Carlo objects to the characterization of the sweatshirt in this one
but i say it belongs to both of us!!
Papa Bear & His Cubs - Sweetest Thing on This Side of Heaven
“Them constantly is to dry-fuck or is it dry-hump? / not that”
Hello:
I spent too long staring at the handwashing diagram on the bathroom wall. The neat squares, the detailed instructions, the way the hands were unattached to any body. In the last square it just said: Now your hands are clean. A spell. That simple.
When I went back out into the cafe the barista handed me my sandwich and called me honey. They had a beautiful orange manicure. I felt a bright flicker in the centre of my chest but did not cry. Outside I sat at a very heavy metal table with a very heavy metal chair chained to it and tried not to check my texts and failed. There was the shadow of a tree falling on the concrete along the sidewalk and I stared at it for a very long time. The weather was very, very beautiful.
Doro talked to me on the phone for like an hour. Thank god for Doro. The enormous street where all the hospitals are has this strange but lovely park built into the median, an act of kindness in the form of civic planning. It is green and treed and shady and surprisingly quiet, given the fact that it is in the centre of a million lanes of traffic. When I got there other people were sitting on the good benches, but soon they left and I was the only person around. It is rare to have a whole park to yourself on any August day. For a while I sat facing the hospital where my granddad had been in the ICU before he died, years ago, this same month, actually almost to the day. I remembered going to visit him, stumbling out of the taxi immediately confused and overwhelmed, looking around at all the other people going in and out of the building, the same way they were going into and out of it now. Thinking How does anyone know what to do?
On the phone I said I was worried I had brought it on by speaking out loud about my happiness. Our roommate moved out earlier this week, an amicable split. When you decide to move in with a couple there are lots of different factors to consider, but you don’t necessarily think about whether one of them is so severely immunocompromised that your life will be even further restrained if a global pandemic hits. It makes sense to want to be free. The chaos of moving had finally cleared, and Carlo and I had spent the day before this one moving my office into her old room and his office up from the basement, just shifting things around. This is our first time living together just as a couple, no roommates, and we kept saying the same things about our luck, me going I don’t want to jinx it and then saying it anyway. The house was the same as it had always been, but also completely new. I felt like a millionaire, walking around, seeing all the things I already knew about it, changed.
So the next morning, the second I opened my eyes, no pause between sleeping and waking, when he asked Hey can you feel my forehead and tell me if it’s… hot hot hot? I knew that it was my fault, I had done it, with just my words. There are different kinds of knowing, but I knew.
The doctor told us to call the transplant people. The transplant people told us to go to the ER. His face was a colour I had never seen it before. It took him fifteen minutes to get out of bed. Somewhere in there his phone company called him about renegotiating his plan, which seemed kind of hilarious, in a horrifying way. In the emergency room waiting area the Coke machine had a huge sign taped on it that just said THANK YOU!! in huge sans-serif letters. One of the questions in the initial screening was “any recent inexplicable falls?” The couple across from us were having an animated conversation about some family drama; the man kept saying You really have to nip it in the butt while the woman nodded seriously behind her face shield. Carlo could not get comfortable in the chair, was doing the terrifying breathing. When they called him they said his middle name too, which startled us both. He came back with a bracelet on his wrist that said ALLERGY, a leftover from the last time he was there. When they gave me the biodegradable bowl for him to puke in he went oh, I know this thing. When they called him into the hospital he took his bag and then I was alone.
On the phone Doro said If you are going to think about it that way you have to think you can speak good luck into your life too. When we hung up I looked at the strip of park around me: birds chirping, weird city tree with its small oval leaves, beautiful terrible buildings, green green grass against the grey grey pavement. A bus wrapped in an ad for the concussion clinic went past and I waved, reflexively, and then laughed at myself. I felt entirely defenceless, paper-thin.
When they said it wasn’t covid I felt half a second of uncut relief. When they said they were keeping him but wouldn’t say for how long I found a second fear underneath the first one, deeper, darker. I went home and packed three of everything plus headphones, toiletries, and the Raptors sweatshirt that is our truest communal property. I spent a long time trying to decide whether to put my manuscript inside too; he had asked me to print it for him, but it felt weird. Back at the hospital, the guy who took the bag at the front desk seemed like he was my age, maybe even younger. I couldn’t stop thinking about that; it seemed wrong, comedically so.
At dinner I drank a beer for the first time in maybe two months. It tasted amazing and kind of like grass. The cat headbutted my ankles. On the drive home my mother said that when she first had me she worried a lot about what she would do if something happened, because I was the only one, but then she realized that no amount of preparation or planning can insure you against the world. Thank god for my mother. That night I had no dreams, not one.
Everyone texted me. I learned that Carlo’s mother has an excellent grasp of emoji as punctuation, and that there is enough room in my new office to lay the yoga mat all the way down and be comfortable with your arms spread wide, and that the light there in the afternoon is perfect, diffuse. I tried to watch the basketball game from the night before but the disjunctive staccato of phone phone phone kept throwing me off. I let the cat out into the garden, brought him back in. I threw away every expired item in the kitchen, felt sweat and decades of old grime clinging to my skin. The backs of my legs had this ache in them that still hasn’t gone away.
Time passed. More time. They couldn’t say what it was but they seemed certain it wasn’t the worst thing. He was feeling better but they wouldn’t let him go or tell him how much longer or what they thought it could be. I lay on the floor, breathed in the air coming through the window screen, breathed out. Felt time give way beneath me. Below the second fear was the unknown, just gently pulsing.
In the evening we had trivia. Carlo had charmed the nurses into letting him go downstairs to get real food. He always says this part of being in the hospital is the easiest but I know that’s not actually true for everyone. He managed to make Zoom work on his phone even though the wifi was threadbare and he had a picc line in his hand. I had never seen a person eating chicken wings in a hospital bed before, but there is always a first time for everything. Our team got 70 out of 74. It was the most normal time I have ever had. Thank god for trivia. The tiny anchors of useless fact.
Later, in bed, alone, I turned the fan off just to see what it sounded like. The silence and the darkness settled around me like a thick, soft blanket. I couldn’t believe how dark it was.
The next day he texted me Do u like big butts? / …...cause I’m about to get SPRUNG and I choked on my water. I went out into the garden and sprayed baking soda and dish soap onto the mildewed zucchini leaves and thought I have got to get my fucking driver’s license. When he came through the door he smelled faintly chlorinated and his hair looked insane. I got to hold him for a long time. We texted everyone and everyone texted us, thank god for everyone. I made him a smoothie and we watched the end of the Portland-Brooklyn game with his head in my armpit.
Now, a day later, typing this, I can hear him in the next room. The deep clicking of the keyboard, the ice cubes ringing in the mason jar, the faint strains of something light out of the speakers. He is sitting in the room that was my office but is now his; I am sitting in the room that was once my office, years ago, then someone else’s bedroom, now my office again but arranged a whole new way. I still haven’t adjusted to the change. My breath catches every time I look down into the basement and see his desk empty, then releases when I remember he’s upstairs, right next to me. Everything is just like it was before, just different.
Here are Otto and Becky, two hot cats:
&&&:
Donate to the Toronto West End Community Forum’s rolling resource fund
I’m obsessed with the whiteboard at Jimmy Butler’s bubble coffee shop