* * *
And so, Laura begins a course of medication, antidepressants mixed in with what the psychiatrist she’s referred to calls one of the “milder” antipsychotics. Like the fasting regimen, in some ways, it seems to help. She finally gets some rest, although she begins sleeping eight hours a night, then nine, then ten, and adding on long naps in the afternoon. David often comes home from work to find her on that lotion-stained couch. She gains weight, and her beautiful dark hair thins. But she is no longer scratching the way she once was, and the wound on her face begins to close. The hives on her body do keep rising—despite himself, David continues to think of them as bites—but she resists the urge to dig at them, and after a day or so, they deflate and fade. David tells himself that it’s enough, she’s healing, but every so often, he looks at the dull-eyed, slow-moving woman on the couch, and almost hates her for stealing the person he loved away.
They sink into a kind of stasis, and David is forced to confront the possibility that this is the new normal, as good as things will ever be. Late at night, as Laura sleeps, David finds himself returning to the idea of a parasite, one more corporeal than unhappiness. It is true, after all, that Laura seems not just depressed, but drained of something fundamental. What if she really is hosting some kind of exotic infestation, and because of David’s poorly timed outburst, the doctor wrongly consigned her to the realm of the mentally ill, drugging her into a mute endurance of her pain?
For all that the possibility damns him, once he latches on to it, David cannot let it go. He loves Laura, the real Laura, that electric disaster whom he first saw spilling beer all over herself at the bar. But this Laura—he can’t remember when this Laura last wore red lipstick. This Laura grooms herself very carefully, so as not to let her inner disorder show through.
And so he sits Laura down one morning. Brings her favorite blanket, makes her tea. When he asks her how she’s feeling, she says the same thing she always does: “I’m okay.” But the whites of her eyes are an eggy, unhealthy yellow, and there’s a rim of red around her nostrils, like they’ve been singed.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, settling himself on the couch beside her. “I’m worried about you. And I’m wondering if we gave up too quickly on the idea that there was something really wrong with you. I mean, with your skin.”
She ponders the bottom of her teacup and says, slowly, “I wonder sometimes, too.”
“I know the Depakote is helping. But maybe there’s something else.”
“Maybe. I guess.”
“It couldn’t hurt, could it, to get a second opinion?”
“Like, another psychiatrist?”
“I was thinking a dermatologist. A good one.” He opens a folder, shows her a carefully arranged stack of paper: articles, from peer-reviewed journals, that he printed out at work. “There’s a lot of evidence that real—I mean, physically real—skin diseases get misdiagnosed as psychiatric problems all the time. Especially in women. Dr. Lansing is old. His generation, they call everything psychosomatic: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. If we want real answers, we need to see good doctors. Not just good. The best.”
“That sounds expensive,” she says.
“Laura. I don’t care.”
Her eyes flicker with an unexpected light, and her mouth twists in a familiar smile. “We could put it on the spreadsheet.”
“Fuck the spreadsheet,” he says. “Laura. I love you. I’ll take care of you. It’s going to be okay.”
* * *
They drive with the windows down to the new doctor David has found, cool wind whipping past them as they review their plan. They’ve decided not to bring the baggie of evidence, which still lives in the refrigerator, untouched, and to avoid talking about the meds she’s on unless directly asked. They want to go in clean, free of the suspicion they inadvertently triggered when Laura handed over the baggie, when David brought up her stress. Instead, she will start fresh: I’m otherwise healthy. I itch.
The new dermatologist’s office is spacious, painted in pastels, and smells reassuringly clean. Though David volunteers to go with them, the doctor, more professional than Dr. Lansing, asks to see Laura alone. Twenty minutes stretches into thirty, forty-five, and when Laura emerges, David jumps out of his chair.
“What did she say?”
“She says yeah, hives, stress, et cetera. She pushed me about medications, I told her about the Depakote. I shouldn’t have. You were right, I could see her mind change. Like, instantly. She offered me a chemical peel for the scar.”
David shakes his head in disappointment, but now Laura is the one to comfort him. “We knew this would be hard. This is just a start.”
It’s true. They did; it is. They’ve connected online with a whole network of sufferers of difficult-to-diagnose diseases, supporters who’ve given them a list of sympathetic doctors twelve pages long. They’ll find answers, even if it takes a lifetime. David believes it, and he can see in Laura’s eyes, and in her bright, lipsticked smile, that she believes it, too.
As many times as he’s imagined this moment, he’s never pictured it happening here: the drab parking lot of a doctor’s office, the sky gray with clouds that are flying quickly overhead. And yet once the words begin rising in him, he cannot stop them and has no wish to:
“Laura,” he says. “Will you marry me?”
* * *
They wed a week later, at the courthouse. They tell no one—not their parents, not their San Francisco acquaintances, not their New York friends. Laura buys a new dress, because none of her old ones fit her, and she finds a pretty vintage hat that she decorates with a little snippet of veil. They ask another eloping couple to serve as witnesses, and pose for a handful of photos taken by strangers. Laura looks a little sad when she sees the pictures, and David can guess why: these pictures will never end up on a mantelpiece, cooed over by admiring grandchildren; in them, Laura is shockingly pale, the garish scar on her cheek clearly visible beneath the veil. But they can do it again, do it better next time. That’s the point: they have infinite chances, now, to figure out how to love each other. They have their whole lives to get it right.
* * *
The night of the wedding, David is lying next to Laura when a shaft of moonlight falls across her arm. The original bite, the one that started it all, has long ago healed into a glossy ridge of scar. It’s hard to believe that something so small could have caused so much damage—a bullet would have scarcely left more pain in its wake.
An inch above the scar, a new welt has formed in a soft puff of flesh, and David runs his finger over it. The welt feels warm, feverish almost, although the rest of Laura’s skin is chilled. As he strokes it, he feels it throb suddenly beneath his touch: an eyelid’s flicker, a watch’s tickticktick.
David snatches his hand back, rubbing his fingers together to clear them of the lively, unnerving sensation. He wants to think he imagined it, except that his eyes continue to feed him evidence: the drum-taut skin over the welt is deformed and trembling, as though something inside is beating against it, trying to fight its way out.
“Laura,” he whispers. “Laura, wake up.” But she is deep in some drugged dream and cannot be woken. He squints into the darkness as the skin on her arm ripples like an unquiet sea. And then, before his eyes, the circle of flesh swells, and a dark pinprick appears at its center. A translucent bubble of blood rises slowly from the hole, and bursts in a spatter of red, as the parasite that has fed on Laura all these months pierces through her flesh and wriggles free.
David grabs for it. He clenches it in his fist and pulls, and it unravels like a living string. He drags it from her skin and casts it, damp and twitching, on the sheets between them: this impossible, this unbelievable thing.
The parasite slaps wetly on the bed, a six-inch-long tube of knobbed white flesh, lined with a thousand shivering legs that wave like seaweed in the unfamiliar air. This is proof too big for a matchbox, too strong for a plastic bag; they will return to the doctor tomorro
w with this unequivocal evidence trapped in a thick glass jar. She was right all along, and he was right to believe in her; he’d come close, so close, to losing everything.
They are safe now. He will no longer be the only one who believes her. Laura’s body may still teem with a thousand swarming hatchlings, but their mother is dying and tomorrow, all of medical science will be on Laura’s side, helping her fight the infestation until her blood is her own again, until the day when she is once again light and free and clean.
The parasite twists itself in one last, violent spasm, and as David peers at it, the worm rears up, blind and hungry, and one of its legs brushes against his face. He clutches at it, but he is too late: it hooks into him and plunges, forcing itself through the tender spot between eye and bone in a blinding white explosion of pain.
David can feel its thousand prickling legs dancing along the inside of his cheek, scratching at his skull, stroking and teasing at the edges of his brain. Then the sensation dims and vanishes, leaving him with nothing but an itch at the site of entry, and a puffed welt, as small as a mosquito bite, at the bottom of his eye. Beside him, Laura rolls over, and moans, and scratches in her sleep, and David collapses next to her as the monster that was born beneath his lover’s skin pulses through his bloodstream, swimming with unerring instinct toward his heart.
Death Wish
Okay, so this was a while ago, back when I was living in Baltimore and I was really fucking lonely. That’s my only excuse, to the extent I even have one: I was unemployed and renting a motel room week-to-week, on the other side of the country from everyone I knew, living off my credit cards and trying to “figure myself out.” By which I mean, getting high and drunk all the time and sleeping like eighteen hours out of the twenty-four.
Pretty much the only people I talked to on a regular basis at that point in time were the girls I met on Tinder. I’d be in my room, drinking and watching porn and playing video games, and then it would occur to me that I hadn’t spoken to a living person in a week or two, never mind left my room or changed my clothes or eaten something that hadn’t come in a box. I’d start swiping, to try and find a girl who could help me feel like a human being for a while. When I did, we’d meet at a bar and talk for an hour, and then the girl would come back to my place to fuck. I never saw any individual girl more than a handful of times. Not on purpose, really. It was just how things played out.
This thing I’m telling you about happened with one of those girls. She was cute—little, blonde, from the Midwest somewhere I think. I could tell from her profile we didn’t have anything in common. Not that it was her fault—I didn’t really have anything in common with anyone back then. My divorce was still going through, and I wasn’t talking to anyone in my family except for my brother like once every two weeks . . . Look. I knew I wasn’t in any state to have a relationship, and I wasn’t trying to inflict myself on anybody long-term. I had that much self-awareness at least.
So me and this girl are messaging each other, and I’m telling her a little bit about myself, my circumstances, nothing deep. She seems reasonably into me, so I ask her if she wants to meet up for a drink. She says she doesn’t drink, and I say, okay, we can get dessert or something, no worries. And then she says, actually, if it’s okay with you, maybe I can just come over?
That level of directness happened sometimes on Tinder. Not often, but it did. I was always down with it, but internally, I’d always be like, wow, that’s brave. Because I know I’m not going to rape you and murder you, but how do you know that? Obviously, it wasn’t something I could actually ask them about. I’d just wonder.
So now this girl is coming over, and I’m rushing around trying to clean the place up, because the room is a sty and I’m the pig that lives in it. I’m showering and shaving and shoving things in the closet, trying to create the impression that I’m the kind of person who changes his underwear on a regular basis, when really, if it wasn’t for Tinder, I probably would have worn the same shit-encrusted boxer shorts for so long that I’d have developed a fatal infection.
I’m still doing what I can to make myself marginally less disgusting when someone knocks on my door. Before I open it, I look through the peephole, just to make sure it’s her. Who else would it be, right? But I had a kind of paranoiac streak going, no doubt because of all the drugs. There she is: this adorable girl, her hair in a high ponytail like a cheerleader, and she’s got on a little pink T-shirt and jeans, and my first thought is, hell yeah. Because you never know, when these girls appear in real life, what they’re going to look like. You can do some serious magic these days with filters and shit. But the second thing I notice is that she’s got a suitcase with her. Not a big one—it’s one of those roller bags, the kind you can carry onto a plane. Weird, right?
I open the door, and the first thing I do is make a joke about the suitcase: Wow, how long are you planning on staying? She laughs, and I say, no, seriously, what do you have in there? Makeup or something? She smirks, like she’s got a secret, and then she winks at me and says, maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll find out.
There was always this moment, when I had girls over, when they’d realize I really did live in a motel room, I wasn’t just passing through. I always told them beforehand—warned them, really—but sometimes, they couldn’t quite believe it until they saw it with their own eyes. Even when I did a decent job cleaning up, I couldn’t hide the fact that the circumstances were pretty fucking grim. If they looked seriously shattered, I’d always offer to take them somewhere else, but no one ever took me up on it. I think after the initial shock, they mostly just felt bad for me.
But this girl—if she gives a fuck about my living situation, she doesn’t show it. She strolls in the door with her suitcase behind her like a flight attendant, and then she goes over to the bed and hops right on it, like—here we go! She doesn’t even take off her goddamned shoes. And I know this is kind of ridiculous, after everything I said before about the state of decrepitude I’m living in, but it pisses me off. We’ve known each other all of thirty seconds, and here you come in with your suitcase and your dirty-ass shoes on my bed, maybe slow your roll a little, you know? The shoes are fine as far as they go—Keds, maybe?—but they’re kind of scuffed up, and there’s a brown smear of what I hope to God is mud on the bottom of one of the soles.
Probably, if I’d been in a different mental place, I’d have said something like, Hey, do you mind taking your shoes off before you get on the bed? And it would have been no big deal. But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction. I knew I was overreacting—in all likelihood, the comforter had seen way worse. I used to think about it sometimes, when I couldn’t fall asleep, how the bedspread would’ve glowed under a black light, all the streaks of shit and blood and pus and cum that were all over it, and, by extension, all over my skin. Now I’m like, why didn’t I just take the bedspread to the dry cleaners, if it bothered me so much? But I didn’t. That was the life I was living, then.
Back to this girl. She’s on my bed. I offer her a drink before I remember that she doesn’t do that. She says, I’d like a drink of water, and I ask her if she wants ice before I realize I don’t have any, so she has to settle for lukewarm tap water in a paper cup. Truly, I’m killing it here. But again, she doesn’t seem to care. I ask her if she wants to watch a movie, and she says sure, but in this way that’s like, You and I both know there won’t be any movie-watching happening tonight. Which, fair enough. Some girls know what they want, and sometimes what they want is random sex in a motel room with a decent-looking guy they met on the internet. People who exaggerate the differences between what men and women want in bed don’t know what they’re talking about, in my opinion. Maybe your average woman is a little more conservative than your average guy, but there’s always going to be some seriously crazy shit happening out at the far end of the bell curve. That’s just statistics, right?
Soon, we’re making out, and then we
’re more than making out, and then I’m making the move to get a condom, and she says, “Wait.”
Okay, I think, she doesn’t want to have sex, she just wants to hook up. That’s pretty common. Honestly I don’t even mind it. I’ll take an enthusiastic blow job over lukewarm sex any day of the week.
But instead she says, “There’s something about me you should know.”
I say, “What?”
She says, “The thing about me is, I have really specific tastes about what I like in bed. And the only way I can enjoy myself, sexually, is if you do exactly what I tell you to do, in exactly the way that I like it.”
Remember, these are more words in a row than she’s said to me in the entire time we’ve known each other. I’m a little taken aback. But I say, “Okay, sure. No problem. Tell me.”
She says, “I want you to agree that you’ll respect my wishes, and do what I ask you to do, because it’s really important to me.”
I say, “I mean, sure, I’ll respect you, obviously, but I’m not going to say that I’ll do something until I know what it is.”
That seems reasonable, right? But she gets a little prickly. I can see it in her face, like she wanted me to agree straightaway, no questions asked. And she was cute and everything, but come on.
In this kind of low, breathy, phone-sex voice, like she’s about to suggest the hottest, dirtiest thing ever, she says, “I want us to get in the shower, together. And I want us to be, like, kissing and touching and making out a little. Normal stuff. And then, after a little while—and this is very important—when I’m not expecting it, I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. After you’ve punched me, when I’ve fallen down, I want you to kick me in the stomach. And then we can have sex.”
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