American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen

pseudocyesis, of women who develop all the signs and symptoms of pregnancy, even though they aren’t pregnant. There’s no shame in speaking in signs. You shouldn’t worry about the word ‘hysteria.’ It’s not just women who speak these languages. I think men are even more fluent in them—”
    “Did you do your training in Oregon?”
    “In Vladivostok,” she said. “But I’m always training. Even now I’m training.”
    “I just want you to say whether I’m dying or not dying. Really, that’s it.”
    She took out a green marker pen from her lab coat and wrote down two words in all caps on the white butcher paper of the exam table. “I understand you’re more interested in prognosis than diagnosis ,” she said, indicating the two words she had written. She paused. “That’s natural. I understand that. But I’m not so detained by either diagnosis or prognosis; what really interests me is simply gnosis .” She had underlined and was pointing to the stacked “gnosis” ends of the two words. “Gnosis itself.”
    There had once been a TV show in which a gnu named Gary Gnu reported the gnews. “It seems like you don’t believe in illness,” I said.
    “I believe in wellness,” Dr. Shliakhtsitsava said.
    Her framed diplomas suggested she was normally certified; also, she had helped me before; you can’t be blinded to past goodness by the klieg lights of a little bit of odd.
    “But do you think I can get it safely removed?” I asked. “Do you think my insurance will cover the surgery? It’s not considered just cosmetic, is it? I mean, it’s a pretty extreme case if it is. Would I need full anesthesia?”
    “I can answer all those questions for you,” she said, deploying full eye contact. “And I will answer all those questions for you. But first I want to say”—and here her status as a pretty person seemed to flush her face with ordained assuredness—“you might want to think about this new part of yourself. Just take some time and think about it. Do you really want to change yourself just to suit fashion when you don’t even know what fashion will bring next? That may not be the person you want to be.”
    The visit cost me $215. I appreciated that she had taken the time to really talk to me.
    *   *   *
    Spring came around. Flowers, I suspect they were daffodils, made their pronouncements. What were maybe dogwood blossoms decorated neighborhood trees. I started craving fruit popsicles. One evening, on the street, I by chance met a woman I had known back when I was in high school. She had distinctively large and wide-set eyes and had never seemed to have reached puberty; it might have been a medical thing; anyhow, it made her easy to recognize. She was in town to help design a duck pond for the campus, or really it was a sort of goose pond, she explained, a place to encourage Canadian geese to rest during their annual migrations. What a treat to see you, she said. You know, I wanted to write to you, she went on. To make sure you were OK. But I didn’t want you to feel singled out in that way. I hadn’t talked to you for so many years.
    Don’t worry about it, I said. I’m just happy to have run into you.
    I had no idea what she might be talking about. That evening I went ahead and investigated myself on the Internet.
    Someone, probably one of the GRLZ, or one of the GRLZ’s friends, had pinned one of the more casually striking photos of my “condition” onto her Pinterest, which had gone to a number of other Pinterests, and Tumblrs, and other places I didn’t know about, and those images had synapsed and traveled and collided with other images, and commentary, and eventually become a Buzzfeed, yoked alongside what must have really driven the traffic, a photo of an actress from a remake of the movie Total Recall ; the woman—she played an alien or something—was three breasts across and wore an outfit that offered coverage of those breasts only via a strap across the nipples.