Professor X said she was not trying to make the landlord feel bad. She paused. “Do you mind…I’d like to talk later…I’m working now.” She held up the student manuscript with her scrawlings on it. X realized that the paper was tinged with vomit. “I’m sorry about the recyclable,” Professor X said.
The landlord stepped backward. She eyed X, the IV pole, and the vomit. She uncrossed her arms.
“I go to church every day, and the Lord keeps me well,” she said softly. “My pastor says every illness is an illness of the mind. It may be physical, but it starts”—she tapped her head—“here. Cleanse the mind and tell your sins to God and he will make you well. You are not ill because you caught something, you are ill because you are sick. Any physical symptom we have is a manifestation of something we have done to make God displeased. When our mind is sick our body registers the problem, do you get me? Do you go to church? Do you pray? I will pray for you.”
“Thank you,” Professor X said.
“I need a rent check. Tomorrow. In the morning, before I go to the bank.”
“Okay,” Professor X said.
The landlord shut the door behind her with a click.
X’s landline rang. X glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Claude Valdenmorten, the man from the collection company. She did not pick up. But his voice clipped through the speaker. “This is Claude Valdenmorten. Professor X,” Claude said, “I have called you eight times this week. You need to call me. This is not going to just go away, Professor X. You can’t just pretend that it doesn’t exist—”
Professor X hit “silent.”
She unhooked her IV bag, walked to the bathroom down the hall, brushed her teeth, and drank tap water.
Her phone rang.
“It’s Gail Jones, the nutritionist,” the nutritionist said. “I got your blood work. You have aluminum poisoning.” The nutritionist went on to say that X’s alkaline phosphates were low and her BUN in the tanker. Didn’t X feel cold? Was she having difficulty remembering words? Professor X asked the nutritionist how she could have gotten aluminum poisoning.
“Tap water.”
“Tap water?”
“From the fluoride,” the nutritionist said. “They put it in tap water. It’s very reactive. It combines with metals in water and carries them into your brain.”
Usually, the nutritionist said, fluoride didn’t give people dementia until they were seventy. But X was on IV antibiotics, so she’d gotten it faster.
“What should I do?” Professor X said. “How can I get it out?”
“You need a good water filter,” the nutritionist said.
Professor X looked at the nutritionist’s most recent bill, on her desk, and beneath it the letter from the collection company. She asked what kind of filter.
“I can’t recommend any,” the nutritionist said. “They’re all faulty. Just don’t get the activated-alumina, the coconut shell, or anything with a carbon-based medium…none of those work. You’ll have to do your own research.” The nutritionist didn’t know what kind of filter, the nutritionist said, because she lived in Reno, one of the last cities in America that didn’t fluoridate. The nutritionist spoke with a Western accent, like a cowboy. Professor X imagined her wearing chaps and a wide-brimmed hat, riding a horse into the sunset.
If the nutritionist could just tell her what kind of filter — the cheapest that would be effective — she was low on funds, she said, but she’d do what she—
“You also need to do heavy-metal chelation,” the nutritionist said.
Professor X looked out the window. The sky had darkened. In the garden below, the landlord walked between her flower beds.
Ten minutes later, having used the last remaining credit on ten different credit cards to buy the best water filter she could find, Professor X began reading the sixth paragraph of “Jenn’s Day at the Mall.” The words did not make sense. But the fault lay with X, not with the manuscript.
A flat blue envelope lay on the table. It was postmarked Boulder, Colorado. Professor X felt a certain trepidation. Professor X opened the envelope. Inside was a jar of Dr. Bronner’s Virgin Coconut Oil. Beside the coconut oil was a box of yerba maté tea. A twenty-five-dollar Amazon gift card fell out.
Professor X put the card down. So, she thought. It’s come to this. She’s written me off with a twenty-five-dollar Amazon gift card. It wasn’t the amount that bothered X, but the anonymity. She didn’t want to take the time to choose a gift, Professor X thought. This is the gift that says, “Go eff yourself,” Professor X thought.
Professor X looked at the enormous box under her desk, full of IV bags of costly Rocephin, bandages, surgical masks, medical tape, PICC line tubing, bandage-change kits, supplies for the home-care nurse to use when she came, as she had every week for the two years of X’s use of intravenous antibiotics, $250,000 worth of care, paid for entirely by X’s insurance company, coverage that X’s sister’s letter and documents, sent to the company by X’s sister, had almost certainly gotten her.
X’s phone rang. She saw that it was the student whose extra story she hadn’t read yet. She pulled her wool hat down over her ears.
Dear Sonya,
Please forgive the lateness of this gift. I’ve been mired in hearings, and I also wasn’t sure what you can and can’t eat right now, or what you’d want, so I’m sending an Amazon Gift Card. I hope you like coconut oil. I used to put some in my bathwater, and when I came out my skin would feel soft. Not greasy at all! It melts in. It smells good too. It was one of those things that helped me get through my illness. Remember, when I was sick, I had days of immense pain and days of less pain, and sometimes that’s a good way to think about it. You’ll get better — you’ll see — I know it.
Love,
Yo Sis
P.S. For the rest of your present, I would like to pay for you to come to Boulder, and for you to see Dr. Claroux again, and get whatever supplements you need from the visit. I know she’s helped the most so far, so maybe she’ll help again. The weather here now is perfect for hiking, and there’s some gentle trails if you’re up for it. The girls would love to see you. They have been asking when Aunt Sonya will visit.
Professor X put down the letter. A wave of fatigue swept over her. She lay down joyfully on her bed and went to sleep.
So you see, my future brother-in-law, when you’ve got a really stubborn older sister, you’ve got a good chance of making it through an illness.
—
It was Leala to whom our mother said, when Leala was seventeen, “Leave this house, if you want; I don’t care. I won’t miss you.” Weeks later, after Leala’s repeated demurrals (“No no, I love you”), our mother insisted, “Leave. Get out. You are not a daughter of mine,” for I forget what offense, perhaps the girl returned home ten minutes past curfew, contradicted our mother, or refused to go to her room. Leala was, of course, an A student, a student-council member, an athlete who never smoked a cigarette, etc. etc.; the point being the precariousness of it all fell on one girl, the same girl whose godmother was a woman who would exist like magic, until one day she appeared and disappeared back into the stratosphere, and on that day it was Leala, aged six, who sat still to have her hair yanked and then said, “Thank you, Haven,” eyes glistening.
And it was me who on yank three said, “Stop!” and leaped up. And ignored our mother, who said, “You are going to get a punishment.”