The Host

Fiction, Ananya Surana

I open my eyes to a strange buzz in my ear. The back of my head has been rented out to a throb. Outside, the sun has already begun an ascent towards its peak, ejaculating its ugly light all over half the surface of an Earth turning in her sleep. Everything in my tiny apartment drips with molten gold. Gaudy. Amid a stubborn winter noon, the inanimates around my pliant body come alive, like little toy guerrilla soldiers from an insipid old Disney movie. A singular ray glints off the mirror in a corner and lands in a puddle at my feet. The riverine blue of my downy old comforter wrinkles into an uptight cerulean under its smouldering gaze. My waist curves upward, and I stretch my fingers to dust the light off. I wish my eyes had never opened.

In tandem with my attempted movements, the buzz grows older, louder in its demand for attention. The matured throb turns sentient, drilling into the folds of skin at my temples, chipping away at the bone beneath, heading straight for the soft tissue inside. I imagine a wreath of thorns wrapped around the length of my head, each woody spine pricking open a fresh graft of blood, like the crown prince of Easter, the master of the Doomsdays, the harbinger of Birth, anno domini. 

At some point in my life, presumably in one of its earlier phases, I had come to believe that the standard dating system of A.D. stood for an abbreviation of the phrase after death. I carried this belief with me well into high school. The upshot had burrowed itself into my brain, and my reasons were compelling. It was hardly an unfair assumption to nurse, after all. If B.C. could stand for before Christ, then why complicate its counterpart with such strange borrowings from Latin? If A.D. and B.C. were meant to be paired, then why must they grow up speaking such different tongues? Why must I learn to date even the origins of Buddhism in the year of their lord? And so on, and so forth. 

There is a certain petulance to adolescent beliefs that dig into the furrows and undulations of a developing brain. You could scrub away the blood and sperm off your pristine white linen sheets, even bleach them for good measure. But hold up a U.V. lamp to it, and there it will all be, the debauchery of your past squirming under your naked eye. Deceptive little invisible rays that are both particles and waves, nosy as the divorced old white lady next door. Airing out my dirty laundry for the world to see. Why would you call yourself Violet, anyway?

***

The hangover nestled itself deeper into the hollows of my body. I feel the ache make its way down to my guts and my womb, now throbbing under the microscopic rays of a risen sun. Light and Time combine to become my arch-nemesis. I heave my body over and about, burying my face into a pillow. A last-ditch effort to escape an inevitable noon. Big mistake. The whirring, throbbing, confused pain slams its weight against the insides of my chest. Every tentacle of hair on my body seems to rise on its own accord, like mendicants in a barren desert, palms faced skyward, eyes glazed over in unfathomable peace. Serpentine and supple, the ache winds a tight arm around my torso and squeezes until every last sip of memory makes its way back into my mouth. 

It all tastes like bile. Flashes of the last ninety-six hours gush forward, dams broken. Tiny streams from distant plains, unknown to one another. Then, caught up in a mad, concurrent dash toward the sea, they meld into a single, forceful stream of nonsense. I am a rickety, ramshackled bamboo raft, barely afloat the surging currents. Water pools at my ankles, joining the puddles, singed there by my assailant, the Sun. Riverine memories snake their way through the throb. My eyes bloat with liquid. If a wave pulls me under, I will sink, I will sink. The water turns brackish a long time before its predestined coastline meets my eye. The sea reaches me a little too prematurely. 

My throb is sharper, more dogged in its spiral descent. Like something (or someone) drills a screw through my sediments, as if in quest for some core treasure buried underneath. Joke’s on them. The layers of reinforcement are piecemeal. I am not Mother Earth. There is nothing but softening soil here, turned barren by the salt of the sea. This downward drilling will be eternal. Somehow, I don’t seem to mind so much. I am, of course, a nostalgique de la boue. 

***

Five days ago, I had my first drink in three months. It started with two unassuming flutes of champagne. At a friend’s dinner party. She wanted to celebrate her new gallery opening, the first this year. She nursed a tendency to call each work her baby. In my defence, I no longer nursed a reason to say no. 

We ended up at a dive bar afterward. There was neon everywhere. A strange stench of decay in the air. The wooden floorboards were damp beneath my naked feet. Some gentle soul slipped me a pill. I washed it down with some Bloody Mary, too heavy on the Tabasco. I did not know where I had abandoned my shoes. They were orange and strappy. The only pair of totteringly high heels I owned. Briefly, I recollected mourning the loss. I nursed the pain down with eight tequila shots. 

A five-day bender would have been second nature to thirteen-year-old moi. At twenty-one, my body is not so compliant. Light and Time teach you the meaning of denouement, no matter how French and foreign it sounds in your mouth. Three months of steady progress only to slither back to the fecund beginnings of a zero. Like a bad game of Snakes and Ladders, with even the highs poised to bite. Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. Numbers join ranks with Time and Light.  

***

Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. It is strange how Math will conjure symmetries where there aren’t any. Though perhaps not as strange for the word symmetry and cemetery to taste the same on my mutilated, exotic tongue. Funny how language will bounce and reflect in such jagged ways, never mind the demands and laws of a mechanical science. 

Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. Fun fact: the Fibbonaci sequence is of such ubiquitous fascination to mathematicians because it seems to appear at random in nature. It snakes down the bristly middle of sunflower florets, the sequence of scales arranged around the fleshy interiors of an artichoke, the thrusting tailes of a pineapple’s head. 

Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. These numbers are first described in an ancient Indian manuscript dated 200, before Christ. They are named, of course, after an Italian mathematician in 1202, anno domini. Each element in this chain of numbers is the sum of the two elements that precede it. A strange, winding, twisting ratio that governs the ungovernable laws of a wild, wild, natural world. Visually, it represents a spiral. 

Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight. 

My lips twist into a smile. Pain coils in my gut. I wince. I count to thirty-four before I raise my throb-shaped head off its dampened pillow. I shift slightly on the mattress and feel the sheets soaked in my own residue, now gone cold. There is a draft in this room. The floorboards under my naked feet are moist again. A scent of mildew slithers into my nostrils. I have brought the bar-rot to live here with me, I think. The throb worsens. Another wave of bile. I make a mad dash toward the sink. 

***

The leather under my thighs is frigid. A trickle snakes its way from the back of my knee to join the estuary near my ankles. The edges of my orange socks are slick with squamous patterns of sweat. The craftsmanship of a Sun past its peak, before I walked into the conditioned air of my mechanical, new car. My body no longer knows whether it is too hot or too cold, so it succumbs to an impartial shiver instead. Inside me, my throb has snaked its way further into my intestines. Snake within a snake. Langourous, the viper sunbathes in the bile. 

The last time I drove myself to my doctor was a month ago. I had sat there in a pink plastic stackable chair. A pile of magazines collected dust on a coffee table wedged into the too-small space between the row of chairs and the stuccoed wall. Its bulky frame looked out of place in the dingy little room. Once, the coffee table had probably decorated the plush living rooms of a carefully maintained household. Then, its wood had worn away, and rats had nibbled at its intricate little footholds. A forced retirement had meant a relocation to a derelict hospital lobby. I had been alone in the lobby, with more than a handful of time to wile away. A spritely young woman had sat at the reception, her nails painted a cherry red, unbearably loud on her keypad. Blue fluorescence from the regulation tubelights had turned the pallor of my skin into a ghostly lime. The woman’s tan lines had seemed stark under the harsh light. I had wondered what she typed so furiously. It had been a while since I had had the time to spew out words with such persistent need. I had remembered her face, more sallow, during my only past visit, yet another month ago. 

Back then, I had wondered why most receptionists are women. I remembered that I had let myself imagine a dewey, dimpled lad in her stead, seated as she was, behind the stark white desk, guarding a stark white door labelled OB-GYN. A snort had escaped the cavity of my chest, I remembered. My muse had looked up, annoyed, raising a single, turquoise-blue, this time, talon to her cherry-red lips. Then, she had hissed at me. The typing had stopped all for three seconds.

In the many, many centuries that humanity has had to share its time on this distant, distant Mother Earth, there are only a handful of opinions that we can claim to have collectively agreed upon. The fact that hospitals are ubiquitously considered depressing places is perhaps the first among them. Possibly, this has something to do with its wide white walls that stare blankly back at you, or the sterile stench of cold, industrial-grade metal as it glints under blue-white lights, or the faceless, languid faces of overworked hospital staff as they cart yet another critical patient into the emergency unit. One does not scream out of joy at a hospital. 

Way back, those two months ago, a greying old nurse in regulation white had waddled up to me as I sat waiting alone in the receptionist’s lair. She had politely ushered me behind the coveted doors. The receptionist had flashed a watery smile in my general direction. As I had stood up, a whiff of ethanol had slammed into the back of my head. Still, I smiled. For about thirty-four minutes, the Head doctor had poked and prodded at my nether regions. A controlled, sterile touch, bereft of anything human. I had lain almost flat on my back, my waist bent at an obtuse angle, as a thick, sticky substance had nestled into the open pores of the skin over my womb. The gel had been cold. I had thrilled inside. The fluorescent white lights had bounced off my doctor’s bald head and refracted around the room. Everything had come alive, like diamonds. He had pointed a stubby, blue-gloved hand toward the display connected to his fancy ultrasound machine. A snowstorm of blacks and greys and whites had settled to reveal a violet teardrop smack in the middle of the screen. “That’s your baby,” he had said, in his regulation drawl, “just about a month old now.” Vaguely, I had wondered if the ultrasound equipment had anything to do with UV rays. Hadn’t I heard, somewhere, vaguely still, that they were meant to be bad for you? I had wondered and wondered all day, that day. Then, nothing. The static that usually engulfed my brain had killed itself. My face had scrunched into an upside-down rainbow. What joy, at the hospital. 

***

But that had been two months ago. 

I remembered, as I took the familiar turn left, dragging my morbid little body down the hospital’s winding white hallways just over a month ago. It had been hardly a question of choice: one, because it was a premise of ill repute, more to do with superstition and hushed whispers than any solid evidence of malpractice. But two, and more importantly (because it is usually the ends that take precedence over the means, in stories like these), that on a good day, it had boasted of a commute time of paltry minutes. The weekends were a different battle altogether. Buses and rickshaws and tiny cars and large cars were found all smashed together in a confused troop advancing from all sides. In unison, they smashed at their bugles before charging bonnet-first into a clash that none could hope to make out of unscathed. The real enemy, of course, was the heat of an incessant Sun. 

I had woken up that day, I remembered, with blood snaking down my inner thigh. It had dried slightly at the edges of its meandering track. I had dipped a ginger fingernail into the mess, only to find it painted a bright, cherry-red. Unassuming, unalarming in sight, the rivulet knew its way well around the contours of my changing body. Almost serene, like the dribble of a water can forcing its way on a bed of freshly planted violets. The drip had traversed through the familiar landscape countless times by now, marking a new milestone each time on its fresh escapade. When I first turned into a girl. When I first became a woman. My flowering and my deflowering. And now, as I was being borne into motherhood, the faithful little trickle had dared to make no fuss about its presence. It sought little in return, save an uninterrupted, incessant spiral downward. Drip, drip, drip. Little Violet sending her first garbled telegram my way. It was only I, after all, after all, who had decided to drive to the hospital anyway. Just in case. 

Well. At least I could drink again. And as for spirals, they are usually downward at any rate. 

***

It is my throb that carries me back to the surface. I come to, surrounded by a swarm of blue, unnaturally deep, like the color of cheaply manufactured plastic bags. Alien light, rogue, spilling out of a gigantic metal donut that demands the attention of my peripheral vision. I am blurred at the edges. My legs do not feel like my own. They have floated to the corner of the room somewhere. They have deserted me. They refuse to let me use them again. Briefly, I feel my face scrunch into the shape of my stomach. I am merely prone to suffering in loss, never skilled at surrendering to it. 

Paltry seconds pass, weakened by their non-continuity. In the meantime, I strike up a friendship with the rough loops of Velcro digging into my limbs. Numbing, and yet insistent on their presence, all at once.  I wear what could pass as the costume of a ghost, save the many miniature violets that cover the entirety of its sterile white surface. The purple stands out in the blue. My throb has not abandoned me. I feel full, like I could conquer the claustrophobia of this godforsaken MRI machine. I wonder if they have put my baby back into me. Stranger things have come to pass.

The idea that the hero of a play, the Merchant we turn to putty for, is also the one to equate an entire life with a pound of flesh, could have only sprung from the loins of the West. Flesh and blood, flesh and blood, more symbols than visceral beings of their own. The stakes are too high, and I am Velcroed to them. A cross fashioned out of my own hands. Life overstuffed into dead words uttered by dead men, repeated indeed by a deadening world. Doomed, they are, to uncanny echoes in the hollow pockets of a literary canon that pretends not to be poised for war. My words slither. My words slip. Fire in the hole! Violets and peonies hoar over with gunpowder. At least Shylock makes no qualms about revenge. 

The throb shrieks a cry into my veins. Outside, an egg-like shadow blots out an iced-over Sun. The ceaseless blue is interrupted by swirling patterns of black. The throb deadens the blur around my vision, pinching me into focus. Another ghostly costume, uninterrupted, this time, with floral patterns of any kind. The white takes on an effervescent glow in the lead of cerulean. Two beady eyes bear down upon me, attached to a shiny pound of flesh. It speaks to me: “Oh, my daughter, my ducats!” 

The throb quiets its cries to let the garbled sound waves through. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) The dialogue rips through space-time. “Take your time. Get your bearings. You must come with us. Take a look at this.” 

I can tell by the dull hiss in his voice that my doctor had once, perhaps in another life, rather enjoyed his stick of smoke. I smell burnt tyre on his lips. Of the many inconsistencies and ironies that mark my doctor’s speech, only a few seem significant to me. I admire how, for example, he contrives injunctions to sound like suggestions. Firm, ungiving, but softened with a subtle hiss of sibilants. In that moment, had he but only asked, I would have parted with my pound of flesh, twice over.

His paws linger over my bare skin as he reaches to unclasp my binds. My body hums, machine-like, in response. Fingers ghost over my thighs and forearms, the whites of our echoed garbs like chaperones of the days bygone— always intercepting a lovers’ union. I let myself be touched, if only to break the monotony of the blue that bears upon me, now numbing, at the back of my head. Bring my throb back, oh my ducats. Pain coils where my throb had revelled, and so I cherish it still; nurse it on my breast. 

Gingerly, I let my feet touch the ground. It is moist. 

***

The stench of stale alcohol settles into the cavity of my chest. I gag. I am stuffed too full to accommodate more foreign bodies. A relic of a wheelchair is my chariot down the winding hallways. The make-believe leather of its seat chafes against my thigh, scrubbing away my doctor’s touch. I am glad I do not have to use my legs. The white walls of the hospital and its overdependence on alcoholic cleaning agents stand on trial for an atmosphere of sinister hospitality. Someone might eat my heart here. They want from me that promised pound of flesh. I cannot protest. The leather and my throb team up to turn my body torpid. 

I cast my eyes downward, instead, and focus on the violets wreathed around my womb. 

White light reflects blue in my doctor’s office. The walls are glass, but solid, like they wouldn’t crack even under the pressure of a full round of bullets. I remember my lover’s handgun buried deep in my closet back home. Gone, now, with the wind, with him. He deals with loss much worse than I do. Memory is a sordid affair, and I am grateful for my throb to dull it all down. One must depend on little else than the pains of the body to bring sense to the present. No point entertaining ghosts. They are not known to be hospitable creatures. My doctor talks at me. Fast, out of breath. Something worries him. He does not care for sibilants any longer. The sound of his voice is sharp, angular, but it does not cut through the glass dome that my throb blows around me. I shut my eyes against the light. I do not want to watch his mouth moving. 

It is only the snowstorm that breaks through my recalcitrance. In a desperate bid, the doctor has turned his monitor toward me. It overpowers his face. I see only the top of his egg crouching behind the screen, like a half-risen sun, like a mound of flesh. 

Florets of whites and blues settle into place, bounded by a tight white ring. A circus act that does not let me laugh. Solid and fluid at the same time, like ink that has been frozen into place. Like an astronaut who fancied a portrait of the Earth, only to spill her coveted pints of paint all over the starry void. My doctor is disappointed by my ruminations.

I am unsure why one makes such a fuss over this bad hangover. The projectile vomiting, the incessant nausea, the faint bile that lingers on like a lover’s touch, are not new to a body that has only recently made its journey back from the first trimester. Then again, it is perhaps ill-advised to have labored through this all on my own. 

My doctor tells me a strange history. 

Halfway to the hospital, my body had seized in on itself, muscles contracted, as if forcing out an alien guest overstaying its welcome. Then, suddenly, fatigued by its non-becoming attempts, I had gone slack, right behind the steering wheel. A pool of cars had collected around my abrupt parking spot. Some decent, well-meaning guy, probably a father of two on his way back from a Sunday visit to the grocer’s, was nice enough to rush me to the emergency unit. My car lay there still, in the middle of the intersection, waiting to be towed. Relief crowds my innards. I have skipped the traffic. 

My doctor watches my unabashedly relaxed eyes. I do not mirror his urgency. I watch him take a breath, deeper than usual. The weight of his chest pushes down his body with his luxurious exhale, forcing his muscles into an emphasized state of calm. Ever the good host, my doctor guides my eyes to the area of poignancy on screen. A green-gloved hand shadows above the indigo Rorschachs and lands on a white, serpentine spiral slightly off-centre.

“That’s a tapeworm,” he says in his regulation drawl, “and we must evict it as soon as possible.” Briefly, I wonder why my doctor insists on the pronoun of multiples when he is just one. A chorus builds up in my brain to drown out my doctor’s jabber. It screams for a pound of flesh. A grimace worms its way onto my face. Then, a smile flowering with revelation.

My baby had returned, and this time I was going to keep it. 

---

Ananya Surana is a writer and researcher whose work explores how the past interacts with our notions of the future through the lens of gender, sexuality, and desire. Their fiction employs experimental forms to articulate the fraught relationship between the body and memory.