Neither Illness Nor Wellness

It's Clubs Day at the university. She cruises the tables of the plaza. The identities and amusements of the student population are strewn across the surfaces of these tables in the form of pamphlets, posters, cards, books, and sign-up sheets. Artifacts of affinity. She scrolls herself past the Young Socialists, the Harm Reduction Action Network, the Conservative Students Caucus, the Anarcha-Feminists, the Wargamers Alliance, the Black Students Collective, the Sinophiles and Friends, the Vancouver Vegans, and the Middle English Speakers Society. They've plated themselves for consumption, she imagines, like appetizers or entrees. She skims the faces of the people seated behind each. Her aloneness coats her. This, Emma is used to.

But the university is depressing right down to its geometry. The scattering of buildings comprising it are all horizontal lines and sweeping sheets of grey. Its brutalist concrete is like a lid on a crypt. Film crews perpetually shoot in and around it, casting it as a future dystopian city one week, a corrupt den of espionage the next. This seems natural. But she could join something. The thought surprises her. She is sick, so maybe it's sickness defeating shyness. That could be the story of this day.

At only twenty-two, her body is unfixing from the inside. The disease is called, stupidly, "colitis" which, when you pry apart the etymology, is the diagnostic equivalent of a shrug. Unspecified trauma, caused by nothing anyone understands, located in the mystery of her abdomen. She trusts words more than people, so she knows that trauma is exactly what the ancient Greeks said it was—a painful, private, ceaseless dream; a drama. A torrent of pills has failed to help her, and the last option her doctor has offered, against the danger of rupture and sepsis, is to open her up. All the blood tests and all the laparoscopic videography and all the magically penetrative scans, apparently, cannot tell the whole tale: she could go on like this, in pain but whole, for years; or tomorrow her gut could finally perforate and poison her. To know the real state of things inside, they need to get in and eyeball it directly. In his West End office, her gastroenterologist said with jollity, "It's time to dive in with the knives." Fuck that, she did not say back. But she has stayed away since, taking her chances.

There is plenty to choose from among the tabled Clubs Day servings: she is, to varying degrees, a young socialist, a black student, and a feminist. She could enter the fray. Fray or be frayed.

And then she comes upon a banner raised behind yet another table near the end of a row, its words red with febrile insistence:

THE PRO-ILLNESS REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST COLLECTIVE

Emma walks toward it, between the tables that are hyphens between other hyphens, and she does not look at who is sitting in front of it. She does not care. That banner and what it says has turned her inside out. It is moronic and resplendent. In her mind, she has joined them before she even arrives at the table to say hello. A smiling person hands her a clipboard with an email list on it. She observes its blank box and enters herself.

________

The first meeting of the Pro-Illness Revolutionary Socialist Collective takes place on the top floor of the university pub. They are enveloped in the buzz of student chatter and the musty smell of clothes and books that have travelled across the city through the penetrating coastal rain. Emma sits between Alain and a middle-aged professor with a grey beard and pony-tail, and on the other side of the table is a young woman called Claudia. This is, apparently, the whole of the PIRSC: a collective of four, counting Emma herself.

She sits there feeling physically weak, as usual, and maybe mentally weak, too—light-headed from the inability to properly digest food. Maybe it's her starved brain that has put her here. Emma sips her lager, looks at Alain and...