V & E are Crazy
I knew that the two of us had grown slightly crazy in the few months we’d been living together, but honestly I didn’t realize the full extent of it until that one pale-skied Friday in November. And it wasn’t just the lung thing, or the car thing, either. Yes I think V was crazy for pulling what he pulled, but perhaps I was even crazier for letting it slide, and then for loving him all the more so. Maybe the craziest part was just how normal it all seemed, like we’d been creating our own little world together, and in it we were playing by our own crazy rules.
Still, in retrospect I shouldn’t have started with V that day. Firstly, we had just gotten over a fight about this cat we’d seen at a flea market: I wanted to adopt the poor thing and V refused, and then I started crying because he said it was about the litter box but I knew it was because he didn’t think we could handle it as a couple. I finally managed to drop the whole thing but I could tell it was still on his mind.
Secondly though he’d had this dry cough for the last two months and finally I convinced him to see a lung doctor. The appointment was that day and the whole thing was also stressing V out. Not because he disliked doctors, but because he hated bureaucracy of any kind, and he probably would’ve rather died from his cough than spend two minutes filling out paperwork in a doctor’s office.
Anyway I got him to go and luckily Dr. Patel ended up being a pretty nice guy, all things considered. He was a bald guy with some long black hairs still combed over his head from front to back, and a sharp dent in his chin. I remember when he pulled up an X-ray of V’s lungs and pointed at it with a gold Rolex on his wrist.
“Here are your lungs.” He said. “For the most part they look very good. Airway looks very good. Clean, clean borders. Nice, normally inflated lungs. Maybe some fine—very fine—markings right here in the left lower lobe, which maybe could represent some trace fluid… but overall, yes. Very good.”
“Great.” V smiled and looked at me as if to say, see? I told you this was useless.
“Hold on. Hold on one second.” Dr. Patel coughed a few times, wiped his mouth, and then apologized for coughing “Sorry, sorry. I’m not sick.”
“That’s okay.” V muttered.
“Anyway, there is a very thin line right here, you see?” Both of us squinted our eyes. “Come, come.” He motioned us off our chairs and right up to the screen. There was a miniscule white line that ran across the very top part of his right lung. I didn’t really know what it meant other than that it was a line and apparently it wasn’t supposed to be there. We sat back down.
“That line represents a small separation of your lung tissue from the inner wall of your chest.” He clapped his palms flat together, and then separated them just a little at the center. “That means there’s just a tiny, tiny bit of air trapped in there.” He was looking at us through the separation in his hands.
Suddenly he coughed again and quickly pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket. “Sorry,” he coughed again into the handkerchief. “I am not sick.”
“No worries,” V reassured him again.
Dr. Patel stood up and went over to the hand sanitizer machine on the wall. It metered out a dollop of white foam onto his hands and he rubbed them thoroughly. “It must be scary for your lung doctor to have a cough, you know. And that would be quite embarrassing for me.” He nodded his head almost imperceptibly from side to side. “But I assure you, I am not sick. It’s just a little dry in here, that’s all.”
“Okay.” I said as Dr. Patel sat back in his chair.
“What I wanted to say is that there’s some air trapped right there, and—” he started coughing once again, his ears turning pink. “Sorry, sorry. I’m not sick. I’m not sick.”
V spoke before I could stop him. He was smiling. “Are you sure you’re not sick?”
Suddenly Dr. Patel’s face lit up. “No. I am not sick. You are the one who is sick!”
“I’m sick? I’m sick.” V pointed to his chest.
“You are sick, yes!” Then he coughed again.
“What do I have, doc? A little white hair in my lung?”
“You have air trapped in your—” He coughed. “Wait.” Dr. Patel left the room and returned not thirty seconds later with a small bottle of water in his hands. He took a sip. “Sorry, I apologize for my behavior. Let us start over.”
I put my hand over V’s mouth. “Let’s.”
Dr. Patel continued. “What I wanted to say was that you have some air trapped right there,” he pointed to the little white line in question, “and it is probably from a tiny hole in your lung. It’s called a pneumothorax.”
“Is that bad?” I asked. V was sounding out the word pneumothorax to himself.
“Well, yes. But the good news is that it should heal all by itself in a few weeks.”
I sighed.
Dr. Patel continued, “but—an important question to ask is, how did it get there?”
“I don’t know. You tell me doc.” V was quiet.
“Do either of you happen to smoke or vape, by any chance?”
“No.”
“Nope.” V and I spoke in quick succession.
“Very good.” Dr. Patel stood up and once again began to cough. “Sorry. Now—” he cleared his throat noisily, “—please come back and see me in a month from now—”he coughed again and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, “or sooner if you start having chest pain or cough up any blood.” Then he quickly gazed into his handkerchief before folding it neatly and stuffing it back into his pants pocket. “Any questions?” He said as he collected some more hand sanitizer from the wall and scrubbed his hands together.
“Yeah, I’ve got a question. Am I going to die?” V joked as he gathered his things from the chair and pulled on his jacket. I chuckled too as I stood up to go.
Then slowly, without a trace of joviality in his voice, Dr. Patel turned towards us and replied, “Yes. One day you will die. As will we all.” He nodded his head and exited the room, and then we heard his voice trailing from the hallway. “Just see the front desk on your way out to schedule your next appointment!”
We left without scheduling a follow up, of course, and on our way home in the car V got into this terrible mood. Even with the windows fully down and the seat warmers on high like he usually likes it, V looked straight ahead with his face all scrunched-up and would hardly talk to me. “M.D.,” he grumbled, “must stand for miserable douchebag.” He turned his head over his left shoulder so that he could merge lanes.
“Oh c’mon,” I pleaded, “he was alright.”
“And what was that whole thing about dying? The hell was that guy’s problem?”
“I don’t know, V. Look, can we just drop the whole thing? I don’t want this to ruin our Friday night. I just want to have a quiet night and do nothing with you.”
“Okay.” V accelerated around a sharp curve of the Southern State and I had to hold onto the handlebar above my window.
“Slow down, slow down.”
“As will we all. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I bet that guy doesn’t have sex with his wife.”
“V!”
“Okay, okay, fine. I’m done.”
We drove in silence for a little longer through a wooded stretch of the highway and I noticed for the first time this season how red the trees had all gotten. The last time we drove on the Southern State together it had been the end of August and V and I had been on our way back from Jones Beach all sunburnt, coated in salt, and happy. At some point I’d fallen asleep in the passenger seat and later V said that he watched me for a full twenty minutes after he’d parked just because I looked so beautiful. I still have the tan lines from that day. But this time V had a hole in his lung and we were all going to die.
As we approached Kew Gardens on the Grand Central, V slowed the car down to a near halt. We were still in the middle of the highway.
I looked at him. “V, what are you doing? Is something wrong with the car?”
He didn’t reply, and slowed down even more. He turned the wheel, and we began to crawl towards sideways towards the highway divider.
“V!” Luckily there weren’t any cars near us.
Then our car rolled to a stop, V parked and shut off the engine, and then unbuckled himself. “What are you doing?” I repeated. I didn’t know whether to get up or stay seated.
“Stay inside,” V said, and then without warning began to climb out of his window. “V! Get back in here—I don’t—stop it!” I called after him, though by the time I was able to unbuckle myself and reach for his heel, the last of his feet had left the window and he was already on top of the hood of our car. I returned to my seat and re-buckled myself in.
We were just proximal to that tunnel that runs underneath Queens Boulevard; our car was sitting still, parked almost perpendicularly to the flow of traffic, and was blocking two whole lanes of traffic. The leftmost lane was still open though and cars were still slowly passing through. That’s where he was squatting now, on our car’s scratched, white hood. He was clearing his throat.
V was wearing all black that day, a black long-sleeved shirt and black jeans. Over that he was wearing an army green bomber jacket and a woolen beanie. His outfit will always stick out to me in relief with that piercing November sky. Especially when he first gathered his balance and stood up fully, rising in front of the setting sun and blocking it out from my field of view. I blinked and then began to see colors inside his silhouette, all of those the dark greens and blacks like shadows nestled inside shadows.
And so there was honking and V was still clearing his throat. Out the driver’s side window I watched people stare at V as they squeezed between us and the highway divider. At first V spoke in his normal register, and I saw his mouth moving but of course he couldn’t make any sound over the noise of traffic. I stuck my head out of my window, and prompted by a sudden knowing that I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, yelled “speak louder!”
He looked down at me and smiled. Then he nodded his head, and when he again opened his mouth his voice was high-pitched and hoarse, but louder now. Still I doubted whether anyone could really hear him.
“All of you! Stop where you’re going and listen!” He put out his two hands in front of him. The building traffic was honking at him. “We’re all going to die! Did any of you ever stop to think about that for one second?”
Someone halted in traffic around five cars away from us got out of the side of their window. They yelled, “Hey! Get the fuck off the road!”
“What.” V’s voice dropped momentarily, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to see the interlocutor’s face. “What? So what! What are you in a rush to do—get to work so that you can waste your time lining the pockets of some pirate? I bet you’d love that! I bet you’re one of those people that lives to work, huh. Well let me tell you something, pal. You better find a new reason for living, and fast, because today’s work—as it’s called by the so-called prophets of our day—is a total sham! Here’s a secret: there’s nothing left of it. All the goodness of work, all of its health; it’s been hollowed out by corporate greed and…”
“I’m headed home from work, you freak!” The man returned.
“Oh, okay. So you work to live, then. I get it. You’d rather go home so that you can stare at your phone for a few hours and pretend that pleasure is salvation, right? So you can pretend that if you dig at desire for long enough, then maybe gratitude will finally grow out of it? Right. Let’s even pretend it did for a second: universal salvation can never be built from the salvation of the individual. We need to start with the collective!” V turned again to the mass of traffic behind us, “Listen, people! We need to have faith in the ultimate solvent of our—”
But another voice suddenly yelled out, “I’m calling the cops!”
“Oh, they can’t save you…” V started to laugh, “they’re just as bought as you are!” but then he made a cone with his hands in front of his mouth and began to yell.
“Love, everyone! Love is the solvent for all of our worries! Love, unlike pleasure, unlike enlightenment, can never be soured, can never be made obsolete! That’s because love is true, and true love is gracious! If we start there, and we love our partners, love random strangers like we love ourselves, then we can transcend even death as an obstacle! Who cares about death if we’ve really and truly loved? It’s carved onto the very fabric of reality itself! Love is the only eternal reason! Love—”
At that point someone slammed on their horn and wouldn’t let up, and all I could see was V shouting into the ripening sky, waving his hands up and down over his head. A few more cars joined in the honking. V balled up his fists and screamed, though I still couldn’t hear anything other than the horns.
“V! Get back in here now!” I yelled. He got off the hood and swung himself back through the driver’s seat window. “What the fuck was that about?” I yelled. “Are you fucking crazy?”
“Yes. Not now. Let’s get out of here.” He started the ignition and we pulled off the highway at the next turn.
~
V and I squatted naked in the shower by the open window, and clouds of vapor rolled in through the blue gap. The steam was only because of how cold it was outside though—once again the shower water was hardly lukewarm on its hottest setting. I’d forgotten to call the super like I’d promised to.
V hadn’t started smoking yet—like he usually does during our evening shower together—but instead he was just squatting there with his neck craned half out of the window, talking about some split between the mystical and the political, all the while holding his glass pipe in one hand and a peach-colored Bic lighter in the other. He looked ridiculous, and seamlessly without him noticing I pushed the tip of his pipe up in his hands so that the weed wouldn’t tumble out onto the wet shower floor. “Careful.” I muttered. Then I picked up the bar of soap off of the counter and wet it. I tuned in to what he was saying while I lathered the bar soap over and over again in my hands. He meanwhile was staring at the building across from ours, a red brick monstrosity that on a clear day would turn the color of a blood-orange at dusk. That’s 4PM in late November for you. He went on:
“…there is no in-between that’s worth dedicating a life to! Either you are engaged in the—essentially individualist—mission of enlightenment, or you should be invested necessarily and totally in the salvation of the masses. The rest is all just pedagogical as far as I’m concerned. I mean if you really think that…” the words floated out the window.
“Oh will you shut up?” I said while soaping myself up, starting with my thighs and making my way upwards towards my breasts. I figured that he would burn himself out eventually, but he continued talking until I had worked my way up to my armpits. I got fed up and elbowed him in the pelvis. “Man. V? Are you going to light that or do you want me to do it?
“Yeah, yeah.” He brought the pipe up to his mouth, lit it while inhaling forcefully, and then stuck his head fully out of the window to blow out the pungent smoke. I heard him cough, and then his voice followed. “I got it. Yeah. Here you go.” He handed me the pipe. In the time between my placing down my soap and reaching out to take it from him, V’s voice came again from the window. “Take it!” His hand was waving.
“I’m going—geez.” I said. Then, knowing exactly what had gotten into him today asked, “What’s gotten into you today?” I took pipe and lighter from right his hand.
He pulled his head back in through the window and replied, “What do you mean?” He knew exactly what I meant.
I apologized. “I’m sorry; I just thought that…”
“You thought what—that I’d be upset about a tiny pneumothorax?” He said the word pneumothorax like he’d known what it was all his life.
“Yes, I’d thought you be more upset.” I actually did think that he’d be more upset.
“Well I’m not. I really don’t care.”
“Okay.” I must’ve given him a look like—you are so absolutely full of it—even if I can’t remember if I did or not. Either way he couldn’t have seen me because his head was still stuck out of the window and mine was inside. I lit the weed and gently pulled on the glass. The chamber filled with slate colored smoke, and a familiar feeling entered my mind, though I’m pretty sure I then exhaled everything even before sticking my head outside the window.
Whatever. I passed the pipe back to him, and with our heads and shoulders now both leaning out into that blue expanse, we smoked in silence for a bit. “Are we not going to talk about what happened on the way home just now?”
“What’s there to talk about? You heard what I said, right?”
“Oh I heard you alright. Have you absolutely lost your mind?”
“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.”
In truth I didn’t really care if he had lost his mind. I probably had too. “Just promise you’ll never do something like that again? I thought someone was going to shoot you or something.”
“I promise.”
“Okay good.” I decided to forget about the whole thing and I took another hit, expecting it to speed up the process. “What are you thinking about?” I asked him hoping at once he would tell me the truth as well as a lie.
He shook his head and smiled, “If I said I was thinking about nothing would you believe me?”
I responded confidently in the negative.
He laughed, and I almost smiled.
“Listen. I don’t think we should talk about what I’m thinking about right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re naked. And high.”
I suddenly realized how high I was. “Right, right,” and suddenly there was a wave of shame that ran through my body. “I’m done for now, by the way.”
“Me too.” V didn’t even look at me, and I put down the pipe. The spray off of our backs misted the counter and wet the marijuana still inside the bowl. The smolders went out. I pulled my head back inside and picked up the bar of soap again. It wasn’t realistically early enough to hide my tears with the excuse that I was done showering, so I picked up the soap and began to lather my neck and biceps. Then I put the soap down and pretended to scrub my face. Just to be extra sure I turned away from him so that he couldn’t see me.
“You know I can tell you’re crying.”
I waited just long enough to let him hear a few sobs before asking. “What are we doing here, V?”
“What do you mean?” His head was still outside the windows, but I could feel his eyes turn towards me.
“Well what are we—” I continued to tell the truth: “Ever since—well, ever since you said you didn’t want to adopt that cat with me—you’ve been…”
“Is that what this is all about? E, where am I going to put a litter box in my apartment?”
“I live here now too you know.”
He corrected himself “—our apartment.”
“It’s not about the apartment!” I found myself yelling. Then, much quieter, “you didn’t think we could handle the responsibility. You didn’t want to handle that responsibility with me.”
“That’s not it.” He protested.
“It is so it!”
“E, c’mon. You know that I think we could handle that responsibility together; I’d love to.”
“Then why didn’t you want to adopt that cat with me? She was adorable. And why—why didn’t you trust us to take care of her?”
“I trust us.”
“Then what was the problem if not that? And don’t say it was the litter this time please.”
He brought his head in from the window and then suddenly yelped, “Fuck!” He recoiled suddenly.
“What. What!” I yelped too.
“Fuck. I thought I saw a cockroach right now but I think it was just a weird shadow. I think I’m starting to see shit E.” Then, shaking, he put his arm on the windowsill and accidentally knocked the lighter off into the tub. It bounced damply between my feet and down towards the drain. V dropped onto his knees and reached under me to grab it. After he stood back up, he wiped it off on a towel and then blew on it. He flicked it alight. “Okay, never mind. Good.” Then he looked around for a dry spot to set it down, and failing to spot one, pulled open the shower curtain and tossed the lighter through the open door into the hallway. It skidded over the wooden floors and then hissed to a halt.
“Now your lighter is going to have cockroach prints all over it.” I don’t know what compelled me to joke right then.
Still he chuckled. “I mean we’re trying to poison them after all, aren’t we? Isn’t it only fair?”
“No. It’s our apartment.” Again I emphasized my presence. “And it’s not spacious enough for us and a cockroach. We were here first.”
“Actually technically they were probably here first. Like, way before humans were ever on earth.”
I gave him another look.
“I mean actually they’re probably one of the closest species alive to dinosaurs. Just look at them! They’re just like those underwater sea monsters.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen, all I’m saying is that they were probably here first, actually.”
“So are you telling me that you’d rather live with a cockroach than a cat?”
“I’m saying that—”
“You would rather be with an insect—than with me. You think I’m less than an insect. You think I’m a nothing.”
“I didn’t say that!” His cheeks turned beet red.
A gust of cold air blew in through the window and filled the space between us. “Don’t you know what it’s like to be me?” I asked.
He remained silent for a while, “no.”
“Well right now, it sucks. And it sucks because you won’t tell me how you feel.”
“About what?”
A few more sobs leaked through. “Stop playing dumb, V.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, E. I don’t have a crystal ball—I can’t predict the future.”
“I don’t need a prediction! I need you.” The water seemed to turn hot just then.
“I need you too,” he hugged me from behind. His skin was warm and reassuring, and for better or worse I was mollified, maybe just because I was stoned. Either way when he set his hands along the tops of my hipbones I instantly turned around and kissed him, and the hot shower water was leaking into our mouths. Crazy.