by Jake Wolff
This was all he wrote the day our affair began:
June 2, 2010
When I woke up today I was colorblind. My bedspread, which I know to be blue, was the color of pancake batter. It was probably the pamidronate disodium, which I’ve been playing with in small doses.
Good night.
All this time, I had wanted to think of myself like Tracy smoking in front of the principal—a good kid breaking the rules. But as the sun came up on another day without Sammy, I allowed myself a harder thought: maybe I’m just the thing you use and cast away, the thing that makes you feel good until it doesn’t.
Maybe I wasn’t Tracy. Maybe I was the cigarette.
CASE HISTORY
Ge Hong Reflects on the Discovery of Mercury
Mount Luofu, China, AD 330
Ge Hong opens his eyes. A swallow has landed on the foot of his bed. It stares at him with its big white irises, its feathery white eyelids. Swallows look surprised by everything they see. The bird hops once, twice, three times, on the floor. Ge Hong watches it dance. Sometimes he finds himself gazing at birds expectantly, as though they might open their colorful beaks and speak to him. But nothing is to be learned from birds except by catching them and taking them apart. He has studied the locomotion of their wings, the way their brittle wing bones fork in the middle like a river around a rock. He has dissected their tiny hearts.
He rolls off his mat and stands slowly, his legs creaking and popping. He is forty-seven years old, a decade older than his father lived to be. He died before Ge Hong turned thirteen.
TEN WAYS THAT GE HONG HAS SEEN A MAN DIE
1. Febrile disease
2. Too old
3. Execution by sword (At first: “There is not much blood?” Then: “Oh.”)
4. Arrow (in two cases, arrow fired by Ge Hong)
5. Stabbed in battle (thousands, but never by Ge Hong)
6. Trampled by horse (“Ge Hong, we must go back for him!” “We cannot go back for him.”)
7. Drowned a. Accidental (“Help!”)
b. Self-inflicted (“Stay away!”)
c. Inflicted (“No!”)
8. Stillborn (“…”) (no silence like this silence)
9. Fire (seen and smelled)
10. Unexplained (“Father, what is wrong?” “Agh!” “Father, can you breathe?” [no reply] “Sister, fetch Mother!” “Father, sit and take water!” “Father, can you hear me?” “Father, wake up!” [Father does not wake up])
Ge Hong goes to his food room. The dried roots of sweet flag dangle in bunches from the walls. He inhales their aroma, at once sugary and acidic and of the earth. He will mix it with ginseng for his morning drink. This will increase the flow of his liver blood and enhance the potency of his vision. If he had already consumed his morning drink, he would be better able to see the boy who is approaching his home, at a full sprint, from the east.
The boy draws closer. He is making such a racket with his running—his feet hitting hard against the path, his heavy breaths echoing in all directions—that the sun seems to rise faster into the sky, as if to say, Well, it must be morning.
Ge Hong curses under his breath. It is Cai Ju, who is only five years old. The villagers always do this. When someone falls ill, they send their dumbest boy in a panic, with no real information. By the time the first boy has turned to make his descent, a second boy will be cresting the final hill, sweaty and panting, with an update.
“Master!” the boy calls. “Master!”
Whoosh. The fire starts for his morning drink.
Ge Hong peers down at the boy. “Yes, Cai Ju. What is it?”
The boy wobbles on his feet. “Mother. My mother. It’s my mother.”
“Easy.”
The boy takes a deep breath. “Mother has the hot sweaties.”
“Are you saying her face is hot and wet, like from a fever?”
The boy turns red. “She threw up,” he says softly, “onto Father.”
Ge Hong pours some morning drink for himself and the boy. Cai Ju’s mother has the febrile disease described by Emperor Huang Ti in the Nei Ching, which is bad but also lucky—Ge Hong is the only one in the world who has successfully treated it. It is the same disease that killed Bao Gu, wife of Ge Hong.
Cai Ju drinks gratefully. “Father says she is sick from the swamp air.”
“That is incorrect.”
Cai Ju frowns. “Father said she is sick from breathing swamp air.”
“Well, what do I know. I’ve only written an entire book on the subject.”
Ge Hong tells him to return in three hours for medicine. Just as Cai Ju disappears from sight, his older brother crests the hill with an update.
* * *
Ge Hong gathers qinghao plants at the edge of the forest. He presses their leafy stalks to his face. They smell like mint and pepper and camphor laurel. The sky is cloudless but the color of clouds, so blue it is almost white. It is the season of sulfur, when the changing wind currents carry swamp air up the mountain. The villagers associate this smell with the fever of Cai Ju’s mother. Swamp fever. They are half-right: The fever does come from swamps, but not from the air. From bugs. For years he has heard that faint mosquito whine, a special hum, that tells him people will die. When the fever strikes a village, it does not strike one person and leave, like lightning. It is a sickness not of people but among people. A sickness that spreads.
KEY MOMENTS IN GE HONG’S ENCOUNTERS WITH SWAMP FEVER
1. The year 304, just outside Luoyang: Ge Hong’s first encounter with the disease. Twenty infected with swamp fever. Twenty die. A mother tries to follow her daughter’s body into the fire and must be knocked unconscious with a stone.
2. The year 310, Lurong: Ge Hong discovers mercury.
3. The years 314 to 316, Lurong: Almost seventy infected with swamp fever. Fifteen live! Ge Hong rushes home and kisses his beautiful Bao Gu. “Progress!” he tells her. “Husband,” she replies, “I love you and your crazy ideas.”
4. The year 320, Mount Luofu: Ten infected. Ge Hong discovers that qinghao should be steeped in cold water, not warm. Six live.
5. The year 321, Mount Luofu: Bao Gu infected.
Ge Hong discovered cinnabar in the hot springs of Lurong. He heard stories that if you bathed long enough in the springs, you could see small pieces of the world’s beating heart float to the surface. It was the usual folktale nonsense spouted by Common People. But he went to the springs and waited until a piece of the crystalline mineral bubbled to the top. Immediately he saw the misguided logic of the folktale: cinnabar looks like a quartz covered in blood. He took it home. He placed the cinnabar over fire and watched, in horror and amazement, as the rock oozed blood, a silver liquid that emerged like tears from its blackened pores. He collected this blood and called it quicksilver.
A metal that runs like water even in the cold; a substance that cannot be destroyed but only transformed. He has burned it a hundred times, two hundred, three—it only grows more beautiful. All earthly things carry the xuan, the Mystery, the embryo of the Original One. In quicksilver, Ge Hong has found the source of the Mystery, the river that feeds the ocean. He needs only to master it, and Ge Hong will never die.
Except: Bao Gu. How long does he wish to live without her?
His thoughts are interrupted by the return of Cai Ju. Ge Hong gives the medicine to the boy, but the boy is weakened by running and worrying and tears. He will never make it down the mountain. Ge Hong puts on his walking boots and swings the boy up onto his shoulders. They begin their descent.
FIVE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN CAI JU’S MOTHER AND BAO GU
1. Big, wet eyes—midnight dark like new moons.
2. A way of laughing so that everyone laughs, even Ge Hong when he’s flattened by writer’s block, even Cai Ju when he stubs his toe and can’t find the words to express his disappointment (“Why is life so full of small humiliations?”).
4. Pretty (not true beauty, the kind you want to observe from a distance, but true prettiness, the kind you want to run straight into, like a field of canola flowers).
5. Killed by swamp fever (despite the best efforts of Ge Hong).WAYS THAT CAI JU, AFTER DEATH OF MOTHER, RESEMBLES GE HONG, AFTER DEATH OF BAO GU
1. Where the Mystery flows, happiness follows. Where the Mystery ebbs, happiness recedes—and the brightest soul turns to dust.
5
The Cave of Gloom
I woke up the next morning with the recipe book draped across my face. I’d slept for less than an hour. In the kitchen, I found Dana standing tiptoed on a footstool, cleaning out the cupboards. When she heard me come into the room and pull the orange juice out of the fridge, she said, without looking over her shoulder, “How are you feeling?”
I poured the OJ into a tall plastic cup. “Fine.”
She turned to toss an ancient, half-used box of spaghetti into the trash bag at her feet. “You’ve hardly talked about Mr. Tampari. You can talk to me.” I’m not sure how many times, in the years since I moved in, Dana had said this: You can talk to me.
“I know.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Do you? Because you haven’t said one word about this man, who died, who you spent all this time with. That’s not healthy, Conrad.”
“I’m fine.” In a strange way, this was actually true. My mother had burned alive. My father abandoned me and drank himself sick. Sammy made love to me and said nothing about whatever dangers were at the door. That’s what I couldn’t communicate to Dana: I was sad and lost and fine. Grief is an emotion, but it is also a skill. I was simply more practiced at it than most.
Dana let out a frustrated sigh and returned to the dusty reaches of the cupboard. “On Monday we’re having dinner with your father.”
I finished my juice.
“You can’t not visit him.”
“I know,” I said again. As I went to the front door, I passed Emmett, eating breakfast in the living room.
Emmett looked up from the television. He was watching anime. “Don’t you need a ride?”
“I’m heading to RJ’s. I’ll ride with him.”
“Sure.” He increased the volume on the TV. “Whatever.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, I sat with RJ in his bedroom, catching him up. RJ lived in a big house—his father had to pay a “mansion tax” and complained about it—but RJ’s was the only bedroom on the second floor, and this made it feel private. The sun rose slowly into the skylight window. RJ was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, belted with blue fabric, and he was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his back to the headboard. I sat at the other end with my feet on the floor, watching his closed door with apprehension. He had just finished breakfast, and his whole family was downstairs, his sister watching TV, his parents making a grocery list in the kitchen, the pair of them dressed in matching tracksuits that rendered them more alien to me than the mother’s French accent.
Today, we’d be skipping school to visit the storage unit.
“You have the key?” RJ asked.
I showed him. It was a stubby yellow thing—the kind of key that comes with a cheap padlock, not the kind you would use to protect an object of value.
“Elixir of life,” RJ said in a voice of wonder. He had the recipe book in his lap. “You think he kept the ingredients there?”
Sammy had given me the recipes, but without the ingredients, what good were they? Still, I was having a hard time saying elixir of life out loud. So I said, “I just know he wanted me to go.”
RJ swung his legs over the side of the bed and began putting on his shoes. Where once he’d been reluctant to visit Sammy’s apartment, this morning he was a bundle of eager, impatient energy.
“Wait,” I said. This was the dynamic RJ and I had established over years of friendship: he would need to talk me into it.
But before he could say anything else, his door swung open, revealing his sister, Stephanie, eyeing us from the doorway. “What are you two talking about?” Her eyebrows were pinched, her voice slightly slurred by her condition, which affected the muscles of her neck and jaw. She was still in her pajamas—ankle socks, silk shorts, a white tank top that said, in gold letters, LOVE IS STRONGER THAN HATE.
“Nothing,” RJ said, and although he filled this word with annoyance, I knew how much he loved his sister. No matter how often or relentlessly she pestered us, I had never seen him tell her to leave.
“Nothing?” she said, slightly out of breath. “Nothing, really?” She looked at me (the weaker of the two). “You’re just in here saying nothing, nothing, nothing?”
I reddened under her gaze. Stephanie’s muscular dystrophy meant she had to turn her entire body to look at you, and I partially attributed her intuitiveness to this. For her, watching someone, listening, wasn’t casual—it took her whole self to do it.
“Why are you breathing so hard?” RJ asked.
Stephanie’s eyes went small. “The doctor said my leg muscles.”
It was the kind of sentence fragment one hears when dealing with a fatal condition; if spoken in full, every sentence would have the same ending. We all looked at her legs together, which were short and thin, her dark skin shaved smooth. In a moment of my own intuition, I knew she must be thinking about the work of that shaving, and how, in a not distant future, she might not trust herself to do it.
Shaken by these thoughts, Stephanie said, “You dipshits are gonna be late for school,” backed one step out of the doorway, and slammed the door shut.
RJ and I stared at each other in the hard silence that followed her departure. “Look,” RJ said, “when someone gives you the key to a mysterious door, you open it.”
* * *
We headed north out of Littlefield, tracing the Little River toward the storage facility. The river was shallow, slate blue, and curved to the southeast before emptying into the bay. Our route took us through Main Street, which was wide and still busy, though emptier now that summer was over. We drove by a lobster restaurant, a beachwear boutique, a chain sandwich shop with a CLOSED sign in the doorway. The sun was overhead, so we could feel it, but we couldn’t see it.
The GPS on RJ’s phone directed him away from the streets we knew and toward the storage facility, which lay in an industrial part of town we never had reason to visit. RJ guided the car down a one-way side street, his eyes focused on the road. He was not classically handsome in the way of Sammy or Emmett; in fact, I wonder if RJ was, to a neutral observer, a bit homely. His forehead was high, which gave him the appearance of a receding hairline. His lips were slightly too narrow for his wide cheeks. But I certainly didn’t feel that way about him, and I admired how he could be completely serious in one moment—as he was then, driving me to this unfamiliar place—or completely silly in the next, as though he had full control of his emotions. His face, handsome or not, registered this confidence. For me, everything always seemed jumbled together: my loves, my fears, my hardest questions about the world.
When we arrived, RJ parked in the lot among a handful of other cars—we would not be alone. I pictured the violent appearance of Sammy’s apartment and felt a stab of fear. It was one thing to read Sammy’s journals at night in my bedroom. But there in the parking lot, in the sun, I was exposed. I didn’t know if we were in danger, and in this not knowing, I felt Sammy’s absence most painfully.
The storage facility was broad and several stories tall, covering half an acre of fenced-off pavement. We made our way toward the wide double doors of the entrance. As we went inside, I was aware of footsteps on the sidewalk, getting
near. RJ heard them, too, and indicated with his chin for us to walk faster toward the elevator, which sat around the corner and was large—as it would need to be, for people and their furniture.
We hurried into it, and I mashed the button to close the door. I’ve since read that these buttons rarely do anything—they’re installed to provide the illusion of control—but I didn’t know that then, and I pressed and pressed, not wanting to share the elevator with whoever was behind us. Only when we could really hear the footsteps did the door begin to close, and by the time it shut, we glimpsed the shadow of a figure making the turn around the corner. As the elevator rose, I imagined again the other-Conrad, Sammy’s second lover, tracing my steps. Then I entertained an even worse possibility: that the figure was Captain Carson, spurred by the intimate photograph of Sammy and me, hunting us like a dog.
At the third floor, we began the walk to Sammy’s unit, counting the numbers as we went. The walls of the storage facility were bright white, the color of tooth enamel, and the rows of identical units made the place feel endless. We twisted our way through the corridors until we were on the far end of the building. The elevator, having deposited us on the third floor, had been called immediately back down to the first.
I extracted the key from my pocket, but in a moment of horrible déjà vu, I once again didn’t need it.
