Mark Doten - The Infernal

What I’m saying is, it could be AIDS or Iraq. Could be both, or something else altogether. Maybe it is her. And even if I suspec8MRCSQ/// B2CR60#T2YM W6SRJDV0

say, percentage-wise, it’s weighed significantly in my corner — it really could be her. The facts could reveal it. And even if they couldn’t, isn’t it possible — I’m just asking — that on some more profound level she was connected? Not the cause of it — and not in a blame-placing sense, I’m just trying to work it out — but isn’t it possible that she’s a factor among the millions of factors?

I know I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment. I’ve been meaning to. Sometimes I meet other guys who’ve served and we talk about this and that, and at last I just come right out and ask — do they have any weird symptoms? Well, sure, everyone’s got weird symptoms. I guarantee he’ll nod. But then the guy — this hypothetical serviceman — never goes further. Never. The two of us just stare into each other’s eyes and shut down.

I need to tell someone about the maggots eventually. Tell someone or die, those are my choices. I just don’t feel ready yet.

The dangers we face are constantly changing.

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When my wife and I kiss now, I won’t let her tongue in my mouth.

When it first started, I’d rinse them down the sink — that was it. Not anymore. I double flush them. And I only ever spit maggots downstairs. My wife doesn’t use that one much, and my son not at all. But the point is I should move into my own apartment, or just kill myself.

It’s fair to say: I look at my wife and son and think of killing myself.

Not some of the time, but all the time.

Or most all the time.

Even now, bulgy white maggots are already poking new heads out at the root of my tongue. I used to squeeze out what I could, the creamy white insides of a maggot buried at the root of my tongue, but I don’t bother with that anymore. It hurts too much, and either way, they’ll be back in a few hours, wriggling out from under my tongue, filling my mouth.

I think: hanging by the neck until death. But what about the maggots that might come spraying out of my mouth? What if they made my family sick? So: bullet in the brainpan. But who’s to say my head isn’t rotten with maggots, that a spring-loaded can of maggots wouldn’t spray from my skull?

A burning, the only real option: a war burning.

But would I really ever kill myself?

Fact is, I’ve always imagined my wife dying first.

First my wife goes, then Charlie — that’s how I’ve ima P+K0IE 40K6BME Y2TVR R XY4 QE ML2Y

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Boys with dead mothers often kill themselves — it’s true. I don’t know how race issues fit in, I’m no race expert, but being an interracial kid — how could that help? So one day I’ll have to explain to him, my Charlie, about his mother’s death and his own — what — his suicide potential. From an early age, and going forward, say, every six months, I’ll have to sit him down — the two of us at a pair of card table chairs brought up from the crawl space. Identical chairs, my son and me seated at the same level, the sense of occasion that the card table chairs give, I might even pour us soft drinks, set a dish of trail mix between us. I’d start generally — some of the things Michael used to say about movies, women, sports. I’d draw a picture of Michael as a stand-up guy, one of the greats. I’d tell Michael’s jokes, Sunni and Shi’ite, Boston and Vegas, then I’d strike my leg — my real leg — the meat of it — with the ball of my hand. I’d say, Charlie, Michael was one of those life-friends that change us, that make us better men — you see tha XG YQ00/HM3P 0XLRW7 0F

he’d listen to his father and try to understand. Head cocked, chin up. That’s when I’ll ease into the suicide question. Mention offhandedly how Michael always said suicide was nasty, a bad joke. Pathetic, he’d say, spitting out the word. And I’d say, spitting it out, pathetic. Not that there aren’t exceptions. That’s life, kiddo. There’s rules, and there’s exceptions. It takes a special man, a Michael , to understand the exceptions, to know deep down the flip side of the rules. Michael always said — I’d tell this to Charlie every year, or maybe every six months: It’s a pathetic joke, no fucking shit. At least, until the day you get a limb blown off … Then suicide, my man, is just the thing.

Michael’s philosophy was, once you’d lost a limb, the pathetic course was not killing yourself. Suicide within the first month, six weeks at the latest. A month or six weeks in the VA hospital, smacked out on morphine, time to say good-byes, then: auf Wiedersehen, sayonara.

I told Michael in the hospital, “No hanging.”

And Michael said, “No, hanging.”

That’s the midpoint of me and Charlie’s little talk. Pause. Lean back, regard my son. Think back to the two of us outside the funeral home, my wife’s family all lined up, black ladies in hats that sail past us one after the next like elaborate desserts — me and my interracial baby set against all these ladies, withstanding their condolences , the doubts and the fury their words barely conceal. My interracial boy, my interracial young man. They say the parent only sees the child, only sees love. But the truth is: I love my child who I’ll only ever see as an interracial child. It’s all love, yes. But anyone who says that the parents of an interracial child only see the child, and not the interracial child, they’re lying. I wouldn’t want my son to have any illusions about us, about the way we stand. I might say, Michael was black, you know. I’d say, Did I mention that? I might say: I will always think of you as my interracial son. Michael was a good man, I’d say. The best. Then I’d lean in so our faces were right up close. I’d grin and say— and one crazy motherfucker.

He hanged himself with bedsheets. Nothing in the room to hang himself on, no horizontal bars, so here’s what he does: IV stand through window, sheet tied off on window frame. Counting on how people are too dumb and apathetic, or maybe just too fucking considerate, to say a thing when a man’s hanging himself.

Or maybe it’s just no one’s paying attention.

Fact is: they let him do it.

And he did die.

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I talked to a doctor later, and he said, “Sure — no question. I saw that guy. I was parked facing the building, listening to an audiobook, eating lunch, and I saw him — but also, I didn’t. I noticed the body perched on the ledge, a one-armed black man tying off sheets with his teeth and hand, then tumbling over, and jittering — yes,” the white doctor said, pausing to consider, “the correct word was jittering. When I saw — or rather, didn’t see — him jitter, I recalled seeing an IV stand crash through the window and strike the pavement a moment earlier. It bounced up on impact to the height of a man, then clattered back down. I hadn’t really noticed it at the time, but as I watched him jitter, I thought of it. Then I saw it: an IV lying right there in the parking lot.”

I flushed again and left the bathroom.

My wife was back at the window. It was more than flurries now. In the other town houses — all the same as ours — the curtains were drawn, but you could see the lights were on, the TVs flickering, and the snow was cutting between them and us. I returned to the computer desk. I let my fingers rest near the keyboard without touching it