Everything Changes

muttering at me in an indecipherable accent as he woke me up in the backseat, the ride uptown in semiconscious delirium, the taste and smell of the college girl in the van. Try as I might, I cannot remember paying the driver, making my way into the brownstone or up the stairs to my bedroom. Nor do I recall vomiting again, but the stinking evidence, hard and crusty on my chest and sheets, is indisputable. Daylight pours through my window, illuminating a galaxy of floating spores. In my stupor last night, I didn’t think to lower the blinds, an omission that probably has cost me a few more hours of blessed oblivion. The light creeps up my bed like nuclear fallout, and when it reaches my face, my eyeballs throb like bruised testicles. The pain is a blanket, thick and suffocating.
    This is what cancer feels like all the time,
I think.
    Gradually, I become aware of an insistent pulse in the depths of my groin, and even though I know it’s just an overflowing bladder, I picture that little dark spot inside me, pulsating malevolently like a black heart, devouring and assimilating cells wantonly as it grows. I crawl to the bathroom and pee with my eyes closed, cradling my head in my hands. When I stumble back into bed, the blood-colored, oversized digits on my clock radio catch my eye, and I’m surprised to see that it’s past nine. I should call the office, but I can’t muster up the strength to find the phone. My cell phone lies on the floor near my bed, but to turn it on will be to unleash hell. I picture my empty cubicle, the e-mails stacking up like Tetris bricks on my monitor, my phone ringing off the wall, my voice mailbox filled with increasingly frantic messages from Craig Hodges about the impossibility of purple swooshes. I open my mouth and whisper the word “swoosh.” The sound, blowing through my rubber cheeks, somehow soothes my headache, so I spend the next few minutes
swoosh
ing quietly. Eventually, I fall back asleep.
    I wake up again, a little after ten, to the muffled sounds of enthusiastic sex coming through the ceiling above me. Apparently, Jed brought someone home from the club last night. I listen to them for a moment, the muted squeals of the anonymous girl, the rhythmic shifting and groaning of bedsprings, and the light banging of the headboard against the wall. From where I lie, it sounds awfully strenuous, and I can’t imagine ever having the strength to have sex again.
    My hangover seems to have been downgraded to a dull headache, so I slowly get out of bed, pop too many Excedrins, and take a hot shower. I seem to be doing everything at half speed, as if rehearsing for the real thing. I find myself staring at the stream of my shower, the splay of my toes on the tiles, the little hairs on my stomach as I wash myself. I consider sweatpants, but then throw on some chinos and a sweater, a grudging acknowledgment that I’m not going to call in sick. I have to be downtown later for my cystoscopy anyway. It takes me over an hour from when I woke up until I head downstairs to hydrate myself.

    “He’s alive!” Jed declares as I come slowly down the stairs. He’s on the living room floor in a pair of boxers and nothing else, doing crunches while he watches
Judge Judy.
    “Not so loud, please,” I say with a groan.
    “That bad, huh?” he says, sitting up and transferring himself to the couch.
    “You have no idea.” I go to the kitchen and fill a beer mug from the water cooler.
    Jed nods and begins channel surfing. “Your boss called here looking for you.”
    “My boss?”
    “Some guy named Bill?”
    “That would be him,” I say, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What’d you tell him?”
    “I told him there was a family situation.”
    “That’s good,” I say approvingly. “Do you think he bought it?”
    Jed shrugs. “He might have. He didn’t strike me as the sharpest crayon in the box. Either way, he’d like you to call him at your earliest convenience concerning an urgent and timely matter, and I believe those were his exact words.”
    It sounds like the Nike shit has hit the Spandler fan. I sip thoughtfully at my water, a palpable unease growing in my belly. “Speaking of family situations,” Jed says. “That was your dad at the gig last night, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So, what’s going on there?”
    “Nothing. He’s just a sad, lonely old man,” I say, surprised at the harshness in my voice.
    Jed studies my face for a moment. “No crime in that,” he says.

    The