Glimmering

Jule took a long sip of his spiked coffee. “You feeling bad, Jackie?”

“I don’t know. I mean, no. I actually feel better than I did a few months ago, when I was in the hospital.” He traced the rim of his coffee cup, seeing how the bones of his hand stuck out, like a bat’s vestigial fingers. “But no one believes me.”

“I believe you,” said Jule in a low voice. “I’ve seen some things lately, made me think differently about all this—”

He waved his hand, vaguely indicating the deteriorating house around them, the world. “Not anything I can really share with you right now—Emma doesn’t like me talking about it.” His big face took on an absurdly furtive look, the cartoon hound trying to hide something under the rug. “But I’ll tell you about it at some point, Jackie. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

Jack looked into his friend’s fervid eyes, already showing a fine glister of drink. “Right, Jackie? Right?”

“Uh, sure.” He had no idea what Jule was talking about. “You hungry, Julie? There’s some bread—”

“Nah. Maybe in a little bit. Got to wake up first—”

He returned to the cabinet and poured more Irish Mist into his mug. Jack watched, suddenly undone by his own sorrow, and anger, the smell of Irish whiskey. “Look,” he said. “Julie, I feel pretty lousy. I’m going to try and lie down again for a while, see if I can sleep. You’re going to be here all day, right?”

Jule stared thoughtfully out the window. “I think so. Maybe tonight, too, if that’s okay with you all. Unless the Allied Commander’s changed her mind.”

“Okay. So in an hour or two, okay, I’ll be back down—”

Jule turned to him, eyes far too bright. “Sure, Jackie, sure. We’ll talk, later.”

He slept, though badly. Dreams of Leonard, Jack’s formerly derailed system of arousal now, oddly, back in place. Lowering his head between Leonard’s thighs, his hands parting Leonard’s muscular legs, taking Leonard’s cock in his mouth. Then Jack himself coming, the first time in ages like that, from a dream: arcing himself awake, hand between his own legs, groaning.

“Ah, fuck.” Orgasm blindsided into a skull-jarring headache; he fumbled at his nightstand until he found the precautionary water glass he’d set there earlier. Leonard, why am I dreaming about LEONARD?

The real question, of course, was Why haven’t I ever stopped dreaming about Leonard? Something he should have taken up with his therapist, back when New York had therapists instead of soothsayers on the stock exchange.

He lay there for a while trying to will away his headache, a dreadful underlying tiredness that, he was beginning to sense, had too little to do with too much Jack Daniel’s. After fifteen minutes he sat up, painfully, and pulled open the drawer of his nightstand. Took out the vial of Fusax, placed a half dropperful beneath his tongue. He had just replaced the bottle when there was a knock at his door.

“Jack? It’s Emma. May I come in?”

“Sure,” he croaked, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He smiled gamely as she entered, wearing a faded denim jumper and cotton blouse, her tousled curls held back by a child’s flowered headband, and carrying a big canvas bag.

“Feeling a little better? You shouldn’t try to keep up with Jule, you know—”

“I wasn’t, I wasn’t—”

“You should leave that to the professionals. When was the last time you saw a doctor, Jackie?”

He thought back: the hospital, early spring. “A month,” he lied. “Maybe two.”

“Where? Those assholes at Saint Joseph’s?”

He stared at the floor, mumbled something about another clinic.

Emma looked unimpressed. “What are your numbers these days? When was the last time you got them?”

“I don’t know, Emma. I mean, I don’t remember.”

“When you were in the hospital they were pretty lousy, Jackie.” She sighed, sitting beside him on the bed with the canvas bag at her feet: “I’m not going to fuck with you, Jack. Right now, to me, you look pretty bad.”

“I’m just thin, Emma. I don’t feel—”

“Even before last night: you just don’t look healthy to me. So. I want to check you out. Okay?”

She pulled on latex gloves, took his temperature, blood pressure, pulse. Felt his joints and examined him for lesions, scabs that hadn’t healed, damp spots in the crook of knee or elbow. Stethoscope to his chest and back, first warming it with her gloved hand, then checking for the telltale sough of fluid in his lungs. Jack sat through it all with troubled patience: something medieval in this, or Victorian: doctor armed with ear trumpet and little else, certainly nothing that could shout above the din of invisibles swarming, replicating inside him. I don’t think there’s anything in that black bag for me.

Away with the stethoscope, out with the ophthalmoscope to peer into his eyes, then change the instrument’s black avian head to examine ears and throat and nostrils.

“Huh.” Emma drew back from him, frowning.

“What?” demanded Jack.