iodine 131

i'm radioactive is what she says on wednesday. this is not a surprise. the middle sister has been preparing for this a while. she has been eating a special diet designed to direct the radioactivity that will seep into her body. her thyroid already knows what to do. it is waiting to soak up radioactive iodine as soon as she is ready. and so, on wednesday morning, her doctor opens a steel canister and then opens another bottle inside the canister. he shakes a pill out into her hand. he is wearing gloves. he doesn't touch the pill. he shouldn't. it is i-131. it has a halflife of eight days. but she swallows the pill and it sneaks its way into her cells looking for things to destroy. if it does its job well, the iodine will attack small tumors clumped up around her thyroid gland. bullies, these things have been gnawing at her poor, exhausted thyroid gland, sidling up to her trachea, shoving veins and arteries out of their way.

because the middle sister has come unacceptably close to death during a routine procedure in the past, there is a part of me that is scared that she has decided to become radioactive on purpose. but she has been talking about herself as something close to a science experiment now for a few weeks and the part of me that is made up of desire for scientific knowledge steps up and asks did you use the geiger counter yet? before i even think to ask how she feels.

she tells me she does not yet have the geiger counter, but it is on the way. i think about radiation sickness. i think about hair falling out and skin turning ashen. i think of eyeless zombies shuffling away from the burned remains of hiroshima and nagasaki. the middle sister is so far away and i can't see her to tell whether she is suffering but then she sends the photo. it is the geiger counter, blurry and yellow and looking a great deal like a relative of the old blue metal detector our dad has had our entire lives. there is a phone jack of some sort in the lower corner and a spectacular gauge at the top with a needle that, in the photo, is swung as far over to the right as it can get without falling clear off the gauge. i ask if she has any superpowers yet. she says not yet, although she hopes her spit will eventually be able to destroy the ivy marauding in her flower bed. she is not yet thinking like someone with superpowers.

she devours lemon drops because they are supposed to help. she sends updates on her status. i have begged her to let her child record the radioactivity of her poop over the course of this experiment and then record the level of his own poop as a control. i insist on normative data. what good does it do to measure the radioactivity of her own poop if she doesn't know what normal poop radiation levels are? she is not sure this is a good idea, but i know in the end the child is likely to wave the geiger counter over the toilet before every flush in the house, just to be thorough. he is like us. he will not want to miss this opportunity.

when i finally get around to asking how she feels she says she is a little tired. a day later, her salivary glands are swelling some. she continues to report. because she is temporarily a dangerous radioactive creature, she is isolated. she cannot touch anyone. making herself into this experiment takes the edge off the tedium. the geiger counter is overwhelmed. it has, somewhere on its insides, a tube full of inert gas. noble gas. maybe argon. maybe neon. maybe even helium. when they get up next to radiation, these gasses become, for a bit, ionized. they become conductive. the machine somehow translates the response of the ionized gas as a measure of the radiation around it. i like to think the tube is filled with argon because it is beautiful, glowing violet when electrified.

the middle sister sends texts with times and dates and distances. the radiation seems to be finding her thyroid gland. it seems to be zeroing in. she takes a shower. when she steps out, the shower does not register radiation but she does. it does not wash off. although she will only be poisonous to those she loves another day or two, she will continue to shed an invisible radioactive trail for a while. she will be a science experiment for some time. she is not worried.

this is no surprise. in this family we are children of the wild center of the country, folks whose words will sometimes roll into extra syllables. you can see spooklight and tornadoes and lead mines swirling in our blood. we are from a state with the insistent motto show me. we are science experiments and experimenters to begin with. it has always been this way and that has always been fine. show me.

but it is the middle sister who is radioactive. right now. this very minute. the geiger counter knows it. i imagine her tomorrow at dusk standing in her yard. it is warm and there are bats flying low to catch the first of the season's bugs. she is glowing. supernatural. she spits on the ivy tentatively and it hisses and sizzles.