I’m going to lie down on the floor now, where it’s cool.
24
Good morning, it’s 6:30 a.m. — All yesterday I could feel the veins in my temples feeding the headache. In the morning, I was talking to Claire when I coughed abruptly and got up to go to the bathroom and then, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening, I vomited a huge splash of water, Tylenol, and apple bits onto the bathroom floor before I made it to the toilet. I felt like a wind sock on a windless day. After the violence of the throwing up was over, and I had gotten my nosebleed under control, I asked Claire to bring a mop and I asked Henry to bring a roll of paper towels, and in the surge of good feeling that follows hours of nausea, I cleaned everything up. I threw out my socks; they had holes in the heels anyway. Then I went back to bed and slept, and when I woke I had a killer headache which lasted all day. But Claire brought me up tonic water and saltine crackers at one point, and though I threw up one more time I think that phase is over. I have something going on deep in my chest. Juliet, the woman next door who runs the day-care center, has been sick with pneumonia; she quite cheerfully told Claire her medieval symptoms at the bus stop and then Claire told them to me.
By feeding it some of an old telephone book, and a whole six-pack soft-drink holder, and an empty baking-soda box, I’ve finally gotten the fire to start. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to sit here, but I do feel fortunate to be able to do it at all. I have a glass of tonic water and five saltines on the ashcan next to my leg. Oh, the little sparkles of salt on the crackers, and the clear sweetness of the tonic water. We didn’t have any ginger ale, but tonic water will do.
I knew I had a fever yesterday, but at first I had no desire to use a thermometer. You just know — with your children, too. Just touch them on their backs, below their necks, and if it’s very warm there, then, yes, they have a fever. The moon is out on the prowl this morning. I slept for fifteen minutes at a time all day, dream-chewing on gristly ground-up pieces of thought, turning on one side and then the other, lifting the covers with my hand so that my knees could pass without sending the covers off the bed. Maybe I should go back to bed now. My head swivels listlessly, like a brussels sprout in boiling water, and yet all I’ve got is the flu. I think I’ll have another cracker.
Yesterday towards evening I started to feel better and I decided that I would in fact like to know my temperature. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t be giving my sickness its fair due, since the only real achievement of a sickness is the creation of a fever. The rest is dross. I found the thermometer and got back in bed, leaning against the pillows, and slid the glass swizzle-stick down into the fleshly church basement below my tongue, on the right side of that fin of stretchable tissue that goes down the middle. The cool glass almost had a flavor, but didn’t; maybe it was the flavor of sitting at a lunch counter in the afternoon, looking out the window. My bottom jaw came forward a bit so that I could gently cradle the instrument with my teeth, and I held my lips pursed, waiting for the mercury to warm itself in my deepest salival catch basins; and as I waited I looked around the room, grazing my fingernails on what proved to be an unusually interesting stretch of wall. Every once in a while the thermometer would slip out a little ways and I would frown and clamp it firmly with my teeth and then chimp it back into place with my lips. Finally it was time to see what my temperature was. I held the glass very close to my eyes and turned it. At first I saw liquidly swollen numbers dancing and drinking sherry on the far side of the triangle, and then, turning more, these hove around and became precise and fringed with well-tended gradation lines, and behind them flashed the infinitely thin silver band, the soul of the body’s temperature, stopped at a little under 101 degrees. I sank back with some relief: I did in fact have a fever. “My fever is a hundred and one!” I called out to whoever could hear.
“Very sorry to hear that, Dad!” Phoebe called from her room. She was writing a one-page paper on Voltaire.
I thought of those five-hundred-pound people in the tabloids who can’t leave their beds. Then I remembered a picture of a woman with a growth-hormone disease. She is growing and growing without stop. Some years ago, she pleaded for Michael Jackson to send her money, and he had, but now who knows? He has his own deformities to contend with.
25
Good morning, 3:49 a.m. and I’m behaving as if everything’s normal. When my apple fell off the ashcan, again, it made a low ominous sound as it rolled across the floor, and I remembered a review I read as a child of a Roman Polanski movie in which someone’s head is chopped off and bounces down the steps. This room is not level or plumb. There is a large hump in the floor in one corner: over the years the floorboards have simply twisted and bent to fit whatever stresses were being imposed on them. I’ve been awake for an hour and a half, flipping through worry’s Rolodex. I’m drinking coffee, oddly enough, and there lies a tale. Claire, knowing that I was determined to get up as usual this morning, very kindly set up the coffeemaker before she went to bed. I, sleepily, swiveled open the filter basket and saw in the dimness that it wasn’t empty and dumped it out; but the filter seemed to fall into the garbage too easily. Only when I poured water into the tank of the coffeemaker and there was an answering sound of water already there did I realize that I’d just thrown out fresh coffee.
I spent almost all yesterday morning in bed dozing, and finally got into work around one. Now my coccyx hurts — the chest infection has descended to my tailbone, or has awakened an old wound. Last year I fell on my tailbone while getting into the car. Tears sprung, pain speared. And that event was an awakening of a very old injury, when once in fifth grade I went sledding down a steep hill. I had a long ride, without incident, and then came to what looked like an insignificant little drop-off from a snow-pile into a snow-covered school parking lot. That little drop landed me right on my tailbone. I hurt there for months afterward. I think I may have broken something, but tailbones are like toes, vestiges of tree-dwelling primates. You don’t really need to worry too much about whether they’re broken or just bruised.
To cool down just now I walked to the dining room, and I almost sat down on the two stairs between the dining room and the kitchen and rested, but instead I walked into the kitchen and had a glass of water. The moon is everywhere — it’s impossible to say what color it is — I thought there was new snow but it was just moon.
Several years ago I decided that I would make a collection of paper-towel designs. Hundreds of patterns were coming and going, offered by the paper-towel makers, and unlike wallpaper patterns nobody was interested in studying them as indicia of American taste. Do you remember when suddenly one of the manufacturers began printing in four colors? I think it was 1996. I had in mind a big folio, with a pane of a towel on each page, and a label of what it was, who had made it, the date, notes, etc. I saved maybe eight paper-towel samples and then abandoned the project: I lack the acquisitive methodicalness that you need to create a really great paper-towel collection. And the main point is that the designs that I would want to have collected, the ones at the top of my want list, are the ones from my own childhood and my early marriage. The designs now are perfectly fine, but the designs then — the sampler-inspired patterns and the alternating pepper grinders and carrots — held an allegorical fascination. Of course there was more excitement over paper towels then — the vast advertising budget for Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper, made it so. A big change in paper towels since the advent of bulk-purchase stores has been the variation in frame size. The old rolls had a perfectly consistent size across all brands, which was very helpful because then you got so that you could tear off a frame without thinking. Then one manufacturer made much longer towel frames, for unknown reasons — perhaps to get us to use them up faster — and I was forever yanking the roll off of its holder, pulling in the wrong place. The roll that I used today has excessively short frames — good, though, because you use less per yank. But consistency has gone all to hell.