The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth Mckenzie

would’ve committed suicide,” and then chomped the pot sticker in a peculiarly mooselike way.
    “Whoa,” said Veblen.
    “Be prepared, she’s a nut,” said Albertine.
    Paul didn’t like having his betrothed described so knowingly, Veblen could tell. Then Albertine led Paul into telling about his school days and the pot growers and narcs surrounding him. It seemed to be going well enough. It was a funny world up there where people lived off the grid and paid for everything in cash. Was it criminal or simply the pioneer spirit? They segued into malfeasance in the medical field, and Paul proceeded to describe the difference between idiocy and evil. Idiocy was the family doctor in Placer County who double-dipped a syringe into a large bottle of Propofol and contaminated it with hepatitis C, only to go on and infect dozens of people from this bottle. Evil was theinternist in Palm Springs who stole organs during laparoscopic surgeries on elderly patients and sold them on the black market. It was estimated that he had made off with hundreds of kidneys, lobes of livers, sections of intestine, and even entire lungs before anyone caught on.
    “Know thyself. Don’t take up space in a medical program if you haven’t dealt with your issues,” said Albertine, and Paul sat up straighter.
    Then Paul said, “Am I right in thinking that in Jungian analysis, most of the training is spent on the self? ”
    “It’s too bad doctors don’t have that kind of training,” Albertine said, pointedly.
    Then on the way home that evening, Paul shocked Veblen by imitating Albertine in a pinched, nasal voice. “We went to school together. We are two wild and crazy girls. We love to wear our big heavy clogs and act crazy in the moonlight.”
    “Stop it!” Veblen cried out.
    “I’m kidding,” Paul said. “How could I say anything after exposing you to Hans?”
    Which led Veblen to realize these friendships were based on a phenotype exchange that occurred only with childhood friends, in which they were simply part of you forever, for better or worse. Veblen had been assigned to the tall, gawky new girl in sixth grade as her Welcome Buddy. In the first few days of their mandated buddy-hood, a boy on the playground was stung by a bee and his foot swelled up like a gangplank. Veblen made an observation about elephantiasis, to which Albertine said, “What’s that?”
    “Haven’t you heard of elephantiasis?”
    “Why would I? I can’t read your mind.”
    “Well, it’s a horrible disease from parasites that makes your body parts look thick and stumpy, like elephant legs,” Veblen pronounced.
    “Ha ha ha.”
    “It’s not funny, it’s very painful.”
    “You’re trying to humiliate me so you can have the power.”
    Veblen was intrigued by the girl’s reasoning, as comfortably skewed as her mother’s. “What do you mean?”
    “You’re testing to see if I can be manipulated,” Albertine declared, pushing her wire frames up her nose.
    “I swear, there’s such a thing,” young Veblen declared, all at once appreciating how elephantiasis could sound as made up as tigerrhea or hippopotomania . They went to the school library and found the disease in the encyclopedia; the new girl shrugged her broom of blond hair and walked off. Veblen refused to believe in the girl’s indifference.
    The next day she brought one of her mother’s medical journals to school, an issue chronicling a recent outbreak of elephantiasis in Indonesia. As Veblen calculated, the new girl seemed touched by Veblen’s passion to lift her up on the subject of tropical illness. Not only that, but they discovered their shared inclination to laugh in the face of bizarre and horrible realities they were spared by a twentieth-century California childhood, and they’d been best friends ever since. Almost eighteen years!
    •   •   •
    S TILL, broad-spectrum uneasiness led to a long lunchtime conversation outside the hospital with Albertine only