by Shelby Smoak
“Okay. I promise.”
“Okay, honey. I’ll miss you, but don’t come back here. You hear me. Write this place off.”
She gives me a last wave as I accelerate onto Aster Drive toward home. The school disappears until only a tinge of red brick pokes through the woods, and then this contracts and disappears. The fall leaves rustle beneath my tires and the wind sounds lonesome in the bare October trees. And in the night, more rain comes and patters its sad lullaby upon the earth.
THE UNICORN
HALLOWEEN 1996. I ATTEND A PARTY HOSTED BY JAKE, A SOMETIMES friend of mine. Too tired and uncaring to put much thought in my costume, I purchase a mechanic’s shirt from the PTA thrift store and, as if I have spent my days rolled underneath cars, I smudge kohl upon my shirt, jeans, and face, decorating myself as a greasy mechanic.
Jake rents an apartment that is hard to find, so by the time I arrive, the party is abuzz with laughter and swaying bodies in costume. I press through the tiny den and scan masks and made-up faces for any that I may know. Eventually, I happen upon Jake, a furry gorilla doing a beer bong through his costume’s snout. When he finishes, Jake dances an apish jig and hoots and moans as a gorilla might while people applaud and shout out happy cheers. Noticing me, he pulls me further into the crowd, and, introducing me to his friends along the route, we soon squeeze onto a small balcony where the keg rests. He pumps a cup for me and for himself, and we toast one another, slapping plastic against plastic, and then he abandons me, returns to the party to find his girlfriend dressed up as Jane for the evening. With nothing better to do, I drink more beer as partygoers loop about the keg.
A young girl dressed as a unicorn fills her cup and stands on the balcony, gazing out to the stand of pine edging the back and showing no intention of returning inside. White strings dangle as a mane down her back. She has sewn on a tail and painted a party hat as a spiraled golden horn for her head. Draped in pure white, she appears before me as that creature from those magical books I read so long ago.
“I love unicorns,” I say as a way to strike up a conversation.
She looks at me bemusedly, flutters her long unicorn lashes. “Really. Well, this isn’t just any unicorn, you know. It’s magical.”
“That’s good because I could use a little magic right now.”
“Seems to me that a mechanic could fix just about anything.”
“Anything, I suppose, without a heart and lungs.”
When she looks to me, her walnut eyes, full of expression, seem brightened by hope. As the night lengthens, we ask questions about the universities we attended, the degrees we hold, and the pastimes we enjoy, and we talk about the people we know in town, hoping to find someone in common, some connection we may have outside of ourselves. Two hours pass like this. Then the party departs for the downtown. Maria—the unicorn—grabs my arm.
“Come on,” she says. “Follow me.”
Together, we join the party—a moving caravan of drunkenness and disguise. Maria tugs me down Franklin Street, now blocked off from car travel and packed tight with Halloween costumes: Thor, Frankenstein, Marilyn Monroe, The Cat in the Hat. A string of identically dressed girls passes, holding hands as Russian dolls. We drink. We stumble up the intoxicated street to show off our costumes.
Maria pulls us onward, lowering her horn to clear a path. And when we have pushed far enough and the crowd begins to thin, we retrace our steps through the swaying sea of celebration. At streetside, we drink and watch the spectacle. The crowd thickens. When a college fraternity parades by in marching band regalia, we duck into a crowded bar and press to the counter for more beers that we then take outside, and when these are finished, Maria leans against me and tells me that she should go back soon, that she is tired.
We return to Jake’s to retrieve our cars and before leaving, there is an awkward pause as we decide how to part.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” the unicorn says. “This was really a nice Halloween surprise.”
“It was something kind of magical, I suppose.”
She comes toward me and we kiss, turning my head sideways to negotiate the horn.
Maria scribbles her number on a slip of paper, and I promise to call.
“Soon. Very soon,” I say as she settles into her car seat and drives away.
When I return to my apartment, it is late, yet I am not tired but feel rejuvenated. I play several albums, and when the last one spins, I listen to the quiet dark settle around me, soothing and palpable. I place my thin, pale hand upon my heart and feel its beat.
WINTER IS THE CRUELEST SEASON
NOVEMBER 1996. I TRY TO REASSEMBLE MY LIFE. THE GRANDEUR OF teaching seeming lost, I accept a position as a bookseller for Barnes & Noble in Durham, and more books pass through my hands than I could hope to read in a lifetime. I work eight-hour shifts and in the evenings, hobbled and stiff, I soothe my ankles in warm bathwater. I prop them on pillows and try to sleep, but they keep me awake. Often they worsen and, with the drape of moonlight around me, I mix my factor; constrict the tourniquet on my arm; slip the needle into a raised blue line running underneath my skin; and infuse. Then I sleep.
To cure my lonesomeness, I call Maria and invite her to dinner. When I first see her again—the unicorn costume long discarded—her face glows and even in the dead of November she smells like the spring dew that settles upon the grass in the early morning. We eat well. We laugh heartily. And I am drawn closer to her. She isn’t silly like some girls, nor a heavy drinker, and I feel immediately how she begins to fill up the hole inside me. Before parting, we kiss beneath the lamplight of her apartment.
“I’m glad you called me,” she says before going.
“Me, too.”
“So let’s do this again sometime. Perhaps after the hectic Thanksgiving holiday.”
“Yes, let’s. I’ll call you.”
The week before Thanksgiving a snow starts in the early morning. I pour coffee and sneak out into a morning made immaculate by a theophany of white. The cold sun filters through the clouds, and I squint at the brightness as I crunch through the frozen landscape. The winter birds flit through the longleaf pines and dodge the slow drip of a thawing world with the trees standing as colossal black pillars against the white garland of snow. Soon the puddles will begin and make soft mud of the earth, but today is luminous, the sky crisp and as blue as the color of ink run from a pen.
While my friend travels during the holidays, his two cats stay with me. When he drops them off, I place Somali, the oldest, in my lap and he purrs and curls up next to me as I stroke his thick fur.
“You’re a pretty kitty.”
He jumps down and scampers off.
“We’ll be fine,” I promise my friend as he pays me. “Your kitties and I will get along just great.”
When I sleep, the cats pounce on the bed and startle me. I get up and set them outside my door, but they mew and paw at it, so to quiet them, I shake food in their bowls and return to bed, but soon they are back scratching at my door. When I leave, they claw at the furniture, sleep on the countertops, and prance on the kitchen tables, so that when I return, I have to clean hair and paw marks from the tabletops and, for the furniture, I fasten double-sided tape to the leg corners. Then, after a few weeks, the smell of shit from neglected litter or from Somali’s upset stomach that causes him to go wherever begins to permeate the apartment’s blue air; its noxious fumes greet me when the door is unsealed and a vacuumed whoosh of stool and piss is discharged. I gag. I heave. I clean the litter. I clean the carpet, the sofa, the sitting chair. I disinfect the kitchen. I pet the kitties, and as I stoop low to stroke their fur, it pulls off in my hand and I notice it has also chunked off on the floor, on the couch, and on my bed. But I’m too tired to clean anymore and only have the energy to retrieve my factor from the fridge and to fall asleep, rise to work, to treat, and to fall asleep again. The air of life has gasped out of me. I’m weary. Tired. And just putter around as best I can.
The pho
ne rings. It is dark outside, and I locate the sound near my bed.
“Hey, Son. How are you? It’s Mom. Just checking in . . .”
“Mom,” I say.
“You’re not already in bed are you? It’s only nine.”
“Just tired is all. Long day at work.”
“You sound perfectly exhausted. Why don’t you come home for the weekend? Dad can cook you a steak and you can get some rest. Are you eating?”
“Of course I’m eating.”
“What’d you have for supper?” Oh, Mom’s sly.
“Supper? I had a late lunch.”
“At the bookstore? Couldn’t have been more than a sandwich.” She pauses. “I think you should talk to Dr. Trum when you see him next week. Don’t you see him next week?”
“No. My appointment’s not for another month. I had to change it because of work.”
“You shouldn’t do that. You should go to the doctor first. I just read an article in Time about Dr. Ho and these new protease inhibitors and it sounds promising. Maybe you could ask the doctors about them? I know you had a rough time before, but medicine has come a long way. You have to try something.” She stops. “Hello,” she says.
“Yes, I’m still here. I need to sleep, Mom.”
“Okay, Son. Just think about. And come see us. Can you come this weekend? I think your sister is coming. She can swing by and pick you up.”
“No. I have to close Saturday.”
“Can’t somebody work your shift?”
“I work Sunday, too. I had to switch to get last Tuesday off for the ID doctor.”
“Well, okay. I just think you should quit it all. Come home for a few months.”
“I need to sleep,” I say.
“Okay, okay,” she says, getting my hint. “I mailed you some money today to help out. Use it to pay some of the bills, and go treat yourself to a nice meal somewhere. Don’t you like the Olive Garden? Or what’s that place you took us to with the really good fried chicken? Dips? Or something like that.”
“Okay, Mom. Thanks. I appreciate it. You didn’t have to do that.”
When we hang up, I sleep soundly—at least until midnight when the cats wake me, mewing and jumping on my bed, reminding me that I forgot to feed them.
For several nights, I awake and my bed is soaked through. My shirt is wet. My boxers. My legs and arms. In the night, my whole body is a cloud of pouring rain and my bed a reservoir of perspiration. I wring out my clothes and drape them over the shower rod while I fish through my dresser drawers for dry clothing. My eyes are red-rimmed. My tongue thick and sticking dryly to the roof of my dry, dry mouth. Even water cannot help it.
“I cannot eat,” I tell the doctor. “When I try to swallow, my throat closes off and I gag.”
The ID doctor holds my tongue down with the depressor. “Yep. Esophagitis. The thrush has worsened. We can fix that with another drug that’s a bit stronger, and you should have your appetite back and be able to eat within a few days. I’m worried about that since your weight is down to 116. That’s pretty slim . . . Now more than ever, you need to eat.” He passes his stethoscope along my chest as I breathe in, breathe out. “Have you been keeping up with your Pentamidine?”
“Yes. I haven’t missed a dose since I started.”
“Good. There’s a little fluid in there, and I don’t want that to grow into anything like PCP, so I’m putting you on an antibiotic to take care of that.” He writes the prescriptions and passes this off to me. “Do you have any questions?”
I draw a hand up to my eyes. The doctor stands beside me and passes me tissue. “I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
“There’s a lot to be scared of,” he says. “I won’t lie to you about that. And I won’t tell you that I know how you feel or what you’re going through because I don’t. I can’t even imagine it. But I can promise you that we’ll give you the best care possible. And, although it may not seem like it right now, I feel you’re in a really good position for treatment. It looks like the protease inhibitors are an effective treatment, and once the FDA approves them, which should be any day now, my feeling is that you’re going to respond.” I calm and dry my hands along my jeans, smoothing the creases with damp palms. “Just take the prescriptions I’ve given you, and you’ll feel better in a few days and I’m sure that fluid in your chest is just a little winter cold. It’s not anything to worry over just yet.” He starts gathering his things. “Call me whenever you feel like. I mean it.”
When our visit ends, I feel weighed down. Even my crying is no solace. I gather myself and exit into the lobby, wearing a brave mask as if nothing is wrong.
At home, I gargle. I swallow. And I stick out my tongue to the mirror and see the thin coating of fungus and the trace of it spreading down my throat. My face is sallow and carved tight round my cheekbones; my skin pockets near the mouth as if tiny invisible gumballs press around my teeth; and my eyes are dark, brooding, and sunken deep in the sockets. I raise my shirt to show a chest that is all bone and arms that are thin flaps of flesh. A fragile peel of skin shrinks round my body as wet tissue to a hand. The mirror does not lie.
I drop my pants to expose my only plump tissue, and to make myself happy for a time, I play, and when the moment ends, my plumpness shrivels into a congruency with the rest of my body.
I cough. I spit out a winter phlegm, thick and viscous. Then I feel chilled. I notch up the thermostat. My nose drizzles. My head hurts. My stomach aches. I feel flushed.
“I think I’m going to die,” I tell William on the phone.
“What? Are you sick?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. I just feel sick and tired and tired from feeling sick and tired.” I blow my nose on some tissue. I cry. “And I’m scared.”
“I’m coming to see you. I’ll be there tonight.”
The hours pass as I wait for William’s company. I huddle in my bed. I watch some TV. I pet the kitties. And when I hear footsteps outside, I spread the blinds to see if it’s William, but, disappointed, I wait. When he finally arrives and I let him in, he surveys my apartment.
“Oh my God,” he exclaims. “You have got to get this place cleaned up. How many people are living here?”
“Just me and the kitties.”
“You shouldn’t be taking care of them. Your place looks like a disaster, and it smells awful.”
“I know. I’m too tired to clean it. I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t.”
I cry. William sits beside me on the couch and puts a soft hand to my back.
“We’ll get this place cleaned up. It’s going to be okay.”
He drives to Walmart and buys cleaning supplies, and when he returns, he scrubs and disinfects every corner of my small apartment while I stare vacantly out the window at the barren trees swaying in the cold breeze. And although the place soon smells as clean as the day when I first moved in, it is still just as blue.
Later, we purr along in William’s car, steering the Orange County back roads. The stars pierce the cold and the moon dangles like a giant orb in the black sky. The farmland, blanketed in night, appears as ashen silhouettes of barnlots and fenceposts, while a thin run of wire sometimes catches a flicker of headlight as we pass.
“I don’t know if you want any,” William says, “but I brought some smoke for you. I really think it would ease your pain and help you eat something.”
“So, if I do, are you going to use me for your legalization campaign? Is that it? I’m your medical marijuana case?”
“Funny . . . I’m just laying out the facts. The choice is yours.”
“I don’t think I’ve got much to lose, so, yeah.”
William pulls off onto a side road where a lone lamppost illuminates bluely as he idles the car and packs the bowl.
“Just breathe in like it’s a cigarette.”
“But I never smoked a cigarette.”
“Never . . . goddamn . . . Well, just breathe in and hold. Here, I’ll light it for yo
u.”
“No, I can handle that. I’ve watched it plenty.”
The lighter flares. I inhale.
“Maybe one more time,” William says.
I inhale again. And then I cough uncontrollably.
“Okay, that’s enough. Here . . . drink some of my soda.”
He passes me his drink and William’s car purrs on as time soon melds into ribbons of darkness; a tingle of warmth puffs me up and floats me in the car seat.