Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  I said, “I’ll be sure to consult Architectural Digest for design integrity, next time I look for a place.”

  He held his hands out palms-up as if anticipating answers to questions posed in a dream before letting them fall and walking back. On his way to the bathroom he paused to peck me on the lips.

  “It’ll all work itself out,” he said. “I have no doubt about that.”

  It was a struggle not to roll my eyes at either his optimism or his breath, each being a mercurial thing with Whit McKee. Beneath the broad cheeks and sandy-blond hair, what appeared to be healthy, gleaming teeth barely clung to receding gums the color of corked wine. It wasn’t something you’d notice under the glow of swapped pleasantries as he signed your book, but eat enough meals with someone, share enough sweet-nothings over mutual pours of Chablis, listen to their erratic, nocturnal chewing, and you’ll start to spot the gaps in the wall.

  The things you overlook when sucker-punched by infatuation.

  I waited for the requisite rattle of pills and the urine stream to reach its apex before asking, “Any news on the tenure track?”

  The stream sputtered to a stop.

  “I’m seeing Bill tomorrow morning,” he said.

  The bureau mirror threw back an incredulous mime in canary-yellow Victoria’s Secret hip-huggers. I said, “Is it archery this time, or more skeet shooting?”

  Whit’s guffaw caromed off the porcelain and Formica.

  “Exploding clay disks are a means to an end, love.” A moment later the toilet flushed, followed by the mumble of profanity, followed by the dribbling of water over the rim.

  ***

  Yesterday, they took the rest of my right leg at the hip.

  The infection keeps spreading, never mind that I’ve been pumped with enough Zyvox and Cleocin to kill all the E. coli in Tijuana. This flesh-eating bug is the Jason Voorhees of bacteria. Not satisfied with a major limb, it has to keep hacking away. This morning they found four expanding lesions on my ass and the small of my back. Even now I can see them if I twist enough so that the split in my gown exposes them: bloodshot, lazy eyes worming through my flesh, trying to glimpse something of their surface host before taking it down.

  I’m tempted to call a photographer to document the creature I’m becoming. Mom was a model in her day and might still have a connection or two. I can already imagine the subsequent exhibit, likely in some abandoned warehouse at the Embarcadero, so like the ones she took me to as a kid. Only instead of yuppies it would be hipsters and academes in beards and horn-rims and plastic cups of cheap chardonnay waxing eloquent on the golden ratio balance of pustule-to-cyst.

  Groggy as I still am from the propofol, I’m already counting backwards from a hundred, anticipating the next surgery and that warm explosion in my brain that signals my descent from consciousness, usually before I reach ninety.

  Those silly doctors and their tricks.

  Whenever I need a real distraction though, I fuss over the fact that I’m two-and-a-half times more likely to die from the anesthesia for these surgeries than to have caught this infection in the first place.

  Seven times more likely to perish from electrocution from all these wires and gadgets I’m hooked to.

  Trust me, I’ve looked all this shit up. Not much to do between amputations and skin-grafts but dredge the internet where all these useless facts bob, waiting to be plucked by the next sullen girl in need of a pick-me-up. Try it the next time you’re laid up with a bum knee or a nasty bout of the Hershey squirts.

  Just today I learned that Jim Henson died of this, though he got the internal sort that ate away at his organs.

  Lucky me I guess.

  ***

  Whit was on his knees sopping up curdled brown nastiness off the bathroom tile when I got home flushed with good news.

  Before I could say word-one, he lobbed the shit-smeared hand towel at my feet.

  “When you get down to it,” he said, “it’s always best to plan things out in lieu of constantly flying by the seat of one’s pants. Odds of success increase exponentially.”

  This was Whit in asshole mode, though in his defense, it’s been a recent addition to his repertoire. Something in the air had flipped on the jittery and snappy in him. Normally I’d sympathize and chalk it up to tenure pressure, but it was really starting to screw with my chi.

  “I got the job,” I said, opting not to entertain his toilet fixation despite the unholy waft in the room.

  His face torqued in lemony-sour knots.

  “Which job is this now?”

  This was Whit at his most unattractive.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The one I’ve been pining over since before we’ve met?” I continued to watch his face as it strained for clarity, wringing itself of all remaining allure in the process. “San Francisco . . . ?” I added to spur him along. I might as well have addressed the crapper.

  He shuddered the way one does when remembering a shit chore still on the docket.

  “Are you talking about that . . . counselor’s position?”

  “Yes, that very one.” I wanted to add that they were starting me at the upper five-figures to suffer the septic-tank exhalations of washed-up rock stars on crack, but salary was never a preoccupation of Whit’s. Only prestige mattered to him, a respect and a rank that he already enjoyed at the college and presumed that I didn’t also crave from the world. Because really, why would a beautiful woman want to slog through mires of petty politics for six-figures a year and summers off?

  Whit opened his mouth to reply, only to suck in a mouthful of fetid air.

  I got busy opening all the bedroom windows. “Relax, babe,” I called back. “I have a week before I need to give them my yay or nay.”

  “I’ll hear from the tenure committee before then,” he said, the relief sighing through his consonants. “Bill assured me.”

  Grabbing the Lysol from the bureau, I did a full lap of the room, spinning twisters of fresh meadow spray behind me before returning to the bathroom doorway. “Yes, as you’ve told me. That’s wonderful.”

  And just like that, he was vanilla-sweet Whit again with his penitent bugaboo eyes and bleached teeth, so like the porcelain tile he was knelt on.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is sudden and . . . complicated.”

  This was Whit in his here-and-now mode.

  In those rare moments of lucidity and consideration, he could be the kindest of souls, never mind that loving him was a constant bailing of water from a sinking boat within sight of paradise.

  Of course, easy me buckled like a first-timer’s soufflé, and when he stood up, I shuffled over and planted myself against him and let his arms cradle me against his chest where our hearts played a lazy ping-pong match. After a while he eased me away and took my hands into his, and only after the fact did I remember what those paws had been knuckle-deep in not two minutes earlier.

  “I have a confession,” he said. “A surprise really. The plan was to wait till the tenure announcement was official, but you deserve to know. It’s been three weeks now.”

  “Since . . . ?”

  “Since . . . I flushed my meds.”

  My right ear sprang weights suddenly, and my head cocked to starboard.

  “Remember the night we had Bill and Ilsa over for dinner, and the toilet backed up again, and you all but had a cow over it?” he said. “That was probably why.”

  I cupped his face in my hands. He was trembling.

  “Oh, baby. You sure that was a good idea?”

  He pulled me in again and rested his chin on my shoulder. “We’ll find out together,” he whispered.

  We stayed that way till the creep of dusk swapped ambers for blues, at which point I told him I needed to go out for some contact lens fluid.

  I drove to the school instead, this to meet the Vonnegut twin in the middle of the student union courtyard.

  He had wanted to rendezvous in a nearby coffee shop, but this was my way of saying I only ever required the
paleontology professor part of him, specifically the access such a title afforded.

  “Got the chopper, Kurt?” I said as soon as he was within earshot, just to drive that all-business nail home. Kurt wasn’t his real name, but it greased his wheels to be called that by little ‘ole me.

  “Not even a hello?” he said. His eyes tongued me head-to-toe more freely than they had in that line the day I met Whit.

  He did merit points for persistence, silly, hopeful old fart that he was. For a simple transaction, he came armed in a paisley silk power-tie and a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo python loafers worth more than my monthly take-home.

  For all of Whit’s charms, a fashion maven he was not.

  “Hellos are for the leisurely,” I said. “Things have accelerated. Do you have it?”

  He corner-smiled me with coffee-stained charm, but my return scowl and extended roll of cash flat-lined his ploy.

  “You know what you could use, Clara?” He handed over the cloth-wrapped piece, attempting a failed finger-caress in the process. “A fresh tutorial on seeing the forest for the trees.”

  “You know what you could use, Lyle?” I dropped the wad into his frustrated hand before turning away. “Some gel strips.”

  Driving back home, and I pulled into a Sizzler’s parking lot on a whim where I idled by a dumpster under the sodium-vapor spill of a street lamp. I pulled off my glasses and pinched at my eyes, and after a while I unwrapped Lyle’s parcel.

  I didn’t touch it at first, remembering suddenly something Whit had once said about certain Egyptian artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb essentially disintegrating upon exposure to air after being hermetically sealed for more than three-thousand years.

  This wasn’t papyrus though, and as I took up the three-million-year-old tooth, its heft assured me it would probably last another million at least. Certainly Whit would know best how to keep it safe and preserved. In any case, I couldn’t imagine anything screaming resilience more than a shark tooth, especially from the sixty-foot, fifty-ton prehistoric version known as Megalodon.

  Tracing my fingers down its striated surface, I knew the aspects of it that Whit would fixate on the most weren’t the things he could weigh in his palm. The sallow light lapping across its pewter-grey four-inch length would only trigger a reverie of swimming alongside the gargantuan predator in the warm brine of Miocine waters. Its pearly, serrated edges and chevroned black root—so much like hammered iron—would merely evoke the thrashings of its final ancestors as they drowned along the dune shores of the Carolina sand hills.

  I held it up so the light could wrap around it some more, this reward for impending tenure as well as blow-softener should I land my own job. Because that’s what it had come down to. Whit’s resentments have grown legs and have begun to lunge now and again like a chained pit bull, and nothing got those teeth grinding more than perceived ill-gotten gain, especially any benefit or achievement not earned through drudgery or payment of dues.

  His constipated reaction to my news earlier was merely a prologue of such sunny possibilities.

  I put my glasses back on and for a moment pictured again Lyle’s shameless ogling. Torn between finding his fleshy approval both impressive and repugnant, I crept the car onto the highway and rolled slowly home.

  ***

  The time to start worrying isn’t necessarily when your doctor makes that taut, sudden-turbulence face while examining you. It’s when he calls in a couple of doctors from other hospitals, and they’re all sporting that same mug in a loose huddle just outside your room.

  As for my request for a photographer, that idea got eighty-sixed on the spot, though the look of complete stupefaction on the head nurse’s face at the suggestion was almost worth it.

  My parents flew in from New Haven last night, but I’d instructed the nurses and doctors not to let them in to see me. Their reactions would be harder to take than any gaping, festering sore. This morning they began plying me with artificial grafts because they’re running out of viable real-estate on my body. Half of me doesn’t even look like flesh anymore, but a Dr. Frankenstein collage of mustard-and-ketchup gauzing.

  Being simple blue-collar folk, Mom and Dad didn’t need to know such an apparition could even exist, much less in the form of their only offspring. Mom especially. She prided so much in my looks, I sometimes felt less a child she birthed as a Pomeranian she meticulously groomed.

  Apparently when my Greek-American father heard about me needing skin, he naively volunteered to donate some his. Of course he was sweet to have done so, but imagine those hirsute patches! I’d be the little wolf-girl of Stanford Medical!

  Just an hour ago they found a new sore budding between my right armpit and breast, so it’s definitely moving north. It looks exactly like Gorbachev’s birthmark, except for the bubbles of clear fluid leaching through the center. For the first time I’m hearing rumblings of coma-induction. The specialist in from Cedar’s is talking behind my curtain, whispering that the odds of septic shock at any moment are quite high, and putting me under is a more stable way of letting my body and the antibiotics fight the infections.

  “Over my dead body,” I manage through a sand-dry mouth. I doubt it sounds much more than a pained groan to them. But if I’m to go, I want to be aware and awake for it.

  When the nice Indian doctor finally pulls aside the curtain and informs me of my chances of survival sans the coma, I reply, “Oh yeah? Well I’m twice as likely to get a tapeworm at least as long as the leg you people cut off the other day. I’m eight times more likely to be here delivering conjoined twins. I’m four times as likely to acquire a nasty staph infection while being treated at a major American hospital for the Michael Jordan of staph infections . . . ”

  ***

  Scotch. If Whit had one escape beyond the dead and calcified world of his work, that was it.

  He was already three-sheets gone and in the process of unfurling more canvas when I got home from work a few weeks after I procured the shark tooth. He paced around the bedroom in a jerky oval, snickering at some private joke of a bawdy nature by the way he kept biting down on a balled fist.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Not exactly a tower when temperate, being sloshed reduced Whit to a cardiganned pigmy skulking about on hinged knees.

  “The real question you’re after . . . is who’s going on?” And he chased the slurring with an open-mouth, pantomimed giggle straight out of a silent movie.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  I wish I genuinely felt the surprise I conveyed to him in that moment, what with me still smarting over his non-reaction to me landing my new job and all. I’d make a piss-poor Method actress.

  From the same hand clutching the highball, Whit raised a sermonizing finger, grimaced ugly, then stifled his initial reply with a raspberry.

  “I shot my first twenty-five today,” he said instead. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  I shrugged before dumping on the bed the pair of suit jackets I’d just bought and was hoping for his two-cents on. “Is that . . . a golf thing . . . ?”

  He wiped at the runaway snot from the snort that followed.

  “It’s a skeet thing, silly! A perfect score. Little ‘ole Billy never shot that.”

  “I thought you didn’t like shooting with him.”

  “I don’t. But . . . he invited me to lunch today. Said he had something to tell me.” He waved himself off through a wince, belched into his left hand, and tippled with his right. “You know, I never . . . I always wanted to say it . . . straight to his pouty lemur’s puss . . . that I think he’s nothing but a world-class suck-up.”

  The smolder in his eyes could’ve melted the ice in his glass had it been directed that way. Except that it wasn’t.

  “Oh, baby,” I said, not evading his glare. “What happened?”

  He glanced about suddenly as if his name had been called from the other end of a large party.

  “No, no,” he said, t
wisting around to home in on the phantom voice. “It must be stated. The world needs to be . . . it needs to know who its blowhards and its . . . fawners are! I mean, what’s the worst kind of . . . ?”

  I stepped toward him and reached out to take his hand, but he started pacing again.

  “Let’s sit down and talk,” I said.

  “Where’s the virtue in expressing pride over what you’ve amassed . . . if you gained it through flattery? Through dumb . . . ”

  I sat on the bed and patted the spot next to me. “Come talk to me.”

  “ . . . dumb blind luck?”

  “What did Bill say?”

  At the mention of the name, Whit cackled to the ceiling.

  “You wanna know who’s worse than Bill though? Who cajoles and pilfers in lieu of . . . earning and laboring even more than that . . . that fraud?”

  “Baby, did you flush all the Thorazine?”

  “That no-talent . . . pompadoured carpetbagger, Lyle Mertz!”

  He jabbed a finger at me as though I were the very individual of his scorn, and in the process he spilled the rest of his drink on the carpet. I started digging through my purse for my phone.

  “I’m calling your doctor . . . ”

  Whit all but pounced on me then, dropping himself to his knees at my feet and swallowing my hands into his. His nails had been chewed to the quick, and the enflamed fingertips matched cheeks pulled taut by an anxious grin.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart, I’m good. I’m fine. Really. I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean to scare you and all . . . ”

  That smile again, killing me all over like that first time. Christ, I was such a sorry Juliet.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” I said. I stroked his cheek and tried to hold his toggling eyes with mine, but that smile slumped into a simper that dripped pure bile.

  “Hey, at least one of us landed our dream gig. We can move to the bigger city now. Go sailing more often. I mean, wasn’t it always a town of . . . good fortune? Of opportunity for those born with the . . . opportune attributes?”

  I drew my hands away. Suddenly I wanted to be a large body of water removed from there.

  “Let’s just go to bed. We can talk in the morning, okay?”