Sick

Sick

“A movie, yeah, let’s have a movie,” she says, delicately adjusting her sick body against the pillows.

She is nauseous and must guard her mind against the dangerous thoughts that provoke the stomach into angry upheaval…she must not think of upheavals. Her body aches in the queerest, most tingly way, as if her blood is infected with strange, restless parasites that swim down to her toes and up to the tips of her fingers; it seems that as soon as she focuses on a part of her body, it is infused with the same tingling ache. She has checked each part: the soles of her feet, the backs of her knees, the deepest place in her chest she supposes she can feel, and everywhere is dull, silent misery. So Kathryn has decided that her body has no refuge. There is no safe place to harbor her weary, wandering consciousness, and she desperately seeks distraction.

“Do you want to watch this one?” Jonathan, her boyfriend, asks. He holds up the movie they considered yesterday and rejected in favor of a more palpable pleasure.

That was before the strange sickness set in; yesterday, when she was a person given to smiling at trivialities and combating the overwhelming truths with detached and slightly amused wryness. The overwhelming truths are too dangerous now, and she cannot consider them. She is sharply reminded of the time she rode the first bus of two to go home; it was early morning in a sober city, and she writhed on the cold plastic seat in the grip of a vicious hangover. Holding herself against the sickening sways of the bus, she had entertained an unusual thought: that this life of hers was all there ever was and ever would be, that whether resulting from the endless contractions and expansions of the universe or from the circular shape of time itself, she would be always here with her sickness, in one way or another…and then she had told her mind to stop tormenting her, and it had protested before submitting provisionally. Somehow she held it all inside until the slowing of the bus pulled her body forward. The beer and vodka and orange juice and acid rolled and roiled in the sick pit of her stomach, and she had barely thrust herself through the opening doors of the bus when her top half fell forward and the poison shot up toward her mouth…No, she cannot think of it anymore! She cannot think of anything. It all turns sick when she thinks of it. She refuses to believe in any more than she sees. There is Jonathan, who holds the movie before her. His gentle eyes implore her answer. They ask, ‘is this the answer to your pain?’

“Let me look at it,” Kathryn says. She takes the movie from his hands and glances at the unfamiliar pretty faces, then turns it over and looks dully at the description without reading it. “Yes, let’s watch this,” she says.

As Jonathan takes the movie, his hand touches hers. He puts his lips to her forehead for a few moments. She closes her eyes, straining to discover the mysterious region of her brain where pleasure is made, but she can only discover the rivulets of electric pain she had forgotten for a while. The lips on her brow are replaced by sticky flesh, his hand on her forehead. His hand feels warm, then hot, then burning; she remembers how hot the room has been the last few days, with a heavy moist heat that the fan can only slosh from this side of the room to that. It is sickeningly hot…she feels a sob rising in her chest, the sting beneath the bridge of her nose, the burning of tears…

“Let me take your temperature,” Jonathan says as he removes his hand.

He took care of her the last time she was sick, too. She waited half an hour for the second bus, shivering and ugly with the putrid taste in her mouth, the gray toxic smell of cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair. The bus came. She sat down inside it and stared at the green paper skin of her hands clasped in her lap, thinking of every reason she should get off at his stop and every reason she should get off at hers. She kept thinking she did not want him to see her like this, because it would corrupt the free, cheerful spirit-girl that darted through the scenes of his inner life. She needed those false images of herself to dwell in his mind and supplement the frail ghost inhabiting hers. She thought seriously on all this until her sneering rational mind was glutted with logic, but the logic of suffering trumps every other kind, and she yanked the cord when she saw the merry combination of letters that formed the name of his street, coming closer and closer to her. As she stood she remembered the weakness in her legs. Her feet shuffled forward begrudgingly.

A chill wind accosted her once she stepped off the bus. Faceless people moved in every direction, and she moved through them. The little force field of personal space surrounded her like a protective bubble, pushing the formless masses away from her body as she plunged into them, squinting her eyes against the tears, forcibly gulping the saliva and mucus that pooled at the back of her throat, over and over. When the sidewalk sloped down she let her body fall with it. Each foot pounded against the concrete and barely lifted itself through the air between the last step and the next. She did not glance in the window of the store to see the green and yellow striped scarf hanging from the manikin’s peach plastic neck, did not notice that the Japanese restaurant had a new special sushi combo, that the couple inside the coffee shop nudged each other’s feet under the table by the window. She fixed her eye on a tree or a stop sign or a parked car, and she watched these things grow larger and larger until they were right before her, as big as they could ever look, and then she forgot this object and found a new one in the distance. In this way she created ropes to tug herself forward in time and space, the way she had to search for pleasures made miniature by huge expanse and hurl harpoons that cut into their skin and tied them to her, so that even if they swam farther into the future, even if they got so small they vanished, they were still dragging her soul forward.

She could see the last anchor of her journey, Jonathan’s apartment…she had paused to check her face in a car’s side view mirror, found that she looked terrible in every imaginable way, considered walking home and hiding her ugliness, then saw that a stranger was sitting in the car giving her a strange look. She jumped away. The shame prickled on her skin as she moved quickly toward the blue paneled house. She was ugly. He would pretend she wasn’t, but she was ruining herself, she had to turn away; no one could see her this way. She pushed the dirty white doorbell and heard the faint ring upstairs where he lived. She knew he was sleeping, because it was still very early, and she regretted pushing the doorbell as she waited. Suddenly her stomach jolted to remind her it was sick. She pushed the doorbell again, pressing it down and holding it this time so the ring upstairs continued. After a few seconds she let go, ashamed. There was a lumpy white couch on the front porch. Its suggestion was enough to convince her body that it could no longer stand. For a few moments she lay sunken in the couch’s ample lap hugging herself, sobbing and then sitting rigidly straight, gazing at the colorless, cloudless sky, and then breaking into sobs again as she felt the pain wrack her body. It was as if her body was a ship in a thunderstorm, knocked in every direction by the relentless gusts and the tumbling giants of black salt water. This was the creature that Kathryn had become by the time Jonathan opened the door. She was a creature mutated by anguish.

But now Jonathan turns on the movie. The opening music drifts from the television to her ears. Motionless, she anticipates the brief moments she will surely forget that her body is real and at war with its own pollution. Then she will be able to look back upon them as enjoyments even if it is impossible to know whether she can enjoy something without being aware she is enjoying it. Even a lapse, though, in this continual consciousness of dull, steady agony she is willing to include in the ranks of her blessings.

She knows she will have to vomit eventually. The opening credits still roll on the television screen, and Jonathan digs through a box, looking for something. Kathryn remembers: it is the thermometer. He is going to take her temperature. She looks forward to the small, tender scene, but then angrily she foresees that she will have no temperature. Her agony hides so well inside that no manmade instrument can detect it. There is no reason that anyone will ever believe her pain is real.

“Jonathan.” She chokes on the name. “You believe me?”

“What?” Jonathan holds the thermometer and approaches.

“That I’m in pain,” she goes on, “that I hurt. You don’t think I’m just being a hypochondriac or something, right?”

Jonathan gently slides the thermometer’s silver tip between her trembling lips. He pets her hair and gazes steadily into her watery eyes.

“Baby, I believe you.”

If she moves, her stomach will revolt. The tears streak over her face. It is difficult for her to keep her mouth shut around the thermometer. The dripping of her nose embarrasses her; she feels disgusting. She feels obligated to contain this awful disease for the good of society. Quarantine, she thinks. That’s the word. Quarantine. While she is waiting to know her temperature, she begins to take inventory of her aches once again. She notes an uncomfortable twisting in her chest now. No, she has to stop. There is a movie on, and there are fields with haystacks everywhere, and the people are working. Look how they move! Could she move like that? She is young and healthy and strong. She is beautiful and intelligent and longs to express her compassion.

She remembers the time she accidentally cut her thumb with a razor. First the blood flooded and rolled down her thumb to her hand and her wrist. She applied pressure again and again, and she soaked a tissue until it was brilliant red, and still the blood pooled to fill the little ravine the blade had opened. The sting was enduring and senseless, and she had silently protested the pain that assailed her. She asked her thumb how its pain was helping them. How did the thumb benefit by tormenting her? When she could find no purpose behind it she invented one: her thumb was taking a share of humanity’s collective pain. One by one, she reviewed the afflictions of mankind. She imagined the cold wrenching terror of a starving belly, the hot blistering scream of skin erupting in flames, the torturous struggle of the heart against a tightening iron fist. In certain places on this earth there was no morphine, no doctors, and that easy death which is a mere slip from a drug-induced daze did not exist, was not an option in these places. Each death was defeat after a violent, agonizing battle that could last hours, days, weeks…

She imagined all this and then focused on the pulsing spring of pain in her bleeding thumb, and she thought to herself, as if praying, ‘This is your hunger. This is your disease. Here are your migraines, your soreness, the foreign aches you accumulate year after year for which no pill exists. Here are the pains you examine, trying to guess where the seed of your death is hidden. This is your terror, your shrieking visions of everything as nothing, when for one torturous instant your mind takes an x-ray of the world and all you see is bones, bones…I’m taking it away. Not all of it, not even half, but I’m taking it away and you’ll feel it. The pain will abate and you’ll take your next step with a consciousness of relief, if only in the slightest…This pain of mine has a purpose, this pain has a purpose…’ And when she could escape from an awareness of the brutal senselessness of her agony, the dumb expressionless misery, she felt a strange pleasure in the pulses of her thumb, and she could feel pain as a sensation like cold or hot. It was something she could identify and be indifferent or attentive to as she pleased. With each pulse she could feel the suffering drawn from the six billion members of her family and drained out with her blood…

The thermometer beeps. Jonathan pulls it from her mouth and reads it. “Ninety-eight point four.”

“I knew it,” Kathryn says angrily. “I made it all up. There’s nothing wrong with me! I’ve caught an imaginary illness! I…”

Her quick speech has excited her stomach, and Jonathan clasps her hand. She becomes aware of the ache in her hand, how much it would like to lay still with the fingers curled up like the legs of a dead spider. How nice it would be to let the skin melt away, let the white sticks clatter apart and be buried and still, so still. To stop feeling, that is all she desires.
“Darling, watch the movie,” Jonathan tells her.
To obey is to lift her heavy sight from one object and set it down upon another. She sees the actors in the movie as small people moving inside a magic black box in the corner of the room. They are still working, shoveling dirt, shifting the piles of hay from here to there with their pitchforks and exchanging brief words on the state of the sky or the dinner they hope to eat next months if the season is friendly. Now the plot emerges. The camera shows her who she is supposed to take interest in. Like a shiftless people-watcher the camera peers secretly at the most beautiful faces to forget itself in their expressions…But Kathryn cannot forget the camera. She sees its motion, the way it takes interest in this or that and then gets bored and roams on its shameless quest for pleasure. She begins to loathe the empty character of the camera, and then she begins to loathe herself. She realizes that her mind is dead like the camera, and she tilts and maneuvers her mind in the same desperate, shallow quest…No, she thinks. You are thinking too much again. Just watch the movie. Just let yourself believe in it.

For the next two hours she watches. Most of the time she lets the camera disappear and allows herself to see the world inside the magic box as a true world. It is a slight ease to her, though she can never feel the relief, because she no sooner feels than aches, no sooner awakens than despairs. Her nausea is her constant companion. It unceasingly remarks on the show and demands that she acknowledges its remarks. Meanwhile, Jonathan sits on the floor before the television, and Kathryn remembers that morning he discovered her crying on his porch. He held her and tucked her into his bed; he uttered soothing words. A dangerous but beautiful memory creeps in, when Jonathan stroked her naked back as her stomach ejected its putrid contents…She reminds herself to concentrate on the movie.

Sometime after the movie has ended, Kathryn passes in and out of a dreamworld where no language exists, so when she wakes slightly and tries to explain she mumbles nonsense and slips back under. Finally she wakes fully and feels sick anticipation in her body. Now her saliva collects as quickly as she can swallow it. The tremors begin in her stomach and reverberate out to her fingers and toes until her skin is cold and wet like a fish. There is a white plastic trash can alongside the bed. In a moment she holds it to her body and opens her mouth. The vomit rushes up like lava. It fills her throat and covers her tongue with its pungent acid taste and splashes into the bin. Jonathan, who was sleeping on the floor a minute ago, has risen and now holds her hair away from her mouth. The emptiness inside her grows bigger and bigger, and the emptiness is better than feeling.