The Resident: An Odd Man Out (part eleven)

The Resident

Chapter Four

An Odd Man Out

They had a mobile phone, their latest answering machine’s. He could leave her, would have to leave her and go to the kitchen, get the phone. Jog back dialing 911. Punching 911. Talk to the dispatcher, my wife has had    she is   passed out, but not   Can she speak?  She can. What does she say? I don’t know. Did she have an accident, a fall?

She mumbled to him, and the words sounded like, “I’m rooting. John, turn me over.”

He lifted her at the ribcage and sat her against him as he knelt. She laughed somehow, and said, oh, it’s like a drug.

“Did you cut yourself on a tool      you said drug     Don’t worry, I’ll call 911. I need to just lay you down.”

“Do not. Call 911.”

He saw her wrists were green and bumpy, like poison ivy, small edges of leaf stuck in the rash.

“My ankles itch so much.”

“It’s a bad reaction…”

“No, it’s wonderful. Make me walk, John. Walk me to the kitchen and make me drink coffee.”

“Coffee’s not made. Diet Coke?”

“Did we buy regular once, for Jennifer? She brought rum…” Dreamily. “She drank the rum. She forgot the Coke. That big jug of it, sitting flat at the back of the fridge? I want that. I want it with Pop Tarts. Tons of sugar.”

“You’re diabetic.” She wasn’t, to his knowledge. He felt wishing of this, though, that anything making sense could also be true.

“Sugar is balancing. It brings me back.”

He sat at the kitchen table, afraid. Of her knowledge, of what was happening to her. Her unshared knowledge…he was not really wanted in this chair. He watched her pour her own second and third glasses of Coke. Rip the foil pack and consume the Pop Tarts, both.

Claudie’s eyes were on her pile of Cheez-Its, her fingers dipping them in Hershey kisses he had melted for her in the microwave. Then…balanced perhaps…she straightened, pulled back a sleeve and studied her rash.

“I’m going to the bedroom to make a phone call.”

“Lie down.”

“I don’t need to. All sobered up!” I just need advice.

He heard her mutter it, through the pantry way to their room.

He got on the kitchen line.

“Absolutely not what I’d thought. It seemed so scary, the poor Pioneers, everything on earth so whole and fresh to them, so many delights, settling happily in… Falling into planet sickness. But you assume pain and suffering. Not floating on a cloud, somehow feeling the sound and light around you…”

“What I know about planet sickness is complicated,” the woman answered. The answer had obliquity factored in; it was a refusal. “If you are tempted to root, you will be making a choice.”

Claudie’s voice went flat. “What do I do, medically.”

“Stay where you are. Find a pretext to have John run an errand, so that I can come over with Teconieshe. We’ll show you how to manage the nodules.”

John in slow motion returned the receiver. He passed through the panty himself, tapped their door, and called, “Could I run into town and get you anything?”

46

Tithonians

An Odd Man Out (part one)

(2022, Stephanie Foster)