YOU ARE AN OBJECT

(dystonias: Matilde Viegas)

“How did you get the flu?”

“I dunno. From someone who had it, I guess.”

“Well…how did they get it?”

You shrug, stretch your legs out beneath the thin, blue sheet that must kind of smell bad by now, which makes you feel lazy; not the smell—which you are incapable of enjoying due to your soggy nostrils—but the feel of it, the fact that the most productive thing you’ve done is figure out different ways to wrap it around yourself, depending on which lying-in-one-place based activity you are indulging in. You’ve got the phone to your ear and the remote in your hand. “I don’t know,” you say. “I tried googling it, but they just said, like, from germs, which means from people, so it never really answered my question.” “Google’s a prick, dude.” “Tell me about it.” “Google probly gave you the flu, to be honest.” You laugh, and it aches. “Whatever.” “How much longer are you in seclusion? Just in case somebody notices you’re gone…” You snort. “I think I felt the worst I’m gonna feel a couple days ago, but, like, I can still ruin people’s lives by breathing on them, so, like, a couple more days, I guess.” You hear Saul drop what sounds like all of his parents dishes onto what sounds like the floor. On TV, two women are getting up in each other’s faces, one of them holding a frying pan, though they’re not in any kind of kitchen. You frown. Into the phone, you say, “Are you dead yet?” “Nah. I’m taking out the recycling, but we put ours in garbage bags, even though it’s against the rules or whatever. I dropped the bag. Where are you, though? You’re not home-home, right?” The two ladies on TV are being dragged away from each other by their shirtless, male roommates. You think you’re watching some Real World something-or-other. You left your glasses at home, so you can’t read whatever words are onscreen, can only attempt to interpret the mayhem on your own. “What? No, I’m not home. My mom pretty much called me a taxi when the doctor said the word ‘flu’. I’m in some getting-foreclosed-on house she got in the divorce settlement but that neither of them can afford.” “There’s no one there with you?” You shake your head. “You’re the only person I’ve talked to since, like, this time last week. There’s a maid lady—housekeeper, I guess?—who comes in every other day to clean, and, like, bring food. But I don’t speak Polish, so I can’t talk to her. I don’t eat much anyway.” “You sound woozy, man. I feel bad. Mostly for myself, because the illusion of having friends quickly dwindles when you don’t have any friends, but, also, because I know you don’t like isolation as much as I do, and it sounds like that’s all you got. Besides the flu.” You cough. You don’t like being alone, especially when you know who isn’t, and know what they’re doing, and what you’re not. Here, you’re so doped up half the time, that it’s actually kind of nice, like you’re an incubating fetus, and the world is missing out, instead of the other way around. Lucid moments, though…moments when you can feel your phone not ringing, when you look at the clock, and know who is doing what, by what time it is, what day it is, look down at yourself, only see the thin, blue sheet. Lucid moments are rough. You like that about your medicine—it doesn’t allow for them. You’re in your own world here. With your makeshift mom—the housekeeper who doesn’t understand you, who you don’t understand right back—and a makeshift love interest—the mailman, who you’ve never spoken to, doesn’t know you’re here. Most likely. “I’ll be alright. I’m a big boy. I’d invite you here—well, invite your Playstation here, really—but I really am a walking cough monster. Remind me to never brag about how dope my immune system is again.” “Well, you can’t, so. Hold on, huh? I’m gonna bring this out. The recycling. It’ll be like a minute.” You can feel your throat attacking itself. You breathe shallowly, as to not piss it off. You need to medicate yourself. This will also take a minute. You hoist yourself up into a sitting position, wonder if Saul is going to tell you stories about what you’ve been missing, socially, wonder if you want him to. You’re a masochist, in this way; you want to know. “Okay,” you say. “Hurry up.” He snorts, bottles and cans jangle in the background. You grab your medicine off the nightstand. “Alright. Hold on.”

Your program goes on commercial (you’ve started calling shows programs, to really get into character—reality programs, game programs), and you put the phone down, put it on ‘speaker’ so you can hear when Saul gets back. You screw open your neon red tussin or other, saving the more brutal Theraflu for later, pour yourself a shot, going light on this dose, the bottle feeling lighter than you expected, your brain losing the grasp of time and therefore unable to formulate an accurate prediction as to when you will next see the housekeeper, and, as a result, get more tussin or other. You knock it back, put the medicine back on the nightstand, grab the warm can of ginger ale from beside it, chase your medicine into your body with it. You put the ginger ale back on the nightstand, too, eyes glued to the television, trying to figure out what, exactly, this commercial is trying to sell you. There’s a couple arguing about bills, but there are cartoon insects, like, soothing them, while gnawing at the walls of their kitchen, then their kid spills something on the carpet, and the dad storms out, as the mom looks at the bugs, who smile at each other. You squint over at the medicine bottle to make sure it’s the kind without alcohol, but the type is too small. What you’ve learned in the last week of wifi so weak you cannot properly stream even the bullshit on Hulu, is that commercials cannot possibly be a psychologically healthy thing for human beings to sit through; there is something so nefarious about even the lighthearted ones, the well-done ones; especially those that are done well, because those are the ones that you know are succeeding. There is a darkness to the acceptable ideals presented both subliminally and overtly, in most of them, anyway; one level selling you the insecurity, the other selling you the thing. It makes you uncomfortable. You figure that’s good. You figure not knowing the difference would be bad, insofar as there is such a thing. “Yo.” You pick up the phone. “Yo self.” “What was I saying before?” You shake your head. You feel like there’s a sadness roaming around your body, looking for your heart, thrown off by the flu taking up so much space, unsure of how to get there. All you feel is flu. “I don’t remember. You can tell me what I’ve been missing, though. If you want.” “I told you—nothing.” “Jason’s birthday party was this weekend, I thought. This past.” You hear the acoustics change as Saul enters a hallway, or something. “Jason’s birthday’s in July dude.” “I thought—” “It was his sister’s party, and I was there for like two hours. You said to tell you what you missed. You didn’t miss anything.” “Was…” He sighs. You hear a door clothes, a TV on in the background of wherever he is now. His bedroom, likely. “Was you-know-who there? Yeah, man.” “True.” He pauses to await your next, masochistic query. You don’t know how to phrase it. He saves you, goes, “And you-know-who was all over everybody, and continued to push the conceivable limits of attention-whoring, talking loudly, and equal opportunity dick- and clit-teasing, and didn’t ask where you were, and acted like they didn’t know me when I said hi, and went home with someone I’ve never seen before, and left a bunch of facebook updates, at four-in-the-morning, likely, in bed with this person, with the letters ‘lol’ pulling double-duty as both sentence-ending punctuation in the vein of periods and exclamation points—possibly question marks, as well, it’s hard to tell—and signifiers of their pathological insincerity and unwillingness to commit. If you were wondering.” You nod, tilt back against the headboard. “I was. Wondering. Thank you.” “Oh, you’re so welcome.” “Your sensitivity is unparalleled. Have you considered changing your major to Soul Crushing?” “I have! Hey, man, Lindsay Field apparently shit her pants on Dana’s futon—Dana’s Jason’s sister—after everybody saw me making out with her, so I’m the guy who made out with that chick who shit her pants, because of vodka. I miss you, bro-self. That’s what you’re missing—me.” You snort, pull your legs up closer to your body, wrap your free arm around them. Your program comes back. Yay. “I miss you, too, papito. Caress your Playstation for me, though?” “I will. What you got planned for today?” “I was thinking of having a coughing fit later. Maybe staring at some razor blades as Jersey Shore plays in the background, then diarrhea, followed by fever dreams, you?” He laughs. “I’m about to go to the gym. I have a paper I have to pretend to do for awhile, so I have an excuse to wait till the last minute to actually do it, then…I dunno. I might go bowling with my sister and her friends.” “True. Call me, if you want. I’ll describe my hallucinations to you.” “What else is new. I will, though. Later, B. You gotta check the mail soon, right?” You snort, which leads into coughing, which leads to you pulling the phone away. You try to hold your breath, to give your throat a chance to calm down. He inhale sharply, and snot ripples through your nasal cavity, and you swallow. Bring the phone back. “I’ll talk to you later.” “Yup.” You put down the phone, pull away the thin sheet, slip your feet into the poor Uggs you found in the bedroom closet. They’re comfortable, they fit, you wear them. They will likely need to be burned at the end of your tenure, but they’re Uggs; they must’ve seen this coming.

The window outside your makeshift bedroom overlooks the sea of pebbles that lead to the street. This neighborhood is for 1% rich folk who don’t give a fuck, and your parents used to be that kind of folk, until the past showed up and froze certain accounts, and revealed certain secrets, and broke apart the home that made you into this constantly needing thing never entirely comfortable with what people saw when they looked at you, like that month when you flirted with smoking, and strangers glanced at you, and you felt like a liar, who hated himself; you’ve waited for the past to do this—to kick you all in the balls—but you can’t say you much like the transition much more than what came before it, though you get the sense that you’re at least falling into some kind of middle ground, where you get to prove yourself to each person based on some lowered expectation, instead of some forcing them to climb up to some height that will only prove disappointing, once they reach it. You feel the buzz of your supposed daytime medicine start to creep in, and you breathe into it, let it take you. You don’t really have a choice. You don’t have to look at the clock to know it’s three o’clock, as the Postal Service truck chugs down the street, turns onto the property, driving all the way up, as there’s no proper mailbox here, just a slot, in the front door. The temperature in here is controlled, but you cant tell it’s warm out, know it’s not just your natural inclination to assume you’re missing something, though, now that you’re saddled with the idea, you assume it’s both. Whatever other explanation you can think of, it’s probably that, too. He parks before the porch, steps out of the truck. He’s older than you, you think, but maybe it’s just the hair—he’s beard is manicured in the way of a youngish person who’s gotten it into his head that he looks best with hair on his face, doesn’t care about the years it adds to the assumptions about him, knows that he can explain, or maybe just knows he wouldn’t have to explain, that anybody worth his time wouldn’t care either way. He trudges up the porch steps—stomping, you can hear him—adjusts his glasses, scratches his left arm with the letters in his right hand, steps out of sight, a handful of seconds in which you’re able to imagine opening the front door, being startled, receiving his apology, explaining that you’re sick, that he shouldn’t get too close, him explaining that he gets sick all the time, that you don’t scare him, you laughing, him handing you the mail, you taking it, smiling, by way of offering him something in return, a reason to look forward to coming back here, the house where someone is happy to see him…and then he’s stepping into view again, hopping down the porch steps, which you cannot hear, and trudging back to the mail truck, and driving away. You feel better. This fantasy stepping into your life, dressing itself in feelings you wouldn’t be able to muster on your own, but that you need, to get through this day, and probably the next one. You don’t know how people who don’t have to do this keep from exploding, life being offered to them fully, their bodies ready. You touch the window like the sky it faces can feel it, too, and pad back to bed, kick off your phantom Uggs, sit on the edge of it, clear your throat, cough; you reach to the floor for a tissue—from a box surrounded by the slaughtered remains of other tissues, none of which you were capable of showing mercy—blow your nose, loudly, proudly, check out the color of your offering—less alien than it has been. You give yourself three more days of this shit. You take a zinc tablet, nestle into bed, pull the thin, blue sheet over your legs, pull it up to your chin, place your cell phone on your chest—you’re going to sleep again, and, in the spirit of not giving up, you want to fall asleep knowing you will be stirred by the vibrating of any calls that might come your way, even if your mind knows better, even through the medicine.