Hidden Men: Fictional Short Story
We’ve had to hide. That’s what they’ve told us. People could never accept the absurdity of a man thinking analytically. We’ve been told from a young age that we protect. We serve. We’re told that our body shape, our higher muscle mass, even our hormone balances, all mean that our function is to fight. We are to protect women, the scientists, the philosophers, the inventors. We work in the factories and on the farms, heavy labour. We’re told that our strength is vital, without us women wouldn’t be able to continue their important work. They’ve cured diseases, sequenced DNA, created the computers that took humanity to the moon. That was just the beginning of the scientific revolution. Just flick through the history books, it’s all women, all the time.
I’ve always been curious. Where are all the men, why are we invisible? It’s as if we’ve been wiped from the very pages of history itself. But we’re there. Hiding. You just have to find us.
One summer, when I was thirteen, I was helping my grandfather clean the house while my sister, Artemis, was reading in the library. We were in the attic, sorting through boxes, some to take downstairs, some to donate to charity. Over the previous summers, my grandfather had taught me to write, so in my finest writing I would scrawl on each of the brown boxes using a large black marker: “donate”, “burn” or “keep”. As I was going through a pile of my grandmother’s old schoolbooks, I found it, a textbook from the beginning of the century. At first glance, it didn’t look like anything special; I’d never seen it in the house before. But as I was flicking through the pages, I found them. Men. Scientists. It was dusty old history book, its pages well-thumbed, creases where the previous owner had folded the pages to save their place. It listed the great achievements of the scientific revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and the beginning of the 21st century. The usual suspects were there: Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Amelia Earheart, Mary Anning. There was a list of all the recipients of Alhena Nobel’s awards. Between 1901 and 2019, 603 women had won an award in the sciences… But 24 men had also won, I’d never heard of any of them with the exception of Pierre Curie, famous for being Marie Curie’s husband. He’d also won an award on his own, one of only 3 men to do so.
Even at that young age I knew that this was something I wasn’t supposed to be holding. But I was intrigued. I was thirsty. I needed to know more about these incredible men. I slipped the book inside one of the boxes marked “burn” and carried it down the ladder. Making sure no one saw me, I stopped on the landing and quickly dashed to my room with the book, hiding it under my mattress. The only other people in the house were my family, but I didn’t want them to know. Not then. This was mine. My inspiration.
There they were, on the pages in front of me, Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming, Francis Crick, James Watson, Carl Cori. They existed. No matter what anyone told me, I knew I was capable. I was a man, and I could do this. That thought kept me going through the long days of my teenage years where I was conditioned into becoming a protector. It was a noble career, defending the lives of the scientific elite (and the only way I would ever be able to place so much as a toe inside a laboratory), but the days were gruelling, with little food and our sleep was constantly interrupted – practice for the real world, we were told, for when we would be vigilant 24 hours a day, guarding the lives of the greatest minds against the brutish men that would stand in the way of scientific progress. But I persevered, knowing that one day I would be free, if those men before me could be scientists, then so could I. I kept that book safe. I’d long since memorised their names and achievements and felt an emotional attachment to that dusty old book. It was dangerous, and if anyone found it it would surely result in my death (or at the very least I would be expelled from the city and forced out to the wastelands). Yet, I kept it, taking it with me with every move, hiding it behind loose bricks in my living room, underneath the floorboards beneath my bed, in a secret panel in my desk. It sits next to me as I am writing this. Forbidden. Deadly.
But I cannot let their stories go unheard. I cannot let mine go unheard.
I am a scientist.
I dug deeper into their histories. Jane Cooke Wright won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1952 for the significant advancements of chemotherapy techniques and for the early detection methods of ovarian cancer (I won’t go in to the societal othering of the man’s body, but we’re still no closer to a cure for prostate cancers). This wouldn’t have been possible without the aid of her father, Louis T. Wright who she worked with at Harlem Hospital. Rosalind Franklin won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1962 for her work discovering the structure of DNA, but it was Francis Crick and James Watson who mapped the structure. Jocelyn Bell Burnell won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars in 1974, which wouldn’t have been possible without the help of her lecturer, Antony Hewish.
The women were blind to the men around them. Too secure in their own greatness. All their awards, all the discoveries, none of them would have happened without men. Before, men were researching alongside them. But even now, we built their labs, maintained the equipment, scribed their notes, drove them between meetings. But we were left in the background. Did they think we weren’t listening? Did they think we didn’t understand?
I was there. I was listening. I understood.
By the age of 19 I had graduated the academy, second in my class, and took my first job as a protector at Franklin Labs. My first assignments were quite basic, patrolling the grounds, guarding the gates. But I quickly progressed, at 23 I become the personal protector of Dr Song (she would go on to pioneer the treatment for endometriosis), I would escort her to her lectures and her research lab, be with her while she visited patients. I watched as she sat on the edge of beds, hearing their stories. She spoke to these women about their pain. She genuinely cared about them. At first, I did too. But the longer I was there, the more men I would see entering the clinics only to be turned away. No one believed them. I stopped caring about the women.
At 10:03 on April 13 it happened. A young man staggered in front of me. I remembered him; he’d been in the clinics before. I remembered his smile, a kind smile, a greeting between men in a women’s space, a reminder that we weren’t alone in the world. He had been complaining of occasional pains in his chest, never that severe. His doctors told him it was probably just indigestion and to lose some weight and eat healthier and the pain would go away. It didn’t. At 10:03 on the April 13 he had his third heart attack. This one was fatal. At 10:08 on the April 13 he died.
The coroner found myocardial scarring, evidence of his previous heart attacks, heart attacks which he knew nothing about.
It could have been prevented. We could have stopped this. It could have been prevented. Those words kept swirling around my head the months following his death. With all the recent public heath campaigns warning about the early signs of heart attacks, how did we miss this?
We knew the symptoms: tight chest, light-headedness, back pain, fainting, extreme fatigue, nausea, shortness of breath, insomnia, stomach pain, jaw pain. We knew what to look out for. We knew when to get help. As part of a massive health movement from the government, posters showing the symptoms of heart attacks were plastered across the city. So why, with all this information at our disposal, were so many men dying?
I started speaking to them. I couldn’t speak to the doctors of course, not directly, not at first. But I spoke to the men, the survivors. The ones who got help in time. There was a pattern. Some had nausea, most had shortness of breath and cold sweats, nearly all of them had pain on the left side of their chests and shooting pains down their left arms. These were not the warning signs we’d been advised of. But they were so common! I imagine that because those symptoms didn’t happen to women, no one realised it.
Men were having frequent heart attacks. Without knowing they were in trouble, they’d collapse. For most it would be too late. The men I spoke to were lucky. They had someone with them who cared, and they were close enough to a hospital that they were able to get treatment in time. If they were on their own, if they lived further away, they would have died for sure. I spoke to the brothers and fathers and sons and husbands who’d witnessed important men in their lives die. The same – shooting pains down their left arm.
Men didn’t realise that it was happening to everyone else. They hadn’t told their doctors, assumed it was an anomaly – and besides, they’d just had a heart attack. They had bigger things to worry about than their arm hurting.
I carried out my work in secret. It was still a dangerous time for a man to show intellect. But I knew this was important. I watched the transfer listings at work, waiting. After five painful months I saw her name, Dr Khan, senior cardiologist. I applied immediately, became her protector. I followed her to meetings, listened to her lectures, scribed her notes, watched her with patients. I taught myself how to create charts, how to organise research.
Over that year I spoke to over 500 men who had had heart attacks, I spoke to the families and friends who had witnessed their loved ones die from heart attacks. Their symptoms were so different to the ones we had been warned of. Chest pain. Cold sweats. Left arm pain. I needed to get the message out.
I told every man I knew, I told them to tell every man they knew. Chest pain. Cold sweats. Left arm pain.
It worked. My message infected the city like a virus. Men knew what this pain meant. They called for ambulances. They got themselves to hospitals. Not all of them survived, but the mortality rates reduced. It was enough for me to gain confidence that my work was important.
I began meticulously compiling my research over the next 20 years, hiding my notes and research alongside the textbook that started my journey. Meeting various men after hours at Dr Khan’s clinic, using her equipment, recording their blood pressure, heart rates, height, weight, lifestyles. Different ages, different ethnicities, different professions. About 12% of these men suffered at least one heart attack over the 20 years, some groups more than others. Wherever possible I got the details of their symptoms before, during and after those heart attacks. My original thesis is attached to this letter. You’ve probably already read it. It was published by Dr Artemis Clarke, the brave woman who dedicated her life to increasing the survival rates of men suffering heart attacks. The woman who never met those men. My sister.
I am Franklin Clarke. I am a scientist.
