In Sickness
A Short Story
Each internal organ has a mind all its own. This is what she knows as she waits for the next wave of convulsions to bring forth acrid fluids from her stomach up through her esophagus and out of her mouth. She crouches in front of the toilet, hands on knees, bracing and breathing before it comes again. Her eyes are closed because she is trying to listen to the inside of her body and because she cannot bear to see her wet, stricken face in the mirror that is mounted to the wall above the toilet, good lord what were they thinking putting a mirror there.
On one acid trip in college she had reclined on her bed in her dorm room, daydreaming and eavesdropping on voices in the hallway, and she could see as clear as anything the sound as it traveled not through nothing but along typically imperceptible pathways made of colorful geometric patterns. Space was quilted. The words were matter. There is no emptiness, she’d learned.
She attempts to apply the same subtlety of perception to what is happening in the tissues and cells and smooth muscle of her stomach, and she is distracted by noise coming from the bedroom, where her husband has his own bowl—the largest metal mixing bowl in the apartment—into which he is now vomiting audaciously.
I wish someone were here to take care of us, he had said to her, so so sadly, only three hours into the retching. We have to watch our water intake, she’d replied, we have to starve the virus—because of course the virus has its own mind, its own desires.
How could they ever have a child? They could not help themselves, let alone one another, let alone a small and vulnerable person. An innocent. They had done something to deserve this, probably, but a child should be spared such abjection. A child should be spared even the indignity of seeing her parents, her protectors, this enfeebled.
Yesterday they had been living blithely, working and grocery shopping and making plans. She had visited a photo shop to have her picture taken for a passport renewal application; they’d recently booked tickets for a trip to Croatia six months hence. Will they still be ill in six months? It seems possible.
Three days ago she’d gone with a friend to see a matinee. Afterward they sat in a quiet café, drank two espressos each, and shared a $15 piece of four-layer chocolate sheet cake. They discussed the film, a hagiography of an 18th-century Christian mystic. What I’m stuck on, her friend said, is how much strength it took to survive. Almost everything was a matter of life or death. You get sick or injured, you give birth, there’s a drought or famine, there’s a war, you’re forced to work in dangerous or unsanitary conditions, you have to travel a long way from home—that’s it. And now, her friend said, we can’t handle even a reasonable level of discomfort. We expect everything to be convenient and pleasurable. We’ve gone soft, she sighed, and that’s why there will be no revolution.
It has been nearly twelve hours of this. Her tongue is thick with dryness but she can’t stop spitting, and she has to sit on the toilet with a bowl in her lap because the extreme upwardness of each heave slams down on her bladder and now the tile floor is slick with urine. The violence of it contorts her abdomen in unnatural directions. She is afraid of rupture, of breakage.
Eventually she joins him in their room, each left to the privacy of their own bowls on their respective sides. The dampened sheets form a trench at the foot of the bed. Pale sunlight presses through drawn curtains. Rising and falling into and out of troubled sleep. Every time they wake, between evacuations, they share meager utterances: We’re saving money on food, she says. He says, Maybe this is how we quit coffee. Hell, maybe this is how we quit drinking.
The two of them together possessed by an organism unknown and hostile, there is no greater intimacy than this. Yet there are limits as to how much they are capable of assuaging each other’s misery. Somehow she is still lonely and cursed by the virus’s effect on her cognition. Thoughts rampage around her brain with such force that it’s like her skull hopes to vomit, too, and it cannot, and the thoughts are trapped, there is nowhere for them to go.
She drops back onto her pillow after releasing somehow more—there is no emptiness!—and immediately begins thinking about Rome’s Spanish Steps and how their 2015 renovation was sponsored by Bulgari, and about a blog post regarding the long-term conservative strategy for an authoritarian takeover, and about something a yoga teacher had said to her one year ago that offended her so irreparably she had sworn never to return to her class ever again, and about an illustration of weeping animals in a book from her childhood, and about the jar of salsa in the back right-hand corner of the bottom shelf in the refrigerator that may or may not be set to expire in the next two weeks, and about an unpaid utility bill, and about how she didn’t have enough sex in college, and about how regrettable it was not to have tried harder at becoming real friends with that co-worker who was by any measure more clever and attractive and professionally viable than her, and about how badly she wished she had spent more time with her grandparents when she had the chance.
And then she thinks: this actually is real suffering, it is. When she recovers—if she recovers—she will report back to her friend, the one who had the cheek to call her soft: Look at what we go through! Look at how we endure! Now and three hundred years ago, we are and have always been pitiful and afraid! We have always been lost and at a loss for how to be good! And this is why there will be no revolution, she will tell her, not because we are soft but because we think ourselves into thinking we are bad, that there is something very wrong with us, very corrupt, very dirty, very wicked and worthless, and so we cannot and do not fight because we believe we, and others, deserve to be punished!
With incredible effort she gets up out of bed to unburden and rinse the bowls so that she and her husband may continue on with the merest self-respect. In the kitchen where the deep sink is full of dishes and silverware from the night before, the smell of food remnants almost intolerable, she performs the chore and feels as resolute as a homesteader.
Almost as soon as she shakes out the bowls and puts them upside down on the countertop to dry, she is puking into the sink, all over everything, and her husband is moaning, he is throwing up onto the carpet or mattress, he is pleading weakly for her to come, please, please come help me. Head in hands, elbows propped on the lip of the sink, trembling and wane, she cries a little, only a little.
Outside is the gloaming, darkness gathering in the horizonless streets, and the world is full of ordinary dread.
After several minutes, once her husband has grown too tired to call for her, she summons the fortitude to wash one fork, one knife, one spoon, one small plate, one large plate, one wine glass. She moves her hands kindly, even lovingly, and when she is through with each object she places it snugly in the drying rack. Each object safe, each object clean and blameless.
Recommended Reading: Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes