Calypso(53)
“That doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’m not interested.”
“But…”
“No.”
My gastrointestinal virus lasted for six long days, each of which involved at least one flight and an appearance before an audience. Halfway through it, the cramps arrived, some so severe they doubled me over. I thought of my insides as a haunted house with bolts of lightning ricocheting off the walls. The worst of them came when I was in Austin, Texas, walking behind my hotel along a path that ran beside the river. I was trying to get my steps in, and as I stood there, legs crossed, my eyes screwed shut against the pain, it occurred to me that if the floodgates did open—which seemed highly probable—I’d have to jump into the water. Getting out again, wet, covered in mud, I’d likely wish I weren’t staying in such a nice hotel. At the La Quinta Inn you might return to your room unnoticed, but there was no way I could sop through the lobby of the Four Seasons without causing a fuss. “A child was drowning, and I jumped into the river to save her,” I could say. “Don’t worry, she’s fine now. I just need to go up and change out of these wet clothes.”
Would they buy it? I wondered, looking out at the brown water. Do I look like the type who could save a child? Should I add more detail—say, perhaps, that the girl was Mexican?
These are the questions you ask yourself when you’re traveling with a gastrointestinal virus. Then one day you wake up normal, restored to health—a miracle. At first you’re incredibly grateful—your appetite’s back, and your energy level. There’s a bit of you, though, that misses the razor’s edge, the terrible thrill that at any moment you might lose control of yourself and finally know what total disgrace feels like. I’ll wager that it’s so far from near total disgrace as to be incomprehensible for a while. The difference, say, between a toothache and being burned alive. I think of that man in the airplane bathroom. The flight attendant knocks, thinking he has his trousers off and is trying to rinse them in that worthless little sink. But he’s still fully dressed and looking in the mirror, shocked that he could feel so fundamentally different yet still have human features, let alone the same face. The two eyes right where they were the last time he checked, that same nose and mouth. But how can this be? he wonders.
“Sir,” the woman on the other side of the door says. “Sir, you have to come out now. Sir? Are you all right?”
When it’s my turn, I’ll open my mouth, unable to speak, and feel a little tap on my wrist. Time to stand up, my watch will whisper.
Then, before killing myself, I’ll say one last time, “I am standing up.”
The Spirit World
Our house on Emerald Isle is divided down the middle and has an E beside one front door and a W beside the other. The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top floor. It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to Amy’s room, which is the same size as ours but is shaped differently. Unlike Lisa and Paul, who are on the west side of the house and could probably sleep on burlap without noticing it, Amy likes nice sheets.
She’d packed a new set in her suitcase, and on the night before Thanksgiving, as I helped her make her bed, she mentioned a friend who’d come to her apartment for dinner the previous evening in New York. “He drinks Coke, right, so I went to the store on the corner to buy some,” she said. “And you know how those new bottles have names on the labels—Blake or Kelly or whatever?”
I nodded.
“Well, there were only two left on the shelf, one with MOM printed on it, and the other with TIFFANY.”
I reached for a pillowcase. “Do you think if I were dead there would have been three bottles on the shelf instead of two and the third would have had my name on it?”
Amy thought for a moment. “Yes.”
“So the only Cokes at that store in New York City are for people in our family who have died?”
She smoothed out the bedspread. “Yes.”
I couldn’t tell if she honestly believed this. It’s hard to say with Amy. On the one hand she’s very pragmatic, and on the other she’s open to just about anything. Astrology, for instance. I wouldn’t call her a nut exactly, but she has paid good money to have her chart done, and if you’re talking about someone, she’ll often ask when this person’s birthday is and then say something like “Ah, a Gemini. OK. That makes sense now.”
She’s big on acupuncture as well, which I also tend to think is dubious, at least for things like allergies. That said, I admire people who are curious and open their minds to new possibilities, especially after a certain age. You have to draw the line somewhere, though, and with me it’s my anus. When I was in my early thirties, it became a thing to have colonics. A number of my friends started going to a man in Chicago and discussing the rubble he’d discovered in their lower intestines. “A pumpkin seed, and I haven’t eaten pumpkin in eight years!”
Their insides were like pharaohs’ tombs, dark catacombs littered with ancient relics. Now people are giving themselves coffee enemas, believing it wards off and even cures cancer.
“I think I’ll take the cancer, thank you,” my sister Lisa said to me on Thanksgiving morning.
“Amen to that,” I agreed.