In the backseat of the taxi, Yony sweat through his shirt. I leaned over his lap and opened the window. He reached his head towards the open air and closed his eyes. Dyed hair blew off his forehead and he looked handsome. He grabbed my hand in his. I let him for a moment before pulling away, sweat slick. I wiped my hand on my shorts and Jack sent me a message: Free for a call?
Yony stumbled into the street disoriented like a lost child and I walked around the front of the taxi to help him to the sidewalk. He was pale and, more concerning, so quiet. He sat down on the curb and put his head between his knees. I sent a message back: Not now, later.
The sun poured down on us, wet with the oncoming rain. Maybe minutes. Yony took off his shirt and gave it to me and I rolled it up tight and slipped it into my back pocket. I stood above him.
“C’mon,” I said, “Yony.” I shook his shoulder. He was falling asleep. I was getting annoyed. My patience was paper thin and I couldn’t hide it. I suppose it was more like he was in sleep’s grip, or, in sleep’s grip on top of whatever ailed him. There was something of a fight. Yony shadowboxed. Christ, I thought. I can be cruel and often am.
“I’m coming,” he said, softly. He sounded almost drunk. His accent when speaking English was Argentine by way of learning the language through British film and television, tinged also with the French he’d been teaching himself over the past few years. Bouncy, posh, slightly uncanny. Earlier in the summer, I’d taken an audio recording of him speaking the latter in my living room. His voice filled the space like heat. I temporarily loved it. I dragged my finger across the screen replaying the moment he said my name over and over: Ira cet été, Ira cet ètè. Ira, Ira. Ira, Ira. He took my arm and I lifted him. He nearly slipped out from me. It had started to rain. He mumbled my name. He was talking about the summer.
A few weeks prior, I was undressing and found a small bug hooked into the skin of my upper thigh, close to my pubic hair. I picked it off and held it on the tip of my middle finger and it lurched around and pinched and unpinched its claws. It was blue, translucent. I took off the rest of my clothes and laid down on the hardwood floor with my asshole facing the bedroom closet mirror. I used my phone flashlight to find the other bugs and I picked them off and held each of them to my eye before drowning them in a glass of blue Gatorade from the nightstand. I looked up on the internet whether or not crabs could drown. They, in fact, can survive for up to eight hours underwater. I swirled them around in the glass, held the flashlight up to it and watched the shadows they made on the wall before flushing them down the toilet and throwing the cup into the trash. I thought about the eggs they’d laid on my body. I looked up on the internet how to say crabs in Spanish and laid in the bathtub with my cock directly beneath the water spigot, rotating every 10 minutes or so, holding open my ass. I turned the knob, made it hotter, imagined little screams.
There was a magnificent stone staircase crowded with people that led up to the hospital. They smoked and ate and talked on the phone and looked bored. A couple of trees sat on either side of the front gate. Hospital Fernández, it said. We walked up the stairs and Yony talked to someone outside who didn’t work there. He gave him information. I was terrified of being watched and approached for holding his hand or kissing him in public. It happened sometimes. He never cared and he never cared that I did. He soon took my hand and we went back down.
Dengue is a viral infection transmitted to humans through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Most commonly, the symptoms are flu-like, beginning with a high fever before turning into a headache, body aches and pains, night sweats. It can get worse but generally doesn’t. There’s sometimes hemorrhaging and rash. Its severity varies, though it is not commonly lethal. My first night in Buenos Aires I couldn’t sleep because the windows were left open in my rental and swarms of mosquitoes took up residency in my ears, on my face, on every exposed part of my body. In my dreams. It was too hot to sleep beneath the covers. I laid awake killing mosquitoes between my hands until the sun came up. I imagined the sun was my pet and I was calling for it, completely out of control. It stormed every night for a week as soon as I got there. The newly elected president, also a former tantric sex instructor and television personality, maintained his stance on healthcare and proved it by slashing the national budget by 48%. By the end of the summer, there would be almost 200,000 cases of dengue in the country, and 500,000 by June. It was the worst outbreak in Argentine history.
I looked up on the internet how to say pubic lice in Spanish and went into the pharmacy. I thought that would be more clear. The man behind the counter gave me a fine comb and a bottle of poison shampoo. He offered a face cream, too. My skin was pink, freckled and UV-damaged, both pock-marked and freshly pimpled from years of adult acne and the violating summer sun. I got back to my apartment in time to stand on my terrace and watch Yony bike past my street on his way home from work. He looked up and waved and was gone. I waved and went inside, took off my clothes and lathered my pubic hair, ass hair, cock, ass, balls, happy trail and thigh hair with the shampoo. I stood in the bathtub like that for a while and rinsed and did it again and again and again. The internet said there was no point in shaving, so I didn’t, though I did trim for aesthetic purposes.
I met Yony through another friend of mine also named Yony who I had dated right after college. They were friends and very similar, both extremely outgoing, talkative, fashionable. They were both people who could be out all night and go to work the next morning like it was nothing, both beautiful and often callous. Both Yony’s showered me in adoration. I didn’t feel good, particularly, with either of them. I grew quiet and romanticized the silent role I took on. I felt like a pet and liked it. I didn’t have to do much, sort of just lay there and come, meet them out, go, play with their bodies, say mean things, show them good, prove myself without words. The first Yony had some issue and it just sort of ended. I moved. Second Yony, this one, was different. He fell in love and I submitted to being with him. I hadn’t even realized we were together until he broke up with me a few months later and I understood that I’d been placed in a position that could be broken, something porcelain high up on a shelf.
“You’re not even crying,” he cried. It seemed like he was acting sad opposed to being it. “You don’t even care,” he said. He put his hand over his face. There were tears. This was my issue, I thought.
“I do,” I said, staring. He reeled it in a little. I was still mostly surprised at our relationship even being one where a break-up was possible. I mostly wished this interaction would end and that he would go. Yony looked at me strangely. He seemed sad, still, but suddenly struck by some sort of question, confronted by something he didn’t understand.
“What happened to you?” he said, looking at me. I looked into the pillows, felt suddenly struck, too. He sniffled. My phone notified me I had gotten an email.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think we can do this,” Yony said. “I don’t want to with you.”
He went back and forth for a while on his decision. I didn’t do much to help him make it. He filtered through emotion after emotion and wrung his hands in my kitchen. We drank cold wine. The whole thing made me feel a little uncomfortable. Eventually he left, hugging me at the door and awkwardly careening his bike to fit through the strange hallway. For a few days he biked past my building and I watched him but he didn’t look up. I found the first bug.
Yony’s head was between his legs again. He was on the floor inside the entrance. The area of the hospital we’d come to was accessible by way of a small, inclined ramp below the main part of the facility. There was a woman behind glass just inside the front doors who took Yony’s full name and wrote it down on a clipboard with a pencil. She worked something into her computer, telling us to wait. I realized we were in the Emergency Room. I thought Yony was being a baby.
“Did she say how long,” I asked him. He shook his head. I had walked him over into the corner of the waiting area and he slid down the wall. I crossed my arms, looking around. Everybody behaved the same. Sweaty, wet with something. Old women laid on the floor, some of them in the laps of younger people. Nothing seemed to be happening at all beyond this.
I took a lot of nude photographs while I killed off the infection. I checked multiple times for them every day. It required positioning myself in incredibly graphic, increasingly desperate shapes in order to get the very best view possible of the affected areas. It required good lighting. I posted some online. I had lost a lot of weight and was tan. I got hard every time I touched myself searching for the bugs and their eggs. I sent some images to men who had no clue what was feeding on me, what else was microscopically alive and breeding, repopulating my body in the pictures. I thought about whether or not crabs had brains and about breaching their consent by sending images of them to strangers on the internet. One day I picked eleven little bugs off of me. They mostly congregated around my asshole and upper thigh. My body felt so full of life, giving itself constantly to creatures, needs, things that needed me for breeding, for aid. I felt like land.
I thought he probably had dengue. He denied it, and the crabs, every time, causing me slowly to think maybe he had something even more communicably contagious. The crabs’ origin was indisputable, I knew, no matter his denial. Whatever else was going on with him, I couldn’t be certain. His kisses and sweat and spit and skin were all over me, all the time, even now in this hospital waiting area. Something from them crept into me like a sick whisper and wrapped itself around the part of my brain that worried. Yony put his head on my shoulder and his mouth to my neck, breathing heavy. His breath smelled like the milk he had for breakfast that morning. The lights in hospital were bright white and flickered and the green-gray of the rainy day outside filtered into the waiting area, turning everything a pale spring. Occasionally, nurses rolled people on stretchers across the hallway behind the woman behind the glass. I told Yony I was stepping outside and he whimpered a little. I joined the people congregated at the bottom of the staircase before taking them up to the main entrance and walking inside. I wandered around until I was stopped. Someone in Spanish asked me where they were supposed to go and I told them about the area down the ramp where Yony was. I sent Jack a photograph of a hallway and wonder if he will worry about me. Someone walked towards the exit. I realize I don’t want him to worry, actually, and send more images, capturing my life for him with brevity and beauty and a little tease. I hope the hallway photo adds to a much larger scape of my new life and the contextual specificity embedded in it will be muddied. Mountains, the book Bambi, a vehicle with strange cargo and a megaphone, the view from someone’s rooftop, my secretly infested body. I remember a time we watched autopsies on film and I followed him out of the theater, holding his hand as he tried not to vomit. Breathe, I said. They looked like landscapes, he said, meaning the bodies. After our relationship ended, I thought about the way he regarded death, specifically death in the human body.
At the end of that month things ended with Yony again, though this time I was the one to initiate it. He hugged me tightly outside his apartment. Fall was coming. I spoke frankly.
“That’s it?” he asked. He was crying.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“I thought there’d be tears,” he said, “or something.” I walked away from him, down the street and back to my apartment. I passed the cemetery wall where he’d one night pulled me across the street at the sight of what he thought was a ghost in our path. I’d seen it, too, a figure watching us in complete darkness. I let him take me.
“Something,” Yony said later of the being that night, “wasn’t right. It wasn’t a person.” The way he said it seemed overly judgmental to me, as if he were talking about someone who’d committed some cruel act. I had turned back that night to look before we lost him, expecting him to be gone. Still, he was staring right at us. I think I saw him grin. A tooth glinted in the streetlight, exclaiming him from utter shadow. I never know what anyone wants. I struggled to want anything. I suppose I wanted to see him. I wanted to know if he was still looking at me.
I didn’t want to stay and wait. I thought maybe I should. I wasn’t sure if what Yony did was bad enough to leave him at the hospital or if leaving him at the hospital was worse than what he did. I thought about my aptitude for forgiveness. I thought about my ability for letting people do things to me without having any intention of retaliating or, at the very least, rearranging them in my heart. I wanted to leave, but less so because I was upset with Yony for giving me the crabs that someone else gave to him, and more so because I didn’t want to spend my day at the hospital. I thought about who between us was the worse person and how this day and its pocketful of decisions could potentially alter that order and if that even mattered anywhere or to anyone at all. I decided I wasn’t angry with him but that I just didn’t like him very much. It felt almost objective, as if I had completely removed myself from the situation and from the sequence of events. I thought about whether that made me selfish or if it made me sane or if it signaled a lack of self-respect. I decided that if Yony could still go to heaven, then so could I. I went back down to the waiting area to tell Yony that I was going to go home and before I could enter, he emerged from the double glass doors.
“C’mon,” he said, “I want to go.” I felt annoyed. He walked right past me and I let him. I decided to follow.
“What did they say,” I asked, “did they test you?” He looked at me like I had said something incredibly stupid. I realized he did that a lot, this expression was so familiar. It never made me feel anything other than disdain. I realized nothing he did or said could actually hurt me that much.
“No,” he said. “The woman at the front is an idiot. Let’s go.” He seemed stronger than he did a few hours before. He moved quickly. I got the sense he had yelled at the nurse or had done another cruel thing. He walked in front of me to the street and hailed a taxi. I looked back to see if he left behind any commotion. In the car he leaned his head out the window and put his hand on my thigh.
He stayed in my apartment in bed for about a week. His illness stayed the same and sometimes got worse and sometimes got better. He mostly refused to eat anything other than milk and pastries. Sometimes he read or watched movies with me, but mostly he slept and I submitted to a period of sleeping next to him. To expedite his return to health I began to exercise cruelty. I only spoke to him if he spoke first and kept my answers short and frank. I cooked things I knew he wouldn’t like. I disappeared in the night. I stopped buying milk and pastries in the morning. I told him he looked terrible. I told him he smelled. His recovery was set to a clock I knew had nothing to do with my behavior and still I chose to fill his time with discomfort and it was easy and felt good. After those seven or so days he garnered up the strength to take the bus home.
On the last day he stayed with me, we sat outside on the balcony in the morning overlooking a small corner of the city. A café, a small park, other buildings we weren’t sure of, an intersection. Yony was more quiet than usual, sipping coffee. I read something. He reached across the table and forced my book down so he could leave his hand resting on mine and for a while I let him. I looked at him.
“I’m going home, today.”
“Okay,” I said, picking up the book, “good. You’re better.” Yony looked from me out onto the street. I watched him watch nothing go by. He picked up his cup and went inside. I heard him moving around my apartment. Yony takes his bike from the hall and fishtails it out the front door. I’m all clear and soon, I move.
In the airport security line, I get flagged. The security guard says he’ll be right back and doesn’t give me an order. My order is his in his absence. They take me through a door that looks like a wall and lead me to a square room. There, I sit in a metal chair and look through one of the walls, a window, like an exhibit at a museum, into an office space, where women work and filing cabinets create one track of logical motion. I am waiting and wanting to go. I don’t think about anyone anymore that’s given me anything except for those I can touch. A woman hands me a paper fine from the window and I do.
x
Marcus brings me to a meadow and lays me down in it. I get good at removing the parts of myself that I don’t think he would like. Deer run past us in families. Every thing has a place which empties itself into the shape of that thing and waits for the thing to fill it again. He puts his hand up my shirt and kisses me. It’s getting late and the summer night is blue. I thought the grass and the mud would be wet and we’d sink into it, but it’s not and we don’t. The long grass sways, is like liquid. You couldn’t tell me it wasn’t like the sea.
“I’m gonna take you there,” Marcus says into my neck. He promises, putting a hand down my pants before slipping them from me. He talks about the future. He takes me there, open-mouthed.
He moves through each room of the house, calling out to me until he finds me and the sound of my name becomes his hands and I’m in them. Later, I’m checked everywhere for ticks.
