Homeland Elegies(69)
“What is it, Mom?”
“I’m sorry we brought you here.”
“Mom. I’ve had a good life here.”
She stared at me for a long moment, as if confused. “You have?”
“I’m happy.”
Her forehead creased with sudden concern. “I don’t think so.”
“I am. I’ve always been a little serious, right? Isn’t that what you say?”
“Too serious.”
“But it doesn’t mean I’m not happy.”
“Strange happiness.”
“I get to do what I love. I’m a writer. Can you believe it?” I smiled. “I’m happy.”
She studied me for a moment, her head cocked cutely, a loving tenderness pouring into her eyes. “That makes me happy,” she said finally. Then, almost as an afterthought, she added: “I never really liked it here.”
“I know, Mom.”
“You do?” She seemed both surprised and pleased to hear it.
I nodded. Then her expression changed again abruptly, narrow with a troubled thought.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Don’t be mad.”
“About what?”
“You’re one of them now. Write about them. Don’t write about us.”
“But I don’t choose my subjects, Mom. They choose me.”
“You can change that.”
The laddoo finished, she closed her eyes and leaned back to rest…
Perhaps it was the growing distraction of my aching crotch, perhaps it was just the proper order of things finally being restored, but as I sat beside her now, my painful distension only worsening, I could no longer make sense of my long resentment toward her. To have held on to it for so long, to have shaped so much of myself around it, seemed so unreasonable. A sudden, simple question loomed: In expecting what she couldn’t give me, hadn’t I rejected what she could?
I got up and turned away from her, and from my father, who was still in the kitchen. I reached inside my pants to adjust. As I touched myself, the pain was sharp and startling, like the snap of a charley horse.
I swallowed a yelp and headed upstairs.
In my bedroom, I undressed with difficulty to my boxers, sat on my bed, pulled off my mittens, and pulled out my phone. The spasm slowly released, but the erection didn’t soften. I peeked inside; I’d never looked so large. Priapism is what some websites were calling it, a condition in which the veins of the penis abnormally constrict and the blood that flows in can’t flow back out. It was a side effect of some drugs, though there was no reference to penicillin being one of them. An ice pack and aspirin were suggested, and if the erection didn’t subside after two hours, the sites recommended a trip to the emergency room, where I could be injected with a drug that would regulate the blood flow. I dreaded the prospect of returning to the ER to have my penis shot up by the very attending who had shortly done the exact same thing to my rear end. There had to be another way.
Just then I heard a soft knock at my bedroom door. It was Father. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing, Dad. Just checking something on the internet.” The door yawned open just enough to show his face behind the crack.
“That day nurse is coming for a few hours. I need to get out.”
“I can watch her, Dad.”
“You know, if she has to use the bathroom…”
“What time’s her next dose?”
“I’ll be back before then.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know. Maybe walk around the casino.”
“Okay. I’ll be here.”
“I’m not leaving yet. Nurse has to get here,” he said as his face faded from view. I heard him quietly disappear down the stairs.
On internet forums, victims of extended painful erections traded home remedies and extolled the benefits of Benadryl, jogging, cold showers, warm showers, and, of course, ejaculation, even though it was contraindicated on more official medical websites. I had trouble imagining how I could make that work considering the discomfort. I took one of the mittens and slipped it over myself. The rabbit fur felt soft against the pain. As I moved it gently, I closed my eyes and summoned Asha’s body, the slope of her thin neck, the muscled ridges of her thick back. I recalled my lips on her lips, the clean, sweet taste between her legs. I imagined she’d come back to me, wet with love and longing. I kept the glove moving up and down, up and down. More than anything sexual, it was the memory of her eyes—wide and hazel and fierce—that sustained me through my physical distress, until at last they broke through the ailing and dissolved both pain and pleasure into a brief, bright blankness, a tiny shudder, and a release I barely registered into the sagging gray Icelandic mitten my mother had barely worn and would never wear again.
*
By week’s end, the diagnosis of syphilis confirmed, I’d left messages for all seven of the women I’d had sex with in the past half year, apologizing for the risk to their health, offering to pay for their tests. After ten days, Asha was the only one who still hadn’t called; as it turned out, she was the one who had it. Blake had it, too—or, rather, had had it just two months prior. She’d known and never told me because at the time her own test had come back negative. No longer. When she finally called to explain all this, it wasn’t long before she was fighting back tears: “I’m sorry.”