Monday Evening

Adelaide's head hurts. The vapor of pesto and beans is overwhelming, pounding down the walls, knocking on closed doors. Adelaide climbs the stairs to her attic room slowly- her knees are creaking already from her Sunday long runs, and her low blood pressure makes her dizzy whenever she stands. Her mild hypochondria defeats her youth daily. She opens the small windows one by one and then sits cross-legged on her brightly colored bed, cases spread before her, spilling off her knees and under the sheets.

Adelaide is reviewing a case in Uganda, a case of a woman who fled the continual rape of police officers at routine traffic stops in her small town. She fled to neighbors first, and then into the bush later. When that did not hide her, she fled to Dulles airport to work as a nanny. Her employer, a White House official, kept her wages from her, forced her to work 12 hour days, gave her a corner of the floor to sleep on, and raped her. When the woman finally escaped, she called home in desperation. Her husband had been murdered and her son imprisoned by the very police who missed her regular resistance. As a final gasp, she contacted a human rights group in the District. In the course of collecting information for her asylum plea and subsequent employment, she discovered she had AIDS. From then on, the nanny from Uganda restricted all her efforts to the attempt of suicide, which also proved sadly futile.

Adelaide went to college a pre-med major, with aspirations to become the neuropsychologist who finally solved the mystery of autism. She finished all of the weed out first year courses, completed the rigourous nightly lab rituals. Now she slept with medicine's acceptable sister, law, but she still retained her comforts in those sterile practices. When the word horror seemed cheap or dime stor-ish, when she could feel the blood and the dirt, Adelaide quieted her mind by recalling how to clean the arteries of that poor piglet, how the dye had made the veins hard and discernable, how her fingers softly plowed through that subtaneous fat till it hit those strings of gold, how she would clean the excess tissues away like it was her tongue on chicken wings. How to make the incision slight in the hide of an animal and free a layer of skin, so that she could slide her fingers underneath and rip the rest cleanly. Adelaide did not need to close her eyes for this. She could see it in her mind, the cold, scientific worth of a body, while she read the words before her, the hot, feathery dirt of life, girls being pushed into the red seed of the land by ugly fat men of sixty, feeling the HIV and slow death drain into them, feeling sick in the stomach, the dread of knowing one's imminent demise, daily, daily. A few of the stories wound up in enormous stacks in a woman's attic, a woman who secretly wished she could speed the Uganda nanny some arsenic or bad coke.

Adelaide, despite her valiant reassertion at age twelve, was fastly losing her belief in life as well. God was in the doorway of a very long hall, and she was elbow deep in pig fat.