YOU’RE ALL FIRED!

As a Latin Americanist who studies the underside of Mexico – border slums, impoverished rural towns, dying Indian communities way up in the mountains – I’m used to life without the niceties of electricity and running water and sewage treatment.  So I’m used to half-digested slurry exploding from my mouth and ass.  Gastrointestinal illnesses are just an occupational hazard in my line of work.  But south of the border, for chrissake.  Not here in the United States.

Today I’m wearing a rut in the floor between the bed and the bathroom, rushing there and dragging back, drifting in this lifeboat of sweat-stained sheets.  I can taste blood in my throat, raw from stomach acid and regurgitated habanero salsa.  My joints are cracking like sadistic castanets.  Every blanket in the apartment is piled on top of me, yet I’m still paved with miserable shivering goosebumps.  If I had the option of dying right now – painlessly, just close my eyes and fade away – I’d be tempted.  Really fucking tempted.

I think every solitary person confronts their mortality like this, wondering how long it would take the world to discover they’re dead.  In my case it would be a couple days.  Maybe even a week.  I don’t have a pet, so there wouldn’t be a barking dog to tip off the neighbors or a cute little kitty in the window with a bloodstained snout.  I don’t live on campus, so colleagues can’t bop over to my place and check on me.  I don’t have a girlfriend or friends that stop over, so my rotting corpse wouldn’t be discovered by accident.  I’d be found when somebody complained to the landlord about the stench coming from 3F, or when the bureaucracy of UCLA finally clanked into motion.  Probably more like a week.

Except not this time.

My cellphone rings at 4:00 on the dot.  “Hi.  Are you feeling any better?”  Nooshin’s voice.  It sounds like she’s trapped in a tin can.  Her new cellphone is a crappy pre-paid one.

“Nah.  If anything I feel worse.  I haven’t even stopped throwing up yet.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”  The words are real, not a polite throwaway.  Then she leaves it alone, waiting to see if I want to talk about it.  No histrionics.  No badgering me about doctor visits.  No asking inane questions like Is there anything I can do?

Me, I prefer to talk about anything but my projectile vomiting.  “You having a better day than I am?”

“Well…” she sighs.  “I’ve been job searching.  Like, just walking around the neighborhood.  But none of the places by here are hiring.  In fact most places are still laying people off.  But the ones with applications, I filled them out anyway, just so I’d feel like I was accomplishing something.”

“What about temp agencies?  There must be temp jobs.  For the holiday shopping season, at least.”

“Kelly Services closed their office near here.  But Top Temporaries is still open.  Tomorrow I’m going to see if they’ve got some clerk-type jobs, or data entry positions.  That’s about all I’m really qualified to do right now.  I know word processing, and I can do administrative things like filing and answering phones, but that’s it.”

Her bleak self-appraisal tugs at my heart.  “Don’t sell yourself short, Nooshin.  I’ve seen the way you write and think.  You’re smarter than any student I’ve got right now, and you learn fast.”

“I know, I know.  This is just a phase.  Everyone starts at the bottom.”

I hear something rattling in the background.  Pots and pans, sounds like.  “You back at your sister’s place?  Making dinner?”

“Um, back at….yeah.  Nasrin’s.”  There’s something wrong with the way she says it.  She rattles around some more.  “Tonight I’m making spaghetti.  From a can, actually.  Don’t worry, it’s still halal.”

“Uh, can we not talk about food anymore?  It’s making me nauseous.”

“Oh Nick.  I’m such an idiot.  Of course you don’t want to talk about food!  How’s your grant thingie coming?  Let’s talk about that instead.”

Nooshin just picked an even worse conversation topic.  My supplemental grant application isn’t writing itself.  And when I try to write it, I get overwhelmed.  Digitizing and organizing an archive sounded so easy.  But now that I’m working my way through the process, I realize there’s nothing easy about it.  Is the extra funding even worth it?  Maybe I’d be better off getting a student loan after all.

“If you get the supplemental grant, then you’ll be able to hire a research assistant,” Nooshin points out.  “I thought you were making all these big plans that required a research assistant.”

“Yeah, but…”  My voice trails off.  It’s true.  A research assistant would be the shit.

“When do you need to turn in the application to Hercules?  Next week?”

“Yeah.  Sometime next week.  And you know what?  Now I’m not just feeling nauseous, I’m feeling stressed.”

“Sorry,” she murmurs, injured.

“I didn’t mean it like that.  It’s not your fault for bringing it up.  You can’t take everything so personally, for chrissake.”  The silence coming from her cheap cellphone is an accusatory reverb.  I don’t want to apologize – I have a good point, dammit – but I don’t want to be an asshole, either.  “Look, I know you take everything to heart.  It’s one of the things I like about you.”

“No you don’t.  You think I should learn how to be tough.  Tough like you are.  You don’t take anything to heart.  Sometimes I think you’re the most insincere man I’ve ever met.”

“But only sometimes, right?”  I force a laugh, ha-ha-ha, until I can taste blood again.

“Right.  Only sometimes,” she relents.

The exchange has me worried.  A bullshitter hates to get called on his bullshit.  Does everybody see through me like I’m plexiglass, or just Nooshin?  I remember my initial categorization of her – mind like a steel trap.  I can’t shake the feeling that she knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her.

I hold the phone away so I can hack into a tissue.  “How are things with your family?”

“Just fine, I guess.”

“Are you getting, uh…”

“What?” she says.  “Am I getting what?”

Divorced? I mean to ask.  But the word dies in my throat.  My constant dilemma with Nooshin – pry like a motherfucker, or just let questions slide?  My curiosity is ready to waterboard her for intelligence.  She’s been a deepening mystery ever since I first glimpsed her, the evil-eyed girl avoided by all the panhandling sharks on Avenida Revolucion.  On the flipside, her marriage is her business, not mine.  If she really wanted to talk about it, she’d –

I never finish the debate with myself.  I’m already mumbling goodbye with a hand pressed over my mouth, struggling to escape the damp tangled blankets, and racing to make it to the toilet bowl in time.