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A Manageable Condition

Ruy Arango

    The man sitting next to her is encroaching on her seat. He’s big. Maybe he can’t help it, but still. She doesn’t want to be touched in any way. Ever. She has the sudden impulse to tell him, to get something out of this. Sudden disclosure right in his ear.
    He gets off at the next stop.
    She watches him check his phone on the platform. The train moves and he slides past. She presses her face against the glass for a better angle. Little black zigzags shoot from her eyes. If people could see them they’d edge away.

    The desire to lash out is healthy, her therapist told her last session. His legs were crossed. She could see his nice socks. The way he said the word healthy bothered her.
    She didn’t need the help. In the first grade another girl told her dogs were stupid. It was during lunch. At hand was one of those hard shell ice packs.
    It took two teachers to drag her off. When her parents picked her up the principle asked them if either of them had seen Quest for Fire. They had. The principle told them it was like that.

    She gets up before her stop. Across the closed doors in sharpie:

FUCK
YOOO

Open:
FU       CK
YO       OO

    At work they gave her two weeks off, paid. As much time as you need, some guy told her afterwards. She found out later it was the CEO.

    She stomps up the escalator. The pill bottles in her purse shake like a couple of maracas. The family in front of her look back at the sound. Passing on the left, she snaps.
    Outside it’s still warm and sticky. The fall is years away.

    The therapist told her this could be very isolating. He wanted to know if she had people to confide in. The noise maker was set to ocean.
    Steven, she said.
    He made a practiced face.
    Steven makes sense, he said.

    HIV. People keep saying that. She finds she hates the word. It’s like The N Word, twice the work.
    People don’t blurt things out or get angry around her anymore either. It’s like being held in oven mitts.
    Her mother tried to move down to help out.
    Just what do you think you’re going to be able to do here, she asked.
    Steven was looking at her when she put the phone down, hitting her with the thousand year old wisdom eyes.
    Don’t, she said.
    Hope is supposed to be a part of it. Hope gets big play.
    Her doctor was young and gave the impression of having spent a lot of time studying her case. He told her he would do his best.
    The thing is to get ahead of it, he said. This meant two separate Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors and one Non-Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor. Later, there might be switch ups.
    Sounds like a party, she said, feet dangling from the patient table.
    He told her they’d have to keep in touch about side effects.
    It had been Ziagen (yellow oblong, scored), Combivir (white oblong, scored) and Sustiva (yellow oblong, smooth) to start with. The Sustiva looked like a multivitamin.

    Her hair is down and already the heat is making her sweat. She used to wear it up to accentuate her cheek bones, but she’s had it down ever since she started accumulating fat on the back of her neck (Combivir).
    Street level and college students in blue shirts try to catch her coming out of the station. She’s all stomping heels and swinging bag and they retreat.

    She laughed when she started getting mailers for support groups. They were on high quality paper with good looking people smiling on the front. She got halfway through the first one before she could figure out what the hell they were alluding to. After she threw the thing away she realized it had been someone’s job was to make it. Another person’s job to mail them. A department ran payroll. My sickness is an industry, she told the garbage can.

    Everything changes when you’re dying. Someone told her that, but who? She can’t remember. Someone well meaning.
    She thinks about that as she walks through construction tunnels. Workers clomp on the plywood over her head. Thinking you’re going to die, that’s how she felt before, she decides. Now she knows, though really, something could get her before. Bus, Rottweiler, Rapist-murderer (joke’s on him!).
    She shoulders through the crowd to stop with her toes on the edge of the crosswalk. Passing cars do things to her hair.
    What has she been doing with her time? Not much, she goes to the therapist and takes her meds. She drinks more than she did before, but that’s not saying much. She’s not planning to go back to work. She’s tempted to take out a big loan, get a new car on credit, wrap it around a streetlamp, do something that flies in the face of her borrowed time. She knows one thing, but feels another.
    Past the construction tunnel the roll away doors of a CrossFit studio are up. Blaring music and gleaming torsos. A coach asks for one more rep. Dead anyway, she thinks. Dead anyway has become her go-to against the pressures of a previous life.
    Save up to buy a condo? Dead anyway.
    Eat kale? Dead anyway.
    Maintain relationships with your fellow humans, encouraging them in their struggles and listening in their dark moments, thus creating that succor which is the one and only comfort of this mortal coil? Dead anyway. Dead anyway. Dead anyway.
    Sweat has plastered her hair to the fatty lump on the back of her neck. All around her the city is folded in on itself, the sights and sounds squared to infinity. The beggars and the buildings. The buying and selling and saving.
    At the steps to her brownstone a coffee cup sits half full, she tips it over with the toe of her shoe.

    I feel as if you don’t like me, the therapist said with ten minutes left. She got the feeling the therapist assumed this was how long the conversation would take.
    It’s okay if you don’t, he clarified, you could even hate me. She looked at him, smooth hands, full head of hair, glasses with no smudges, and those little things. What were they called? Cuff links.
    He cocked his head when she looked up.

    It’s four flights of stairs to her walk up. After the first flight the sweating doubles down, then the nausea. Not fair, says some part of her brain. Not fair.
    She’s got to stop at the top of the third flight to catch her breath. The nausea is like waves at a beach, crashing into her. But she’s close, close to the top. Close to home. And already she can hear Steven, who’s been thinking about her all day.
    Through the door she can hear him jumping and prancing, skittering on the wood floor and he can’t wait to see her. He’s going nuts.

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