Maladies
Harris is dying. He’s sure of it. His last moments will be in the stall of this movie theater men’s room. The human body, this fragile vessel, has offered him nothing but a cascading series of disappointments and ever-worsening failures. On some level he welcomes its end. He’s so tired of the doubt, the worry, and, worst of all, the maintenance, the relentless upkeep. The pushups, the running, the flossing, the plucking, the scrubbing (on the inside and out), the consumption of kale and egg whites and chia seeds and flaxseed and other seeds high in antioxidants and soluble fiber. What’s it all for? Another ten, fifteen minutes of life he’s probably going to spend on the toilet anyway? Sure, maybe he drinks too many beers on occasion, and yes, he forgoes roasted beet and goat cheese salads for large pies, piled high with hot peppers and sweet Italian sausage with greater frequency than he should. But that’s not his fault. Not entirely. A not-insignificant portion of the blame falls on the shoulders of Vivian, who was, up until recently, his girlfriend. She has the eating habits of a toddler, and a cast-iron stomach to go along with them. Spaghetti-Os and chicken nuggets and Cheesy Gordita Crunches from Taco Bell are the order of the day, every day. An endless parade of over-processed vittles. So yes, Harris has had and continues to have his moments of weakness—too many, really—partly because Vivian approached every meal like a latchkey kid attacking an afternoon snack. That shit was almost impossible to avoid, and forget about getting her to eat better. Such nonsense was simply not on the table for discussion.
“You hate genuine flavor,” Harris told her, a year into their relationship, when, on their anniversary, he’d suddenly resolved to eat better, to refuse restaurant meals, and to try and use unprocessed foods to fix his insides. They were sitting down on the couch with their respective dinners. Him: a quinoa bowl with feta, cherry tomatoes, and roasted carrots. Her: a plate of microwaved pizza rolls and some nuclear-yellow mac and cheese. “That’s not food. It’s just a bunch of chemicals from a factory masquerading as food. It may as well be cardboard.”
“You’re right,” Vivian had said, “I hate flavor. Go to the kitchen and get me the ketchup, wouldja? These pizza rolls are in need of some serious lubrication.”
That was how more and more of their meals unfolded as their three-year relationship went on. Vivian would eat what she wanted and would remain frustratingly never the worse for wear. She could eat a bag of lawn clippings and still have room for cheesecake. If Harris so much as winked at a donut he’d spend the better part of the evening praying the cramps that had him doubled over in pain weren’t signaling a blood clot working its way from his small intestine to his brain.
Oh, God, what if he has a stroke right here on the toilet? Or an aneurysm in this unsettlingly humid men’s room? However he goes, he doesn’t want to end up a vegetable. Make it quick, Lord. Consider it reimbursement for this third-rate dumpster-fire of a body you stuck me with. Just make my death quick.
Although his mind is primed to obsess over the possibility of a stroke or brain bleed, more pressing is his current condition: this pain, this persistent ache in his abdomen that’s taking its sweet fucking time. It’s toying with him and it’s probably going to continue toying with him until it kills him, months down the road. He used to fantasize Vivian would put him in hospice. Harris would have waking nightmares of watching as she flirted with the strapping male nurse dedicated to changing all those catheters and colostomy bags. That was another thing: Harris was so broken, he couldn’t even daydream right; he always wound up fixating on his early death, and its humiliating cause.
And it’s not that he doesn’t want to die (Harris has been thinking about that a lot lately), he just doesn’t want to die here, in the men’s room of the Cinerama downtown, during a David Cronenberg retrospective that, admittedly, given the state of his body and the state of his mind, maybe wasn’t the best idea to attend.
This is his first solo outing since becoming single and it has been something of a rollercoaster. For one thing, Harris spotted Vivian as he wandered down the darkened aisle of the theater, searching for an open seat. She was near the back, off to the side, sitting next to Randall, that engorged simpleton from her office who would, always in the presence of Harris, make an overstated effort to reference private in-jokes between he and Vivian. Jokes Harris had no way of understanding. Randall also made a habit of wrapping his arms around her in greeting, to show how close they were, to cling to her a little too long, a little too tightly, whenever Harris accompanied Vivian to one of her office parties. How Randall got tickets to the Cronenberg retrospective in the first place, why he had two of them, and whether or not Vivian was the person he initially planned on going with were questions Harris felt reluctant to dig into too deeply.
In truth, Harris hadn’t anticipated the possibility that Vivian had moved on, had begun dating again. He’d even entertained flashes of hope that Vivian would be waiting for him outside the theater, where, in the rain, she would hold out her hand and, without saying a word, he would place the second ticket they had bought together months ago into her open palm. Instead, Harris busied himself with the task of turning what would have been Vivian’s ticket into a ball of wet paper between his thumb and forefinger.
Had their eyes not met during his fleeting scan of the theater’s crowd, Harris was pretty sure he would have left, eaten the cost of his ticket (and hers) and returned to his empty apartment where he would gorge himself on a bag of tortilla chips and spend a sleepless night alternating between the couch and his overused toilet. But Vivian had seen him, that much was certain. The corners of her mouth bent into something like a smile when she caught him ogling her—or, rather, the immoderate pile of concession snacks teetering on the armrest between her and Randall. He wasn’t surprised at their choices or the sheer quantity of it all. Randall likely encouraged her to get everything, both to satisfy his own substantial urges and to tickle Vivian’s lust for all things junk food, to co-sign her “live fast, eat trash” ethos. Harris made note of a 40 oz. soda (Dr. Pepper, most likely), a large tub of popcorn (certainly buttered), and a box of M&M’s (which would be added to the popcorn for that sweet and salty punch). Then there was the gigantic soft pretzel, a twisted, three-pound monstrosity, served with a bowl of nacho cheese for dipping, that the theater had named “The Knotty Doughman,” and had since become semi-famous (or notorious) for.
For himself, Harris had purchased a small Diet Coke and a box of Sno-Caps, the least appealing of all theater concessions—a fact made evident by the grimace on the face of the teenaged girl who pulled them from the concession stand. The purchase was a smokescreen, intended to make him seem more normal—just a regular guy enjoying a night at the movies. But the Sno-Caps served another function: so revolting were they that they offered little to no temptation at all, and he could, in theory, not only appear ordinary, but also eschew any unplanned gastric distress during the film by ensuring his stomach remained empty.
~
The words “shit or get off the pot” have been running on a loop in Harris’s brain for the last twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of sitting on the toilet. Before that were the twenty minutes of his being unable to look over his shoulder to see how close Randall was to Vivian. And before that, twenty minutes of being unable to watch a pre-shithead James Woods in Videodrome on a big screen. Now, he was entering twenty minutes of cursing himself for actually eating a handful of Sno-Caps.
These thoughts rattle around Harris’s head like ball bearings in a washing machine’s spin cycle. To put himself at ease, he consults the internet on his phone about his various symptoms. He hopes to settle his nerves, or, better yet, come across an undiscovered method of alleviating his discomfort, of solving the mystery(s) of what ails him. “Nothing good can come from that,” Vivian told him once. “You’re better off consulting a psychic or an oracle.” He thought she might be on to something. From what he knew, psychics and oracles rarely subscribed to the internet’s all-roads-lead-to-cancer philosophy of self-diagnosis. But, then again, psychics and oracles lacked the same firsthand experience of fellow mystery gut-pain sufferers from the discussion-boards on which he lurked. So, really, who should Harris trust? Who, when the chips are really down, can he rely on? Vivian and her constant urging for him to seek professional care, or the practical, real-world knowledge of discussion-board posters like INFLAMEDCOLON616 or GLUT3NALL3RGY?
Is he a hypochondriac? Does thinking you are a hypochondriac make you a hypochondriac? Harris has been asking himself these questions for most of his life and, despite what Vivian thinks, “Yes, Harris, you’re definitely a hypochondriac. It’s a problem for you and for everyone. Please seek help before it gets any worse,” he’s no closer to finding the help he needs. Would a priest help? Would having his last rites read to him do the trick? Maybe Harris could get a two-for-one deal on his last rites and an exorcism on the ungodly pain in his side.
This pain, it’s more than an upset stomach. A failing organ most likely—his liver or gallbladder or pancreas. Maybe it’s his colon, or the whole fucking digestive system, which, if he were being honest, never really worked properly in the first place.
Harris was diagnosed with an ulcer when he was in the fourth grade. The doctor who delivered the diagnosis, a fatherly pediatrician named Dr. Dean, had been perplexed, to say the least. At the time, an ulcer was what forty-something businessmen acquired as a dubious badge of honor from too much time spent stressing about work and the application of too much liquor to take the edge off. While his mother sipped sour-smelling coffee and flipped through months-old copies of Allure and Elle in the waiting room, Harris sat in a cold, dimly-lit hospital room, awaiting what he was certain would be a terminal diagnosis, a death sentence before he entered the fifth grade. He tried to remain calm, but there was a chill blowing through the adult-sized, open-backed gown he’d been given to wear. And the chalky mixture the x-ray technician had instructed him to drink, to make his organs more visible on film, had begun to congeal into something that would make his next week of bowel movements slow, painful, and embarrassingly unflushable. The technician tried to warn him about this eventuality, but the way he looked at Harris, especially after he’d caught a glimpse at his patient’s insides, it was nearly impossible not to read what the technician had foretold would happen as unique to his particular gastrointestinal predicament. And when the technician handed Harris off to his mother, he explained again what might be coming down the pike, and that they’d likely just have to wait for it to pass, one way or another.
As it happened, the technician’s warnings came to fruition, not that Harris's mother ever noticed. Up to that point, much of his identity was built around his need for alone time in the bathroom. But after the ulcer x-ray, Harris was left to his own devices and, with the help of a plunger and a toilet brush (both of which he later disposed of under the cover of darkness), he devised a brute-force method of compelling the disconcertingly white turds to fulfill their destiny, to go down the pipes and leave him be. When things returned to normal, he felt an unfamiliar and fleeting sense of relief at no longer having to deal with this one reminder that his body refused to work properly.
Since that fourth-grade diagnosis, Harris’s awareness of even the smallest changes within his body was heightened to an absurd degree. Vivian described it as an obscenely sharp kind of paranoia attuned to the baffling goings-on of his organs—internal and otherwise. On some level, he’d always been this way. When Harris was six, he ran from the bathroom, pants around his ankles and genitals in hand, after he discovered a mole on his scrotum. He was certain it had popped up just as he gazed upon it—his body was sneaky that way—though he couldn’t be too sure. In his panicked state, he wound up presenting his junk to his mother while she was in the kitchen preparing dinner. She put her wooden spoon down and wiped her hands on her stained apron before taking an apprehensive look. With her hands on her hips, she paused, trying her best to comprehend the peculiar spectacle before her. The corners of her mouth quivered, revealing what Harris now understood was a deep, internal struggle among a myriad of emotions: concern for her boy, bewildered amusement and the accompanying guilt of wanting to laugh at her child, and a kind of personal shame that her own body had erred so badly, had somehow cooked for her a hysterical, paranoid, hypochondriacal child.
He’d felt a burning shame then, one he knew now was caused less by his own panic than by the look of dissatisfaction and disappointment on his mother’s face—not at the mole on his genitals, but at the glimpse she’d been given of her child’s true nature, his anxiety and obsession with his personal health. He wished now that she had said something lightly sardonic, like, “Well, you’ve got balls, kid,” to break the tension and to let him know that, yes, this was a weird thing to spring on your mother, but it was also nothing to be ashamed of. But she was unprepared for and ill-equipped to handle this onslaught of childhood neuroses. “Ask your father when he gets home,” was all she said. It was also the last time Harris enlisted her for help diagnosing some new health issue, or to stifle the growing fear that his body was self-destructing.
~
“What are you so afraid of? Don’t you want to feel better?” Vivian asked him in the aftermath of a panic attack stemming from a strange twinge in his neck he assumed was an embolism. She managed to get him all the way to an ER parking lot before he shook his head and refused to go inside. “Do you even want me to try and take care of you?”
She pressed him to see a doctor, go to urgent care, an herbalist, a vet, naturopath, chiropractor, acupuncturist. Harris interpreted this as Vivian no longer having the bandwidth to deal with his anxieties and his internal distress—though he was certain that was part of what initially attracted her to him. “You have Florence Nightingale syndrome," he told her after she stayed the night at his apartment when what was to be their first date became instead her ordering Chinese delivery, watching movies on his couch, and petting his head as he lay in her lap in between frequent and prolonged excursions to the bathroom. “What can I say?” she said. “I like a man who appreciates a good night in.”
Though Vivian had a fairly comprehensive understanding and acceptance of his maladies—he wasn’t that good at hiding them—he couldn’t reveal everything to her; it was too preposterous. How was he supposed to tell her he feared contamination from the world itself? That everything around him was toxic and actively trying to kill him. That he neither wanted to touch anyone nor be touched (and that he nearly put these instructions on the syllabus for the Intro to Geography class he taught at the community college). That he had to wash his hands exactly four times whenever he felt he might have been exposed to something or someone unclean. That he could only dry his hands with every twelfth paper towel if he was in a public bathroom. That at some point in his childhood, he became convinced Wendy’s hamburgers were unsafe because the patties were square instead of round.
Two weeks before the end of his relationship with Vivian, the headaches began. A pinching pain behind his left eye that erupted into a white-hot, vision-blurring blaze that no over-the-counter remedy could abate. It got bad enough that Harris conceded Vivian’s point and went to see Dr. Reichenbach, a towering man in his seventies with an impressive shock of white hair atop an otherwise ruddy face. Reichenbach took only a passing interest in Harris’s pain and claims of constant discomfort. He looked at Harris over the frames of his glasses and explained that the pain he was describing, the anxiety and the headaches, were typically something experienced by women—older, menopausal women, in fact. He said this in a way Harris thought was meant to make him feel better, though it just kind of pissed him off. The doctor then jotted something down in a folder, and casually wrote off a scrip for Lexapro, told him to “Maybe try eating less bread.” That was it. No discussion. He never even laid a hand on Harris, never checked to see whether his abdomen was swollen, if his gallbladder was full to bursting, or if his liver was hard as a rock. Desperate for relief, Harris took the Lexapro for about a week, until he saw a commercial listing the drug’s possible side effects (painful urination, dizziness, drowsiness, tiredness, weakness, anxiousness, muscle spasms, insomnia, sweating, dry mouth, increased thirst, loss of appetite, nausea, constipation, and excessive yawning) and immediately began experiencing most of them. He flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet, then exploded at Vivian, somehow convinced that, had she not cajoled him into seeing the doctor in the first place, he would never have been in the position he was in now.
“I’m just so sick and tired of it all,” Vivian had said.
“What do you want, then? Do you want out? Go ahead and leave. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.”
“No, Harris, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want to be excited about the future, our future. I want to not be constantly fixated on what’s wrong with you. You’ve had a hard time. But so have I. Your twisted gut, your shits, your headaches, your fears, your paranoia. All of it takes a toll, Harris.”
“Well, geez, whatever you do, don’t sugar coat it, Vivian.”
“Look, Harris, maybe I’d better go before I say something I really regret. Before it gets worse.”
“Can it get any worse?”
“Yes, Harris, with you it can always get worse. That’s basically become the motto for our relationship. We used to laugh. Do you remember that? How you could make me laugh? How we would laugh at all the crazy shit you were doing? How you would make me laugh at your crazy shits? Somewhere along the line you just forgot you could laugh most of this bad stuff away. That it was all in your head and so long as you accepted that that’s what it was, you could get through the day. Now it’s like this thing inside you has swallowed you whole. And it’s eaten up all the things that used to make being with you fun. We used to make plans. We were going to go hiking in Iceland. But now you refuse to go anywhere there’s not a toilet a hundred feet away.”
In the month since they last spoke, Vivian’s words proved prophetic. In her absence, it felt to Harris as though his decline had intensified, become a kind of slow torture underlined by how hard he worked day after day to conceal his maladies from those around him, to appear normal. He became fixated with thoughts of one day, if things truly got bad enough, manufacturing his own instantaneous death, unable to imagine succumbing to the rotting dysfunction and gnawing erosion brought on by terminal disease, a parasite, organ malfunction, or whatever was actually wrong with him, because he really didn’t know.
~
“You know for sure you’re not in love anymore if you can’t quite explain yourself to yourself. It’s really not about the other person at all. If you don’t recognize who you were in the relationship, if your thoughts feel like they came from someone else, then it’s definitely over. Kaput.” Vivian had delivered this nugget of wisdom while hunched over a paper plate of street tacos. It seemed an odd thing to say at the time. They had been dating for two months and had come to a point in the courtship where she and Harris no longer scheduled dates; it was just assumed they would do everything together. Those days the conversation was often about Justin, her soon-to-be blocked ex who was bombarding her with unwanted calls and voicemails containing half-hearted pleas for reconciliation.
Does Vivian still recognize the version of herself who loved (loves) him? The version that seemingly relished any opportunity to cancel plans with her friends or family so that he could lay his head in her lap and convalesce as she watched reality TV and nibbled on buffalo wings or White Castle sliders or loaded tater tots? Or has Randall already been given the receiving end of this same speech to mitigate any worries he may have about Harris?
As these questions turn over in his mind, Harris shifts his weight on the toilet seat, aware of a tingling numbness in his feet and legs, like a thousand tiny novocaine-laced pinpricks jabbing at his flesh. The sensation pulls his thoughts from Vivian and Randall, perhaps now grinning at each other like two people in the midst of a conspiracy, taking turns feeding each other kernels of popcorn and M&M’s or bits of Bavarian baked goods drenched in nacho cheese. He is certain this (possibly hypothetical) mutual feeding will inevitably lead to a more frenzied kind of touching later on. The thought makes Harris queasy in some perverse way that is refreshingly different from everything else he’s experiencing.
Without consulting the internet, Harris diagnoses the prickling in his legs as a kind of neuropathic pain. He thinks back to a post by INFLAMEDCOLON616 that suggested a correlation between severe IBS and a pins-and-needles sensation in the feet and legs of those who suffered from it. Another commenter, whose name Harris can’t remember at the moment, had chimed in with a thought: correlation is not necessarily causation in this case, and that those who suffer from irritable bowels are likely spending a significant amount of time sitting on the toilet, the result of which may be a temporary loss of sensation below the waist. This theory did not sit well with many in the discussion board, Harris included.
As he rubs at his tingling legs, the din of the theater’s concession stands, ticket takers, and moviegoers, floods the men’s room. Atop the clatter from the lobby comes a set of heavy footsteps on the white tile floor. So far, Harris’s bathroom sabbatical has only occasionally been interrupted by a few happy urinal whistlers and men obsessively checking and re-checking their hair in the mirror before returning to a mostly dark room. In other words, he’s been lucky. Harris knows that by the law of averages he’s due some dreadful bathroom encounter and curses under his breath when the footsteps enter the stall next to his. He hears a belt being undone before the pants fall to the floor with a jangly thud. The man’s weight barely registers on the toilet seat before a gale-force wind, a portable hurricane, exits his body. The man’s opening salvo, his campaign of shock and awe, is so swift and decisive that Harris doesn’t have time to fill his lungs with unpolluted air. Instead, he zips his jacket up above his mouth and nose, hoping the fleece will be sufficient to filter out the contaminants.
“Long live the new flesh,” Harris hears a familiar voice say. “That movie is fucking crazy!” Harris doubles over, looks under the stall, and sees a worn pair of black Wolverine work boots. The preferred footwear of deranged bathroom talkers. “Fucking crazy, right?”
“Hello? Are you talking to me?”
“Harris?”
“Randall?”
“Yeah. What’re you doing in here?”
“Oh, you know, something to do.” In the short silence that follows, Harris hopes Randall will stop talking, finish his business, and leave him to die in this stall.
“Viv sent me.”
“Vivian sent you to take a shit?”
“Oh, I’m not taking a shit.” Randall seems in high spirits, which doubles Harris’s suspicions, and to his dismay, his curiosity as to what Randall believes he is actually up to in there, if not taking a shit. “She said you’d been in here for a while. Told me to check on you, if you can believe it.”
“I can, actually.” Some habits die hard, Harris thinks. Like Vivian’s care-taker attraction to him, that burning need of hers to act as his nursemaid, a role he never quite understood but also steadfastly refused to question, lest he inadvertently encourage her to do the same. As if by instinct, Harris calls up the message app on his phone. Come and get your boyfriend. He’s wrecking the men’s room, he texts Vivian.
“So, uh, do you?”
“What?”
“Need help?”
“That’s actually really nice of you, Randall, but no. All good here.”
“Okay, man,” Randall says. “Hey, so you like Cronenberg, huh? You ever see Scanners, Harris? Those heads exploding? Shit’s like that lady who got one of them brain-eating amoebas from her Neti pot.” Harris’s head swims as Randall regales him with the story: a woman in Seattle was admitted to the hospital with severe headaches and cognitive issues. When the surgeons opened her skull to investigate a strange shape in her frontal lobe, they discovered her brain had been reduced to a pulpy mass by a single-celled organism wreaking havoc inside her head. “You imagine getting one of those? One day you’re fine, then it’s like someone turned the fucking lights out.”
The story of the Seattle woman snags the tripwire in his brain responsible for engaging the destructive self-diagnosis engine that drives his anxiety, his hypochondria, his panic attacks. He feels one coming on—the growing suspicion that what was really wrong with him was a single-celled organism happily munching away on his gray matter. He tries not to embrace such thoughts. He tries not to let his mind wander to that time he was careless in the shower and let some water get up his nose. He tells himself there’s no way one of those little bastards could have hitched a ride on the saline spray he uses to flush out his sinuses. But his fear has always been greater than his self-will.
He fixates on the idea that an amoeba has hijacked his brain. That fixation then becomes a sharp pain at the back of his neck. His vision narrows and the staccato thrum of his heart feels like angry fists on the wall of his sternum. This is it, he thinks, this is the big one. This is how I die. He tastes bile and stands in anticipation of the Sno-Capped peaks of vomit rising in the back of his throat. He stands too fast and his dead legs, more phantom limb than actual limb at this point, give out beneath him. He manages to pull his pants up around his waist but not to close them before tumbling forward, fumbling the stall door latch open and, dead feet tripping over each other as he takes one step, then another, he spills out onto the bathroom floor.
“Whoa, buddy!” Randall says. “What’s going on over there? You okay, man?”
“I’m dying.” I’m dying. He’s dying. Again.
“Jesus, man, this is no place for that.”
He drags his body across the bathroom floor. He gasps for air, then gags on a mouthful of Randall’s spiteful aroma. He can no longer feel his heart in his chest, is certain it has stopped altogether. He grips the faux marble of the bathroom countertop, pulls himself up to face his reflection in the mirror. He looks at the sink—there’s simply no time to wash his hands—and is grateful the cracked porcelain is there to catch the drool dribbling from his lips. Behind him, Randall’s voice registers as a distant hum mingled with the muffled chatter of the crowd exiting the theater. Harris notices his pants—unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped—sliding toward the floor. He thinks how badly he doesn’t want to die. Not here. Not now. If this is death, this is no good at all. No serenity here, that’s for sure. Despite his best-laid plans, he will not exit life gracefully; he’s going to go out kicking and screaming, making a goddamned scene.
This is how he will be remembered.
~
Harris is in the cold hospital room awaiting his fourth-grade diagnosis. He pulls at the cavernous gown he’s been given. Try as he might, he can’t manage to bring the two pieces of fabric together in the back. He can’t hide his exposed flesh or the blue waistband of his Scooby-Doo Underoos. He can’t escape the shamefulness of his situation. Next to the exam table stands Vivian and the x-ray technician—they are one and the same. How had I never noticed that before? He reaches to touch her, her hand, her black hair, the lapels of her white jacket. Each time he comes up empty. Each time he feels the sting of her absence.
“Drink this,” she says and offers him a small paper cup filled with a foamy white sludge.
“Come on, Harris, drink this,” Vivian says again, her face above him now, full and in good kilter. His head is in her lap. “You’re okay. It’s ginger ale.” She brings the cup to her lips and drinks. “It’s safe. See? You’re safe.”
“You came to get me?”
“You know me, can’t resist a man in peril.”
Harris breathes in through his nose, the air smells of Vivian now, sweet like cinnamon and icing. His heart has slowed. His pants are in the proper position—buttoned, buckled, and zipped. How? It doesn’t matter. The world settles around him. The fluorescent lights of the men’s room are not so bright, not so oppressive they burn his eyes. A small crowd of onlookers—men bursting with soda and popcorn and opinions on Cronenberg—has gathered in the doorway, eager to take in this post-credits scene, this hysterical one-man show.
“I don’t think I should die here,” he says.
“You’re not going to die, Harris,” Vivian tells him. “Not today, anyway. But you’ve made a real mess of things, haven’t you?”
“I feel like that might be true.”
“And that text, what is it that you think I can do for you? Do you want me to take care of you or do you want me to feel sorry for you?”
“Yes,” he says and finds himself watching Vivian breathe. It’s hypnotic. She looks at him and takes a deep breath, holding it in her chest—one, two, three, four seconds—and then blows the air out in a cool stream. He watches her pull the air into her lungs again and finds himself mirroring her actions. He fills his lungs. He holds the breath in his chest—one, two, three, four seconds—and exhales toward the ceiling. Everything begins to slow down. The world begins to move at a more appropriate speed, not his usual fast forward toward oblivion.
“Well,” Vivian says, still looking Harris in the eyes, “what’s in it for me?”
