by Rob Rufus
When we got on the elevator, I asked Mom what she thought. Where did she think they hid the goners, the real tragic cases?
“I think that my son shouldn’t ask such horrible questions.”
* * *
Mom checked me in with the receptionist herself. Our doctor’s office had referred me to Dr. Sherman—she said that he would see us shortly.
Mom sat down right beside me, even though the waiting room was empty. We sat in silence for what seemed like an hour.
“Ali seems nice,” she finally said.
“Yeah. She’s rad.”
“You two have big plans for Valentine’s Day?”
“Come on, Mom—Valentine’s Day? It’s just an excuse for companies to sell chocolate and stupid cards.”
“Well,” she said, shrugging, “does Ali think it’s stupid? Because I know I didn’t when I was sixteen.”
“I dunno,” I mumbled.
“Maybe you should ask her what she wants to do—whether she thinks it’s dumb or not. Women need to know they are heard. She’ll appreciate it more than cards or chocolates, although chocolates are nice.”
A fat nurse with a clipboard walked into the waiting room.
“Robert Roofiz,” she yelled.
Mom strutted past the nurse and through the door before I’d even made it out of my seat. Women need to be heard, I thought. No shit.
I sighed, stood up, and followed.
* * *
The nurse walked us into a bright white tile hallway. She had me kick off my shoes and step onto a scale—one hundred ninety-two pounds thin. I stood straight against the wall and she measured me—five feet six inches short. Then she led us into the exam room, flipping a red plastic flag outside the door to show it was occupied.
The exam room was so clean that it looked completely unused. A big exam table was in the corner, covered in a strip of parchment paper like the kind Mom used when she baked cookies.
The fat nurse sat me down. She took my temperature and my blood pressure, and then left the room. She told us that the doctor would be in shortly.
“You have to wait in a room just to wait in a room,” I said.
“Welcome to real life, sweetheart.”
* * *
An hour and a half later, there was still no doctor. I thought they’d forgotten about us. I wanted to leave. Mom refused. I lay down on the exam table and dozed to the buzz of the lights overhead.
I woke up when the heavy door slammed shut. I squinted into the fluorescent lights above me. I blinked until my eyes could focus on the blurry image of Dr. Sherman.
Dr. Sherman was about Mom’s age, with little wire glasses and thinning brown hair. He had a mustard stain on his tie.
“So,” he said, flipping through a chart, “I understand you’ve had a persistent cough?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I cough, like, all the time. I don’t spit anything up, no snot or nothing—just this cough.”
He nodded. “Any other symptoms?”
“Not really,” I said, and then Mom interrupted.
“Actually, he is having other symptoms—I would say that ‘persistent cough’ is the understatement of the year. These are severe coughing episodes; I mean coughs that wake everyone in the house up at night. He’s in pain, even if he says he isn’t. I can see him wince after each cough.”
“Anything else?” Dr. Sherman said.
“He seems a little disoriented throughout the day and has been increasingly short of breath.”
Disoriented—have I? I wondered.
“She’s right, I have been really outta breath. I figured it was from the coughing.”
Dr. Sherman told me to sit up straight. He looked into my eyes. He looked in my mouth. He made me say aaaahhhh. He ran his fingers under my jaw. He listened to my breath. He listened to my heart.
“Well,” he finally said, “you don’t seem to have strep, which is good.”
“So what do you think is causing it?” Mom asked.
Dr. Sherman shrugged. “The cough may be a lingering symptom from a cold, or possibly allergies. Truthfully, I’m not too worried about it.”
“But I am worried about it.” She was speaking louder now. “He’s been coughing for weeks—maybe longer. And I hear him wheezing when he walks up the stairs. He—”
“Robert is forty pounds overweight,” he told her. “His weight, mixed with what I can only assume is a sedentary lifestyle, could be at fault for his shortness of breath. It may also have affected his ability to get over whatever brought his cough on in the first place.”
He turned his attention to me.
“I’m going to write you a prescription for an antibiotic. Let’s see if that helps knock out the rest of this cold.” He paused. “I will also write a scrip for cough syrup . . . there is codeine in it. Do you know what codeine is?”
“No.”
“Sure you don’t. It should help with some of the pain you are feeling during these episodes. But only take it as directed—it is not a party favor, understand?”
“Uh, okay?” I said.
Dr. Sherman scribbled something onto his chart.
“If the cough hasn’t cleared up by next week, you need to come back and see us—okay?”
Mom stood up behind him.
“Listen,” she said, “he’s my son. I’ve seen him with a cold, with strep throat—this is different.”
“Well, your son apparently doesn’t feel too sick to spike up his hair, so I don’t think this cough is terminal just yet.”
Before she could reply, Dr. Sherman grabbed her hand again, shook it, and left the room.
2
If I could tell myself I was okay, didn’t that mean it was true?
I wasn’t sure anymore. When I heard Mom raise her voice at Dr. Sherman, it wasn’t anger that registered—it was concern. Fuck, man, it shook me up a little. The next day my life went back to its normal flow, but I found it harder to push the “symptoms” Mom spoke of out of my mind.
I went back to school while I waited for my antibiotics to kick in. Besides playing drums, and a few failed make-out sessions, I’d been completely inactive since my house arrest—so as I merged back into my old routine, I couldn’t believe how much harder it was on me physically after only a week away.
I struggled to class in the mornings. My backpack felt heavier, as if someone had filled it with ball bearings. The hallways stretched out before me like some fun-house trick.
My breath was so thin that it shocked me. Simply making my way through the school took forever. This was just walking (more like strolling, even—I hadn’t rushed even on my best days). Now I had to stop every few dozen feet and catch my breath. By the time I made it to my classrooms, the hallways were completely empty. Even Ali, it seemed, gave up waiting for me against the first-period lockers. I stood outside the door until my breath got under control. Then I’d duck past the teacher and collapse at my desk.
I started to think that Mom was right about my attention span. I’d never really paid much attention in class, but now that I was back I found I couldn’t concentrate even when I tried. I guess I hadn’t noticed these changes when I was watching daytime television at home. But being at school meant learning—or at the very least, engaging, and I just couldn’t seem to focus at all.
No matter how much I tried to pay attention, the information always became scrambled—twisting in my consciousness with random thoughts and images—a terrible pop song I’d heard, a day-old afterthought, a magazine cover, a car on the highway—every single thought and every single day blended and spun in my mind as one strange vision: a carousel dream that I could ride but never stop.
3
The cough syrup Dr. Sherman gave me came in a red bottle. The liquid inside of it looked thick and black—everything about it screamed CAUTION. I tried it a f
ew times, just to see if it helped.
It tasted like turpentine; I could barely stomach two spoonfuls. It did ease the pain in my throat and chest a little, but it didn’t stop the coughing. Mostly it made me feel fucked up, tired, and even more disoriented.
* * *
I wasn’t sleeping much anymore.
In bed, all the thoughts of the day caught up with me. It was ironic, in a way. I spent my days exhausted, barely able to focus on the most simple tasks and conversations—but in the dark I couldn’t shut my brain off.
Anxious thoughts came at me from every angle. I wished for sleep, struggled for it, but fighting just made things worse.
When the restlessness got to be too much, I’d lock myself in the small bathroom that was connected to my room. I sat on the cold tile floor and warmed myself with my small red hair dryer—the white noise was all that seemed to calm my head.
The sound magnified in the small space like I was in an echo chamber. I sat there for hours as the temperature rose in the darkness. I stared through the window and over my neighbor’s rooftop, up toward the moon and where the stars should be. The mechanical hum of the dryer drowned the thoughts in my brain mercifully, rolling over each one like a calm, tideless ocean.
* * *
A week and a half later I went back to the doctor. Valentine’s Day was only two days away. I took my mom’s advice and asked Ali what she thought of it, to which she bitched about the horrible V Days of her past—so I knew I had to suck it up and take her out.
This time at the hospital, they stuck me with Dr. Dixon, a tall black guy with a heavy baritone voice. He listened more intently than Dr. Sherman had—to me, not just my mom—and didn’t make any dick comments about my hair or weight.
But in the end, Dr. Dixon’s opinion was the same as Sherman’s—wait it out.
He told me to give it another week, keep taking the cough syrup, and see if it subsided on its own. He said he’d give me a note for school, like that was the solution for the struggle of walking to class.
He said that if nothing changed in a week, he wanted to do a chest X-ray and look for signs of pneumonia, though he doubted that it was anything that serious.
4
Sappy card—check. Heart full of chocolates—check. Half-dozen (plastic) roses—check. Dinner reservations at the nicest restaurant in town—double check.
V Day was upon me, and I was armed with an arsenal of romantic crap.
Granted, the arsenal was supplied by my mom (lame!), who’d picked it all up at the pharmacy while waiting for my cough syrup to be refilled. I was embarrassed when she showed up with it all, but whatever. At least it was free.
Paul was putting on a special show that night, the Valentine’s Day Massacre. He packed the bill with the most brutal bands he could find. Nat tried to get me to go with him, but I said I was too sick.
If the dudes knew that I was skipping a show to hang out with a chick—Valentine’s Day or not—I would never hear the end of it. What kind of pussy had I turned into?
* * *
I called Ali at home.
“Hey,” I said, “our dinner reservations are for eight thirty at Red Lobster. I figured I could pick you up a little earlier, and we could—”
“I was thinking we skip dinner.”
“Why?”
“Because—my parents are out on a date.”
“So?”
“So, they’ll be gone all night.”
“Oh,” I squeaked.
“So why don’t you just come over? We can hang out here and stuff.”
AND STUFF.
I cleared my throat.
“Right on,” I said, as aloofly as I could. “That’s fine, babe. Whatever you want.”
“Okay, good. That’s what I want.”
She hung up the phone.
* * *
I was nerrrrrrvous nervous nervous, man.
Ali. Home alone. On Valentine’s Day. I felt like the planets had aligned, and the chances of me finally getting laid were at their all-time high.
AND STUFF.
I checked my look in the mirror. I wanted to change my clothes, my hair, my face. I tore off my black T-shirt and put on a different black T-shirt. I paced around my bedroom. I paced around my bathroom. I paced until I was out of breath.
AND! STUFF!
I gathered up the candy and the plastic flowers. I grabbed the keys to the van. They jingled in my shaking hand.
Without thinking, I went into the kitchen and pulled my bottle of toxic cough syrup from the cabinet. I chugged eight good gulps, tensing my throat muscles so I wouldn’t puke. I screwed the lid back on the bottle—I’d killed nearly half of it. I put it back in the cabinet and waited.
After about twenty minutes, I felt my nerves calm down. I felt better—tired, but better. What was it that I was so nervous about?
All of a sudden, I couldn’t remember.
* * *
When Ali opened the door and saw me standing there with all that Valentine bullshit, she screamed—it was ridiculous.
She hugged me and kissed me and pulled me inside her house.
As she led me to the living room, there were no signs of her parents, brothers, or sisters anywhere. She took me over to the couch, where a rectangle-shaped gift was wrapped in her pink notebook paper. She’d written my name on it inside the outline of a heart.
I opened it slowly. It was a VHS tape—Bon Jovi LIVE! Reading Festival, 1990.
“I had to buy it,” she said. “It was just so us!”
Goddamn it felt great to have an us.
We threw the tape in the VCR.
Jovi hadn’t even gotten into their third song before we were fooling around. I was feeling about one swig of cough syrup away from passing out. But there is nothing—except maybe death—that cannot be overcome by teenage lust. So although my head felt foggy, Ali’s body felt warm and perfect as it rubbed against me to those beautifully cheesy rock ballads.
When I tried to take off her shirt, she stopped me.
“You want to go in my bedroom?”
“Um—[gulp]—yeah . . . sure . . .” I said. I choked back a cough.
“You okay?”
I cleared my throat and promised I was fine. I would have promised anything at that point.
“I just don’t want to get you sick,” I told her. “I probably shouldn’t even be kissing you.”
Ali stood up and pulled me off the couch.
“Whatever you’ve got has got me too. Don’t you know that by now?”
She led me into the bedroom.
* * *
Ali picked up a shirt off the floor and covered her table lamp. The light dimmed.
In the shadows she seemed older. She moved through her room with purpose. She led me to the bed and sat me down on its edge.
She shut the door. She locked it.
She stood in front of me and took off her shirt. I just sat there, staring up at her. She smiled at me and unhooked her bra.
I couldn’t think or react. There were fireworks inside of my head. When she unbuttoned her jeans, I watched my left hand rise up and touch her hip. It was moving on its own.
I started coughing again. Ali stopped. I hacked until my face was burning bright red, and then sat there embarrassed, trying to catch my breath.
Ali eased me down on the bed.
“Take it easy. Just relax, okay? Don’t worry about anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
When she started to undo my jeans I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of her body on mine, and the smoothness of her thighs around my waist as I sank down into the mattress.
I opened my eyes.
I counted the freckles above me, glowing and dimming and glowing again.
SEVEN
Kids Today
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1
The day after Valentine’s Day, I was back at the goddamn hospital.
Mom had been put in charge of a new project at the refinery, so it was a lot harder for her to get off in the middle of the day. This time I went alone.
They put me in the same exam room. The hospital had the same smell. The nurses were still overweight and detached.
Only the doctor was different. The receptionist told me which one I’d be seeing, but this time I didn’t bother remembering his name.
I waited. I waited some more.
Finally, the doctor came in. I went over my whole spiel again—the cough, the symptoms, the progression, the other doctors—the whole exercise seemed so counterproductive. How did they not know this already? What the fuck was in my charts? Didn’t these quacks even bother to read them?
After I rehashed my last two visits, I told him what had changed.
I was still coughing, and my other weird symptoms seemed to be getting worse. My shortness of breath was worse than ever, and even the slightest activity had me pleading for air. I was confused a lot, and I’d been getting brutal headaches. I wasn’t sleeping.
The doctor said that the lack of sleep might be causing my headaches.
“But what is causing this insomnia?”
“Probably the cough,” the doctor said.
But he still couldn’t tell me why I was coughing!
Unlike Dr. Dixon, this one didn’t think the cough had anything to do with pneumonia. He saw no reason for me to get any X-rays.
He said that the symptoms were so strange, they could only be caused by a severe allergic reaction to something—maybe food, maybe linen or carpet, maybe some hidden mold, maybe an animal—he wasn’t sure. Figuring out the culprit, he said, was up to me.
His best suggestion was to remove as many constants from my life as I could; family pets, bedsheets, clothes, carpet, all the food in the fridge. He said process of elimination was the best way to find out what was making me sick.