

I phoned Jonas while she was in one of those rooms. “I’ve been feeling like she’s having an affair.”

“Don’t be stupid. Tor’s crazy into you. So. When are you going to come see these videos?”

We fixed a day.

She came out of the room and said to me, “Are you ready to go?”

“How was it?”

“Meh.”

One of the actors was standing in the doorway of the little room. He was a young skinny guy with dark skin and long hair, wearing a ticket collector’s uniform. He was watching. I couldn’t tell his expression past the big old glasses he had on, but he was looking at her, hard.

Jonas met me at a side entrance to the hospital.

“She’s here today,” I said.

“I know. She’s in a different building. I want to show you something that happened last week.” He took me to a meeting room and we leaned in around his tablet while he started the footage. “So this is like a final exam for some of these guys. Seriously, you tell anyone I’ve shown you this and I am out on my ass, you understand?”

A ceiling camera looked down. A young woman sat before a desk, perfectly still. It was a full second before I realized it was Tor. A medical student came in, scribbling on a clipboard.

“Miss Benedict,” the student said. The sound quality was not good but you could hear her nervousness. She shook hands with Tor and sat down. “I’m Dr. Chung. Please tell me what I can do for you.”

Tor was silent for a moment. She glanced to her right and waited, then said, “I have a pain.”

Her voice was low and totally unlike her own.

Jonas paused the image.

“So she’s supposed to have a pain down in her side,” Jonas said. “Appendicitis.”

“A classic,” I said.

“This is about the eighth student she’s done. She’s been at this all day.” He restarted the footage. “All fine until now.”

“Where’s the pain?” Chung said.

“This pain began on the back of my neck,” Tor said. “It started two days ago in the hollow at the back of my neck, and it’s spread down my spine and up into my skull. It’s spread into all my limbs.”

I looked at Jonas.

“Can you describe the pain?” Chung said.

“It’s a pain like melting plastic. A hot pain. It started almost unbearable and I was screaming. But then it seemed to cool and as it spread out across me it left my skin hard.”

“Excuse me?” said Chung.

“Where the hot goes it leaves my skin as hard as my fingernails. And covered in raised patterns. See?” She held up her arm. Chung wrote notes.

“What’s she talking about?” I said. “What condition is this?”

“You tell me,” said Jonas.

On the screen the door opened and a senior doctor I vaguely recognized came in.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to interrupt you,” she said. “Ms. Chung, can you wait outside, please?”

The student left and the doctor stared at Tor and the screen went blank.

“I wish she hadn’t stopped the filming,” Jonas said. “But apparently, that doc, Sheila, she asked Tor if she was OK. Because this sure wasn’t appendicitis. She was way off-script. Tor says she’s sorry, she’d mixed up another project, though excuse me, what the fuck? She says it had been a long night, she laughs it off, and she comes back and does two more hours of appendicitis, and it’s fine.”

He swiped through his files. “Then. Three days later,” he said. “She’s Agnes Ball, chatty hypochondriac with gastroenteritis. First couple of sessions no problem.”

A different room, a different desk. Tor stood against the rear wall. A student entered.

“So, Doctor,” Tor said immediately. She lifted her long sweatshirt and bared her midriff. The young man blinked. “Things are moving below here,” she said. “I think I have eggs inside me, moving around in my blood. They were tiny, like flaxseeds, at first, and it was painful but I knew it wouldn’t kill me. But then they grew and changed shape, and now I have a cluster in my thigh, and a cluster in my left hand, and some right here in my belly. I’m worried because I’ve been dreaming in languages I can’t speak.”

Jonas froze the image of the student’s confusion. He swept slowly through a collection of others.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at my face. “Every few times, now, she comes out with symptoms like this. When we ask her about it she says she got confused, that she’s doing another project. Does that make any sense to you? Some play … ?”