The Fever
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 30: "The dead, the living, the hour, the dream. Where were the—what do you call them again—demarcations?"
When the fever got higher than 101 degrees Fahrenheit, I started to employ tricks I’d learned from the ICU nurses. I raided the tiny freezer for things that could double as ice packs. There wasn’t much. No frozen peas (alas). I stuck a sealed cod steak on the back of my burning neck, and containers of leftover chopped fruit under my armpits. When the fever climbed above 101.8, my thoughts started to come apart at the ligaments; dissolved, as if in hot oil. The dead, the living, the hour, the dream. Where were the—what do you call them again—demarcations? The makeshift ice packs didn’t seem to be doing much.
Back when you were still alive and we were still together, I entered a terrible period where I was always dreaming about your death. There was nothing that seemed to pose any particular danger to you then. You were not sick. There was not a war. You employed no dangerous hobby or profession. There was the danger of your youth, of our youth, our own young carelessness and the carelessness of our friends. Cars, alcohol, late nights, black lakes, foolishness. But that is not what got you.
At the hospital, when I finally go in, the young doctor is without compassion. She sees only my cheap coat, my unkempt hair. Careless. She speaks to me like I’m an idiot, because I am foreign and have an accent. All the people I belong to are far away or in another country, or dead. The doctor runs no tests. Disheveled and still feverish in the fluorescent lights at 3 a.m., uncollected, I am told to take a Doliprane, acetaminophen, and go home.
Somehow, unaided, I find a taxi. It is the hour when the dead come out to smoke their cigarettes. The streetlights bent over the empty streets. The sky moody. The air as cool and clean as it intends to be. No hour cooler or cleaner.
In the street the next day, after I am well enough to venture out, all is as it always has been. The milk on the milk shelf in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. The salt and the toilet paper and the dish soap, and the plastic packets of cheap caramel pudding. The tray of butter croissants at the bakery, and the dark purple grapes at the fruit stand, the plastic bottles of freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juices. I buy the grapes, as if I were going to visit myself at a nicer hospital than the one the midnight call to the doctor had sent me to. I try to buy myself flowers, but being Monday, the flower shops are closed.
Now, when I dream of you, I always dream that you are living, or might be, or that I’m uncertain; there’s been a mistake, they got it wrong, etc. I go looking for someone else but find you instead; your face, after all this time. Your physical sense in the world. Your shirts, the dark rooms with music blasting out of them. In the dreams I try to select a perfume that I think you would respond to.
Sometimes grief is like a water balloon. You carry it around all the time, shift it from hand to hand, and sometimes you drop it, and sometimes it breaks. Always this awkward, breakable, explodable thing that you must juggle. You get good at it, so you almost forget it’s there, but then—oops! Splat. There goes another one. You can never put it down. Can you feel it, the water balloon, in your hand even now?
Adapted from a notebook entry written in 2022.
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Fantastic story. I feel your pain - kinda. We live in temperatures that reach 120 in your measure. But the behavior of the doctors and nurses is the same here also.
Oof! This hits. Hard.