Love is a drug, but drugs are safer. When they come in pills and powders, in nightclubs and alleys and Turkish baths, when you’re sweating cold despite the heat of dance or sex or steam, when you know what you’ve put into your bloodstream.
Every time I open him a bottle of water—which is often: it’s all he’ll drink now, Volvic, clear and blue, blue and clear as he is now, we keep a case of it under his high bed, hospital bed here in the living room, bedroom, dying room, call it what you will—every time, I think of stag beetles and worse.
Love is a drug, but sex is safer. Sex can be controlled. Do this, I’ll do this, we won’t do that. Paisley patterns of memory, paisley with my lenses out, bright but soft, swirling, incoherent, unattached. Which night and with whom, the details are lost; it’s all habit now. Everything’s contained.
We took him to the show in his chair while he was still able for it, while he was still interested. The water-bottle was the first thing we saw: Volvic, small, clear and blue, lying on its side on a white plinth, seal intact.
Inside it, in the water was a beetle. Massive and horned, legs splayed, drowned and dead.
Nice, he said.
Next was the demijohn with the air-trap in its throat, bubbling slowly, making scrumpy. With a rat in it, floating, rising and falling more slowly than the bubbles were. Traditional, he said.
Then the cold cabinet, white wire shelves and the hum of the chill of it and the little jars of lumpfish roe, red and black, each with a fish’s head staring out at us through the smear of eggs; and between them a big three-litre plastic supermarket thing of milk with something murky in it that we couldn’t see, something dead of course, and much wider than the neck was wide.
How did he get that in there? we asked, as we were meant to; and, what happens when the milk goes off ?
Last was a rack of tins, unopened, soups and beans and such. The label at the side said that each had its intruder: larva, pupa, imago. Butterflies and moths and dragonflies, it said, in all their stages. How could we know? Open a tin, you kill the mystery; and mystery is all that’s left to play with. Answers are dead ends. Schrödinger’s Catastrophe, we called that. He smiled, and said nothing. I used to hate his silences; now I could welcome them almost, as a forerunner, a taste, rehearsal time.
Love is a drug, but words are safer. Words can bury anything. Words could even bury him, if I would let them; but I drown words, I store books in bowls of water, ink in solvents. Or rather I do not, but I wish I would. Words fix the world too firmly, books describe what ought to be beyond description, sacrosanct.
How long I can live like this, I am not clear. The trick will be not to fail before he does. Which is a monstrosity in itself, tingeing each day’s sullen beat of blood with a whisper of poison, perhaps this will be the last, perhaps I need hold out no longer than tonight, one day more, I can manage one more day…
Love is a drug, but I think I’ve grown immune. It’s too much, a lifetime of love, loving, being loved; I have drunk it and drunk it, tentative sips and great draughts I choked to swallow, spilling from the corners of my mouth. When he fell sick I stopped drinking, too late for either one of us. My name is what it is, and I am what I am: I am a lover. Please, no applause. It’s not that praiseworthy.
When he bleeds, when he gouts blood into a bucket—it’s a thing he does, the artery that feeds his liver starts to leak and then there’s nothing else he can do but spout forth, utter it, words reduced to a liquid sense—when that happens, he breaks his containment and my own. What comes out is dark, splashy, messy and hard to catch, everything that he tries so hard not to be. Sometimes it gets everywhere, as he does.
That’s what he doesn’t know, or at least I hope so, though I find it difficult to hide at such a time. I want him not to see how permeable I am to him, to the essence of him. We wear rubber gloves at his insistence, but they are no defence; what he spills out is more than blood, does more than stain the carpet. I am soaked through and through with what he is, with what he has become. It’s not so different to the way we were before, except that if he guessed he’d think me hurt, infected, harmed.
Which I am, of course, of course I am; but not in the way he’d think. I only hate what he hates, the stink and the filth, the indignity to us all. That apart, I would drink him and drink him; even that I can swallow, as I must. And change the sheets beneath him, scrub the floor, make play with disinfectant. My fingers wrinkle despite the gloves and I reek of pine, as close as ever he’ll come to landscape now. I am his view, as he is mine; I wish that I could show him trees or running water, anything not closed in or sealed off.
I wish that I could tear this paper mask away and breathe his air unfiltered, strip my hands naked before I turn to stripping him again. I want to give him back normality, but he refuses. He made these rules for our sakes, so he says; for his sake I comply, that he not see what he has done to me, how my veins run with him.
Love is a drug, but immunity is deadly. My mouth is dry, although I share his water. There’s nothing else left that we can share, and that only for a little while now. What happens when the bottle’s empty, none of us has asked.
It should be him that’s frightened, but it’s not. He lives in a bubble, hermetic, eremetic; nothing of the outside can touch him, as it seems, and that’s where fear thrives. Nothing of the inside touches me. He has filled me like a swelling, swallowing bubble that cannot burst, it is too full of matter. I feel him in my throat and in my belly, I hear the shiver of his heartbeat below my ribs, the suck of his blood in my ears. Nothing remains of me within my skin, he’s left no space for it.
Love is a drug, but drugs are senseless, random, worse than blind. They don’t discriminate, they can’t foretell. I knew what I was getting into, only not how deep I’d have to go.
I give him not everything he needs, no, but everything he’ll take from me. I have become a master of the needle, of the intimate cartography of veins. I draw his blood in measured millilitres, and it seems that he can barely spare so much; in return I give him clear, pure liquids against the desert that his body is become. I fix his drip, I raise him up and help him swallow pills as the clock dictates. I used to bring him illicit cigarettes and wicked whisky, but the fun died with the conversation; he has nothing to tell me now, nor I him. Or only the one thing, that I will not say however much he needs it.
Love is a drug, and you get it on prescription. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.