Desiccated

Coming around.

Coming around after a night like that (like what?) is neither waking up nor regaining consciousness. You're not really awake, your consciousness is buffering at best, and let's not even talk about the senses: the eyes that can't see because the light pains them, the nose rendered useless from all its mucus, the ears hearing nothing but the inner groans and whimpers of your body somewhere (where are you?), the dry tongue a gutted chub on a shore, swollen from breathing through your mouth all night, snoring. Your snoring makes her feel so pissed off at you, sharp elbows in the middle of the back all night despite your being unconscious when you do it.

You are diagonal. Going diagonal: that's what she calls taking over the whole bed as soon as you get up in the morning to take a piss, making sure you don't sneak back in, which means the heat will be turned on, NPR on, that the roar of the grinder will foreshadow caffeinated bliss coming her way. It's seldom you are diagonal in this way.

You swallow, and it's like those sphincter doors on spaceships that close with a click. You try to summon some spittle but all of your moisture seems to be elsewhere in your body. Muscle memory takes over and you succeed in shakily moving, tendons a-creak. Your arm drops off the side of the bed in search of a seltzer bottle that exists there most nights. No such luck this time.

Head pain makes itself known to you: not a throb or a pierce but a sizzle. You gag on something, try to swallow it, gag again. You open your eyes and the sizzle goes shhhhhhhh, like static. You do a horizontal pull-up to look over the edge of the bed and see a liter bottle of Pepsi Light lying empty on its side. Pepsi Light hasn't been its contents for at least six months, since you came back from Bosnia. It's the bottle you smuggled your dad's homemade slivovitz in.

You would call her name but you can't with this throat. Keeping low to the bed you swing your legs to the hardwood floor, launch yourself through the doorway and use your lizard brain to avoid the familiar obstacles and find the passageways. You thud across the house to the kitchen sink, turn the first available knob on the faucet, cup your hand, and gobble. The water is cold at first, then tepid, then lukewarm, and you remember your elementary school teacher in Bosnia saying if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly bring that water to a boil the frog will let itself be boiled because it's not very good at detecting incremental changes in its surroundings. This horrified you as a kid, this notion that something can be all around you, killing you, something you could get yourself out of if you could perceive its presence, yet you have no apparatus to do that. You think you're fine because your eyes can't see it, your nose can't sense it, your… and then your throat yelps. You pull your face from the faucet just before the scalding water gets you.

Swallowing still proves a problem.

You look through the window to the world outside. Next door is the pale yellow house of a widowed psychiatry nurse who keeps to herself, wears nothing but pastel scrubs, doesn't say hello unless she's cornered and even then only mumbles about the weather, mooning over sunshine and bitching about the drizzle—mostly doing the latter as you live in Portland, Oregon. A terra-cotta pot with some leaves coming out of it is overturned next to her basement window.

Your white pickup is parked a little down the driveway and its wheels and undercarriage are so muddy that a thought collapses in your mind with the ferocity of God making himself known to a sinner.

Your wife is dead.

Your eyes burn at once. The water you just drank...