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The Virtues of Vulnerability
 The Virtues
of Vulnerability
Humility, Autonomy, and
Citizen-Subjectivity

S A R A RU SH I N G

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rushing, Sara, 1972– author.
Title: The virtues of vulnerability : humility, autonomy, and citizen-subjectivity / Sara Rushing.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019492 (print) | LCCN 2020019493 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197516645 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197516669 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Vulnerability (Personality trait)—Political aspects. | Humility—Political aspects. |
Autonomy (Psychology) | Political participation—Psychological aspects. | Civics.
Classification: LCC BF698.35.V85 R87 2021 (print) | LCC BF698.35.V85 (ebook) | DDC 179/.9—dc23
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 Preface

Embodied Awakenings: On Love, Loss, and

Learning to Be Human

[W]hile philosophy may begin in wonder that things are the way
they are (Aristotle), may be a preparation for death (Plato), or may
be the acceptance of finitude, much political theory begins with loss.
Loss animates it as an enterprise and forms its problematic.
—Peter Euben, “The Politics of Nostalgia and Theories of Loss”1

In many ways the story I tell through this book, like so many other contem-
porary American political narratives, originates in the fall of 2001. But it was
inaugurated by, and its arguments take shape through, much more personal
contexts than 9/11. While September 11 was a moment of profound national
shock and trauma that I shared in as an American, and a human (albeit one
who experienced that event from a distance), it was October 29 that I regard
as the day this project started. On that day, my twenty-five-year-old brother
committed suicide. On that day, I began a crash course in traumatic loss and
grief. While at the time I could intellectually appreciate the ensuing national
discourse on the need for public rituals of mourning and the politics of grief
in waning democracies, I also felt utterly removed from it. Occasionally
I even felt incensed by the ability of theorists to abstractly theorize loss or
deploy trauma as a heuristic. Too miserable and lonely at home, though,
I would drag myself to campus and sit in my crowded graduate student office,
knitting loudly and feeling proprietary over suffering, and also hoping that
no one could see me.
When someone you love commits suicide, people sometimes ask, “Were
you surprised?” I used to find this question so personal, odd, and aggres-
sive. Did I know it was coming, and still fail to prevent it? After some time,
however, I came to think about it differently. Was I surprised? Maybe not.
Shocked to the core of my being in a way that escapes words, yes. It is amazing
how shocking something perhaps unsurprising can be! For can you really be
surprised by the suicide of a young person who has struggled with mental
viii Preface

illness for many years already, who has recently undergone his first involun-
tary commitment to a mental health facility, who is frenetically bright and
poignantly creative and can only see a future of dull and always ending jobs,
who occasionally believes he’s Jesus and gives away all his stuff, who thinks
he is entitled to so much more from the world and also nothing at all? Can
one be surprised, when these are not uncommon dimensions of young white
male mental illness in America? I don’t know. What I do know, at this point, is
that my foray into shock and grief deeply shaped how I encounter the world,
not only as a sister, daughter, friend, mother, or partner, but as a feminist and
political theorist interested in citizen-subjectivity, self-determination, and
bodily and psychic vulnerability.
As Judith Butler tells us about mourning,

There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of

loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. One can try to choose it,
but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at
some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant
ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this
way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll en-
deavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit
by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and
finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not
know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own
project, one’s own knowing and choosing.2

Captured here is the connection between the deconstituted subject, the con-
tingent self and its thoroughly relational identity, the grieving body in pain,
the peculiar punctuation of death time, and what we might call, in the lan-
guage of Lauren Berlant, the cruel optimism of “choice.”3 Grief has little in-
terest in our (extensively socially produced) desire for choice and control.
When we are finally fed up with grieving, after months or years of feeling
bone-weary, unreliable, cranky, bored, six inches off the ground as we float
through the days, and we say to grief “No more!” or “Enough already!” or
“Fuck this!”4—grief is deaf. When we are good grievers, patient and nice
enough to others despite our pain, working the five stages, setting some goals
for becoming human again, making a “grief plan” based on researching the
grief trajectory of successful grievers we interview—grief is unimpressed.
Years later I can laugh at this sentence, and the endearing if misguided ways
 Preface ix

one might attempt to manage failed autonomy under the humiliating forces
of grief. But at the time I had no idea. With one phone call from the San
Francisco Police Department I was set on the path to awareness of the extent
to which I had dwelled, until that moment unwittingly (even hubristically!),
in a blissful delusion of sovereignty.5 A wish turned into an illusion, as Freud
tells us.
Why do I describe as “humiliating” this sudden embodied awakening to
the extreme vulnerability that grief exposes, perhaps particularly grief from
traumatic loss? Assuming for a moment that my brother’s suicide was not my
fault (an assumption I believe intellectually is accurate, and bodily churn over
still), why does the very fact of exposure give rise to feelings of something
like shame or embarrassment? Suicide carries a stigma, of course. When you
tell someone that a beloved died of suicide and not, say, cancer, their sym-
pathy is always (in my admittedly subjective experience) intermixed with a
grimace that conveys the horror of such things. Sometimes this is a knowing
grimace—the cringe of familiarity. Dear reader, you may or may not know
this, but it turns out that a lot of people commit suicide. Still, it was many
years before I was able to answer the question “How did your brother die?”
without being wracked by a deep desire to respond to the inquisitor, “Don’t
look at me!”6
Etymologically “humiliation” derives from the Latin root humus—lowly,
earthy, on or of the ground. The word “humility” shares this root, though
within the tradition of virtue ethics humility as a character trait becomes
something we can actively cultivate in ourselves, and should, because
it is figured as good for the bearer of the trait (hence its status as a virtue,
for Confucius at least if not exactly for Aristotle, as I explore in Chapter 2).
Humiliation, in contrast, is something done to us. We get humiliated, or are
made to be humiliated, often by others but also possibly by our own actions,
exposures, and failures. Humiliation is a feeling, or a condition (ideally rare
and temporary). Humility is better grasped as a disposition. Part of the story
I tell in the following chapters is about how humility can be (indeed, must
be!) uncoupled from humiliation, in a way that I argue can allow vulnera-
bility to become a route to a form of autonomy and not, as we typically con-
sider it, an obstacle to autonomy. As this preface seeks to show, my stakes in
this venture are real and personal. But this project, of rethinking humility in
relation to autonomy, also makes a broader intervention into important con-
temporary debates about vulnerability and embodied agency within political
theory, philosophy, feminist theory, critical race theory, disability studies,
x Preface

and, as the chapters ahead make clear, healthcare under the pressures of neo-
liberal medicalization.
Some time a few years after my brother’s death something in me shifted,
and I went from wanting to be invisible in my grief—to retreat into myself
and tell people to “Look away!”—and started looking at it, marveling at it,
wanting to share it as a constitutive part of my humanity in all its humility.
There are no silver linings here, and the conditions for making such a psy-
chic shift are, I fully acknowledge, extensive and entail all sorts of privilege
(therapy, unconditional love, time off from work, a partner who does their
share and then some, a family of origin with a dark sense of humor, the cur-
rency of whiteness and the cushion of middle classness, etc.). Yet I now see
that I was set on a transformative, if initially unwelcome, path. In making
my way along that path and slowly learning to chart its course (just a little
bit, on the good days), I came to see its profound value for me as a human.
The word “human” shares the “hum” with humility, and comes from the
Latin humanus or homo—earthly beings, as opposed to the gods of the sky.
In the introduction to Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway tells us of
the chthonic creatures she will orient her exploration around, beings of the
earth that “romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with the sky-gazing
Homo.”7 Haraway’s beings are always among the earthly, not the gods of the
earth who were sent, as the Bible tells and as John Locke shored up again
later, to subdue the earth and rule over it.
As Haraway unpacks and critiques this story, the human came to think of
himself (if not herself) as the exceptional critter, and the hero. But the project
of subduing and ruling over—the quest for mastery of self through domina-
tion of nature—hasn’t gone very well. The Anthropocene tale is a futile one.
We need a new story, Haraway persistently, insistently reminds us. I share her
impulse, though I explore new ways of thinking about the human vis-à-vis
humility, relationality, and the quest for autonomy in the context of a dif-
ferent aspect of late modern power/knowledge at work on and through the
body. As the introductory chapter ahead outlines, the site of my analysis is
“the clinic.”
My journeys in the clinic did not begin with my brother, exactly. He did a
forty-eight-hour stint against his will at a mental health facility in Berkeley,
where, in a move that fascinates and delights me, a janitor suggested he read
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. (“Have you heard of this guy?” he asked
me later. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” I answered gingerly, trying not to be the
know-it-all big sister who not only commits you to a mental institution
 Preface xi

against your will, but also brags about what she’s read.) My brother was
working on finding a psychiatrist, but without much luck (thanks, Foucault).
As for myself, I had been to therapy after my parent’s divorce as a kid, done
my yearly wellness visits with primary care doctors, and had a broken arm
that required surgery and physical therapy (OK, and there are plenty of other
bumps in the road that I am leaving out). But it wasn’t until I was pregnant
with my daughter, at thirty-five, that I found myself caught up in the world
of obstetric medicine for patients of “advanced maternal age,” in a way that
worked on my consciousness by way of much contact with and surveillance
of my apparently geriatric body. I do not miss peeing in a cup.
I will end this preface, then, with a story of my February 2007 trip to the
perinatologist, a lovely man in Eugene, Oregon, who was so firmly committed
to respecting my autonomy as to be useless! The question I felt ill equipped
to answer, based on having zero personal experience with the matter, was
whether to have an amniocentesis to test for genetic disorders because of my
elderly status. If possible, I preferred to avoid having a large needle inserted
through my abdomen into my amniotic sac, with a chance of miscarriage.8
The risk of loss, my sense of the extreme precarity of pregnancy and life more
generally, and my fear of being exiled again in the land of grief were visceral.
The doctor gave me a lot of statistics weighing various risks (none psychic, it
bears mentioning), and asked me what I wanted to do. I asked him what he
thought I should do, given the details of my health, age, and family history.
He gave me all the statistics again, and some additional ones, and again asked
me what I wanted to do. I asked him what he would counsel me to do if I was
his daughter and he was, say, a perinatologist. He laughed, and said he really
couldn’t advise me on what to do, and blah blah blah patient autonomy and
so on, and began to give me the statistics again. The statistics said “yes” to the
procedure, but my belly said “no,” and the doctor said nothing particularly
helpful. My partner was there too, and he didn’t know what to say, for which
I fault him not at all! But what to do?
I went with my gut, or my belly (or my deep desire to avoid the needle, and
loss), and all was fine in the end. Yet I left that foray into the clinic with a pro-
found sense that while I was a relatively educated person who valued my own
agency and was personally and politically invested in self-determination,
I was also confused. And, perhaps paradoxically, I felt like my autonomy was
not served by the doctor’s firm commitment to leaving the choice entirely up
to me. Dude, just tell me what to do! The quest for agency (autonomy) and
deference to authority (which calls for a certain humility) seemed to me in
xii Preface

that moment not to be opposites, but to be fundamentally interdependent.

That hunch, that nagging embodied sense, became the ideational basis for
this project.
Grief I have known, and birth I have done (first in a hospital, and then in
my living room). The other chapters of this book are personal in different
ways. Hospice for the slow dying of long-term illness is something that, per-
haps strangely, I now find myself hoping to be lucky enough to experience
with my parents (and maybe, way down the road, myself). Yet I am terrified
of wading into those waters unprepared as my parents age. They might prefer
a quick death, but selfishly I want time to process. So far no one is sick, but
death is unavoidable. Treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for
combat-wounded veterans vexes me as a citizen. It’s easy for it not to be per-
sonal, because most of the veterans I know are students, and they come and
go, and are seeking a college degree often for a future beyond the military,
and they typically don’t tell me about their PTSD unless they really have to.
But the numbers are stark, and that is on all of us. So despite feeling totally
unqualified to write about veterans, I wrote about veterans.
As the introductory chapter maps out, this is a very interdisciplinary pro-
ject that seeks to make contributions to an array of literatures and debates.
In that sense, I wrote this book as a political theorist, and I hope it speaks
to scholars within and beyond my discipline, as well as to healthcare
practitioners and administrators. But I also wrote this book as my brother’s
sister (and my sisters’ sister), my children’s mother, my partner’s partner, my
parents’ daughter, my friends’ friend, my neighbors’ neighbor—a person
whose identity and agency, past and future, are deeply imbricated with
others, in a relational network that brings much joy, meaning, inevitable loss,
and pain. So mostly, I hope this book speaks to readers as humans, in all their
vulnerability, with their aspirations for autonomy, in relation to each other,
in ways that always require humility; and humility not as the result of humil-
iation, but as a cultivated disposition toward being human, and thus a route
to meaning, connection, courage, hell-raising, and humor on the path from
birth to death.
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 Acknowledgments

This book was long to gestate. Needless to say, an extensive community of

scholars, friends, and family supported its delivery into this world, including
many people along the way willing to share with me their stories of love and
loss, and of birth, death, and illness.
From the day I got to graduate school, Keally McBride has endlessly
encouraged me. David Gutterman popped into my office when I was
adjuncting at Linfield College and asked if I wanted to co-author something
on suffering, Socrates, and Judith Butler, and got me to finish a dissertation
I was ready to ditch. James Martel, who endured my youthful (over)enthu-
siasm when editing an essay he wrote for Critical Sense, a graduate theory
journal at Berkeley, has repaid my haughtiness with kindness and insight.
Keally and James provided detailed feedback on virtually this whole manu-
script, for which I’m deeply grateful.
Some early helpful comments were provided by Wendy Brown, Mary
Dietz, and Kathy Ferguson. Others who have been unfailingly supportive are
Libby Anker, Cristina Beltrán, Mark Button, Heath Davis, Karen de Vries,
Shirin Deylami, Kennan Ferguson, Farah Godrej, Bonnie Honig, Vicki
Hsueh, Bridget Kevane, J. J. McFadden, Claire McKinney, Matt Moore, Tracy
Osborn, Heather Pincock, Shalini Satkunanandan, Leah Schmalzbauer,
Nichole Shippen, George Shulman, Simon Stow, and Andrew Valls. And so
many others!
I’m grateful to Michaele Ferguson, Anna Daily, and Tamar Malloy for
facilitating a lively engagement with the theory crew at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. I also benefited from presenting at University of Nevada,
Reno; Western Washington University; the Montana State University
Honors College; and Amherst College, the last of which was particularly
lovely because attended by my undergraduate advisor at Mount Holyoke,
Steve Ellenburg.
Steve Angel and Michael Slote helped me immeasurably during an
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar at
Wesleyan College on Virtue Ethics and Confucianism; as did Howard
xiv Acknowledgments

Curzer, Ben Huff, Heidi Giebel, and others who reconvened in Bozeman and
then Beijing.
My sincerest thanks to Angela Chnapko and Alexcee Bechthold at Oxford
University Press for helping turn an unwieldy manuscript into a real, live
book, not least by selecting two thoughtful and detailed external reviewers
whose feedback was invaluable.
The Association for Political Theory has supported my flourishing and
this project over the past years, by including me as a conference participant
(where I benefited from amazing co-panelists and discussants, and got to
know senior people in the field whom I might not have otherwise met) and
giving me the opportunity to serve my discipline.
At Montana State University I am extremely lucky and grateful to have a
department full of colleagues who are curious and kooky in the best way.
They are critical readers, teaching mentors, and engaged citizens; they are
confidantes, skiing partners, surrogate aunties/babysitters, and advocates for
(my) pay equity. Their support of me as a parent, scholar, and activist over the
past decade has been profound. Thank you, David Parker, Linda Young, Liz
Shanahan, Eric Austin, Paul Lachapelle, Eric Raile, Franke Wilmer, Kelsey
Martin, and Holly Watson.
Other thanks for sustaining me all these years goes to the Berkeley kids—
Laura Henry, Jill Hargis, Brian Duff, and Maria Rosales. My head and my
heart are so much the richer for our friendship. I am eternally grateful to
Hargis for dragging me out of bed so many mornings after my brother died,
and making me jog my way through grief. Thanks also to Ellie and John
Larison; Wyatt Cross and Elizabeth Reese; D’ana Baptiste, Jen Jordan, and
the Yelapa crew; Rebecca and Andy Bunn; Steve and Coco Kirchhoff; and the
Westridge/Circle Drive neighborhood gang.
Above all, I am grateful to my family: thank you to my Dad and Step-mom,
Travis and Julie Rushing, and my stepsisters, Dee Dee, Stephie, and Carrie.
To Sam, Rena, and Leslie Powell, Jacob and Elise, and Steven Stoll. Thank you
to Augusta, Ben, and Will, the three amazing creatures whom I get to call my
children. You never cease to delight and challenge me, and are the greatest
things that ever happened to me! To my love, Scott Powell, my partner on
this journey, who constantly runs interference and without whom I could not
have finished this book, or a whole lot of other things. To my sister, who is
one of the funniest, smartest, weirdest, loudest, kindest people I could ever
hope to share my life with, and who loves me enough to call me her “favorite
living sibling.” Jill Rushing Fonte, you complete me. To my mom, Diane
 Acknowledgments xv

Wolff Rushing, who is my greatest supporter and honestly seems to think

I can do whatever I put my mind to, with the proper balance of humility and
autonomy. It’s a powerful elixir and a profound form of love. And finally, to
Travis Parker Rushing (1976–2001), without whom this project would not
have happened (and I say that, Tip, in the snarkiest, most loving, saddest, and
most grateful big-sister way possible).
 1
The Body as a Site of Politics
On Choice and Control

Democratic theory, with important exceptions, counts voting and

open rebellion as “political” actions, for example, but neglects or
dismisses the constitution of citizens in the therapeutic, discipli-
nary, programmatic, institutional, and associational activities of
everyday life.
—Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower1

The body has long posed a problem for Western thought. It has represented
the locus of need and dependence and been the source of our loss of control,
our slavery to appetites and passions, our susceptibility to impingement by
others we do not choose, our subordination, our annihilation. Bodies, we
learn, are humiliating. Yes, the body is also the site of desire, pleasure, con-
nection to the world, a vehicle for heightened consciousness, and, for some,
autonomy. But Christianity, and Plato before that, provided an enduring
claim that in many ways Western thought has yet to transcend: the body is
a prison.
Within the liberal tradition, the impulse to manage and capitalize on this
problem turned the body into the site of rights and the source of economic
value; one’s dominion, tool, and property. Contemporary critical theory,
particularly feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability
studies, has done much to critique both liberal individualism and the sov-
ereign body as abstraction. All these literatures have focused attention on
what Judith Butler has called “the disavowed dependency at the heart of the
masculinist idea of the body,”2 and threads within each discourse have per-
sistently reminded us that the normative body is not only “able,” straight, and
male, but also white, wealthy, and “of sound mind.”

The Virtues of Vulnerability. Sara Rushing, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516645.001.0001.
2 Virtues of Vulnerability

Disability studies scholarship has perhaps gone furthest in depicting de-

pendence and vulnerability as paradigmatic, not exceptional, and thus artic-
ulating the problem not as one of certain kinds of bodies, but of cultural
mythologies and inhospitable environments; psychic and built worlds that
create obstacles to access and inclusion.3 Such barriers often are not insur-
mountable as design or engineering problems, but as matters of public and
political will (including willful ignorance about infrastructural and norma-
tive impediments to full participation in public life).4 Feminist care ethics
has similarly centered dependence and located the problem not in bodily
fragility itself but in a world of social and economic structures that render
relationality and caring responsibilities private, invisible, and of low value.5
And critical race theory (particularly Afro-Modern and black feminist
theory) has centered the body, dependence, and vulnerability, but deployed
the concept of intersectionality to demand recognition that, while these
human conditions are universal, embodiment and how body meets world
admits of crucial variation for those whose bodies are traditionally the source
of subordination.6
These critical, problem-centered theories persistently call our attention to
the fact that the body, as the material entity that both connects us to and
separates us from each other, functions as a crucial site of contestation and
negotiation. And yet, while recognizing the significance of relationality, in-
terdependence, and how body meets world, all of these discourses main-
tain commitments to individual bodily integrity and self-determination.
Feminist political activism (particularly activism oriented around reproduc-
tive rights) has been especially vocal about affirming a certain ideal of self-
possession, or the idea that “my body is mine,” as crucial for emancipatory
projects.7
The body, political theorists well know, has long served as a metaphor for
the structure and relations of the polis. But embodiment—the lived reality
of “body-in-situation,” as Iris Marion Young (following Beauvoir) described
it, or the social and material configurations of the body that Elizabeth
Povinelli calls “enfleshments”—is something that political theory has fre-
quently bracketed when theorizing citizenship, agency, and the category of
“the human.”8 As Samantha Frost writes in Biocultural Creatures, “so much
of what drove the old project of the human was a revolt against embodiment,
against the animality, the organismic, the materiality of human creaturely ex-
istence.”9 The disembodied rational, autonomous subject of liberalism lent
itself well to the democratic individualism that Tocqueville pointed to in the
 The Body as a Site of Politics 3

1830s, when he wrote about Americans that “They owe nothing to any man,
they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always consid-
ering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their
whole destiny is in their own hands.”10 While perhaps a bit of a caricature,
this hubristic sentiment has had many robust iterations in U.S. history.
Against this tendency, how might we reimagine the political potential of
embodiment, or make space for considering what I call “the virtues of vul-
nerability”? I explore this question here on a journey through medicalized
encounters with birth, death, and illness. These are moments of profound
bodily vulnerability, but also sites where we are hailed as certain kinds of
agents. Subjected within the dominant cultural and medical-institutional
discourse of “choice and control,” we find ourselves having to navigate com-
plex, overlapping systems of power and knowledge that we may know vir-
tually nothing about. What material and relational conditions and personal
traits might make this journey through what sociologist Wendy Simonds has
called “Hospital Land USA” more, or less, empowering?11 What might make
our experience of extreme bodily vulnerability there fortifying and not (or
not merely) threatening? Through detailed examinations of birth, death, and
illness, I argue that refigured conceptions of the ethical virtues of humility
and autonomy—uncoupled from humiliation and radical independence,
respectively—would serve us well as we navigate complex orders of enfleshed
contemporary life, from institutionalized healthcare to democratic partici-
pation in the polity proper.
One aim here, then, is to leave readers with a new conception of “humility-
informed-relational-autonomy.” I will consider this book at least partly suc-
cessful if you are no longer able to hear “autonomy” without “humility” and
vice versa, both when thinking about “patienthood” and citizenship. The
quest for freedom and self-determination must partner with the recognition
that we’re bound to fail at that project much of the time, as people living in
fleshy bodies over which we never have full control, and as citizens living
and acting in pluralist political bodies, within which we never have full con-
trol. Given these facts of life, humility-informed-relational-autonomy is a
crucial ethico-political disposition, the recognition and cultivation of which
has the potential to make experiences of vulnerability empowering and not
merely threatening. Humility then becomes foundational for a political
subjectivity and a form of agency that takes embodiment as its condition,
not an obstacle to overcome. Put differently, I argue here that while corpo-
real experiences of certain kinds might diminish our sense of ourselves as
4 Virtues of Vulnerability

agents—as people capable, individually and collectively, of challenging and

possibly transforming systems of power we are subjected within—other
encounters with bodily vulnerability, particularly those that entail socially
supported conditions of humility-informed-relational-autonomy, can en-
hance our agency.

On Choice and Control, Life and Loss

In the United States, the problem of bodies is conspicuous in the ongoing

political debate about healthcare. In its most recent incarnation this debate
has revolved around the battle between “Obamacare vs. Trumpcare.” As nu-
merous commentaries on the topic note, the message consistently sent by
those on the right is that the way to avoid trouble is “don’t get sick.”12 In
the words of one Republican member of Congress speaking on CNN, we
should simply decide to be one of “those people who lead good lives, they’re
healthy, they’ve done things to keep their bodies healthy.”13 This comment
tracks a widely circulated 2009 Wall Street Journal editorial in which lib-
ertarian Whole Foods CEO John Mackey said, “Rather than increase gov-
ernment spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor
health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is respon-
sible for his or her own health.”14 Make good choices. Expect nothing from
any man; your destiny is in your own hands. This now decades-long debate
about the American healthcare system lays bare the risks of embodiment and
unsettles any notion that “choice and control” is equally available to all, and
that “choice and control” alone provides a reliable route to “health.”15
Perhaps what distinguishes the current debate about healthcare in
America, however, is the existential anxiety that overlays it, about ideas of
citizenship and security; a sense of impending loss that exceeds the terrain
of healthcare and conjures loss of social and economic progress, of historical
hierarchies of privilege, of legislative politics as we once (perhaps) knew it,
of commitments to democratic culture and tradition more broadly, of any
sense of a shared future, of ways of life and, of course, loss of life itself (lest
we forget Sarah Palin bemoaning Obama’s “death panels”). As Judith Butler
wrote in Precarious Life, “loss makes a tenuous ‘we’ of us all.”16 Butler was
writing about national loss after 9/11; a loss that “we” in America all shared,
albeit in different ways, and that the global community endeavored to share
with us through the statement “We are all America.” In theorizing responses
 The Body as a Site of Politics 5

to 9/11, Butler aimed to persuade us that grief could be channeled by an ethic

of generosity, humility, and restraint, and an acknowledgment of our consti-
tutive human vulnerability, into something other than rage, disavowal, and
ever more violence. Such dispositions, she argued, could enhance, not di-
minish, our relationality and responsibility with each other—could forge a
“we,” however tenuous.
But the losses threatening the populace at this political moment, though
shaping up at the intersection of bodies and democracy—theoretically
things we have in common—will not be shared nationally. This is true partly
because many of the losses (physical and financial) will take place out of the
public eye, in hospital beds and accounts payable offices, hospice centers or
homes; too personal and painful for the grief to register as political, despite
the fact that they will represent systemic healthcare trends, suffered by indi-
viduals but working at the level of populations (some more vulnerable than
others). But the sense of threat that permeates the healthcare debate is also
unlikely to forge a new “we,” however tenuous, because the debate is ideologi-
cally polarized at this point, and many of the prominent voices against social-
ized medicine (or even greater access to privatized care) attach to people who
perceive their bodies as impenetrable and their health as their own doing.
Let’s face it, though: we are all born into bodies that we are utterly inca-
pable of independently sustaining as babies and children, and we all die in
bodies. At some point all humans confront the fragility of corporeal exist-
ence, regardless of whether they “make good choices.” Knowing this, disa-
bility studies scholarship has long urged the centering of the “non-normative”
body, versus the exceptional yet somehow hegemonic ideal of invulnerable
physicality (statistically speaking, dependence and vulnerability are the
norm). In All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability, Kennan
Ferguson invites us to consider all the “ways people begin to deal with issues
of physical disability.”17 He writes, “Your wife develops diabetes, leading to
partial blindness. You give birth to a deaf son. Your daughter’s doctor diag-
noses her with multiple sclerosis. A sports accident paralyzes your sister.
Your elderly father begins to require a scooter or a walker to move outside the
house. Your brother has an epileptic seizure and must decide whether or not
to give up driving.”18 Such experiences belie the idea that individual choice
and control can stave off a life that comes into contact with, or even is deeply
defined by, risk, exposure, potential pain, disability, and the navigation of an
often inhospitable world. Arguably, the intensity of the disavowal of depend-
ency in much of the contemporary debate about healthcare testifies to the
6 Virtues of Vulnerability

realization, on some level, that being of “sound mind and able body” may
be fleeting or out of our control, and that loving other people exponentially
increases our chances of living with that fact.
In this vein, Nancy Hirschmann has framed hostility to disability (and dis-
abled people) as what she calls “a function of fear of the undecidability of
the body.”19 Only a small fraction of disabled people are born that way, so
for the vast majority something likely unexpected happened, which thrust
them into a world that the as-of-yet-able-bodied can only figure as a space
of loss.20 Hirschmann quotes Tobin Siebers’s insight that “In no other sphere
of existence . . . do people risk waking up one morning having become the
persons whom they hated the day before.”21 But she also tempers his point,
noting as Ferguson does that many non-disabled people love and care for
disabled people. Living entails being imbricated with others in bodies that we
don’t control. Thus, to shore up my point about disavowed dependency and
the discourse of “choice and control,” even if my own choices are “right” and
effective, they are only a small part of my life story.
Sometimes a story follows a tidy narrative about a normative lifeline. But
often, as Ferguson and Hirschmann point out, we are confronted with fra-
gility and the deconstitution of the “normal” body and mind when we least
expect it. Maybe the story goes birth (our own), illness (our own), death (our
own). But maybe it goes illness (our own), birth (of another), death (of an-
other)—or any myriad of combinations that might keep us awake at night! In
a sense, I aim to functionally challenge the impulse to a normative timeline
(or the delusion about life’s controllable unfolding) by looking first at birth,
then death, and finally illness. In a sense, as addressed in the preface, it is the
unruliness or potential disorder of life’s path that I seek to grapple with here,
and that I invite readers to consider with me.
Sure, life starts with birth and ends with death. For many people, though,
the two do not represent bookends. For many, I would guess, the un-
varnished confrontation with the risk of death and the idea that the right
“choices” might averat it will occur first at the site of childbirth. Particularly
in hyper-medicalized contexts, death is the pervasive specter that informs
how birthing gets done. Perhaps this has always been the case. While birth
and death may be the two universal facts of life, however, it bears mentioning
that birthing and dying are culturally and historically specific, and even in
the United States alone they have changed dramatically in recent history.
Most people in techno-industrialized Western democracies do not simply
grow old and die anymore, let alone grow old and suddenly drop dead one
 The Body as a Site of Politics 7

day (let alone die in childbirth, though by certain accounts the United States
has the worst maternal mortality rate in the “developed” world, and it is rising
particularly for women of color22). For the vast majority of people lucky
enough to live under more amenable economic and political conditions,
birthing will be safe (if often surgical) and dying will take (and thus allow)
some time, resulting from diseases that, once “terminal,” are now more often
“chronic.”

Health, Citizenship, and Health Citizenship

Many people around the globe, including in the United States, are not lucky
enough to live under conditions of relative prosperity and security. Health
and citizenship (including “second class” citizenship23) are intricately
connected. Access to quality healthcare is impacted by our disparate citizen-
ship locations and statuses. And normative ideals of health are often linked
to racialized, classed, and ableist conceptions of the “good citizen” (robust,
fertile, rational, self-reliant, or, in the United States today, “resilient”).24
Sites within healthcare—the complex medical/moral/religious/epistemic/
legal matrix that Foucault called “the clinic” and that I primarily refer to
as the “medical-legal-policy-insurance nexus”—are sites at which political
subjectivities and agency can shape up.25 Under the rubric of “health citi-
zenship,” scholars and policymakers have traditionally debated about health
as a right of citizens, and being healthy as a responsibility—a moral and ec-
onomic imperative—of citizens to their community, state, or nation. More
recently, the idea of health citizenship has been used to capture dimensions
of patient participation in one’s own care, and in public debates about the
conceptualization and social meaning of a disease or condition and the re-
sources allocated to research and treatment (consider breast cancer, AIDS,
cystic fibrosis, and autism activism, among many other contemporary health
citizenship movements).26
Some scholars now seek to distinguish “health citizenship” from a more
radical and critical conception of “health activism.” Where the former
revolves around rights and responsibilities within the existing medical and
political systems, the latter involves a systems-challenging approach aimed
at contesting the medical paradigm itself and the political, social, legal, ec-
onomic, and insurance structures that bolster it.27 While typically oriented
around a particular disease community, a health activist approach also
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Jerry's recollection flashed to his conversation with Ollie Gibbs, to
the things he had wanted to tell the other man but was unable to
put into words. All the heaviness he had borne alone these many
years was apparent to this mind he enhosted. The alien mind knew.
Knew!
"I see," it said again, though Jerry was unaware of expressing any
conscious thought. "It is clear to me now. You have suffered much—
will suffer much. No hope for you, is there?"
There was warmth in the words—warmth, friendship and
compassionate understanding. Suddenly, to this mind of an alien in
its incongruous, invisible baby's body, Jerry found himself blurting
the things he had never told to any man. Things which no Space
Zoologist had ever discussed even with another member of that
hapless clan.
"They never told us," he said to the alien. "I don't hold any rancor
because of it; they dared not tell us, lest we refuse to become one
with them. They were fair, though. Long before we were
indoctrinated, long before we'd been allowed to attempt our first
Contact, we were told that there were dangers. Not the dangers we
had heard about, such as the imminent peril of dying if the host died
while we were in Contact. Another danger was implied, one which
we could only learn of by actually becoming Learners, and one which
—once we had learned of it—would be impossible to escape.
"With a little thought along the proper lines, we might almost have
guessed it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
One of Newton's laws, applied in an area he did not even suspect
existed.
"Oh, we were a brave, adventurous lot, all of us. We would be
Learners; no alien mind but we could enter it, and actually become
the alien for the period of Contact. Thrills, danger and hairsbreadth
escapes would be ours. Ultimate adventurers, they called us. And all
along, we were fools."
The alien refrained from comment, although Jerry could feel its mind
waiting, listening, assimilating.
"Contact had a drawback. A basic one which we might have
guessed, if we hadn't been going around with stars in our eyes and
a delightful feeling of superiority over the men who would never
know the interior on any minds but their own. In Contact, just as in
sunbathing, there is a delayed reaction, a kickback."
"Sunbathing?" thought the alien.
Jerry's mind swiftly opened for the alien's inspection his full
storehouse of information on the subject. In an instant, the alien
apprehended the fate that lay in wait for the careless Space
Zoologist—

"Sure is warm in here," said Bob, running a finger around inside his
sweat-dampened uniform collar.
"You have to be careful," said Jana, indicating the quartz panes that
formed the ceiling and three walls of the solarium. "The quartz
passes ultraviolet, unlike glass. You can pick up a severe burn if you
sit out here too long without some sort of protection for your skin."
The tech nodded. "The insidious thing about sunburn is that you
only turn a little pink as long as you're out in the sunlight. It's when
you've gone indoors, or the sun has set, or you put your clothes
back on that the red-hot burn begins to show up on your flesh."
"It's the light-pressure," said Jana. "As long as there's an influx of
ultraviolet, the flesh continues to absorb it without showing much
reaction. But as soon as you get away from the rays—the burns
show up.... I wonder how Norcriss is making out."
 IV

"You mean, then," said the alien to Jerry, "that all the experiences
you undergo in Contact are held back under the surface of your
mind, waiting there until you let up on the incoming Contact
experiences?"
"That's it," said Jerry, miserably. "In some of my Contacts, I've
undergone pretty painful experiences. I've had an eye twisted out,
an arm eaten and digested, been poisoned, nearly strangled—you
name a near-death; I've been through it."
"And your reaction?" thought the mind.
"Nil," said Jerry, ruefully. "When I awakened from a Contact, my
memory of my experiences was strictly a mental one. Like something
I'd read in a book. There was no emotional reaction whatsoever. My
heart beat its normal amount, my glands excreted normal
perspiration, my muscles were relaxed. Not a trace of shock or any
other after effect."
"And later?" the mind asked gently.
"Back on Earth," said Jerry, "the Space Zoologists have a thing we
call the Comprehension Chamber. It's a room filled with couches and
helmets, in which we can listen—through replayed microtapes—to all
the Contacts our confreres have ever made. Perhaps 'listen' is a
weak word. For all practical purposes, we are in Contact, so long as
the tape runs. I thought this room was a wonderful adjunct to my
education, but nothing more. I went there a lot at first. It was even
more fun than the real thing because there was no danger of
perishing. Tapes of zoologists who died while in Contact are never
used in the Chamber."
The mind waited, listening patiently.
"So one week—" Jerry's mind gave a mental twinge akin to a
physical shudder—"one week I got bored. I decided not to go to the
Comprehensive Chamber. I went out on a few dates, instead. Tennis,
the movies, like that. And on the third day, I woke in the morning
with a heart trying to pound its way through my ribs, with my
bedsheets dripping with cold perspiration, and lancing agony in my
eye, my hand knotted into a fist of pain, lungs burning for air...."
"Delayed reaction," said the mind.
"Yes," said Jerry. "That was it. I recognized the pains right away,
having been through them personally in Contact only a month before
them. I had a horrible inkling of what was occurring. I called the
medics at Space Corps Headquarters before I passed out. They
came, shot me full of morphine and stuck me into a helmet for
twenty-four hours straight, to cram my reactive agonies back
beneath an overload of vicarious Contacts. It worked pretty well.
The pain was gone when I awakened. But my nerves weren't the
same afterward. I used to look forward to Contacts because I
enjoyed them. Now I look forward to them because I dread what will
happen if I don't have another one in time."
"In time?"

"I find that I must get to a Contact—real or vicarious—at least once

in forty-eight hours. I've been trapped by my job. I'm doomed to do
this job or die horribly. Some men, desperate for escape from this
treadmill, have quit the Corps, tried to battle this kickback-effect.
None of them have made it. They were found, all of them, in various
states of agony. Dead, broken, burnt, torn...."
"Psychosomatic pressures?" asked the mind.
"Yes. Their minds, overborne by their emotions, self-hypnotized
them into re-undergoing their experiences. And their bodies, duped
by their minds, reacted. On a normal man, a hypnotically suggested
burn can raise an actual blister. On a man who's opened his mind to
the Contact-power—his body can break, burn, dissolve or even
evaporate."
"Poor Jerry," said the alien mind, soothingly. A tingle formed slowly
in Jerry's mind, a growing warmth, a vibration of utter affection. He
was being consoled, being loved by the alien. It knew his troubles. It
understood the sorrow of his life. It wanted only to keep him close,
to tell him not to be afraid, to make him happy, comfortable, safe....
Safe, and secure, and—
The glare of silent lightning leaped through Jerry's consciousness,
jerking him back from the unnervingly delightful torpor he'd been
letting overcome his thoughts.
Something hard bumped against his forehead. He realized that he'd
just sat up on the couch, knocking the helmet from his head with
the shock of the breaking Contact.
"Sir!" said the tech, pausing only to snap off the circuit switch before
dashing to his side. "What the hell happened? I never saw you break
Contact like that! Did you see the alien? Can it be destroyed?"
Jerry groaned, tried to speak, then fell back onto the thick padding,
unconscious.
"What's the matter with him?" cried Jana, sensing the fright in the
tech's attitude.
"I don't know," he whispered. "I've never seen him act this way
before. Whatever's out there, it's unlike anything we've ever
encountered before! Here, you get some of your medics up here to
see to him. I'm going to process this damned tape and see what's
what!"
Her face pale, Jana hurried off to do his bidding. The tech began to
reset the machine so that the coded information on the tape might
be translated into legible words.
And Jerry Norcriss lay on the couch, sobbing and groaning like a
man on the rack, although his mind was blanked by merciful
unconsciousness.
"A baby?" choked the tech. "That thing out there is a baby?"
"Does the tape ever lie?" sighed Jerry, relaxing against the plump
white pillows Jana had arranged under his back and shoulders.
"Well, no," faltered the tech. "But a baby! Five hundred feet high—
and invisible—and able to carry on an intelligent conversation?"
"Which reminds me," said Jerry, sternly. "I am going to ask you to
edit both the tape and that typewritten translation of that
conversation. It's just as well too many people don't get the inside
story on my job, and its rather rugged drawback. And as for
yourself.... Well, I can't order you to forget what you've read there."
"I won't talk about it, sir, if that's what you mean," said the tech.
"It's not such a hard secret to keep. All the crewmen on the ship
know there's something pretty awful about your job. I just happen
to know what. All I'd get for spilling the inside dope would be, 'Oh, is
that what it is!' Hardly worth it."
"That's hardly a noble reason to keep a secret," Jerry murmured,
looking narrow-eyed at the tech.
The man grinned, then shrugged. "Makes my life easy, too. Now
when you flare up at me, I'll know why, and skip it."
"Thanks a hell of a lot," Jerry muttered.
The tech laughed aloud.
"But," the zoologist added soberly, "we did learn one surprising
lesson today. The forty-minute Contact period can be broken, under
certain stresses."
The smile left the tech's face, and he looked earnestly puzzled. "I
don't follow you, sir. There was nothing on the tape about—"
"Tape?" said Jerry. "You saw how quickly I came out, didn't you?
What's that got to do with the tape?"
"Sir," the tech said hesitantly, "you were under the helmet for the full
forty."
Jerry flopped back upon the pillows, staring at the other man as if
he'd suddenly gone berserk. "That can't be," he said slowly. "I was
in a long-life host. The clouds weren't even moving. That baby was
living many subjective days in the forty-minute period."
"Begging your pardon, sir," said the tech, "but you must be
mistaken. You were gone the full forty."
"That's impossible," said Jerry.
Jana, who'd been standing back from the two men, stepped forward
cautiously, apprehensive at butting into something that was not
really her affair.
"Excuse me, Lieutenant Norcriss," she said softly, "but Bob's right.
You were gone as long as he says."
"You don't understand, either of you!" Jerry snapped. "My time-
awareness in a host is subject to the host's time-awareness. So far
as this host was concerned, a day was a confoundedly long period.
But I could tell the elapsed time by watching the clouds, the height
of the sun. They didn't move, either of them, visibly...."
"How's that again, sir?" asked the tech. "How long did you seem to
spend?"
"Possibly an hour."
"Well, then." The tech shrugged.
"But this had nothing to do with the host's subjective sense of time,
Ensign. It was my own knowledge of objective time through
watching the sun, the trees, the clouds. None of them moved during
my subjective hour in the host-alien. So no time—or very little time;
barely a few minutes—could have passed while I was enhosted, do
you see?"
"Lieutenant Norcriss," said Jana, abruptly. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but
did you say clouds?"
"Yes," said Jerry, puzzled by her intensity. "Why?"
"There hasn't been a cloud in the sky today," she said awkwardly. "I
mean—Well, look for yourself!"
Jerry turned his gaze upward through the quartz ceiling of the
solarium. The sky, a rich turquoise, was smooth and unbroken save
for the glaring gold orb of the sun, Sirius. He sat up then, looking
out through the likewise transparent walls. As far as he could see,
over storetops, cottage roofs, and distant green glades, the sky was
that same unbroken blue.
"But that's crazy!" he said, sinking back against the pillows. "It
couldn't have been like that all the time I was in Contact. Could it?"
Jana and Bob exchanged an uncomfortable look.
"Well, sir," the tech said, "we weren't exactly watching the sky, if you
know what I mean. But it was clear when you went into Contact.
And it's clear now."
His voice trailed off, uncertainly, but Jerry gave a slow thoughtful
nod. "You're right, Ensign. It is, and it was. The likelihood of its
clouding up for forty minutes, and then clearing again is so
ridiculous I can't even consider it.... And yet, I saw—"
Jerry stopped speaking, and shook his head. Then he waved a hand
at the tech, abstractedly. "Get me some coffee, Ensign. I have to
think, hard."

When nightfall had cloaked the planet in dark purple folds, Jerry was
still gazing intently at nothingness, racking his brain for an answer.
Bob, meantime, had checked the card against the ship's files on
dealing with alien menaces, and had found—much as both he and
Jerry had suspected—that there was no recommendation available.
The menace was new. It would have to be approached strictly ad
libidum. Whatever method served to rid the planet of the menace
would then, not before, be incorporated into the electronic memory
of the brain on the ship, to serve future colonies who might meet a
similar alien species.
"Any ideas, sir?" asked the tech, after a long silence from his
superior.
"None," Jerry admitted, not turning his head. "It's pretty damned
difficult to find a solution to a problem until you're sure what the
problem is."
"Well," said the tech, "we played the radar all over the area where
the tape said the thing was located. We got nothing. Maybe the kid's
mother came back."
"Just a second—" said Jerry. "Ensign, could you rig the machine to
give us, not a written transcript of that alien's description, but a
drawing of it?"
"Jeepers, sir!" choked the tech, taken aback. "I don't know. I'd have
to talk with the engineers."
"It should be possible. Hell, it's got to be. When I was enhosted, my
mind transmitted back every bit of info on that body. A man who
only knew mechanical drawing could sketch that shape, simply by
following the measurement specifications as my mind recorded
them. Go on, Ensign, get with it. One way or the other, I want a look
at what we're dealing with."
It was nearly midnight when Bob shook Jerry gently awake and
handed him a small glossy rectangle of paper.
Jerry, blinking his eyes against the sudden onslaught of light in the
room as the tech threw the wall switch, stared blearily at the paper
for a moment, blank and disoriented.
"It's the picture, sir," Bob said, recognizing the bafflement on his
superior's face for what it was. "I finally had the bright idea of
turning the problem over to the brain, aboard the ship. It followed
the specifications from the tape by drawing the picture in periods."
"In what periods?" Jerry mumbled, still trying to come awake.
"Not time-periods, sir. Punctuation. Then, when it had the thing
done, on a ten-by-fourteen-inch sheet of feed-paper from its roller, I
had the ship's photographer take a snapshot and reduce it in size, so
it looks at least as good as the average newspaper half-tone job."
Jerry nodded, absorbing the information even as his eyes crept over
the image in his hands. "Looks strangely familiar," he said, studying
it closely.
"If you'll pardon what sounds like a gag, sir," began the tech, "I
think that the picture—in fact, we all think—"
"Yes?" said Jerry, looking at the man.
"Well, the consensus among the crew was that this baby here looks
a hell of a lot like you, sir."
Jerry sat where he was, his eyes on Bob's face, for a long moment,
as fingers of ice took hold of his spine. Then, with unreasoning
apprehension, he turned his gaze back upon the near-photographic
likeness he held. "Ensign," he said, after a minute. "This is a picture
of me."
"But sir, it can't be," said the tech.
"You're wrong," said Jerry, letting the paper drop to the floor. "It can
be, because it is. And all at once I think I know why."
Without warning, Jerry swung his legs over the side of the couch
and jumped to his feet.
"Listen," he said urgently, "there's no time to lose. Get the hospital
staff together, fast, and bring me back their best psyche-man. I need
a hypnotist."
"A h-hyp—?" the tech blurted, confused, then gave an obedient nod
and hurried out, shaking his head all the way to the switch-board.
"Never mind why, Doctor. Can you do it? That's all I care to know,"
Jerry's voice crackled, his eyes flashing with authority.
"Y-Yes, I think so," quavered the other man. "If you can be
hypnotized, I mean."
"All Space Zoologists have the brainpower necessary to be perfect
subjects," Jerry snapped. "Quickly, now, Doctor. I've wasted one
Contact already."
"Very well, sir," said the man. "If you'll lie back, now, and make your
mind blank—"
"I know, I know! Get on with it, will you!"
Bob and Jana stood back in the shadows beside the towering metal
control board, listening in silence as the hypnotist put Jerry under,
deeper and deeper, until his mind was readily suggestible. Then he
made the statements Jerry had told him to make, and with a snap of
his fingers brought the zoologist out of hypnosis.
"You heard, Ensign?" asked Jerry. "Did he do exactly as I told him
to?"
"Sir!" protested the doctor.
"I mean no offense," said Jerry. "But if your words left my mind too
free, too human somehow, the alien would sense it. And a ruse like
this one might not work on a second attempt, once the alien had
been apprised of our intent."
"He did, sir," said Bob. "Word for word, as you told it to him."
"Good," Jerry said. "Thank you, Doctor. And good night."
"Uh—yes," said the man, finally realizing he was being peremptorily
dismissed after coming all the way across the town from his warm
bed in the black morning hours. "Good night to you, sir."
He fumbled his way out the door, and Jana, after a glance at Bob,
shut it after him. Bob stood beside the control board, waiting as
Jerry once more adjusted the helmet upon his head and lay back on
the couch.
"All right?" he called to the tech, as Jana, now walking nervously on
tiptoe, though there'd been no injunction against noise, hurried to
Bob's side and took his arm.
"Ready, sir," Bob said, keeping his voice steady.
"You've set the stopwatch?" warned Jerry.
"I depress the starter the same instant I turn on the machine," said
Bob.
"All right, then," said Jerry.
Bob's right hand threw a switch.
Even as it snapped home, his left thumb had jabbed down upon the
stopwatch button. The long red sweephand began clicking with
relentless eagerness about the dial.
On the couch Jerry stiffened, then relaxed.
"You'd better stay with him," Bob cautioned Jana. "The machine's on
automatic. If I'm not back on time, it'll take care of itself."
"Back on time?" she gasped. "But you can't be, Bob. If what he said
about the timing—"
Bob shut his eyes and gripped his forehead between thumb and
fingers. "Yes, of course. I'm being an idiot. This maneuver is
something new. But—" he withdrew his hand from his face and
smiled at the girl—"you stay with him anyhow. I'd feel better—safer
—if you weren't with me and the others."
"Yes, Bob," she said, in a faint shadow of her normal voice. "Be
careful."
Bob grinned with more confidence than he felt, turned and hurried
from the room.
Jana moved slowly across the floor to the couch where Jerry
Norcriss lay in unnatural slumber, and stood staring down at his
strange, young-old face, and her eyes were bright with quiet
wonder....

"What's this, what's this?" rasped Jerry's mind. "Where have I gotten
to, now?"
"It's all right," said a soothing voice. "You're with me, now."
"Oh? Oh?" Jerry's mind said, snickering. "And who might you be?"
It was dark as he looked out through the alien eyes, but a quick
patting of his paw across his face reassured him that his sharp white
incisors, muzzle and stiff gray whiskers were intact and healthy.
"How can I be you?" asked Jerry. "If I'm a gray rat and you're a gray
rat, what am I doing here?"
"You've come to spy on me, I know," said the soothing voice. "But
see? You have nothing to fear, nothing at all. I'm not going to hurt
you. You find no menace in me. Do you?"
"No. No menace. No danger. I'm safe, I'm secure, I'm warm and
loved...."
"Relax," said the alien. "Relax, and let me have full control again.
You can sleep if you do. You can rest. I'll take care of you, trust in
that."
"Yes. Sleep. Rest. No more running, hiding, fearing...." said Jerry
Norcriss, the gray rat-mind in the invisible body of another rat much
like himself....
"Come on with that flashlight, damn it!" Bob raged, leading the other
three crewmen through the woods. Two of them carried rifles, one
had a flamethrower, and Bob himself carried one of the new
bazookas with a potent short-range atomic warhead. Ollie, the man
with the light, hurried up to him with a quick apology.
"Okay, okay," Bob said. "But I've got to see this dial—Ah, yes. This is
the way, all right. Come on. Ollie, keep that beam so it spills on the
tracking-cone dial as well as on the earth. We don't dare risk losing
our way. There are only seven minutes left until Contact is broken."
"Yes, sir. I'll keep it right on there," Ollie said. "But about the
lieutenant—are you sure he won't—"
"That's what the stopwatch is for. We must strike just as Contact is
being broken. Any sooner, and we kill Lieutenant Norcriss with the
alien. Any later, and the alien kills us. The same way it did the others
who came upon it."
"But what does it do? What does it look like?" Ollie persisted.
"Damn it, there's no time to talk now! Just keep that light steady,
and hurry!"
The men plunged onward through the woods, the white circle of
light from the arc-torch splashing the cold leaves and damp,
colorless grass with sickly, stark illumination.

"If you would only release your hold," the alien was saying. Then its
mind-voice stopped.
Jerry, too, had seen the dancing white freckles that spattered the
boles and branches of the nearby trees. The darkness of the woods
was rent by streamers of ruler-straight light beams. They began to
radiate like luminous wheel-spokes through the tangled leaves of the
woods.
"Men!" cried the alien mind. "Men are coming here. Men, our
enemies!"
Jerry, still in partial control of the invisible rat-body, fought the flight-
impulse that began to stir beneath the unseen skin.
"Run!" shrieked the alien mind. "You fool, can't you see that we
must flee this place? Quickly, or we are done for!"
"Run—Flee—" Jerry said dully, within the alien mind. "Yes. Run from
men ... the eternal enemy, men. Run, hide, a dark corner, under a
bush, behind a tree...."
He felt his own mind joining that of the alien in the preliminary
tension that comes before flight.... Then the glaring beam of the arc-
torch was full in his eyes, and the hypnotic illusion, at this, the
trigger of his psyche, was shattered. And Jerry once again knew
himself to be a man.
A man in the body of a rat—the animal which Jerry Norcriss loathed
most of all creatures!
"Run!" screamed the alien. "Why don't you—!" Its commands ceased
as it realized the difference within the mind that had invaded its
body. "You again!" it cried, trying wildly to reassume the placid
plump image of that unseen baby once more.
"You're too late," said Jerry, fighting its will with his own as the
crewmen broke from the underbrush into the clearing, and the tech,
pointing straight at him, yelled a caution to the man with the flame
thrower. The man bringing up the terrible gaping mouth of that
weapon halted, waiting, as the tech stared at the stopwatch in his
hand.
"Five seconds!" cried the tech. "Four ... three ... two ... one.... Get it,
quick!"
Jerry, still within the mind and watching with the same horrified
fascination as his host, saw the puff of flame within the flame-tube
of the weapon, then saw the insane red flower blossoming with its
smoking yellow tendrils toward his face—
And the silent white lightning flared—
And he sat up on the couch, back in the solarium.

Jana hurried over to him.

"Did it work? Did it work, sir?" she cried. "Is Bob—"
Jerry patted her hand. "Bob's all right. He was on time. Just on
time."
"I still don't understand, sir," said the nurse, sinking onto the couch
beside him without waiting for an invitation. "I don't understand any
of this!"
For an instant, Jerry resented this familiarity, then felt slightly
overstuffed, and slipped an arm paternally across her slim shoulders.
"I'll explain," he said. "It'll pass the time till he gets back."
Jana nodded.
"The alien," Jerry said softly, "was a mimic. A perfect mimic. It was,
while non-intelligent, of an abnormally well developed mind in one
function: telepathy. That's how it could carry on apparently
intelligent mental conversation with me, during my first contact. It
could sense my questions, then probe my mind for the answers I
wanted most to hear—and play them back to me. For my forty
minutes of contact, it told me only what I wanted to know, like a
selective echo. It needed no understanding of my questions, nor of
the answers it plucked from my mind. It had one instinct: self-
preservation. It could sense my question, select an uncontroversial
answer from my mind and feed it back to me, without really
understanding how it warded me off as a menace to it, any more
than a dog understands why lowering its ears and hanging its head
as it whines can fend off the wrath of its master. It works; that's all
the creature cares about."
"But how did you know—?" Jana asked.
"I didn't," Jerry replied. "It fooled me completely. Until the Ensign—
Bob told me that my full forty minutes in Contact had elapsed,
despite my knowledge that the sun and clouds had remained
motionless during my Contact. That threw me, I'll admit, for quite a
while. It just didn't make sense."
Jana's eyes widened as she suddenly understood. "And then you
realized that you had seen the sun and clouds motionless because
that was what you expected to experience when enhosted in a
baby!"
"That's it," Jerry nodded. "It made an error with the baby, though. It
was able to duplicate it in almost every respect except two: Size and
appearance."
"Why?" asked Jana. "And why appear as a baby at all?"

"I'm coming to that," said Jerry. "The size was off because the first
thing I saw when I blinked open my eyes was a distant copse of
trees, which I took to be an upright pile of leafy twigs. Since my
mind possessed information regarding the relative size of babies and
twigs, the alien immediately made sure my mind saw other things in
the same perspective. By the time it realized it had made an error, it
was too late to normalize the baby's dimensions; that would have
given its fakery away."
"But why did the thing choose a baby?"
"Because that was the thing's protection! It had a powerful hypnotic
power, one that worked on its victims' minds directly through its
telepathic interference with sensory perception. It always appeared
as the thing the victim would be least likely to harm. In my case, a
baby. But it made a slight error there, too. I'm a bachelor, Jana.
There's only one baby with whom I ever had any great amount of
experience: myself."
"And the invisibility?"
"I have no recollection, even now, of my body when I was a baby. I
may have stared at my toes, played with my fingers, but they just
never registered on my consciousness as being part of myself. So
the thing was stuck when it came to reproducing me visually, since it
depended upon my own memory for details. But it was able to
supply the way I'd felt as a baby. Every baby has an acute
awareness of its own skin; it will cry if any particle of its flesh is
bothered in the slightest. So the alien fed the 'feel' of my baby-body
back to me, if not the view. Which is why the electronic brain on the
ship was able to duplicate the detail into an almost perfect replica of
my babyhood likeness."
Jana nodded, as she finally understood the meaning of that strange
illusion. "And this time? That post-hypnotic suggestion you had the
doctor give you, I mean: that you'd think you were a gray rat until
such time as the light of the arc-torch caught you directly in the
eyes...."
"Duplicity, Jana. It had to be that way. The alien was very sure of its
powers. If I returned, and it were a baby again, I couldn't attack it
or thwart its ends. And such an attack was necessary. I had to be
able to fight it, to hold it in place for that last moment before it was
destroyed. Which is why I chose a gray rat, an animal I cannot bear
the sight of. When the light struck my eyes and I became myself
again, I caught the alien unawares. Then, before it could change to
a baby, and start lulling me back into camaraderie, it was too late.
Bob had given the order to fire. And here I am."

Hurrying footsteps sounded in the corridor. The door burst open and
Bob rushed in, his face anxious and creased with worry until he saw
Jerry sitting on the couch, alive and well.
"Whoosh!" The tech expelled a mingled chuckle and sigh as he sank
into a chair opposite the zoologist. "Well, sir, I can't tell you how glad
I am to see you. I couldn't be sure you'd gotten out of that thing
alive until I got back here. Glad you made it, sir. Damn glad!"
"That 'thing' you mentioned," said Jerry. "What did it actually look
like?"
Bob jerked his head toward the corridor. "The other guys are
bringing it along. I kind of thought you'd want a peep at it."
As more footfalls were heard from the corridor, Bob bounced to his
feet again, and stepped to the door. "Hold it a minute, guys," he
said, then turned back into the room. "Jana, I don't think you'd
better stick around for this. It's not very pretty."
The girl hesitated, then flashed him a smile and shook her head. "I'll
stay. It can't look as ugly as a bad case of peritonitis on the
surgeon's table. If I can take that without upchucking, I can take
anything."
Bob shrugged. "Suit yourself, honey. Just remember you got fair
warning." He leaned back out the door. "Okay. Bring it in."
The crewmen, looking a little ill, came slowly into the room, bearing
a bloated, scorched object on a stretcher they'd contrived from two
long poles and their jackets. They set it onto the tiled floor before
the zoologist, then stepped away, all of them wiping their hands
hard against their trousers in ludicrous unison, though their grip on
the poles had not brought them into actual contact with the alien's
corpse.
"There it is, sir," said Ollie Gibbs. "And you are very welcome to it."
Jana, to her credit, had not upchucked, but she went a shade paler,
and her mouth grew tight.
Jerry studied the burnt husk, from its sharp-fanged mouth—easily
eighteen inches from side to side—to its stubby centipedal cilia
under the grossly swollen body.
"Damn thing's all bloat, slime and mouth," said the tech, suddenly
shuddering. "I wonder if its victims felt those jaws rending them
open, or if it kept their minds fooled through to the end?"
"I don't think we'll ever know that, Ensign," said Jerry. "Unless you
feel like going out there and playing victim to one of this thing's
confreres?"
"No thanks, sir," said Bob, so swiftly that Jana laughed. "I'd rather
fall out an airlock in hyperspace."

"Well, here's what we do to get rid of this thing, then," said Jerry.
"Since it assumes a form that's the least likely to be harmed by
whatever presence stimulates its mimetic senses, we'll have to trick
it. Before this thing decomposes too far, rig it up with an electrical
charge, and stimulate its nerve-centers artificially. That ought to give
you an accurate microtape of its life-pulse. Then hook the tape to a
scanner-beam, and send the life-pulse into the mine-area. When the
fellows of this creature react to it, they'll assume the safest possible
form: their own."
"I get you, sir!" said Bob. "Then all the miners have to do is see it
for what it is, and shoot it."
Jerry nodded. "It'll mean all miners will have to go armed for awhile.
But that's better than getting eaten alive by one of these."
"You sure their presence won't trigger the thing's mimetic power?"
asked Bob, uneasily.
"Not if you give full power to the scanner-beam," Jerry replied. "It'll
muffle their life-pulse radiations under the brunt of the artificial
one."
"Good enough, sir," said Bob. "I'll rig it right away."
Jerry shook his head. "No need. You could use some rest, I'm sure.
The morning'll be soon enough. Meantime, you can see this young
lady home. The rest of you," he said to the hovering crewmen, "are
dismissed, too."
The men, eager to be away from the thing, saluted smartly and
hurried out of the solarium, buzzing with wordy relief.
Jana paused a moment, staring at the creature whose strange
powers had destroyed her father. Then she turned to Bob.
"I think I'll go to Jim's place," she said. "I want him to know." She
moved her gaze to Jerry. "I owe you a lot," she said. "We all owe
you a lot."
Embarrassed by the warmth of her praise, Jerry could only mumble
something diffident and look the other way. He was taken quite by
surprise by the pressure of cool moist lips against the side of his
face.
When he looked back at the pair, Bob and Jana were on their way
out the door.
Only when he heard the elevator doors at the end of the corridor
close behind them did he move to the still-warm corpse of his
onetime adversary, with a look of deepest compassion on his face.
"Well," he said gently, "you've lost. The planet goes back to the
invaders. Once again, Earth has successfully obliterated the
opposition."
He reached out a hand and touched the hulking thing on the floor.
"Good-by," he said. "And I'm sorry."
Jerry Norcriss wasn't thinking about the deadliness of the thing, nor
of the deaths of the hapless miners, nor of the billions of dollars he'd
saved the investors holding Praesodynimium stock. He was thinking
of a voice that—even unintelligently, even in the course of deception
—had said, "Poor Jerry. Rest.... Relax. You're safe.... Secure...."
"You really had me going for a while, baby," he said, then blinked at
the sudden sharp sting in his eyes, and hurried from the room.
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