Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil

I closed my eyes with force. “How serious is it?”

“Because they found it early, they’re going to put me on medication, and they believe it will help,” she said. “If they had discovered it later, it could have required removal of the colon.”

I opened my eyes again. Three of the chairs at the table were in order, but the fourth one was out of line, and the asymmetry bothered me. “What causes it?”

“No one knows,” she said. “It’s just poor luck.”

“Maybe you have been losing weight because you have been studying so much. When I work hard I sometimes forget to eat well.”

“No. I have been eating less because everything I eat makes me feel ill,” she said. “I did not tell anyone what was happening to me because I was humiliated.”

“You should get a second opinion,” I said.

“Three different doctors here all agree.”

“Still, doctors are sometimes wrong.”

“I have it!” she said. “All right? I have it.”

I aligned the fourth chair with the other three and sat in it. “This is not right. It is not fair for you to get this.”

“Stop it, Karim. Don’t make me sad about this.”

“I’m not trying to make you sad. I am upset for you.”

“Well, don’t be!” she said. “I’m trying to see the better side. It could have been worse. They could have discovered this in six months and I could be preparing to lose my colon. Or the accident could have been worse. I could have been that boy.” She stopped.

“I am going to fly home tomorrow,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I can handle this. They say I am anemic and require a blood transfusion and they want to observe me here for a few more days. The visiting hours are short and there is no need for you to miss your last week of work if you are already coming home on the 31st.”

I hadn’t told her that if I signed a new contract, Schrub would therefore probably extend my stay beyond my initial departure date. We argued more about it, but finally I said I would call her each day. Then I asked, “How is father?”

“Haami and Maysaa are with him now,” she said. “It is hard to tell with him. He has been very quiet.”

Before the nurse made us disconnect, I asked, “Zahira, why were you in the Mall?”

“I was buying a gift,” she said.

“Who was it for?”

She paused. “It was for myself.”

It was difficult to continue talking, but I said, “I have missed our conversations.”

She said, “So have I.”

At night I called Rebecca. “We have family friends over, so I can’t talk long,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

She talked about the activities like cross-country skiing she had done with her family and the many milkshakes she had consumed and a class of cheese she enjoys that she consumes there. “I may even need to set foot in a gym to shed these 30 new pounds,” she said. I didn’t respond, and she laughed and said, “That’s an exaggeration. I’ll never go to a gym.”

I said, “My sister has had some health issues.”

She immediately said she was very sorry and asked how she was. I told her, but I didn’t include the bombing. “What about you?” she asked. “You all right?”

“It does not matter how I am,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Is it a good hospital?”

I felt pressure behind my eyes as I did in Rebecca’s bedroom at her party, and my throat began restricting itself. My voice was unstable as I said, “I am receiving another call. It may be my family.”

“Take it.”

“Good-bye,” I said, and now my voice was very volatile.

“Bye,” she said. “I guess I’ll touch base with you when I’m back.”

I disconnected and stood there for several minutes with my eyes closed until my body stabilized. When I opened them, my black table and its four ordered chairs looked very spacious and voided.

touch base = reestablish contact

I talked to Zahira each day. She was still fatigued, but her mood was enhanced, and she told me everything about her disease that she had learned from the doctors and her own research. She used many jargon terms I had never heard before, and I had difficulty following her, although I didn’t want to tell her that while she was stimulated, but when she started discussing a chromosome named “1p36” in English, I finally had to confess that I didn’t understand.

“I think that is the first time you have admitted you don’t know something,” she said.

Normally I would be slightly angry, but I could tell she was smiling, so I merely said, “You are skilled at biology, and I am skilled at computers. If you studied computers you would excel in them, and if I studied biology I would excel at that,” although that is false, as I was never strong at biology.

Talking to her distracted me, but I was still uncertain about what to do at my meeting with Mr. Schrub on Thursday afternoon.

Rebecca was working overtime in preparation for Y2K and was too exhausted to see me, but I went to her apartment on Wednesday night. Jessica was there with a man she had recently launched a relationship with named Colin who had almost parallel facial features to her, and the four of us cooked a dinner of couscous and vegetables and a stew together. When Jessica couldn’t find their blender (which was inferior to my Juicinator) and I found it in a cabinet, she said, “Time for you to move in with us,” which simultaneously humiliated and delighted me.

Colin and I partnered to purchase olive oil at the market. He asked how long I had been dating Rebecca. “Since Thanksgiving, so five weeks minus one day, although I have known her for almost three months,” I said.

“You seem to really like each other,” he said.

“We are very different in some ways, but similar in others, and I have not met anyone like her before,” I said. Although I always attempt not to be boastful, I added, “And I believe she has not met anyone like me.”

After dinner we played poker and bet quarters. I played well, as did Rebecca, although I was cautious and only bet when I knew I had a high percentage of winning. At the end Rebecca and I continually raised each other, and Jessica and Colin exited the game. I had two pairs, but Rebecca raised so rapidly that I began to question the relative value of my cards, and finally, even though the money was insignificant to me, I exited as well, because it’s still always preferable to minimize losses. Jessica asked what we both had. Rebecca showed her cards, which were valueless. “Just my ability to bullshit,” she said as she aggregated the quarters. “You’ve got to learn how to bluff if you’re going to be a card shark, Karim.”

We divided into the two bedrooms. I selected a CD by Bob Dylan without asking her permission and reclined on the bed with my head on her stomach and listened to it while she petted my hair. My preferred song was called “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which was a strong example of the art I had been enjoying the last few months in that it blended positive emotions with negative ones. I still of course appreciate art that boosts positive emotions, because that is rare and necessary, and although the Beatles will always be special to me because of my memories and because their instrumental and vocal skills are the highest quality, musicians like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are also appealing because they sing about subjects that reject binaries and are mysterious in the way math can be mysterious, e.g., sometimes you locate an answer and the universe becomes almost magical because in the middle of chaos there is still order, and sometimes there is no answer, and because of that the universe is even more magical since it has secrets that humans can never understand.