The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [8]
Something streamed down my legs when I coughed, when I breathed too hard. Something as warm and slow as blood.
Soon we had to work at the basic behavior. It was work to walk. It was work to get dressed. To get undressed was work. To pee, to drink, to groom, forget it.
With no official diagnosis forthcoming, we troubleshot at home, white-boarding the safer explanations first. Maybe this wasn’t a sickness so much as us getting older. Who knew what we were supposed to be feeling, anyway? We assessed our self-care and charted our intake. On principle we ate the better foods. Was one meant to be perfect at nutrition, otherwise be sickened? At first for dinners we had nuts and greens and the healthy oils. Plates of firm white fish crusted up in a glowing pan, shards of salt littered on top. A handful of salad on the side. For dessert a flavored ice or some crisp, cool fruit.
Not anymore. The food burst into rotten morsels in my mouth when I ate. I thought I was chewing on skin, maybe my own. Frequently I spat sad things back onto my plate, and if I ate at all, I waited until Claire and Esther were asleep, snuck into the kitchen, and sucked on a rag soaked in apple juice, which offered cold relief.
Our weekly trips to synagogue, trekking to the woods each Thursday, were robotic, if we even went. Until October we heard only the usual services, Rabbi Burke’s sermons lightened by occasional broadcasts of Aesop’s tales. At synagogue we sat in stunned exhaustion, taking in nothing, and we barely got ourselves through the woods back home again before collapsing.
Claire and I started making way for each other, the small courtesies one shows a sick person. Wide berths in the hallway and boundaries observed in bed. We slept in lanes, did not visit each other in the night, even for the sexless embrace, to extinguish each other’s insecurities, to see what comfort there wasn’t in someone else’s cold frame. Skills arise to suit this sort of work. I could turn over without breaching Claire’s side of the bed. A person wants his space when he feels like that. Even our functional kisses—good night and, less happily, good morning—were drily offered at a distance, faces braving the infected space, bodies angled away as if leaning into a terrible wind. Separately we showered and bathed and soaked in salts, we rinsed with astringents, dutifully pursuing what hygiene we could manage, but something wasn’t washing out, and I was versed enough in rotting, spoiling, putrefaction—we all have our specialties—to know that these odors of ours were not the oils of the skin or the tolerable foulness of sweat.
If Esther banged on the bathroom door and so much as shouted “Hurry!” that word alone tightened my throat. I’d go to my knees, the wind knocked out of me.
The evidence was mounting, but I seemed to have a pact against insight, a refusal to name my poison. Esther had no such inhibition. Esther knew, in the precocious way of nearly everyone but us. She might have thought it was what she said that hurt us: the actual words in their scathing specifics, as if meaning itself ever had that kind of power. But she could have been singing us love songs, cooing little melodies of affection, and the effect would have been the same. By now, or maybe always, the meaning failed to matter.
I required Esther’s total silence. When I looked at her—a young girl dipped in a shell of unkillable health—it was with pure, scientific ambition. I had a technical, professional need, and it wasn’t personal, or of course it fucking was. I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.
Dr. Moriphe, when we returned to her, did the blood work, metabolic panels, thyroid function tests, an ESR and a CRP. Claire got spun through a cylinder that whirred and clicked, a picture of deep blue space flickering on the screen, her body