Barbara the Slut and Other People

It sounded like Mike Anonymous didn’t have any symptoms, so I made an appointment for an STD testing with no symptoms at seven the next night. I ate the last bite of my eighth brown rice cake with peanut butter and went back to work.

• • •

The next day Louisa had to work the front desk with Boss Donna, so she answered the phones, “Thank you for calling the clinic, this is Louisa, how can I help you?” instead of “Gonorrheaville, please hold,” or her other favorite, “Chlamydialand.”

I was in the dirty lab getting instruments out of the autoclave when Donna paged me. “Vivian to the front, please. Vivian to the front.” Boss Donna loved the intercom.

I walked to the front, stepping on only the pink tiles.

“Your patient is here,” Donna said when I got there. “The one that called yesterday.”

“What?” I said. The waiting room was empty except for a man filling out paperwork in the closest seat to the check-in window. He was sweating and his face was flushed. He looked like he was in his thirties or forties. He wasn’t fat-fat but he had a round face and he filled out his suit.

“That guy?” I said.

“No, one of the other guys,” said Donna. “Yes, that guy.”

I shut the window between the check-in desk and the waiting room.

“He speaks no English,” said Louisa, “not one word.”

“That’s Mike Anonymous?” I said. “He’s not supposed to be here until seven. How come he’s my patient?”

“Because we can’t understand him at all,” said Louisa.

“Neither can I!” I said.

“We’ll let you know when his chart is ready,” said Donna.

His chart was ready quickly because he didn’t answer any of the questions on the questionnaire. I brought him back to the bathroom to pee in a cup and told him to leave the cup in the window and meet me in the lab. But when he came into the lab he was holding his urine cup. He was still sweating. I smiled at him but he didn’t smile back.

He sat in the blood-drawing chair and I asked him all of the questions he hadn’t answered. I rephrased them so that he could answer yes or no. His breathing got heavier and he answered the questions in gasps. When I got to the questions about who he had sex with and how, he said yes to being married. He didn’t answer how he had sex, and I wasn’t about to ask yes-or-no questions about whether he had oral, vaginal, or anal, so I skipped that part. He shook his head like he didn’t understand again when I asked him whether he had had more than one sex partner in the last six months. Two drops of sweat fell onto his shirt. I wondered if it was possible that he understood me perfectly.

“We’ll test your urine for gonorrhea and chlamydia and your blood for HIV,” I said.

He took some gauze from the supply table and dabbed his chin and then his forehead. Now I was pretty sure he actually had no idea what I was saying. I pricked his finger for the rapid HIV test, set the timer, and sent him back out to the waiting room.

• • •

I started working at the clinic after I graduated from college. I was supposed to do some other stuff, like med school, but I kind of crashed and burned in the fall semester of my senior year, and now I was trying to figure out what to do about my life.

My childhood dream was to be a girl-scientist. I started conducting chemistry experiments in the kitchen before I could read. My parents gave me a drawer to keep my potions in, and the only rules were that I couldn’t use anything with a green Mr. Yuk sticker on it, and I couldn’t use anything from the garage. In first grade, my half brother Charlie got sick, and I imagined that if one of my potions cured him, I would be such a famous girl-scientist that I would have to wear disguises when I went outside. I made more and more potions, and when Charlie came to visit he tried the ones I picked out for him. He took a tiny sip from each, and once he threw up from smelling one.

Charlie was eighteen years older than I was, and he lived in New York City. I remember thinking that he was the person who knew me best in the world, because he sent me fancy dresses for every holiday except Halloween, when he sent me costumes. Later my mom told me that he bought them at a special store and cut out the tags, but at the time I thought he made them for me. My mom said she told him to stop sending them because she knew he couldn’t afford them, but he didn’t care what he could afford. When my dad sent him money for food and bills, he used it to buy dresses, records, and pieces of china for his Royal Copenhagen collection, which he left to me.

After that, I started thinking I might become a girl-doctor instead of a girl-scientist. I thought that through high school and most of college. And now I was supposed to be applying for something for next year, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know if I still had it in me to study medicine, or even chemistry. I was thinking I might want to study public health, but I was also thinking I might want to move to the forest and eat berries and mushrooms and hibernate with the bears in the winter.

• • •

Mike Anonymous’s test was negative. I called him back in. His shirt around his neck and under his armpits was see-through with sweat. I showed him to the closest counseling room. I could hear him breathing as he went into the room in front of me and sat down, and I told him it was negative before the door even closed, because I thought he was going to pass out if I didn’t. But instead of being glad, Mike Anonymous stood up and slammed his hand on the table and said, “No!” I jumped. Then I think he said the test was wrong, or I did the test wrong. He wanted the traditional test, and he wanted to see a doctor. I was starting to understand him better but I was also starting to get scared of him. I told him he couldn’t see a doctor unless he had symptoms, and he said he did have symptoms.

“You told me on the phone you didn’t have symptoms,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Okay fine,” I said, “what are your symptoms?”

He showed me a dot on his hand that looked like a freckle but was black.

“Are you sure that’s not ink?” I said.

“What?” he said.

“Ink,” I said, “like pen?”

Mike Anonymous shook his head and waved his hand in my face so that I could get a better look at the symptom.

“Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

Something something penis, he said.

“Something is wrong with your penis?” I said.

Something something penis, he said again, louder. I told him to hold on and went out to the hall. A med student had arrived with Dr. Wagner, and they were talking to the clinicians about what patient to take.

“I have a really good patient for you,” I said.

The med student looked excited, like he thought it was going to be a woman with a double vagina or something. He was new to the clinic and he was technically a resident, which allowed him to see patients under Dr. Wagner’s guidance. He was too tall and he walked like it was hard for him to balance on such long legs. I wondered if that was why Dr. Wagner didn’t seem to take him seriously.

“This guy is sure he’s HIV positive but he had a negative rapid test, and when I told him it was negative, he decided that something was wrong with his penis,” I told them.