"Clean Bodies" by Jenny Rowe
Photo Credit: Nate Dumlao, licensed under Public Domain and obtained through Unsplash
Clean Bodies
Days before the coronavirus reaches the U.S., I’m in Bangkok with a broken pelvis. The fracture is in my right pubic ramus, a small piece of bone near my hip socket that sounds too intimate to share with strangers. It’s a common fracture for the elderly, but mine happens when I am thirty-three and running across a dark highway with two friends. They make it across but I’m not fast enough, and the motorcyclist who hits me can’t stop in time. The collision knocks off my glasses (somehow undamaged) and one of my shoes. When I stand back up and try to walk, I feel the bone snap like the pull tab on a soda can. My friends wrap their arms around me and help me onto a nearby bench as I shake with pain. They talk to the motorcyclist, a softspoken middle-aged Thai man who has shattered a clavicle from the impact, and to a police officer, who seems unconcerned since everyone is still alive. Because it is rush hour in Bangkok and an ambulance would take much longer, my friends and I get into the motorcyclist’s car, driven by his wife, and together we all go to the nearest hospital. It’s the third day of the Chinese New Year holiday; my friends and I are American teachers at international schools in Beijing and Shanghai.
It’s a clean fracture, my Thai doctor says later with a shrug. No surgery needed, just two weeks of bed rest. His English is clear, but he uses my language sparingly, preferring to communicate with a winning smile. I think on his diagnosis long after he leaves my small sterile room, how a broken thing can somehow be clean.
In two months, my body will grow new deposits of collagen and calcium over a crack big enough to see blank space through on the x-rays, and I will walk and move normally again. I understand the biology, but still this ability fills me with wonder. How can our bodies be so skilled at healing physical wounds but often so taxed by our minds?
***
Four years before the coronavirus and my collision, my ex-husband, who was still my husband then, complained of a rash and said it felt like something was biting him. He scratched at his arms incessantly, his thin body somehow looking thinner. I switched to unscented laundry detergent. Still, he itched. There’s something in the house, he said. We had the occasional spider and house centipede, but otherwise I hadn’t noticed anything offensive.
He paid for a bug guy to spray. I didn’t think much of it, deciding this was an acceptable action to take. We were living in a two-bedroom duplex on the eastside of Iowa City. He was working on a doctorate in biomedical engineering, and I was teaching as an ESL lecturer. We had been living there for four years with no issues. He’d struggled with depression and drug addiction when we lived in Ohio, but I thought we were past those problems by then.
Two days later, he was still convinced the problem hadn’t been removed. He took advantage of the satisfaction-guaranteed policy of the company and summoned the bug guy back for another spray. When I came home from work the next afternoon, he was peeved, saying the man in the plastic foot booties had looked at him as if he were crazy.
Oh hon, I said, and kissed him on the cheek.
Yeah, he said, smiling a little with me. I know. Not crazy.
He threw out all his clothes not long after the bug guy rang twice and kept saying, Something got in them, I’m sure of it. We went to Target, and he bought a bunch of sensible new pants and sweaters. His clothes were old anyway, I reasoned with myself. As good a time as any to get new stuff.
For a few weeks, that worked. He strode into his research lab and soaked in the compliments on his dapper new look. He was smiling again. Leaves fell from the trees, and I thought all was well.
When frost started appearing in the mornings, his paranoia returned, making him certain that everything he owned was infested again. He was confident bleach would do the trick. All his new clothes went into one load, and he filled the washer drum with a whole bottle. The sweaters and pants came out looking like spectral versions of themselves. I told myself they weren’t that bad. It was getting colder; he could hide them under his wool coat. But then the coat was washed in the same manner a few days later. It came out crunchy and unwearable. Something else started appearing in the washing machine too: thin cut pieces of plastic straws, about an inch each. I knew what this meant—he was using again. I didn’t see the familiar bags of white powder he ordered from nefarious labs on the Internet, but I knew they were back in the house after years of sobriety. I worried but kept silent, not wanting to upset him. His doctoral research wasn’t going as planned, he kept telling me. He had enough on his mind.
***
I learn I can fly out of Thailand if I fly first class. My doctor insists it would be too dangerous to fly that long in economy since I’m not very mobile yet, citing the risk of blood clots. You need to be able to lie down flat, he says. My parents offer to help pay. They see the number of infected expanding on the national news every night and want me home, whatever the cost.
I understand the biology, but still this ability fills me with wonder. How can our bodies be so skilled at healing physical wounds but often so taxed by our minds?
On the night I leave, a nurse hands me a small stack of paper masks. You should wear one now. It will be crowded at the airport. What she means: The coronavirus is here. It might not be safe.
When we arrive at the bustling airport via a short ambulance ride, my nurse locates an airport wheelchair and takes me to the first-class kiosk. She stays long enough to ensure I get my boarding pass, and then she tucks my backpack on the hand bars behind me and sets a durable shopping bag bearing the hospital’s name on my lap. These two items contain the only things I will take out of Asia. Good luck, she says, handing me my new crutches last, and I watch her walk back to the ambulance idling outside as an attendant materializes to wheel me through my security check. I’m reminded how dependent I am on strangers.
When I reach my layover in Dubai, the sun is just beginning to rise. I’m greeted by a young man with a slim airport wheelchair as soon as I step off the plane. He flashes a brilliant smile and reminds me of the young Saudi men I taught in my first ESL university course. Welcome to Dubai, Miss.
It looks beautiful, I say, glancing at the glittering skyline visible from the airport windows, rising out of the desert like a mirage.
Excuse me Miss, but can I ask how you got hurt?
Oh, it was an accident. I’m not really in the mood to explain.
Well, I will pray for you. His voice sounds so sincere that I bite my lip to keep from crying. A few years ago, I might have snickered at such a gesture, but acquired loss has made me sentimental.
Thank you, I say, and I truly mean it.
Your health is most important, he says, gravely from behind the wheelchair. All these people—he sweeps his arm over the magnificent desert metropolis in the distance—They’re so busy making money, they don’t realize the most important thing. Without health, you have nothing. I try to crane my neck back to see his face. Did he know about the new virus already?
We reach my next gate, for the plane that will take me all the way to Chicago, and I stifle a laugh when I see my fellow passengers. Nearly everyone else waiting for first-class to be announced is also in a wheelchair and white. The only major difference between us is age: I’m at least thirty years younger. I think about their delicate bodies, and I wonder if they hope naively, like me, that we’re somehow getting away from the virus. We aren’t, of course. It follows us on our flight back to America, unyielding as the arc of the sun.
***
I don’t remember how long it took him to pour Borax on the carpet of our second bedroom, the one he used as his home office—maybe a few weeks or a few months. He ushered me toward him when I got home from another day of teaching. He was excited. I finally found something that works! Before I saw the mess, I had a glimmer of hope. I wanted so badly to believe that his sufferings were external, even as my doubt grew louder.
He opened the door to his office, and my hand instinctually went to my mouth. Two-thirds of the floor was covered in glittering white powder. It smelled like an industrial laundromat. In the places that weren’t coated in detergent, the carpet was obscured by half-empty Gatorade bottles and discarded protein bar wrappers. He hadn’t let me into this room in days.
I think about their delicate bodies, and I wonder if they hope naively, like me, that we’re somehow getting away from the virus. We aren’t, of course. It follows us on our flight back to America, unyielding as the arc of the sun.
It’s killing the bugs, see? He waited for my approval. I stared at the floor and stared at my husband. I spoke slowly: I think maybe it’s time to acknowledge that the problem might not be here (pointing down to the carpet), but—
His hands came out so fast that it took me a moment to realize what happened. I’d done something I later learned was probably a trigger in his fragile mental state: I reached up to touch his forehead, intending it to be both a loving gesture and a silent accusation: The problem’s in here. He responded by grabbing my throat. My hand froze in midair, never reaching its target. We stood there for an indiscernible amount of time, a tableau of domestic violence. I remember seeing dust particles float between our faces in a beam of sunlight. I could still breathe, but I didn’t move. Neither did he. I was no longer with my husband, but a wild animal.
Something stirred inside. If I could still breathe, I could still speak. Please let me go, I said. I’d never heard my own voice sound so low before. Let me go, I said again, looking at him but speaking to whatever had hijacked his mind. By some miracle, it/he obeyed. His hands fell limp. I stood there free and in shock. He turned away from me, cradling himself in his arms, shaking. Go before I do it again, he said in a small voice. I still stood there, unsure of how to move, trying to calculate how not to provoke him further. He screamed: Just fucking go! That broke the freeze. I ran out of the room and grabbed my car keys on my way out the door.
***
Before I leave, my days in the Bangkok hospital follow a certain routine, but the best part is early in the morning, just as the sun rises to meet my square window. None of the nurses have entered my room yet, and I am pleasantly still, my body partially numb from sleep. I am not reminded of the broken bone near my hip until I move again.
For the first few days of my hospitalization, I am weak, and my fracture is too unstable for me to go to the bathroom on my own. The nurses and I quickly discover that I can’t even lift myself high enough for a bed pan without excruciating pain, so they go for the next best thing: large flat pads, like the ones people use to house-train puppies. I learn how ordinary something humiliating becomes when it’s your only option.
I try to time my first piss of the day so that it works with the nurse’s schedules, and I can avoid pushing the little orange button next to my right ear and hear them, one less time, ask Pee-pee? I usually go after the first nurse, young and always smiling, stops by to check my blood pressure and heart rate. The second nurse, who is older and stouter, arrives a few minutes later for my daily ablutions.
Clean body, she says to me each time, as a greeting. For some reason, she grins and says, Oh! when she discovers my wet pad, as if I have offered a present. She pulls the pad out under me with deft gloved fingers and tosses it into the small white bin in the corner, bedazzled with the universal BIOHAZARD sticker, but not before she fills a small bowl with icy water from the sink and pours it between my legs. It feels like a daily baptism, this ritual that starts with my own warm urine seeping beneath me, followed by shockingly cold water to wash it away.
After, she goes about the task of removing my hospital gown and applies two or three wet wipes (which are also cold) to my naked body. I wince when she reaches my leg, which over the length of my hospitalization turns from purple to green to a shocking electric yellow. Sorry, sorry, she always mutters, seeing my brief expression of pain. It’s ok, I always say back, unable to tamper my Midwest manners, even so far from home. The finishing touch is a pleasant dusting of baby powder, which she rubs gently onto my belly, arms, and neck. I am outfitted in a fresh cotton gown, the back strings left untied to allow for an easier bed-pissing experience. Clean body, she repeats at the end of this task, standing back and nodding slightly in approval of her work. I offer her a smile, grateful for the care that keeps me from festering in my own waste.
This hospitalization in a foreign country humbles me. For the first time in my adult life, I’m completely helpless. Within twenty-four hours of being admitted, I struggle with feelings of shame and disgust at how useless my body has become. It takes some time of doing nothing and thinking from the confines of my plastic-lined bed to recall where this loathing of disability might have originated.
***
I am eight years old. Dad tells my sister and I that we need to help Grandma Rowe move out of her studio apartment downtown because she’s going to a full-fledged nursing home. She can’t take care of herself anymore, he explains. We bear witness to this when we enter her apartment, which is overwhelmed with piles of dirty dishes in the small kitchen and stacks upon stacks of cheap paperback novels, most of them Harlequin romances that she’s only partially read. My sister and I are puzzled; she has a bathroom with a toilet, but there is stale urine in a portable commode next to her bed. Our father shakes his head in frustration. Jenny-bear, why don’t you take Grandma down to the café and get a snack. My little sister stays in the apartment and flips chaotically through the books while he empties the commode into the real toilet. I understand he doesn’t trust my paternal grandmother with a six-year-old, but as the big sister, I can handle her. I walk slowly down the hall to the elevator with her while she shuffles with a walker. She is breathing hard, the weight of her body pressing down on the metal bars. When we reach the elevator, her arms start shaking from exhaustion. Oh Lord, help me, she mutters when we’re about halfway down to the ground floor. In that moment, I look up at her with disgust and think, I will never be like you.
Within twenty-four hours of being admitted, I struggle with feelings of shame and disgust at how useless my body has become. It takes some time of doing nothing and thinking from the confines of my plastic-lined bed to recall where this loathing of disability might have originated.
For years, I could see only what my father told me to see: a weak woman, someone who let herself go. I often compared her to my maternal grandmother, Marilyn, who had a pie cooling on the kitchen table when we visited and rarely allowed herself time to rest. I thought her body was the body I’d inherit as a woman: petite and birdlike, nearly always in motion. As an adult, I enjoy the satisfaction I get from cooking and cleaning my own space, as she did, but I also find myself spending long stretches of time immobile, usually while reading, writing, or working in front of a computer screen. My body now looks more like Dorothy, my dad’s mom: thicker around the middle, my feet clumsy and prone to shuffling in the morning, as hers did. I sometimes see her flash at me when I look at myself in the mirror, like a stereogram. The problem’s in here.
I know so little about Dorothy, but what I’ve learned from my father is troubling: Her father, Cordt, immigrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century from the Black Forest region of Germany, where many of the Grimm brothers borrowed stories originated. She told my father that Cordt had been a harsh man, something that isn’t hard for me to imagine when I see an old family photo of him watching his daughters—Dorothy being the youngest—having a picnic somewhere near Queens, New York. The three young girls are on a blanket in pale dresses, smiling at who I assume to be their mother taking the picture, and Cordt sits apart from them on the grassy hill, scowling in the sun. My father doesn’t know how or to what extent his mother was abused, but asking about her brings up his own painful memories of how she neglected him as a child, often refusing to soothe him when he cried or punishing him by serving no dinner. She died when I was fourteen. It stuns me to realize now, well into adulthood, how long my ancestry has been carrying its trauma, how it continues to reside in me.
We all carry parts of the minds and bodies of those who made us, however imperfect they may be. I’m trying to forgive the ones I’ve got.
***
When I got close enough, I realized the blaring alarm was coming from the psych ward. I pushed the red call button next to the giant reinforced double doors hesitantly, thinking that perhaps there was an emergency evacuation. Instead, a nurse in blue scrubs opened the door as if nothing was wrong. Sorry about the racket. Our emergency system went haywire this morning and we’re waiting on maintenance to shut it off. He led me to the front desk, where I signed a form declaring that I was here to see my husband.
Where is he? I yelled over the siren.
I think he’s in his room right now. I’m sorry, but I can’t disclose details of his condition or treatment. He didn’t sign off for you. I already knew this from the phone call I had an hour earlier and was strangely grateful for the enforced ignorance. I nodded, and the alarm stopped.
That’s better, the nurse said. Please go ahead—the rooms are to the left.
I took in my surroundings. Beyond the check-in desk was a small living room with plastic-lined couches and chairs. A single square window added some weak sunlight to the space. It could not be opened for a fresh breeze; we were several stories up. A communal tv was playing the movie Frozen, which I suspected was on a loop. Elsa was singing “Let It Go,” and somehow this seemed cruel here. A few patients sat around, not so much watching as just using the film as distraction. One young woman kept saying in a strained voice, to no one in particular, I wanna go home.
Slowly, I walked down the narrow hallway and read the names on each door.
Jenny, is that you? I followed the familiar voice. I discovered a small dining room where he sat. He looked calmer than I’d seen him in weeks, and I wondered what kind of meds they had him on.
How are you?
He shrugged and offered a small smile. I’ve been better.
This is what I knew: After making a vague but serious-sounding threat to his lab supervisor, he was questioned by the university police and then involuntarily admitted to the university hospital, which determined this ward was the safest space for him. There were many unanswered questions, but after witnessing his behavior at home, I wasn’t surprised to see him here.
We all carry parts of the minds and bodies of those who made us, however imperfect they may be. I’m trying to forgive the ones I’ve got.
I don’t belong here, Jen. I stared down at my hands, not sure how to respond.
Can I show you something? He pulled a paper from a folder beside him. It was a childlike drawing of three people, a man flanked by two women, their backs turned. They were walking down a path toward a rising sun on the horizon, together.
I drew this during an art therapy class they made me sit through yesterday. The instructor asked us to draw what we want to happen in the next few months. I understood. It was a drawing of his girlfriend and I, walking hand-in-hand with him. I’d consented to an open marriage over a year ago, a situation I did not want but agreed to because I thought if I didn’t, he’d start using again. His depression seemed to be returning, and though he was not yet talking about suicide like he had when we were undergrads, I feared that dialogue would return unless I acquiesced. I was living under the blinding veil of the abused: Give him what he wants, and everything will be okay.
I knew about this other woman and had shared a few meals with her, trying to convince myself that I was okay with our arrangement. It became easier to accept as my husband’s mental health worsened; if he became too irritated at home, he’d go to her place, granting me a night of peace. I reasoned, unfairly, that she could handle him better than I could. She fought back on his accusations of a bug-infested house (he saw his hallucinations wherever he went at this point), whereas I tried to placate him as much as possible. The more unstable he became, the more I saw her as a buffer I could use to buy me time to find a way out. It was cruel, but it was survival logic.
This is what I want, he said, his eyes tearing up. I want to try to be a better man to both of you. I want to build a future with you.
I returned the drawing to him and gave a small nod to show I understood his wish, but I already knew I wasn’t going to be part of his fantasy. Even if he never tried to hurt me again, I wouldn’t go any further. I’d just moved to a new apartment by myself. My husband understood I wanted space, but he didn’t quite know how much. He said he was happy to live with his girlfriend for the time being, but I suspected it was no accident he was now unraveling, even in his beloved lab on campus.
He was released from the psych ward with a mandated treatment plan a week later, which I later learned he disregarded completely. I took advantage of the stabilizing meds that were still in his system after he got out and told him I wanted a divorce, which he didn’t protest but didn’t seem to accept as an official end to us, either. Perhaps he didn’t think I’d actually go through with it.
The last time I saw him, we met briefly in town to separate our cell phone plan into two different lines—the last tangible manifestation of our relationship. He was eerily calm, even a little jovial, during the process. I bought him a coffee after, not really wanting to prolong our time together, but also seeking some form of closure, or at least a sign that he might be stable. When we walked out to the parking lot to our separate cars, he pulled me into a hug, which I didn’t want, but I didn’t want to provoke him, either. He whispered: You’re the love of my life, Jen.
A few days after that, he nearly beat his girlfriend to death. The report filed indicated bruises around her neck—an attempted choking. The university police called and strongly suggested I get my own protection order; she already had her own. I walked to the Iowa City courthouse during a lunch break in a numb haze and was given a form to fill out. In blue pen, I finally wrote what I hadn’t even had the courage to write in my own journal: He grabbed my throat. That granted me a one-year protection order—enough time to complete the divorce with an attorney. A job offer to teach in Beijing came on the same day my divorce was finalized. It seemed I was finally getting out of the nightmare I’d agreed to stay in for years.
***
There is no pain when the motorcycle slams into my body; it’s too quick for that. I can only remember a tremendous impact, a force that lifts me off the ground before returning me to the pavement. It’s dark, and I am disoriented. My friends are screaming my name, running back to the road toward me. I learn later that another motorcyclist sees the accident in time and stops in front of me, positions his bike as a shield for the lane I land in, and protects me from being hit twice before I manage to stand up. I never speak to him or see his face.
It’s the imagined second hit that doesn’t happen that I sometimes think of now. How close I was to being obliterated.
Later, I will try to rebuild the events of the evening in my mind from my hospital bed, but I cannot make sense of my decision to run in that moment. The cars and motorcycles are fast on the four-lane highway; I could clearly see this. Even more puzzling is that my friends and I were a quarter of a mile from a pedestrian bridge that we used an hour prior to get to a park. Why didn’t we walk back to it on our way to dinner? Why didn’t I suggest that and instead blindly followed them when they started to run?
***
Six months before the coronavirus emerges in China, the man who is now my ex-husband drives his car into oncoming traffic on I-80, a few miles outside of Iowa City. It’s dark. He turns his headlights off and accelerates toward the first car he can find. He wants to be obliterated. The sixty-five-year-old man driving his family back from vacation tries to dodge the dark car coming at him, but he’s not fast enough. They collide. The man dies instantly, and his family members suffer injuries. They survive. So does my ex, who confesses a suicide attempt and is immediately incarcerated.
This is what I learn when a colleague reads the news bulletin from her phone. We teach high school English at an international school in Beijing, and she lets me hide in her empty classroom when I get a text from one of my ex’s former lab mates that has a link to the report and a single sentence: I’m so sorry, but I think you should see this.
It’s the imagined second hit that doesn’t happen that I sometimes think of now. How close I was to being obliterated.
For the first hour after I receive the news, I am broken. My colleague, who is the same age as my mother, rubs my shoulders while they shake with heaving sobs. My face is flat on a desk, and the words how could you replay on an ongoing loop in my head.
At some point, I feel my mind disconnect from my body. It floats up to the ceiling and looks down at the wretched crying thing and says, You’ll be okay. It keeps saying this until I hear it, and then mind and body reconnect.
***
I don’t know what to make with any of this. Every few weeks or months, I take the pieces of this narrative and try to fuse them together into something whole, but they resist being melded so easily. I think they’re trying to teach me something about bodies, how they can break in so many ways but somehow remain, either within themselves or passed on in subtle puzzle shapes to their kin.
In my body I carry the grit of my great-grandfather, the wary survival logic of my father, and the quirks of my grandmothers, Dorothy and Marilyn—both the good and the challenging. It’s hard to say what contributed most to my brief flirtation with destruction: the ambitious, always-moving pieces that thought I could outrun something much faster, or the slower, stubborn parts that sometimes employ self-sabotage. I could be talking about what happened on a highway in Bangkok or what happened in a duplex in Iowa City, couldn’t I? But somehow, I remain. That’s something to appreciate. The trick now is to get my mind and body to feel whole together, to be able to look in the mirror and say: No problem here.
Jenny Rowe is a writer and teacher of ELLs (English Language Learners). She’s working on her MFA for creative nonfiction at the University of Montana and plans to graduate in the spring of 2024. Her essays focus on connections, divorce, survival, and memories of being an expat in Beijing before the pandemic. She lives in Iowa City when she’s not writing in Missoula.