Viral
This story was published in Lilies and Cannonballs Review
Spring still feels like winter, streets like muddy ash.
The work I once did continued on somehow without me, so I spend most of my days now with a lot of time on my hands. I try to practice self-image. I stand as still as I can in front of the mirror in my garage, looking at myself, encoding the particular ticks that have made me this person, a person I do not know, a person who wants to be forgotten, tossed from the window of a car, left for dead on the banks of a sewer drain. By lunch I am looking the part pretty well. Hands and shoulders in the right place, the right look on my face, even my breathing is dark and shoveled. But right when everything is just about perfect, one shot away from being absolutely the most buried person I can be, I will anticipate the moment and fuck it to hell. My face goes slack, my shoulders soften, and once again I am the visible me, the one you see pausing on the sidewalk to listen for the sound of cars passing him by.
Then my wife gets sick. The doctor thinks she has the new viral infection, the one that appeared in the north last fall when the waterways of the cities bubbled up in unclaimed body parts. My wife lies awake every night, bleeding from her eyes. She keeps a bucket beside the bed.
Once, I had a job listening to fish. It worked about the way I thought it would. I sat on an aerated metal chair––holes drilled into the seat for no discernible reason––my ears wedged into plastic tubes and the mouth of the tubes set against the glass of the fish tank. A lot of things sounded like air inside the tank, or rather what air sounds like underwater, sounds the Fish Listening Advisory Committee called bubbles, or bubbling. The active theory behind the project was that the fish talked inside these bubbles, that somehow the air inside their breath was a language which would better explain our language if only our ears could learn how to decipher it. I had no qualifications. Neither did the Fish Listening Advisory Committee.
I make a promise never to bully my wife into getting better. But two weeks ago comes this new kind of medicine the doctor seems pretty sure about. My wife has a bad feeling but tries it anyway to make me feel better. The instructions sure sound important, full of hard consonants and Roman numerals. “In short,” the doctor explains, “let’s have confidence that it works.” It doesn’t. In fact, the medicine makes her much sicker than she already was.
The worst job I ever had was in a knife factory. Every night I fell asleep and dreamt about the light of meat lockers; the sound of leaking water; the smell of underground walls, puddles, and table saws; the sound of a blade cutting through somebody’s bones, the hot smell of it, like burning rubber or hair. My job was to press initials into the handles of all the knives. Everyone seemed to be named Jim. Or J.I.M. I imagined whole companies of Jims roaming our nation’s highways in search of marrow and muscle tissue, their basements full of hanging bodies and sheets of skin, face masks and flesh jackets. I was going to quit the knife factory, but the company replaced us with a giant machine before I got the chance.
Before my wife and I married, we took picnics on this wide open hill where a contractor who had refused to hire me was building huge, new homes based on stilts. Our favorite house was never finished. It stood there, month after month, fragmented and skeletal with big slabs of wood lying about like monster chopsticks. We picnicked on the top floor, looking out at the rest of the homes littering the valley. We decided then, over cold cuts and paper cups of wine, never to build our own home because it would turn out just like this one: never completed, standing alone on the top of a hill outside the city. We live in the city now, in a small apartment with a window ledge.
Some days, when the clouds rise and the wind comes across the water, the trash on the sidewalks spills into the streets, muddy and trampled, weather-soiled with a late spring and a winter that has hung on far too long. Greasy wrappers and napkins fill the air. There should be a season for eating. A place in the weather where nothing is prepared, ever. We will sit in empty kitchens, watching storms devour the land, learning how to eat the world in huge, raw gulps.
When I was a kid, I made gifts for myself from the butcher paper my father brought home from the butcher’s. It was difficult work, the paper always so greasy with blood, the smell of blood, the filmy pieces of pork or cow gumming up the scissors. But once cut, the crusty stiffness of the butcher paper made for great sculpting. Dinosaurs and evil robots were my favorite. Sometimes they battled. The dinosaurs always won.
My wife and I had been married for three years. Our favorite restaurant was downtown. We took our anniversaries there. One day we decided to have lunch. It was raining. We both had colds. We ordered the soup, which was always very good. Mine was too hot, which surprised me, the boiling insides of the vegetables coming alive suddenly on my tongue. I held my mouth as my wife licked her right index finger and stuck it into my soup. She looked up at me. “Here,” she said, “let me cool it down.” I think about that lunch all the time.
Today my wife tries to stick her wet fingers into an electrical socket. Neither one of us knows if it will work for sure, but I try to stop her anyway.
I spent the last days at my last job talking to a blank computer screen. Robots did not turn out nearly as smart or evil as I expected them to be.
The blood my wife bleeds from her eyes looks very black in the streetlights. Every night I empty her bucket from our window ledge. My wife was always so afraid of heights.
Once, when we were on vacation in Florida, my wife asked me if I had ever been skinny-dipping. I never had, but lied and said yes, “There was this party in high school. I finger-banged two sisters in their parent’s Jacuzzi bathtub.” When I finished telling the story, my wife was silent and would not speak.
At the beach I undressed by myself on the sand and went running into the surf. It was very warm. On the way back to the hotel, a raccoon ran in front of our car. I jumped and choked myself against my seat belt. I was still naked. The raccoon caught itself in our headlights right before we hit it. Then, as it moved out from under our car, we saw its sharp green eyes and huge, powerful ass, crushed and broken, snaking behind its body into the woods. After all my years in the city, I had never seen anything like that.
My wife started slamming her hands on the steering wheel, telling me to get out. But I did not want to get out. That thing was out there in the dark, just on the other side of the road, waiting in the low brush, ready to claw out my eyes. My wife was screaming, “Get out! Get out of my fucking car!” I kept shaking my head no. It got to the point where I wished the raccoon would just come out from the woods and finish us both.