Bleeder: A Memoir

Winter Is the Cruelest Season

171 winter is the cruelest season November . I try to reassemble my life. The grandeur of teaching seeming lost, I accept a position as a bookseller for Barnes & Noble in Durham, and more books pass through my hands than I could hope to read in a lifetime. I work eight-hour shifts and in the evenings, hobbled and stiff, I soothe my ankles in warm bathwater. I prop them on pillows and try to sleep, but they keep me awake. Often they worsen and, with the drape of moonlight around me, I mix my factor; constrict the tourniquet on my arm; slip the needle into a raised blue line running underneath my skin; and infuse. Then I sleep. To cure my lonesomeness, I call Maria and invite her to dinner. When I first see her again—the unicorn costume long discarded—her face glows and even in the dead of November she smells like the spring dew that settles upon the grass in the early morning. We eat well. We laugh heartily. And I am drawn closer to her. She isn’t silly like some girls, nor a heavy drinker, and I feel immediately how she begins to fill up the hole inside me. Before parting, we kiss beneath the lamplight of her apartment. “I’m glad you called me,” she says before going. “Me, too.” Shelby Smoak 172 “So let’s do this again sometime. Perhaps after the hectic Thanksgiving holiday.” “Yes, let’s. I’ll call you.” The week before Thanksgiving a snow starts in the early morning. I pour coffee and sneak out into a morning made immaculate by a theophany of white. The cold sun filters through the clouds, and I squint at the brightness as I crunch through the frozen landscape. The winter birds flit through the longleaf pines and dodge the slow drip of a thawing world with the trees standing as colossal black pillars against the white garland of snow. Soon the puddles will begin and make soft mud of the earth, but today is luminous, the sky crisp and as blue as the color of ink run from a pen. While my friend travels during the holidays, his two cats stay with me. When he drops them off, I place Somali, the oldest, in my lap and he purrs and curls up next to me as I stroke his thick fur. “You’re a pretty kitty.” He jumps down and scampers off. “We’ll be fine,” I promise my friend as he pays me. “Your kitties and I will get along just great.” When I sleep, the cats pounce on the bed and startle me. I get up and set them outside my door, but they mew and paw at it, so to quiet them, I shake food in their bowls and return to bed, but soon they are back scratching at my door. When I leave, they claw at the furniture, sleep on the countertops , and prance on the kitchen tables, so that when I return, I have to clean hair and paw marks from the tabletops and, for the furniture, I fasten double-sided tape to the leg corners. Then, after a few weeks, the smell of shit from neglected litter or from Somali’s upset stomach that causes him to go wherever begins to permeate the apartment’s blue air; its noxious fumes greet me when the door is unsealed and a vacuumed whoosh of stool and piss is discharged. I gag. I heave. I clean the litter. I clean the carpet, the sofa, the sitting chair. I disinfect the kitchen. I pet the kitties, and as I stoop low to stroke their fur, it pulls off in my hand and I notice it has also chunked off on the floor, on the couch, and on my bed. But I’m too tired to clean Bleeder 173 anymore and only have the energy to retrieve my factor from the fridge and to fall asleep, rise to work, to treat, and to fall asleep again. The air of life has gasped out of me. I’m weary. Tired. And just putter around as best I can. The phone rings. It is dark outside, and I locate the sound near my bed. “Hey, Son. How are you? It’s Mom. Just checking in . . .” “Mom,” I say. “You’re not already in bed are you? It’s only nine.” “Just tired is all. Long day at work.” “You sound perfectly exhausted. Why don...