80
IN THE HOSPITAL, I see not-James rattle and rummage for thousands of dollars to pay for the decision to help me live, the cost of health care an abstract inconvenience until it becomes real and necessary and he realizes how expensive the machines are that scour my system for threats, that empty every bit of me out, making a wire frame of my body, ignoring the years it took to make all of those cells. They flush in other people’s versions of my blood and pull out my spoiled organs and replace them with flesh convinced from other persons. They find the filthy irregulars and kill them with chemicals and upriver energies, with no one coaxing the small of my back or giving me tempting eyes. They unscrew my beefy truths and find fires to put out and leave me in disarray. They mutter aloud and shine warm lights on parts of me that have never before seen their way out of the dark and blow warm air to stir my withered innards to dilation.
I wade through an unknown number of days—silent only in voice—in that hospital before I’m able to talk back, and by then, I know the doctors’ questions, how they grease my palms with promises of survival and early release.
Where have I been living and working? My lungs are inflamed, full of a moldy growth.
What have I been doing and eating? A welter of iron paces my blood, but holes are opening in my veins allowing the deep red to seep and slam toward the surface, forming those bruises.
At first they think my mouth is full of meat scraps, but find it’s my tongue and cheeks where my teeth wobbled through in the fall.
I’m unsure if I’m here because of my injuries or because of the impulse I had to throw myself off the roof, but either way, the doctors and nurses tell me stories of survivors with faith and determination as bright and shiny as new chrome, and they thunder their version of the kingdom of heaven into me, with absolute confidence, and I panic occasionally when I’m alone, and then I remember that someone is never far and fluster at that as well. When I’m made to walk through the halls, I think of carrying a ball of yarn to trace my way back. They wheel cots by the door like ponies storming. Bells constantly chime, enough to make my sleep shabby and my ability to wake nimble. I wonder at all the fingerprints in this place, the sly traces of blood no one will admit to, the dust waiting to edge into a wound despite custodial diligence.
When not-James is here, he spares no sigh, lets them all breathe into the room, his shoulders hanging, and I watch his instincts plume across his face as he ignores every one of them, and every night he leaves only when darkness has chanted itself onto the earth.
He develops a cough that I notice first, interrupting his conversations with the doctor to expel the wet air into his inner elbow, and he asks the doctor when I might be allowed to go home, and the doctor says they can’t recommend release yet, and they don’t want to create false hope.
The sunrises start to feel like failures and not-James tells me he’s been going to the chapel and I want to beat my chest and refuse his prayers because the man I married would not believe that simply placing his body into such a structure could make a difference. Not-James tells me he feels less alone there, his ears cocked to the silent prayers of the hospital, and I tell him that I am his god, and I watch his chin start to twitch, but he doesn’t deny it.
When he leaves, I let the starlight wash my eyes and watch as the world outside contracts into darkness, and I rub the lizard face of my elbow skin and listen to the old woman down the hall cackle and chuck anything within reach out the door of her room and hear a nurse drag a chair to set up camp until the woman is quiet and the nurse can loosen her clenched fists.
Hospitals, I realize, fill themselves full of accusations, of people believing certain truths about their blood and their hunger and their minds, and when another tries to force guidance on any of these topics, the impulse can be to travel as far away from these assumptions as possible.
Not-James’s cough becomes a clay-packed wheeze unhitching itself from his lungs only to bind itself again and again. He talks the doctors into allergy tests. Mold comes back as a singular cause of his trouble, matching one of my many. They continue diving into the fungi spectrum and return with ergot as the answer, rye mold. I imagine the house furred with it now that we’ve been gone for days, a thin fuzz coating the walls and floor and furniture like on raspberries forgotten in the back of the refrigerator.
My body remains a slab in a loosening husk of skin and the sheets of my bed fill with black smears and the nurses want to know where they come from. I remind them of the mold that stuffs me, too. I worry aloud to them that I could infect the whole hospital. It is difficult to convince or remind or inform anyone of anything in my state.
James tries to convince me away, telling me to focus on getting better so I can come home. “But to what filth?” I ask, and his eyes clank over me, plundering me and trying to fill those gaps at once, and I recognize that our awe has tattered, as we buck and shatter against the tedium.
81
I SEE THAT the doctors are trying to diagnose Julie with internal battery. They’re convinced her systems are attacking her from the inside. I know that these same shy symptoms hide within me, too. I experience the guilt of being only slightly more or less. I walk through my faults with open eyes. I say, Yes, yes, yes. I feel electric with self-wisdom. I suffer the sticky bile of jealousy and the magnetic pull of avoidance at once. I become beautiful with admiration for the diagnosed. I ignore all the other clues. I have been delivered an answer that satisfies.
Still my mind says, Show them. Make appear what you know is within you.
They don’t at first know what they’ve found in Julie. I insist they check me for the same unnamed disease. The doctor says I look fine. He says that if it were meant to happen to me, I’d already be farther down in this chain reaction. I’d be whipping around at the end. I shake my head no. There is a spectrum that mustn’t be ignored.
“Uncountable diseases might conceal themselves deep inside each and every one of us. Let us be thankful when they are not summoned to the surface.” He speaks as if he were calling me to worship. He gives me a leaden smile. I want to resist and test him. I have always preferred knowing to wondering, When?