The Cessation
by Ginny Hogan
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
I never wanted to be a hero. Heroes save people, and I didn’t even like people. But we all must step into our destiny, I suppose.
The day it happened, I didn’t notice until 10:00 a.m. It was 11:00 a.m. before I realized I wasn’t the only one. The tweets had begun. Several nurses had made comments. I figured it must be a slow news day. That was a good thing, as far I was concerned. I hated the news. I hated pretty much everything. Well, I liked one thing.
“Tuzzy!” I beamed at my favorite patient. “How are you feeling?”
“Actually... okay,” she said. “I don’t think I filled up the bag.”
I craned my neck to look. This was no one’s idea of fun, but with Tuzzy, I barely minded. Sure enough, the bag was empty.
“And you’re not in any pain?” I asked.
She nodded her head ‘no.’ I smoothed down her hair. That was a relief, at least. And the only one I’d get that day.
* * *
“Should we sound the pandemic alarm?” I asked.
“Don’t be dramatic. We don’t yet have evidence it’s a virus,” Dr. Rash said. “We’ll send the economy into free-fall if we bring it up again.”
I wasn’t surprised. “Pandemic” had become something of a dirty word, now that everyone knew it was real and could seriously muck up our lives.
“If my last round was correct, no one has released waste since midnight last night,” I said. The question made patients uncomfortable when I asked, but we didn’t have the privilege of being comfortable. Not when I had lives to save. Well, one life. “Not one single person. You know what the risks of holding it in are.”
“But are we holding it in?” Dr. Rash asked. “I’m not. I have no urge. It’s almost pleasant.”
He wasn’t wrong. It was sort of pleasant. I didn’t like urinating any more than I liked anything else. Still, it wasn’t normal, that we, as a population, had suddenly stopped peeing. “Aren’t we the ones responsible for investigating bodily abnormalities?”
Dr. Rash rolled his eyes. “Please, Amanda, you’re an excellent physician, but leave the hypothesizing to me and Ron and Sam and Jose.”
“The men?”
“That’s a random coincidence.”
“No one has peed in 12 hours. I know that’s normal for men, but not for women.”
“I know how women pee. I have a daughter,” Rash said. “Let’s give it a few more hours before we get hysterical.”
* * *
“The economy is going to be devastated,” moaned Roy the next day. I took his wife’s pulse. Tuzzy was alive, but she wasn’t thriving. To be fair, most live people weren’t.
Typically, when a man says something I don’t want to hear, I “play dead.” I’m pretty good at it, since I am a doctor and am therefore around dead people somewhat regularly. This time, I didn’t have to. A nurse named Frank volunteered himself to bear Roy’s frustration.
“Are you kidding me? I think it’s great. I spend $6 a month on soap that I’m not going to have to spend anymore. That adds up,” said Frank. “It sure adds up.”
I wanted to tell Frank he could simply steal the soap from the supply closet, but then there might not be enough for the doctors to steal. I said nothing.
“You’ll still need soap,” said Roy, although we all knew that wasn’t the truth. No one would be washing their hands now that we’d stopped urinating. It was already a stretch to assume people washed their hands after using the bathroom; most just left the water running to fool those outside. I’m a doctor, and you wouldn’t catch me dead coming out of a bathroom with wet hands. Cell phones are expensive.
I knew why Roy was so anxious. The coronavirus pandemic had devastated the economy: unemployment rose to such high rates that I almost became grateful for my job. It’s no wonder any sudden change could trigger fears. And Roy. Well, Roy ran a porta-potty company. He was in the business of bodily waste. Why would a woman as smart as Tuzzy — a talented hydraulic engineer — marry such a man? Don’t ask me, I didn’t tell her to.
* * *
In the coming days, there were calls to investigate what had caused the Cessation. Was it pesticides? Global warming? Social media? Not enough Acai? All those were nefarious culprits, but none could explain the most puzzling part of the Cessation, the one I couldn’t get out of my mind: why was it sudden?
The government set up a task force — the Committee — tasked with explaining the Cessation in terms lay people could understand. We weren’t wrong for wanting an explanation. This wasn’t 1984.
But the government was wary of dissent, as the next morning’s paper warned us:
‘During the COVID pandemic, we didn’t listen to our scientific authorities. We said 20 seconds of hand-washing was 18 seconds too long. This time, we ought to trust the Committee that the government had established to investigate the Cessation. We must learn from our mistakes. Or else,’ says Surgeon General.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t that gentle.
Dr. Rash had begun assuring patients the Cessation would benefit humankind. “It’s good that we no longer need to pee. Everyone who struggles with bladder-related issues is now free from their bleak tinkles,” he said. “An end to all yeast infections, to UTIs. We will all thrive. Safe and healthy.”
Much to my chagrin, thanks to the leadership Dr. Rash had taken at our own mediocre hospital, the U.S. Surgeon General tapped him to run the Committee. Our head of Urology, now a player on the national stage. Who knew the national stage had such low standards?
I don’t care for most of my patients. And I cared for none of my co-workers. In fact, I don’t even care for one of my children, and I only have one child. But I cared for Tuzzy. Tuzzy — unlike all the others — expressed gratitude. Tuzzy told me I was her favorite doctor. Tuzzy made clear no one could do what I did. She was the only one who saw the real me.
Remember during the last pandemic, the photo collages of those we’d lost? The media’s desperate attempt to make us feel something. This time around, those little shits took it upon themselves to show us photos of all those the Cessation had saved. Case Number 1: Tuzzy.
She was on the front page of The New York Times. A young woman, gripped by a terminal bladder illness, saved at the last moment by the Cessation. The poster child for our glorious next step as a population. When Tuzzy was wheeled out of her hospital by her doofus, porta-potty-slinging husband, she was greeted by armies of well-wishers, eager to see a “young woman return to the life she deserved.” I’d advised against discharging her so early but, as usual, no one listened.
Everyone thought Tuzzy should be grateful. “The Cessation helped her,” they said, “because, for her, peeing was the problem. Now she doesn’t need the urostomy bag.”
Without it, she must be wholly cured of her mysterious bladder problems, the ones that had brought her to my door three years ago. Right?
Two days later, her husband wheeled her right back. By then, the press had been written, and it could not be retracted. Press only moves in one direction.
My poor, sweet patient was in serious pain, struggling to breathe, unable to digest her food. The same symptoms she’d had before, when her bladder malfunctioned. Doctors had said the Cessation would cure bladder problems. Now, they were stumped. Luckily for her, she still had me.
“How’s my favorite patient?” I said with a sheepish grin that belied my preparation. I’d rehearsed the line in my head dozens of times before entering Tuzzy’s room. I was not naturally warm. This usually shocks people, since I fake it quite well.
Tuzzy was good-natured and kind, and she — unlike the other ingrates — actually appreciated my work.
“Thank you for making time for me, Dr. Dubois,” Tuzzy said. “I can only imagine how busy you’ve been.”
I patted her head: all the unused maternal energy I knew I had in me. I saw that Tuzzy was in bad shape, but something wasn’t adding up. If the problem was her bladder, and her bladder had ceased functioning just like everyone else’s, then why were her vitals still so off?
“Is it bad news?” she asked.
“No... well... we just need to run more tests,” I lied. “In the meantime, I’m going to hook you up to a drip.” I’d done this in the past to ameliorate her condition. The first time I pumped her with Liquid X, a nebulous substance one of our cleaning staff had brought to make the toilets shine, was an accident — I thought it was morphine, and I thought she was dying. Miraculously, it brought her back to life. Since then, I’d regularly used it in Tuzzy’s treatment. This is how science happens. I’m an amazing doctor. And at this point, I was her only doctor, so there was no one else left to check me.
She nodded and laid her head back against the pillow. She was the one patient of mine who’d never complained about the firmness of the hospital’s bedding. As a reward, I’d brought her my own down pillow from home to use. I didn’t need it anyway; it was just my son’s. And she deserved to be more comfortable than the other patients. She appreciated me.
“So, how are things?” I asked.
She said nothing. I turned around to look at her. She’d already drifted off to sleep. Yes, I’d brought her a very good pillow.
I got home that night, exhausted. A few slices of pizza sat cold on the counter. To the untrained eye, it may have looked as though my degenerate son Jacques had decided to leave some for me as a kind gesture, but I knew the truth. He was trying to sabotage my diet. He knew I didn’t eat bread. I would not be so easily fooled, though. He would not outsmart me. He didn’t know the first thing about tricking a woman into bread consumption. For starters, pizza crust doesn’t count as bread.
I gazed down at the counter. It was unusually clean — so clean I could eat off it. And so I did.
* * *
Weeks had passed since the Cessation. “We’ve Leapt Ahead,” headlines claimed. The Committee’s investigation had concluded, apparently, and no negative side effects of the Cessation had emerged, apparently.
“Five years ago, we’d been forced to spend a year inside our houses,” they said. “That was a cage. A Cessation of urination, on the other hand, is ‘freedom.’ Freedom is the opposite of cages. Everyone is better off. Productivity is through the roof, without those pesky bathroom breaks. Single moms are saving much-needed food dollars on their water bills.”
Yada-yada-yada. Sadly, they weren’t the only ones spouting such absurdity.
Feminists began to say bladders were oppression; the wage gap was driven by women’s uteri, which sat on our bladders and forced us to urinate more often. Without this, women’s salaries would shoot up to match men’s, although men’s salaries would shoot up too, now that they no longer had to pee standing up in a line like the fucking Rockettes. Men are so embarrassing.
“The Cessation is part of evolution.” That was the Committee’s line, and they stuck to. It was one Dr. Rash would repeat on every talk show for weeks.
I tried to cull through the Committee’s exact argument for kernels of logic. As far as I could tell, they claimed we’d simply outgrown urination. In several centuries, humans would hear that we once peed and react the same way people today do when they hear people used to stay married their whole lives.
I scoffed. People never stayed married their whole lives.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Ginny Hogan
