Barrett Warner: A FEW UNTIED ANGELS AT DUSK • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Barrett Warner
A FEW UNTIED ANGELS AT DUSK

Once so obvious and common—consumption now wears many disguises. It can live in an elbow, pretending to be bursitis. It can lodge in the brain or spine, like a migraine. The disease finds a bench—any organ will do—the lungs, the diaphragm, the sweet earthy liver. Hidden under a false beard it fans its newspaper with two coin-sized holes to peer through. It watches you from inside you, observes your comings and goings, the pained look on your face, how you cradle your right wrist in your left hand. The mortal ache goes where you go, puts itself in your world while you’re putting yourself in your world, a panic of engagement and apathy all swirling together like Wheatfield with Crows.

Two people become fast friends on either side of my lesions. I make Bruce and Jenny nervous so they read at the Post-it notes on my headboard. One says, don’t be afraid of dying—it’s only temporary. Another says, if anyone finds the left side of my face, please return it to the right side.

Jenny is sober. I smell weed on Bruce. Give me a hit. This is what I would say if I could speak. I choke out a melody of chirps and gravel, like two mad herons fighting over a consonant. It’s a language only my twin could understand in the way of secret sibling phonetics. But I don’t have a twin, and my sister lives in Massachusetts.

Jennifer plays a Fender Squire bass in a club band. They play surf music under punk lyrics, but also slip in a few covers like “Hotel California.” Everyone I know hates that song unless it’s dark and there’s been some drinking. Aggressive drumming helps you move around when you’re sick or out of it and can’t remember any other words. That’s who she’s married to, the drummer, Batty.

Bruce always wanted to be a busker. “On a dark desert highway,” he sings, but speaks the rest of the line.

The brain must be like a garden. Mine is full of useless trees. The cashew tree, as if it’s constantly sneezing. Night bats eat the cashew fruit, leaving behind the nut which is indecipherable to their tiny molars. Do I really have to say the fruit is dark red? Of course the fruit is dark red.

I want to describe a feeling of hearing a bird and knowing that you will live. Ecstatic whippoorwills are everywhere. It takes them hours to say goodnight, making sounds like a third banjo string imitating the flight of an arrow.

I’m untouchable. That is what no one is talking about. Anyone coming into my room gets shrink-wrapped with plastic hats, gowns, shoes. There are terrible anti-social warnings outside my door. One of them says, nothing by mouth. Still, Sister brings me a wafer. “Stole some Jesus for you out of the Tabernacle when no one was looking.”

Saving a soul has more meaning when it’s a crime.

Healing is so tedious. I try teaching myself French. I enjoy listening to the many shush sounds and the way action can be reflexive. I like that verbs are tensed by time and doubt.

One of my nurses is East African—from Chad. What is your reve? I whisper to Ghislaine who gazes for decades and decades at my vital signs.

“My dream?” she answers. I imagine her dreaming of helping sick children because it’s what I would do. But she dismisses me. “No one has ever asked me that.” She turns away and hangs a bag of liquid iron that runs into my vein. It’s meant to stimulate my marrow. The nurses call it a Christmas Bag because it’s red. The other bag has vitamins and potassium salt. They call that one a Banana Bag.

Everyone is always asking: How did you get Tuberculosis? First I look away. I look to the wall as if the answer is locked inside, as if each of us is born with our own seventh seal that is slowly revealed. I make up a story about a hot walker at the racetrack. I say, Thanks, Adam, for giving me your cough. It’s a cookie cutter explanation meant to soothe fears. It works like ginger ale.

I don’t have any answers. I only have general impressions: When experience is universal, perception means everything. Waxy sleep is a great friend of demons. Distance is hard, but it’s what saves us.

At five or five-thirty Mary comes to take my blood. She wheels a tray of syringes and rubber-stopped vials, her eye teeth caught on her lower lip. Before gloving up she smiles, and pulls the plastic vampire bridge from her gums. “Just a little humor,” she says, explaining her vaudeville phlebotomy.

Sister bands my arm as if I were a lark, and she, a tracker of the coming migration. The wooden cross on the wall beside an electric reassurance of my pulse, the Gothic pewter crucifix on Sister’s marbled neck: the harmonies of the world. And strangely, desire. Sister is so short and bosomy. I’d always wanted to open my eyes and see a woman whose breasts were larger than my face. Never figured her for a nun.

My disease is rising among the homosexual community, the side effect of immunity suppressing troubles. It passes with needles. It passes with breath, and having love and sweating with a stranger.

You can also get it by drinking unpasteurized milk, or sharing an elevator with a sick cow shitting or coughing around you.

“I need to go,” Jennifer says. “But I want to give Bruce the kiss I mean to give you so you’ll know how much I love you.”

“You want to give me a kiss?” Bruce says.

“Shut up,” Jennifer says. She grabs at his cherry face and rocks his lip for half a minute.

I reach for them but they’re careful not to reach for me. I’m trying to say, here—take my skull guts. The cashews are delicious.

Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius). He was awarded the Salamander fiction prize, and the Cloudbank and Princemere poetry prizes, among others. He has been a nonfiction fellow at the Tuscon book festival, Longleaf Writer’s Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. His writing appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Loch Raven Review, Cutleaf, The Adroit, Carolina Quarterly. and other places. For the past ten years he has lived in South Carolina where he edits Free State Review in a fishing shelter on the South Edisto River. Despite trying wrigglers, shrimp, and crickets, he has never caught anything.