Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“George,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

“George,” I say. I take him by the arms, pull at him, shake him a bit. Then I feel that his body is so close to me, and I press myself into it. I put my arms around him and pull him close, and I feel how big he is, and how alive, and how good he feels being there with me, just another human being that I happen to love. He puts his arms around me, too, without saying anything, as if it is an autonomic reflex. He doesn’t even need to engage his brain to do it.

“Are you dreaming, George?” I say, my chin tucked over his shoulder and my chest against his. He is sitting on the well and holding me close. He says nothing.

I run my hands up his back, stroking him. I feel the length of him, up to his neck, his head, and I bury my hands in his soft shining hair, and my face in his neck. He is so dear, so precious. How can I ever give him up? Then my hand touches something bad. It is wet and spongy, and I pull away. I stare at him and really try to focus through the dreamspell, and get some clarity in my eyes. I see that something is coming out of George’s head. I examine him. I pull apart his hair. There on the side of his head is a terrible wound, a deep aberration in his beautiful head, and it is spewing ganglion and bloody membranes and bits of something that I don’t understand.

“George, something is wrong with you,” I say. “Something is wrong with your head. Are you OK? Are you OK, George?”

He just smiles and sits there, with this hideous blob coming out of his brain, and I become frantic and try to shake him and pry his mouth open. But he doesn’t listen. I hit his face.

“George,” I say, and I am crying. “I need you to understand me. There is something wrong with your head. Please listen. Wake up, George. I see something. I need you to listen.”

But George does not wake up, and neither do I. We just stay there holding each other in the Hinterland, and I know that the well has not failed me, and that this is what I want, for sure, forever. The terrible fact is, however, that I cannot have him. And in the Hinterland my dreaming self knows this. And I’m crying by the well, holding my boyfriend, and he’s got bloody brains coming out of his head, and there’s nothing I can do.

George sat on the edge of the examining table with his legs dangling off the side. He wore a hospital gown, tied in the back, and his feet looked odd sticking out from beneath it, like they were someone else’s feet, someone bluer, older, thinner. He could see all the weird little veins in them. How can I not even recognize my own feet? He thought. The world is changing, and I don’t like it.

“My feet look weird,” he said.

“It’s the light in here,” said Sam Beth. She was standing next to him, leaning back against the examining table, her little hips and shoulders shifting back and forth occasionally like she was dancing. She was listening to something on her phone through earphones, and thumbing through messages, too.

“I thought you weren’t listening to me,” said George.

“I can hear you,” she said, without lifting her eyes from the phone. Her ponytails waved back and forth.

“How old are you, Sam Beth?” said George.

“Twenty-four,” she said.

On his other side, the goddess of the race sat fidgeting. She wore a tracksuit with the hoodie pulled up. Inside the hood, her pale, silvery face was tense, and she was biting her lip. George patted her on the leg. He could smell her eucalyptus gum.

“It’s alright,” he said. She snapped her head around to look at George, and the piercing eyes met his.

“Yeah, are you alright?” asked Sam Beth.

“I’m alright,” said George. He put his other hand on Sam Beth’s shoulder, reassuring them both. “I’ve just got to get some better drugs.”

They were all three waiting for the doctor to come back. She had given George a cursory examination, moving a finger in front of George’s face, asking him to walk heel to toe across the room, in a straight line on the tile floor. She’d checked reflexes and examined George’s pupils at length. During this time the goddess of the race had done standing jumps, where she’d touch her knees to her elbows by leaping into the air and bouncing them off each other in midleap. When the doctor left, she sat back down next to George and seemed to want to huddle against him.

George’s phone rang. His pants were across the room, but Sam Beth went over to them and fished his phone out of the pocket.

“It’s her,” she said, looking at the screen.

George snatched it out of her hand. “Irene?” he said into the phone.

“It’s me,” said Irene. “George, listen.”

“Hi! How are you?”

“George, listen,” she repeated.

“Listening,” he said. He couldn’t help but feel his face stretch into a grin. He wanted to squeeze Sam Beth around the shoulders until she popped. He wanted to cheer the goddess of the race to victory, pumping his fist in the air. He was so happy that Irene had called him on the phone.

“I know this is going to sound odd, but you need to take this seriously, George. What I’m about to say.”

“I absolutely will,” he said.

“I can tell that you’re not, though,” said Irene.

George laughed. “Of course I am,” he said. “If it’s something you want to say to me, then it’s serious to me.”

George was ready for her to talk. He was ready to hear that she was sorry, that she never should have left him, that she’d been impulsive. He knew that these answers were coming. He just wanted her to say them and get it over with. He needed to hear her say she was coming back, and he could say that all was forgiven. “We never have to see my mother and father again,” he had prepared himself to say. “We can pretend we fell out of trees or arrived in a spaceship or grew from the swamp. Nobody has any mothers where we come from. We don’t even believe in mothers.”

“You need to go to the doctor,” said Irene.

“OK,” said George. “Is that the thing you wanted to tell me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. I think—this is going to sound really weird, but bear with me—I think there is something wrong with your head.”

George said nothing. He pulled the hospital gown lower over his knee.

“Can you hear me?” Irene said.

“Yes,” said George. “I just thought, I thought that you were going to say something else.”

“What else?”

“I thought that you were going to say—”

He felt embarrassed, in front of Sam Beth, in front of the goddess. They both knew so much about it already. It was shameful, what was happening to him. It was embarrassing.

“Did you think I was going to say that we were getting back together?” Irene wanted to know. Her shrill voice cut into him. He had been thinking it was a beautiful voice, so clear and direct. But now it just sounded awful.

“No,” said George. “Well, yes.”

“We can’t, George. You know that. We can’t even think about that.”

George said nothing again. He had no response. His head was throbbing. The goddess of the race put her hand on his back and rubbed back and forth over his spine, her blunt fingers with their short pale nails scratching gently over his skin.

“So, what then?” he finally said.

“Go to the doctor,” she said. “Get your head looked at. It’s important. I can’t explain why. But it’s important. I think there might be something badly wrong with you.”

George gave a little wry laugh. “OK. OK, I’ll go to the doctor.”

“Don’t blow this off,” said Irene. “Don’t snort painkiller up your nose and wait another day. Please. For your mother, if not for me. For Sam Beth.”