He could hear his sisters downstairs. He listened until the sounds turned into words and made sense: they were leaving with Ms. Johnston and Ms. Johnston’s daughter to go to day camp. The bedroom wall stopped swimming and solidified. He rose and suddenly the fever pain wrenched him deep down, and Touissant, who believed that he would live forever, felt starkly, completely alive.
His fever rose like the fires in the San Bernardino Mountains, a homicidal element flashing up against the living world. He felt two quick acid ropes scour his lungs. When he finally half-crawled his way down the stairs and his mother told him about the death in the family, he vomited on the living-room floor.
She looked at him with a blankness that Touissant had never seen in her eyes. “I got no minutes for this,” she breathed. She put her hands on her hips and did something that made her throat sound like it was purging itself. Touissant knew that his getting sick was the last thing the family needed right now. He knew his mother was already counting out the cost of the trip to Fresno, gas money, the funeral fees, the inevitable breakfasts, lunches and dinners that she and her husband’s degrees would somehow be expected to pay for. He understood why she was frustrated and didn’t want to trouble her more. He wished he could chase the fever spiriting through him right out of his body. He watched her clean the mess, and saw how she glanced back at him furtively to judge whether he would vomit again.
“You need water,” she said.
Touissant nodded.
“Water. Hot water. Vitamin C. An antibiotic.”
In the kitchen, she rang out two vomit-soaked towels. Touissant turned and watched his dinner rice and clumps of congealed cinnamon and little undigested relics of vegetable and turkey fly wildly from the towels like water shaken from a dog. “Is that what’s inside of me?” he asked, unbidden.
She stopped. The question caught her in full motion; a stopping question. Questions without answers were an inheritance down from his dad, but they annoyed his mother; the realities of a childhood spent picking fruit and cotton in the Central Valley were as simple and inarguable as the sun and had left her no minutes to ask why life was this way or that. “You sick, or just strange?” she asked. “You sit there.” She pointed to a spot at the near edge of the living room couch. “Peace and be still there. Don’t wiggle around. Don’t move. Be still.”
Touissant did as he was told. Not a sweet woman really, she was a healer, a leader, a mother. But look for your coddling and little self-esteem stuff elsewhere, his dad liked to say, look for it where you gonna find it. His dad’s mother, the woman who had gone to her Lord before the sunrise, knew kindness and knew how to rear children with kindness. Touissant’s mother was very different. He was starting to notice important differences between women. All his life, black women had seemed like so many sisters to each other, all of them as similar as his twin sisters were to each other, a universal feminine. He was starting to see past that now.
She heard him shifting around and ordered him to be still. “Your stomach idn’t settled, idn’t close to settled. You gotta let it settle. Sit back down.”
Touissant obeyed and after a moment accepted his stillness. She was right, too: the longer he sat in place and the more fixed and motionless his body, from his toes to his intestines to his closed eyelids, the calmer was his stomach. He wasn’t even aware that his eyes were closed until a drawer jarred open and the metal of knives and kitchen utensils sounded against each other. Then the door shut hard, wood blasted against wood. Then he knew his eyes were closed because he didn’t know which kitchen drawer had been opened and closed, or who had opened and closed it. He tried to look around and saw only heat waves streaming without progress or recess, thick fluid fever lines where his sight should have been. Then there were shadows the color of faint ink blots that came and sat atop the waves. There were faint shadows where the kitchen table and the center island and the living room clock and the couch that he sat upon should have been. He wondered where his dad was.
“I’m tellin you the situation right now. My son, the fever, the unresponsiveness, the convulsions. I’m tryin my best to help my son. We’re tryin our best. My husband’s mother died this morning. He’s not himself. He’s not slept, hasn’t had any water or food. We’re tired. And now my son—.” Touissant’s eyes came open and he saw his mother’s sculpture-hard face. He could hear her speaking fast and panicked. He saw her intent eyes, eyes harder than her face. Everything about her fixed on the problem that Touissant had become. “Goddamn. Is his chest rising and falling? Yes! He’s convulsing. Why are you asking me that question? If his chest wasn’t rising he’d be dead. He’s obviously alive! Do I want an ambulance? What do you think? My son is writhing on the floor like an epileptic. My husband, a full grown man, cain’t keep him still. Is anything coming from his mouth? Do you mean, is he expectorating? Foaming at the mouth? Lady, what kind of question is that? No!” She yelled at the woman on the other end of the line. “He is not foaming at the mouth! What kind of crazy question—my son does not have rabies. This is the situation: he’s convulsing, his muscles are seizing, his eyes are open but he’s not responding when we try to talk to him. He may or may not really be conscious and aware right now.”
Touissant’s heart turned into a kicking fetus. His chest was the heartchild’s womb, demanding out with all the beating violence it could bring. His heart went faster and faster. “Shit,” he heard himself say from some point distant from his uncontrollable body.
His dad’s strong but soft-palmed hands gripped him and stilled his writhing. “You hear that, Lilly? You hear that?”
“What, Bobby?”
“He talked. He responded.”
“He’s talkin,” she said into the phone. Then to her husband: “Rub his chest.”
His dad pulled Touissant’s shirt up and his soft palms went along his narrow chest, kneading his tensed torso and abdomen. Touissant’s heart rate slowed, but sweat rafted down his skin in hot forceful currents.
“They say,” his mother knelt next to father and son, “it’s probably some sort of febrile seizure.”
Touissant jerked out of their grasp and coughed up a chunk of phlegm and stomach waste that hit the carpet and did not move. Everyone gazed at the clear block of vomit.
“God-damn,” his mother said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
The voice on the other end of the phone blared incoherently.
“He coughed up somethin,” his mother began. “He coughed up somethin clear as day and solid as a brick. We need an ambulance.”
Touissant was still now. His seizure having subsided and the vomiting having emptied him, there was nothing left but to be still. His insides were hollow. He wanted the ambulance.
“You are telling me,” his mother challenged in terse, measured words, “that there is no ambulance? Am I understanding you correctly? Then why did you ask me if we needed an ambulance just two minutes ago? What was the purpose of that question?” Her hands went into a brief seizure and she dropped the phone. The answer at the other end of the line resonated throughout the living room: the question about the ambulance had been procedural. Its purpose was to assess degree of urgency. That no ambulances, paramedics, or emergency responders of any kind were available did not preclude procedure. Procedure had to be followed to assess risk. When she picked the phone up again, Touissant’s mother laced into the woman: “You tryina tell me ain’t no ambulance, no paramedics, no emergency responders whatsoever? Because the state closed down the gotdamn fire station?” She dropped the phone again, this time purposely.
“Recession,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.
Touissant didn’t know what a recession was except that it seemed to shut down fire stations, lay off paramedics and ground ambulances. He wondered what recessions did to hospitals, doctors and nurses. In a city an hour east of a city that