There are no Acts of Love, only Selves of Love

Her crying is wet, hiccuping; she stands at the bars of her crib and coughs out these glottal stops. Each one, another bubble of sadness floating out into the darkness. After a few minutes, the cries become more urgent, the sorrow more keen as if she is asking the dark ‘will no one come?’Her faith in us—the good forces in the world—rapidly ebbing. The screen on the baby monitor flickers on and subsides, flickers on again and, as the cries become a wail, stays on, filling the room with the garish color of periwinkles.

I roll over noisily to wake Gina. I tell myself I’d go in, but naturally moms are better at this sort of thing. She’s nurturing and calm. When I go in there, I only exacerbate the situation and then no one gets any sleep. This is what I tell myself anyway and I roll back over, sighing loudly and stretching. Gina wakes up all at once. She’s already been up twice and has just fallen asleep. It takes no more than a second for her to comprehend the scenario. The myrtle flower light of the monitor, the hiccuping wail, tinny through the monitor speaker, urgent through the walls and tremolo in the kitchen. She tosses back the blanket.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask in a bullshit way.

“No,” She responds, unmasking my bullshit by leaving the room before I have time to say anything else.

Her feet fall heavily across the small house. On the stove, the finger bowls of salt and pepper rattle a little. The candles and picture frames on the bookshelf knock together with a castanet clicking. I wonder if this is her way of letting our daughter know she’s coming. The wail does not diminish. If anything, it becomes even more urgent and then, after the door to the small bedroom with leopard removable wallpaper and a bookshelf full of board books about going to sleep opens, the wail goes back to a hiccuping cry and even from across the house, I can hear how she’s raised her little arms up in her crib to be lifted away from the dark sadness. And once she is lifted, her crying quiets and stops. She wants such a simple thing: to not be left alone because she is very small and unfamiliar with the learned response to solitude and quiet and darkness. For her I know each moment passing in the dark alone must feel impregnated with all of time itself. I remember, even at six or seven lying in my bed and thinking through the dark and quiet until it began to feel like everyone I loved was gone, that the dark had swallowed them and it felt so terrible tears would roll down my checks and I would think ‘my poor mom’ over and over, seeing her gone and then it would occur to me that if I went to her room and just saw she was still there, I wouldn’t have to worry and when I crossed the hall and saw her sleeping, I knew everything was fine, that tomorrow would come as sure as the previous day had. But what did I do before I could get up? Before I could move across the house and make sure my mom was still there? Did I lie there and cry and wail, bouncing up and down in my crib, waiting through dark hours for someone to come and prove the world was still there? What agony to be so long in suspense and then what torture to be so long certain.

The house has gone quiet and I roll back over and sleep. When Gina gets back into bed 10 minutes later, I don’t wake up. But when the cries start hiccuping again and the light of the monitor flares up, I wake up and become restless. I lie there listening, seeing my daughter’s tear-streaked face and her little hands clenching the top railing of the crib. I’m feeling more awake, even to be woken up three times and go back to sleep starts to compromise the quality of my rest, though I’m the lazy one. I pull my courage together and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“I’ll go,” Gina says, coming up from the bed by straightening her arms, pushing down on the mattress.

“Are you sure?” I ask, already starting to swing my legs back into bed. And she goes, but this time I don’t fall asleep again. I lie there, listening to the cries mellow into quiet thinking about these two people I love, how they’re suffering for each other and how I don’t figure into the situation. How this is the role of dads everywhere, to go back to bed, to only emerge when the situation is resolved or has become completely untenable and no one can sleep. My family needs me and I’m just lying here, preserving myself for work, following the American mantra that doing is all that matters and my ‘doing’, as the man, is not here but at work.

I’m groggy, but no longer tired. It’s almost six. I get out of bed, go out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the living room, Gina is lying on the floor, half asleep and my daughter is in her room happily pulling all her books off the bookshelf, one at a time, throwing them behind her with no concern for where they land. I tell Gina to go to bed, to try to get a little sleep before the morning, although I know she won’t. It’s too late for that, but maybe next time I’ll get it together a little earlier.

My daughter hears me and drops her last book before crawling over in her quick and somewhat floppy way. I reach down and pick her up. The tears on her face have dried, but her eyes are still a little glassy and her palms are wet, though it’s difficult to tell if it’s tears or sweat that’s moistened them. Almost as soon as I pick her up, she starts wriggling to be put down and I follow her over to another pile of books she starts to go through. She throws them and laughs now that I’m watching.

Gina goes to bed and I pick my daughter up from her books and show her how to grind coffee and pour the hot water into the press. She watches with sleepy attention. Then we go back to the living room to read and watch the sun come up through the windows and as she turns the pages of the book we’re reading, I’m glad to have woken up, to be here for this moment of being, as spending time with my daughter, no matter how early in the morning, is the only part of my day this isn’t ‘doing’. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known that is fulfilling without an associated sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing to be ‘done’ we just ‘are’ together.

Maybe Gina and I are spoiling our daughter by getting up with her in the night and not letting her cry by herself in the dark hours that are so much darker and longer for her. Maybe we’re not properly preparing her for the rigors of life. For now, I am happy to make the sacrifice to spare her the discomfort of the sadness of being apart from the ones you love. It seems like too grievous a thing to be insisting a baby learn so young and she’s so happy now, playing with these books. How can I deny her when all she wants is to not be alone? Why does she need to learn this terribly American skill at all? Why do we place so much value on the individual? Because their support will one day fade away? Should we not love our daughter to the full extent of our ability because one day we will die and no longer be able to actively supply her with this love? No. Even if I can’t always get myself out of bed, I will always want to go to her, to alleviate her suffering. Nothing could change that. Nothing could undo it.

After an hour, Gina wakes up and in the roseate light of the early morning, the three of us ‘are’ together. We sit there, together, not entirely awake, and relish the opportunity to be without doing. Later the light will spread across the fields and make its customary demands for the day, but for now there’s nothing to accomplish, but so much to be.

Dark Streets, Bright Waters

The generator came on sometime in the middle of the night. Although the power had gone out for the rest of the area, our landlord’s foresight had saved us from sharing the darkness that swelled outward from the town. The bright gibbous moon made the sky brighter than the clusters of buildings and homes that seemed to absorb light without returning any, making the darkness we actually live under apparent. In the light of the moon, the dark buildings looked cold and hunched over.

In the morning, I woke up late and the sun was shining across the fields that can be seen from my bedroom window. The dew had dried up and the cows were tearing at the grasses.

PG&E said they turned the power off as a wilfire precaution in the severe winds. We turned on the radio and checked the local websites while we made coffee. The consensus was this was a quid pro quo with PG&E’s line being ‘You sue us for the fires last summer, we make sure it doesn’t happen again by shutting off the power. Sorry for the inconvenience.’

There was no inconvenience for me. In the middle of the week, I had the day off. I could relax, catch up on work and spend time with my family. After coffee, we set out toward downtown to see if anything was open.

More cars were on the streets than there would’ve been on an average Wednesday morning. There was at once a stillness and a hurried quality in the air, like the little whirs and hums all that electricity produces had to be replaced by something, so everyone got in their cars and started driving. But the noise wasn’t complete. It wasn’t the sound of a town, but more like a country field a tractor has just rolled through. Despite the drivers’ efforts, the silence seemed to be rising.

The first businesses on 11^th st. were closed, but when we rounded the corner to I st. we noticed the bagel shop was open. The wire bins, normally stocked with bagels were empty and the production area behind the counter was dim, the mixers and ovens still and cold. The only thing they seemed to be selling was coffee, but the people who’d bought some, didn’t look at all concerned by the lack of bagels and they sat on the front patio sipping their drinks contentedly and watching passersby with that kind of open, bovine way cafe patrons often do.

The Co-Op parking lot was full. Surprised to see it open, we headed for the door. The place was so dark, I expected to be turned back, but we walked in and were soon in conversation with a clerk who told us that they’d be open as long as there was daylight and that all the refrigerated stuff was all half off. The place was a little warmer and smellier than usual—especially near the cheese display—but no one seemed to mind and despite the empty shelves and dimness of the aisles, people shopped as they would on any other day. In the refrigerated section, realizing how cheap 50% off made everything, I complained about not having brought the car, with our generator, we really could’ve cashed in. But even then, I don’t know that I would’ve bought much more than I did. The ice cream was probably already pretty melty and I didn’t want to be the guy throwing panicked armloads of food into his cart, even if only to save money.

We bought enough for a nice breakfast and walked back home. The streets of town were cushioned with the quiet of a snowfall even in the radiance of the October sun. Many stores were open, only accepting cash and illuminated with daylight. I stopped into the bookstore and the dusty creak of the floorboards and the chill shadow at the back of the store where the light didn’t quite reach gave the impression of a dry goods store 100 years ago.

…

In the evening, I went for a bike ride to the next town over. I wanted to see what nightfall looked like when the lights over the car lots and the drive-throughs were all off.

I rode west out to the ocean and then returned east with the smoldering sun already under the horizon behind me and the stars beginning to shine over the mountains. The streetlights were off. The traffic lights were off; it looked like the whole town was camping. The usual amount of traffic was on the streets, but it was hard to imagine where anyone could be going. Nothing was open. I rode past homes to find most people sitting in their cars, the weird blue light of their phones coldly illuminating their faces. I didn’t see a single candle, nor a lantern. The houses were completely darkened except those—and they were rare—that had a noisy gas generator roaring in the front yard. It looked like some kind of exodus, like everyone had decided to take to their cars and give up their homes, but now that they’d done so, realized they had no where to go.

Noticing some cars in the Safeway parking lot, I turned in. There was only one feeble light radiating from just inside the propped open door, but people came and went as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The parking lot was so utterly steeped in darkness, it would’ve been possible to bump into someone before you saw them coming. Even the headlights of the entering/exiting cars did little to brighten the scene but, rather, seemed only to expose the profundity of the darkness.

Once again, I expected to be turned away at the door. Only one was open and an employee was standing there like a sentinel. I quickly walked in past the rows of checkout counters and found myself in thorough darkness. The shelved items blocking out most of the residual light from the front of the store. Shoppers walked around with the flashlights on their phones. Either they had over-flowing carts or carried only one or two items. There seemed to be only two classes of shoppers. Those who were there for novelty of shopping in the dark and those who were there to clean off the shelves. It would’ve been very easy to steal, but there was so much trust, so much goodwill in keeping your doors open after sundown and such a wholesome joy in the kids giggling and trying to scare each other it would’ve taken some extraordinary need to steal, perhaps Safeway was counting on this. As if to highlight this sense, the customer and the clerk in front of me were talking about little league baseball games and while I waited, I watched three or four families with five or six kids a piece come through the door like they were entering the doors of a fun house. The transformation of the ordinary was better than a spectacle that set out to be extravagant. Everyone, even the adults, seemed pleased with this result.

Back out on the street, the moon was up and, again, the town was darker than the mountains and the sky overhead that reflected the moon light more than the buildings and streets. I rode past a few more people sitting in their cars staring into the blue light of their phones, radios turned up against the silence. The brightness of the moon only increased as I rode back out toward the ocean, into the fields, away from the dark, furtive town.

I crossed the Mad River and, looking down in the moonlight, I saw three river otters, a family, unperturbed by the blackout, splashing in the silver moonlit waters, gleefully enjoying what, to them, was surely a very bright night. I watched them until they splashed up the river and out of sight and then continued riding back to the darkness on the horizon that marked the next town and my home. 

The Last Copy

After two days of snow in late September, the golf course on Wood Street looked like a swelling wave covered in particulate pieces of Styrofoam. A few kids had trampled the undulating parts of the turf or whatever you call it, looking for a place to sled and left all these slipping, matted-grass prints everywhere. The cold had come on so suddenly, nothing had died yet and there were even a few crushed dandelions under the grass. In one place, it was clear where someone had fallen down and left a big green swipe out of the snow. Walking by it one afternoon gave me the idea to shovel the walk when I got home.

I started on my panels of sidewalk, but there were only a few so I decided to do Mr. Morris’ sidewalk, too. When I finished that, I just kept going, thinking, I’d go at least as far as the Quality Dairy so I wouldn’t have to walk in the snow to get cigarettes.

When I got to the Quality Dairy, I left the shovel by the door and went and bought a coffee to reward myself for all the work. Buying the coffee, I noticed the smiley face cookies by the register my mom used to buy me as a kid. I couldn’t bring myself to buy one. They probably had all kinds of crap in ‘em.

I paid the 1.35 for the coffee and stood at the door reading the newspaper headlines before stepping outside to appreciate the steam rising from the hot coffee.

I stood by the ice freezer with ‘ICE’ written in snow-capped red letters, the freezer itself being capped with real snow plus cigarette butts. I imagined the red letters with little cartoon cigarettes poking out of the cartoon snow and watched the cars go by on Michigan Ave. each one with its own fox tail of exhaust flickering behind it. I thought maybe I’d go down to the library, but I still had the snow shovel with me, so I took it back to the garage and knocked the snow off my shoes on the cold concrete floor, which did no good because I had to walk right back out into the snow.

With the sidewalk shoveled, my shoes didn’t get too snowy until I passed the Quality Dairy and I sunk in almost up to my ankles. How could there already have been so much snow? It wasn’t even October.

The night it fell, I’d enjoyed the spectacle, watching the shreds of gray fall like static through the screen of the window. There was almost a hissing, a crackle of the sudden dry snap. Beyond the snow and the streetlights, the only thing visible had been the smokestacks of what ever it was on the other side of downtown with smokestacks. There was an allure in those ruddy lights and the insulated quality of the night. I imagined the silence where that light must be falling on the snow out along some railroad line and some empty buildings near the Oldsmobile plant or something. How nice it would be to go out there to the base of those smokestacks and just drop into the snow and watch the graphite skies throb with the redness of the smokestack lights. I fell asleep imagining myself lying in the snow alongside the tracks.

When I got to the parking lot, I decided to keep going. It was too cold for the snow to melt much so my feet were still dry. I walked in the alley that went behind Theio’s and the muffler place. There was some ice under the snow and, walking on it, I slipped and fell on my ass. Snow on ice makes it even more slippery. I left a big human-shaped blot on the surface of the unbroken snow, just like the kid who’d fallen on the golf course looking for a place to sled. At least the kid had an excuse. I was just walking.

I went over to Kalamazoo Street, to stop by the little gas station where I’d worked. It was almost a year later and I still liked stopping in, smelling the burned coffee, the stale smoke of the back room and the cedar woodchip-like smell of the Skoal displays. I’d stand there in the tiny building and focus on the idea that I didn’t have to stay and work eight hours. It was such a lovely feeling it made my fingers splay out just thinking about it.

I filled up my coffee with the burnt stuff at the gas station for the warmth and kept going. The Red Cedar River was just past the low scrub that grew along the side of Kalamazoo. It hadn’t frozen over yet and could be heard burbling away behind the scrub. The snow had come before the leaves had fallen and the waxy green, like something out of a magic marker on crisp white paper was still scribbled all over the scrub, the tough brown shoots were all tangled up in it. The whole thing looked like it’d grown down from somewhere, like the white ground was the sky and the bleary wastes overhead were the ground that coughed this stuff up.

The sole was coming off my left shoe and snow kept getting packed into the space under it. Every few minutes, I had to stop, make a hook with my index finger and scoop out this little puck of hardened snow. A salt truck had been down the street and had splashed a little salt around. There wasn’t a lot of traffic so I walked over the raspy salt. The coffee had gotten cold so I slipped it out of the cup in the splashing arc preferred by anyone dumping a half-cup of cold coffee into the snow. It was more like backing the cup out from the coffee than throwing the coffee out of the cup.

I forgot how far south Kalamazoo comes out in East Lansing and was annoyed at having to walk way back up north, again through the unshoveled walks of student housing and, all the while, picking those gray snow pucks out of my heel. Plus the campus yielded nothing at all to look at to the east: fields, fences and dorms—is there a more desolate landscape to contemplate in the autumn when it’s already under three inches of snow? I thought maybe I’d go find a book somewhere and sit down and read. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in walking around. The wind was picking up, chapping my earlobes and burning my wrists sticking out above my pockets.

When I got into the track between the student housing and the campus buildings, the snow was all tamped down a miscellany of boot/shoe prints, each one smirking with a different crescent of shadow, depending on the angle of the print. Looking at them all, it was easy to imagine the sounds they’d made and the people who’d sunk them. But there was no one around. I passed another Quality Dairy. The puddles in the parking lot were frozen into a milky ice. There was only one car, probably the person working. The dorms loomed unimpressive with stories of mid-afternoon study lamps glaring against each window.

I crossed Grand River at MAC where there was no crosswalk and had to jump over the aisle of slush that had piled up between the car tire tracks. The snow in the median still relatively untrammeled.

Jeff the crustie was out in front of the Bubble (Boba) Tea place, spanging. He was the only person on the sidewalk. I stayed on the median, and walked north, hoping he wouldn’t see me, but on the damn median, I was way too exposed and he called out. Sucker than I am, I turned and crossed over to him, keeping my head down against the wind and so I didn’t make eye contact with him.

The shiny black that Jeff wore almost mocked the white cold around us and as much as I didn’t want to talk, I handed him a cigarette (of course he had none) and lit one myself.

“I didn’t think you were still here.” He said, looking at the cigarette to see what brand it was.

I shrugged. “Where would I go?”

“I thought you were moving to San Fran? That’s what your roommate told me. The one who reads all the comic books. I saw him here the other day.”

“Oh, Dan you mean.” I said, clarifying the roommate out of a sense of duty. “Yeah, I told him that, but, I don’t know. It fell through, I guess.”

“How did it fall through?” Jeff asked, taking a long drag, jealous even of the wind smoking his cigarette. I noticed his knuckles were pink, like pig pink.

“The place we were going to move into didn’t work out. Maybe it’s for the best. I don’t know what I was going to do out there, just work, I guess. I could do that here.”

“Yeah.” He said, looking around. Some girls were coming out of the Bubble Tea place and he asked them for some spare change. Two of them ignored him, but one stopped and gave him a dollar. He thanked her with the kind of individual complement he was so good at. She smiled at him. He asked her name. She demanded to know his name first and I was beginning to feel superfluous before he turned back to me like he hadn’t even been talking to her. “Yeah. There’s nothing in Cali. It’s expensive. Too many yuppies. You wouldn’t like it.”

The girl, taking the slight walked away. Jeff called after her but she didn’t turn around. “She’ll be back,” he said. I wouldn’t have disagreed.

I told him my feet were getting cold and said goodbye but before I could get away, he asked me for a dollar. I gave him another cigarette instead.

I started walking back west on Grand River and it started snowing again. Not the heavy, still, plumb-line snow that had come two nights before when I was looking at the smokestacks, but one of those whirly, premature evening, cold snows. I unrolled my beanie to cover my ears and put my hood up. It was under all these layers that I noticed it, the whole block of stores before the fork in the road at the 7-11 had been torn down. It was where the bank had been or maybe it was that sushi place that never seemed to have anyone in it because it looked fogged and dirty. All that was left were buckled pieces of blacktop and machine treads in the snow. What was it, a week ago I’d been here? Wasn’t it still there then? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything. I looked at the mussed snow and the stack of pipes destined for the ground. What had been here? Was this where that church had been? I stood in the whirling, cold snow, flakes of it actually blowing up my nose, trying to remember what had been where now there was only a frozen porta potty and a faded yellow backhoe.

I started walking again, trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. Things were always changing, but, the whole way home, it wouldn’t leave me alone, the nagging feeling that there’d been something important in that block that I couldn’t remember. I pushed the thought out, thinking I’d remember if I didn’t think about it.

I went under the overpass past Frandor, crossing back in Lansing. Under the bridge, the snow stopped, the air dampened with the warmth of cars passing overhead and I noticed the piece of graffiti on the cement embankment with the initials and the heart. It always made me laugh because both sets of initials were the same. RS+RS and there was something either so vainglorious or incestuous about this it seemed absurd to proclaim this forbidden love in such a public way.

I smiled and the smile brought the memory back. It was winter about six years ago when I was still in high school. It had been a snowy night like this and we’d gone to the used bookstore and, finding nothing, written the story of the night on the flyleaf of a George Eliot book and put it back on the shelf. I’d gone back many times and, every time, slipped the swollen hardcover from the shelf to read what she’d written years before, to see that looped handwriting—so unlike my own jagged EKG scrawl—and to remember that evening when I’d driven up in my mom’s Buick on the ice, convinced any minute I was going to slide off the road. We’d gone to Denny’s and watched the snow pile up on the newspaper vending machines, drinking interminable cups of coffee and then we’d walked on the snowy sidewalks to the bookstore and she wrote in the Silas Marnier because there were so many copies and it looked like a book no one would care about.

I thought someone would’ve bought it before they tore the place down, but now the bookstore was a broken lot with the bundles of pipes and the frozen backhoe partially raised as if shielding itself from an impending blow and the book was probably frozen in a dumpster, maybe frozen open to that page with her writing and mine and our names, frozen open to that moment.

When I got back, I opened the door on the old carpet smell of the house and the sound of the wind soughing in the gutters and over the broken roof tiles outside; moan-whistling. I left my coat on and the light off and went and sat down on the couch. Outside, I could see the red lights from the smokestacks on the other side of downtown, they seemed to flare up in each gust of wind. Gradually, I stretched out on the couch as if feeling my way through the dark for something important and, still feeling, fell asleep.  

The Sacred and the Profane (Infested Part 2)

If you haven't read the previous entry "Infested" I suggest you do before reading this, it's sure to make what follows that much more cringe-inducing. Enjoy!

West End Road starts along highway 299 and veers down into a valley, dropping, somewhat abruptly into a swale of redwoods. When you’re on your bike, the green-toned shadow of the trees rises up to meet you as the road drops. Even though the ride is smooth, there is a toppling involved going down the hill. Moving under the heavy shade is like jumping into a sylvan lake. The heat of the day is overwhelmed by the layers of shadow which is dappled on the road in thick acrylic drips like a Pollock; some of them are so dark they look like pot holes. This effect is produced by the piling of the mixed coniferous and deciduous canopy. First there are the hefty ferns hanging palm-like in green bursts along the ground, there are the dappled oaks and their broad lobed leaves. Above those there are some tangled and mossy shore pines, knobby pine cones growing directly from the branches like sores, and above these, a few scattered redwoods. Each one of these trees throws its own shadow onto the street when the sun is overhead. In places where only the ferns or the oaks cover the sun, the shadow is lime or kelly green and it goes down the light spectrum with each overlap. Green becomes blue green and then blue gum and finally an inky midnight blue, each layer adding, also, a cooling effect. The deeper the shade, the cooler it feels. Imagine the opposite of a spotlight, a beam of cool dimness, now multiply it hundreds of times, but maintaining a fragility which is set to stirring even in the slightest breeze. On the street, while above ground, you simultaneously are at the bottom of an algal pond, drifting through kelp forests and under lily pads.

When you come out of the swale, the trees sweep out and reveal a golden valley of dry and sun-battered grasses. Grasshoppers can be seen flinging themselves up and catching the light of the sun like coins tossed into a summer afternoon fountain, flashing brightly before falling toward the water. There are frequently deer nosing through the grasses and no matter the time of day, there is always a just-before-evening quality to the light in the valley. Though the road passes a few homes, no one is ever out, if they are, they’re way back in the distant fields, so far you have to squint to see them. When you do, they seem to be waving. It’s hard to be sure, but, to be safe, you wave back anyway. A few farm animals nose the fences. Curious sheep and horses glance up from where they’re chewing, but seem too contended to bother about investigating you and your aimless waving arm.

Where the road comes to a fork, the Mad River sloshes through its gravely bed. In warm weather, whole families sit along its banks, children wading out into the stone-colored water and dogs swimming silently with their heads straining through the ripples and wavelets, dragging entire branches like beavers building a dam. There’s music playing, but it’s far enough away from the top of the bridge where you cross over this scene, the melody can barely be discerned, but the words have been worn away like the magnetic dust which eventually falls off videos and cassettes leaving only static and a watery beat.

At the end of the bridge the village of Blue Lake begins with it’s customary turn-of-the-century logging architecture, boxy, primary and half-covered in multi-paned windows of old, wobbly glass. There are no curtains up because in many of the buildings, there is nothing to see behind the windows but the afternoon darkness which, seen from the outside always reflects back as a sort of pewter. Downtown there’s a bar, a cafe which is permanently closed and gradually reverting to abandonment and a few large municipal-looking building that have been converted into community centers of various stripes with swollen doors and rusty locks which are shot back no more than once a week. The main street (I have no idea what’s it’s called), rises about a quarter block and levels out in a neighborhood so residential, it’s difficult to believe it could be anywhere near a bar or any place without a swing set in the backyard. There’s nothing to do in Blue Lake except look at the creaky Victorian houses and imagine living in them. Waking up with the perpetually evening sun shining in the windows, feeling the worn wood under your feet, listening to the gentle squeaks and pops of the stairs, coffee already brewing in a tiled kitchen that smells perpetually of drying dill and basil. The dull peaceful feeling of Saturday exuding from the place where the sun is shining on an old cat and an older rug.

But there’s no reason to keep going into Blue Lake and peering into people’s windows, cursing under my breath about the exorbitant housing market. Back by the river there’s a berm that sits slightly above a field, creating an embankment that looks out over the mountains to the north east, the field, wide and blank, acting like an earthen reflecting pool, a mantle spread out from the shoulders of the mountains. The bank is full with the spice of crushed and goldenrod grasses, deer urine and hay. A place to lean up against the afternoon and to study and memorize a moment of summer.

I get off my bike and I go to sit down, but I find myself hesitating. The last time I sat here, a few months ago, it couldn’t have been a day later when my back started itching and became red and swollen. The swelling quickly moved up and down my body in tracks, bloody red dribbling things. Tunnels, apparently. The doctor at the walk-in clinic confirmed my internet-produced fear: scabies. I had to slather myself in Permethrin. My wife and daughter did the same. We bagged up everything, left it on the porch for a week and then put the Permethrin on again which, by the way, is slightly toxic. My daughter was 5 months old. The whole thing was a nightmare. I never figured out where the scabies came from, I assumed the bus, but, this field. I had sat here just before...No. That didn’t make sense. Scabies are pestilential. They swarm in warm, wet and dark areas, in fetid areas, dirty jackets, the kind of beanies one finds on the playground and kicks out of spite for the vermin they are surely infested with. Scabies, like lice or crabs live on people, secreted away on their persons somewhere like an embarrassing secret. They feel karmic. You get them, it’s accidental, it’s personal; unless you live in squalor you can’t help but to feel you did something to deserve them. Whatever they are, however I got them, it was not from this sunny, robust and healthy field. This place was quite possibly the exact opposite of a scabies breeding ground.

I ignore the sense of caution that feels so out of sync with the beautiful afternoon, sit down in the long grass and read “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by DH Lawrence. In the story, a respectable middle class family of three brothers and a sister lose their means and must vacate the only home they’ve ever known. The brothers, somewhat assured a living, poor as it may be, are not much bothered by the imminent loss of their home. But the sister, Mabel—a name that must’ve translated better in England in 1922—is left to move in with a sister, forced into her employ. She is later seen from up on a hill by a friend of the family, a doctor, walking deliberately into a pond until she disappears under the water “in the dusk of the dead afternoon”. What a contrast to the gentle stirrings of the field, the unbroken cerulean sky, the summer warmth and the bright the trill of bugsong. I had been down to the bottom of the pond in the swale of trees on West End Road, but it had been a clean decent. There had been none of the muck, the “foul, earthy water” described in the story.

Mable is saved, or she saves the man who rescues her or they both fall prey to their baser instincts and deprive the heroic act of all validity or perhaps they both drowned after all. What else can happen to two people and a body of water? If it wasn’t one of these things, it was all of them.

After the story, I stay for a moment, comparing the view of the mountains to the stagnant English pond I’ve been reading about. Even on the warm, dry day, I feel like I’ve got a little murky water in my ears, a little of the rotten clay under my fingernails, some algae in my hair. The feeling makes me itch, but I ignore it, hop on my bike and take the cleansing ride back through the shade pools and sun baths along the road back home. It’s a classic summer afternoon, difficult to leave, but fading, very naturally, to quiet in the evening. That’s how all long summer days shake you off: When the sun finally sets, the warmth under your skin makes the sheets cool and sleep comes on so gently, it takes you by surprise, somewhat like finding yourself tossed up into the air and then, pop, you’re asleep, back under the cool weight of the evening.

I wake the next morning and I itch. I check in the mirror and the red patch on my lower back is there again, a large histaminic welt. I rake my fingernails over it and the sensory trill over the swollen patch is luxurious, but provides no relief. If anything, it only intensifies the desire to scratch. I curse myself for lying down in the same field, but, it doesn’t make sense, how could it happen again? Scabies can’t live in fields and last time, when I went to the walk-in clinic, I remember the doctor showing the intern the tracks on my body, the same as those coagulating under my skin again, and describing them as textbook scabies. Was I on to something? Had I discovered some new specie of scabie or were they another parasite that mimicked the action of scabies and, thus, had the same effect? Maybe it was chiggers? Or the mite that lives in hay? It had to be something like this because the Permethrin had effectively treated it. Therefore, it must’ve been something similar in body type and vulnerability to scabies, right?

I went off to work, found a routine in the summer again, rode around some more on my bike, but the rash was worsening, surpassing the point it had reached at its most extravagant the last time I’d had it. My ankles, thighs, the back of my knees, lower back, upper back, arms and chest were inflamed. In some places, like my lower back, the rash was total, a whole raised area of skin, like a red histaminic raft on a pale, sunless sea. In other places, like my arms, the rash was particulate, looking like dense clusters of chicken pox and along my wrists and in between my fingers it was swelling into clear, separate cysts. That seemed filled with the very fluid of itch. I had to avoid touching any part of my body for fear of setting off the itch which was of the maddening variety that made one want to rub against a loose nail or take a piece of sand paper and just burnish the maddeningly ticklish swelling away. If I began scratching, I couldn’t stop. I’d scratch until little pores would tear open and drops of blood would form on the skin. Even then, there was no relief. I wanted to savage the rash, raking my fingers over it until I’d removed most of the offensive feeling, leaving myself with a ripped and bleeding back, arm or leg.

Last time the rash had the civility to stop below my neck, this time, when I took a shower—which really brought out the itch—I could feel it in patches on my neck, nose and even on my eye. I stood under the hot water with the rash glowing like an anemone flush with sea water at high tide, feeling itch everywhere. This comparison made me think back to the story and Mable walking into the cold and sepulchral horse pond. The kind of place you imagine full of goose shit and the gassy stink of decaying willow leaves. It felt as if in reading of it, I’d been down to the bottom of the pond, too and had come up covered in the scabrous muck that caused the itch. It was like there was something psychosomatic to it.

Surely this wasn’t scabies again. I couldn’t have gotten it from a field (or even an imaginary pond). It wasn’t chiggers. It wasn’t mites. Dammit. It had to be some kind of plant. Poison oak, maybe? It would make sense. After all, there had been plenty of plants on the berm that I’d lain in. We didn’t have poison oak where I grew up, so I wasn’t really accustomed to looking for it. Had I really lain down in a patch of it? Was it possible I had been so stupid?

Yes. Emphatically yes. The next day, I took Gina who was better at identifying rash-inducing plants to Blue Lake. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car when she declared, “Oh my GOD that’s a whole patch of poison oak! I can see it from here! Some me where you laid down.” and I pointed to the middle, the dead center of the patch. Gina repeated what was by now becoming her mantra “OH MY GOD!”

By this point, I could only think this funny, really hilarious. Twice now, I had come and pretty much rolled around in a largish patch of poison oak. When I went to the walk-in clinic last time, they’d told me I had scabies. They told me I needed to coat not only myself but my wife and daughter in Permethrin. We had to put everything in bags. We had to vacuum, rub everything down in bleach. We had to induce compulsive-level cleaning and rabidly rub mildly toxic medicine all over ourselves. I drove myself crazy thinking about the little bugs burrowing under my skin. I was manic trying to figure out where I’d gotten them (scabies, after all, is not an ‘it’ but a ‘them’) from and too paranoid to touch my baby daughter for weeks for fear I should infect her (if she wasn’t already). For nothing. All for nothing. I’d never had scabies. The first time, like this time, I’d had poison oak. I tried to muster some kind of anger toward the walk-in clinic, but it hadn’t been their fault. If I’d gone in declaring that I thought I had poison oak, I’m sure the harassed doctor would’ve just as easily agreed with that prognosis as she had with the scabies I’d suggested. Too bad about that intern, though. She was going to be calling poison oak rashes scabies for the foreseeable future. I could only hope that others would be more savvy and avoid the doctor altogether, opting for th traditional at-home treatment.

I went and bought a bottle of calamine and antihistamine pills, but the rash was spread so thick, neither really did anything and I spent another week or so waking up periodically in the night to itch, rub more lotion into the rash and press burning cold ice packs against my skin, but this time, it went away without the Permethrin and now at least, I have some idea what poison oak looks like, but I’m not going to take any chances. From now on, I’ll stay on my bike, drifting up and down West End Road, sinking through its shade-flooded valleys and rolling along its susurrating golden afternoon fields without exposing myself to the “foul, earthy water”. The rash may have not been produced by a neurotic reaction to the DH Lawrence story, but I still felt Mabel’s story embodied the poisonous side of nature. When I thought of myself, laying in a path of poison oak and reading about the horrors of drowning in a cold, stagnant pond, it seems as if there’s some connection to what nature can do and what it was doing as I lay there oblivious to its ravaging. Even the brightest, most innocuous landscape has the potential to become a gray English pond of rotting leaves and cold rain and even July sunbathing can come to feel like drowning, provided there are enough poisonous plants around.

At least I can say I never really had scabies now, but I don’t know that’s it much better to say that I got poison oak twice from the same place.

Infested

I was trying to make sure everyone understood their assignment, crossing the room, leaning over shoulders, checking in and generally making a nuisance of myself, but my mind was on my back which has started to itch in this severe, crispy way that made me want to rake my fingers over it or, better yet, to pull off my shirt, lay down in the parking lot and ask someone to slowly drag me over the roughest patch of concrete. But, in front of the class, I could only give myself an occasional furtive pat which did nothing but send the itch signals stampeding through my mind.

“Yes, that’s it; can’t you see?” My mind was trying to communicate to my hands. “Scratch at this! Scratch at this for all you’re worth!” Must’ve been the new detergent. I ignored it and it subsided. It didn’t, however, go away.

When I got home, after scratching a bit on the bus, shimmying around in the seat—probably how I got this itch in the first place—I hiked up my shirt in front of the bathroom mirror. My lower back was an involuted mass of histamine swelling, like my body had decided to grow another brain just above my ass.

“Gina!” I yelled, hoping a second opinion would be less worrying, because, with my head turned around looking into the mirror everything looked worse, or so I hoped.

“Ohh that’s bad” she said, before she’d even gotten through the bathroom door. Together we marveled at how red and swollen it looked. “Something just irritated it.” Gina said and, to show her solidarity with my pain, she rubbed some lotion on the rash for me and, to stand by her point that the rash was some slight irritation and nothing more, she rubbed the leftover lotion onto her face, physically addressing the tacit question of whether this might not be something worse, something contagious and disgusting.

“Wait!” I started to yell, and then dropped my voice—Esme, our six month-old daughter, was asleep in the other room. “What if it’s contagious!” Gina waved away my concerns as unfounded. As usual, I was overreacting. She rubbed the leftover lotion vigorously into her face, smiling. Nothing to worry about.

...

Friday, I woke up, not itching, but still swollen, still red and with a ticklish feeling. I took a bike ride and picked up some hydrocortizone almost as an after thought—even that didn’t really seem necessary. I’d use it once or twice, like that Nyquil I bought the last time I had the ‘flu and then it’d get forgotten under the bathroom sink. I was surprised when I got home and put it on and it didn’t seem to do anything. “Hmm, still itches.” I said scratching the cream into the inflammation, hoping the intense contact with the cream would result in something.

Saturday, working for the bakery, out doing deliveries, I noticed I had a slightly different rash breaking out across the tops of my hands. Rather than being a single red plateau, these were islands, blistery islands, almost like zits, but less opaque, like a cyst. In one place there was something that looked like an inflamed scratch, a jagged line only, like everything else, it itched. I drove and scratched at the back of my hands. Muttering about the allergic reaction I was having. Clearly, the itch, the inflammation, the infection or whatever was spreading, but how the hell did it spread from my lower back to the top of my hands and the inside of my wrist? Was it poison oak? I hadn’t been near the woods in a week. Was it all the flour from work? Had a year of close contact with bread resulted in a gluten intolerance? I was grasping at straws, but I had nothing else. But even with this horrific rash breaking out all over, I figured I just needed to put some more cream on it and maybe get some rest.

Getting older brings so many maladies with it, I scarcely pay attention to the individual ones anymore. I had woken up at 3:30 to get to the bakery. I felt lousy all over. My eyelids were dried and felt jammed like rusted storefront shutters. My ears had a slight ringing that sounds like a distant alarm when you don’t get enough sleep and drink too much coffee and I was farting like crazy. I felt like an old scabrous dog: itching and farting. The itching, I reasoned on my way home from work, was just a specific symptom of a more generalized decay. I mentioned this to Gina by way of my usual Saturday afternoon ‘how do you stand me?’ monologue. Something about waking up too early on Saturday makes me feel particularly vile and hideous by the afternoon. As we talked, I scratched myself and whined piteously.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel like a damn dog scratching like this.” Gina laughed at this and reminded me that I’d been scratching myself nearly since we’d met.

“Remember Argentina?” She laughed. “My boss when I was babysitting didn’t even want me coming in after I told her about your itching. She was convinced you had scabies or something.”

At this, a dull lightbulb flared, not the strong incandescent kind that come with a good idea but a naked bulb hanging in a basement, illuminating something awful lurking in the shadows. Scabies, that was something I’d hadn’t considered. By this point in my itching, I’d Googled all kinds of word combinations that seemed to encompass my symptoms. I’d played Scrabble on the internet with words like ‘rash, inflammation, hands, causes, treatments, blisters, swelling, redness, allergy, psoriasis and dermatitis’ all of which yielded those ‘top ten’ lists of common skin aliments, common treatments, common causes, etc. They had names like:

• 7 Worst Rashes!
• 4 Things You Don’t Want to Infect You!
• 5 Reasons you Itch like a Damn Dog!
• 6 and ¾ Symptoms of Psoriasis!

Comparing my rash to the pictures on the internet was profoundly depressing. I was beginning to resemble the inflamed bastards with their expressions of quiet sufferng, but no matter what diagnosis I gave myself, the problem persisted. The itch defied categorization. It only looked vaguely like anything I’d seen on the internet and usually only had about 3/4ths of the associated symptoms. After Gina mentioned it, I decided to type in ‘scabies’. It was going out on a limb, but it was something else I hoped I could rule out.

The images of scabies looked slightly worse that what I had. Inhabitants of the ninth circle of hell stared back at me from the screen, covered with oozing pustules and rouged and swollen burrows, like wiggly track marks. Just looking at the poor bastards made me itch, but this time there was something sympathetic about the reaction. As I read about the symptoms, I felt myself becoming more and more desperate, which was a sure indication that I had what I was looking at. When previously reading about the symptoms of psoriasis and eczema, I found myself overextending to try and make my symptoms match what I was reading, with the scabies this wasn’t necessary. I had everything it said I would have, everything, that is that indicated a ‘highly contagious infestation’ for which Web MD recommended cleaning every kind of fabric the afflicted had come into contact with. As I read I looked around the room. The carpet floor, my daughter’s blanket, the rugs, the clothes, the fabric of the couch. It was impossible not to imagine the scabrous bastards crawling all over everything. If it was scabies. I was screwed, worse yet, my family was screwed.

Gina was still laughing remembering how her former employer thought I had scabies when I motioned her over to show her the picture I’d found of them that looked very much like what was on my wrist. As she looked at it, I raised my wrist alongside the monitor, in an awful display of similarity. She stopped laughing and, she too started looking around the room, in particular at where our daughter was playing, surrounded as she was by the potentially infested fabric of her baby blanket.

“Oh my God,” she said, showing dismay for the first time, “after I touched your back that time, I rubbed my face!”

“Wait,” I said, interrupting her and my own thoughts which were racing ahead to all kinds of awful quarantine scenarios. I began to read the screen. “There’s a test, rub a marker…. alcohol.” I didn’t bother reading it, but left the details to Gina and ran off to get the makeshift scabies test components.

When I came back, she told me what to do. Rub the marker over the sores and then use rubbing alcohol to wipe it away. If there’s a dot of ink that won’t be wiped away, you’ve got scabies. We conducted the test twice, but each time, the result wasn’t clear. Some ink remained, but it didn’t seem like enough to be of consequence. “Besides,” I argued. “That’s just where the skin is broken from scratching. Of course it’ll leave a mark there.

Don’t ask me how we did it, but despite all the evidence to the contrary, we mutually convinced ourselves, I didn’t have scabies and went for a walk! Not just a little stroll but a rollicking Saturday afternoon walk, downtown and back. And worse still, I carried our daughter in the carrier, where her tender skin would be pressed right up against mine for hours! Looking back now, I want to scream at this lunacy, but my protests go unheeded and that foolhardy couple goes walking out the door, wanting to think themselves safe so badly did they ignored even that most faithful of Cassandras, the internet.

...

I think it possible that the news was just too overwhelming. The diagnosis too severe. Scabies? Who gets scabies? Sure I was not the cleanest of individuals, but it’s not like I was sleeping on couches found discarded in alleys with suspicious stains and faint noisome odors. It’s not like I’d been staying in an abandoned house, sleeping on a pile of mattresses found in the basement. I hadn’t been in any dumpsters lately. What made the scabies so impossible was that I’d never gotten them before when I’d been doing all the things I’ve listed. I used to eat from the trash, spend excessive amount of time in squalid settings and go for days, even weeks without bathing while wearing the same clothes I slept in. When I was in 8^th grade. I wore my Operation Ivy shirt every day of the school year and I don’t think I ever washed it. In 9^th grade, because I had to get up early, I took to sleeping in my clothes. In college, the trend continued, but now so far from my mom’s free laundry service, I eschewed the entire practice of washing. In short, I used to be filthy and I’d never gotten scabies. Now I woke up and showered almost every day. I changed my clothes. I wore shirts with collars. How the hell was it that only now I got scabies? Had they lain dormant, waiting until I’d had a family they could infest as well? All the websites said they were usually transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. Whose skin had I contacted? Show me where and when. It just wasn’t possible, but the more I thought about it, it was.

It’s not the most common scenario, but scabies can be transmitted in fabric, especially in institutions where infestations might not be noticed or treated right away like prisons and rest homes. While I hadn’t been in any such place recently, I’d been on a close approximation: The Redwood Transit Bus.

Because I’d braved all kinds of dirty scenarios and never had any ill effects, I’m not squeamish about germs or dirt or unwashed hands. The one aspect of filth that I try to avoid, and not because I’m afraid of it, is stink. Even in my unwashed years, I made an effort to avoid any kind of noxious odor: that awful mattress that got left in the flooded basement, the armpit infection a friend developed, people’s feet, vinegar in any of its putrid forms, halitosis and the incontinent. The latter I’d been increasingly encountering on the RTS bus. Probably twice a month, riding back and forth to work, I’d find myself seated too near someone who’d crapped or pissed themselves who didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to do anything about it. Each time this happened, I noticed something awful. The offender would get off somewhere along the line and, within the next few stops, someone else, usually a fairly clean and nice-looking person would sit right where the incontinent had been, as if they were sinking into their own couch at home. I always wanted to say something, but how do you word that?

“Excuse me, ma’am, but you’re sitting in a seat that, well, the guy who just vacated it, well, I’m pretty sure he’d recently shit himself. The smell might not be too obvious anymore, but if you do some olfactory casting about, I’m sure you’ll soon discover all the evidence you need. You might want to take my seat. I’m about to get off anyway.”

A few times, I myself had sat down in a seat that had a lingering cloacal quality. But, because my experience had led me to believe such interactions were unpleasant, but ultimately benign, I didn’t think much of it. Now, it seemed, I had my answer. If I’d gotten the scabies from anywhere, it was from the bus, not necessarily from someone incontinent, but someone who had such a bad infestation the mites had been raining off of them onto the seat, waiting for me to get on and, so trustingly, take the open seat.

“Damn those padded upholstered seats!” I shouted, after returning from the walk and reading how scabies is difficult to transmit through hard or smooth surfaces, preferring fabric or hair the way lice do. “Why did they ever switch over from those hard plastic seats buses used to have?”

It was like we just needed the walk to process things and by the time we got home, both Gina and I were convinced what I had was scabies. Gina bathed Esme and put her to bed, hoping such preemptive measures could stop the dread mites from spreading. I sat in front of the computer, scratching and obsessing.

The internet suggested all kinds of things to combat my infestation, but, unfortunately, I’d have to go to the doctor to get a prescription if I wanted to be sure to get rid of them. I rubbed tea tree oil all over myself while Gina started striping the rugs off the floor and the covers off the chairs. She took all the pillows and blankets and made me sleep on the couch. I closed all the self-diagnosis windows on the computer and opened Youtube, searched, Choking Victim’s song “Infested”. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but I remembered the words. I sat back and listened, scratching and smiling with complicity.

I’m sure I hate ‘em, there ain’t no maybe/ body lice and crabs, headlice and scabies.

In the morning, first thing, we headed over to the walk-in clinic, one of those places that exist solely for people who are convinced they don’t need insurance and that any rash, cough or shooting pain will eventually go away on its own. To see such a place through the gloom of Sunday morning is really a powerful argument for finding a family practice but, of course, who has the money for that?

The clinic opened at 8, and we did the thing we always do which was that we got there just early enough to be at the back of the line of desperation before the place opened. Anything that was going to bring people out early on a foggy Sunday morning to stand around a parking lot in Eureka was surely going to be bad. One lady coughed like she had TB, an old lady chatted with someone else about her bladder infection. There were various symptoms passing between these people like witticisms at a 19^th century dinner party. We stayed by the car.

When the doors opened and everyone ran to claim their place, I found myself predictably near the end of the line, between the old lady with the bladder and the woman who couldn’t stop coughing. A guy with a clipboard was moving down the line, asking everyone, in a way as to completely dispel any lingering illusions of privacy, what we were there for. I didn’t bother to beat around the bush. When he came up to me, I told him, ‘scabies’ and almost enjoyed watching everyone, including him, shrink slightly away from me.

I was told there’d be an hour wait. Gina and Esme were waiting in the car, not wanting to risk exposure to the miasma of germs and bacteria swirling around that waiting room. There was a cafe nearby and I went over to get a coffee to calm my nerves. Gina made me get decaf—probably for the best.

After an hour of hanging around the walk-in clinic parking lot, they called us in. When we were all ensconced our little examination room, a girl, no more than 20, peaked her head in, she was observing the doctor today and would we mind if she observed my case. “Sure, join the party,” I waned to tell her. As little as I was concerned with my image, I understand why people don’t want to tell everyone they have scabies. For one thing, it’s contagious. If you told me you had scabies a few months ago, I might still consciously move a few feet away from you and go wash my hands at the first opportunity. Furthermore, well, it’s got that association with filth. I was surprised to find all these things online telling me that it wasn’t only the lowest of the low that got scabies and to not take the diagnosis too hard. It seemed the biggest blow for most people is psychological. Not only do they feel dirty, there’s the knowledge that they’ve got bugs burrowing through their skin. But really, we’ve always got bugs burrowing through our skin, it’ just that certain varieties are a little more pernicious. I didn’t mind the observation, but I wasn’t about to tell all my friends I’d recently seen that I had scabies. It just makes you sort of untrustworthy in a way, like you’ve allowed yourself to be colonized by bugs.

I had tried not to harbor any illusions, but when the doctor came into the room, I couldn’t help but to hope that maybe she’d tell me that, as much as it might look like scabies, I’d just had an allergic reaction to something. But when I told her I had scabies, she just nodded and began showing the intern—or whatever she was—the telltale signs, making me strip down so that they could both marvel at this thorough example of an infestation.

The doctor prescribed the Permethrin I needed, but when I asked about my family, she told me that she’d have to see them, too in order to prescribe more. The cost of ‘seeing them’ would be 100 bucks a person. I considered protesting, but Gina told me she’d call the open door clinic and see what she could do—they’d probably be willing to help a breast-feeding mother by just sending in the prescription. The doctor even told me, sotto voce, that she was prescribing the largest size and including instructions for female and well as male application, wink wink.

Next it was time to worry about the insurance covering the medication. I’d read on the walk-in clinic’s website that they accepted Medi-Cal, but when I got there, I had to sign a waiver saying that I acknowledged that they didn’t accept Medi-Cal and would have to pay out of pocket. I’d been told my insurance would probably cover the Permethrin, but, I was expecting the same thing to happen again. This is usually what happens with insurance. They do all they can to avoid paying for anything. At least, for once, I wasn’t paying for the insurance anyway, so if it gave me nothing, it wasn’t like I’d put anything into it.

I was so happy to find that the Permethrin was free, I didn’t worry much about the size of the tube that didn’t look like it would be enough for three people even if one of them was a baby. When I got home, as usual, Gina took the disappointment in stride. After all, I was the one who actively had the bugs, shouldn’t I be the priority here? She agreed, but I understood her reluctance. I’d read somewhere that an infestation could take a few weeks to display symptoms and she had rubbed the lotion from my rash onto her face and then there was Esme who, as a breast-feeding baby, was still attached to her most of the time. If Gina had it, it was certain Esme would get it too. I tried not to picture the wriggly bastards flocking eagerly to my daughter’s soft and probably much more vulnerable skin.

We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the house. We bagged up everything that could be bagged and sprayed Clorox on anything that couldn’t. I wiped down the floors with bleach water while Gina took Esme for a walk, but as I cleaned, I couldn’t shake the notion that I was undoing my own work. I hadn’t put the medication on yet so I was still crawling with scabies. I’d thought about putting the Permethrin on first, but then I would’ve been touching all the things that potentially had scabies on them, as well. Despite this concern, when I finished the cleaning and the whole house seethed with bleach and Clorox fumes, I felt better. It was hard to imagine anything, no matter how tenacious living through the disinfectant—even I had to open the windows and go outside.

That night, I put the Permethrin on, taking care to rub it into every pore beneath my chin. I’d hoped it would tingle or at least smell like an insecticide, but it was about as sensational as an application of Jergens. I went back to the couch to sleep for the night. As I lay there, still itching, I couldn’t help but to wonder if I’d gotten a defective tube.

After the application of the Permethrin I was safe to go back to work. It was for the best, if I had to stay home, I would’ve done nothing but sit around and worry. I woke up and took a shower after leaving the Permethrin on for the maximum time of 12 hours. I couldn’t even tell if I was washing it all off. There was no residue or any hint otherwise that I’d gone to sleep slathered in toxic goop.

Even though I wasn’t contagious, I stayed as far away from everyone at work as possible. Not only to avoid an outbreak but also because I was beginning to look scabrous. The pimples on my wrist had swollen to pustules. I had an inflamed and sweaty plateaus on the back of either hand. Despite the medicine, I could swear the bastards were spreading.

I was relieved to get a call from Gina in the afternoon telling me, after much finageling and calling around, she’d managed to get another tube of Permethrin for her and Esme. When she’d called the local open-door clinic they told her they’d have to see her before prescribing—the same runaround we’d gotten before. She tried to explain that she had no symptoms, but the receptionist wouldn’t accept this. When Gina relented and asked for an appointment, they told her it would be more than a month before they could see her. No wonder people are clogging up the emergency rooms. There’s no where else to go. I could see how something like this, though not necessarily an emergency, would make anyone frustrated enough to just risk the expense and go to the hospital—even with no symptoms. After everything we’d read said everyone who’d been in contact with the afflicted needed to use Permethrin.

By the afternoon, I’d begun to itch like crazy and I felt guilty as hell just being at work, sitting in chair that other people sat in. Using a computer that other people used. Touching things. Would the mites crawl into the mouse pad and wait for another wrist to infest? Was that how I got the bastards in the first place? Maybe I’d been wrong to accuse the bus, maybe I’d gotten scabies from a much more benign place, like the college. My mind went into hypochondriac overdrive. Everything around me could’ve been infested. I started thinking of all the other associate faculty. Who knew where they’d been. I was freaking myself out and I decided to go home.

Over the next week, I continued to have small outbreaks I was convinced were indicative of the Permethrin’s ineffectiveness. I still itched and nothing looked to be receding. If anything, it was swelling and growing more red and involuted as the days went on. I started putting on aloe and tea tree twice a day and showering like a madman. Every time I’d feel itchy, I’d point to it as evidence that nothing was working, but, gradually, the itching and the swelling started to go down. By the time a week had gone by and we were to reapply the Permethrin, I was nearly back to my normal appearance. Other than a few red bumps on Esme that we obsessed over, but turned out to be pimples, nothing developed in anyone else.

It’s now been almost two weeks; today is my last day of class for the semester and it’s looking like infestation has subsided, except for this strange collection of small red bumps on the side of my nose...oh well, it’s probably just another symptom of the larger, more generalized infestation of time, one that, unfortunately no cream can combat which continues to ravage my body. I guess it’s just something I’ll have to get used to—time that is.