Sublimation

Assia woke up this morning and could not open her eyes. They were sealed shut with yellow crystals – like at the edges of a marmalade jar – and she turned to me in bed, she turned to where she thought I was, and said: “I’m blind.”

~

The walk-in clinic is nurse-led. It’s in the financial district, five minutes from our flat, up two sets of escalators.

Too many times, I have been sat in front of a doctor trying to recall my illness, trying to summon it up, days after it first struck – pressing the glands on my neck, plucking at my adam’s apple, faking a shiver.

But to be able to walk the symptom, the moment it appears, to carry it like an injured bird, and lay it on the nurse’s desk.

~

Assia pushes through the double doors, a piece of paper in her hand. Her eyes are watering, swollen, inflamed. She looks ecstatic.

“I have conjunctivitis,” she says.

~

We walk through the arches of Bishopsgate mall.

“I need to buy Infected Eyes Eye Drops. Chloramphenicol.”

“Say it again.”

“Chloramphenicol.”

I nod.

“She said I can get it over the counter,” she says. “But she said conjunctivitis is very painful.”

“Conjunctivitis,” I say, loud enough so that people walking near us will here. “That’s big.”

“Big news,” she says.

“You’re ill.”

“My God.”

~

In Boots, we wander through the aisles, past the hairdryers, the home electrolysis kits. On a poster for a decongestion tablet, the slogan reads: Treating people, not symptoms.

I never trust the aisles. All the good stuff comes in plain packaging, behind the counter, in a sliding drawer.

We see the fluorescent Pharmacy sign at the back of the store. The top of a man’s head bobbing up and down behind the partition. At the till, there’s a pale girl wearing a clean white smock, and underneath it, a blue polo neck.

Under the surgical strip lights, Assia’s eyes glow red, like satellites burning up on re-entry.

“Hi, can I help?”

“Yes, I’d like Infected Eyes Eye Drops, please.”

“Okay, can I ask what’s wrong?”

Assia puts the little sheet of paper down on the counter, flattens it out with her fingers. It’s just a Post-it note with the name of the medication written on it. There’s not even a signature.

“I’ve just been to see the doctor,” she says.

“Okay,” she says.

“I have conjunctivitis.”

The word sounds awkward.

The girl, the pharmacist, leans forwards and squints.

“What are your symptoms?” she says.

“My eyes.”

She smiles at this. Assia turns the piece of paper around so that it’s easier for the pharmacist to read.

“Okay. The Infected Eyes Eye Drops are very powerful. I’ve got something else that I think would be more appropriate.”

“The doctor said I have conjunctivitis.”

Assia turns to look at me. I step forward and speak to the pharmacist.

“We want the stronger thing,” I say.

~

Walking through the underpass, past the fast food stalls, the opticians, Tie Rack. Assia’s eyes are simmering with moisture.

“What is a pharmacist anyway?” she says.

“Does anyone ever actually want to be a pharmacist?”

“Bitter, power-hungry, kicked out of med-school…”

Med-school. When Assia is angry she uses American phrases.

“…probably got caught brewing up her own methadone diazepam speedballs.”

We’re walking to a different pharmacy. There’s an independent one beneath the Barbican. Assia walks quickly, as if she’s late.

“How long does it take to train to be a pharmacist?” I ask.

“What is it – an eight-week course, evening classes, Monday nights in the upstairs room at The Horse and Groom.”

“Here – try on this lab coat,” I say.

“Feels good, don’ it,” she says.

“There’s this new treatment we’ve got called Par-a-cet-a-mol.”

I try and imagine a time when Paracetamol sounded exotic. Back when tapes were compact cassettes. In the days of exotic desserts. Aspirin, tiramisu.

Under the overpass, the Barbican’s got its own supermarket, stationery shop and chemist. We walk through the car park and up some steps. Howard Palmer Chemists has clearance stock in baskets by the front door: misshapen hair brushes, leaky shampoo bottles. The overhead lights are dusty.

I stop Assia outside the door to make sure she has her story straight.

“I won’t come in with you,” I say. “You’ll be better off on your own. Tell them that your eyes are itching. And that when you woke up this morning, you couldn’t see.”

~

When she comes out, I see that she’s holding a small plastic bag.

“Yes?” I say.

“Got it!” she says, and she waves the bag in the air.

“Woo!”

“I deserve it,” she says.

We hug and I pick her up off the floor.

“What did they say?”

“She didn’t say anything really.”

“What did you say?”

“I just showed her the bit of paper.”

“And she didn’t ask you anything?”

“No. She just gave it to me. She didn’t even seem to really know what it was.”

“Oh. Weird.”

“Let’s take some,” she says, taking the cardboard tube out of the bag and opening it. A small, bullet-sized plastic bottle.

“It’s tiny,” I say.

She reads the packaging.

“One drop in each eye every two hours. You have to help me.”

There are people going past with trolleys. The security man from the supermarket is stood outside the front sliding doors, watching us.

She tips her head back, rolls her eyes up in to her head. She’s a zombie. Red veins like fork lightning mapped across her corneas.

I break the seal on the lid, unscrew the bottle and hold it above her eye. As I squeeze, a tear hangs on the tip of the nozzle. It drops. Assia’s body jerks.

“My God, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “That was involuntary.”

“It’s like I’m electrocuting you.”

“Do the other one,” she says.

~

In bed, I am watching Assia drift off. After we got her medicine, we shared public moments of pharmaceutical faith. Every two hours. We were both wearing watches.

Her eyes rolling up, two drops. Like reanimating a corpse. In the antique book store. Beneath the World War II memorial. On the high stools at Bentley’s oyster bar. In the leatherette booth of a smokeless pub. We are getting better.

And then, ten minutes after the drops, Assia would retch. On the underground escalators, bent over, her shoulders jolting. The taste of it in the back of her throat. The eyes, the nose, the throat: tubes connect them all.

Myoclonic twitches occur as people fall asleep. Scientists suggest that it may be a lingering evolutionary function, that the brain misinterprets relaxation as the sleeping primate falling out of a tree.

More than once, Assia has woken me up with the force of one.

Her body vibrates like she’s dreaming of paramedics, defibrillators.

~

I wake up because Assia’s bed side lamp is on. Her body is turned away from me. It’s still dark outside. I reach under the duvet and put my hand on her hip.

“What’s wrong?”

She is reading the small print pamphlet that came with her Infected Eyes Eye Drops. The page has been folded many times. There’s a list of side effects. I read: Changes in the blood, leading to severe tiredness or easy bruising.

“It says we should have kept it in the fridge.”

“Really?”

“They should have told me in the pharmacy. Two to eight degrees.”

I read the words: Swelling or breathing problems.

“Nobody told us,” I say.

“It was warm today. What was it?”

Are you pregnant or planning to become pregnant?

“Twenty degrees. More?”

“More,” she says.

To be used during waking hours only

“Don’t worry,” I say.

We were given simple instructions. All we had to do was read.

Do not share your eyedrops with anyone else

~

I wake up and Assia is not in bed. I put on my baggy towel dressing gown and go in to the lounge. She is lying flat-out on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

The instruction leaflet is crumpled beside her.

With one hand she is pulling out her lower eyelid, creating a pocket of air. With the other, she is holding the bottle above her eye. This is a kind of betrayal.

“You’re going to miss,” I say.

The drip lands precisely in the gap between eye lid and eye. Her body does not jerk.

“Ka-boom,” I say.

Assia blinks.

I stand above her, looking down. My dressing gown swings open at my knee.

“How long have you been up?” I ask.

“I feel a sense of foreboding,” she says.

She is staring up at the ceiling.

“What about? We should have read the instructions.”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Death?” I walk over to the breakfast bar. She’s already had breakfast. I clatter some Oatibix into a bowl. “Your body’s inevitable decay?”

“Maybe it’s just Monday,” she says, still lying on the floor.

Something in me would like to be ill, to catch something.

I pick up the dishcloth we haven’t washed in weeks, the one we use to mop up spills. I sniff it. I wipe a plate with it.

I take out the smoked salmon we should have thrown out days ago. It smells chemical. Seams of grey run through the orange flesh.

I lick my fingers.

Using the pan with the plastic coating peeling off its base, I fry an egg in butter, but I undercook it, leaving the surface and edges transparent.

At the bottom of the bread bin, I find a crust that’s turning turquoise. I drop it in the toaster.

I arrange the food to look pretty: bread then salmon then the egg, pouring the pan juices on top.

Assia is still lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling.

I watch her as I eat it.

Everything tastes fine.

~

After Assia has gone to work, I start to think about the fevers I used to have as a boy. About once a year, from the age of eight to thirteen, I would slip into a separate world, in a ball, under the duvet. I remember feeling incredibly strong. My bedroom was at the top of the house and I remember that I could have just stood up and lifted the roof off, tossed it in to the sea. I felt huge, expanding, skull like a hot-air balloon.

I lie on the spot of the floor where Assia lay. I stare in to the overhead light. I envy Assia her conjunctivitis. I envy the new understanding she has of her body. The tubes that connect the eyes and throat. The beautiful crystals on her eyelashes.

And I remember, in my fever dreams, that I was able to drift through objects as though everything were liquid. The idea that I was made of molecules, with gaps in-between each one. And that everything else in the world was made up of these same blocks. And just understanding this allowed me to step clean through my bedroom window and out in to the sky.

To return from a fever was always a huge betrayal. The limited universe: a bowl of onion soup, a door, my mother.

The idea that a virus lets us glimpse reality. That if we could just remember how we felt, shivering, hugely powerful beneath our duvets.

The universe was a ball of wool and now you bring me soup.