Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

  “Oh, is that why you showed up naked in the kitchen?” He realizes, as the snarky words leave his mouth, that he’s hit the painful truth. She’d exposed herself to him the night before her surgery because that was how she wanted him to remember her: strong and self-possessed. Not this frail, trembling assemblage of flesh and bone.

  “Actually,” she says. “Yeah.” She shifts, wincing. “Pillows would be nice. And some fresh water. Oh, and turn the heater up.”

  He mimes doffing a cap. “Yes, milady.”

  “Thank you, sir neckbeard.”

  He takes the empty glass from her nightstand into the dining room. The thermostat’s already at seventy, but he cranks it up another five degrees before heading out to the truck, shutting the sliding door between the kitchen and the laundry room like an airlock before stepping into the night. It’s as warm outside as it is in, and he can’t tell whether the air is smoky or just dark.

  When he lets himself back into the bedroom, arms full of pillows and the duffel slung over one shoulder, she is asleep. She’s kicked the duvet half off, probably because the house is now a sauna, so it covers only her torso. At least she’s comfortable. He drops the baggage at the foot of the bed, then edges around her side to plug her phone into the charger on the nightstand and switch off the lamp.

  As he turns to leave, navigating by the light from the hall, one of her feet slides off the edge of the mattress. He nudges it with a knee as he squeezes past, but she leaves it dangling. She shifts, letting out a faint moan, and moves a hand on the duvet, over her incision.

  Which is when he remembers the dressing needs to be changed. Not only because of the shower, but because it’s time. He taps the face of her phone to check the hour. Past time.

  “Chica.” He says it in a low voice, not sure if he hopes she wakes up or if he hopes she doesn’t. “Chica, you—”

  Fuck it. He’s already seen her naked. Twice. More, if you counted Nora’s birth. If she cared now, she’d be at Greta’s house and the kids would be here with him. He bends, propping one hand on a bedpost, and shoves both her feet toward the center of the bed. When she still doesn’t stir, he pushes again, clearing enough room to plant his massive ass on the edge of the mattress. Reaching back, he grabs the duffel and unzips the smaller compartment on the side, angling it to catch the light from the hall. He sorts through a collection of pill bottles, arranging them in a line on her bedside table, before pulling out gauze pads, tape, latex gloves, and a little bottle of sterile rinse. Then—

  Then he lifts the duvet. And her shirt.

  Touch her, his inner voice urges. She’s right there. She can’t stop him. Go ahead. Do it.

  He clenches his fists and waits, staring at the dark crevasse between her legs, until the blood thundering in his ears dwindles to a dull roar. He is a colossal fuck-up. An enormously dysfunctional mess of a human being. But even he has limits. Maybe he isn’t complete garbage after all.

  Jesus, his bar is low.

  His hands are shaking so badly it takes him a while to work his fingers into the gloves. Then, carefully, he peels back the existing dressing. The nurse had showed him how to loosen the tape with fluid, but the dampness from the shower has already done the job. It comes off easily.

  He is rinsing the wound with a few teaspoons of the bottled solution when there is a change in her breathing. He pats the wound dry with a piece of gauze, and then covers it with a second.

  She is crying.

  Knock it off, he wants to say. Pull yourself together. Doesn’t she know he’s the fucked-up one? Putting herself through school after her father’s death; raising Seth when Tavis deployed; Tav’s death; Nora’s birth; his sentencing. Through it all, she’s always pulled herself together, always soldiered on.

  But now he’s sitting here taping gauze to her pelvis, listening to her strangled hiccoughs in the dark. He doesn’t ask whether it’s the physical pain, or the casual violation of his touch. Probably both. He finishes, quickly, and tugs the t-shirt down.

  She fumbles in the dark, finds a pillow, and pulls it over her face. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t leave, then, but he doesn’t. Inertia, maybe.

  He pulls the gloves off and packs the supplies back in her bag. “Are you—do you want anything?” He’s an idiot. And he forgot the fucking water.

  There’s a word, muffled by her pillow, but he’s pretty sure it’s “No.”

  “Okay, well, I’m gonna be in the living room.” He leans forward, propping his hands on his knees to rise. “Your phone’s here. Text me if—”

  She moves; her fingers brush his hand, and then sink into his arm. “Don’t.”

  Don’t what, he always says. But he knows.

  Don’t leave me alone.

  It’s not as simple as sliding in. There’s not enough room on her side, and he’s not sure she could move even if he asked, so he gets up and goes around to the other side of the king-sized bed. He sits on the edge of the mattress, slipping his shoes off heel-to-toe, and then heaves himself backward. Shifts. Adjusts his belly. Works one leg up and then the other. Grabs the headboard and heaves himself toward the center of the bed again until, finally, he’s close enough to touch her. It’s a whole process, getting himself into bed, and at the end he’s breathless and perspiring. He leans his back against the headboard, blood pounding in his ears.

  He’s not sure what to do, then, but when he touches her shoulder, she reaches for him. He picks her up like a child, hands under her armpits, and helps her settle onto him. Even in the heat, she is shivering. He stretches, rocking his bulk slightly, and manages to snag the corner of the duvet. He pulls it over her shoulders.

  Her arms spread wide over him, one ear pressed into the hollow between his sagging man-boobs. He feels her lips move against his shirt, damp with sweat and, now, her tears.

  “I didn’t even want another baby,” she whispers. “But now I can’t. And for some s-stupid reason that seems like the end of the world.”

  Too early the next morning, she wakes him to give her a boost out of bed. She sits on the edge of the mattress to take her pills and then makes the rest of the trip to the bathroom herself, shuffling out to the couch when she’s done.

  Getting himself out of bed is another ordeal—sitting with his back against the headboard all night hasn’t done his back any favors, and his right leg, which she’s been laying on for hours, has gone completely numb. When he plants his foot on the floor, the blood comes rushing back. His shoulders, his neck—everything feels like he’s been hit by a truck. More so than usual. Her meds are tempting, but he leaves them alone, going into the bathroom to piss and choke down a handful of Aspirin.

  “You okay?” she asks, when he limps out of the hall. “You snore like a chainsaw. It’s kinda nice, actually. Like white noise.”

  “Fuck,” he says, hobbling into the kitchen, “off.” He puts the coffee on—for her, not him—and starts breakfast while he’s waiting for the drugs to kick in.

  Eventually, they do, and he brings her coffee, pills, and oatmeal waffles with strawberries on a tray. This time, she’s able to sit up on her own, tray perched on her knees. “Can you turn the couch, like, ninety degrees? So I don’t have to twist my neck to see the TV.”

  He eats four waffles, standing in the kitchen, while she flips through Netflix menus and finally settles on a subtitled police procedural which sounds Scandinavian. He could go for another, but he’ll stop there. He’s fine. It’s enough. He skipped his habitual mortification in the hospital, and here, last night. Not to mention the last five years. He doesn’t need to gorge himself while she’s sitting there in the next room, because as easy as it is to muster the necessary self-loathing, he doesn’t want her to see him stretched to his limit, gasping for breath.

  Oh, as if she could possibly have forgotten the past. Like the time she’d had to pick gravel out of his arm because he couldn’t reach his own elbow. Or how about when Seth had insisted on inviting him to his fourth birthday, and he couldn’t fit i
nto a booth at the ice cream parlor? Even if she wanted to wipe that incident from her memory (and she undoubtedly does), the photographic evidence is tacked to her kid’s wall. And who could forget the time he’d made the mistake of forgetting to adjust his clothing before sitting down on her living room couch, and his belly had spilled out of his pants, and he was so big he hadn’t been able to reach his own waistband and (oh God) she had reached over and pulled his pants back up over his gut? He certainly never will.

  Which is substantially different from getting into her bed... how, exactly? Or climbing the stairs? Or walking downtown? Or what about the massive shits he takes, which no amount of air freshener could possibly hope to cover? His dignity, if he ever had any, is long gone. Look at him. Just look at him.

  And if more proof is necessary: Last night? Holding her as she fell apart?

  Best fucking night of his life.

  He inhales another waffle.

  “Hey, can I get some more orange juice?”

  He knows what she’s doing. Trying to distract him. To make him feel better, when he should be the one taking care of her.

  The television goes silent. “Cyril—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” It’s half growl, half gasp.

  The house is silent. And then, a moment later, the TV goes back on.

  He has no shame. He is disgusting. Robin’s in the next room, suffering, through no fault of her own. She deserves love and sympathy, or at the very least, a caretaker who is an even slightly functional human being. And still, he does this to himself. He knows what kind of sick fuck that makes him.

  But he keeps shoving carbs into his mouth—“eating his feelings,” as his mother had so often quipped—until there’s no doubt in his mind that one more bite will make him vomit. And he refuses to push himself that far, because he’s not going to absolve himself of the consequences of his depredation. No. He deserves to carry this weight in full.

  When he is able, he pushes himself away from the counter and lumbers into the dining room, willing her to do them both a favor and just pretend he doesn’t exist.

  “Hey,” she says, hitting pause as he reaches for her laptop. “Sit with me.” She pulls her feet back from the end of the couch.

  He pulls a chair out from the table but doesn’t sit. He’s not sure he can. “I’ll block your view.”

  “Nah. Come on. Keep my feet warm.”

  Her voice is gentle. Because, of course, she knows what he’s been doing. The recursive loop of insanity that spins inside his head. He wants to scream at her: yes, she knows. He knows. Does she think he doesn’t fucking know?

  But he does as she asks, pushing the foot of the couch back slightly so she doesn’t have to try to see around his head. He sets the laptop on the end table before backing up to the cushion and letting himself drop with a heavy, breathy grunt. He spreads his knees, attempting to accommodate his bloated belly, but any way he sits it fucking hurts. Good.

  “Sexy,” she says. Dishing out leftovers of his sarcastic comment the night before. She wedges her feet under his thigh, hits play, and takes a sip of orange juice. The glass is half-empty.

  When she’s not napping, Robin spends most of the next two days binge-watching the procedural, which, it turns out, is Icelandic. He fetches food, water, washcloth, socks, air purifier, phone, laptop, magazines, pillows, blankets, and whatever else she needs to remain parked on the couch. Not without complaint. He is one hundred percent committed to this fiction of not giving a fuck.

  And then, on the third day, the sun doesn’t rise. This is not a metaphor. He is still asleep when Robin’s hand rests on his shoulder, shaking gently. He blinks and asks, “What? Are you okay?”

  She stands at the end of the couch, looking from him to the window. The curtains are open. “It’s nine A.M.” she says, and he snorts because it’s quite obviously still pitch black outside. In a quiet, uncertain voice she says, “Check your phone.”

  “Holy shit.” She’s right. He gets up and goes to the window to peer out. The world is black, although in the place that ought to be the horizon there is a disc of dull red. “Okay. Um. Get your meds together. I'll pack some shit and pick up the kids—your friends, too, if they want—and we’ll go.”

  But there’s nowhere to run. The fires are everywhere, from Los Angeles to Oregon. The smoke column extends eastward as far as Colorado. They could drive for days and still not find fresh air. Robin texts furiously with Greta. The kids are fine. She and her husband are fine. Thanks to Robin’s handiwork, their house is essentially airtight and filtered. The kids are already in school.

  Robin turns on the television and they eat breakfast sitting on the couch, watching the world burn.

  Chapter 17

  Light returns the next day, though the sun is still no more than a smoldering red circle through the haze. Robin showers without assistance and gets up from the couch once or twice to putter around the room, saying “I just need to move” when he tells her to sit the fuck back down. She’s obviously feeling much better, but he resists the temptation to pretend it’s all sunshine and rainbows from now on. The fires still burn. There’s still chemo to come.

  When she muses, “I miss the kids,” he looks up from her laptop long enough to say, “No.”

  She wiggles her toes against his thigh. “No? No what?”

  “No, they can’t come home yet.”

  “Who said it’s up to you?”

  He looks at her again, and then closes the laptop and balances it on the arm of the couch. “If they come home, you’ll be running around trying to get them dressed or feed them or whatever. And they’ll jump on you and beg you to play or get them a cup of water and you’ll do it.”

  “That’s what you’re for, big guy.”

  “But will you let me?”

  Her eyes widen, all innocence. “Yes?”

  “You’re a shit liar.”

  She clicks the television off. “Cyril, I am so bored. I need some snuggles from my little guys.”

  “Consider a hobby.” Everything she enjoys is in some way physical. “Read a book? Knit?”

  She sticks out her tongue. “Seriously, though. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from them since—” She stops.

  Since the last time she had cancer. “Yeah. I know.”

  “I just need to hug them and know they’re safe.”

  “They’re safe where they are. Probably safer.” The walls of the ramshackle old Victorian are more like semi-permeable membranes, and even with the doors and windows shut the smell of smoke permeates everything. “Honestly, if you wanted to make an argument in favor of joining them at Greta’s, I’d be more inclined to agree.”

  She chews thoughtfully on her upper lip. “What if—what if they just came over for dinner?”

  He sighs, elaborately. “Fine.”

  Greta’s front door opens the instant before he can knock—but only a crack. The half of her face he can see hisses “Quiet,” before she steps back to let the door swing in.

  He steps over the threshold and she shuts the door behind him, twisting the knob carefully so the latch doesn’t snap. He sucks in a lungful of crisp, fresh, filtered air.

  It’s rare to find himself eye-to-eye with a woman, but Greta nearly manages it. She is both muscular and slightly overweight, though the latter would not be so immediately apparent were her narrow leather belt not cinched two notches too tight over pleated old lady jeans. Her expression, as she turns to look him over, is one of bitter distaste, as if she’s just bitten into a square of baking chocolate.

  “Don’t wake him,” she warns, eyes flicking to the room on his right. “I’ll get the kids.”

  As she leaves, he turns, wincing as the floorboards creak, and finds himself in a cozy formal living room, a wool lap blanket folded neatly over the nearest floral-print rocking chair. A worn leather armchair and a matching ottoman sit next to a gas fireplace, the face of which is eclipsed by a humidifier gamely puffing out a stream of fine mist. Facing th
e fireplace is a couch, and when Cyril comes around the end of it, he finds the cushions occupied by a sleeping man.

  Cyril had met Cooke in person only once prior to becoming his employee, and then only briefly; since that initial consult, their interactions have been conducted exclusively online. He knew the guy was disabled—carbon-fiber elbow crutches propped against the far end of the couch confirm nothing’s changed there—but he hadn’t remembered him being so small. The sallow face is all angles, and a hand draped over his narrow chest is nothing but translucent skin and bone. His knees, drawn up in a pyramid, are half-covered by a blanket identical to the one on the rocking chair. Cooke looks like a desiccated rat.

  Cyril uses a knee to give the arm of the couch a good thump. “Hey. Wake the fuck up.”

  Cooke’s eyebrows arch before his lids snap open, and his eyes dart around in bleary, unseeing confusion before landing on Cyril and snapping into sudden focus. “Oh. I was wondering when you’d show up.” Cooke pushes himself up on one elbow, running a hand through short salt-and-pepper hair. “So,” he says, in conversational singsong, “how was prison?”

  Nervy little fucker. “I need work.”

  He clears his throat with a laugh. “Your breviloquence is refreshing, as always.”

  “While you manage to be even more pretentious than I remember.” Cooke’s confidence in his own intellectual superiority had permeated his company, leaving less confident underlings ripe for exploitation. As the guy hired specifically to find holes that needed plugging, Cyril obviously had an unfair advantage, but he’d been hired to test the code, not the employees. With zero access to anything classified, it had taken him less than a week to find a sucker with clearance willing to let him hop on his laptop for a sec. It wasn’t logged in, right? His machine was at the other end of the building and he just needed to hop on and fiddle with one line of code. Five minutes and a rootkit and the USMC server in Afghanistan was his. “Which, honestly, I didn’t think was possible.”