Content Warning: illness, death
The fever came on Monday. It put me right to bed, pink and hot. I shivered under the duvet with the sick bottle and a sleeve of saltines. There wasn’t a thermometer in the bathroom cabinet so I couldn’t take my temperature, but I felt I could boil over. I didn’t call anyone. I watched the voile curtains ripple in the breeze, veiling the dark eye of my open window.
On Tuesday, I threw up. The crackers were gone, so I didn’t eat anything at all. By noon, it was the sickest I’d ever felt. Large pieces of time slipped through. My bedroom, once so banal and straightforward, spun around me on a new axis: a strange tabby cat licking tears from my face with its hooked tongue; a flower placed on my bedside, and then gone. I registered my body, my presence in the world, as a spill. A stain.
The man came on Wednesday. I discovered him slowly. There was first the smell of cigarettes, spilling into the bedroom and inflating it. Then the sound of sock-feet in the hallway, soft on the shag rug.
When I rolled over, he was standing in my doorway, tall and crooked in the frame. Half of my face was sticky with spit. A spool of moon caught the blue trucker’s hat he held to his chest, but nothing else. I didn’t move, and neither did he. He was a dark, breathing shape; I could hear the catch in his throat, a rattling, smoker’s sound.
I went back to sleep.
On Thursday, the man came back with a Campbell’s soup can and a spoon. He couldn’t open the can himself, so I did it for him while he stood at foot of my bed. In the dull light, I could see it better: the man’s funny, asymmetrical face. One side drooped down, the skin around his eyes ballooned and sagged and spotted. There was silver scruff on his chin and he thumbed it, looking out the window as I ate. His lips were a dark, purplish color.
My swollen eye snagged on his belt. It was leather like sandalwood with a buffalo etching. There was a strange spot next to the speckled buckle: a dark, greasy stain. I think in half-sleep I tried to reach out and touch it, because the man stepped backwards and then was gone.
On Friday, my eyes opened slowly, soft and gummy. An Otis Redding song was playing somewhere, curls of smoke drifting in through the open window. My pale, doughy hands were speckled with heat rash. My sweaty hair stuck to my forehead like cold fingers. I couldn’t leave my bed, but I knew he was down there. I saw him standing on the cement patio barefoot. No – in moccasin slippers. I saw him in the blue terry cloth robe. I saw the Winston in between his fingers, staining them yellow.
On Saturday, he didn’t come, and I missed him.
On Sunday, I felt the box spring sink down. I came out of sleep to see him sitting at the foot of my bed. Outside, the night was blue like spilled ink, and in the dark bedroom his eyes were black and tired.
He pulled out a small, weathered box from his breast pocket. I recognized the red banner. From the box, he took a cigarette and a short, bulbed match. He lifted up his t-shirt and struck the match off the top of the buffalo’s nose, beside the buckle. I watched the flame make the stain shimmer like a dark, open face. It was a snag. It was a hook in me.
“Once, you buried the German Shepard.”
It was the first time I had spoken since I’d gotten the fever. My voice was like another body in the room.
“Yes.”
“You buried her in our backyard. You put a wire cross in the dirt where her body was.”
He looked exactly at me – in his old, still, way – as the ember ate down the cigarette’s spine. The night we buried her, I walked to the gas station to buy him more of those cigarettes, stopping at the stables to press my face into the Stallion’s soft coat. When I came back, he was leaning the shovel against the stained siding of the one-story house. We peered into the hole together, and I saw the Shepard’s body, her loose shape down in the cool dark.
I wanted to tell the man what else I remembered. The green armchair, which I curled upon when he wasn’t sitting in it, feeling the large dent of him in the cushion. The sushi restaurant where the plates moved around on a circular conveyor, chopsticks falling from his fingers. I wanted to tell him that the restaurant was no longer called Way of the Orient, but Sushi Train. I wanted to tell him about the blue robe.
I wanted to tell him I remembered him sticking the cross in the fresh dirt carefully, with tenderness.
“When I buried you, I put a wire cross over you too,” I said. “Even though I didn’t believe in God the way that you did.” The smoke shifted and bubbled in front of his face. He put his hand on my knee, and I felt his knobbed fingers. My love for him was without word. It was a dull, important feeling, like a cramp.
“I know.”
The fever broke on Monday. I woke up starving. I made myself a three-egg omelet with blue cheese and ate it in the backyard. The sun trickled down the fence and was warm, reminding me it was June. I sat on the cement patio and looked out over the two crosses, standing like a pair of wiry willows.
I opened my mouth, but then I closed it. I had the funniest feeling I didn’t have to describe the way our cottonwood pools in the air like schools of fish, the way our blueberries bubble out green.