Howls From Hell

by Grady Hendrix

  “Fuck you.”

  “Maybe dust?” I suggested. “Have you tried flushing it out with water?”

  “No, dude, I haven’t tried flushing it out with water,” she responded dryly. She ran a finger around her eye, pulling her eyelid down to reveal the wet, fleshy redness beneath.

  After a bit, we rolled out of bed. I whipped up a taco salad for dinner while Marnie took a shower. When she sat down at the dinner table, the skin around her eye was puffy and pink.

  “So,” I said, staring at my bottle of homemade chili-lime dressing, “how was the trip? Anything exciting to report?”

  “We had to social distance the entire time, so I had no one to speak to but my cousins for three weeks. We also had to share bunk beds. There isn’t an open bar in the world worth that torture. Not sure I would’ve wanted to talk to anyone else on that cruise, though. I’ve never seen so many pear-shaped people in one place.”

  “Nice of your family to pay for a vacation, though.”

  “True, I drank my bodyweight in free Bud Light. I’m not complain—” her hand wavered awkwardly, nearly stabbing herself in the cheek with a forkful of salad, as if her brain and eyes had miscommunicated “—not complaining about that.”

  “Well.” I gave her a smile. “I’m happy to have you home.”

  “Happy to be home,” she said. “And the fucking employees. I thought cruise workers would be fun.” As she spoke, she started rubbing her eye. “They were so . . . vacant, robotic, like members of some pelagic cult.”

  “I really don’t think it’s a good idea to keep touching it.”

  “Yeah? I think it’s a good idea to keep it to yourself,” she snapped, fixing that eye on me like a laser.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, surprised at her ferocity. “I’m just worried that it’ll—”

  “I’m fine, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just uncomfortable. It itches.”

  She fully mashed her palm into her eye.

  I nodded and forced a smile. We finished the rest of our dinner in silence.

  I got up early the next day to cook Marnie a welcome-home brunch. To make up for last night’s tiff, I whipped her up her favorite—eggs Benedict.

  As I stood there cracking eggs, all I could think was how much they resembled eyeballs. I passed yolks and whites between half-shells in a borderline trance . . . big yellow pupils slowly separating from globs of white sclera.

  Marnie shambled into the kitchen just as I was whisking an unethical amount of butter into the hollandaise. She moved with the gait of the undead, as if brutally hungover. When she looked at me, my stomach lurched. Her eye looked like it should be floating above a tower in Mordor.

  She barely ate anything, just half a poached egg, then pushed the rest around the plate like it was prison food. We’d been together for five years, Marnie and I, and I had still yet to give her a present that made her happier than my homemade eggs Benedict. Evidently not this morning.

  “What’s that?” she said, indicating a gift basket sitting on the living room table.

  “Oh, that. Housewarming present from my mom,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for you to open it up.”

  “All right,” she said, worriedly lifting it up and unraveling the wrapping. “Let’s get weird.”

  My mother had a penchant for giving her loved ones uncomfortably personal, high-concept gifts. A couple Christmases ago, to the horror of the entire family, she stuffed Marnie’s and my stockings with various flavored contraceptives—condoms, dental dams, etc. Whether this was a ghastly attempt at a joke or a jab at our childlessness, Marnie never got over it.

  This gift basket was at least less disturbing—a basket of kitchen supplies we’d have—per her handwritten note—“never thought to get” for ourselves: a melon baller, an egg timer, avocado savers, a sponge holder, and a bunch of other stuff I’d give good odds on being lost in the back of the utensil drawer within a year.

  “Oh wow,” said Marnie, bouncing an elaborate apple corer in her hands. “Is all this stuff so that I can have really nice dinners waiting for you when you come home from work?”

  “If you want to?”

  She gave me a look that said: You’re an idiot. I scratched my neck. Sometimes Marnie said things that went over my head.

  I got dressed for work, opening a pack of masks and tossing my freshly-washed Steak Frites apron into my knife bag, while Marnie lay on the bed looking at her laptop.

  “Need anything on my way home?” I asked.

  “Yeah, could you toss a Molotov cocktail into The Cheesecake Factory’s front window?”

  “Uhh . . . ?”

  “I’m kidding,” she huffed, closing her laptop, “but those fuckers still haven’t officially laid me off.”

  “Fuckers,” I echoed. “No unemployment check, then?”

  She shook her head. She’d been a server at The Cheesecake Factory until a couple weeks before her vacation and was hoping to get her job back when things settled down. “I’ll call them later.”

  “Hey, at least you don’t have to go to work,” I said, examining the glinting silver blade of my beautiful Grand Maître knife. “Some of us still have to!”

  “Yeah, you’d rather be jobless, worried about where your money’s going to come from, while the entire ugly, awful, apocalyptic world burns to a crispy turd around you?”

  I blinked at her. “It’d be nice to have some time off?”

  I came home that evening with a cornucopia from the pharmacy: all the eye drops, allergy pills, and skin ointments I could fit on our credit card.

  “Thanks,” she said, applying some stinky oregano oil around her eye, “but I think I need something stronger. Something’s really wrong. I’m going to go see my doctor tomorrow.”

  I was going to ask how she was so sure it was that serious, then noticed her laptop open on the couch.

  “Have you been diagnosing yourself on Google? I’m not sure that’s a great idea . . .”

  “Look, look, look,” she said, grabbing her computer and clicking through about forty open tabs. She landed on an enlarged photo of an insect: a creepy, red-and-orange monstrosity. It looked as though several other insects had come together to form an insect-Megazord. “This is malleus e oculum, a gnat native to the Amazon. It gets in your eyes and feeds on the white eye jelly—the vitreous humor.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “But you didn’t go to the Amazon.”

  She shrugged. “So? There are something like seven thousand billion undiscovered insect species. What if there are other genuses of this motherfucker in other parts of the world?”

  “I think you might be making your anxiety worse by looking at this.”

  “My anxiety . . . ?” she asked with a sidelong glance.

  Her eye had turned the color of red wine dregs. I choked back a gag and gave her an apologetic smile.

  “Horseshit,” Marnie said, bursting through the door.

  I startled, fumbling the book I’d been reading—Jamie’s Comfort Food!—like a bad wide receiver. “Hi, um, how’d it go?”

  “It went,” she said, whipping her purse into the couch, “like horseshit.” After a thirty-second exam, she explained, her family doctor had concluded it was a simple infection. Minor periorbital puffiness—nothing too bad. An infection of the sclera or of the macula, possibly, had spread into the vitreous humor, thereby making it difficult to treat with over-the-counter medications. She gritted her teeth. “He didn’t take me seriously at all.”

  “Sorry, lady.”

  “At least he prescribed these,” she said, revealing a big white pill bottle. “Sweet, sweet, prescription drugs.”

  Three days later, she asked me to examine her eye again in the mirror.

  “Looks a little better, right?” she said. She’d been taking the pills and applying ointments and cream pretty much hourly.

  I leaned in close and inspected her eye. It did not look better. If anything, it was more inflamed. The blood vessels were s
uch a bright red I worried she was going to weep blood.

  I coughed, hiding my grimace, and said, “Yup, definite improvement.”

  When the weekend came and the problem still hadn’t gone away, Marnie called the cruise line to see if anyone else had reported any medical issues. She left the call on speaker.

  “No,” the man said. “No recent vacationers have reported any medical issues.” He sounded thoroughly disinterested in the conversation.

  Marnie asked if she could possibly be put in touch with other people on the cruise to confirm that fact, to which the man chuckled.

  “No. Guest confidentiality is the company’s top priority,” he said.

  “Higher priority than a guest’s health?” she asked.

  “Guest health is our absolute, top, highest priority,” he said. “However, given that the cruise you took was at one-third capacity, and that family units were required to social distance—outside of regularly scheduled Luaus and Limbo Competitions, of course—it is highly unlikely that infections were passed between guests. Perhaps you have a preexisting condition?”

  “A preexisting fucking thing in my eye?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor,” he said, then explained that she could be in touch with the cruise line’s legal department if she felt the need. Though he added, with a smirk you could actually hear, that the waivers she had signed divesting the company of medical responsibility were “remarkably ironclad.”

  I never realized how many tiny parts were inside a cell phone until I watched Marnie pitch hers against the wall.

  “Well, there are no infections, and nothing is lodged in there,” Dr. Fulci concluded flatly. “I see that the periorbital skin has become raw, though I do not see a clear cause. Perhaps the abrupt change in climate after returning from the cruise?”

  Dr. Fulci, a well-reviewed optometrist Marnie had found online, was kind but slightly terrifying. Her voice was an octave too high, her posture sharp and stiff from years of sitting behind a desk. She brought to mind a hungry eagle.

  As the doctor spoke, Marnie sat twisting up various medical pamphlets while muttering beneath her mask. I’d driven Marnie to the appointment, as she could barely see out of her left eye.

  Dr. Fulci’s office was crammed with a wide array of optometric machinery (nearly all of which Marnie would have her head stuck in by the end of the visit) and graphic medical posters. On her desk sat a sliced-up eyeball preserved in plastic casing. A light smell of vinegar hung in the stuffy office air. I tried not to think about it possibly emanating from the eyeball slivers.

  Though Marnie didn’t say much—mostly just muttered incoherently to herself—I could tell she was frustrated by Dr. Fulci’s vague conclusions. After the appointment, we walked across the street to a pharmacy and picked up a number of different medications and eyewashes, as well as a pair of thick, tinted goggles that made Marnie look like she should be driving an airship in some strange steampunk fantasy world.

  None of it helped.

  “It’s shaking,” she said a few days later, yanking the skin around her eye in front of the mirror. “I feel it shaking.”

  By that point, she spent most of her days sitting in the dark living room watching television with the sound off. She flipped channels constantly, obviously unable to concentrate on anything for long. The discomfort sapped both her attention span and her stamina. Sometimes I caught her crying, but whenever I asked about it, she said it was nothing.

  When The Cheesecake Factory announced they were reopening, they offered Marnie shifts, but she turned them down. She did not think she would be able to effectively do her job like this, she said. Probably no one would want to be served by that globulous red eye anyway, I thought (but kept to myself).

  I wanted to help but couldn’t think how. This person simply was not her. Marnie did not pass up work. I had seen her, after drunkenly pitching herself down a two-story flight of stairs, wake up for a 7:00 a.m. brunch shift. When a coworker quit abruptly, Marnie had picked up three double-shifts during her midterm week. Seeing her so lethargic unsettled me.

  And the problems were not confined to her waking hours. Usually a solid eight-to-nine-hour sleeper, she became impossible to lie next to at night. She twisted up the sheets in distress, and when she did fall asleep, even in dreams, she’d worry at her eye with her palm. She had to start wearing the goggles in bed. Our sex life—previously healthy, although short-lived at times—became non-existent. I examined her eye so uncomfortably closely, for so long, and so often, that we achieved a level of intimacy that sex could only dream of, though intimacy of a far less pleasant kind.

  The doctors at the hospital lay Marnie on a stretcher and strapped a thick leather band across her forehead. Then she was thrust, like some huge, oblong phallus, into various pieces of whirring machinery. I watched it all from behind a viewing pane. The first few doctor’s visits had already drained our out-of-pocket expenses. Thank God for my Steak Frites medical coverage.

  Dr. Fulci had ordered a full electrodiagnostic examination of her eye after Marnie wouldn’t stop calling her office. Once Marnie had gone through a few exams, the optometrist put a gloved hand on my shoulder and asked, conspiratorially, if we could speak in the hallway.

  “I’d like you to know that these tests we’re running on her are unnecessary,” she said in that slightly too-high voice.

  “Oh.” I awkwardly adjusted the straps of my mask.

  “I have all the equipment in my office necessary to find anything that might be wrong with her eye, as would any of my optometric colleagues. These machines might be more powerful, but I’m confident they won’t tell us anything new.” She leaned against the wall, fidgeting like a pack-a-day smoker gone cold turkey. “There is nothing wrong with her eye. Nothing that I can find.”

  “Why did you bring her to the hospital then?”

  Dr. Fulci took a step towards me. She spoke low, voice muffled by her mask. “I had to do something else to back up my prognosis. No matter what I’ve explained to her or showed her, Marnie has remained insistent that something is wrong. At first, of course, I believed her. But I’ve run every conceivable test I can imagine. I told her that, but she won’t listen.”

  “Oh. Wow. Okay,” I said. “You said ‘believed,’ as in, like, past tense . . . ?”

  “You have to understand that I’m technically breaking doctor-patient confidentiality right now. I’m also making medical recommendations outside my area of expertise. But I think it’s possible that the problem is psychosomatic—a psychological issue.”

  “The thing in her eye is . . . in her head?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’re saying she’s nuts?” I asked.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  Dr. Fulci sat me down on a nearby bench. “It is not uncommon for psychological issues to manifest themselves physically, even if the person in question has no underlying or undiagnosed mental illness,” she said, sternly patting my gloved hand with hers like I was a misbehaving child. “It can be actively harmful to think of such people as being ‘crazy.’ The relationship between mental and physical health is a complex beast, one that modern science has barely even come close to truly understanding. It's a relationship of such extreme complexity that most of our current treatments will probably be viewed by future generations the way we would look at, say, treating tuberculosis with leeches.”

  I could tell Dr. Fulci had more to say, but a crackling intercom announcement informed us that Marnie’s exam was finished. In retrospect, I wished I had picked a better word than “nuts.”

  We were in the living room watching some interchangeable Netflix show when I was finally able to bring up the whole “psychosomatic” thing and show Marnie the literature Dr. Fulci had emailed me.

  “Oh. You think I’m crazy?” she said, not looking up from her laptop.

  “No—God, no,” I said, turning my attention from the movie to her. “The relationship between mind and body is, like, a way-mi
sunderstood beast? That modern medicine is still only beginning to wrap around—uh—wrap its head around?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  My eyes darted around the room stupidly, looking at anything but her furiously red left eye. “I’m just saying that there are other things that maybe—?”

  “There is something,” said Marnie, pointing at her face, “in my fucking eye.”

  “Because you won’t leave it alone!” My forehead glowed and voice rose, unbidden. “You keep rubbing it and touching it and staring at it—every day. Even with the glasses. Of course it’s going to look bad! You need to leave it alone.”

  She didn’t seem shocked that I’d yelled, just kept a hard face, staying silent and staring at me with that Mars-esque eyeball. After a few seconds, she said, “You know why no one ever believes the girl in horror movies?”

  “What? No?”

  “Because it’s true to life. I’m Virginia Madsen in fucking Candyman.”

  “What do you mean?” I was so confused. I’d never seen Candyman.

  But she didn’t answer. She got off the couch, saying something about buying yellow wallpaper for the bedroom.

  After a couple more weeks of useless eyewashes, antibiotics, and steampunk eyewear, Marnie started to deteriorate. She did nothing but crawl from the bed to the couch, leaving all the lights off in the apartment. She was so inanimate, lying there with those enormous black goggles on, that I sometimes worried she was dead, except I’d often see her kicking the couch armrest, an involuntary tick.

  Her communication with me wilted to monosyllables. The few things she did say made no sense at all. I’d overhear her muttering stuff about “literal hellscapes” and “divine punishment.” Unable to touch her eyes with the goggles on, she’d often dig her nails so deeply into her palms that it would draw stigmatic blood.

  I started bumming smokes off the dishies at work and letting the line guys go home early while I stayed late into the evening. Somehow endless piles of uncut beef carcasses seemed preferable to facing the problems at home.