Dolor (Third Coast, Spring / Summer 2020)

Pete twists his knee again during his evening run, limps home and scans a respectable 4.5 on the Dologram, saves his score onscreen to show Patricia when she gets home, not to moan about it, but just to reinforce what he’s been telling her, what his daily runs cost him.  Though when Patricia comes in from the garage an hour later, sipping kombucha, she doesn’t even notice, just straps the Dologram on herself, squints at the screen, says again she thinks something’s wrong with it, that there’s no way this migraine she’s had all goddamn day is just a 3.2.  And after that Pete limps up to his office and Patricia to the bedroom, and they commence their separate orbits for the evening, though they might meet down here later by the Dologram if her headache persists and if his knee is still acting up. 

Pete and Patricia bought their Dologram late, after most people who could afford one already had, a couple of years after the earliest adopters like their neighbor Carri-Ann (finally something to show the doctor's about her fibromyalgia!) or Carlos at Pete’s work who stows his unit under his desk and takes furtive readings throughout the day.  Pete and Patricia resisted the hype, the attention, laughed along with the standup bits and late night show satires.

They were still mostly laughing, still mostly rolling their eyes, when they gave in and bought a unit in some Cyber Monday sale.  They kept the squat machine in the master bathroom at first, hidden between scale and hamper, then for a time in the bedroom, now in the living room, where they can easily show one another the numbers on its golden display. Patricia complains about tripping over it, but Pete likes it there, something comforting when he can’t sleep, how the box lights as he draws near, small face aglow with amber sympathy.

A year later they still make the same, tired jokes.  How Pete will announce, “I’m going to go have a talk with Dolly.”  Or how Patricia’s scores are always lower than she expects.  I mean, how does the fucking thing even work, she continues to ask, even though that’s been explained abundantly in the news and the commercials.  Even though it was the doctors who embraced the tech earliest.  The first place most people saw Dolograms -- the old, bulky ones -- were in hospitals.  First examination rooms, then patient rooms, then nearly everywhere.  And they make sense there, introduce new sorts of order, new hierarchies.  Pete remembers when he dislocated his shoulder last year, was in some agony in the ER but still had to make way for the old guy with the kidney stones and the eye-popping 8.6.  “That gentleman over there needs our help a little more than your husband,” the nurse chided when Patricia complained about being skipped over.  And though Patricia fumed, how can you argue with an 8.6?

If one thing has been made clear post-Dologram, it’s that older people do in fact have it worst.  Pete remembers his mother using their D-gram for the first time, pressing the contacts reluctantly to her temples, pulling on the gauntlet, gasping as it tightened on her wrist.  But then, on the screen, that stark 5.3 -- Pete and Patricia exchanging surprised looks behind her.  They’d thought it was just kvetching, her complaints about the aches and pains.  But there it was, in gold, undeniable digits.  They patted her back and made sympathetic sounds though honestly the old woman didn’t look miserable, looked almost excited, asking to try it again, wondering aloud if she should buy the one at Costco.  “Poor Ma” they repeated in unison, though Pete guessed Patricia was thinking what he was, less about Ma’s troubles and more about what was in store down the road, that idea a little terrifying when you dwelled on it. 

Carri-Ann, their neighbor, is only ten years older than them, but the pains are already mounting, multiplying, besides the fibromyalgia, her arthritis, her colitis, her plantar fasciitis.  She invited them in once to see a high score as if she were showing a golf trophy.  They giggled all the way home, though Pete couldn’t help but remember the woman’s unnerving eyes, something between zealotry and vindication.  And something more, a kind of pride.

 The rare critics keep voicing the same complaints.  That the Dologram can’t read how we receive pain, how we process it, how it accumulates and combines.  How it doesn’t solve the mysteries of pain, can’t account for anomalies like the New Jersey woman who registers a perpetual 6.0+ while insisting she feels nothing wrong or the Indonesian man in the viral videos who shows a sub 1.0 while treading on hot coals or sticking steel pins through his earlobes.  Doloscan, the manufacturer, is developing algorithms to give fuller and more accurate measures, greater context.  Users input their own assessment as to the severity of their pain; the machine learns and adjusts.  Patricia almost likes this idea.  Pete hates it, says it caters to hypochondriacs and whiners.  “There has to be some objective measure, right?  Or what does it even mean?”   

Patricia is most bothered by other things.  “No one who hasn’t been depressed understands what it’s like,” she tells Pete again.  Though Doloscan has promised a new emotional suffering module, says the prototypes show great promise, she’s unconvinced.  “They’re going get people killed.  They’re going to tell them that their pain isn’t real.  And people are going to die.”  She sends Pete online articles that argue roughly the same thing.  Peter skims them, can’t summon up the interest she has. 

And what about all the other things it doesn’t measure, Patricia continues?  How it feels to be the only African-American or Latina or Asian in a room?  Or a woman in an unlit street.  Somebody gay.  Somebody disabled.  Someone abused -- the constant background hum of trauma.  All of these hurts combining, magnifying.   

“It’s only designed to measure the sensation of pain,” Pete says helplessly, repeating what the Doloscan people always say.  “Not the experience.”  And though that doesn’t quite satisfy either, it does shut Patricia up for a while.  Or at least they can move on to argue about other things.

 A few days after his knee is better, Pete throws his back out again cleaning the pool.  He’s warned Patricia this might happen (why can’t the pool kid come weekly?) and now it has, and he’s not happy, so he leaves his score, a 5.1, up on the Dologram screen where Patricia will surely see.  Later, when he hears the garage door and limps downstairs, leaning on the bannister, he sees that she’s taking her own reading, staring unhappily at the display.

“Did you see it?  My score there.”  Pete descends, winces, descends some more.  But Patricia isn’t paying attention. 

“3.6.”  She’s clutching her middle.  “This is such bullshit,” she huffs.

“You must have cleared it -- my score that was there.”  Pete sighs.  “It was a 5.1.  My back.”  He breathes in, jolts, shudders.  “I was trying to clean the pool and --”

 “This can’t be right.  This is like the worst I’ve ever had.  I took four Midol, and they haven’t even put a dent in it.”  Patricia bats the machine’s side.  “There’s something wrong with this thing.  It’s all a scam.”

“I’m just saying we should probably save the score that’s on the screen before we put a new one up.  I mean, that feels like basic courtesy, right?  I mean, doesn’t it?”  And it’s maybe Pete’s back or maybe the fact he hasn’t slept well that has made his voice rise, has made Patricia turn and sharply glare then stalk away.  It will be another wordless evening, though that might be better than the alternative, staring at their separate tablets while they half-watch the only TV show they can agree upon. 

 But for now Pete’s alone with Dolly, the amber glow flickering on as he eases his suffering body into the chair next to it.  He takes another measurement – only a 3.9 now – and feels disappointed.  Maybe embarrassed.  Maybe a little betrayed too by these numbers on the Dologram’s serene, golden face.  Surely it’s got to be worse than that?  He bends a little, twists his torso, feels the tug and bite as the muscles spasm.  He measures again.  Up to 4.0 now.  But what’s become of that lost 1.1, he wonders, clears the score because there’s no point in saving anything this paltry.  Maybe Patricia’s right that there is something wrong with their unit.  Maybe they should trade it in for one of the newer, more accurate models.  Or maybe they should get rid of it altogether. 

A few of Pete and Patricia’s friends, even some of the earliest adopters, have ditched their Dolograms, brag now about their unencumbered lives, the satisfaction of facing their suffering unquantified.  Though some of them, like Carlos at work, reverted back soon after – Carlos frowning again down between his knees at that box jammed in there.  And even the others, after all the bragging, don’t look entirely convinced, look uncertain, even troubled, maybe because, even if they don’t know the numbers anymore, they do know that there are numbers.

In early evening Pete decides to go out for a walk to stretch his sore back, sees too late their neighbor, Carri-Ann, heading for him, on an intercept course he can’t evade.  Has she been watching from her window, he wonders, waiting for someone to pass?

She’s coming at him with the new portable unit, the deluxe mini, the one that straps on your forearm like a bracelet.  She waves it before his eyes, the little box, but he doesn’t have his right glasses on and can’t read the number she shows him.  He winces anyways and shakes his head.  “Oh.  Wow.”   

“So that’s what I’m dealing with today.”  Carri-Ann taps the little screen.  There’s something urgent in her gaze -- that zealotry that scares Pete a little.  “That’s what I’m feeling right now.”

“Wow,” he says again. 

“Do you want to try it?” she asks.

Pete thinks of refusing, but he is a little curious, lets her strap it on him, the smooth grip of the rubber, the polite cool of the metal contacts.  Carri-Ann looks at the number that appears and hisses in a breath, clucks her tongue.  And Pete feels guilty now for the times they’ve mocked her, thinks that Carri-Ann isn’t so bad.  She just wants a witness to her pain.  There’s nothing ridiculous about that.  And up close, Carri-Ann’s deluxe mini isn’t as ridiculous as it looked in the commercial that he and Patricia guffawed at where peppy seniors speedwalk around parks and handsome doctors offer minis in their palms like magi bearing gifts.  And it really is just his Dolly in miniature, isn’t it?

And so Pete nods and winces and sympathizes with Carri-Ann, and Carri-Ann listens to Pete too, listens in a way no one has in a while, with attention, with seriousness, biting her lip in the way he wishes Patricia would do just once or twice when he shows her a particularly high score.  “Poor you,” Carri-Ann says to him, squinting down at the number on the little box bound about Pete’s wrist.  “Oh God.  Poor you.”