Free Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus

invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. Hayley promised to break bitter pieces of German chocolate over his tongue as he stared at the ceiling and wished his life away. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment up at the clinic on the hill.
    Treatment,
well, that might not have been the word. His was one of the doomed conditions. An allergy to his own blood, he not so scientifically thought of it. An allergy to himself, was more like it. His immune system was mistaken, fighting against the home team. Or his immune system knew
exactly
what it was doing. These days autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy. In the States, with such pain and such striking blood work, they merely soaked you in opiates and watched the clock. They dug your hole and wrote your name in stone. Not so in Germany, a shining outpost on the medical frontier, where out of wisdom, or denial, or economic opportunity, they tried what was forbidden or unconscionable elsewhere. And for a fee they’d try it on you.
Massive doses of it
. You could bathe in its miracle waters. You could practically get stem-cell Jell-O shooters at the bar on Thursday nights. So long as, you know, you waived—yes, waived—it good-bye. Your rights, your family, your life.
    It was not such a terrible trade. The clinic brandished a very fine needle on Julian’s first day. It gleamed in the cold fluorescent light of the guinea pig room, and they sank it into his back. From his wheezing torso they drew blood and marrow, his deep, private syrup—boiled it, then spoon-fed it back to him until he sizzled, until he just about
glowed
. Of course the whole thing was more complicated than that, particularly the dark arts they conjured on his marrow once they’d smuggled it out of him. They spun it, cleaned it, damn near weaponized it, then sold it back to him for cash. Zero sum medicine, since he’d grown it himself, in what Hayley, digging into his ribs, had called “The Julian Farm.” Except the sum was a good deal larger than zero. He might as well have eaten his own arm or sucked elixir through a straw punched into his heart.
    Back home he’d tried it all and felt no different. The steroids, the nerve blocks, the premium plasma. He ate only green food until it ran down his legs. Then for a long time he tried nothing. He tried school, then tried dropping out. Now he was trying, in his midtwenties, his old room in his father’s house, which Hayley always said
impressed
her. The courage it must have taken for him to decide to
really
live there with his father. Maybe. Through it all, though, he was mostly trying Hayley, as in really, really trying her, and he could see how very tired she’d been getting. Imagine that you’re the girlfriend of a long, gray, twentysomething man who is ill in a way that no one understands. Or is he? It was Hayley who’d pushed for this trip, so Julian could finally have a shot at the new medical approach they’d read so much about, a possible breakthrough with rare autoimmune disorders.
    In Germany they treated you with yourself. You were guilty of hiding your own cure inside of you, you selfish fuck. They salvaged and upgraded it, then returned it to you with a vicious needle while you trembled in your chair. After a few weeks you’d be better. Hmm. In his wellness fantasies, Julian always pictured himself scrubbed clean, nicely dressed, suddenly funny and charming. All better, in every goddamned way. Maybe even a name change. Of course throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, your frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the