Ugly Behavior

The Cough

A tickle like the sound of a truck rumbling in the distance, felt in the chest, where bones join tissue and there are quantities of liquid for lubrication. Something was coming. Something was clearly out there. Something he didn’t want to know about.

He’d had the cold for weeks. Three, four weeks. It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem natural. Weren’t colds two week affairs? His wife had told him that at some time or other. He remembered the time last winter he’d been moaning and groaning, thinking he was going to die, angry because she wouldn’t take care of him, wouldn’t even sympathize, and she’d said, “Two weeks and it’ll be gone. It’s just a cold. Drink your orange juice.”

Women had little sympathy for men. That had always been true. It was a way at getting back at their ill treatment under a patriarchy, he supposed. It was a man’s world, and women had little sympathy. He really couldn’t fault them for that, but it felt bad just the same.

Suddenly his body exploded into a fit of coughing. His face felt flushed. He could feel himself filling with fever. He could feel the tube of his throat constrict as he coughed, twisting at its root, trying to rip itself out of his body. Something was coming from a far distance. Something that didn’t agree with him.

He spat something milky into the sink. His wife would have hated that. “Men have such disgusting habits,” she used to say. He leaned over the sink and looked at what he had coughed up. Men did that, too—periodically they felt compelled to look at whatever came out of them. The globule in the sink was creamy, yet somewhat solid, like a small bit of half-digested flesh.

He wondered if what he was suffering from was akin to what they called “consumption” in the old days. He had no idea. But he was a man. Naturally he felt consumed. Men had a lot of things on their minds.

Suddenly the cough racked him again. His head jerked as if he’d been slapped. His wife had slapped him a couple of times, because of some dumb thing he’d said to her. He’d never hit her. He had no use for men who hit their wives.

But she should never have hit him.

Something was coming from a long distance away, something had come from a long distance, and now it was filling his throat. He thought that he would choke. He ran to the toilet bowl and coughed something up from his throat. It felt large and soft as if it were one of his internal organs as it passed his lips and plopped into the water.

He looked down. It was longish and pale, like an arm, and then it dissolved into the water.

Where was she, anyway? He couldn’t remember. If it had been her making these noises of distress she would have expected him to come help her. But when he was the one who was sick, she hid herself. Marriage ought to be a two-way street.

At least she could have fed him something. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything all day, and he’d had way too much to drink last night in order to ease the pain in his throat and in other places he didn’t like to talk about. He was hungry. Men had hungers. Where was she?

The next cough practically split him in two. It felt as if it had originated miles away. Something rushed through him, then past him as if on its way to an important destination. Where was she? He looked down at what he had brought forth from such a long distance away, and saw a soft, liquid, barely recognizable version of his wife’s face floating in the bowl, a soft tinge of blood in the lips and cheeks. The image started to break up even as he impulsively jerked the lever to flush it all away.

And then he remembered.