Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"Give me back my body, give me back my body."

Helen Keller Really Lived 1 Give me back my body, give me back my body. Really, I’m not joking, lyubov moya. Give me back my body right now. Or else. If you don’t give me back my body, I’m gonna come and take something of yours, something you’ll miss, missy. Like that three legged monster of a rabbit that lurches around the lawn of the house you bought with my insurance money, performing a grotesque fusion of the bunny hop with a sidewinder snake dance. Give me back my body, give me back my body or the rabbit dies. Alright, alright. I was just trying to get a rise out of you, like you could always get out of me, sometimes three times in 2 Elisabeth Sheffield one night. I know you can’t give me back my body—at least not the body I had. Before it went to hell, so to speak. I’m not stupid. Let me remind you that I was thirteen years old when the bratva got me in—couldn’t speak a fucking word of fucking English. One year on the streets and I had street cred American, one year on my knees and I was on my feet with a green card and “supportive” American foster rents (four years, all expenses paid, at Scarsdale High). And when the supportive rents proved unsupportive (after a little free trade incident), I hooked my way through SUNY, four years of medical school, an internship and a residency until finally I reached the promised but by no means guaranteed land of a successful private practice. You don’t do that with a case of faecal encephalopathy , a.k.a. shit for brains. But you never respected me when I was alive—why would you respect me now? God I sound like Rodney Dangerfield another kiddo from the old Eastern Bloc, bet you didn’t know that (he was born Jacob Cohen). You knew me for a stooge though the moment I walked into the exam room, the moment my eyes dropped like pants. The clipboard in my hand provided cover as I pretended to scan your chart, but you could probably already tell I had it bad, see right through me even as I was let’s see over 200 by then… no 90 kilos… always liked the slimming effect of the metric system… far from being a ghost. Yeah right through me even though you were the paper doll a real flimsy floozy your motives completely transparent the way you’d wrapped your sun-browned bod in the standard pink gown, like a piece of eye-candy or a goddamn sex bonbon . My vatruska, it was obvious what you were up to, rigged as a Viagra erection, and I’d had my fill of sweet, young, and notso -young things (yeah even then I could see your expiration Helen Keller Really Lived 3 date). But somehow you knew that too. Knew that after a while they all look the same, from the PHAT downtown trophy wives to the morbidly obese suburban breeders, smell the same. Take your pick it’s all just the stale estrogen reek of pizda. So you knew not just to wear the shoes but also to leave them on. Yes my sweet tart, my limonka, those shiny black, granny tie ankle boots with the six-inch heels were what finally piqued my ruined appetite. But not because of the way they forced your long boy’s feet to do what anthropologists call the courtship strut, though I wish I’d seen you wobble through the door in them. You were already posed up on the exam table however, looking yummy but by no means irresistible in your strategic pink wrapper. So like Spike Lee said, “money, it’s gotta be the shoes.” The way the platform soles curved and arched like two frightened pussies (pun intended) the way the black patent vamps spat back the fluorescent lights. In Russian there’s a very old curse, poshol v pizdu—literally “go back into the cunt.” But it’s worse than that—a wish for someone’s death. I don’t know why I chose a profession that had me up inside them all day. It wasn’t a turn on, for god’s sake. Maybe to convince myself I was out. I dunno, if I were interested...