The Sea of Light (33 page)

“I can’t,” I told him.

He smiled. “You can’t do anything else.”

I sat there on the examining table staring at a life-sized chart of the human body—all organs, bones, musculature, stripped of the covering skin. All we were in the end, I thought: the flesh. Violable. Combustible. Stronger was better, but not invulnerable. A small piece of metal, or microscopic virus or bacteria, could tear it to pieces. And when the flesh failed, so did the person.

“I want you to take five hundred milligrams every four hours, Ellie. And the cough syrup should help you sleep.”

I saw into the distance of the bleak and immediate future. Visualizing. Watched the short-course season fade away.

“Are you German?” I asked.

“Somebody’s great-great grandfather probably was. My dad’s family is from Texas, though. My mom’s from West Virginia.”

“Oh.”

“What about you?”

“German and Polish.”

“Got family over there?”

No, I told him, not any more.

Walking down an ugly off-white corridor to the Health Service pharmacy, bumping into kids coughing and sniffling and sucking throat lozenges, or sporting crutches or bandage-wrapped wrists, I felt much worse. But also in a way resigned, like I’d accepted illness, believed the diagnosis; whereas, before, when I had ignored it, it had almost seemed okay, something I could get over on my own, without any help at all—certainly not from some German doctor.

Standing in line, I felt tears drip. But the rest of me was numb.

You okay? Someone asked.

Sure, I said. Nothing Thorazine can’t handle.

*

“Did you tell her?” Danny asked later. “Your Babe, I mean.” He spooned cough syrup into my mouth, made me sip tea through a straw. We sat on the sofa with the usual distorted, static-buzzing black-and-white TV picture flickering in the background, and in my weakened state I realized that he had always been a perfect mother to me.

“Tell her what? That I’m gay?”

“That you’re in love with her.”

“How do
you
know who I’m in love with?”

“Well, let’s just say that you don’t have to be, like, a
genius
to figure
that
one out, Ellie.”

“It’s that obvious?”

He nodded.

I covered my feverish face with a pillow and groaned. Told him about her waiting around for me after practice all the time. Long walks across the library quad. Push-ups face to face in the free-weights room. Whirlpool sessions together. I told him the story of dinner, and smoky catastrophe. Swimming. The shriek of the whistle. Brenna Allen. Mike Canelli.

“So now she’s going out with the biggest, creepiest jerk in the world—”

Danny snorted. “How do you know that’s what’s really going on?”

I let the pillow drop, made a face. “Female intuition, okay?”

He stirred my tea, got up to smash the top of the TV set with his palm and, for a while, the picture cleared. When he sat back down next to me he crossed his arms over his chest, and I could see the biceps swelling out the upper sleeves of his sweater so that for a moment I cursed Brenna Allen and mourned my comparative lack of muscular definition, wondered with a high-pitched feverish buzzing sound in the center of my skull just what, in fact, all the work had been for anyway. Danny sighed.

“I don’t know, kiddo. It seems to me like you’re giving up before you even start trying.”

There are two kinds of giving up, I explained, weakly and feverishly but sarcastically: the first of which is quitting because you are afraid; the second of which is quitting because you understand the waste and futility of continuing an endeavor. I myself was not and had never been a quitter in the face of fear alone. And if he really was my friend, it would be to his benefit to remember that.

Thanks, he told me, after a while. Thanks for the lesson in courage. And friendship.

He stood, grabbed his coat.

“Leaving so soon? Why, our little party’s just beginning.” And I gave the Wicked Witch laugh. But Danny wasn’t smiling. “Uh-oh,” I said then. “You look really pissed.”

“Well, maybe I am.”

“At little
me?”
I meant it to be humorous, but it came out sounding feeble, petulant. I wanted to take everything back, including my own birth, but the hot-cold sweating feeling inside my head took hold again, and I forgot how.

Danny shoved his arms into coat sleeves. “Yes, I’m mad at you, Ellie. It’s time for you to grow up around this stuff, you know. I mean, I’m sick and tired of being your official guide to gay life. If you love someone, you have to let them know how you feel. It’s the biggest, most important thing in the world. It is the greatest gift we ever give.” He jammed fingers into each glove perfectly, deliberately. His voice was almost quiet, very controlled. But I could tell how mad he was, and I hated him for it, and I was surprised that his thick call used fingertips didn’t come ripping through the gloves. “Tell her! Find out where she’s coming from herself! And if she freaks out, then the hell with her—you don’t want to know her, anyway. Life’s too short.” He pulled his scarf out of a pocket, swung it around his neck once, twice, deftly. A nice tartan wool. It looked like a present. “I mean, I never thought that
I
would be standing here, you know, saying this—but since I met Gary things feel really different to me. And I am
not
going to be on call to sit and hold hands with you on a Saturday night while you mope around feeling oh-so-sorry for yourself that you’re queer. Because
I
don’t think it’s, like, any kind of a tragedy! I think it’s great! And you ought to at
least
have enough self-respect to think so, too.”

There was this weighty, muted stillness between us. The fever rattled in my head, white noise blurred the TV screen. We stared at each other. We were both pretty shocked, I think. He was all bundled up, ready to leave, but somehow didn’t look as if he wanted to. So he just stood there, like he was some kind of delivery boy waiting for a tip, and then all the words I didn’t even know I’d wanted to say exploded out loud.

“I’m really tired of you telling me how I ought to be, Danny. You think that just because you’re getting laid you suddenly understand the secrets of the universe or something. And that you, like, have some kind of right to give me this great sermon on love. Well, maybe I’m not quite the same as you—okay? Maybe I have a life and feelings that are really different from yours. Even if we’re both gay; maybe that’s where the similarity starts and maybe that’s where it ends. Because, quite frankly, I don’t think we have that much in common with each other. You don’t know my dreams! You don’t know how I want to touch someone—how I want to kiss a woman, and everything that it will be for me—I mean, because you just cannot
relate.
And to tell you the truth, I can’t relate to the way
you
love, either. And since you met Gary you haven’t really been much of a friend. So if you want me to show some self-respect, I can start right now. Go away and leave me alone, okay? And don’t come back until you’re ready to understand me instead of just bossing me around. I’m sick of it, Danny! In more ways than one!”

We stared at each other, he all muffled in his coat with his face pale, only the angry dark eyes shining out; me in my T-shirt and sweats, my skin bright red with fever. For the millionth time that day, I started to cry. But stopped myself. I turned to grab a tissue and blow my nose and by the time I turned back the door had slammed, and he’d gone.

*

To make a lengthy tale of misery short, the next two weeks were a haze of illness and medicine. I had the foresight to call my teachers and tell them, and reschedule midterms. But the first meet of the year could not be rescheduled.

Not that it was some kind of disaster without me. We won by a handy cluster of points. I heard that Babe wiped out her competition in the 100, and the 200, and that her breaststroke leg of the medley relay put us so far ahead that, in the end, the anchor almost coasted in. Coach took the kid to task for coasting. Unacceptable attitude during competition, she said. But she must have been pretty pleased with the win.

Actually, she’d been kind over the phone. Told me not to worry, just get better. Said there was plenty of season left. But inside, I think, she knew what I knew: it was over for me, kaput, my mediocre swimming career had squeaked me through a mediocre college education by the skin of its very thin teeth, and would end with a whimper. The sooner the better, as far as I was concerned.

Potalia dropped by one afternoon. It was the first snow. I’d spent a lot of time just sleeping, groggy with cough medicine, feeling sick to my stomach from the antibiotics. The cough was taking a long time to go away, I thought, and so was the fever. I was surprised to see her. She brought a box wrapped in sparkling gold-colored paper, and a card signed by all the members of the team—one of those funny Get Well Soon things—and inside the box was a custom-made velveteen jacket, with fancy script lettering across the front left breast that read
Captain Marks,
done in the school colors. There was a bottle of expensive Vitamin C with rose hips in there, too. I wondered, dully, for the umpteenth time, what rose hips really were.

Potalia chattered away, acting pretty friendly. I would have felt a little wary or something if I’d been up to experiencing subtleties at all, but she didn’t seem to hate me any more, seemed anxious to be on good terms again. She said she’d gone through attitude changes lately. Babe Delgado, who turned out to be an okay person after all, was giving her some breaststroke pointers. Things were looking better academically. And, yes, she was still engaged to be married.

I confess that, after she left, I peered closely at every name on the card, and even started to get this sick feeling inside that had nothing to do with pneumonia, until I found Babe’s signature scrawled sloppily under some banal words like Hope You Feel Better Soon.

Most of the team phoned at least once or twice—to talk, try to make me laugh, tell me they missed me, ask how I was feeling—the usual stuff. Brenna Allen called, too—a couple of times a week. Once she called and I was asleep, Jean took the message, came upstairs snickering later on. So stern, she laughed, and yet so competent-sounding. Does your coach strap on a six-gun and walk down dark alleys, Ellie? I mean, talk about
commanding!
—be still, my heart.

I threw a cough-drop wrapper at her, feebly.

Several times, a few of them dropped by to bring cookies, which I couldn’t eat, and more Get Well cards, which I pretended to laugh at. Nan and Jean played the nesting, nurturing game in between their endless rounds of studying, making me pots of tea, calling upstairs like a couple of screeching mother hawks to see how I was doing. Aside from that, I was pretty much alone. Danny didn’t call or come by. Neither did Babe.

*

The time spent alone got me thinking differently, I guess, and feeling differently, about myself.

One reason was the fever dream. I was lying there in bed, had put
Billy Budd
down across my chest because the words were dissolving and reappearing, wavering crazily on the page, and it was making me nauseated. I spaced out for a while, awake but not exactly conscious. Shut my eyes and saw little SS stormtroopers dancing along the rim of my nose, calling me, thrusting knives up toward my pupils. I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

Hi, said one, My name’s Dave Heilbronner.

Hello, said another, My name’s Brenna Allen

Then I saw Lottie and Ztscha sitting on my nose, looking grief-stricken, panting as if they’d run a long way, staring at me like I was some kind of stranger. I’m Ellie, I whispered. Your daughter. Remember? But they just kept staring up at me in their stunted, miniature, panicked little forms, unable to move, or speak, or recognize.

I smelled hot cereal, and red Passover wine, and chlorine. Then the smell of something burning—something strange, that I didn’t exactly recognize but thought maybe I ought to—and I bit into my lip and tasted blood. Brenna Allen wavered in the air above me, floating on a rose hip, holding a cat-o’-nine-tails, and my blood was dripping from it. The strangest thing was that she didn’t look mean or cruel, staring down at me; she seemed sorrowful instead, her eyes full of grief and pity, her lips full and soft and kind.

Please, I begged her. I’m too young for this. And your Babe is much too hurt to help.

Or maybe I said: Your
baby’s
much too hurt to help.

Later, remembering, I wouldn’t be sure.

But I’d always remember what she said to me, next—or rather, what the hallucination said:

You’re alone, Ellie, all alone. And so am I.

I came to in the living room, Nan pressing a cold wet towel to my cheeks and forehead. I looked up at her, suddenly glad, relieved, like I’d been reprieved from death itself, to see her in normal size, the dim flickering light behind her, static buzz of the TV set familiar in the background. Jean’s voice drifted in from the kitchen.

“I called Emergency. They said aspirin and an alcohol bath.”

“I’m okay now,” I croaked. And started to cry.

*

The next morning, fever broken, I dragged myself upright and turned on lights and leaned against a steamy bathroom sink to look in the mirror.

The face I saw was changed. Not just so that it looked like shit warmed over—which it did; it was pallid, thinner, with deep sleep creases across the forehead and splotchy gray shadows under each socket—but so that it looked older. The eyes were a little softer somehow. They seemed sadder, but calmer. Who knows why. Dark hair curled around the thin, bony cheeks like rat tails.