Shaun McMichael story End Stage
Detail from Isolation, by Kennan Hutchins, Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 32″ x 32″, 2020. (Photo by Manfred Wolf)
END STAGE
by Shaun McMichael
When his wife Tamara walks into his hospital room, Nelson can tell something’s wrong. She’s gagging up each word. Her cat-like poise is crimped as if something has her by the spine. Though she bears her usual vase of Virginia bluebells, she wears henna arabesque around her wrists. The swirly tattoos are the same color vermillion as Nelson’s blood running in and out of the dialysis machine, his most devoted attendant other than Tamara since he was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease four years prior.
“Darlin’,” Tamara begins, over the TV. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
The angel of death? Nelson wonders. He loved meeting people. When he’d been the director of the Shenandoah Pioneer Experience, an outdoor museum and cultural center, he’d gotten to shake the hands, hoofs, and paws of many an Augusta County resident. But the only people he gets to meet now are in scrubs, and carry clipboards and forms proclaiming his name and blood type. Pinpoints of pain radiate from his penis and kidneys, referring their ache to his whole midsection like a searing fanny pack of misery. And this with the analgesics for his upper urinary tract infection—the second he’s had in the last two years. During the first infection, which had been worse, he’d given up his career. Health issues. Everyone said they understood. But what they meant was they didn’t want to understand. They had busy lives to live. And Nelson? Well, he had a once-busy life that he now needs to go about losing. So, who’s this new person Tamara wants him to meet?
And as if summoned, in rolls a man on a Onewheel. A while back, CNN did a story on the newly invented motorized unicycle. The man steps off the Onewheel and stands so close to Tamara their arm hairs are touching. Tamara doesn’t move.
Nelson stares at the TV. She doesn’t nag him to turn it off the way some wives might. He’s always loved that about her, though the news is dyspeptic. Two states westward, Ferguson Missouri burns. Just as German Coast, Mississippi, burned, just as Southampton County burned. The children of murdered unarmed Black people rise up and arm. Meanwhile, the dialyzer’s blood pump rotates round and round. In the moments before and after dozing, he imagines the bonfires and shattered glass on the newsfeed are projections of the hurt inside him. When he was a historian and a steward of the past, the heart-rending tragedies of life had been hallowed and motionless as a snowy peak at the foot of which all could gather and blink at in peaceful incomprehension. Peaceful because they were in the past. Now the tragedies are alive and writhing with a hot, all-consuming tedium, no more comprehensible.
He turns the TV off.
The Onewheel man’s face is open and likable except for the triumvirate of wispy hairs sprouting from the sides of his upper lip in a style unintentionally khanate. As the man steps forward, revealing his receding hairline drawn into a ponytail that journeys down to the small of his back, Nelson recognizes him from somewhere. “I’m Arthur Trout,” the man says, sticking his hand out.
“The guy from your self-help books?” Nelson asks Tamara.
“That’s me,” Arthur answers.
Nelson’s starchy hospital sheets crunch and rustle as he sits up to give the man a half-hearted single pump.
“Uh. Nice to meet you. Wow,” Nelson murmurs. “Come by to give me some ‘hope in the face of challenging times’?” It’s the subtitle of Arthur’s latest work, A Thing With Feathers, though Nelson doesn’t think pop-psychologists refer to their books as ‘works’. Some hack probably ghost-wrote it for him, Nelson thinks.
Tamara runs a hand through her hair, the skeins of silver no longer visible as she’s recently dyed it. A pity, as her silver hairs remind him of the cords tied around the curtains on the English House attraction back at the museum. But reminders of her gray hairs’ presence have always made her eyes droop and flit off into a corner, as if the effects of aging were a disreputable family relation best left unmentioned. Tamara’s gaze falters now as she tells him that Arthur is a new friend.
“He’s… I want him… He’s going to help me…Us. With some things. I’m…We’re… I can’t… ” she says before going to pieces in Arthur’s arms.
Nelson bolts up, unintentionally nudging his catheter and wincing as the burning throbs between his legs.
“What are you doing?” Nelson asks.
“Keep going,” Arthur coaxes her.
“Arthur’s going to be our new friend,” she says.
“What kind of friend?” Nelson says through clenched teeth and a heart beating out of its skin to the point he nearly forgets about the hot twinges at his center.
“I’m sorry darlin’,” she says. “I just can’t do this alone anymore.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
From the lone visitor chair, Arthur holds a balance bird on his pinkie. It’s a raven. He offers it to Nelson.
“It’s wild how calming they are. I use it with my clients all the time…”
“I would really like you to leave,” Nelson groans. “I’m not going to kill myself. What I said before… I was just…”
“Oh, I believe you. I can leave. Just… remember my offer.”
He said he’d let Nelson ask him anything. But only for the next hour.
“Okay.” Nelson stares at the drop ceiling tiles. Looking at Arthur and his brand of neo-beatnik is igniting a murderousness he thought he’d left in the blood-and-rain-slickened alleys of McKeesport. But looking away is no better. Amid the coffee-colored moisture rings of the ceiling tiles, for some reason, he keeps seeing the face of an old flame. Rayelle. An old hurt reignites as life inflicts a new one.
Nelson flashes his eyes at Arthur. “Was Tamara one of your clients?”
Arthur nods. His big upper lip dips into his mouth as if he can still taste some of Tamara there. Nelson does the same, though he finds her taste long gone.
“Were you the one that helped her after her surgery?”
Arthur nods again.
“Okay. That’s all I can think of for now. Go enjoy my wife,” Nelson says, turning to look out the window at his allotted swatch of sky—the blue of a baby boy’s room.
Arthur mounts his Onewheel and it rolls him over to the window. Nelson wonders how the machine works. At the windowsill, Arthur idles for a moment, balance bird still wobbling on his fingertip. Outside, the sun’s insistent yellow ferments into an amber, bruising the ego of clear sky above copses of sassafras. He’s looking below at a definitive point: maybe at his car or at Tamara, who walked out when Nelson shouted at her. His first time ever doing so. And in front of this snake-in-the-grass.
“I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you,” Arthur says.
“No, you can’t.” Nelson looks at his fistula: the bulbous green shunt sending his blood into the cylindrical dialyzer for its bicarbonate bath.
“Tamara meant what she said,” Arthur turns his gaze to Nelson. “I’d like to be your friend.”
“Why?” Nelson asks, and Arthur falls backward off the Onewheel, balance bird skittering across the linoleum.
Nelson laughs so hard he thinks his catheter’s going to burst from his urethra. The explosion of mirth morphs into rage. To the tune of Arthur’s groaning, Nelson says something along the lines of, “You deserve that. And more. You fat fuck. Boning my wife while I’m still alive. I’m going to end you, you piece of shit. From this hospital bed, I’m going to call up every licensing board from here to California. Your shrink days are over, friend.”
During his rant, Nelson’s eyes become a rain-covered windshield. He has to dry his tears off with the backs of his hands so he can see. He hasn’t said words like that since he first came down from McKeesport to attend UVA twenty-seven years ago.
Arthur regains his stance and rolls back over to the visitor chair, massaging his hip. He’s smiling good-naturedly as if to say I’d have said the same things if I were you, and Nelson hates him all the more for that.
“How do you do it?”
“Live with myself?”
“The Onewheel.”
“Same as my motorcycle. Same as everything else, come to think of it. Balance. And a little back and forth.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A biker. She’s fallen for a biker! A shrink-turned-author? That, Nelson could understand. But a biker—an identity that surely permeates all others? They had mocked motorcycles throughout their marriage as dangerous, expensive, and impractical. Do those guys know how many motorcycle-related deaths happen every year? And so loud too! But she must have hidden her real thoughts. About motorcycles. About a lot of things. Maybe about everything.
Clouds have shot the sky through with flame-colored light above the brooding earth. The sodium lights of a nearby baseball field flicker and then go out for the night. Nelson hobbles down the hallway, towing along a bag of his draining urine, knee high on a wheeled IV pole. He walks his usual exercise route— a figure-eight around the ward. Only this time, he’s thinking about his miscalculations with Tamara.
Instead of the petal-plucking “she-loves-me, loves-me-not” routine, he feels like doing infatuation’s exact inverse: ripping the feathers off a beautiful bird while alternating, “she loved me once, she never loved me at all.” Either way, he knows he’d given her plenty of reasons to fall out of love with him.
Early on in his life with PKD, Nelson got certified to perform dialysis on himself at home to minimize drive times. Time for a morning walk with Tamara, yes! But mostly so he could work more. She discouraged it in her way: giving him pamphlets on the family medical leave act, emailing about sick-leave donation pools, reminding him gently of the option of just quitting. They’d always take you back, darlin’. Everyone would understand.
But they wouldn’t understand. And the Igbo Village attraction wouldn’t be completed. Or not by him anyway. The Shenandoah Pioneer Experience, the museum at which he was still director thank you very much, would continue to have a German House, an English Farm, the Virginian log cabin, an Irish smithy, and the Woodland Native Camp attraction, but not a single testament to the origins of the peoples on whose backs most of Virginia’s, and the Nation’s wealth, was built!
Of course, he was thinking of that memory of Rayelle from a lifetime ago: her smirking at him below her afro while he expatiated on the luminousness of Howard Zinn.
“Oh, you haven’t heard the half of it yet,” she’d said as she’d handed him her copy of Ain’t I a Woman?
Her two front teeth turned toward each other just enough to seem shy. An effect juxtaposed with her fierce brown eyes, easy laugh, and honey-nut brown skin. And they’d had plenty of time to laugh as the two misfits of Blackfriars’s Shakespeare ensemble. Neither had ‘the look’ to be cast in the big parts: she, too Black, and he, too tall—with eyes too close together and too big a nose. Such a big nose in fact that he appeared cross-eyed just trying to see around its bridge. None of this was helped by the movie star looks and talents, albeit aging, of Fred and Priscilla Carelli taking up the center-staged parts—two married town darlings who’d been playing the leads at Black Friars for the prior ten years.
There was something else about Rayelle’s front teeth that drove him crazy. Little brown colorations he always wanted to lick off for her. She let him try.
They’d lain naked, sweating in the sweet-tea stick of August air, and she’d run her fingers through his curly hair so roughly he worried he’d go bald from it.
“Now, why can’t I do that with your hair?” he asked between kisses.
“Because! Your sweaty hands would get me all kinked up.”
“I’d say I already got you kinked up.”
With their lips, they cupped at the open peach of each other’s bodies. It took muscle, time, and suck to get at all that sweetness.
In the hospital hallway, his catheter pinches off his erection, and a hissing of pain stings up and around his groin to the point he swears he can feel the burning in his pubic hairs, the arches of his feet, and in the vertebrae near his waist.
While Nelson had been with Rayelle, he went out of his way to take an African American studies class, boning up on everything he could. He even did the optional readings about Gulla and Yoruba cultures, and he’d talk Rayelle’s ears off about it all.
“What’s your deal?” Rayelle asked him once. “Why are you so into us? It’s not just about me.”
Nelson gave some garbled response. Something about how he wanted to honor a vital people group’s oft-ignored contribution to society. In retrospect, Nelson thinks he was running from something. Probably his revulsion of the poor whites of his childhood slinking around McKeesport with their track marks and wife beaters and unshaven, raw-morning faces.
When small-town theater mainstays, Fred and Priscilla, moved on, Rayelle got the role of Viola in Twelfth Night. Meanwhile, Nelson was stuck playing Captain, feeding Rayelle’s Viola tips—while inside, Nelson felt as twisted up as Malvolio in his cross-garters. He quit a week before opening, already having lost Rayelle to extra rehearsals (so exhausting!) and impromptu soirees (core cast only) and photo shoots (so overwhelming!) and all the swirlings and laughter of the hot, confettied center of the town’s attention. Staunton’s first African American star actress! And she’s single, too, fellas! Nelson dropped theater as his second major and, tightening his suspenders, he turned down history’s long, gloomy corridors of lonely dates, musty shelves, and surprise outcomes that seem inevitable only in hindsight.
Yes, he still fantasized about Rayelle after he met and married Tamara. His only hope was that Tamara had a secret of her own that she could befriend in the night. And this thought kept him from feeling too guilty about occasionally replaying scenes with Rayelle. Usually at work when he got a big win. After he got the Clifton-Lowry grant that would do the heavy lifting for Igbo Village. After he determined that the orange mud and tribal hut replica could be obtained and shipped for cheaper from Gambia rather than Nigeria—a straighter shot to Virginia without the Bight of Biafra in the way. When he found and hired Papé Ngwene, a visiting scholar from Senegal, to be the lead docent and trainer for the attraction. When they poured libations of palm oil on that beautiful mud, already hardening in the colder clime of Virginia’s western shoulder. See, Nelson said each time, running a hand along his memory of Rayelle’s cheek. I’m a star too.
“A fallen star,” Nelson mumbles at his reflection in the night-dark windows of the hospital corridor. All those hours making Igbo Village happen. Had he done it all to try to prove himself to the one that got away?
“I think your dream of Africa Farm is beautiful, darlin’,” Tamara said throughout the lead-up to opening weekend.
“Igbo Village, honey,” he corrected. Africa, of course, being a continent. She’d come a long way since they’d been dating, when she’d divulged to him that yes, she’d dated a skinhead. And yes, she’d gone to a few ‘meetings’ in the basement of a Waffle House on the outskirts of town. She hadn’t known. And after this degenerate hayseed made her sit through every minute of Birth of a Nation, she dumped him as soon as she could get away. She started working at the local café, Stone Soup, moved up to manager, and by twenty-five, she was an owner. And she did all she could to be welcoming to everybody, though the town of Waynesboro was mostly white.
“Igbo Village sounds nicer. You’re right,” Tamara said. Beautiful. Adoring. Faithful. Long-suffering.
What he’d give to go back in time to that conversation, turn, and slip her a little tongue before they got busy.
During Nelson’s fundraising and organizing fervor, he must have forgotten to disinfect something thoroughly enough because a germ had crept in and never left. Nelson’s fistula became inflamed with every kind of “itis” out there. In the hospital, they plunged a catheter into his neck so he could have his plasma cleaned once a day through a vascular mainline. Then a revolt started moving through his organs. Sepsis. He made it through the IV fluids, the horse pills of steroids, vitamins, and blood pressure stabilizers and an additional surgery. At certain points, his life seemed like he was standing below a waterfall of tepid hospital tap and swallowing the gush.
He made it through all of this so he could walk into Tamara’s hospital room down the street and give her a bouquet of Virginia bluebells.
But despite his intentions, he emerged from post-op daze like an island after a hurricane. Everything around him was bright, antic, and buffeted, though he remained too heavy to be carried away. As he avoided looking at the tangle of gauze and tubes in his right arm and the purpled skin beneath, he saw a vase of their favorite flowers, trumpet-shaped and clustered. She hadn’t been able to put her surgery off any longer. The green cords of her varicose veins bunching on her right calf had started whipping at her with every step she took. And between managing a café and taking care of him, she took a lot of steps. She’d recovered a week prior to love him the way he wanted to love her.
And now he knew why. She had a certain ponytailed helper.
After Nelson had shouted at her, Arthur coaxed Tamara back into the hospital room to talk with Nelson. Alone. Arthur rolled out on his Onewheel while she took the visitor chair and cried at Nelson’s side—to the extent that he’d patted her head and shoulders and said he was sorry.
In her despair and loneliness during his hospitalization and her pending surgery, she’d become a client of Arthur Trout, the writer of this life-changing book she’d been reading. It was a cry for help. A shot in the dark. She never thought he’d have room on his caseload. But of course Arthur had room.
She kept saying to Nelson. I love you. I really, really do. She just needed help. I’m going to stand by you. My man. She kissed his hands. Until the end.
She had tried. Back at home, when he’d been self-administering dialysis while he kept working, she’d given him a come-hither once a week or so. Putting an arm around him and giving him her Bambi eyes. Wearing something skimpy and saying hey, sexy. And every other week, he turned toward her, and they were skin to skin, quenching themselves on each other again—his hands covering her breasts as if out of modesty while he painted the insides of her thighs and vagina. She’d been his to juice once again, one hand squeezing her sitz bones, the other around her ribcage. Only a few pressings would have her crying out, and they’d lose themselves together in breathless wonder.
In the intervening weeks, though, he had turned from her advance. He was working on a project, or he was too deep in the waves of fatigue that washed over him after storms of lumbago. What was more, he’d left her alone to figure it all out herself. How was she coping with it all? Even if he could secure a transplant and it took, he would die younger than most husbands with similarly healthy lifestyles. How was she holding up after the disappointment of him not getting that last transplant? The donor took too long to die, and the tissue wasn’t a match. It had been Nelson’s third near-miss. A disappointment akin to miscarriage settled in. The truth was, Nelson was scared to even think about how Tamara was really doing. Instead of checking in with her, Nelson had kept his head down, kept on working as long as he could, and offered her only thin smiles on his way up the stairs to their home office.
The night-darkened windows of the hospital corridor compete with the gloom of the patient rooms; both yawn out at him on his “exercise” stroll, which leaves him panting, the way it does every time. He replays Tamara’s confessional from earlier:
“He really likes you,” Tamara offered from the visitor’s chair in Nelson’s room. “I’ve told him all about you. And he’s read about you on the museum’s website. He likes all the things you like: history and people and books and ideas. He can talk to anybody about anything.”
Especially pretty, lonely wives with terminally ill husbands.
She was wearing that purple tank top with yellow butterflies on it. A favorite of his.
“Arthur says he’s not traditional…about bedroom stuff.” She smelled the ends of her hair. The way she did when she was nervous. “I… I’ll have enough for you too, still. When you can.” She said this leaning toward him. “He’ll have to share me.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he’d said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You can leave. Now.”
How was this ‘sticking by her man’? Nelson wonders as he skulks down the hospital hallway. ‘Until the end‘—was the end coming that soon? He could only hope. From the other patients’ rooms Nelson hears low moans and the shuffle of the nurses’ tennis shoes. He smells urine so rank it could be coming out of him, which, Nelson discovers, it is.
There’s a leak in his bag and blood-tainted stick on his legs and his feet. It’s puddling on the floor. He’s heard that urine is actually good for the skin. An acrobat-turned-thespian back in Black Friar days bathed in it before each performance, swearing it gave her a sheen. An overly talkative nurse back at the dialysis center regaled him with how, as fetuses, we soak in and drink our own urine. It helps us learn to swallow and exposes us to germs from the outer womb. Nelson envisions his fetal self getting whipped in the face by his own pee, the way he’s getting pissed on now by the inefficient glomeruli of his nephrons. From piss we are born, to piss we shall return.
His earlier furor has tapered down to bitterness and self-pity, but ultimately, he’s more sorry for Tamara than anyone else.
When he thinks of his first time walking into Stone Soup, her café, on one of his many drives between Staunton and Charlottesville… When he thinks of his first time seeing her—way-too-big apron hiding her cute little hips and tits and freckly shoulders… When he thinks of how she called him ‘Suspenders’ those first few months while he worked up the courage to ask her out; he’d still been getting over Rayelle… When he thinks of how he practically fell into her wondrously wide green eyes, the color of Gypsy Hill’s pond beneath the magnolia and sweet gum groves… When he thinks of her crooked teeth, coarse black hair always hidden in a ponytail, and a myriad of other quirks he thought made her a keepable keeper… When he thinks of those things, he wishes that sometime in the early aughts he would have spun on his patent leather shoe heel and walked out without his Americano and never come back. For her sake.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The cardinal preening itself on the snow-covered branches of the dogwood tree seems like a beating heart to Nelson from his perennial position splayed out on their hunter green sofa. Tamara and Arthur are arguing upstairs. He listens with a bemused smirk. He’d offer the guy pointers, but he didn’t have any. He and Tamara had never argued. She’d always deferred to him. He’d been the one with the crusade—to make history alive and inclusive. She just owned a coffee shop. His smirk at her and Arthur’s arguing fades. The cardinal flies away. If she and Nelson had fought more back then, maybe things would be different now.
He doesn’t know what they’re fighting about. He tries not to care, tries not to listen in. An old college buddy, now a professor at UVA, sent him a new version of American history that was going to rock his world. Though Nelson doubted it at first, Stamped From the Beginning has proven to be a diversion significant enough to distract from his plunging glomeruli filtration rate. He appreciates Kendi’s use of race to neatly make sense of the curves and roundabouts of history. It makes Nelson wish he had some paradigm to explain his own situation—sympathizing with his wife’s lover as he prepares to give up his ghost.
He imagines a couple of rednecks jawing about him in a dive bar: Cleatus, did you know there’s some guy lettin’ some other guy lay pipe in his woman who couldn’t wait till he keels over to do it?
Think he’d mind if we went over and screwed her too?
There’s no Cleatus nor Jethro. But if there were and he traded insults with them—Racist!, Yank!, he’d tell them that, like their ancestors, he’d come down from Pennsylvania via the Appalachia trail looking for another life. And that, like them, for better or worse, he’d found one.
Since coming home from the hospital to their gambrelled cottage back in August, Tamara and Arthur have waited on Nelson hand and foot. He’s kept the master bedroom, and she’s moved into their former office—and Arthur has never spent the night. In fact, Arthur and Tamara rarely spend much time together in front of him.
In addition to one and two wheeling, Arthur can cook! Carbonara, curry, ceviche. He’s proven adept in adjusting to Nelson’s kidney-delicate diet: no greens, nuts, or tomatoes (too much potassium) and no cheese, pizza, beer, or chocolate (too much phosphorus).
No chocolate. Are you hearing me Jethro? No beer. Are you hearing me Cleatus?
Life’s hard enough already. He’s dying. Though the pump still whirs and the machine still sucks up his blood for obligatory cleaning, with a GFR of less than 5 and dropping, all of it is ceasing to matter as he and his football-sized kidneys head toward end stage.
So, what’s the point of being unpleasant? Aren’t we all about the peaceful transfer of power around here? Sure, he could kick Tamara out; it’s his house. He could get a lawyer, divorce her, pay movers to put all her stuff in a truck, ship it somewhere… Or could he? How much of his severance package is left? How much of that would disability cover? It all makes his eyes cross and lower back throb and succumb to the fifth catnap of the day. But if he just does nothing, he doesn’t have to worry.
Sometimes, he wants to fling his arms around their necks and treat them to a fare-thee-well dinner. Other times, he wants to throw Arthur out by the seat of his pants. But he has all the kinetic energy of a deflated tire. So he lies around, reads, doses, and dozes ad infinitum.
Meanwhile, in addition to running her café, Tamara’s part-time job is helping him with health bills and keeping on top of potential organ transplant requirements and monitoring his medications and dialyzer levels. He loves watching her lips firm up as she, on her laptop, moves money from one pot to another, as she files reimbursement form after reimbursement form, and finishes with a kiss on his forehead and a TV dinner handoff before she leaves on a date with Arthur.
It’s not much to be jealous of. Their dates mostly consist of Arthur swinging her by the Food Lion to pick up picnic supplies for an unideal idyll at Gypsy Park. Arthur doesn’t have much in the way of funds these days, which makes Nelson cry a crocodile tear or two about all his calls and letters to the health boards, which yielded the revoking of Arthur’s license.
But Arthur is in the process of getting back on his feet. You don’t need a license to market yourself as a Life Coach. You just couldn’t keep Arthur down, with his wide, tan features and joie de vivre. Nelson understands what Tamara sees in him now. And Arthur’s always up for watching a game or catching a flick.
As Nelson tells Arthur during one of their chats, this is turning into the sublime adolescence he never had. The sperm-donor that was his father smoked himself into an early grave at the height of the crack epidemic, well before he could have started showing signs of his own PKD, let alone communicating the likelihood of Nelson inheriting the disease. Nelson’s mother lived a hard, lonely life of regret, brightened only by Nelson doting on her during his teenage years, on top of his maintaining a 4.0 in high school. When he’d gotten into UVA with a generous financial aid package, she’d let him go, dying of cancer not long after.
But with this second surprise adolescence, lived out on his couch, there’s come an unanticipated downside: listening to the adults yell.
Tamara comes down to check on him. Her face is flushed and she shakes a bit.
“Sorry. We’re just…” she rolls her eyes. “Having a disagreement. Can I get you anything? I brought some shoefly pie home from work. Oh… The molasses. Darn it.”
Nelson shrugs.
She fidgets. “Tell me about what you’re reading.”
He shows her the cover.
“I know but tell me about it.”
“LBJ’s implementing his Good Society which benefits the same Black people he’s feeding into the hungry maw of Vietnam. Fun stuff.”
“The arc of justice bends long?” Tamara ventures, quoting him quoting King.
“Good memory. But this guy, Kendi. He says it’s not so much a march toward progress as a cycle. Almost like day and night. And that the only way to prevent racism from coming back is to be vigilant.”
We just really suck at loving people, Nelson thinks. If we all had the same pigment count, we’d find some other reason to hate each other to death.
As it’s piping his phosphorous-and-urea-clogged blood into the dialyzer spa, the pump head spins and spins.
“You’re so smart, darlin’,” Tamara sighs, tells him she loves him, and tells him to buzz her if he needs anything. “We could watch a movie later.”
He gives her the thumbs up and watches her walk up the stairs, her jeans riding low enough to show her crack. He thinks how she’d look good with something back there. Like a tramp stamp. She pauses as Arthur passes her. As they know Nelson can see them, they keep it platonic and brief.
“Just be careful,” she pokes him in the sternum.
The cicada-like chitter of the machine winds down. Session done. Two more to do this week. Nelson is unhooking himself when Arthur starts chatting him up. Football this, film that. Nelson smiles and gives his two cents here and there while sanitizing his equipment.
Lying back down on the couch, Nelson looks up at Arthur.
Having studied him for a few months now, Nelson thinks he’s put a finger on Arthur’s problem. He gives himself so wholly to whatever new phenomenon catches his attention that whatever possessed him previously enacts vengeance upon him for his caprice. Nelson imagines the debts, wounded lovers, defaulted mortgages, junk-filled offices, and bewildered colleagues left by Arthur’s flight from restaurateur to therapist to author to Onewheeling philanderer-life-coach. Maybe Tamara is just his next thing. Or a force in his life that could root him. Nelson knows he won’t be around to find out.
“Say, couch potato,” Arthur says with a dance of his eyebrows. “Want to have some fun?”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Arthur cranks the front fork of his “Dyna” Harley Switchback onto the Blue Mountain Highway. Squeezing the pillion with his knees, Nelson can’t imagine anything less practical than straddling the fuel tank above a twin cam engine at 80 miles an hour.
Along the way, Arthur had toured the bike through downtown Staunton, passing its Beaux-Arts bastions with their fluted Corinthian columns, pediments, porticos, and port-cocheres. Mercifully, no one Nelson knew was around to see him squeezed into his wife’s leather jacket and helmet while bike-spooning his wife’s boyfriend.
Arthur flares the Dyna’s 103 motor around the bends, festooned in oak and hickory; Nelson tightens his grip on Arthur’s waist, despite instructions to ‘keep it loose’. He’s getting a feel for Tamara’s experience riding as a passenger on the precarious beast of Arthur’s life. Arthur sings Bob Seger from behind the handlebars, his face shielded by a perfect circle of glass. As Nelson’s taller than Arthur, there’s the occasional ominous flick of an insect meeting its end on his visor. The engine vibrates beneath their legs, a well-oiled organ that slingshots them along, its coils dispensing injection fuel at precise intervals, its pistons firing their expertly timed micro-explosions, meanwhile Nelson’s own cyst-crippled kidneys fail to filter away his waste. The body that no longer works is carried by the machine that does; the husband that can no longer be, is driven by the man who can. It’s almost enough to make Nelson wish for a falling bough, a killing branch. Said bow would cause the bike to skitter into a slide-out, shattering their torsos and leaving their skulls as soup bowls for the ravens.
While they’re stopped at a train crossing, Nelson suggests they turn back, but Arthur says that it’s now farther back than forward.
Beneath the jagged assemblages of greenstone and granite of Humpback Mountain, they stretch out near the parked Dyna on a Gore-Tex-bottomed picnic blanket. Out of the saddlebags, Arthur produces a thermos of brandy-spiked hot chocolate for himself and tea for Nelson—all other libations off limits due to his kidney-delicate diet of next-to-nothing.
He hasn’t been to Humpback since Tamara’s older sister and her two-and-a-half- year-old daughter, Wendy, were visiting from Nashville. This was early on in their marriage—a crucial juncture to decide whether they would or wouldn’t have kids. Wendy refused to ride in the shoulder carrier Nelson had borrowed off a coworker. Instead, impelled by some inner combustion engine, the little tike hiked herself to the summit. But on the way down, Wendy started crying. Her legs hurt, they surmised; she was too young to say yet. With his sister-in-law’s permission, Nelson picked her up against her will and slid her into the shoulder carrier, then hefted it onto his back to make their way down. At first, she cried so hard she puked all over Nelson’s neck. Serves me right, I guess. But then the regular ambulation of Nelson’s long strides downward soothed her. She peered out at the loblolly pine and cedar, which seemed to grow ever upward as they descended. Until Nelson tripped. He landed solidly on his rear, but Wendy resumed crying. Tamara’s sister took her out, and she walked the rest of the way down on her own. Nelson wiped away the remaining puke and, with it, his insistence on having kids.
Tamara always went skittish when he brought up wanting children, so it was just as well.
“A baby?” she chided. “Have you seen my hips?”
Nelson nodded vigorously.
“I couldn’t squeeze out a bean sprout, let alone a baby.”
But a few years later, when he became director, he brought it up again.
“I think we’d make some really cute kids.”
“Oh, darlin’,” she said. “I can’t. I saw what having kids did to my mother.”
Immediately after being diagnosed, Nelson felt glad they hadn’t had children. But he has been surprised, in the lonely, restless hours on the couch, how often and how dearly he has wished for a little bundle of baby’s breath to hold. Something to reach out with unquestioning love to feather its fingertips along his beard. Something to leave the world with as he disappears.
Humpback Rock heaves up its masses of quartz and relict pyroxene, harkening to the forces of time and happenstance bearing down upon them all. Nelson wonders aloud what the Native Americans and the early pioneers thought about the possible utility of such formations. Could they have imagined them being sites for mere leisure?
Arthur does what the bumptious do when backed into a conversational corner of their own ignorance: he brings up a point so tangential he might as well have changed the subject.
“It’s a testament to divine power.”
“Humpback Rock?”
“Look what its force can do!”
“Couldn’t the force be explained geologically? Fault pressure. Sediment transport and metamorphoses?”
“Okay. But what’s the force behind those? There is a grand intelligence at work. It shaped these rocks, and it’s inside us. In you!”
“Sure wish it could think of a way to decompress my nephral tubules.” Nelson pats the approximate places in his enlarged abdomen where his cyst-enlarged kidneys squirm in their neoplastic swelling.
Arthur takes a pull at his boozy cocoa. “I’ll say the same thing I tell my clients: Even if it’s not true, you’re better off believing it. Everything in the universe happens for a good reason—the ups, the downs. The endings. The beginnings.”
“Even this,” Nelson motions between his swollen abdomen and Arthur.
“Especially this. Our paths have crossed for a reason.”
“Well,” Nelson begins. “I am glad to know you.”
“Really?”
“When I go, Tamara will have you.”
“Tamara doesn’t need me.”
Nelson massages his back while he waits for Arthur to finish, but he doesn’t. After a silence, he changes the subject again.
“This snow is going to make for a great fishing season around here. You should come with me sometime. Peaceful.”
Nelson says he’ll think about it, but he knows that for a guy like Arthur, fishing means waking up before dawn and getting home after dark to maximize the possibility of something interesting happening so he could enchant all who’ll listen with feats little and large. And Nelson’s low energy levels and dialysis schedule only give him a few hours’ leash.
They look up at the hoary peaks.
“What were you two arguing about back at the house?” Nelson asks.
“This,” Arthur says, motioning to the bike, to the rocks, the snow, chuckling himself into a snort. He snorts when he laughs. “Even though she rides all the time, she was worried about you. But I told her it’s your kidneys that got cysts, not your heart.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Nelson says.
“Spending all day, every day on that couch… It just seems like you need something.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A dry spring makes the dogwoods and daffodils bashful, blooming late and together like old lovers coming at the same time. Nelson hangs up his coat and thinks about crashing on the couch. He’s certainly tired enough after dialysis. He’s started going into clinic again on the advice of his nephrologist. Gets him out of the house, gives his machine a rest, etc… He thinks about turning on the news, but it’ll just be the same deluge of the President scapegoating poor people of color and his crowds lapping up the sweet poison like dogs do with antifreeze until it kills them. The country seems to be in an end stage all its own.
Nelson ventures up the stairs to see how Tamara’s doing. He knocks, and she bids him enter. With coarse black mane—silver streaks and all—tightened back, and her eyes bloodshot from staring at her screen so long and her butterfly tank top smudged and flecked with the detritus of avocado toast, she’s still the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. From that desk, she’s not only run her café, taken care of him, but also started a second location in the coveted clocktower building in downtown Staunton.
He tells her a little bit about how dialysis went and hears about her day some. Then, before leaving, he leans in and slips her a little tongue. She grabs his shirt and pulls him onto the pullout that she’s been sleeping on for the last year.
The sex is different. There’s none of the politeness or pleasantries from before. After tearing past clothes and past inhibitions, they’re off, their bodies moving as one body toward the finish.
After, wrapped in each other’s arms, skin on freckled skin, they listen to the rain. Her cries were so loud, so close to his ear, he didn’t hear the downpour at first. But it’s going off like buckshot, caroming on the roof, the vibrations shaking the bluebells dangling from a vase on her bedside. With their fingertips, they trace the curves of their shoulders. They don’t ask what they’re going to do. They don’t chide each other for what they’ve done and haven’t done. They just listen.
“You’ve been so great through all this,” Nelson tells her.
When he first started experiencing the itchiness, fatigue, and windedness, she encouraged him to go to the doctor. But when days turned into weeks, she never nagged. And even after, she’d never asked him why he hadn’t acted sooner. He loved that. How in-momento she was. Always had been. He was glad she hadn’t asked because the truth revealed what a plodding bovine he’d been. He’d just hoped that if he kept going through life’s motions, all his symptoms would go away. Or he would. Either way, things would resolve.
He can’t imagine that Rayelle, the newly born starlet of Staunton, would have found time to visit him in the hospital. In his consciousness, gratitude and regret are sisters.
“So what’s Arthur up to today?”
“Fishing out at Middle River,” she says.
Nelson frowns. He read in the paper the river is at an all-time low. But he imagines Arthur Trout’s expert fly reel whipping in the air, making the same serpentine shape of the river itself as if in homage before releasing it into a perfect little eddy to hook a big ol’ musky.
“Or a trout,” he says, more to himself.
“What?” she laughs with him, the way she does even if something isn’t particularly funny.
The only thing that tickles his annoyance is that beneath the wings of her undemanding nature, he had cultivated the confidence to lead, to envision, to delegate, to overwork. He thought she’d always be there, patiently waiting for him, more like a fixture than a person. By assuming so, he’d hurt her, caved her in a heart hibernation her loveliness could not abide. He’d driven her to Arthur’s books, then to Arthur himself.
Nelson begins to apologize for all of it when the antique, but functional, rotary phone she keeps on her nightstand chimes brassily. She picks it up so he gets to watch her freckled, still-supple back muscles work as she stands.
After a few yes-yes-yeses, she receives the news that Arthur Trout is lying brain-dead at the Augusta County ER, after a motorcycle accident on the highway as the waters of the Middle River rose in a flash torrent over the asphalt which he escaped on the quick-accelerating fury of the Dyna. He’d been driving so fast that the tree fallen across the roadway must have taken him completely by surprise.
Tamara cascades down. Nelson encircles her, and she nests between his shoulders. The rain continues to retch upon the house so loud and frightening now that the roof seems to open and the walls fall, and before him is the broken, river-washed road of the rest of his life. However long the road is, he isn’t sure he’ll have the strength to walk it. Especially since now he’ll have to do more of the carrying. Meanwhile, her face frissons at this tiger claw curve of life.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
It’s been two months since that asshole from Ohio drove his Challenger into the crowd of Charlottesville demonstrators protesting against the neo-Nazi cabal taking place on the same streets. In the wake of the death and the woundings, the President insists that there were good people on both sides. Nelson’s trying to not think about it while raking up the dew-soaked oak leaves and listening to another audiobook on the Civil War. He sits for the sixth or seventh time that hour and drinks some water. He takes out his headphones to hear the robins.
His kidneys have swelled to the size of rugby balls.
The spangle and clamor of a crowd moves through the fog toward him. The signs are all familiar. He follows the headlines about most of them and admires their sentiments, though he doubts the effectiveness of anything, in the face of what has come and what is still surely coming. Still, he leans on his rake to stand.
He recognizes many in the crowd: neighbors, former donors and patrons of the museum, farmers, friends, professors, former colleagues, college buddies, and acquaintances. Fellow dialysis patients banner-wave from the bed of a lowrider pickup truck. There are people from just about every race and gender and class he can think of. From their flashing eyes and teeth, they sing of a brown body moldering in the grave with a truth that’s marching on. And they are marching and slow-rolling their way the 40 miles through mountainous passes to Charlottesville. They intone to him to join them, but he stays rooted to the spot, rake fallen at his side, until what could be Rayelle’s twin calls to him thunderously from her crow’s nest atop a Jeep Cherokee with roller bars and all-terrain tires. It is Rayelle. Along with dreadlocks to her waist, she wears sashes of cowrie shells and skulls from owl, deer, fox, and weasel. Half of her face is painted as a matron on the wrong side of the Styx, the other side as Lady Liberty herself. Her spiked crown impales papier-mâché heads done up to look like familiar billionaire tech-bros, each strangled with rodent hair and Yoruba curses, and hexed in bat blood.
He senses Tamara beside him. She doesn’t check to see if he’s okay, ask him what he wants to do, or remind him that the dialyzer is calling. She’s a presence beside him. She is still pale from her grieving spent indoors, but back to around normal weight, thanks to Nelson cooking her meals. Even ones he can’t eat.
With slow steps, he could join the crowd. The other dialysis patients would haul him up onto the truck and give him a banner to hold. Hang the dialyzer for now. Join them on their march through this beautiful country. His gaze drifts up to Rayelle again. Though he can’t spot any wrinkles, the age spots dot the cheekbone hills on either side of her light brown eyes, which burn now as she calls him by name.
Shaun Anthony McMichael is the Pushcart-nominated author of the novel WHISTLE PUNK FALLS (Alternative Book Press, 2025); THE WILD FAMILIAR short stories (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024); and the poetry collection JACK OF ALL…(New Meridian Arts, 2024). Over 120 works of his writing have been published in literary journals such as The Chicago Tribune, Bellingham Review, and Adroit Journal. Since 2007, he has taught writing to students from around the world, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son where he attends church most Sundays. In addition to teaching English to immigrants and refugees at a public high school, he hosts an annual literary arts reading series, Shadow Work Writers. You can read more of Shaun McMichael on Blue Sky, @shaunmcmichael.bsky.social. and Instagram: samcmichael.
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