Listen to Emily Lyons Flamm read an excerpt from “Fruits of the Forest.”

 I asked him to stop talking several times before I got rude. His current attitude was resistant to conventional manners. His eyes were fixed on the distance past my head—he was speaking to posterity, or onlookers, or aliens homing in on our coordinates.

Shut the fuck up, I said. Just, for real. Shut up. He paused briefly, like a swatted fly, then resumed his buzzing around.

Please shut up, I said, then got up and walked outside. I didn’t have anything special to do, but I could see out the tiny little window that breezes were happening, that there was a rustle in the branches. Dougie was still talking when the door closed behind me.

Dougie and I had been living together a long time. Six years. By choice, you could say, but the sense that it was a choice disappeared at some point. He couldn’t read me well anymore, which was strange, because we’d been sharing the same bathroom, we pulled each other’s shed hairs from the drain catch, we heard each other’s toilet sounds. He knew I stacked new foods on top of the old foods every time I grocery shopped, letting a wad of slimy rot fester back there out of view beneath the fresh things. He’d seen my dirty underpants, I knew his credit sucked, and he had my mom’s phone number, and I knew he was a mostly heterosexual romantic but he couldn’t talk to women unless he was naked in the dark under a sheet or behind a pane of glass and a keyboard. We were just friends, or something like friends, but we would destroy at those game shows that attempt to expose how well or not-well a couple knows each other. We tried having sex once but it was like trying to coax flavor out of an uncooked piece of chicken. Wet germs. We shrugged and agreed on how bad it was and he went back into his room. That was about three years ago.

He was talking politics a lot lately, politics and public health, and why did they do this and why did they do that. I could never figure out why people could never figure out politics. Circuses are never that complicated. They did this for attention, they did that for money, they get more attention when they have more money, and they get more money when they have more attention. There was never any other goddamn reason. Dougie was starting to grow suspicious of the scientists and the way diseases were handled. He spoke angrily about pasteurized milk and how it was committing thievery against our biomes. He was digging into message boards, participating in forums where the similarly obsessed could rile each other up and suck deep from the acrid firehose of pissyness.

Please shut up, I said, this time to no one. An unassuming grackle looked up at me with what might have been concern. I’m sorry, I said to her, in earnest.

I needed more time outside. If I was sucking deep from the acrid firehose of anything, it was nature’s bounty. There was a lively little trail a half mile from our rental rowhouse, and it contained a bunch of trash and didn’t go on for long or connect with anything special, but I treated it like it was the one true religion. A dead bird or live deer sighting on the trail could throw me into a fiercely poetic spell.

Remember all those mistakes? Dougie asked over breakfast.

I’m not sure which ones you mean, I said.

The ones that everyone made, he said.

Yeah, I said. I think I am thinking of different things than you are when you say the word mistakes.

Yeah, he said. I know. I think—I think they’re pretty common, he said. Mistakes.

He set his jammy knife so it was suspended over the edge of the sink like a plank. I waited for him to leave the room, and then I washed the knife with resentment. I leave things out too but when I do it, it’s not, like, a gendered taunt.

The mistakes he was referring to, probably, were the ways people had tried to contain the outbreak: Stay in, cover your bodies, sanitize, don’t touch your face, don’t hug your parents, don’t grocery shop with others, don’t eat unboiled fruit, don’t sit next to someone if there is a nearby place to weirdly stand. I felt some of these things were mistakes too, mostly, but they were made in good faith. The kind of mistakes people make when they care too much but don’t trust the situation and want to preserve everything forever and ever in amber until the wisest answers avail themselves. Dougie thought these mistakes marked a kind of cultural turning, a venture beyond from which we would not recover.

When I got sick I lost some things. It was okay to have lost some things in a global reckoning because it was less than everything. I wasn’t honestly even sure what I lost, but the gaps were real. Once, I lost track of the keys on the keyboard, just could no longer tell where the keys were, and I could not solve it for a couple of days, and then they resurfaced. I lost some words. Probably unimportant ones but I would need to be able to identify them to be sure. In a disaster where some people lose everything and you lose some things, you should say I am well, considering, and could be worse and the like. There are days it seems everyone lost things, or the ability to stick things one to another, and what remains is incompatible. Everything fits poorly. Not that it was so great before.

One thing that bothered Dougie was how rich he got, but in theory, never in pocket. He went in on digital money when no one else I knew was doing it, and he sounded absolutely mad-dog-fucking crazy, telling people to bury their hard-earned thousands of dollars in the yard and watch it blossom, but then it absolutely did blossom and it happened so dramatically that it freaked him out. He spent days and nights staring at the line twitching up and down and sometimes way up and sometimes way down but on the whole, on average, way up. He started theoretically buying property and outfitting it with theoretical speakers and driving a theoretical pussy wagon. He said “pussy wagon” with some space around the words, letting me know that he knew how ridiculous that phrase was but that he also wasn’t joking.

He still had a lot of money from that experiment—a lot more than I had—but it remained theoretical. He never bought anything meaningful or fun, and the total amount was less than half of what it was at the peak. Theoretical losses can feel pretty real I suppose. He probably dreamt of numbers, climbing green digital numbers, of giving the command to sell at the peak and entering an elongated period of easy living and imagined cosmic applause. If his e-values ever returned to their once glorious height, he swore to cash out, and if they never got there he would just live and die in this little rathole with me.

Maybe I should be, I don’t know, a scientist, I told Dougie.

I could take a different path. I wasn’t set in stone, professionally. I’d been doing online science tutoring for rich high school kids since everything closed. Science wasn’t my field, but I wasn’t bad at it and the language used to describe lab work sounded so clean and confident. Sterile. Empirical. A perfect needle ascending to the sky.

I liked that there were rules and protocol in science. I’d studied English literature, which pretended to tuck in and follow rules but those loved best in that field got in through some gate of patrician manners and then broke whatever rule they wanted. That was the draw, probably: sublime paradox. But the paradoxes of literature had come to feel less intriguingly ironic and more generally ineffectual, because you were always ending up about where you started, with some new shades of understanding that you’d never be able to explain to anyone without several hours of their undivided attention. The scientists didn’t pretend at much. They wrote out all their verifiable details in organized columns and defined their terms in unslippery ways. They fought toward takeaways. They even had a uniform: white coats. In lockdown I’d begun to wear a white woolen coat around the house. It made me feel clean and smart and put together. It covered my whole lumpy self, down to the knees.

When I said I wanted to be a scientist Dougie looked at me like I had done violence in his brain. A fucking scientist? he said. After all this, a fucking scientist?

A fucking scientist, I said. I don’t know what kind. Not medicine, that’s not me. Too much agony. Too much tenderness. Maybe I’ll measure chemical traces in the soil. I bet there’s something I can do fully from a chair. Measure the gaps between galaxies. I could find some new and palatial planet we’ll never get to live on.

I want to puke, Dougie said. I really do.

And I want to puke on your fake money, I said.

And I want to puke on your bullshit coat, he said.

And I want to puke on your artless existence, I sang.

And I want to puke in our fucking fridge.

And I want to puke in our fucking—I looked around—toilet.

Well—we both laughed a little at that. If we were angry and ridiculous simultaneously, things could realign.

I hate you, I said. I actually fucking hate you. This is not an exaggeration and I will not retract it later or lose any sleep over saying it. With the heat of a thousand suns I absolutely fucking hate you.               

I fucking hate you too, he said, making eye contact. With the same heat you hate me with.

I made us a pot of Sleepytime tea.

One morning I did my usual trail walk and returned to an absurd pile of boxes on the porch. Dougie was reclining at a fifteen-degree angle on the couch in his boxers and a stiff, new-looking T-shirt that said “Running is for pizza.”

What’s all these boxes? I said. And the fuck is that shirt?

He looked confused for a moment. They’re here! he said. A surprise for you.

A surprise.

Yes, he said.

My disdain was palpable. He was suddenly awkward and I understood that this surprise meant something to him. It could not be overstated how much I hated gifts, how they sat smugly before a person like weird little lawyers expecting perfect and immediate responses. How they managed to mean too much and too little.

Okay, should I bring them in or—

No, no no no, I got it, he said, pulling together his internal scaffolding to find an upright position.

Okay, I said, sitting down in a strangely alert way. For actual gifts, formality would have to be involved.

He brought the boxes in and set the bundle at my feet like a suburban dog taking in the paper. I clenched my teeth to avoid visibly shuddering.

I opened the first one and encased in plastic bubbles was a bright silver pan with scalloped indentations. I knew the pan from cooking shows—a pan for madeleines, the weightless treats famous for collapsing time and being a fast channel to memory. I softened, genuinely pleased that I hadn’t predicted the contents. I looked at Dougie, who was preemptively avoiding my gaze in favor of a squirrel darting past the window frame.

I opened another box to find a mixing bowl larger than my head, quite heavy. The third box contained some nice quality kitchen tools: three different sizes of whisk, a zester, an apple corer, and a vegetable peeler. Woven bamboo steaming baskets in the next box. A stockpot in the next, an enameled tart pan with fluted edges in the last.

So . . . it turns out that cooking is like science, but for women, Dougie said, still looking out the window.

It bothered me that he said it, but that was by design and I couldn’t snap at the bait. I appreciate it, I said. Help me break down these stupid boxes.

Dougie was in the early throes of railing against Western medicine at the time I got sick, but it was still his idea to go to the hospital. He took my car because his was out of gas. I had been awake for four days and nights with a vicious headache. My neck had gone stiff, my lips felt tingly. I listened to meditation prompts and white noise and green noise and blue noise and purple noise. I binged TV shows with bland, straightforward scripts. The headache intensified when I stayed in a position for more than a few minutes, rendering sleep impossible. The information I could find said I needed to mainline salt and guzzle water, flood my tissues somehow. I ate the saltiest foods around and drank as much water as I could stomach. The websites all recommended caffeine, which would shrink the blood vessels in a good way, so I drank coffee at night and licked the insides of potato chip bags and writhed in pain.

He heard me crying in the bathroom and came in without knocking, which didn’t give me a chance to push him away. I didn’t want to be enclosed in my own disappointing body anyhow. I could not decide anything. I could not answer a question. If anyone asked me where something was or to do a simple task I would have combusted on site. He said I said my blood was buzzing and too, too alive and I couldn’t sleep and I would never sleep again because this kind of thing only gets worse for people like me. He said I said I could hear a running dialogue of sports commentary everywhere I went, in the hall, in my room, in the shower, on the porch, and there was no source for the commentary, it was an auditory hallucination on loop. He said he asked what sport it was and what was happening in the game. I said it was impossible to say but it was terribly repetitive and no one was winning.

The hospital didn’t know what to make of my symptoms, my story. They tried to discharge me quickly, because I was in my thirties, not bleeding or fainting or foaming, and suddenly I was sitting upright like a very good student, able to perform the part. Dougie said that I explained that I don’t ever go to hospitals, that I don’t even go to doctors except in an emergency, which sounded crazy, but I was trying to say that I generally know how to care for myself, that I care for myself as much as humanly possible, but once in a while everything falls apart and there’s nowhere to go but the hospital, and they had to help me because I couldn’t help myself and that’s what they were for. I told them what I had eaten, lots of salty foods and coffee, and I had been drinking so much water that it might be damaging my organs. The doctor asked if I had ever been treated for anxiety and I said not exactly, not by anyone with letters after their name, but surely I had anxiety, which wasn’t the point, there was something bigger here, something in my brain and in my neck and in my blood. I asked for a spinal tap and an MRI and the doctor said that I needed to lie down and accept the nutrients into my bloodstream and she would see about the tests. She assured me I was going to be fine, and she said the hospital was full of people who were coding and we heard a voice over the intercom and she said see there’s another one, people were having strokes and they needed my bed more than I did, and the virus had compromised whole swaths of the population, and I said I was sorry, I was so sorry, but I did not think there was any chance I would be fine, and if they could check whatever they could check as fast as possible I could believe them if they told me I was fine after that.

They did the imaging but not the spinal tap, and they said I wasn’t dying, not even close, and I should rest and very soon I should find a good physician and therapist and seek treatment for anxiety. These assurances felt like failure but they helped. There was evidence, there were images, there were pictures of my brain to support the assertions that I was fine, even though I did not feel fine at all. But the doctor’s informed sense that I was fine, the story that I was fine combined with empirical evidence of fineness did slow the spinning wheels. And Dougie sat there the whole time, doing sudoku on his phone, offering me Grandma’s sandwich cookies from the vending machine and fidgeting with medical equipment.

Dougie’s approach was pretty basic but being cared for was a powerful drug. It’s hard to gauge how one’s own experiences measure against social norms, but I’d begun to sense that I did not receive much parental care as a child. I was raised largely by neighborhood kids and teachers and Ricki Lake, and I was outwardly good at coping, signifying stability. I had a switch that made me funny and earnest and calm and a little mathematical, and I flipped it on whenever shit went down. The switch always bought me time, controlled the bleeding, inoculated me from questions. On the few occasions when the switch failed there was no plan B. Someone else had to see me vulnerable, see me in a dead panic, and they had to force the issue.

The headaches continued for a few months but they were never again as bad as that first episode. The crisis abated and I was able to get some sleep with my regiment of salt and caffeine, which I eventually weaned off of. I felt better in the house for a while. I took vitamins galore and went for daily walks on my trail. Dougie asked me how I was doing, and when he asked I felt better because he knew what the darker possibilities were and he knew I couldn’t fake it with him.

The trail was a seven-minute walk from the house. It twisted and turned for about a mile and then met back up with the main road. It had an ugly metal bridge spanning a ditch with a trickling stream that you could, if you were feeling rhapsodic, say was a glen. Fat squirrels hung out there all year, and deer flitted through it in spring and fall, and it usually had grackles and cardinals and robins and crows. Around the anniversary of lockdown, it bustled with rabbits, swallowtails, bees, buttercups, violets, and the odd crocus.

The season of spring had come to signify catastrophe to me. Everything shuttered that first March, which didn’t feel so wrong initially, it made life special and novel in basic ways, and although we lived near the hospital and could not ignore the constant sirens, or for that matter the dashboards that showed the steeply rising counts of the infected and hospitalized and deceased, there was peace in the quiet of being at home. I felt relief in being still and trapped and unalone, in being locked down with someone who mostly understood me. The bar I’d worked at folded almost immediately after the closures, and it stung, but I had been ready for a change. I collected unemployment while Dougie helped me capitalize (his word) on my people skills (his words), helped me fudge (his word: tweak) my resume and build a website and fabricate (refine) some testimonials and surgically market myself to online parent groups who were terrified their kids would crash and burn at the first sign of academic distress. I felt gratitude for the arc of my life up to then. I felt relieved I hadn’t married anyone evil or had children. I felt young enough to reimagine my story, to start fresh amid the wreckage.

Not for the world, and certainly not for the dead, but for me, the first spring of the plague was the high point. Every spring thereafter, I fell apart. My unraveling joined with all that heady terrestrial awakening, with new feathery leaves uncurling along the empty branches, with nests of green-blue eggs so perfect they resembled candy, with pastel floral drifts erupting along the tree line whose petals snowed romantically onto oily streets and gutters—and it all felt like some kind of holy war. Some tendency within me was the problem; the beauty set my cells on edge.

And the trail changed each day. There was always something to witness, something real and sensory.

Behind our house was all concrete—no yard, just a covered parking spot backing up to an alley, and we had originally agreed to rotate who got to use the spot, one month for him, one month for me, but Dougie felt strongly about having his car off the street and I did not. He drove a ten-year-old white Ford Focus and he noticed every scratch and ding. To me, a car was more of a burden than a tool or a prize. I had always preferred to walk the city, even at night, even coming home from the bar at 3 am. If I had ever gone on The Price Is Right and won a fancy car instead of a stand mixer, I would have been pissed.

All this to say that I hadn’t been back there behind the house in a while—a few months, maybe. Dougie and I were both working from home, no one went out, no one came over, and it was a bland little out-of-sight rectangle I hadn’t considered to be a potential anything, not a problem, not an asset. I had noticed that Dougie had been back there some but I assumed he was quality checking the locks and obsessively monitoring the condition of his stupid car.

Years earlier, when I first moved to the city, I had seen an installation at a museum that shook me hard. The placard said it had been made by a self-taught artist named James Hampton. He had built a transcendent shrine of cardboard, foil, and other bits of refuse called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. The shrine was spiritually recombinant and utterly glorious, and although a small percentage of the work was on view at the museum, what was visible to me was vast. Meticulously crafted thrones and crowns and seraphim and regalia and handwritten religious scripts in his own invented tongue. What I loved most was the tiny black-and-white message above the scene that commanded: fear not.

Hampton had lived and built his shrine very close to where we lived. His atelier was an unheated carriage house in the mid-twentieth century, and he spent more than a decade there twisting his foil and paper, pulling the various pieces together and perfecting them. His paying job was to clean federal buildings, and in some of his writings he referred to himself as “Director, special projects for the state of eternity.”

What ultimately brought me out back was the sudden and assaultive stench of dead rat. It was in the height of our second pandemic summer, and it overtook even the godawful food smells emanating from the fridge. Dougie responded by wearing my KN-95 masks at all times, claiming the ecosystem and the smell of dead rat weren’t his responsibility, and he didn’t give a fuck what all happened in the short term and that nature would sort it out eventually, and if I really cared I should call Barbara Jo, who owned the house, and tell her all about it.

I put on a mask and pulled on some useless winter gloves and went out back. The offending rat, wherever it was, wasn’t inside our fence line. What I did find, on the surface of the white painted brick, near the ground (he must have had to sit on the concrete to do it), was a hand-painted landscape in black, white, and gray. It was about a square foot, small and out of the way enough that Barbara Jo wouldn’t notice at a glance if she ever decided to come by. Its sky was filled with a multitude of beautifully rendered black and white eyes, some open, some closed, some looking down at the painted grass, some intent on engaging with the viewer. I had never known this Dougie, Dougie the artist. He could be a little funny, and I knew he was an absolute fucking weirdo, but I mostly knew him as a hater. A joyless person who thought house pets were a neoliberal scam, who took refuge in perpendicularity, in columns and pixels, who treated the prime of his life as a numbers game. A person who loudly shat on the unlucky, and who disdained suggestions that the world and its inhabitants contained hidden wonder.

I was cramming for the GRE when Barbara Jo called me to let us know she was planning to put the house on the market and there was a very slim chance we would be able to stay and rent from whoever bought it. On the spectrum of irritating landlords, Barbara Jo wasn’t a monster, she was fairly responsive on critical matters and only a little overbearing, but Dougie and I couldn’t stand her. We bonded in our mutual disgust re: Barbara Jo. Whenever she gave us important information she insisted on calling, and she sounded very disappointed in us, had a put-upon lean in her voice suggestive of disgruntled parent. And honestly, what the fuck was that about? We were her customers, we were her income, we were, if you want to get into very loose definitions of things, her people.

No one made sense anymore, including me. Barbara Jo wasn’t the enemy. She had kept the rent artificially low even when the post-COVID restrictions lifted, she brought us homemade Christmas cookies and was mindful of Dougie’s egg allergy, she even put in a bush of yellow roses in our postage-stamp front yard. In light of these efforts, we hated her all the more.

When I told Dougie the news, he frowned and said nothing and went up to his room.

I was in the habit of sleeping late. The next morning Dougie knocked on my door with a tray. Upon the tray was a pot of coffee, a stack of what looked like butter cookies from the grocery store, and an open bottle of prosecco. Two mugs and two stemless wine glasses. Everything was perfectly organized and upright, and nothing wobbled. He looked right at me, another thing he never did, with those deep brown eyes that ended who knew where, his eyebrows arching expectantly.

Can I come in? he asked.

The fuck is this, I said. Sure.

I pushed some books and candles aside on my desk and he set down the tray. My room was narrow; everything in it was just an arm’s length from anywhere else. I made some room on the bed for him to sit. He poured a coffee and a prosecco and placed a butter cookie on a napkin and gestured that these things were for me. He then poured two more beverages and put a butter cookie on a napkin for himself.

Hi, I said. What are we doing?

Yeah, he said. I know. This is weird.

It’s fucking insane.

Do you want to stay here? he asked. Really?

Forever? No.

Not forever. He knocked back the prosecco like it was a shot and followed it with a giant swig of coffee. Then he burped disgustingly and grinned at me. Just a little longer, he said.

How much longer? I nibbled at the cookie. The trail came into my mind’s view, the little trash-and-flora-filled glen. A brown bunny hopped across the path.

As long as you want, he said. I guess until you really get sick of me.

He pulled up his phone and showed me his big electric green balance, its numbers changing in real time. It’s not as high as it could get, he said, but it’s a lot. I can sell it all and buy the house for us. Not in cash, but I can buy it. Easy. We can. If you cosign—

I held up a hand and he stopped talking. My eyes closed involuntarily, I felt seasick, like my stomach was scrambling to catch up to the boat I was in. I opened my eyes and glanced out the window, watching the tree branches blow, and the metaphor changed on me. It was like being at the top of a waterslide, like you were a kid who’d waited years to be tall enough to take the ride and finally you’d climbed the half-dozen flights of rotten-ass stairs and waited forever, and when it was finally your turn for something exciting to happen you would sit there and pause, the rush of water lapping at your legs and crotch, and once you gave the nod the lifeguard would nudge you forward and there’d be no stopping without a miracle or tragedy, you’d just hurtle through the turns decision-free until the whole goddamn whimsical machine chucked you out on the other side. ■

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