Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

TUESDAY EVENING, AN hour or so after dinner, Alice awoke from a nap and discovered white, hot brightness along the surfaces of her eyes. She let out a cry, slammed her lids shut, felt residual burning. By then, floorboards were rumbling. Oliver — who’d just gotten home — was rushing into the bedroom. “Why are they even on?” Alice cried. “They’re off,” he assured, trying to get up to speed, asking, “What? What’s happening?” He again promised the lights were off, and by then Alice’s mother had joined them, and was agreeing, in a soothing tone, They’re off, honey . Now, from the depths of the apartment, the baby’s upset was audible. Alice fluttered, tried again; even a sliver was too much, her eyes too sensitive. Oliver was searching through her desk, hunting down the ward’s phone number, then thumping around, cursing each usual spot where he got reception. He gave up, used the house line, was put on hold. Finally a doctor told him that Alice’s sight troubles were most likely a latent side effect of the chemo. Oliver was advised to keep washing out Alice’s eyes with water, and that he should get an alcohol-free version of No More Tears. The ward was sending a prescription for stronger eyedrops to his pharmacy right now. If Alice did not improve, she needed to come into Whitman’s emergency care center.

So long as everything remained covered in shadows — people appearing as dark forms against a thinner black veil — Alice was okay. Moving her head was fine. Entering a new room, though, being hit by some kind of light for which she wasn’t braced, that she couldn’t handle. Blinds were pulled, their bedroom transforming into a bat cave; Alice lay in bed, let herself go sedentary. If she had to be trapped, she was not going to feel sorry for herself; she would not wallow, fretting about the implications of this new twist. She kept running a hand over her small bronze figurine, familiarizing herself with Guanyin’s grooves, her sudden points, her small indentations, that chip thing along her base, the rough ending to what Alice imagined as an elephant’s winding trunk.

“I’ll order a car service,” Oliver pleaded. “We swoop into the care center, fix it, in and out.”

“Can’t we just wait?”

Alice was more than ready to be over and done with lying in bed. But she did not want to go back there.

Oliver couldn’t say no to her request. He wasn’t going to. Not after where he’d just been. Rather, he offered a papal procession of damp washcloths, made it idiot-easy for Alice to rinse her eyes, anytime she needed. They bought out all the Chelsea drugstores’ No More Tears shipments, repeatedly flooded her pupils. A five-in-the-morning alarm waking the baby wasn’t an option; instead Oliver showed initiative and nipped at Alice’s lower lobe. The flesh was loose. His teeth applied just a bit more pressure, then he raised his mouth, nuzzled into her ear. “Time for your prescription drops.” She stirred, emitting a sleepy but satisfied moan. Oliver further goaded, got into position, and without mercy used his fingertips to pry open her eyes.

These burned in a different manner than how light affected her, this burn more pulsing than it was painful, and going deeper, as if digging into the corneas, the irises, causing a weird tingle in those roots behind her eyes, those optic nerve things. Medicinal effects were immediate, her pain easing, some, so that if a room was mostly black, her eyes didn’t hurt so bad. But even the weakest morning light — peeking in around the edges of the blinds — caused recoil. Her eyes were so sensitive that she could barely see anything, even in dimness. Her squinting became perpetual; Alice began staring down into her lap, hiding her eyes, squeezing her facial muscles to where her forehead cracked with lines of pain. Her shoulders perpetually curled, her body tensing. She placed gauze pads over her eyes, transforming herself into an Egyptian mummy. She had the awful thought of herself as a corpse, her bedroom a tomb. She kept rubbing at the gauze pads, patting them, exhausted but unable to nap, her eyes burning and pulsing. She felt thirsty, but couldn’t pull herself upright to drink. She imagined that the throbbing could be scooped out from her sockets, like the meat from a melon. She concentrated on motionlessness, worked at stillness, daydreamed about sitting in a Korean nail shop, getting a pedi and reading a stupid magazine with advice about summer sandals. That dead-ice smell kept intruding.

One form of refuge arrived in the simplest of delights, flickering coolness on her tongue: rainbow sherbet. Alice indulged. The taste allowed her to imagine a very specific freedom: walking down the street, laughing and taking a lick from a waffle cone. Every so often she heard a song and let herself indulge further, imagining that he’d been in a studio for its creation. Alice saw him studying the sheet music, listening for his part and joining in, laying down tracks. She missed the humor of his calls, it was true. At the same time, she could not handle any more of the horror she’d felt those few times when Oliver had expected news from the hospital, and had picked up the phone.

How does Oliver see? The balloon floated through her clouded mind. How does that happen?

—

Past Alice’s bedtime. Her mother in the kitchen nook, zoning, worn out. Another batch of that horrid tea brewing. “To watch my girl slowly disappear like this…”

She balled her hand into a fist, gave Oliver a hard stare.

“I know hippies. I raised my only girl in a hippie town. Lord knows, I don’t have any problems with anyone having a spiritual center. But explain to me — not even going to the care center? Can she actually trust that statue more than her doctors?”

Oliver put an arm on her shoulder, brought himself down to her, and embraced her. In an even, sober voice, he promised: Katherine. He was staying on top of it all.

The next day, walking into the bedroom, Alice’s mother saw her only daughter and granddaughter sleeping next to one another. Half on her side, the baby was leaning in so the crown of her skull almost touched the top of Mommy’s, with Mommy’s shoulder serving as Doe’s pillow. Swathed by afternoon light, the sleeping infant had wrested free of the comforter and was nestled into her mother’s side. Doll eyes were shut, doll lashes long and curving just like her mommy’s had been. Doe’s breaths were slight; the petals of her lips — so delicate they could have been painted on by a toymaker — puckered happily around her pacifier. To her gramma, Doe looked whole, content. Alice remained motionless next to her, asleep on her back like always, compliant to her child’s clinging wishes, satiated by them, or maybe unconsciously oblivious. Alice’s mother could not tell. The two of them, like this, was one of the more tender sights Alice’s mother had witnessed, and one of the most horrifying. Her daughter’s head was so diminished, so stripped down and smooth. Its resemblance to a skull was simply impossible to ignore. Indeed, her daughter’s head was tilted backward, her mouth wasn’t just open but gaping, so wide it might have been unhinged. There was no way around it: Alice looked like a corpse. Even when Doe’s hand spasmed and came suddenly alive, dimpled chubby fingers clutching at Mommy’s neck, Alice did not respond. Alice’s mother dipped in, made sure she was breathing. Ten minutes later, she checked again.

Five minutes after that she still could not sit still. Could not be inside that apartment, could not do anything with her energy but convert it into action. She proceeded to go down the list that had been left for her, deciphered Oliver’s chicken-scratch directions. She let Alice’s friend know she’d be back.