Humans
A leather chair is tipped over in the cluttered bedroom. A divorce relic. Lover Monster opens a cedar trunk and shows me the rare coins and a great-grandfather’s Army coat. An aquarium burbles with goldfish. No plastic castles or mermaids. I’m alone with the tall man. Under his flannel sheets with a tuxedo cat at the foot. Snow falls outside the Seattle window. He’s my husband but not legally. In a cathedral, we’d consecrated our marriage with silent vows and strings tied around each other’s fingers.
Now: the burying. My face on his thigh, smelling at the edge where it meets the pelvic bone. Breathing through mildew—what we cut away—babbling and reserving a soft moment. That lust revealed by a checkered vintage shirt—ripped along its smaller rip—shredded through the worn thread, loomed and ironed and dyed and washed and dried. Ripped along the front where the buttons once had purpose: now dangling in a strip. The scabs and those years of spacing out. The pounding that led to spaced-out awareness. Lover Monster wants to feel where my bones fit together.
Three decades earlier, in 1989, I’d met Lover Monster at the San Francisco Auto Repair. A gloom of oil and metal unrest. I was twenty-four to his thirty, and my Plymouth Valiant had a cracked rear brake cylinder. Pushbutton transmission. Fog and mercy and sex. He drove me to the wave organ, a jetty of marble graves played by seawater curves. Six-four in boots.
He said, “Don’t seek out the things that hurt you.” On Dolores Street he shut my door.
Lover Monster disappears for three decades. I worry before we meet in person. How will we feel about our aging, the wearing down of skin and tone? He assures me, “Our bodies have changed, but not the basic mathematics of your elbow. I look at you and parts of you resonate with this fundamental part of what I want to see in a partner.” We become inseparable.
He never forgot our connection in a small room on Dolores Street, my bass amp in the corner, a tabby hiding under the tub. He writes, of his love, “It’s like a string vibrating, making a silent sound that I remember from then. That sound from deep when I’m against the wall and the sky splits open and my arms fall off.”
In June of 2020, Lover Monster transfers job locations and moves into my Portland home with my feral teen and me. All the car tools. His tuxedo cat. The engineering books. A motorcycle helmet. Sparkplugs and feathers. Even his worn-out teddy bear. He plants a Japanese maple in our backyard, and we pick wild berries.
At night he puts a pillow between his legs because he is sixty, and his muscles sometimes clench. He pulls at his thighs to release them. His forearm to his fingertips puzzles my hip bone to my knee cap.
That summer of 2020 I want my days off with Lover Monster. Bam. Focusing on the wound and the need. Sucking on it. Sucking on the need and the open mouth. The hard nub. The urge to hide.
Remember friends? Ambition? His need for speed. Like the bore kit on his motorcycle: he’s sexy, hot, and wild.
And he gets sick on a Friday. He’s had tremors, loss of peripheral vision, and a disturbing MRI test. He holds a coffee cup and his grip loosens. It shatters on the sidewalk. We go to ER on a September day with skies yellow from forest fires. He walks in through the automatic doors. He leaves with me, twelve days later, unable to walk on his own.
Nurse tells us, “He only has three months to live.”
Nurse tells us, “By the time he dies his brain will look like Swiss cheese.”
Nurse tells us, “You two are so cute.”
I watch, appalled, as he goes through spinal taps and other tests that confirm the inevitable: he’s dying of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a variation of mad cow.
A man who just a week before had kayaked with me can no longer touch his finger to his nose without shaking. No cure. Relentless and fatal.
Bats and Humans
In rural Connecticut, bats emerge from the attic of my godmother’s mansion with its peeling wallpaper and unusable tubs. The shadowy disturbances head downhill toward the lake. The brown bats devour flying insects. The females return to suckle their babies in the rafters.
Bats, if loose indoors, risk getting whacked. They roost down the hall from the room hosting a tiger, its head stuffed with sawdust. It’s close to a cabinet with fishing lures and two human skulls, blackened and discolored, and two thigh bones, relics from Yale’s Skull and Bone Society. One severed, mummified hand is saved in a Tupperware container. Abandoned and menacing. A colonial crime. And in the sunlit dining room, a desiccated bat rests on a china plate.
Humans
In the neuro wing I stay with Lover Monster and line empty juice boxes on the windowsill. He wakes in fear, forgetting his legs are strapped to the bed. “Where’s the half of me?”
Nurse says, “He will have good days and bad. He won’t be the same person a month from now.”
Lover Monster tells me the symptoms started a year ago December. “It happens when you see the edge. Like in a mirror, like a reflection.”
“That was what you thought was the disease?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. It’s the glass bending.”
“Are you suffering?” I ask.
“A little bit.”
“Would marrying me for real ease your suffering?”
“Yes.”
Reptiles, Amphibians, and Pink Mice
From Lover Monster, in a letter to me: “My stepdad Smitty was into frogs and lizards. He had his own room in our farmhouse on Queen Anne Hill. The room was full of shelves with Suriname toads, emerald tree frogs, an iguana, and other creatures. To feed these animals he raised crickets, mealworms, and mice. The crickets often escaped and made their way downstairs, chirping from under the kitchen sink. Most of the amphibians would only eat pink mice, the babies, and they were the saddest creatures.”
Humans
From Lover Monster, in a letter to me: “In grade school, Mom would go to the neighborhood drug store and get a box of paper valentine cards. Everyone in the class did the same, writing each person’s name on the card or envelope. There was always one girl I wanted to give me one, and I tried to do something secret to hers, hoping she saw it and felt the same. You are that girl.”
To Lover Monster, in a letter from me: “I don’t feel I deserve anything, but I hope so much to have our thing deepen: you, an only child, and me, a brainy misfit attracted to bad boys. You’re the reformed bad boy with a sweet tooth who’s not afraid of my intensity. Crawling across the floor to you, lighting matches, smelling my way until you grab me and we bite.”
From Lover Monster, in a letter to me: “You have tried to find me for your whole life, but you didn’t know it was me. I am the idea you wished could be real.”
Bats and Frogs
Fringe-lipped bats tune into mating frogs. The male frogs wait in shallow water and croak to attract females, and as the water ripples, the bats find the frogs through echolocation. The louder the frogs croak, the more they are in mortal peril. The fringe on the bats’ mouths neutralizes the toxins on the frogs’ skins. As a child, Lover Monster writes a story about a frog prince. As the happily ever after, the princess kisses the frog and turns into one.
Humans
Friends in masks help me set up the house for the invalid man, clearing out junk from the bedroom, installing metal bed railings, drilling holes for banisters on the stairway. I hang a bell on the bedroom doorknob. Lover Monster can’t be left alone because he might fall. It’s COVID times and if he breaks a limb, he’ll be taken away and die alone. If I’m downstairs, I can rush upstairs to help him at the bell’s bright clang.
The urge increases to suck on lemon drops and to measure time in the soft belly. What gurgles mean what?
The speeding of the misfolded proteins in Lover Monster’s brain. Spreading the disease. Ribboning his cortex. Only two weeks before: hands folded. Stroking my hair. Gripping a steering wheel all day in the big truck. Waiting to—
We peel it off.
Now his right foot dances. His left hand pulses.
Lover Monster is too scared at first to tell me of his mania, when he was lost teen, kicked out of his home, sleeping in the streets. He confesses his fear that I wouldn’t love him. But I’d guessed his mental unrest already, years ago.
He says, “You are a goddess in my totally fucked mind.”
Lover Monster sees black spots and dribbles food on the sheets. The spinning ceiling fan frightens him.
I hire my ex-husband to help me care for the big man. Seeing him lie in the bed that used to be his.
Not knowing what the tongue did. And the hands and the wrapping. That big mess.
Drooling on the sheets. Biting and sweating happy. Now, I sweat fear and pencils.
Lover Monster says to me, when we’re alone, “We made something from nothing. I want us to be back to being whole. I’m twisted sideways. I want us to be whole. Complete. Healthy.”
I slow-dance him to the bathroom.
Bats
My godmother has arranged the dead bat on the dish. Its wings are folded in like a capital M, with the body splayed and distorted. The bats roost in the attic and the guano falls on the wooden floor, but this little bat corpse decorates a floral plate.
Bats have damaged caves and wrecked habitats. Distorted migration patterns. Dying off with white fungus on their dumb little mouths. Bats with their radar, bats with their rabies. Tick-laden bats. They’re killed for magic, as symbols of death and rebirth.
Humans and Pathogens
In the neuro wing, the doctors walk in as our Gloom Team. Lover Monster wakes, attached to IVs and monitors and straps that keep his legs in place. He says to me, “Navigating the forests, you have to make room for clocks.”
Some believe COVID-19 originated with bats and, through an intermediary animal, entered humans. Bats have ancestral viruses. Some think COVID-19 can inflame sections of the brain and activate the dormant prion disease that is killing Lover Monster.
The fluff on Lover Monster’s head. The long tongue.
Before the sickness, Lover Monster writes to me, “Memories of us are beneath the surface. Dark and full. I want to put our broken, crooked bits together.”
At home, as Lover Monster weakens, we move from the bedroom to the futon couch to a borrowed hospice bed. His leg falls off the hospice bed, and he can’t lift it, so I prop it on the piano bench. In his hands, I place roses and lavender.
I record his groans when I might as well be a
Cat, or a
Hamster, a
Turnstile, a
Gnome.
I play Brahms for him and almost apologize for the mistakes.
He clenches his hand on the railing and shakes it. His lasting odor is a white narcotic drool on a travel pillow.
A toddler can bend his legs. Lover Monster can’t. The prion disease spreads exponentially, killing healthy neurons. He merges with the larger animal kingdom, like diseased
Cattle
Sheep
Deer
Elk
Moose
Mink
Cats
Goats
Camels
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease infects only one in a million each year in the United States. I’m shocked Lover Monster is dying from this rare calamity during a global pandemic.
He points to his chest and says, “See how you saved me?” I weep.
Bats
Bat fingers. Claws sewn into the selvage of the sheets. Shave off the fur from beneath the bat’s chin and sprinkle it on a valentine.
Out on the mansion’s concrete patio is a bat cemetery, open air for the bugs and decomposers. My godmother names the dead bats. There’s Fife and Eeyore. Skin flakes off. She tucks the corpses in cabbage leaves.
Black Cats and Humans
I taste Lover Monster’s blood, as I would lick a kitten’s eyes, if I were its mother, knocked up at age one and stricken with pain, nursing one newborn as another pushes out. I lick Lover Monster’s cut as I would suck my arm to quell the blood from a thorn, as I would chew a scab on the playground. We consume blood and eat pieces of ourselves to keep their magic intact.
Lover Monster says, “My bones are yours. And the muscle holding us together when we are deep in each other.”
Eye of newt, black rhino powder, rat snake soup. Slit a goat’s neck. Drop clipped hair in a jar.
People can get mad cow from eating human brains. Albinos in Tanzania are hunted for their limbs.
Black cat snores on Lover Monster’s legs.
Lover Monster’s penis shrinks. I wash it like a baby’s. Gently, so it doesn’t reek of piss.
After Lover Monster dies, the state pathologist calls because he wants to cut Lover Monster’s skull open and add his name to the infectious disease registry. I confess I licked Lover Monster’s blood. Would I get the disease, too?
The pathologist says, “Not likely.”
Alone in my queen-sized bed. Lover Monster’s comforter above me and his mattress below. Black cat spreads grit across sheets where I had trailed human ambrosia, my thigh to Lover Monster’s. I wake, crying, and touch the sheets, sensing Lover Monster’s body.
Bats
Bat intestines. Bat liver. Bat spleen. Mount them on a wooden plank with metal pins and they quiver at night. They sense the mummy hand up the circular staircase. It’s locked in a metal cabinet by mildewed photo albums and maps and fishing lures. The mummy hand is gray and leathered.
Humans
Temporary curtains separate the dining room from the living room. We create a womb for the hospice bed, for the man who may not know he’s human. Sudden sounds, like a doorbell, frighten Lover Monster. The hospice bed has rubber sheets.
The dining room table is covered with flowers and medicine bottles. Wipes and potions. I feed Lover Monster morphine in spoonfuls of my raspberry jam.
I lean my head by his. His blue-opal eyes can no longer focus.
I don’t know if he can see.
I say, “If you’re scared, smell me and know you’re safe. You’re going to another plane. I will find you.”
He says, “You smell so good.”
Nurse comes in the last night of his life. She criticizes me, “He looks uncomfortable. You didn’t clean out his throat. We can’t put on his pants after he’s dead.”
I start to panic.
Nurse says, “Do you want a hug?”
“No,” I say. I cinch Lover Monster’s worn cloth belt around my waist.
Rose placed in one hand. Lavender in the other. Twenty-four days to death. The doctors promised three months. We hoped for a year. A cure.
Lover Monster promised he would never leave me, but he does. His wings: burned. The myth rots. I want the muscle and voice. A doctor cuts open his skull, and strangers smoke him to the sky.
Red lips on fire. Pink tongue flares to ash. Stained teeth meet smoke, his skin: our air.
I’m left with one leather boot. One box of ash. One leather boot. Another. His skin is not the skin in a word. His ashes are not the bones I crushed.
The night after he dies, Lover Monster crouches at the foot of our bed. “Take me to the ocean,” he says.
“You don’t have a body,” I say. And he disappears.
I wake with these words: “I met my peaceful other. I met my ferocious other. Some people see only one.”
