on the days he couldn't get up he lay in bed with a banana shaped boat to spit into. he was full of phlegm and mucus and saliva helping transport it from his lungs and stomach and bronchial tubes to his mouth and then to the boat. he could fill the boat up in two days, forty-eight hours, he imagined if someone didn't come by to empty it out. he did a lot of spitting and hacking and not much eating or drinking or swallowing of any type. he used to do more swallowing than anything, he laughs to himself as he lies there working up that particularly pesky piece of phlegm in his throat.he has a black blanket on top of him. black at the top and bottom edges with a Native American design in the middle changing from clay houses to the black sky on the top side of the picture and to the black earth on the bottom side of the picture. She brought that from her garage the last time she was here. it's the middle of summer in Texas and he's shivering like a wet puppy in Alaska. he works the muscles of his throat, his tongue trying to make something happen, trying to take the lead, like a long line of people passing water down a line, or boxes of vegetables perhaps. but these people are muscles and this thing they're passing along the line is a piece of phlegm. feels like the lining of his lung. it rattles in his tubes as he tries to breath around it. And he has to take lots of breaks, a break to breathe and then back to the job at hand, Tow that line, move that phlegm!
He has fever dreams, imagines himself in imagined places he read about in history books, on a plantation. he is a slave. A slave to this sickness. A slave to A. He hacks a good bit and the phlegm comes up. He doesn't quite expect it. The boat is not in place and so the phlegm lands on the top edge of the blanket and slides off of the silky material along the top edge and makes its way onto the fuzzy blackness, the Native American night sky. And he imagines it as a meteor plummeting toward earth, taking out the village and throwing the planet off kilter, sending it flying out of its orbit, long ago and the future is nonexistent and the planet was barely getting started. The New World hadn't even been discovered yet.
But it's more aquatic than astronomic, this blob of phlegm on the blackness. It is whitish with dots of orangish red. brick red. red like the color of the university mascot, a red cow. really brown orange. dots, little dots throughout the phlegm but in a particular pattern. It looks like a squid, some sort of a white and red speckled squid. he peers at it for a long time, forgets his sickness, forgets the banana boat in his left hand, going slack, hanging over the edge of the bed, the side of the bed. If it were a movie, the camera would focus on that slop in the bucket, the boat, the camera would let us watch how close the nastiness is getting to spilling out, forcing a neighbor to do more cleanup than she'd expected. But he's caught, mesmerized by the squid on his blanket, like a squid on display on black velvet, at the museum of natural history. this is what the lung squid looks like, the sign would say. Lung squid. White phlegm speckled with blood, the lining of his interior.
he doesn't feel the pain of creating these squids specifically, he only feels a general pain, a weakness, on the days he's laid up. And then he'll be okay for a week or so. Hardly even any coughing. It's a strange feeling to die slowly, to know you're dying and to be able to watch it. Your brain helps you get around the idea, helps settle the score: You lost. But your brain doesn't help the neighbor come to terms with what she's witnessing, and her brain doesn't go far to help alleviate the pain and confusion and sadness She's seeing and feeling. You're just a couple of human animals, each doing its part, one dying, one---
