Sick. A Blond in Your Bed. Gym. Family Lore. Muscles.

--Fever night.
Your brain is burning.
Sometimes you wake with your teeth chattering.
Other times it is too hot.

Your muscles are going taut. You can not get comfortable. Your throat has closed. Your lungs are weak.

Your dreams are strange.

--There is a blond in your bed.
You have the need to tell her something. Maybe you are afraid she is gone. Maybe you are afraid she is not.

You sit up and open your eyes, but you’re not really awake.

You lift pillows, blankets.
Where is she?

There is no blond in your bed.
This was a wish or a fear.

And the night air is blue.

--You stumble to the sink, to the cold water, to the mirror.

How pretty your eyes when you are sick.
How pale your skin.

--You wake for real in the morning, a phone call from LB. You sound awful, she says. I’m sorry.

And you will not sleep again.

You tell yourself: I’ve got to go to the gym. You fumble with your clothes. With your shoelaces. With the keys to the car and with the drive itself.

--Legs, shoulder, triceps.
Approximately two hundred and seventy reps.

Each one a more than normal act of will.
This is good.

In your fever, the people around you are not of the same world.
It is you and the weights and your sickness. And there is no blond in your bed. There was no blond in your bed.

You can see your skin trembling.
You can see your chest heaving.

This a test you like for yourself.

What can you make your body do of which it seems incapable?

--The game you used to play with the heating vent, pressing your fingers on the hot metal, telling yourself, just one more second, or the way you hold your head under the bath water repeating the same refrain.

Family lore: your mother noting a limp when you were five. Sitting you down. Peeling your sock off. Finding a rubber band twisted around the big toe and its neighbor, the toes purple and bulged and unhappy.

The look on her face. “What are you doing?”
“Learning to be tough.”

--These are your arms.
Deltoids. Bicep. Triceps. Forearm.
Sinew and vein.

--It reminds you of the time you were fevered but went rock climbing. That was with MC, years ago, in the Kootenai Valley, and winter wasn’t quite over, but snow was off the face of the rock.

You hiked to an over drop above the river and threw ropes over and with your backpack on begin your descent to the pebbled bank below. Three quarters of the way down, seventy or eight feet from the ground, you saw that you were out of rope. If you went three more feet you’d be off of it.

The face of the rock was too far away. You were hanging there, sick and stranded.

You looked up. Just the overhang. MC couldn’t see you.
And below: the gray water.
The gray bank.

You could feel the backpack pull on your shoulders.
You could feel your forearm stiffen where it held the rope taut in the belay device.

You didn’t have the heart to yell more than once or twice.
There was the sound of the river.

And the shock of emergency melded with the fever and you saw yourself falling over and over. You imagined how the backpack would act as anchor.

Eventually, MC, wondering why the rope never went slack, hiked down and looked up from the bank and saw the fix you were in. He hiked back and lowered and rigged a rope.

You’d been there maybe twenty or thirty minutes, thinking about many things. You can’t recall them now.

--In the gym, you push your shaking muscles.
You do reps against the fever ache.

Your eyes are green on days like this.

--This is your hamstring.
It is separate from the rest of you.
Feel it working.

It doesn’t matter about the pain in your throat. The throb in your chest. The burn along your scalp.

This is your quadriceps.

Would a woman ever love you for that muscle?
Would she sink her teeth and burst the teardrop of it? What kind of bonding that?

This is your quadriceps.

--You think silly things or maybe they are wise.
You think: I am not worthy of love or its opposite.
You think: Not for more than a moment, not for more than a pinprick.

Rising up before you, some gray eternity.
Your ashes will mingle with all the others, the billions.

This is your deltoid.

--And you remember there was a time when you hung there on the rope, thinking you were going to eventually slip the final three feet and be free to fall, that it was, in its way, funny.

And you remembered to laugh.

--And you think of the morning a week before everything crashed.
You turned to the woman and you said, “I think I’m in a time of crisis.”

And this woman, who feared your strength, who feared your seeming lack of need, who feared the illusion you offered that you carried no wounds, you nursed nothing, that pain was somebody else’s burden, she feared all of that imagined strength, but more than that, it was in her face: she feared this moment of weakness more.

--Quadriceps.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m learning to be tough.”