The Human Body Read Online Free PDF Page A

seem different to you. Spotless as those in a hospital. And the faucet. When you see a faucet like this again, you’ll feel like licking it.”
    Ietri nods. His heart is pounding like mad.
    â€œBut it won’t last long. At first it all seems magical when you get back. Then it goes back to being what it is. Crap.”
    Ballesio tugs on the towel roll, but the dispenser is stuck. He swears, then rubs his wet palms on his pants. He nods his head toward the corporal. “I can’t manage with scissors,” he says. “My wife bought me a nail clipper. Only thing is, it leaves rough edges.”
    When Ietri returns to the airport terminal, he’s furious. He looked like a fool in front of the colonel and it’s all his mother’s fault.
    She stretches her neck to check his fingernails. “Why did you only cut them on one hand? I told you I should do it. Pigheaded—that’s what you are! You can’t do it with your left hand. Come on, let’s go.”
    Ietri pushes her away. “Leave me alone.”
    The woman looks at him sternly, shakes her head, then starts rummaging in her handbag. “Here. Eat this—you have bad breath.”
    â€œWill you stop it? Shit!” the corporal hollers. He knocks her hand away. The candy falls to the floor and he stamps on it with his boot. The green sugar shatters. “Happy now?”
    Di Salvo and his family turn to watch them, and out of the corner of his eye Ietri notes that even Cederna has turned around.
    He doesn’t know what’s gotten into him.
    Two teardrops well up in his mother’s eyes. Her mouth is open, the upper lip trailing a resilient strand of saliva, and her lower lip is trembling a little. “I’m sorry,” the woman whispers.
    Before now she’s never apologized to him. Ietri is torn between wanting to shout at her that she’s a stupid imbecile and the urge to bend down and pick up the slivers of candy one by one and piece them back together. He feels his troop mates’ eyes on him, judging him.
    I’m a man now, and I’m going to war
.
    Later he won’t remember if he actually said it or if he just thought it. He grabs his backpack and throws it over his shoulder. He kisses his mother briefly on the cheek, one side only. “I’ll be back soon,” he says.

The Security Bubble
    S ecurely stored in Lieutenant Egitto’s cabinet, though with the key handy in the lock, is a personal stockpile of medications, the only ones in the dispensary not recorded in the inventory register. Besides a few over-the-counter drugs for short-lived ailments and some totally ineffective ointments for flaking skin, there are three bottles of yellow-and-blue antianxiety capsules. The bottles are not labeled and one is just about empty. Egitto takes sixty milligrams of duloxetine in the evening before going to the mess hall, as he has for almost a year; it seemed to him that most of the unwanted side effects were worked off during sleep that way, starting with sleep itself, which hit him like a ton of bricks and rarely allowed him to stay up later than ten o’clock. When he first started taking the pills, he had experienced just about all the side effects mentioned in the explanatory leaflet for antidepressants, from acute headaches to loss of appetite, from intestinal bloating to intermittent nausea. The most bizarre of all was a severe numbness of the jaw, like when you yawn too wide. He’s past all that, however. Just as he’s past showing any trace of the shame he felt at the beginning, when he felt like a loser for taking the capsules, like a drug addict, the same shame that led him to slip the pills out of the blister packs and transfer them into unlabeled bottles. For some time now, Egitto has accepted his defeat. He’s discovered that hidden within him is a vast, soothing amiability.
    The serotonergic drug performs to perfection the task for which it was created,