Culture Bound
by Kirsten Kaschock
part 1
While in Finland, I became aware that coprophagia, the ingestion of feces, is known to manifest most frequently in the coldest climes. It is sometimes considered part of a larger culture-bound syndrome, a psychiatric and somatic complex recognized as disease locally, not globally. Other examples include Dhat in India, Ghost Sickness in Native American communities, and Koro among the Chinese and Malaysian populations of Southeast Asia.
It may not be entirely accurate for me to say “while in Finland,” since during my time there I was almost always down in the Tunnel, the fluorescent labyrinth coiled below the university, where post-docs and techs subsisted on pizza and Coke and bad jokes through hours that often stretched through unmarked nights and into mornings. Endless-seeming time, though in actuality less than a year. None of us who were there then became what you would call intimate. It may be true that I got to know Fitch better than anyone I’ve ever known. That didn’t make us intimate.
Since choosing my field, I’ve worked almost exclusively with scientists, almost all of whom have been men; I haven’t liked many of them much.
I met Fitch in late March at a headhunter’s office in Chicago. We shook hands between interviews. His skin was remarkably soft — unchapped — thanks to a scrupulous lotioning habit. The next morning, we were flown across the Atlantic to a small university above the Arctic Circle and immediately sent down into the Tunnel, to work on the repurposing of human waste matter into a nutritive supplement by encouraging an extremely narrow range of bacterial growth and adding chemical compounds that could be harvested from a rock in space. Our job was to help the asteroid miners.
Help them eat shit.
Early on, it became obvious that Fitch would be making the worst of the Tunnel’s bad jokes. “You know what doesn’t smell?” This, on the first day. “What?” I asked back, stupidly. “Shit without a nose.” And then he laughed, loudly in the white-tiled bunker that was to house us eighteen hours a day, seven days a week over the next many months.
We worked hard because of how we were trained; in the same type of big lab under rockstar primary investigators who knew their fields like no other: Fitch, at the University of Chicago with Amoroso in bacteria; I, at Northwestern in longevity with Eckelstein. We worked hard because people’s lives were at stake.
Not that we were enlightened. “Deadline-conscious” is the more apt term, as well as being a pun Fitch repeated almost daily. We worked hard, because anyone in space is a hero. Because they were stranded and we technically weren’t, and because I’d wanted to be an astronaut since I was five and met an aging Sally Ride at the Illinois State Fair, but my physical specs were trash.
During the first few weeks, if I ever forgot that, Fitch would remind me. “You own a scale, Park?” And when I said nothing, “Don’t buy one, it’s not worth the weight.”
Fitch and I weren’t intimate for many reasons, prime among them Fitch being an asshole.
On the first day down in the Tunnel we learned that the ship, Rootwork, was defunct. We — me and Fitch — we were handed our aspect of the project, told that the work in the Tunnel had urgent real-world application, that the lives of eleven miner-nauts hung in the balance.
That day, Ms. Durham’s skirt was short, her hair pulled back. Ms. Durham was a management drone from Ezos; the mining project was their baby. Later, Fitch told me the whole university had been bought outright a decade before, to serve as a front for the company’s R&D. I’m not sure about that. What I know to be true is that (1) many private universities in Europe and America had in the past few decades become firmly entrenched in corporate service and that (2) the miners were publicly invisible.
There’d been rumors on some conspiracy boards a few years back that the unmanned ship sent to grab data from the asteroid belt was too big and too complicated for its task, but these boards had no shortage of secrets to plumb and only occasionally dealt in the brand of paranoia that was also speculatively correct.
The ship, hit by an errant rock while nearing the end of its mission, had lost a compartment full of provisions and part of its navigation system. Ezos was sending a fix. But the food supply was coming up short no matter how the bean-counters figured the rationing. Without a stopgap, Ms. Durham told us the miners wouldn’t make it. She handed us the fat dossier that contained all relevant materials.
What Fitch leaned over to me and said then — and it sounded right — was that the hardhats had to have a solid leader among them. “Only one or two need to survive to deliver the goods — maybe not even that.” Fitch said they must’ve threatened to jettison the cargo if extraordinary efforts weren’t made. This was a hypothesis, but not an unreasonable one. The money sent down the Tunnel was not the kind of money usually allotted to any humanitarian effort on Earth or elsewhere. But when Fitch suggested the substance they’d gone to retrieve from Interamnia was of alien origin... Well, what I know now but didn’t then is that Fitch frequented some of the sketchier boards.
Fitch was unabashed in his deepweb consumption. It took only four days before I caught porn on his laptop. After that, he didn’t try to hide it. He told me the long hours made certain transgressions of lab protocol unavoidable. The hand lotion at his station smelled, obscenely, of freesia.
After the first week, he and I ate nothing worth calling food. Fitch insisted. He put us on the miner’s diet of freeze-dried fibrous vitamin cocktails. They were actually high in calories, but we ate only a third of a daily ration — same as the miners — though none of them were women. Someone had to produce the exact-match shit we would use for our experiments, and Fitch said the regimen would help motivate us, “Plus you could afford to drop a few... dozen.” He was no prize himself.
By the time Ms. Durham returned to assess our progress in May, I’d dropped thirty-five pounds, and Fitch had fallen below any reasonable weight. We’d been starving for nine weeks.
“You’re looking gaunt,” she said. She was blunt.
Fitch just nodded.
Fitch didn’t like Ms. Durham. He talked a lot in those first nine weeks about how much he didn’t. She was relatively pretty, I guess. Sexy definitely. Her extreme competence had a physical quality to it, potentially adrenal. Fitch didn’t like anyone he deemed less intelligent than himself, which meant he didn’t like many people. Certainly not her. “She has an MBA, for chrissakes,” he said, “Tell me a better indicator of psychopathy.” Me, I was as smart and as dedicated as he was, and Fitch knew it, but I wasn’t pretty — so not threatening. My face was a fat face. Fitch called me, sometimes, Moonpie.
Just that week, we’d gotten some good results. But Fitch wanted to be absolutely sure before we handed anything over to the bureaucrats. He’d told me to stay quiet.
He was gazing into a Petri dish. “So Durham, how’s it hanging?”
She pursed well-defined lips. “The miners have stretched their resources as far as possible. They needed something yesterday.” Then she tapped her French-manicured nails on the lab bench beside him, as if trying to get the attention of a cat.
“We know this.” Fitch said. That day, he looked not unlike a wet cat, or a gnarly crow: greasy black hair and long, meticulous fingers. Once, for seven painful months, my parents had forced me to attempt piano with my pudgy digits. After the first concert, with the instructor’s blessing, they relented. Over years my fingers had gained a certain fluency with micropipettes and centrifuges, but compared to Fitch’s, they still lumbered.
“Well?”
“We’re close,” Fitch said, looking over at me. I nodded.
“You look like you’re about to keel over.” She was aiming all her sentences at Fitch. This woman was blunter than any of the women who worked in the Tunnel, which was just me and the other one, Uliana, over in engineering. Uliana wasn’t blunt. Then again, she didn’t speak much English. So it’s possible she was blunt only in Russian.
I wanted to ask Ms. Durham why she wouldn’t look at me when she was talking about our project, Fitch’s and mine. But I wasn’t blunt in any language.
“We’re close. I told you,” Fitch repeated. “We’ll call you when we have it.”
Turns out our good results were a red herring. The others in the Tunnel sometimes ate herring on toast, a local thing. When I smelled it coming from the lounge down the hall, I got nauseous. Not that I could vomit. We went back to the drawing board, hungry.
* * *
Fitch asked me, infrequently, about my life before the Tunnel while we sat hunched over the bench. So I told him, in some detail, about my dissertation. “The life-extending effects of caloric restriction on C. elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, and Mus musculus.” He asked excellent questions, was surprised that my lab was flush enough to work my project through three model systems: worms, flies, and mice. Big private funders meant big private money. Of course the Tunnel had more. Whatever we asked for, we got, no questions asked. Fitch was the one to skype with Ms. Durham. To deliver our demands. Bluntly.
“These micropipettes are substandard. They shatter if you breathe on them funny.” Better pipettes were delivered the next day.
“We need more of the bacteria you sent last week. Park left the refrigerator open.” I hadn’t left the refrigerator open. He hadn’t requested enough to begin with.
In between skypes to Ezos and work hours scored with yacht rock off his laptop, Fitch battered me with his past life. As in bad 80s movie plots, his were unlikely-sounding exploits, with Fitch always the lucky-getting protagonist.
His tales rained over me like the talk radio my dad listened to while driving me the hour each way to St. Albans’. A long drive to be subjected to so much hate. Once, I reminded my dad that we were immigrants, and he waved a hand at me. “This is not about us. I, too, need to worry about the state of this country. I brought us here for you, Lily Park. You should care more.” Then he’d turn the vituperation up.
There was one story Fitch told me that stuck, though I wish not.
It started like the rest. Frat party. This “hot girl” got wasted and showed what a slut she was, grinding against everyone like an animal in estrus. Fitch said, “In estrus.” Then, before he had his chance to talk to her, she’d left with a rower. Fitch spat the guy’s name: Ass-hat Chad. On the stairs off the front porch, her hella-high heel caught between the wooden planks and she’d tumbled forward, bloodying her face on the sidewalk. Pretty badly, Fitch said. Suddenly Ass-hat Chad didn’t want anything to do with her.
“He laughed, told her she shouldn’t wear shoes like that next time she was getting blitzed, and to tone down the makeup. Then he said he wasn’t sure about that though, because after that spill — maybe she’d need some spackling.”
Chad’s speech sounded made-up.
“He got a text then and he just left her there on her ass, bleeding. What a douche, right? So I pried out her shoe and knelt down beside her to present it. Like she was Cinderella was the concept. I was still pre-med, so I told her that, and got her back into the house and into the bathroom. I fixed her face, or did what I could. It was swelling up pretty goddamned quick.”
I wanted this to be the end, but I knew Fitch by this point. He wouldn’t tell a story that ended there.
“She was so goddamned grateful. Goodgod... the head she gave me for playing doctor. I mean, I’d had someone suck me off before, but she was a freakin’ expert. I didn’t even mind the bloodstains she left on my jeans — she was so unbelievably eager she didn’t even let me take them off.” And on he went.
I don’t know why that one stuck. It was, I guess, representative.
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Kirsten Kaschock
