I grow wild within me as I drive. This means to the hospital. These are my days of blood, so I go there. I mean my parents found me ankle deep in bleach. Sanitizing everything like I feared we’d all crash out with Marburg unless we took stock, no one fucking move. So.
The cop brought a catlike squint to bear upon the license when I told him I’m going to the hospital. I’m going because I am not, they say, all together. Despite my traveling faster than a flushed pintail he said go on.
One of my broodmates folded up in horror at the thought of driving. I crossed myself. Another had the panic, too. Panting down the freeway, limplimbed, aghast at motion, self-controlled motion, screaming at the freedom. I didn’t understand it. I wanted to make a break for it, embroider them all up in my train, and streak across the dull fallowland towards a future. A drive-thru. Somewhere. Fear not, little ones. But we are all gathered here to jump in lifeboats and I won’t give up mine.
I can watch TV at night. And do exposure exercises like a catechism. I could read but choose not to. Easier to stare and mouth some words if the film’s familiar. Mom and Dad are stumped and floating along, what have I done to them, seriously, dragging them across this boundary line, drugged and insensate. It’s a miracle they still make me dinner.
I can watch TV but it was TV originally that did it. Some small event can trigger fission in your head. Watch a prestige show and see blonde supporting actress number two get blood drawn and mouthswabbed and wait in the clinic for the result. And neurosis wept for there were no more synapses to conquer. I rapidly disintegrated.
For an unknown reason in the hospital there are Sun Chips in great profusion, like hothouse flowers, red and screaming. I eat them like water. Now I look for them in gas stations and corner stores, driven by an unnameable nostalgia. What is this pulse I’m feeling? Stuffing them inside me, gargling their sharp edges, their dusty basecoat of umami, bags folding thin and venereal. Like being homesick for a funeral you missed, like pining for the call you hope will never come. When they’re in me my eyes narrow.
Yes, it is sexual. Why I shake with fear. We kissed and mumbled and she whispered to me that her temple was clean as an empty canoe. But doubt is a tinnitus growing.
Now a nurse leans over me, in charge, he says touch your pants. Touch your underwear. See the microbe and the worm and the chittering virus. These exercises are normal and have precedent. I don’t know, it hurt me, it cloaked me, fostered dimness. I never did exactly what he said. I trusted him and the fear of trust meant I crouched, animal, gnawing at my hawser but scared of working loose.
This same teacher, more spirit guide than spare-the-rod, told me once he thought he might just shit and walk out dry-handed. This is, I thought, a man whose face needs crushing. I wanted to be him so bad.
I drove to a career fair, because I was to do something with my life. A place to sort through resumes and wince at hangers-on. New shoes on me, size ten but should have been eleven, and racking up unsteady circuits of the hall I felt the pinch, then saw the blood seep out of my ankles and into my socks. And when I came home having driven off in terror I catalogued the places I had touched, and then I saw my mother touch them, and I cried curled like a dumb infant. I pooled alcohol on the floor and handles, and ripped the varnish from the door. Protecting is a brand of conquering. I’d have it all planed smooth to the horizon.
Chaperones handheld us to lunch. We could wear shoes. We could eat food. We could talk in a simulacrum of society. But eat, please, pare the world to the barest biologies. Eat swallow stare. One boy talked too much. One girl eyed the light fixtures moonfaced and slack. I felt urine and things inside. It must have been forty-five minutes before I was able to get up. I wasn’t held, I was just in a new song, humming a lilting catatonic scale.
At home in full sunlight I call the hotline, no not the hotline, I don’t call the hotline. I call the clinic where I was vaccinated fourteen years before. I’ll do it. I wonder if they remember me. Or know my name, incoherent manboy. I’ll beg of them the purity that comes from knowing what’s my fate, what are these seeping symptoms, will I die or should I, an important difference. The woman on the line is curt, loving, this cannot be sustained.
My nurse insists on smiling at all hours. His name is Josh, a name warm and stupid and hopeful as a family hound. He is damp and tart like vinegared rice. I like it. This heavy shawl of soul is what I look for in a mate. He’s here to help. This is said repeatedly. He’s here to help. It’s true. For once there’s no catch, except my soul. Like it’s a bargain. Maybe I’ll smear my name in his ledger with lingonberry juice, hoping it works, I can’t stand blood.
We could go to the bathroom, monitored. Someone would grin as we exited. Too long, they’d say, what were you doing, washing your hands. Washing my hands. I thought so. The goal’s to lick your fingers after. To plunge them into a lover after. To be flayed and have no pores to scrub because your whole meat’s an angel dangling in the air collecting microbes. And you’re to believe it’s all okay, all fine, completely fine, I love it. One day that’ll be you.
I can’t do my activities for daily living. They call them ADLs. Like some critical tendon in your foot. And it’s just as bad for them to fail. Challenge: to shit. Impossible. Or to shave in such perfection that all your blood stays locked within your puffy cheeks. Eat without wondering if your lacerated chewed-on tongue will poison the potato dregs Dad touches in the sink after. I’ve never managed it, nor can I piss in peace. Sleep is my one talent.
Cowed by the magnitude of my brain’s inventions I felt the only recourse was to record it all. I mean write it down to get parental understanding to a point where acceptance could occur. They wouldn’t understand, I knew they wouldn’t. I remembered being told at ten to stop unheading my hair. I remember being told at five to stop ticcing like a tenspeed. Still, I wrote the things that brought me shame and then I stopped and handed it to Mom and felt transparent. An old fish deep in cave water, whose functions play through jellied flesh.
At nine in the morning each day I text a friend. Pissed in Los Angeles she deigns to wake and hold me from afar and say you’re nuts, tell me of disease, you’re nuts, stop it, continue, stop it, you’re safe.
During this time I only work weekends. My shift ends at midnight, an utterly dead hour, doubly so in winter. Wasteland. The glaciers beat their retreat millennia ago but you’d never know it to look. A blueish farmlight buzzing on a wire. Stanchions with a chain hooped across. You can imagine in these blackened plots a dog half frozen, to be discovered only at dawn’s hoarfrosting. Cows steaming, blunt heads prowing forward in the ice night. Driving past it all, hoping for no accident, I scratch my head and tear a pimple. Feel the scoring and feel the loose liquid and skin and feel panic rise, where can I go, how can I drive without touching the wheel, how can I become a bird.
Be firm in your rejection of all normalcy, be large, go for broke. You don’t go mad by choice, of course not, but logic fell out of the truck bed long ago. A base meaty prion awoke in your skull and now off you go. Do it. Most sanitizers gesture towards aloe but you still get dry and hurt. And then your wrists bleed, so. Do it anyways. Try and lave a salve over the hurt in your life. Chisel away the bugging things like a squamous knob they might shave from your back. And when you’ve done it, find it did nothing for you. Do it again. You have to do it again.
If you have a labcoat or a suffix, it means I wring you dry. Tell me I’m okay. Tell me I’m okay. Tell me I’m okay. Tell me I’m okay. Tell me. And do it again when, in five minutes, I find the lie inside your soothing. Tell me I’m okay. You motherfucker. Tell me. Please. I’m sorry. I know you know.
Do you know what it is to feel absent in one’s own home. Not an unbelonging, or a fear, or sleepwalking and waking up on the davenport no one uses. I mean the absolute negation of a prior occupant, yourself, your old fine self. A corpse sits up in the surgical theater. I sat on the couch staring while a TV hummed. My parents never did volunteer what they thought of my letter.
At the hour I drive in you can see dead deer half chummed half drumtight upon the shoulder. I release my hands briefly from the wheel and breathe. Antiseptic snow at the ass end of March, cloaking and pale. I steady myself every day in the parking lot and go wet with fear.
In a chalkboard chart I chalk the sites of fear. Touching cups and pants and pens and things that I suspect might house the filoviral if only I could get them tested. I finger fronds of the potted plants while I walk past them in the hallways. The door locks from the outside. Men who find their only home in holes become a type of animal. Badgers, they called them in my state, but I don’t have ore to dig.
At night, find me in a dark room with hands clasped beneath the sheets like huge streaked tulips. One wall yellow, egg yolks purling in the pan. I grew up here. The other walls each their own primary color shouting. It has a lukewarm feel, like cooling leftovers. I cinch my hands tighter and refuse to move, and I spurn my parents when they want to kiss me. Upon waking I always check to see if there’s wet. I cinch my hands tighter to forget that dying and hoping both branch from the smallest kernel exploding into seed.
I should address death. Doing it is extremely difficult for cowards which is why I never did it. A nurse asked, and I said sure, I would tell anyone if it got that far. They make you say that, and I’m not too cynical to say yes, self-oaths are a form of binding. But no, I didn’t mean it. I had a hazy idea it would be whatever was under the sink, or ibuprofen the color of livers sledding down my throat, resigned, sip a little tap water. Maybe self-immolation in a duck blind to give it a local feel. But it would be accomplished, it simply would be right, and good, and liberating. I’d gurgle, but just a little. Clean clothes, obviously, and a paper tacked to my breast pocket.
When I achieved that clarity I also received a special horror into me, like a sac bursting. Eight years later, laid low by a bad lung and my vision fading to a point, I thought, all right. I’ve prepared for this. In neither case did I fold into that forever, but I still retain the right.
After a month away from razors, I itch. A sweatshirt worn unwashed for a week means I make folks retch. We’re so close, the program guide says. Harassed by visions of the ethyl and the isopropyl I try to get through winter. It’s fucking cold. We’re so close, he says. Touch your shoe soles, touch your mucus membranes, touch the maggoty dump that heaves behind the Lutheran steeple. Who’s getting closer?
A bird tucks, wishing the season could get it over with. The fir cones grow cowls of snow to hood their sap. Here I am learning how wrong I am for the earth. I’m the tallest one in the sharing room and the last one to speak. I cry occasionally, but only when the door’s closed. Bringing air in frothy and sour and heaving my chest like when you slap and fart the mustard from a bottle. Things can get too much. Everything contains the germ of death, death in all its fullness.
I rewash my hands, bring them together. Prayer isn’t a thing I do. Once I thought I could invoke the heavens, even thought the Ancient of Days was brother to me. But at one a.m. during a church lock-in I had a vision of wan Jesus sidling in stonefaced as if to shiv me. I told my dad what my seer’s eyes saw and he nodded, grave, like when they did the intake form. I thought Christ would bless me ghostly but now I’m just a font of terror. A burning bush would only leave weals, scabs, pus.
I cut myself doing dishes and threw the pot away so no one else would feel the virus bloom. I know I’m not in thrall to gods or their intermediaries. I can trumpet my own portents, I can knife my own virgin self. Mom pulled the pot out of the trash while I looked on.
Pellets of snow like rice chime on the windows. On a chipwood path in the garden I’m asked to stand stock still, ears full of little winds stealing through the grove. There’s a rockhewn place to sit and gorge myself on air, air so clean and sharp it could bleed me like a prizefighter. But there’s an undercurrent shimmering. Smells dungish. I’m party to all Earth’s dirt these days. And rotting leaves. Marchmelt makes the state all grubby, the edges of your vision can’t tell much apart, things smear together as the snow piles turn gray. The one in the Kohl’s parking lot its own tarry Matterhorn. I buy new clothes in case my old ones need burning, I should burn them, maybe, I think.
Bubbles spread on the tile. My mother swears in silence while she buffs the injured woodgrain where I flooded it with Clorox. I think that particular pooling bought me a half hour of peace. She’s past nonplussed, now she has to bear it, this her boulder named Son. We tear each piglet from the sty, she knows this. We doom ancestral plots with bad seeds, we deflesh the living trees with the adz, we flay ourselves like bucks shedding velvet. I will continue to do this, again and again, and it will never end.
In the meditation garden a blackbird stays longer to watch us every time, unfearing. I take a step. Beneath the memorial chair for a lost patient there’s a mummied rat. It gives like shoe leather. The bell rings.
Seth Kleinschmidt is a Midwesterner from the banks of Wisconsin’s Rock River. After many years spent on and off the air as a radio producer and disc jockey, he is now an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
