Jeffrey Eugenides - Fresh Complaint

One night as he was coming back, he heard an Australian voice say, “Here comes the patient now.” He looked up to see Larry and an older woman sitting on the porch of the hut. Larry was rolling a joint on his Let’s Go: Asia . The woman was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at Mitchell. “Hello, Mitchell, I’m Gwendolyn,” she said. “I hear you’ve been sick.”

“Somewhat.”

“Larry says you haven’t been taking the pills I sent over.”

Mitchell didn’t answer right away. He hadn’t talked to another human being all day. Or for a couple of days. He had to get reacclimated. Solitude had sensitized him to the roughness of other people. Gwendolyn’s loud whiskey baritone, for instance, seemed to rake right across his chest. She was wearing some kind of batik headdress that looked like a bandage. Lots of tribal jewelry, too, bones and shells, hanging around her neck and from her wrists. In the middle of all this was her pinched, oversunned face, with the red coil of the cigarette in the center blinking on and off. Larry was just a halo of blond hair in the moonlight.

“I had a terrible case of the trots myself,” Gwendolyn continued. “Truly epic. In Irian Jaya. Those pills were a godsend.”

Larry gave a finishing lick to the joint and lit it. He inhaled, looking up at Mitchell, then said in a smoke-tightened voice, “We’re here to make you take your medicine.”

“That’s right. Fasting is all well and good, but after—what has it been?”

“Two weeks almost.”

“After two weeks, it’s time to stop.” She looked stern, but then the joint came her way, and she said, “Oh, lovely.” She took a hit, held it, smiled at both of them, and then launched into a fit of coughing. It went on for about thirty seconds. Finally she drank some beer, holding her hand over her chest. Then she resumed smoking her cigarette.

Mitchell was looking at a big stripe of moon on the ocean. Suddenly he said, “You just got divorced. Is why you’re taking this trip.”

Gwendolyn stiffened. “Almost right. Not divorced but separated. Is it that obvious?”

“You’re a hairdresser,” Mitchell said, still looking out to sea.

“You didn’t tell me your friend was a clairvoyant, Larry.”

“I must have told him. Did I tell you?”

Mitchell didn’t answer.

“Well, Mr. Nostradamus, I have a prediction for you. If you don’t take those pills right now, you are going to be hauled away on the ferry one very sick boy . You don’t want that, do you?”

Mitchell looked into Gwendolyn’s eyes for the first time. He was struck by the irony: she thought he was the sick one. Whereas it looked to him the other way around. Already she was lighting another cigarette. She was forty-three years old, getting stoned on an island off the coast of Thailand while wearing a piece of coral reef in each earlobe. Her unhappiness rose off her like a wind. It wasn’t that he was clairvoyant. It was just obvious.

She looked away. “Larry, where are my pills now?”

“Inside the hut.”

“Could you get them for me?”

Larry turned on his flashlight and bent through the doorway. The beam crossed the floor. “You still haven’t mailed your letters.”

“I forgot. Soon as I finish them, I feel like I’ve sent them already.”

Larry reappeared with the bottle of pills and announced, “It’s starting to smell in there.” He handed the bottle to Gwendolyn.

“All right, you stubborn man, open up.”

She held out a pill.

“That’s OK. Really. I’m fine.”

“Take your medicine,” Gwendolyn said.

“Come on, Mitch, you look like shit. Do it. Take a goddamn pill.”

For a moment there was silence, as they stared at him. Mitchell wanted to explain his position, but it was pretty obvious that no amount of explanation would convince them that what he was doing made any sense. Everything he thought to say didn’t quite cover it. Everything he thought to say cheapened how he felt. So he decided on the course of least resistance. He opened his mouth.

“Your tongue is bright yellow,” Gwendolyn said. “I’ve never seen such a yellow except on a bird. Go on. Wash it down with a little beer.” She handed him her bottle.

“Bravo. Now take these four times a day for a week. Larry, I’m leaving you in charge of seeing that he does it.”

“I think I need to go to sleep now,” Mitchell said.

“All right,” said Gwendolyn. “We’ll move the party down to my hut.”

When they were gone, Mitchell crawled back inside and lay down. Without otherwise moving, he spat out the pill, which he’d kept under his tongue. It clattered against the bamboo, then fell through to the sand underneath. Just like Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest , he thought, smiling to himself, but was too genuinely exhausted to write it down.

With the bathing suit over his eyes, the days were more perfect, more obliterated. He slept in snatches, whenever he felt like it, and stopped paying attention to time. The rhythms of the island reached him: the sleep-thickened voices of people breakfasting on banana pancakes and coffee; later, shouts on the beach; and in the evening, the grill smoking, and the Chinese cook scraping her wok with a long metal spatula. Beer bottles popped open; the cook tent filled with voices; then the various small parties bloomed in neighboring huts. At some point Larry would come back, smelling of beer, smoke, and suntan lotion. Mitchell would pretend to be asleep. Sometimes he was awake all night while Larry slept. Through his back, he could feel the floor, then the island itself, then the circulation of the ocean. The moon became full and, on rising, lit up the hut. Mitchell got up and walked down to the silver edge of the water. He waded out and floated on his back, staring up at the moon and the stars. The bay was a warm bath; the island floated in it, too. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. After a while, he felt all sense of outside and inside disappearing. He wasn’t breathing so much as being breathed. The state would last only a few seconds, then he’d come out, then he’d get it again.

His skin began to taste of salt. The wind carried it through the bamboo, coating him as he lay on his back, or blew over him as he made his way to the outhouse. While he squatted, he sucked the salt from his bare shoulders. It was his only food. Sometimes he had an urge to go into the cook tent and order an entire grilled fish or a stack of pancakes. But stabs of hunger were rare, and in their wake he felt only a deeper, more complete peace. The floods continued to rush out of him, with less violence now but rawly, as though from a wound. He opened the drum and filled the water bucket, washed himself with his left hand. A few times he fell asleep, crouching over the hole, and came awake only when someone knocked on the metal door.

He wrote more letters. Did I ever tell you about the leper mother and son I saw in Bangalore? I was coming down this street and there they were, crouching by the curb. I was pretty used to seeing lepers by this point, but not ones like this. They were almost all the way gone. Their fingers weren’t even stubs anymore. Their hands were just balls at the ends of their arms. And their faces were sliding off, as if they were made of wax and were melting. The mother’s left eye was all filmy and gray and stared up at the sky. But when I gave her 50 paise she looked at me with her good eye and it was full of intelligence. She touched her arm-knobs together, to thank me. Right then my coin hit the cup, and her son, who couldn’t see, said “Atcha.” He smiled, I think, though it was hard to tell because of his disfigurement. But what happened right then was this: I saw that they were people, not beggars or unfortunates—just a mother and her kid. I could see them back before they got leprosy, back when they used to just go out for a walk. And then I had another revelation. I had a hunch that the kid was a nut for mango lassi. And this seemed a very profound revelation to me at the time. It was as big a revelation as I think I ever need or deserve. When my coin hit the cup and the boy said, “Atcha,” I just knew that he was thinking about a nice cold mango lassi. Mitchell put down his pen, remembering. Then he went outside to watch the sunset. He sat on the porch cross-legged. His left knee no longer stuck up. When he closed his eyes, the ringing began at once, louder, more intimate, more ravishing than ever.