I shut my eyes and Nell disappeared, replaced by Fen who sat so much closer, the fan nearly swatting me, the wet cloths runny, water dripping in my ears.
I think he was telling me about his time in London, and it happened just after that. All I can say is that everything that was big got small and everything that was small got big. A great sudden terrifying inverse. I remember not being able to shut my mouth. I remember nothing else after that, just waking up more or less in Fen’s arms on the floor. He was hollering things, ropes of saliva coming out of his mouth. A great many people came after that, Nell and Bani and others I didn’t know, and I was put back on the bed and when I opened my eyes it was just Fen and Nell and they looked so ghastly worried that I had to shut them again. The next thing I was aware of was Fen shaving my face.
‘You were scratching it so much,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d flaked out on us.’ He tilted my head up so he could get underneath my chin.
Through the netting I saw Nell holding him, hushing him, as he shook.
I heard:
‘You’re so good with him.’
‘Better than with you, eh?’
‘Methinks you’ll be a good papa.’
‘Youthinks, but you aren’t certain.’
‘You had a seizure,’ Fen said. ‘You stiffened up like a corpse then writhed like a whip snake then stiffened and this yellow shit came out of your mouth and your eyes were gone. Blank white balls like this.’ He made an awful face and inhuman noises and Nell told him to stop.
Every bit of me hurt. I felt as if my body had been flung from the top of a New York skyscraper.
My fever broke. That’s what they told me. They brought me plates of food and seemed to expect me to leap out of bed.
I woke and my eyes were already open and Fen was talking. We seemed to be in the middle of a conversation. I had become a receptacle for his whirring thoughts, and he didn’t particularly mind if I was awake or asleep, lucid or befuddled. ‘My brothers were trouble, every one of them. But I was the least favorite child. I was small and smart. I used words in ways that bothered my parents. I liked books. I wanted books. My teachers praised me. My parents walloped me. I hated farm work. I wanted to leave home before I had words for the thought. In some ways I would have been better off if I had just run away then, age three, just packed a little bag and troddled on out to the main road. Not sure things could have been much worse. We were raised to know nothing, to think nothing. Chew our cud like the cows. Say nothing. That’s what my mother did. Said nothing. I made myself as useless as possible in order to stay in school. I was the only one who did. I was lucky to have three brothers ahead of me, otherwise my father never would have allowed it.’
‘And a sister,’ I remembered.
‘She was younger. At school I received something somewhat close to affection. At home, even when I managed to beat my brothers at something, I got ridicule. Then my mother died and it got worse.’
‘How did she die?’
He paused, unused to my participation. ‘‘Flu. Gone in five days. Couldn’t breathe. The sound of it was terrible. The only thing I saw through the door before my aunt pulled me away was a bare foot sticking out the side of the bed. It was pale blue.’
In those hours or days it seemed I fell asleep and awoke to the sound of his voice.