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had stayed at school later than usual rehearsing graduation exercises. By
the time I got home, there were cops everywhere. There was an ambulance, and two
attendants were wheeling someone out on a stretcher-someone covered. More than
covered. Almost... bagged.
The cops wouldn't let me in. I didn't find out until later exactly what had
happened. I wish I'd never found out. Dad had killed Mom then skinned her
completely. At least, that's how I hope it happened. I mean I hope he killed her first.
He broke some of her ribs, damaged her heart. Digging.
Then he began tearing at himself, through skin and bone, digging. He had managed
to reach his own heart before he died. It was an especially bad example of the kind of
thing that makes people afraid of us. It gets some of us into trouble for picking at a
Reprinted by permission from the author and publisher. ?1987 Omni Publications International, Ltd.
Callaloo 24.2 (2001) 401-418
CALLALOO
pimple or even for daydreaming. It has inspired restrictive laws, created problems
with jobs, housing, schools. The Duryea-Code Disease Foundation has spent millions
telling the world that people like my father don't exist.
A long time later, when I had gotten myself together as best I could, I went to
college-to the University of Southern California-on a Dilg scholarship. Dilg is the
retreat you try to send your out-of-control DGD relatives to. It's run by controlled
DGDs like me, like my parents while they lived. God knows how any controlled DGD
stands it. Anyway, the place has a waiting list miles long. My parents put me on it after
https://www.51lunwen.org/englishpaper.htmlmy suicide attempt, but chances were, I'd be dead by the time my name came up.
I can't say why I went to college-except that I had been going to school all my life
and I didn't know what else to do. I didn't go with any particular hope. Hell, I knew
what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just marking
time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and mark time, why not do it?
The weird part was, I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at
something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
Sometimes I thought about trying suicide again. How was it I'd had the courage
when I was fifteen but didn't have it now? Two DGD parents-both religious, both as
opposed to abortion as they were to suicide. So they had trusted God and the promises
of modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what had happened to
them and trust anything?
I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good
at the sciences-genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry.... That something was
terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became
destructive before we had to-yes, we did produce more than our share of criminals.
And some of us went good-spectacularly-and made scientific and medical history.
These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us. They made discoveries
in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare diseases, made advances in the fight
against other diseases that weren't so rare-including, ironically, some forms of
cancer. But they'd found nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the
latest improvements in the diet, and those came just before