excerpts from sick bed
sophie whittemore
I.
On the twelfth day she started digging a hole. The virus had been around for much longer than twelve days, but business as usual had only just ended. She had been following the news closely since it spread from China to Italy and finally to her. For her, this was day 91. Now there was little to do but be outdoors, so she started to dig.
It was only a couple of feet deep but she didn’t stop until the hole was dug wide enough to hold four Alexanders side by side by side. She had to get a lot of bad dirt out of the hole so she could replace it with better dirt for a garden. The pink plastic shoes she used to wear in the YMCA showers back when gyms were still open, slid around her feet as she stalked her yard looking for the shovels. One was missing, probably stolen, and one she put in the back of the SUV. With the seats folded down she could fit stacks of big plastic pails in there. She drove out past the country houses with sprawling, cluttered yards. The radio DJ was broadcasting live from his bedroom since the radio stations had been shut down. The muffled acoustics were bad and made him sound like an astronaut. Unlike most people she knew, her car still had a radio and tape deck and she was glad for it because she liked that someone else chose each song. She thought making choices was exhausting. After thirty minutes she turned left onto a long asphalt drive. She headed past the dump trucks weighing in and a little white sign that said in red lettering Old Dixie Hwy Landfill and Convenience Center. She turned right once the giant looming green of the landfill choked the horizon and saw the cluster of old trucks parked near the large pile of free compost.
She backed her car up to the edge of it and with two fingers gingerly pulled the thin elastic band of her sky blue N95 mask from around the rearview mirror. Through the reflection of the mirror, her eyes locked with one of the men positioned around the pile. He stood on the edge of the compost like a poacher on his slain prey, one foot on the ground and one firmly on its ribcage. He smiled with one half of his mouth and though his eyes were mere slits against the sunlight she could see them boasting. She started to feel nervous. If Alexander had been there, she would have already followed him out of the car, watching him, feeling for cues that everything was normal. Then suddenly she began to panic and – doubting her sense of orientation – she wondered if she had let herself be distracted by the radio and driven to the wrong place. This might be someplace for farms to dispose of dead animals, they might lay packed beneath the dark earth. The thought that the virus had killed them slid past her like a night breeze.
She broke off her gaze with the man and looked at the steering wheel. One hand was gripping it tightly and she could feel the vibration of the engine, which was still running. She took the hand holding her mask, and, careful to keep her foot on the brake, she tried to turn the keys to the off position, but the key wouldn’t budge. I need this car to stop, she thought, pressing her brake foot further to the floor of the car. I don’t want it to roll right into this pile. Fuck this stupid soccer mom car.
A wave of shame began to melt her face as she recognized her mistake. Her car had an automatic transmission, not like the big black truck she used to drive. She realized that she had seen a black Ford Ranger on her way in that had stuck in her mind like a splinter. She had imagined she was inside of the old Ranger with its manual transmission. She shook her head to clear it out, put the Toyota in park, turned the key and relaxed her foot. The car became still and quiet, she took a slow breath, focusing on her bulging knuckles.
First realization: If this were a pile of dead animals, I know I would smell it. Second realization: the compost pile is just the shape and size of 21 cows piled up, dead or alive. Third realization: the rear window of the SUV is tinted, so he can’t see through it to lock eyes with me.
She felt pride at her ability to reign in her mind. She said out loud, “And it was a relief to confirm she was not crazy.”
She took a minute to let her fantasy unravel her. Back when she lived in New Orleans, some squatters who had moved there from California showed her a technology landfill which was a bright green hill just like the landfill she had driven to. They told her if you dug beneath the turf, even just clawed at it with your fingernails you could hit the little metal nodes of computer parts. Okay, that definitely happened, or at least was a real dream, she thought.
So, digging down was not foreign to her in that setting. Check. She allowed her attention to move to the compost. Indeed, if someone had forced her to say how big a pile like the one before her might be, she would report that it looked about the size of a few dozen brown cows sleeping in a pile. Check. If she lived in a world which measured size by dead bodies. Check. She put on her mask and walked to the back of the car and to the edge of the dead pile.
Dead pile. She had not meant to think that. It was surrounded only by men, all of who wore dust masks or bandanas over their noses and mouths. One had a t-shirt tied round his head so the collar was stretched into a thin opening for the eyes, the sleeves knotted behind the head. A short time ago t-shirt masks indicated something very different to her. She remembers when she thought of them as sexy. Homemade balaclavas for criminals and revolutionaries, now simply snot rags and sneeze guards. The men shoveled compost into truck beds and black trash bags or big plastic flower pots as the blazing sun shined down from above. The man she had mistaken for a poacher had left the pile to grab a cement mixing bucket. Hardened cement lined its edges. He headed back toward his post, and she noticed he was wearing khaki shorts and a stained shirt with a lilac bandana half-heartedly tied under his nostrils. How had she perceived his lop-sided smile?
She began to shovel. She could feel his eyes beaming on her and was sure he was wondering what she was doing out here where the virus probably lingered in the air. The trash from the whole city had come to rest in this big convenience center where they stood, covered in germs and excrement. She was wrong to be there. She looked at the other men, one by one. She could feel their disappointment in her for leaving the house. She tried to shovel faster, but the shovel kept hitting dense strata of earth and the resistance hit the long wooden handle and traveled up through her hands and arms to the scar across her neck and she blushed, embarrassed. When the shovel glided smoothly and gathered the maximum amount of dirt she felt proud of her skill, knowing the men could not place as much guilt on her presence. But we are all guilty, she thought. We are all here, spreading and breathing the virus. When she finished filling the buckets stacked in the back of her car, she grabbed a shovel she saw leaning against a cement parapet as she left, sliding it between the buckets of dirt.
As she drove, she kept the radio off. She was safe, now, away from the duplicitous pile of earth, though she was carrying many pounds of it in her car, she realized. She was a person who believed that fantasy was necessary, but she could not reconcile that with the decomposition of mind she had just experienced. She had heard of other places where the morgues and cemeteries were so full that bodies were stored in rental trucks and shipped downstate. Trucks just like the ones she saw at the dump. Alexander had recently shown her a video with blood seeping from a U-Haul parked in New York somewhere. She began to feel excitement spreading through her belly. The virus, the germs, the compost, mixing around with the unknown consequences of inhaling. She struck the feeling from the record and turned on the radio.
II.
She was in the bed she and Alexander got when they moved to the last place. A very young woman who had been dating the dj everyone started referring to as “Shit Boy” had been moving in with him and no longer needed it. They had paid her twenty dollars and shoved it in the Toyota. That must have been years ago. Now as she lay in it, she googled angled foam pillows. She was looking at the kind used to prop the pubic bone up so the ass tilts high toward penetration. They were called things like Liberator ramp and EverCharm wedge. Another tab was open with the words “remote controlled hospital bed” in the search bar. She had not been able to think of another way to describe the finger-sized electric buttons on the side of the beige bed. Her fingers seemed to strain a bit, as if entities unto themselves that yearned to detach from her, to be free, to search for the lightly pebbled bedframe. Down arrow for flatter bed and up arrow for torso to lift and crook of knee to be raised. That’s where the sex pillow would go, under the soft and unprotected area between her hamstrings and calf muscles where that dog bit her years ago during the bad luck week, leaving one pea-sized hole. A few days later a car had pulled in front of her bike and the handle bars had been smashed, then came the diagnosis.
She mouthed what she saw on the screen, “Graham-Field Lumex Patriot Semi-Electric Hospital Bed”, and the words were moldy in her mouth. Even if she bought the triangular pillow and attempted to reconstruct the feel of the semi-electric bed, it was not the bed alone that she yearned for and the overly proper noun attached to it solidified this.
It’s not that feeling sick would be comforting, she thought, but indulging the fantasy helped relax her. She was quick to clamp down on the thought like a lid on a boiling pot. Wrong.
She went outside to stare at each plant in the garden, touching them one by one. Bits of broken glass or metal, refuse from the house that must have been demolished years ago, reflected piercing rays of sunlight as they hid beside her pea plants, cabbage, radish and peppers. The plants were so soft and vulnerable. Little beige bugs were eating their way around their edges.
She knew they were weevils that needed to be gotten rid of, but they crunched between her fingers in a skeletal way which felt too personal. Instead, she focused on the aphids which popped like tiny water balloons. In the garden, any plant not doing well made her somewhat nauseated.
Yet sometimes she found herself parked in front of nursing homes as the sun rose; they seemed to radiate a cleansing power.
It was as if she woke beside them, as if she had automatically driven to the wrong place without thinking, which was normal for her. She often set out to drive to the café but without meaning to, drove directly to the park. These instances infuriated her. She blamed herself and cursed the roads, other cars, but the night drives were different. She left the house in a blissful state, embodying her lack of direction. All of the driving she did normally seemed to have imprinted a quiet map on her brain which became loud only on these occasions. She knew these nursing homes, she must, or how would she always drive straight to them?
The answer was barely a whisper, “Sniffs out like a dog.”
She read somewhere once and thought it true that removed organs haunt the body. They are like invisible, private limbs that can’t be felt until they are absent. Hers laughed at her like a ghost “Remember me?” Dr. Sharma must have held it in his hands once it was properly severed. She imagined herself in place of the surgeon, how she would like to hold her thyroid in the palm of her hand, how she would squeeze it and it would slip through her grip like a boiled egg. She didn’t think of the lymph nodes. She touched the dent between her clavicles and felt for the throbbing. The large vein which had caused so much nervousness before her surgery was left unmarred and fully intact in the almost empty space where her thyroid used to be. She kept her finger there and felt the blood tapping back from the other side.