Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  And then one day, like that elusive singer to the song you’ve been humming all weekend, it all slurps into your brain like a length of linguini. You see the new wool throw she’d brought home the day after bringing you home from the hospital. You see the Mason jars start to accumulate, along with the swatches of cloth. Finally, you see the light in her eyes like never before. The light of anticipation. The light of love. And it all dovetails so smoothly together that you want to kick yourself (if you could) for not having recognized it until then. Because she used to describe it. Hell, she reveled in reminding you how she used to pump her milk into Mason jars because nursing you was like trying to suplex a baby crocodile. Said you were too rough with her, and when you were especially crabby, she’d have to swaddle you in a quilt like a full-body tourniquet, and plop you into the crib and slack-jaw all day at The Price is Right and Phil Donahue while you cried yourself dry.

  Yes, she used those very words. And sometimes, she’d yell at the kids playing loudly in the street just for practice. Because she wasn’t all too fond of children to begin with. Not really.

  And now even that’s in the past. Because while ***.A. Maddie scowled at you like a harpy when you told her you’d gotten knocked up—and from a one-nighter with one of your loser poker buddies, no less—A.A. Maddie now can’t wait to be a grandmother.

  That your fetus not only survived the accident but is still strong and viable within the inert, warm pulp that is your body is the ultimate, belated wet-dream of modern day Phil Donahue. It’s why you continue to pine for the infarctions, and the aneurysms, and the cancer, despite how they conflict with the impulse of self-preservation.

  The impulse of maternal self-preservation.

  Maddie knows about that all too well. It’s what you were both arguing about in the car on the way to Planned Parenthood before that truck ran that red light and altered your gravity. Even Wolfie’s constant yips were like additional half-votes cast against your choice.

  Wolfie. It was his permanent death, and not your living one, that would’ve broken Maddie completely if not for the new life growing inside you, rekindling hope and agency.

  “Memory is life’s natural preservative,” she tells a petrified, half-skinned Wolfie—almost as if hearing your thoughts live. “Sometimes though, physical mementos are necessary to help cure them.”

  And until that day arrives four months from now, you’ll listen to Maddie warbling more bliss while basking in her checkered-tile parlor of controlled docility and petrified beasts. You’ll watch her waning mind as she absently plunges-and-pulls individual hairs into a forever play-bowed Wolfie, replacing his unruly flaxen pelt hair-by-hair with your copper strands, and maybe your desire to die will succumb to your fledgling fool’s hope that she’ll do better with yours than she did with hers, and that maternal self-preservation will conquer your errant ways once and for all.

  TOOTH

  What are the odds that they’re gonna let me say ta-ta to my foot before they saw it off?

  That would be nice of them. No one ever thinks about these things until moments before a masked stranger, wafting of iodine and bleach, takes up something shiny and sharp, and built solely to lop off pieces from human beings.

  “Ma’am, would you like a moment to bid adieu to your . . . whatever.”

  Don’t hold your breath. Closure for life’s less savory, signature moments is a close cousin to caveats before embarking on life’s chancier ones.

  It would’ve been nice if, as an example, on our first date, Whit had said, “Clara, can I let you know just how deep my emotional issues run before you decide to proceed further?”

  No such luck there either.

  Best I got with the former scenario was when a nurse asked me only an hour ago from behind an off-putting, chipper smile: “Would you like your toe-rings in the same bag with your other personals?”

  I replied: “Do you have a hospital-issued jeweler’s velvet pad I could use?”

  Ten days ago when I was admitted for severe sepsis, the predominant question was a variant on, “Any idea how you acquired the initial infection?”

  And despite my knee-jerk impulse to come back with, “Isn’t that your job to tell me?” I managed to confuse them further by saying, “His smile killed me.”

  This is what I’d tell the coworkers, the busybodies, the three-appletini-deep TAs at academic parties whenever they asked what I thought about Whit the first time I met him.

  This is what I just told the new nurse prepping me for surgery, a bug-eyed greenhorn named Abby, with a bun of ginger hair pulled so tight it distended the freckles and acne around her hairline to the point her whole face seemed on the verge of jumping into hyperspace.

  She looked more scared than I felt, but one gander at my engagement ring and she jumped at the chance to chirp on about the lucky man who put it there. Chit-chatting’s crucial to the medical assistant’s job for one major reason: to keep the patient’s mind off of what’s being done to their bodies by grownups in fuchsia pajamas.

  And herein lies my problem: Necrotizing Fasciitis is the hands-down, all-time champion elephant-in-the-room. Having some RN behind a face-shield snip buntings of dead flesh the color of blackberry fruit-roll-ups from your thigh for a week going isn’t like a needle prick to the shoulder you can just glance away from. Nor does lancing a wart hold a candle to having strips of still-healthy skin uprooted from your back to replace the festering bands pared from the limb in question.

  So they preempt the mutilation with small talk, usually revolving around happy tidings or events, like weddings, even if they’re not happening anymore.

  They don’t know this. At least I don’t think they do, so I keep quiet unless they push for details, which they haven’t dared to yet. I sensed that Abby was about to before one of her more seasoned cohorts shot her a look that could freeze gasoline. But the broken record of cordial smiles and subsequent, abrupt silences tell me that they already know enough.

  ***

  Regarding Whitney McKee, PhD, a few words on our meet-cute moment.

  I was still wonderfully whole on that summer day one year ago. Except for my eyes. Despite their debatable status as my finest features, they were faulty from the start. Seeing far for me is a three-alarm poop-grimace even with my contacts. But that day I’d opted for the slutty-grad-student look, which only meant a slightly darker lip-gloss and my Tom Ford cat eye frames.

  Because I’d heard that Whit was a looker, and being a fair one myself, I figured my odds required little handicapping.

  Yes, friends have often cited vainglory as my biggest foible, to which I’d smile back roses, stifling the retort that my biggest foible was keeping around friends who would cite self-awareness as a foible.

  So back to Whit, my fossil expert.

  When I first laid eyes on him, he was about to give a talk at the school entitled “From Skinny Shrew to Megalodon: Tiny Progenitors and Shrinking Giants.”

  Now I don’t usually attend stuffy dinosaur symposiums, especially ones with a woman-to-man ratio of ten-to-one. The first five rows were an NSYNC concert with the smattering of men present—those who’d either lost bets, or were in the process of making up for some moronic, Bill Clintonesque overstep. But like I said, Whit was easy on the eyes, and even straight men can respect the spite-motivation that only a handsome hombre can galvanize.

  Watching him take the stage in his folded brown shirt sleeves and wrinkled khakis, one abiding comparison prevailed: the Indiana Jones of Alameda County.

  Shorter though, and with slightly more bee-stung features. But damn if he didn’t pull it off, the way certain women can pull off baldness. Add to it the pursed, pensive lips and a chenille voice that spoke of those extinct animals with the fondness of one sharing photos of his children, and you’d soften fast too.

  After a series of overheads and requisite Q & A on the 160 million-year-old opossum-like varmint called the Skinny Shrew, the announcement for the book-signing portion of the evening goo
sed the ladies into action.

  My reaction? I bee-lined it straight for the closest male at the front of the line.

  “Think it’ll count against me that I forgot both my book and signing ticket at home?” I asked the Vonnegut doppelganger. He was in mid deep-throat of his glasses for a fog-and-wipe, though I doubted he needed them. My eyelash flutter was wicked-good and I had legs to the moon.

  My prided dancer’s legs, never mind that I never boogied a lick in my life.

  The way he squinted back put my own eye-pinching to shame. He might as well have been gawking at a walrus, and only after slipping his glasses back on did his eyes recalibrate to trace a meandering path down the vintage floral print of my dress.

  “I don’t see it being a problem,” he said, and following a bonobo grin that dog-fart lingered, he carved out a spot for me in front of him.

  With six women ahead of us, it took nearly forty minutes to get to Whit’s table where I could finally snag a book from the pyramid that had been set up on one corner. All the while the Vonnegut clone kept rapping in my ear in a staccato drone that drove an itch into all my unreachables—topics from the DOW breaking 4,000, to Oklahoma City, to OJ’s glove shenanigans, to the impressive girth of the Megalodon tooth gracing the book’s cover.

  Watching the head-cocked, snaggletoothed smile of the mousy coed in front of me was only annoying for as long as it took Whit to move her along with an indulgent smirk reserved for chatty toddlers and grandmothers.

  Finicky and reticent. That in cahoots with green, anime-wide eyes had me jonesing for him all the more, and after checking that I was adequately boosted and wrinkle-free, I squared myself up and opened with a salvo of pearly-whites and dimples.

  “Amazing little creature,” I said, handing over my freshly pinched book. “Does every first-thing on Earth hail from China?”

  His smile was slow to curve, glowing-white teeth stopping just short of touching, as if contact would’ve ensured some premature and irrevocable commitment.

  “In terms of human civilization . . . yes,” he said.

  A gulper too! Both of our hooks were set.

  “But we’re also a geological hiccup time-wise,” he added. “First life started in the oceans, actually. And if we die out, it’s likely where it’ll start all over again eventually.”

  I flipped through his book, not bothering to even slightly feign interest in taxonomy or radio isotope dating.

  “And what other brilliant insights will I find lurking between these sky-blue covers?”

  Another gulp. Whenever he did, his eyes flashed more quiet panic than at a Vatican ball.

  “Well, there’s always the . . . ” He sized me up suddenly, as if nudged into it by some invisible, bobbing toady. “Are you in one of my classes?”

  And yes, I made one of those exaggerated big “O” faces.

  “Oops. And here I thought I’d wandered into Dr. Hekler’s OCD forum. No wonder I couldn’t pinpoint which possum-toothed member of your panel skinny shrew was an indictment of.”

  Those big eyes. They billowed atop his cheeks like spinnakers. It was my first taste of his disapproval—a feeling akin to dumping a pint of hot cocoa on your lap.

  I guess he could tell that I’d already sensed the jutting elbows of some murkier presence lurking behind those irises, for he initiated a half-dozen blinks in rapid succession before both corners of his mouth dimpled again.

  “Who should I make this out to?” he asked, reaching for my book.

  “To Clara.” I leaned forward so he could take in as much as he dared. “The same woman you’re taking to dinner this Friday.”

  His own surprised “O” was a more subnormal, rhomboid version of mine, and eventually he dove into the book for a John Hancock that took an epoch to evolve. No sooner had he handed it back that he looked right past me to his next fan. I lingered a beat before stepping down. If I’d ever been blown off before, it sure as hell hadn’t been with such pussy disregard. My immediate impulse was to hurl the book at the stack on the table and hope for a seven-ten split at the least, but I wanted a gander at his signature first. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he was hung-over. Either way, his signature wouldn’t lie. You could tell a lot by the way a man spikes his consonants or dangles his vowels.

  At the foot of the dais and within his view, I opened the book to the flyleaf. His signature was tight and controlled, with all the caps and lower cases peaking at the same height. But what floated under the signature redeemed him somewhat, at least in the balls department.

  His scribbled phone number flew all over the place, mad and unruly, like an exorcised demon.

  I looked back and just caught him whipping his eyes away from me and towards Vonnegut-lite, his grin wide and pressed into action.

  Yeah, his smile killed me alright. That sixteen-point ivory picket fence letting the cherubs out while keeping the pucks in.

  ***

  But how I loved to trigger that smile. And at a time not so long ago when I seldom got into a dither over the why’s and the when’s of anything, charming out that beam became a daily preoccupation.

  Nowadays, not so much.

  Yesterday the doctors took more of my left leg, this time to just below the knee. They did their best to save it, of course, but Herculean efforts are a poor comfort when you’re being reduced by base-ten percentages every other day.

  This is the strength of Necrotizing Fasciitis—its power to deplete on emotional as well as physical fronts. For the first time I’m starting to understand the true chokehold depression had on Whit, though to be honest, better-late-than-never just doesn’t pack the consoling punch it used to.

  How I caught this lovely malady to begin with, no one could say. Not at first. By the time they could it mattered about as much as the concept of nuclear fission to the blind Hiroshima fisherman dragging the scorched train of his skin over the black glass that used to be his beach.

  To refer to this blight by its more common name of the flesh-eating bacteria would be a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t eat flesh so much as kills it outright, doing this to one in every four-hundred-thousand lucky contestants or so.

  Odds fixation. What used to be a casual diversion has now become my full-blown obsession.

  If there’s a psychological term for it, I haven’t been able to find it. What I have found is that I was twice as likely to get struck by lightning than getting this infection. Four times more likely to die choking on a non-food item, a la Tennessee Williams. Twenty-two times more likely to be the victim of murder. A hundred-and-sixty times more likely to die from slipping in the shower—or maybe not anymore at this point!

  Remember all of this the next time someone crows to you about the virtues of originality.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m not dead yet, though what’s left of my drumstick from the knee up is a Josef Mengele quilt of lipstick shades. The newer wounds are meshed over with vacuum dressings to promote blood flow in anticipation of future grafts. Most are no bigger than the very ring of my nurses’ unwitting curiosity. Some push the size of hockey pucks. A few, as large as coffee saucers.

  Each a portal into my subcutaneous world. Think the eye of Jupiter rendered in acrylics of blood crimson, fat primrose, and canker plum.

  The nurses do their best to keep things light and upbeat as they patch me up while I strive that much harder to out-cool them. The way I see it, you can either agonize and mope, or you can leave the world a deeper impression than what you made while whole and ambulatory, all with the sunniest of smiles.

  It’s one of the few lessons my mom tried to drill into me that actually stuck.

  ***

  It didn’t take long with Whit and I. Three months and we had moved in together. A hiccup in relationship time.

  The first night in our new apartment, he stood in his boxers and grey Cal shirt in the middle of our bedroom, surrounded by the skyline of boxes we were too tired to start unpacking. He was gazing up at where the walls me
t the ceiling, teeth grinding, a baby’s quiver to his chin.

  This was Whit in contemplation mode. His brooding and gnashing had increased exponentially since we became official, but considering that he hardly fluttered a lip or twitched an eye even when we had sex, I quickly grew to relish any flaunt of emotion, however mopey.

  “Was that crown molding always up there?” he asked.

  I’d just walked out of our bathroom, Chanel Precision spackling my face.

  “Uh, yes. In fact I made a big to-do about it when we first saw the place. About that trim not belonging in a Spanish revival and so forth? Remember?”

  He glanced back, smile wide and languid. Those addictive grins that seemed to atone for past fibs and larcenies. Along with the occasional ear-popping belly laugh, he was an unwitting reminder of those very famines in my own life. That he could laugh more richly than most mentally-hale men only made it worse, though I supposed the meds loosened that up in him. A kind of humor expectorant.

  My fucking Kryptonite either way, the dark behind the light.

  “I remember the landlord couldn’t take his eyes off you,” he said. “Never would’ve gotten those free repairs on my own . . . ”

  My face cream turned piss warm before he finished his sentence. As much as he claimed to love my looks, he also resented them the way some people did another’s comparably excessive talent.

  “Yeah, well the toilet still overflows. Maybe another inch of thigh would’ve scored us a handyman not from the seventh page of a Craigslist ad.”

  His eyes moored themselves to the trim-work again. I was tempted to hurl a pillow at the back of his head, but the only other time I’d done that he wallowed in a butt-hurt daze for the rest of the day.