Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
| ISBN-13: | 9781501116124 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Touchstone |
| Publication date: | 01/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
And Again
Sam leaves to check his messages when the doctors descend. Dr. Mitchell gives a quick knock on the door as he enters, less a request for permission and more of an announcement of his presence. There’s no stopping anyone in a hospital; you’re on their turf, a supplicant. The doctor is an older man with bright silver hair and an oblong birthmark on his right cheek. Dr. Shah follows him, and the contrast of her youthful exuberance could not be starker against his measured, practiced calm. She practically skips into the room, teetering in her high heels, looking more like an extra in a Bollywood movie than the scientific savant that she is. The third man is less familiar to me. He’s tall, middle-aged, and has a certain bureaucratic exactness to him. I wonder if he’s from the government, one of the doctors who will be reporting on all of the SUBlife patients during the next year before the program goes up for FDA approval. The three of them close in around me.
“How are we feeling today Hannah?” Dr. Mitchell asks, taking a penlight out of his pocket and shining it in my eyes. I smile because he always speaks about me in the plural and because, of all my doctors, I like him best.
“The pain is gone,” I reply, a bit afraid to say it out loud, lest I tempt it back with my words. A nurse elbows her way between Dr. Shah and the other doctor, unceremoniously grabbing my arm for a blood test. She plunges a needle into the distended vein in the crook of my arm. It’s almost a welcome sight; my old veins had been so shot in the last few weeks that the nurses in the ICU had to draw blood from the tops of my feet. Dr. Mitchell checks the glands in my neck as the nurse removes the full vial of blood and tapes a lump of cotton to my injured arm, then disappears without a word. The brusqueness and efficiency of the hospital staff has become commonplace for me, and I long ago surrendered any resistance to their needles and catheters and tubes and relentless prodding. It’s been a long time since I felt that my body was in any way my own. But this is the first time that I wonder if this body is mine at all, if I even have the option to refuse any of the medical demands they will make upon it.
I answer Dr. Shah’s questions and read the flash cards she puts before me as Dr. Mitchell listens to my heart and lungs, tests my reflexes. I recite the words they asked me to remember before the transfer. Glass. Curtain. Snapshot. When she holds up a card with a blue box in the middle and asks me what color it is, the smart-ass in me wonders what would happen if I tell her that it’s yellow. I feel like a seal with a ball balanced on my nose, clapping my flippers for their amusement. But I give the correct answer instead. My guess is FDA guy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.
“What did you do for your seventh birthday party?” Dr. Shah asks. The question surprises me a bit, because I haven’t thought about any of my childhood birthdays in years. She must have gotten her information from my sister.
“Horseback riding,” I reply, recalling the coarse feeling of the horse’s mane beneath my hands. The memory brings with it a flood of relief. It must all still be there, I think. All of my memories must have transferred over, even the ones it wouldn’t occur to me to remember on my own.
Dr. Mitchell presses on my stomach. FDA guy looks bored. I wonder how many times he’s been through this before. I wonder how many of us there are in the Northwestern pilot program. Or maybe he has to fly around, go to all five of the hospitals that were approved for SUBlife trials. How many times can someone watch a human clone wake up for the first time before it becomes boring?
Dr. Mitchell pulls out a pen and scribbles in my chart. “Everything is looking great, Hannah,” he says. “You should expect some differences at first. Your muscles are still underdeveloped, so we’re not going to get you up and walking just yet. And we’re going to work our way up to solid food to make sure your digestive system is in good order. But none of that is out of the ordinary for this stage post-transfer.”
“Has anything gone wrong with any of the others?” I ask. Dr. Mitchell glances at Dr. Shah. She’s the one who answers.
“We only have data for our SUBlife patients here at Northwestern. But so far, everyone has responded very well to the transfer.”
“How many have there been?”
“You’re the fourth. You’ll meet the others next week when you start attending your support group meetings.”
“And you’re sure—” I swallow hard against the lingering dryness in my throat, trying to get the question out. “You’re sure the cancer isn’t going to come back?”
There’s a slight pause in the room. FDA guy looks at me like I’m an idiot, probably wondering why his taxpayer dollars are funding a study to save someone like me, someone who can’t even grasp the most basic of concepts. But if I don’t ask the question, here, out loud, I know the lack of an answer will plague me forever.
Dr. Mitchell is kinder than his counterpart. He takes my hand, leaning forward a bit. Maybe he knows how badly I need to hear it again now, even though I’ve heard it a hundred times before. “We were able to isolate the defective genes, Hannah,” he says, smiling a bit, a kindly old man calming his grandchild after a nightmare. “We removed them completely when we began developing your SUB. No, the cancer is not going to come back.” He squeezes my hand.
Now I start to cry, which clears the room pretty effectively. Sam steps back inside as the doctors leave, and he brings me a handful of tissues, but doesn’t sit back down. I wonder if his instinct is also to flee at the sight of my tears. Maybe he’s finally reached his limit, too.
“Penny left three messages. I told her I’d call as soon as you woke up, do you mind?” He holds up his phone.
“No, I’m sure they’re going crazy,” I say, drying my eyes as he steps back out into the hallway.
I wad up the damp tissues and toss them in the direction of the wastebasket. They fall short, of course. I take a deep breath, revel in it, and decide to take stock. I haven’t been alone yet, in this new body, and it feels a bit like waiting to become acquainted with the body of a stranger, a new lover. It’s something that must be done in private.
The skin of my arms is very pale, dusted with a fine down of dark hair, unbleached by the sun into its usual golden invisibility. Trails of cerulean veins stand prominent beneath the skin of my wrists. I can’t tell if the patterns are still the same as they were before. I don’t remember, and it scares me how little I memorized of the body I’d lived in for twenty-seven years. All of my freckles are gone, giving my skin a strange, placid sort of appearance. As if it’s not quite real, as if I’ve pulled on a pair of perfect, silken gloves that reach all the way up to my shoulders. There are dark, damp thatches of hair in my armpits, and I begin to feel itchy as soon as I discover them.
My hands look small, their joints thin and supple, and I move them experimentally, testing to make sure my synapses fire with the same precision as before the transfer. They are foreign objects now, like the pale, delicate petals of a lily. These hands have endured none of the years I spent scribbling on sketchpads or being sliced up carving linoleum in a printmaking class or trying and failing to learn the piano. I wonder if I can hold a pencil. Or a paintbrush.
I flex my feet, stretching my legs under the bedspread, then fumble a hand under my hospital gown, taking care not to detach any of the EKG leads fixed to my skin. I laugh a little to myself when I find the soft dent of scar tissue in the middle of my stomach, testing it with my fingertip, wondering at the thrill of familiarity in provokes within my chest.
“What?” Sam says as he reenters, noting my reverie.
“For a second I was afraid I wouldn’t have a . . .” I motion to the middle of my stomach. “I mean, does a clone need an umbilical cord?”
“I guess there were one or two things we didn’t think to ask, huh?” he says, leaning close as I tuck the hospital blanket around my waist and draw up my gown, revealing the pallid skin of my stomach, with the little knot of my navel in the center. “Looks the same to me,” he says. I smile.
“What did Penny say?”
“She called me a very nasty name for not updating her sooner,” he replies. The thought of Penny’s famously quick temper hits me in a tender spot somewhere in my chest. I turn my head as Sam settles back into his chair, so he won’t see that I’m on the edge of tears again. I feel as if I have no skin, as if every emotion that wells up inside me will immediately spill out. I can hold nothing back, not in this new body; I can’t control it like the body I remember.
“I told her that they can come by as soon as visiting hours start. And, of course, she ignored me and said they’re coming over now. I didn’t see any real point in trying to argue with her.”
“Smart man,” I say, though I’m grateful that my oldest friend is dragging her boyfriend into their car and heading toward me, probably at blinding speeds. I need Penny’s eyes, and her honesty, to tell me if I’m the same as I was before. Sam has been so wrapped up in the mechanics of my disease, and the day-in, day-out of my life at the hospital, that I’m not sure he’d be able to tell. Maybe I’m afraid that he doesn’t remember what I was like before I was sick, even though it’s only been a handful of months since I was diagnosed. Or maybe, despite his righteous honesty, the journalistic ethics that have seeped into every bit of his life, I’m still afraid he’d lie to me.
Penny breezes in like a wash of winter air, crisp and bracing, the tiny dark ropes of her braids animating around her as if caught in a wind that belongs to her alone. She strides over and clasps my face in her hands, the silver of her rings cool against my skin. She studies me, her heavy eyebrows furrowed above the dark scrutiny of her eyes. I hold still, feeling very much like I’m showing her one of my paintings, watching her eyes scan with passionless appraisal. I’m about to interrupt her concentration and demand a response, when she breaks into that lovely smile of hers.
“There you are,” she says and kisses both of my cheeks, releasing me.
“Am I?” I ask, still internally bracing myself. I don’t doubt Penny’s judgment; I’m just unaccustomed to walking away unscathed by it.
“You look pretty decent, actually,” she replies. I grin, because to Penny, decent is just this side of tremendous. She turns to Sam, who is sitting by the window reading something on his laptop. He’s been on a leave of absence from the Chicago Tribune, where he covers national politics, though it hasn’t stopped him from working during every spare moment. I wonder what it’s costing him, these weeks away from his job, and wish I could signal to Penny to lay off him, at least for today. But I’m already out of luck. “You, however, look dreadful,” she says.
“Thanks, Pen,” Sam replies, barely glancing up from his work. Penny’s friendly dislike of Sam is nothing new, and he’s as familiar as I am with the smooth clarity of her whims and the depth of her candor.
“Connor’ll be up in a minute. He stopped downstairs to get coffee,” she says, flopping down into the seat next to my bed. Every time she moves there’s a dull clatter of bangles and beads. I’m sure I look bare and unformed next to Penny’s intricate, well-curated beauty. “So how do you feel?”
“Good. And really strange. A bit naked.” I roll up the thin cotton sleeves of my hospital gown and show her the pristine skin underneath. My arms are spindle-thin, broken only by the joints of my elbows like dense knots in sapling branches. They are as unmarked as porcelain.
“A waste of good artwork,” she replies, and sends another pointed glance in Sam’s direction. “Better for the country club though, I guess. Finally smoothing out all of those pesky rough edges, aren’t we?” Sam isn’t listening, or he’s choosing to ignore her. Either way, changing the subject is best.
“I keep feeling like I should have my glasses on.” My battered frames sit on the table next to me. I grabbed them out of habit a few minutes ago, sliding them on and recoiling at the warped blur that clouded my vision.
“What happened here?” she says, motioning to my bandaged hand.
“Pulled out my IV,” I reply. “Accidentally.”
“See,” she says, making a soft tsk-ing sound in mock reproach, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”
“Do you have a mirror?”
Penny goes fishing in her bag, an old gray corduroy satchel that seems to hold a good portion of her worldly possessions at any given time. I’ve seen paintbrushes, lace underwear, antacids, spools of thread, condoms, even bottles of perfume produced from that bag at a moment’s notice. And yet somehow, magically, Penny is always the first one to dig out her ID when we go to bars together. She hands me a tortoise-shell compact with a circular mirror inside.
“You haven’t seen yourself yet?”
“They won’t let me out of bed,” I reply, peering at my right eye, which is huge and bright and the color of coffee under a shapeless, overgrown eyebrow. I move the mirror down, trying to glimpse more, to get a sense of my face as a whole. But it’s too small, that scrap of reflection. I can only see one feature at a time.
The freckles on my nose and cheeks are gone. My skin is poreless, scrubbed of its ruddiness and even the barest hints of sun damage, like a doll’s face. The small dent of an old piercing is gone from the right side of my nose. The mirror reveals hollow cheeks, a chin that is more pointed than it was before. I am all bone structure, a skull that has been dipped in wax. My upper lip sports dark fluff, a shadowy contrast against the muted pallor of my face. I’m a bit mortified by this discovery. I think of Sam and the waxing strips I hide behind a bottle of lotion in our medicine cabinet. Such petty dishonesties that have always existed between us, where our bodies are concerned. How piteous it is that they linger still, even through the worst of circumstances. I snap the mirror closed, handing it back to Penny. It’s too close, too fragmented an image to satisfy me.
“So here’s a question,” Penny says, dropping the mirror into her purse and sitting back. “I know they supposedly have the genetic side of this all figured out. But what happens if you take up smoking? All bets are off?”
I shrug. “I guess. They can’t do much about environmental risk factors.”
“Actually, you can’t take up smoking,” Sam says, glancing up from his reading. He’s been listening after all. “It was in the paperwork you signed before the transfer. You’re not allowed to do anything unnecessarily dangerous to your SUB.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Penny asks, before I have the chance.
“Smoking, skydiving, driving drunk, things like that,” Sam replies. “That’s an expensive bit of medical research you’ve got there.”
“And what are they going to do, take her body back?” Penny’s crisp diction holds the slightest hint of her father’s thick Parisian accent.
Connor interrupts Sam’s answer by appearing in the doorway, flush-faced and jubilant in his thick glasses, a tray of coffees in his hand. The three of us cheer as he distributes the spoils, kissing me on the forehead as he passes, his patchy attempt at facial hair prickling against my skin.
“You look gorgeous, Han,” he says, handing me a steaming cup. “Are you allowed a little jolt?”
“Who cares?” I reply, popping open the cup’s lid and blowing a ripple of steam across its contents. I inhale the scent of dark-roasted beans. That smell used to immediately conjure the frosted mornings Penny and I spent in the coffee shop across from our first apartment, eating sticky Danishes and sharing the discarded sections of other people’s newspapers, flirting with the baristas. But the memory doesn’t come easily now. Something is missing, some connection that I can’t place. I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s so shocking, so appallingly bitter, that I spit the hot mouthful back into the cup.
“Jesus, where did you get this shit, Connor?” I ask, meeting three pairs of startled eyes.
“The coffee stand downstairs. Did you want cream and sugar?” Connor asks.
“No, of course I didn’t . . .” There was an ancient coffee maker in the School of the Art Institute’s Fine Art building. It produced sludge so thick you could almost stand a paintbrush on end in a cup of it, and I was infamous for drinking it with religious devotion. Now I glance at Sam. “Yours is okay?”
He nods, the crease between his eyebrows deepening.
“I can get you something else,” Connor offers, but it doesn’t do much to diffuse the sudden wary tension in the room.
“That’s all right,” I say, unable to brave anything else from the coffee cart at the moment. But I do need something, something to get the burnt, tarry taste out of my mouth. “Maybe just some water.”
Sam goes to get it for me, and no one says anything while he’s gone.
This reading group guide for And Again includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Jessica Chiarella. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
.
Introduction
Four terminally ill patients receive the chance to enroll in the SUBlife program, a scientific advancement that gifts them with brand new bodies free from their old illnesses and the ravages of time. They’re exact replicas of their former selves . . . or so it seems.
The four patients are Hannah, an artist who cannot seem to recapture her prior inspiration; David, a politician whose meddling with FDA approval for the SUBlife program is a secret he’s hoping to keep; Linda, who spent eight years in a “conscious coma” and is trying to reconnect with the family from whom she became estranged; and Connie, a soap-opera actress trying to revamp her career. And Again raises the question: is getting a second chance at life as miraculous as it seems?
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. When David wakes up with his new body, he vows to be a different man who won’t drink, won’t smoke, won’t indulge in extramarital affairs. How much of our habits are tied into our psyche and our genetics? Do you think old habits die hard? Or can we really re-train ourselves?
2. Speak to the ways in which each of the four characters sees their body as a tool, an object separate from them, something not their own, after the SUBlife program. Hannah cannot summon her old passion for painting. Linda feels helpless after her husband signed consent papers while she was in her coma. Have you ever felt separated from your physical body in this way? How much of your personhood do you think lies within your physical body?
3. Despite their external differences, what bonds do you see between Hannah and David that might lead them to be attracted to each other? If they had never met inside the SUBlife program, do you think they would begin an affair in real life? Have you ever been drawn to someone who seemed completely wrong for you? Why?
4. Connie’s life with Dr. Grath, a blind man with a love for old black-and-white movies, contrasts sharply with her life in Hollywood meeting sleazy agents and managers. Why does Connie find sanctuary with Dr. Grath? How much does his blindness factor into her sense of comfort around him?
5. Hannah is drawn to personalities like Penny and Connie, women who are unafraid to speak their minds. Think about Hannah’s voicelessness compared to Linda’s literal voicelessness. How would Hannah’s life be different if she spoke her mind more?
6. Though our society does not currently have something resembling a SUBlife program, author Jessica Chiarella’s alternative present does not seem far off. What similarities and topical themes did you notice throughout the book, from stem cell controversy to Linda’s lack of choice in having her child? How probable does SUBlife seem to you in our current society?
7. Linda feels a close bond to Connie due to years of watching her on Stratford Pines; this bond sometimes verges even on the sexual. What do you think spurs this false kinship, and why is it especially keen for Linda?
8. When Hannah learns the truth of why Sam was not at the hospital when she was at her illest—not that he had an affair with Lucy, but that he fled the state—she throws him out in a rage. In what ways is this worse than an affair for Hannah? Which would be a worse betrayal, in your opinion, and why?
9. Is there a part of your anatomy worn by time that you’d like to reverse? If you had a SUBlife body, what parts of your old body would you miss?
10. After having blinking yes or no as her only form of communication for nearly a decade, Linda finds it difficult to relearn how to communicate the breadth of her feelings with her partner Tom, and with the therapy group at the hospital. Imagine yourself in her situation—how do you think it would cause you to rethink how you communicate and what you choose to share? In what ways would you feel frustrated, and how might it be a relief?
11. Hannah makes the decision to re-ink her new body with a tattoo of a phoenix designed by Penny. If you had to choose a defining tattoo for yourself in this moment of your life, what would it be?
12. When the four SUBlife participants encounter one another in real life, outside the realm of their weekly therapy sessions, they share with one another an intimate secret, a special bond. If these four had not gone through the SUBlife program, do you think they would still share a bond? Do you detect a similar thread of experience that still binds them together?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Re-tell a chapter of this story from the point of view of the main characters’ partners: Sam for Hannah, Beth for David, Tom or Katie for Hannah, and Dr. Grath for Connie. Share your chapter with the group and see how the narrative changes.
2. Create a piece of art that you feel conveys your physical body as it is today, affected and informed by a lifetime of experience. Then have a friend in your group do the same, objectively drawing your body as a physical entity. How is it different? What surprises you?
3. Research articles in the news today about stem cell research and the advancement of cloning underway. Then look back on archived stories about Dolly the Sheep dating back to the mid-nineties. How have our society’s views on cloning and even stem-cell research changed? How do you think they will continue to change?
A Conversation with Jessica Chiarella
How did your training at DePaul University prepare you for writing your first novel?
Being a student in DePaul’s writing and publishing program really made all the difference for me in writing this novel. I wrote the first draft in a two-part novel-writing class run by Rebecca Johns Trissler, who has become a wonderful mentor to me throughout this process. The class was essentially a novel-writing boot camp, where each of us wrote sixty thousand words in ten weeks, took a week off for spring break, and then came back and revised those drafts over another ten weeks. There were about fifteen students in the class, and we were absolutely exhausted by the end, but I walked away with the raw material that eventually became And Again. It turned out to be an extremely rewarding way to write a first novel, because I was sharing the experience with such a talented group of students, and we all sort of leaned on one another for advice and moral support during the process. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the novel included a support group that met every week, because that’s exactly what class felt like by the end!
Why did you choose these four characters to explore and investigate in their SUBlife journey? Were there others you discarded in your drafting process?
There were absolutely other characters that I had to lose as I revised the novel. The first draft was written from only Hannah’s point of view, and as soon as I finished I realized that I was spending most of my time thinking about the other characters in the support group, wondering what their lives and futures would look like. There were originally six or seven members of the support group, so when I finally decided to write from the other points of view, I knew I had to create composites of some of the characters to keep the novel from becoming too crowded with perspectives. I still think about the characters I cut though, because there are so many different ways I wanted to tackle SUBlife’s effects, such as through issues of gender identity, disordered eating, and mental illness.
Which character do you find yourself relating to or empathizing with the most?
Each of the characters has traits or attitudes that are drawn from my life, and each has some that are diametrically opposite to me as well, so that answer has shifted a lot depending on where I was in the writing and revision of the book. But in the end, Hannah is very close to my heart. I think her duality is something with which I strongly identify—her perfectionism contrasted with her rebellion against societal standards, the ways in which she grapples with her own privilege and yet still gives in to her selfish impulses—those are the things that made her come to life for me. She makes some very poor choices out of a very human desperation for connection. Sometimes she held up a very challenging mirror for me. But I knew that the more uncomfortable she made me as I was writing her, the better a character she would be.
How do you envision these characters’ lives ten years after getting their new bodies? Do you think the SUBlife program could happen in real life?
I think they would certainly be more at home in their new selves. The initial shock of it would probably have worn off, though I think they would still be contending with the aftermath of some of the choices they made in that first year. They’ll probably all have some serious regrets regarding how they reacted to the transfer initially. But I think, ten years out, they’ll have stopped thinking of themselves as patients, stopped thinking like people who have dodged a bullet, so their problems will be more practical and less existential than they were in that first year. I’ve always been amazed at how adaptable people are in the face of profound change, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they spend whole weeks without thinking about the transfer at all, after a decade.
I’m not sure that something like SUBlife could happen in real life, but I think the idea behind it—that the miracle cure will not be a pill, will not be something we’re anticipating, but something much more holistic—is possible. I spent a lot of time thinking about human flight while I was writing the book, that it was less than a century between the Wright Brothers and landing on the moon. I think the next big medical advance will happen that way; there will be very little time between the first breakthrough and its logical conclusion.
What inspired you to write this story? How do you think you would cope if you were a member of the SUBlife pilot program?
The book started out as a love story, as an examination of how a relationship would be altered if a person went through a transformative physical experience. But very quickly I realized that something like SUBlife would have such an impact on the patient herself that everything in her life would be transformed, not just her relationship.
I’m not sure I would fare any better than the characters in the book if I had to go through SUBlife; I’m not great with change as it is, so the idea of such a profound physical alteration would be incredibly difficult. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about losing my tattoos, and it’s always an upsetting idea. Then again, the idea of a fresh start is very appealing. I would probably spend a few months falling apart, and then thank my lucky stars I’m still alive and march myself straight to a yoga class.
New year, new list of must-read books—so if you’re still trying to finish off last year’s list, get cracking, because time waits for no reader. 2016 promises to be a great year for clever novels with great premises, the sort of “elevator pitches” that convince you to read them after just a brief description. That means […]
