One Anguish
MAX STARES into the toilet and swears the water is pink. He has studied it for five minutes. When he angles his head so he can’t see the glare, it looks pink. He’s pretty sure it’s blood. He’s studied it long enough that he has to pee again, and he does, and he is all but certain the second time that he’s peeing blood. Leonard, his roommate, insisted on pausing the movie, but Max has held out in the bathroom long enough he ought to have started it again by now. Leaning against the wall with his pants still unzipped, Max pulls his phone from the vanity and takes a picture of the water in the toilet, then searches: blood in urine, dry eyes. Bladder and kidney infections, the same as the last time he searched. He’s ruled those out already by taking the Macrobid he stole from his sister. It’s not taking into account the dry eyes, he thinks, since all the results are skewed toward the blood in urine. He adds headache and fast heart to the query because his pulse is up and his head now hurts, but it’s still all bladder and kidney infections. A CT scan would find it, he’s almost sure, but he’s saving for vagus nerve stimulation and doesn’t want to blow that cash. He opens the photo he just took of the water in the toilet and holds his phone under his nose and scrutinizes it. He swipes through some of the others. The photos don’t capture *it*. It barely looks pink, he thinks. He sighs, washes his hands, and, as is his ritual, searches his cheeks in the mirror for signs of jaundice. His cheeks are plenty red, but his eyes have it, they are yellowish, he thinks. Leonard will say they’re fine without even looking. The left eye has been bothering him since he got drunk on Saturday. What a mistake, he thinks. He pulls the lid down and examines it closely. It looks mostly normal, which sinks his heart, because no one takes his complaints seriously when what he’s complaining about *looks* normal. He looks again. “Yellow,” he whispers. He’s had more floaters too, and in fact, a big eely one just swam by. He can’t pick his phone up fast enough. He adds to his search: jaundice, eely floaters, etc. Vitreous hemorrhage, he gets. Vitreous hemorrhage can cause the eyes to see the world in a red tint. The toilet water—
He coughs. He hadn’t swallowed for too long and his throat dried out. It’s plausible, and he does think that’s what happened, but still his heart drops even lower and his breath stops a moment. He sucks air to ensure his lungs inflate. They do. His throat is just dry. He hopes. He swallows cautiously and is answered with a scratch, like a long finger with a short but sharp nail stroked his oropharynx. He learned oropharynx from his searches yesterday, and that wasn’t because he coughed yesterday but had thought he had something lodged there. Now that it’s scratchy...
He squeezes the edge of the vanity until it hurts. In a fury he whips up his phone, takes a picture of his throat, then searches: blood in urine, headache, cough, floaters, sore throat, faint jaundice, dry bladder. He races through the new possibilities, but soon enough, here come bladder and kidney infections.
Leonard pinches a flap of turkey between his fingers and swipes at the congealed gravy in the corner of a microwave meal tray before folding it into his mouth and chasing it with milk. The movie is paused and the man on screen is still clutching his chest, just the way he was when Max went to the bathroom.
“Can you look at my eye real quick,” Max says as he reenters the living room. “You can hit play.”
“Nah. I’ll wait til you’re ready to watch it,” Leonard says, licking his lips. “What were you doing, jerking off?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Max says. “I’ve got problems. I told you. Look at my eye, tell me it isn’t yellow. Hit play.”
“You were in there taking pictures, weirdo,” Leonard says. He starts the movie and adds, “I’m not getting up to look at your eye. I want to eat and watch this movie.”
The movie’s audio is saturated with the man’s struggle to breathe. Max watches only a moment before his own chest tightens. His breath falls flat and shallow and out of rhythm. The man in the movie falls to the floor, makes a sound, then lies motionless before the scene changes to one full of trees and Max can breathe again. He sits opposite Leonard on the couch and looks toward the TV, though in truth, he’s staring past it.
Leonard says, “Are you going to text her or not?”
“Why would I text her? I’m pretty sure I’m peeing blood and my eye is messed up and you won’t even look at it,” Max says.
“You’re not pissing blood, I guarantee it. A person isn’t ‘pretty sure’ they’re pissing blood for days and days on end. For weeks on end. You’re either pissing blood or you’re not. There’s no ‘I think’. You’ve been saying for months that you’re pissing blood or you got this or that or whatever buboe on your stomach, man. Do you realize how wild that is?”
“Look at this picture,” Max says, pulling out his phone.
“I’m not looking at your piss. I’m not. I already did all the other stuff. I pressed behind your knees and I pressed your stomach or whatever you had me do. I’m not taking your pulse anymore, none of that. There’s nothing wrong with you, man. You’re fine. You thought you had buboes. You’re fucking fine. You’re getting weird. It’s stress. You need to relax.”
“It’s not stress,” Max says.
Leonard laughs and gestures at the TV. “You can’t even watch a movie without going to the bathroom every time someone coughs.”
“He wasn’t coughing. He had a heart attack.”
“All right. Well I’m pretty sure he coughed somewhere in there. Are you going to text her or not? What’s her name? Jenny.”
“Genevieve,” Max says. “That’s all I remember, so I don’t know how I’m going to text her.”
“That’s right, I remember now. She goes by Jenny, she spells it like Gene, I remember. Just do it, who cares? You’re going to waste all my efforts.”
“You act like getting laid is going to make me not sick,” Max says.
“You’re not sick,” Leonard says, incredulous. “And if you are, getting laid will cure it, I guarantee that too. Who said you’re getting laid, anyway? I just said text her…”
Max is indignant. “I’m telling you,” he says, “something’s wrong. My skin looks weird lately too, like it doesn’t matter how much lotion—“
Leonard’s voice loses its touch of jest and becomes more frustrated, angry even. “Your skin is pale. It’s not yellow. I’m looking at it, it’s pale. Because you don’t do shit. You never go anywhere. That’s what you need. Sunlight. You never go anywhere. You need sunlight. And pussy. That’s what you need.”
“Fuck off,” Max says.
“Your eyes are fine. Your piss is fine. Your skin, all of it. You’re scared of girls is what it is.”
Max shakes his head. Leonard has poked him someplace soft. “How’d I get her number, then?” Max blurts out. His voice, the way he is standing is defiant, but it’s a ruse. The confidence doesn’t belong to him and it leaves with the words from his mouth. He knows it. Leonard knows it. He knows that Leonard knows it.
Leonard smiles a little. “You got her number because I got you drunk and shut down whatever part of your cockadoo brain thinks you’re dying”—he motions with the remote like he’s going to start the movie again, but his face distorts and his hand stops, midair—“you’re going to manifest cancer or something with how you are. I’m serious. People do that. People give themselves stuff. Heart issues and stuff. I believe that. I’m never scared because I’m relaxed. I don’t think like you. I’m not scared of that kind of stuff. You got to change how you think on all that. I’m watching this movie. I have to work tonight. You can watch it with me or not, but I got to go to work and I want to relax first.”
“I’m going to go do some stuff,” Max says.
“Like what? Are you at least going to text her? I’ll wait a second if you’re going to text her because I want to know what she says.”
“I’ll text her from my room,” Max says.
“You’re such a cuck. No you won’t. Whatever man,” says Leonard. He presses play and rediscovers his meal, which is certainly cold, and starts to devour it again.
“That’s disgusting,” says Max. But Leonard doesn’t react, and Max, ignored and agitated, retreats to his room with the compulsion to text the girl, Gene, before he loses the sudden stir of fire.
Max steers with one hand and takes his pulse with the other. He considers what might happen once he is at her door and he goes sideways. Too much might go wrong. Turn around, he considers. Guys do this all the time, he counters. It’s easy. It’s nothing. Talk to her like anyone else. But you’re not anyone else. Don’t stay long. Tell her you don’t feel well. It’s true. You have a headache, ask for an Advil, leave, and do it all another time. Next time. Always next time.
He’s stuck and stuck tight. He met her the one time this past weekend. He was drunk, she danced. With him? Near him? He fell in love. He remembers that he’s in love. That’s it. He hadn’t even remembered she went by Gene until Leonard said so. But the love, he *feels* that like it’s alive inside him. It keeps him from turning around.
But I was drunk and I’m not drunk now, he thinks, and that sends him sideways again. He shouldn’t have drank. The yellow skin, it could be a liver thing aggravated by the alcohol.
A stoplight breaks him from this thought. He reads one of her texts from twenty minutes ago. “Come over.” His own texts, he can’t read them. They’re not him, they’re Leonard. His heart is beating so hard he can feel its pulse in his head. His pulse *is* his headache. The light turns green but he doesn’t drive, not until someone honks, and when they do, he has an epiphany: “The Macrobid was expired. Or, the Macrobid interacted with the alcohol—.”
His thoughts leave. The blank, featureless door that opens to her apartment reflects the content of his mind. His mind wasn’t blank before, it was filled with all the things that might happen at this moment. He had raced through to the end of each outcome, jumping from one terrible, humiliating prediction to the next, skipping the unfathomable, replaying the most likely, and lingering on the hopeful. Like: she’ll talk enough for both of them. When she finally takes a breath, she’ll be embarrassed she has talked so much and he’ll say something like, “No, not at all, listening to you is like listening to good music.”
He’s run through a thousand responses to all the things she will say and he’s narrowed them down to the best three or four, which, as he parked at the side of the street, he decided are the most likely to be needed. But the door, the door is a portal to another world. It’s unstable and might produce any number of irrational scenarios which he has not thought about and so cannot respond to. He’s not prepared. His thoughts had begun to fall on the walk up to the door. There will be one outcome, a real outcome, any second, one that started with the message “come over,” which was itself a response to Leonard, who, in his excitement at Max’s texting her, had insisted on “sealing the deal.” She’s expecting someone else. That is the last thought to come and it twists his stomach before it is gone too, pushed out of his head with the rest by a monstrous hand that also, as if gripping his wrist, keeps his own fist from knocking.
So he is standing stupidly with vacancy in his eyes when she opens the door and tilts her head out and angles it to one side and asks him what he is doing. She says, “Why are you just standing there?”
She’s younger than he remembers. She’s prettier too, thin to meagerness but with all 100 pounds or so capable of bearing down through the eyes. Her confidence glows behind the loose strands of her hair and floats her up and away, over and above him. He wills himself to rise in the moment to meet her, but nothing happens. His mind remains blank. Some flattening force of hers, one that belongs to all women like her, drives him into the ground so that he can’t move or think. It’s the gaze and the way she moves her hair to maintain it. She turns her attention for a moment to the phone in her hand and in that moment he’s free. He tries to will himself invisible. He wants to recoup and start over. It’s been silent since she opened the door and spoke and seconds are passing like a sticky film in the air. Though her eyes remain on her phone, the small sound that puffs through her still smiling, barely parted lips is directed at him. She’s asking, “Hello?”
He smiles. It’s not his choice. His mouth, by its own agency and in some kind of rebellion against his brain, recognizes his incapacity and seeks to win the day. It turns itself up and, despite the awkwardness, endears him to her. She smiles more widely, more authentically. “Cheesecake,” she says, and hangs on the door a moment before opening it to him. He follows her. She’s on her phone, walking through the living room to the refrigerator.
The apartment smells like laundry. Vintage movie posters in frames hang over the couch. Comics are spread on the coffee table—some of his heroes. Folding chairs pulled up to the rug suggest six or seven people were just here. Things are crammed but neatly arranged: a record player and some records. A few books. Empty glasses. A camera. A charging block on the floor with half a dozen cords sprouting from it. Pictures on the fridge, her and girls, her and guys. The carpet needs vacuumed. The dryer hums. “You can sit down,” she says, pulling out a stool at the kitchen counter as she passes it. He sits and is in the middle of all her things, which could just as well be his things they are so well matched to him. This does not put him at ease but instead raises the stakes and starts him picking at his nails and noticing more intensely the headache. She’s expecting someone else. He’s a lizard on a radiator.
“I’m still cleaning up from last night,” she says over her shoulder, and blushes, or at least she pretends to blush. She pulls from the refrigerator a box holding half a cheesecake.
“I’m surprised they let you have so many people in here,” he says. He watches her nervously as she sets two clean wine cups on the counter, which she had had to reach to the back of a cabinet for because the rest are dirty and spread all over the living room. She fills both and laughs, glances at the mess, and says, “The property manager was here. He doesn’t care. He just left.”
“Oh,” Max says. He rubs at his neck.
“There. Wine and cheesecake,” she says, sliding both toward him. Her eyes glow brighter and fix on him with anticipation. She is proud. She has completed some quest, or manifested the punchline to a joke, or fulfilled some promise and now expects to claim her reward. He cannot remember.
“Oh, thank you,” he says, exasperated, and trying to appear smiling.
“You don’t remember? God, you were drunk,” she says, playfully.
“Yeah, no, I don’t remember much, I’m sorry. I don’t normally drink. I can’t really have any of this.”
“Oh, OK,” she says, and after a pause of consideration, “you don’t want any of this?”
“No. Huh uh, I can’t,” he says, shaking his head.
She tosses her hair with one hand. “OK,” she says.
He’s embarrassed her. He’d better explain. “Dairy makes my blood thicker or something,” he says. “I notice when I eat dairy, it’s like my blood flows slower or gets heavy or something, you know? Like I can feel it’s harder on my heart. My heart, you know, it’s bum-bum-bum super hard after dairy. Like yeah, there’s definitely something with dairy and my blood. But it’s hard to explain all the details. Anyway, cheesecake would just make my heart explode. Probably not literally, but you know what I mean.”
She almost laughs, but he’s serious. He doesn’t interpret the face she makes. It could be making fun of him, it could be pitying him. He’s planning what to say next. She puts the cheesecake back in the refrigerator.
“I should have told you before you got that out,” he says.
“It doesn’t make a difference to me. It’s weird you don’t want to eat dairy all a sudden when all we drank were White Russians the other night.”
He’s so caught on the word *want* that he says only, “It’s not that I don’t *want* to. I *can’t*. It will make me sick. It makes my heart work harder.”
“Right,” she says, turning her eyes to her phone. Without looking up, she adds sarcastically, “Do you not drink either?”
He peers down at the glass of wine as if seeing it for the first time. His throat tightens. He swallows. There’s something in his throat. That finger is there again, tickling it, making it itch. He suppresses a cough. She watches him dumbfounded, amused that he’s considering what to say.
“Actually,” he says, “When I said ‘I can’t have any of this’ I meant the wine too. I’ve got some issues with my health, alcohol can’t be good for it. Actually, alcohol may have made it worse. That was the first time I’ve ever gotten drunk and now I’ve got all kinds of new symptoms.”
Almost before the words have cleared his tongue, she says with an utterly destructive earnestness, “Why did you come over here, again?”
Her tone grabs him by the throat. He straightens himself, newly conscious of her strangeness, and at the fact they have only met once before and that he remembers nothing of it. His notions of her are in flames. His breathing starts out of rhythm. She’s completely in her phone now.
“Um, do you have water? Can I have a glass of water, instead, and an Advil please?” he says, standing. She scoffs, grabs his cup and flings the wine at the sink. She fills the same cup with tap water.
“That is so lame,” she says, as if her friends are there and she’s talking to them. He downs half the water. What had been projected as innocent shyness this past weekend now feels uncomfortably weird. Awkwardness unbinds itself from him and whips around them in a frenzy. His headache is throbbing so hard he’s nauseated.
“Can you leave, please? I don’t have Advil,” she says from the silence.
“Can I use your bathroom, first?” he asks. He doesn’t say please but his voice is pleading.
“Can you hurry, please? My friend is coming over, just so you know. Can you hurry? I’ve been texting him. He’s coming now.”
He’s afraid to look in the toilet because he’s certain by the ache in his lower back that there will be more blood than usual, so he keeps his eyes on the mirror, on the reflection of his face. By the time he’s done, he has seen something off. He pushes his nose into the mirror and pulls his eyelid down. It’s wet, too wet, like tears have gelled. It’s red where it’s supposed to be pink. He compares the affected eye to the other and removes all doubt. He pulls his phone out. In seconds he learns the words *caruncle* and *plica semilunaris*. He refines his search. *Dacryocystitis*. *Canaliculitis*. *Dermoid Cysts*. *Foreign body reactions*. *Foreign body reactions*. He looks closer. There does appear to be something in there. A black dot. Dust. A fleck of wood. Worse, a fleck of glass. Or is it green? An infection.
She’s knocking. “Can you hurry please? I’m uncomfortable.” He’s ashamed and sweating. He moves faster.
“I’m almost done,” he says, and begins washing the eye.
“My friend will be here any minute,” she says.
He fills his cupped hands with water from the faucet and splashes his eye. Again, then again, more frantic, each time checking to see that the foreign body is still there and it is, easily visible now, embedded like a black stone in the fleshy redness, which is redder. In this pattern of splashing and checking he cleans the eye until finally he rises to observe the embedded thing is shrunken, almost gone, so he bends and thrusts his eye into the stream directly and holds it there. When he finally pulls it out again, he scrubs it with one finger and checks again. The whole eye is inflamed, but he sees no black dot, no foreign body. He breathes. His shoulders fall. He tilts sideways and looks again. It’s gone. He breathes deeper. The bathroom comes back. Bottles and things that crowded the counter now litter the floor.
“Hello?” she says.
“One second,” he responds, trying to pick up the mess he’s made. One of the bottles he’s scooped into his arms falls and clatters.
“No offense but get out of my bathroom,” she says.
“I’m so sorry, one second,” he says. He’s telling himself to leave, but what he wants is an excuse that will have her say, “I’m sorry you’re sick. Take your time.” An excuse that, once he’s opened the door, will mark his behavior all so insignificant and understandable that she won’t care to remember anything about it.
“I’m sick,” he manages. In truth, he might vomit, and that, and because he is awaiting her response, is why he has not yet opened the door.
It’s quiet except for the sound of the water striking the drain. He barely moves. His face is sallow, his legs are weak. His bladder is burning again already. She says, after the pause, “Can you be sick at your house?”
He can’t. He vomits.
A heavier hand pounds the door and a heavy male voice follows: “Open the door—you have five seconds.”
Max feels at once like a criminal, and raises himself from the toilet to leave, finally. As he does, he avoids the mirror. In it is something pathetic and inexcusable that he cannot recognize as himself. He opens the door and steps forward as a pig into a slaughterhouse.
A fast gasp escapes Gene’s mouth. The young man in front of her, a guy about Max’s own age, jumps, startled. The guy settles quickly and the shape of all his features shift from tight to loose, hard to soft, belligerent to gentle. Max does not speak—his eyes are on the front door and toward it he walks. He mutters that he is sorry, that he got sick. As he moves to pass the young man, whom Gene is hiding behind, the guy grabs Max’s shoulder, touches it rather, and turns him slightly so that they face each other.
The man says, with a tone of surprising benevolence, “What’s wrong with your eye?”
“It wasn’t like that before,” Gene says.
“There’s something wrong with my eye?” Max asks, meeting the man’s gaze.
“There’s definitely something wrong with your eye. Like, really wrong,” the man says.
“Oh my God. You need to go to the hospital,” Gene says.
“Yeah, man,” the man says. “You need to leave. But you need to go to the hospital. Holy, what is up with your eye?”
“You see something wrong with my eye? It’s bad?” Max says. His voice is not frantic but excited. Jubilant, even.
“You need to go to the hospital,” the man says. “We can take you. Should we take you? Should we take him?”
The stiffness in Max’s neck dissolves. He straightens himself, relaxes in the light of validation. The young man’s voice is warm with it. Gene’s face is pale by it.
“What’s wrong with you?” Gene bursts out.
“I’m sick, I keep saying,” Max says. Their concern pulls the pain from his limbs, his organs. The pain is drawn out, gratification is pulled in. He settles on a thought, which had been coalescing as the satisfaction of the moment flooded his blood: this is how life is given. His soul stretches into a smile. He lifts an open hand and the man takes it. “Thank you,” Max says. He nods at Gene and leaves, flees really. Not in his car, but on foot, through town at a jog first, then a wild run. He is so light and everything so bright.
By the time he’s arrived home, his smile, which has grown continuously since he left Gene’s apartment, extends across half his face. In his living room, his lips stretch farther, past his ears, and upward toward his nose. He is so light as to be empty. His lips open more, and more still, until they are not a smile but a greater expression of his lightness, a gaping hole through which eight bloodless fingers emerge and grip and pull until the hole is wide enough for the bloodless thing to climb out. It does, and it leaves the rest of Max lying on the floor.
The door to the bathroom is shut and the light is on and from within Leonard calls, “Max. You home? Hey man,”—the bathroom door opens and Leonard walks out in shorts, drying his hair with a towel—“There’s actually a shit ton of blood—” he looks up and sees the bloodless thing that resembles Max, remembers Max, is of Max, but is not Max. Leonard yells and looks wildly around, as if for help, before running to his room.
The bloodless thing, who has found Leonard’s leftovers on the counter and is licking the plastic clean, has eyes less strained than Max’s were. They watch Leonard with a composure that belies its simmering vitality. Leonard locks his door. It returns to the plastic tray, but there is no more gravy to get. The glass of milk next to it is nearly empty, but it licks at that too before fixing its gaze again on Leonard’s door. It’s starving. It hasn’t eaten all day.