I don’t know how long I knelt there, maggots pouring from my mouth. Toilet water spattered, dripping off my eyes and nose and mouth. The water rose several inches as I worked, until it was almost to my face. I wanted to close both eyes, but I couldn’t, I had to keep watching the maggots, a twisting mass that seemed on the verge of coalescing only to break apart again, long plump maggots tumbling by the dozen from my mouth. I screwed one eye open. Had to be sure none of them escaped, maggots drawing into a brain-like mass and drifting apart, an intake and an exhalation, water spattering.
At last my mouth felt cleaned out. I flushed, then JFCP EB0YBS RQGVF
one lightbulb was enough, no matter that two were burned out. Gray fuzzed their upper halves — I wished my wife would be more attentive to the dusting. But it was my job to buy the bulbs and replace them, so we were about even.
I craned my neck, peering one way then another into the mouth cavity.
I plucked the last few maggots and tossed them in the bowl. The last few loose ones, I mean. Then I went to work on five or six at the root of my tongue, half-buried in the pink tissue, flailing fat bodies that I sheared off with my right thumbnail. The other halves stayed buried, creamy white circles staring up from under my tongue like a row of eyes.
Hard to know.
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I mean, sometimes I wonder. For instance, about my wife. She’s a dental technician, and one thing I do worry about is AIDS. I’m sure if I brought up my concerns, she’d just come back with a bunch of statistics. You hear stories, though. Maybe more in the past than now.
Facts, though. What can be verified? Because the maggots were part of our problem. I mean, even if my wife didn’t know about them — I hoped she didn’t—I knew about them, and me not saying anything was what I’d seen referred to in a magazine as emotional infidelity.
So lets talk facts. Say for instance I didn’t have the maggots before I went to Iraq.
What I’m saying is, it could be AIDS or Iraq. Could be both, or something else altogether. Maybe it is her. And even if I suspec8MRCSQ/// B2CR60#T2YM W6SRJDV0
say, percentage-wise, it’s weighed significantly in my corner — it really could be her. The facts could reveal it. And even if they couldn’t, isn’t it possible — I’m just asking — that on some more profound level she was connected? Not the cause of it — and not in a blame-placing sense, I’m just trying to work it out — but isn’t it possible that she’s a factor among the millions of factors?
I know I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment. I’ve been meaning to. Sometimes I meet other guys who’ve served and we talk about this and that, and at last I just come right out and ask — do they have any weird symptoms? Well, sure, everyone’s got weird symptoms. I guarantee he’ll nod. But then the guy — this hypothetical serviceman — never goes further. Never. The two of us just stare into each other’s eyes and shut down.
I need to tell someone about the maggots eventually. Tell someone or die, those are my choices. I just don’t feel ready yet.
The dangers we face are constantly changing.
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When my wife and I kiss now, I won’t let her tongue in my mouth.
When it first started, I’d rinse them down the sink — that was it. Not anymore. I double flush them. And I only ever spit maggots downstairs. My wife doesn’t use that one much, and my son not at all. But the point is I should move into my own apartment, or just kill myself.
It’s fair to say: I look at my wife and son and think of killing myself.
Not some of the time, but all the time.
Or most all the time.
Even now, bulgy white maggots are already poking new heads out at the root of my tongue. I used to squeeze out what I could, the creamy white insides of a maggot buried at the root of my tongue, but I don’t bother with that anymore. It hurts too much, and either way, they’ll be back in a few hours, wriggling out from under my tongue, filling my mouth.
I think: hanging by the neck until death. But what about the maggots that might come spraying out of my mouth? What if they made my family sick? So: bullet in the brainpan. But who’s to say my head isn’t rotten with maggots, that a spring-loaded can of maggots wouldn’t spray from my skull?
A burning, the only real option: a war burning.
But would I really ever kill myself?
Fact is, I’ve always imagined my wife dying first.
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Boys with dead mothers often kill themselves — it’s true. I don’t know how race issues fit in, I’m no race expert, but being an interracial kid — how could that help? So one day I’ll have to explain to him, my Charlie, about his mother’s death and his own — what — his suicide potential. From an early age, and going forward, say, every six months, I’ll have to sit him down — the two of us at a pair of card table chairs brought up from the crawl space. Identical chairs, my son and me seated at the same level, the sense of occasion that the card table chairs give, I might even pour us soft drinks, set a dish of trail mix between us. I’d start generally — some of the things Michael used to say about movies, women, sports. I’d draw a picture of Michael as a stand-up guy, one of the greats. I’d tell Michael’s jokes, Sunni and Shi’ite, Boston and Vegas, then I’d strike my leg — my real leg — the meat of it — with the ball of my hand. I’d say, Charlie, Michael was one of those life-friends that change us, that make us better men — you see tha XG YQ00/HM3P 0XLRW7 0F
he’d listen to his father and try to understand. Head cocked, chin up. That’s when I’ll ease into the suicide question. Mention offhandedly how Michael always said suicide was nasty, a bad joke. Pathetic, he’d say, spitting out the word. And I’d say, spitting it out, pathetic. Not that there aren’t exceptions. That’s life, kiddo. There’s rules, and there’s exceptions. It takes a special man, a Michael, to understand the exceptions, to know deep down the flip side of the rules. Michael always said — I’d tell this to Charlie every year, or maybe every six months: It’s a pathetic joke, no fucking shit. At least, until the day you get a limb blown off … Then suicide, my man, is just the thing.
Michael’s philosophy was, once you’d lost a limb, the pathetic course was not killing yourself. Suicide within the first month, six weeks at the latest. A month or six weeks in the VA hospital, smacked out on morphine, time to say good-byes, then: auf Wiedersehen, sayonara.
I told Michael in the hospital, “No hanging.”
And Michael said, “No, hanging.”
That’s the midpoint of me and Charlie’s little talk. Pause. Lean back, regard my son. Think back to the two of us outside the funeral home, my wife’s family all lined up, black ladies in hats that sail past us one after the next like elaborate desserts — me and my interracial baby set against all these ladies, withstanding their condolences, the doubts and the fury their words barely conceal. My interracial boy, my interracial young man. They say the parent only sees the child, only sees love. But the truth is: I love my child who I’ll only ever see as an interracial child. It’s all love, yes. But anyone who says that the parents of an interracial child only see the child, and not the interracial child, they’re lying. I wouldn’t want my son to have any illusions about us, about the way we stand. I might say, Michael was black, you know. I’d say, Did I mention that? I might say: I will always think of you as my interracial son. Michael was a good man, I’d say. The best. Then I’d lean in so our faces were right up close. I’d grin and say—and one crazy motherfucker.