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Stonehenge and the Flu

Anne Turner Taub

    The flu is the kind of illness that you know won’t kill you but you don’t care. You want to die anyway. You’re sick and miserable and it’s never going to end. Just the Machiavellian memory of one more tissue raking viciously through the skin on your raw, red nose—
    Sick with the flu, drugged with whatever new scientific discoveries were being promulgated for sneezes, coughs, and that mysterious thing they called malaise, Marta slept and woke, woke and slept in an antihistamine netherworld, where there was only herself, the television set, and the night table holding little armies of bottles with their torpedoes of darts each laying its claim on a different part of her body. And, in addition to that, her l4-year-old son would be coming home soon to start The Great Civil War—Teenager versus Parent.
    Over-medicated, in a limbo between sleep and waking, the thought of facing another day of adolescent rebellion was too much for her, and she stared back at the television set which was always on. It didn’t matter whether she watched it or not. It just stayed on, had a life of its own. She had developed, or rather it had developed, an anthropomorphic relation with her where it talked to her and said, I have more life than you. I move, I make noise, I sing, dance, have conversations. You’re a zombie, you’re still alive but does it matter?
    Although she had developed an intense paranoiac hatred of that TV set, she now began to watch it anyway. A program on Stonehenge. Stonehenge. If there was one thing in the world that did not interest her, it was a dump called Stonehenge that she had been forced to read about in some long-forgotten art history course. Blocks of ugly stones piled on each other, no graffiti, no advertising posters, no arrows pointing to the outdoor privy, Actually, Stonehenge had bored her to death even in her normal life, if she could still believe she had ever had one, somehow those days had totally disappeared, belonged to someone with her face and figure, but that person had died and been resurrected as a charterhouse for flu bugs.
    She looked at the television set. It looked back at her. I’ll get you, she said, no TV set is going to tell me what to watch. But the remote control had fiendishly disappeared, lost somewhere in the wilds of her white, bedsheet world. In an antihistamine-induced hysteria, she almost cried. Where was that damn thing? The television set grinned back, continuing on its merry way, in complete control now, discoursing learnedly on a pile of rocks. So it was Stonehenge or go fish for that damn remote in a state of total surrender. She did not have the strength to go on the kind of safari that demon of elusiveness would require. Her choice seemed simple; it was Stonehenge or die of total misery. The television set, as usual, won the battle. Just wait, she thought, wait till I am vertical again, just you wait ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait. I’ll never watch you again; you’ll go to that happy television hunting ground in the sky and never be heard from again. I’ll unplug you like a broken hairdryer, you one-eyed monster.
    Stonehenge was being romanticized by a bright young man with an English accent, an ascot, and bad teeth. Stonehenge, he was explaining, had been built sometime around 2,500 B.C. She’d heard it all before—she knew it was some kind of religious temple erected by Druids. Who cared? Why did she have to go through something she’d already suffered through once before. Obviously this was all punishment for something she had done, what else could it be?
    She looked round to see if the remote had surfaced, hopefully in a non-exertion area. Nowhere. Back to Stonehenge. Oh, look at that. It was not a religious temple. It was there long before the Druids. Now he was describing the blue stones of Stonehenge that were different from any other stones in the area. These stones had come from the mountains in Wales. Nice, blue is a nice color. Christ, wasn’t she even entitled to a commercial? They had carried these huge stones 240 miles to the Salisbury plains in southern England. Why and how they got there, no one knew. Since no one knew, what was the point of the program? She reached for a pill on the nightstand without looking at the bottle. She didn’t know what it was for and didn’t care. She needed some activity that the television set couldn’t dictate. Maybe it was for her head, lungs, throat, stomach, wherever this one wanted to aim its little darts—maybe there was a part of her body called a malaise. Maybe she would start jumping in the air and skipping like the people were doing now on a commercial because they had taken a laxative.
    Back to El Dorado, the land of television heaven for couch and sickbed potatoes. So these idiots had carried these huge stones overland 240 miles—they had only simple tools, no real transportation but rafts. God, they must have had broken legs, aching backs, pulled muscles and no antihistamines.
    She felt a swirl of sympathy rising in her for those poor people of long ago. That was strange. She realized she had just had a real emotion. She hadn’t felt anything but drugged self-pity for days now. But these people did all that backbreaking work—and not for money, not because they were slaves, but, according to the speaker with the highbrow English accent and the lowbrow teeth, because they felt it was something that they wanted to do.
    I don’t believe that, she thought. How could anyone today know what they wanted? If that was why they did it, they were fools. I sound like my son, she thought. I’m regressing back to acne and rebellion.
    Now Mr. England was delightedly glorifying a bunch of English schoolboys who were replicating the journey of those people long ago. The boys had put a huge concrete slab on a raft. It was one-fifth the weight of the original stones and they were shown floating it down a river, then pulling and pushing it on land.
    When she saw the boys, she realized they were the same age as her son. Suddenly she was filled with sadness. Well, at least it wasn’t self-pity. Since her husband had left them two years ago, her son had become a bitter, silent creature. His father had remarried, had not called or visited once. She could not have a conversation with the boy. He either met her questions with silence and a withering look or a contemptuous retort that was worse than the silence. For some reason, he seemed to blame her for the breakup. If she had been a better wife, a better homemaker, a better cook, better looking, anything but what she really was, his father would still be there.
    On the TV, the scholars had decided that Stonehenge was not a religious temple at all, but a system of charting the planets and stars, and as an exercise in astronomy, it was a miracle of achievement. This stuff was getting interesting—a bad sign, she must be getting worse. A commercial advertising the sunny beaches of the Caribbean came on and she fell asleep.
    She was awakened an hour later when the door of her room erupted into a war-dance, and her son burst into the room in a thunderous cloud of activity. Then as if regretting that he had actually been caught in motion, he reluctantly lowered himself inch by inch into a chair and stared at the TV without saying a word. She had long been trained by her son not to ask questions but today, artificially brave on flu medicine, she didn’t care. She asked the question every mother is afraid to ask a teenager. “How was school today?”
    Silence.
    Reckless on drugs, she dared one last question before the sarcastic retort. “Do anything interesting?”
    Without looking at her, his eyes glued to a TV cartoon, he answered, “We watched a program on some rocks.”
    “Stonehenge?”
    Silence. More silence, then—
    “Yeah, how did you know?”
    “I watched it, too.”
    “You did? I didn’t know you liked that stuff. It was great, wasn’t it? Imagine what those people went through!” All of a sudden the boy became animated. He began to tell her his thoughts on Stonehenge and suddenly she realized that this was the first time since her divorce that they had had a real conversation.
    A flood of love for her son suddenly swept over her. As he talked excitedly about how much he wished he had been with those boys ferrying the stones to Stonehenge, something was happening to her. In her week-long well of self-pity, she had somehow never cried. Now tears came to her eyes in warm, welcome little pools of relief. Unaware of her tears, her son responded warmly to her nods and soft grunts of understanding.
    As he talked, she realized that even her flu symptoms seemed to have gone. Silently she sent a prayer of thanks to those people thousands of years ago who had broken their backs putting together a bunch of rocks, and at the same time starting herself and her son on the road to healing their relationship. At that moment the cartoons ended and a commercial came on.
    “Ma,” said her son, “do you think we could ever go to Stonehenge?” We. We? she nodded slowly as if she were considering carefully an experience that nothing on earth would have kept her from sharing with her child. We. That was the first time in two years, he had used the word We.
    At that moment the remote control fell off the bed. It had been under her pillow where she had put it hours ago so she would have it on hand. As it hit the floor, the television set, in total surrender, shut itself off.

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