Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (7 page)

As he went in, he debated whether he should tell Kenny what had happened—whether there was any shame attached to swallowing a fly. He decided it was something he
could
speak of. So he did. And when he stepped back on the street he felt a whole lot better. Walking to work. Singing.

And he stopped dead.

As he stood on the sidewalk halfway between Kenny Wong’s restaurant and his record store the awful possibility hit him like a sledgehammer in the stomach. Maybe he didn’t
swallow
the fly. Maybe he had
inhaled
it. Maybe the fly wasn’t in his stomach—where it would drown and be eaten by stomach acid and disposed of in the most fitting of all possible fly burials. Maybe the fly was in his lungs—where there was oxygen. Where it could presumably . . . live. And lay eggs.

It was Dorothy at Woodsworth’s Books who once suggested Dave should have changed his marriage vows from “in sickness and in health” to “in sickness and remission.” She had a point. There is no denying that Dave has, over the years, waged more than his share of battles in the struggle for survival.

The war began when he was a child.

It began the summer afternoon he noticed his kneecap was loose. He was seven years old, attending a school swim meet, sitting in the stands in his bathing suit with his hands on his thighs when he stood up to see over Nancy Miller’s head, and discovered that if he pushed down on his leg with his hands his kneecap moved back and forth under his skin. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Then he went to the boys’ locker room and locked himself in a cubicle so he could check out just
how
loose it was. It was alarmingly loose. He suspected that it was probably like a loose tooth and that he should leave it alone because the more you wiggled it, the looser it would get. He was worried that it might fall off. But once you discover something like this about yourself, it is hard to leave it alone.

Six months later when he went for his polio booster Dave showed his loose kneecap to Dr. Art Ormiston. Dr. Ormiston examined it carefully and acknowledged that there was no question it was moving around. Then he patiently explained that a kneecap wouldn’t likely fall off. There was all that skin to hold it in place. Unfortunately he went on to tell Dave that from time to time people’s kneecaps could dislocate. Dave looked puzzled. “Slip out of place,” said Dr. Ormiston.

It took Dave no effort to imagine his kneecap slipping out of place. He imagined it sliding down his leg under his skin like a falling egg. In his imagination his kneecap ended up wedged in his ankle so he couldn’t walk. He wore a Tensor bandage around his knee all that spring, only giving up when summer came and he had to wear shorts.

When he was eleven Dave got a sore in his mouth that hurt whenever he touched it with his tongue, which of course he did continually. Although he was ashamed of the sore, his curiosity soon outweighed his shame. He showed it to his father, who said it was a canker and that it would be over in a week at the most. Dave thought his father had said
cancer,
and understood that
he
was the one who would be over in a week. What he didn’t understand was why his father seemed so offhand about it.

Later he learned about bacteria in health class. He began to hold his breath whenever he walked passed a sewer. He still doesn’t inhale when he empties the garbage.

We all lug around baggage from our youth, and in the years that have accumulated since Dave was a boy he has become hyper-aware of the thousands of wily viruses and bacteria that orbit him like a family of organized criminals, sizing him up, preparing their move. He thinks of himself as a walking Petri dish, available for colonization by any one of the thousands of his microbic neighbors who may choose to move in. Knowing that at any moment he may inhale the wrong speck of dust and his face will begin to blow up like a balloon, or his capillaries will begin to leak blood and his crucial organs will pack it in one after another.

He takes as many precautions as he can without drawing needless attention to himself. He never takes painkillers when he has a headache, in case he might accidentally mask a massive stroke; and he knows the symptoms of most serious diseases, and many obscure ones. He knows how to disengage a hungry tick with a spot of whisky—which he long ago decided was a good enough reason to carry a flask wherever he went.

The notion of having a lungful of flies was not something he was going to shrug off. The notion of having a lungful of flies horrified him.

Once again he was standing on the sidewalk, motionless, his hand on his chest.

What did the old lady do?

She swallowed a spider.

There was no way Dave was going to swallow a spider.

It didn’t work for the old lady anyway.

Dave did not want to die.

Especially a trivial death.

“Unexpectedly, on his way to work, after a brief struggle with a chain letter.”

A small part of Dave understood he was being crazy. Paranoid. He couldn’t even say with certainty it was a fly he had swallowed, or inhaled. And there was a valve in your lungs that closed down when you breathed something in. Wasn’t there? He was pretty sure it was impossible to inhale a fly. He might have swallowed a fly, but he was pretty sure he didn’t inhale it.

He was also pretty sure he could feel it bumping against the side of his lung—as if it were trapped between two window panes.

He coughed as he unlocked the front door of his store. There was no one around. He left the Closed sign in place, locked the door behind him and stood despondently in front of the cash register. He looked around the empty aisles wondering what he should do. He could hardly go to the emergency department. He picked up a broom and began sweeping his way around the bins of records—pushing at the dust carelessly, trying to keep his mind off his lungs more than anything.

It didn’t work. It was all he could think of. And pretty soon he knew with certainty the fly
was
in his lungs. He could feel it. It was a weird sort of buzzing sensation—a tickle that was less than a cough, but undoubtedly there. It wasn’t normal.

By three o’clock Dave had worked himself into a complete lather. Maybe it was a fly that came into the country in a shipment of exotic fruit. A fly that carried an obscure disease that only a very few genetic types in all the world were susceptible to. And Dave was one of those people. They’d never diagnose that.

He would get a fever and go into a coma and then after a long and valiant fight in the hospital the fever would suddenly break and he would snap out of the coma but he would be speaking a foreign language that no one could understand. And everybody would think he had gone crazy.

Until an elderly Egyptian orderly recognized the language as ancient Sumarian.

It was six o’clock. Time to close the store. Dave wasn’t sure if he should go home or straight to the hospital.

He went home. He took his temperature. Ninety-nine point two. Not a good sign.

Whenever Dave really starts to get into potential diseases, he likes to do Tai Chi. He only knows a couple of the movements but he repeats them over and over and they seem to center him. Before dinner he went into the backyard and started to do Tai Chi. Morley has been around long enough to know what is going on when this happens. When she saw Dave in the backyard awkwardly spinning, stretching and bending she called out through the window.

“Dave,” she said, “there’s no such disease.”

What did she know?

Dave knew he was going to die. The best he could hope for was that he might become a world-famous medical case and attract the attention of someone who could help him. Maybe along with the Sumarian he would develop the ability to solve complex mathematical equations, and Dr. Oliver Sacks would come from New York City to examine him. Dr. Sacks would watch Dave work out equations on a big blackboard in a university classroom and they would make a movie about him starring Robert Redford. Dave imagined himself going to the opening with his only friend in the world. The old Egyptian orderly. No. He would die before the movie was finished. He wouldn’t get a cameo role, just a cryptic mention in the credits:
This movie is dedicated to the memory of Dave
.

He knew what he had to do and he knew he had to do it fast. He had to kill the fly. Until he killed the fly he was not going to be able to function as a normal human being.

The only thing he could think of doing was to cut off the fly’s supply of oxygen.

Sadly, this was Dave’s supply of oxygen too.

Working on this sort of medical problem—which essentially involves auto-surgery—is not something Dave likes to do at home in front of his family. He was too anxious to eat dinner.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

He told Morley he had to go back to work.

He let himself into the store and spent half an hour squatting on the floor behind the counter—trying to hold his breath for longer than a minute. Using one hand to squeeze his nostrils closed, and placing a strip of duct tape across his mouth, and kicking his feet as if he were being throttled, Dave was able to last a minute and fifteen seconds.

The problem was that after each attempt, he sucked in air so desperately and deeply that he was pretty sure that had the fly been trying to abandon ship it would have been driven back so far by the force of his inhalation that it would never find its way out again. He was pretty sure he could feel it reeling around his bronchial tubes like a drunk after an all-night binge.

That’s when Dave realized the fly probably wanted out as badly as he wanted to get it out. They weren’t enemies. They were partners. This is what people who run management seminars call “a shift in paradigms.” Dave should help the fly, not punish it. He should show it the way home.

He stared at the table lamp on the counter beside the cash register. He removed the shade and flicked the light on. He slowly opened his mouth as wide as he could and began to sink down with his mouth wide open—trying to get his lips as close to the bulb as he could.

Which is what he was doing when his eyes caught movement at the front door. He looked up and saw Jim Scoffield staring at him, with
his
mouth hanging open, even wider than Dave’s.

Dave straightened up and unlocked the front door.

“I was walking by,” said Jim defensively. “I just happened to look in.”

“I swallowed a fly,” said Dave. “It’s in my lungs. I thought it might be attracted to the light. I thought it might fly out to the light.”

“That’s moths,” said Jim.

“What?” said Dave.

“Moths,” said Jim. “It’s moths that are attracted to light.”

Dave stared at his friend.

“What are flies attracted to?” he asked.

There was a long and awkward moment of silence.

Jim said, “How do you know you have a fly?”

“I can feel it . . . it’s a buzzing sort of feeling . . . like blowing on grass.”

Jim said, “Do you have a vacuum cleaner?”

Dave glanced toward the back of his store.

Jim brightened. “We could use the crevice tool. The one for behind the radiator.”

Dave said, “Are you out of your mind?”

Jim said, “You’re the one with the fly in his lung.”

Dave said, “I
do
have a fly in my lung.”

Then he said, “Put your hand over my mouth and hold my nose so I can’t breath.” He started to turn around. “Don’t let go unless I start to pass out.”

Jim shrugged.

“Okay,” he said doubtfully. He rolled up his sleeves and shifted his weight from foot to foot trying to find his balance.

He slipped his arms over Dave’s shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” he said, dropping his arms. “What do I
do
if you pass out?”

Dave turned around in exasperation. “You wipe your fingerprints off the door and go out the back so no one can see you.”

Jim nodded earnestly.

Dave couldn’t believe him. He was almost yelling now. “What do you think you do if I pass out? You give me mouth to mouth until I start breathing.”

Jim cocked his head. “There’s an idea.”

Dave said, “What’s an idea?”

“We could drown it,” Jim said. “We could go to a pool and you could suck in a lungful of water.”

Dave looked alarmed. “What about me?”

“We’ll go to the Y,” Jim replied calmly. “Where they have life-guards. They’ll know what to do about you. They’re trained for that. You look after the fly—they’ll look after you.