It was the penicillin. He was allergic to it. The doctor explained to him, “You had a violent allergic reaction. You got here just in time. We have your sister to thank for wasting no time in making that call!” The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder. But the next morning the results of the new blood test arrived, showing that it was clearly a case of resistant bacteria. He yelled at the staff and refused to wear the ridiculous robe, not to mention the underwear. He didn’t like the food, he didn’t like the smell, everything was disgusting. This place makes you sick, he raged. His room had small low windows. The hospital was built at a time when they all economized on glass. He couldn’t stop thinking about this as he lay there. Every time he looked over at the small peepholes and out to the world, he thought about it. 1973. Maybe ’75. The oil crisis. All they could think about was saving money on expensive materials like glass. It drove him crazy.
April
He was sick. They sent him home. He came back. Very sick. New medicine. Home. Gorgeous let herself in and rustled about somewhere near him. Her cool hand against his warm skin. Back to the hospital. More tests, a biopsy, blood tests, urine tests. Pus began flowing from his ears, his eyes and nose were clogged and sticky with green gook, he felt nauseous all the time, and eventually got diarrhea, later, blood in the diarrhea. He watched the transparent tube where the sulfa drug went through in drips to his vein at the back of his hand three times a day. His uncle called and demanded to talk to the head doctor. This can’t be true. There must be something you can do. There wasn’t. “Yes, there is,” said Charlotte. “We can hope and pray that you get better.” He had no strength to either hope or pray. By this time, he felt like a slab of meat rapidly decaying. But also: It’s not true. Denial. Aggression. Later, panic attacks and difficulty breathing. He changed from one medicine to another. And to different types of medicine. The infection spread. He was moved to his own room. He was delirious. Peter visited and took one look at him and cracked up laughing. And he laughed with him, as best as he could, almost grateful for his brother’s laughter, his completely ordinary reaction, “Holy shit, you look awful!” But it got worse. And it went quickly. No strength left to sit up, push the call button, scratch his leg, hold a glass of water.
The doctor repeated what was already known, “Unfortunately the bacteria are in theory multi-resistant,” and he sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’ve decided to move you to the General Hospital. I’ve already talked with them and they can take you as early as this evening.” The doctor leaned forward and said confidentially, “I have to be honest with you. We can only hope for the best.”
June
Isn’t it summer? He tries to wave hello. Charlotte smiles, but she doesn’t know how to comfort him. She calls their mother even though that’s the last thing he needs. Their mother is shocked by how much weight he’s lost. She brings roast chicken and mashed potatoes and feeds him with a teaspoon. He throws it all up. He wants her to go. That anxious old mourner’s mug. She cries into the mashed potatoes. He feels guilty. He closes his eyes and pretends to sleep. He opens them a little, and now she’s eating what’s left of the food with the teaspoon right from the Tupperware thingy. Later, he actually does fall asleep. And there’s a waterfall tumbling over rocks and a sound that’s about to burst his head open. Isn’t it summer now? Then he’s on his knees on the floor in the little bathroom throwing up. He’s in the infectious disease ward at the General Hospital. “This time you’re staying,” said the doctor. “Your immune system is burned out, you might say, and we’ll do all we can, but no promises.” He has fungus growing in his mouth, in his intestines, on his hands. He’s lost almost all of his hair, and, in three months, he’s lost fifty-five pounds. When Charlotte calls Stig, thinking he’s asleep, he overhears her saying, “When I was here yesterday, two nurses helped him to the bathroom, they wanted to give him a bath. I’m standing in the doorway and he vomits this thin green fluid into the sink. Then I see diarrhea running down one of his thighs, and he passes out. Oh my god, Stig, I thought he’d fucking died, just like that, collapsed. But there was a pulse. They asked me to get help, and then three people lifted him up and carried him back to bed. It’s so humiliating. You can smell him from far away. You’ve got to visit him.”
He thinks about what he’s touched. Did he touch the toilet? Did he touch the chair? Did he lean on the chair on his way to the sink? Did he touch some bacteria, perhaps some bacteria found its way into his body? He doesn’t want Charlotte to get too close to him. He keeps asking her to wash her hands. She stops coming by so often, she has to take care of her shop, get ready for the sale, it’s a busy time with the big summer sale. And, as she says, crying hysterically, “I’ve got to live my own life, don’t I? I’ve got to look out for myself.” It’s something she’s realized, she says, after thinking long and hard about it for almost three months. She gets loaded at Stine and Jakob’s garden party. She sits on the lap of a young man and sings.
He doesn’t notice that she stays away for long periods of time. There are visions and shadows and faces that come close and then disappear. There’s nausea like a snarling dog pressing its wet fur against the inside of his esophagus. There’s a constant whistling in the pipes or maybe from his body. They have grafted skin from his thigh to his buttock. He doesn’t remember. Charlotte says, “They’ve done an excellent job,” but he doesn’t believe her. His mother talks to him with the same consoling, loving voice she had when he was a child. She keeps talking to him until he calms down, and he does calm down, listening to her voice, as if it came from above, as if it were flowing into the room like liquid or gas.
Finally, Stig comes to see him. He pushes the door open, and puts his hand to his mouth in shock, as if he’s seen a ghost. Then he backs out. The door closes quietly. A little later he comes into the room and sits on the edge of a chair. He has a big bouquet of dark purple flowers on his lap. He whispers, “What have they done to you?” The bedsores hurt. He doesn’t have the strength, for conversing, for holding up his head so that he can look at Stig. And Stig says, almost angrily, “For Christ’s sake man, how long have we known each other? A long time. Right?” He looks down, “I never thought that…” And Stig puts the flowers on the nightstand, lays his hand on the blanket, and squeezes it, swallowing hard. Get those flowers out of here. He can’t think about anything else. Stig had touched them and then the blanket, for God’s sake, don’t touch me. Stig gives him a pleading look. But he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, Stig’s gone. At night he asks for a mirror. The nurse holds it in front of him: His cheeks are sunken, his skin hangs in large gray folds, his eyes are yellow, he looks like someone about to die. A corpse. He turns his head and looks at his inflamed ears. He’d already seen his hollowed out ribs and sunken stomach. His arms and legs that have transformed into bones covered with skin. He has felt the top of his head. But the face. He wants to scream, he has no strength. “Sleep well.” The nurse is standing in the doorway and has turned off the light. She leaves. And he cries.
July
To see your own face. Now he’s tormented by violent panic attacks, they give him medicine for this as well, and it helps: he sleeps better and more, it’s as though his thoughts were padded with wool, no longer knocking hard against each other; he receives intravenous feeding, oxygen, morphine, he calls for a bed pan, he asks for music, and they bring it, he listens to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the edge of pain is taken off.
Charlotte sits in the window seat swinging her legs. Smiling, she hesitates to tell him that she’s now seeing Stig, and that they’re in fact in a relationship. “Isn’t that great?” He grumbles. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” You’ve betrayed me. She, in the sunlight with the blue sky behind her, his rage reduced to sniveling, no strength. Charlotte says, “It’s funny, isn’t it? If you weren’t here, I would never have noticed him, NEVER!” She giggles. “He’s not exactly a hunk, is he?” And then, dreamily, “But we understand each other, I’ve talked a lot
lately—about you—and your illness, you know, that’s how we got to know each other. Are you sleeping?” She hops down and comes closer. He swipes at her with his limp hand. She looks troubled, “I thought you’d be happy.” He tries to smile. All is lost, he’s given everything he has, he can’t do any more. And the days run together with the light nights, suddenly he comes down with pneumonia, high fever, he has a nightmare about the hamster cages, dreaming that he’s trapped with the scratching animals; everything is going downhill, they can’t stabilize him.
One day the head doctor sits on the edge of his bed and says that he has to give it to him straight: it’d be a good idea if his family from Jutland, his sisters and father, visit him now. The doctor keeps looking him straight in the eye with a serious and compassionate expression, but he fails to understand even this hint. “Why in the world should your so-called father come now? What business does he have here? He’s never once bothered to send you so much as flowers!” The mother is beside herself, her voice rises. Charlotte gives her a beseeching look. The mother sniffles, squeezing his hand. He pinches her as hard as he can, and she pulls away frightened; he asks Charlotte to wash his hands with soap and water. “And rubbing alcohol! Put gloves on. Put rubber gloves on before you wash me.” He shakes his contaminated hand in the air. “For Christ’s sake, go get a washcloth, NOW!”
Then his father and half-sisters arrive. And his mother and Peter, Peter, pale and shy this time. They say good-bye. Yes, that’s what they’re doing. They sit at his deathbed holding back their tears. Then Charlotte says, “That’s enough. He’s tired out.” They back out of the room with dark eyes. She pulls the blanket up around him. “Don’t die. You’re not going to die. Just you wait and see.” And he thinks she smiles. But she winces when she gets out into the hallway. Because she knows she’s losing him, but she doesn’t know if it’s her fault. She runs a little, desperate to get out into the cool summer night.
When they detect meningitis, he’s given a new kind of medicine that’s hard on the kidneys. He turns yellow. They’re afraid his muscle mass will be permanently damaged. They say that the medicine is working. But the blood tests still show an infection. Then it looks like it’s beginning to have an effect. And he, he has no suspicion about the threat of death. He has no intention of dying. He puts on the headphones: “Give it away, give it away, give it away now…” The bass pumps, he rocks his head from side to side on the pillow, and looks out at the evening turning blue, the moon half hidden behind the drifting clouds. Did I have sex with her or not? And then suddenly he remembers. He didn’t. He couldn’t get it up! He smiles to himself, it’s so funny, imagine that, he couldn’t do it, he was healthy and strong, but he couldn’t get his dick to cooperate, and now he also remembers that they shared a joint afterwards, when he’d given up, and she had been so shit-faced that her eyes rolled around in their sockets, then she fell asleep with her head in his lap; that’s how it was.
March
He opens the main door and falls onto the street. It’s raining. He can’t get up. He tries to get up on all fours, but his body refuses. He simply lies flat on his stomach on the dirty wet sidewalk. There are a few people at the bus stop watching. Then, at last, an older couple comes over to him. They could be his grandparents. He takes their hands and with great difficulty, he hoists himself up. A couple of teenagers hide their laughter. A young woman turns her back. He thanks the old people, and leans against the wall of the building with one hand. Then he starts to move up the street with small steps. As usual, he feels pins and needles in his feet. They say there’s chronic nerve damage. Charlotte is furious at him. In a way, that makes it easier. He’d rather not be bothered. His clothes hang on him. He lives on pork chops with gravy, but he only gets fat around the waist, it doesn’t distribute evenly, so he still has toothpick arms and toothpick legs, but he doesn’t have the energy to use the exercise bike, he can’t be bothered; it takes him at least ten minutes to crawl up to his apartment on the third floor; he smokes a lot of dope, that helps, he sleeps better, it dulls the anxiety—his fears, simply. There’s so much he understands now, which he can’t bear to understand: he is terrified to die, he’s afraid of being sick—cancer, heart attack, a boil on the ass—there’s so much he’s come to realize, the underlying frailty, how close he was to kicking the bucket, and then the fact that his life has broken into a thousand small discordant pieces, it can never again be as it was, he’s not the same person anymore, no pride, no joy, no recognition: THIS IS ME, but whatever he is, he doesn’t know, he has no idea how he’ll move on with his life, as Charlotte put it, when she also told him it’s sink or swim and slammed the door, he could hear her shouting something else on her way down the stairs.
He smokes, turns up the music. And suddenly starts laughing, loud and heartfelt: Shit, when he was at Peter’s and his new girlfriend’s wedding last week, he threw up and got such a pain in his stomach that his mother had to drive him home; shit, there wasn’t anything fucking wrong with him, it was just stress, all those people, no, nothing was wrong, it was just that he was suffering from an imaginary sickness, that’s so fucking funny and so to hell with everything, he’s sold the summer house, he will sell his share in the company to Stig, he’s staying here, ordering pork chops from the take-out place across the street—they’re so kind to deliver it to him—dragging himself down the stairs to buy dope, and then: ah, sweet sleep, sweet refreshing rest, thank the Lord; he sits down and cracks opens his long-anticipated beer, suddenly feeling like a newborn with everything to look forward to.
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