The Two Kinds of Decay

Just Visiting

Here I am, eleven years after the day I woke with numb feet.

My friend Isabel is sitting in a blue plastic-upholstered easy chair with a twenty-two-gauge needle in her left arm. Her arm veins are good. She’s receiving saline, steroids, and a designer immunosuppressant.

We’re making off-color jokes. About sex, not death. There are some sick people on the other side of the curtain.

When I played Monopoly with my parents, when I was very young, we were careful to leave our playing pieces on the margins of the Jail square when we were Just Visiting.

I’m having a good time, just visiting. I feel like a secret guest of honor. I’ve taken more of everything than Isabel has. The nurses don’t know it, but I do.

The nurse has just left, after connecting Isabel to a little glass jar, and we tell some more sex jokes, Isabel and me.

I’m sitting in a chair carried in from the waiting room. Isabel’s in the center of the room, in the reclining armchair with the blue scallop shell print, with her left forearm resting on a pillow in a grayish white pillowcase, vein up, and with a grayish white blanket covering her bottom half.

We trade driver’s licenses and make fun of the photographs and make more sex jokes. Isabel’s infusion rate is increased, and she falls asleep.

Then she wakes up, a little euphoric, and we talk about drugs. Which ones we’ve done, which ones we’re afraid to do, which ones we liked or didn’t like. Which ones we’re afraid might kill us. Then the death jokes start coming.

I’m having a good time, just visiting.