Strange Condition

           I can’t say where I saw her first, because it certainly wasn’t in the drugstore. The sense of familiarity in seeing her was too great to think that that was the first time I saw her. I knew I had seen her somewhere and I probably stared at her for a good seventeen minutes before I even spoke. And that was well after she asked me a question, so there was a long peculiar silence between us that I didn’t realize because I was drunk on her with the first drink of my eyes, which is an elaborate way of saying that it was love at first sight. She was a pharmacy technician at the drugstore on Main Street in the dusty, small town whose old bones rattled with the thundering herd of semi-trucks hauling stuff to and from places much more interesting than here, I would guess. I don’t really know, though, because I haven’t been anywhere else. As much as I would like to go someplace else, this is the only place I’ve ever been. The place where I was born and will probably die. It isn’t a depressing thought after you accept it, really. Death, that is. But boredom is very depressing and nothing in my life has depressed me worse; therefore, I avoid it by any means necessary. Usually, with that of a fantastic imagination.  

My life has been anything but boring, though. I first had cancer when I was five. I lived through it. It came back when I was nine. I also contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion between there, and two bouts of scarlet fever. They treated the hep and that went away. But then I got sickle cell anemia, which is really weird because I am not black and someone told me that only black kids get sickle cell, but I don’t know, and there are less than 200,000 cases per year, which makes getting it about as rare as hitting the lottery. 

I had polio for a stretch at seven and was wheelchair bound, but my mom took me to a preacher of some kind in a giant tent somewhere that smelled like straw and elephants and they wheeled me up through the aisle where this preacher man with a big shiny smile grinned and seemed to suck up all the light in the tent in his gleaming-white Jesus teeth. He wore a cheap suit and was covered in sweat and he looked rabid and when I told my mom I was scared, she said not to worry because the Lord is in him and so I figured that is why he sweat so much. His hair was slicked-back and he shouted about everything and when he put his hand on my forehead, he yelled at me to get up out of my chair and I did and the polio was gone. Everyone went nuts. They didn’t know that I just naturally got over these things. 

I had a healthy stretch for a few years until I got chlamydia at twelve, though I wasn’t sexually active and wouldn’t be for six or seven more years. The doctor said he guessed that I could have gotten it from touching something someone with chlamydia touched, and then by playing with myself with the “bad hand,” but he assured me I was the first person in the history of his practice with self-induced chlamydia, if that is what happened. They thought I was sexually abused and social workers came and went. Having chlamydia was a walk in the park compared with all the other things I previously had or that waited down the road for me. I was the only kid in my town for over three decades to get smallpox, they said. And then when I got rubella, they said I was the only kid to survive both smallpox and rubella, also known as “German measles.” Then there was a drought of illnesses. For another two years. Still, my mom pushed pills down my throat for this and that. She said to imagine they were paratroopers being dropped down my throat to kill the enemy soldiers in me that wanted to kill me, so I did. I imagined they were Cobra because at the time I really loved G.I. Joe. Eventually, swallowing pills was just like swallowing spit to me.  

But as droughts often end, the rains of sickness poured down upon me with a vengeance and at the age of fourteen I got HIV from somewhere, not sure where. Everyone was convinced I was going to die because some hotshit people had died of HIV/AIDS and when hotshit people die of something, common people are screwed. But they treated it and that went away much like Magic Johnson’s HIV went away. I sometimes imagine that Magic’s HIV and my HIV are hanging out together somewhere. Maybe they are shooting hoops in a driveway in some cold suburban neighborhood until their mother calls them in for dinner and then they say “oh, shit” and heave desperate threes before they go in and eat their spaghetti. That was how I thought of it so not to be bored. The diseases and illnesses went on and on and no doctor could make sense of them. They said I had a terrible immune system, but it was more complicated than that. My immune system, however terrible, would allow me to get practically any illness or disease, but once I got it, I kicked its ass so aggressively they called me “The Wonder Boy.” 

I have been to over a dozen different university hospitals and been prodded and pricked like a guinea pig until I said enough was enough and refused to let them experiment on me anymore. For years they assured me that I had the key to the cure for all diseases buried in my complicated immune system like The Holy Grail. But there was always a “but” and it was usually accompanied by the line, “If only we could do something.” And so I began to hate the words, “if only” very much.  

Hospitals have pretty girls in them. I can say that I’ve never been to a hospital that didn’t. The career of nursing attracts the loveliest among us, I’ve discerned over my time in and out of them with nothing to do but observe people. To watch and look. But that isn’t to say that all nurses are attractive. Certainly, that is not the truth for I have met some wildebeests and buffalos who put on scrubs and a stethoscope for a living. But through all of my pain and suffering that God had decided to inflict upon me in this life, for whatever reason he has, there is nothing in the world like a pretty girl to make everything feel right, if only they were known in passing. It was all that I needed because in every pretty face I felt the tingling of a beautiful dream. But despite their prettiness, no woman has ever made me feel that all is right in the world, which is true when a person finds real love, or so I was told once in a therapy group for people with heart disease, which I had one summer. And at the ripe-old age of 36, I had all but given up on hope that such a woman exists. But I wouldn’t settle for less, which often meant spending time alone with only my plethora of illnesses and dozens of pills to keep me company. 

This town is without color. Entirely in black-and-white as though everything and everyone was covered in soot, or my eyes were bled of whatever filter or pigment it is that makes one see colors. It is entirely possible that is the case because of some rare eye disease that I have which makes it appear so, as color is only a perception and not the physical attribute of anything. I don’t pretend to be a scientist or a smart man. I am neither. Even my name is boring. And as much as I dislike being bored, perhaps that is my fate. I was born into it. But the girl in the drugstore wasn’t like any of the other girls and it was impossible to look at her and feel any part of ennui. She inadvertently sowed in me a beautiful dream. It was impossible to look at her and not feel as though I was looking at the whole world and every dream I ever had all in the assembly of one person. 

I was shopping for bandages for my hemophilia when I saw her through a rack of greeting cards and over-the-counter drugs and cosmetics. And when I saw her once, I couldn’t look away. She wasn’t absent color like everything else. And she had electric in her eyes and her skin glowed like they say people glow after exposure to radiation. There must have been an entire nuclear fallout in her soul which shot out of every pour with such brilliance I had to grab a pair of Blue-Blocker sunglasses from the rack and put them on. And to also conceal my ogling. Her lips were rose-colored and her eyes, a deep electric blue. I had never seen anyone like her. Not in all the hospitals I’d ever been. Not on TV or in magazines. The clean or dirty ones. Not in this life, or the last, and probably not the next. And certainly, no Heaven had anything more beautiful for me to see than her. 

I had a dozen prescriptions to pick-up for my current diseases and illnesses and I assumed she was new because I had never seen her here before, though I had only recently transferred my scripts over to this drugstore. And so my time had come, I knew. As sure as I knew I once had tuberculosis and epilepsy, only I wasn’t coughing up a lung, or twitching on the floor, though I felt in my insides that I was doing both at once. I approached her directly. Everything around her in black-and-white, but she in stunning intense color, like Oz when Dorothy opened the door. She was Oz. All of it. Every munchkin. Every painted horse. And emerald-colored palace. The pharmacist said, “Oh, hey, Joe,” as he always did, and the other techs smiled and said “Hi, Joe,” but I was still staring at her. Only at her. Her name tag said her name but I didn’t look so she wouldn’t think I was staring at her chest. But her chest wasn’t chesty, so it certainly wouldn’t matter if I was and the brain tumor in my head ached and I wet myself because of my multiple sclerosis, which I had for a good month or two and which didn’t seem eager to go anywhere like the other diseases had.   

Fortunately, I don’t think anyone noticed because I was wearing dark jeans. Then I thought about how I almost wore light jeans with holes in them that day. So I suppose God doesn’t hate me that much after all, despite the excruciating pain of a lifetime of practically every disease known to man at one time or another. But I didn’t have time to chat with her and knew I had to make it quick before the pungent smell of my piss arose and the stream of urine ran all the down my leg and in and out of my shoe and puddled at my feet. Hell, what was I thinking? She wouldn’t be interested in me. The man with a thousand diseases. The Wonder Boy. 

So I made quick work and smiled and said hello and that it was a pleasure to meet her and that I am a regular and hope to see her again. She quickly processed my insurance card and handed me the usual large paper sack with my monthly medications and I said that I would see everyone next month and everyone said they would see me next month and to take care and that sort of thing. But before I left, a few of the techs gave me the gifts they usually give me which they had stored in the back beneath the counter. They were sympathy gifts. Usually cookies, or something baked because they knew I had no family. I came in the same day every month, so I was predictable. They felt sorry for me. It had nothing to do with the business I gave them. That which my insurance pays. I am surprised my insurance company has not sent someone to kill me because my monthly bill is over ten thousand dollars. I am the reason everyone’s premiums go up. And all I do is work at the Post Office selling stamps and doing customer service, unless one of my diseases makes me too grotesque or contagious for public contact, in which case, they have me sort mail. 

So soggy-legs and all I schlepped out with a big paper-sack of meds under my arm, a pineapple upside down cake, and a paper plate full of peanut butter no-bake cookies. And I went home and sat at my dining room table and emptied my sack and arranged my pills and planned out my monthly dosages. But my eyes twitched and I was having a hard time seeing the bottle and I knew there was something wrong. Not only that I couldn’t see color, but I was having a difficult time focusing. Glaucoma, I assumed. Maybe retinitis pigmentosa. There was one thing I had never suffered over 36 years and that was a significant eye disease. Nearly every part of my body had been effected by my strange condition, but never my eyes. And it came at the worst possible time. When finally there was someone in life worth seeing.

I didn’t have time to waste. Each day my vision got worse and worse and though like all my other ailments it might have gotten better in a matter of months, I couldn’t chance it. So I went into the drugstore every day at the risk of being obvious and bought something. Sometimes it wasn’t anything more than a candy bar, but every time I did I paid for it at the pharmacy where she was working. Cleo, which wasn’t short for Cleopatra, she admitted to me. And the pharmacist said “Hey, Joe” and the techs said “Hi, Joe” and every day that Cleo was working I timed it just right that I would pay for whatever I had when she was free to cash me out. And every day my eyes got worse and worse, but she was still in color while the rest of the world was the dismal color of dead fish. 

Every day I stared at her a little longer than the last, committing her to memory, but she didn’t know why. She must have thought I was just another kook. But we made small talk and my favorite days were the days when I said something that made her laugh. She had a beautiful laugh and when I was home in bed at night and laying there in the dark, it didn’t matter that my eyes were betraying me because I could see her, and I could hear her as though she stood right before me. And I swore sometimes she hovered over me in bed so close that I could feel her breath upon my face, but when I reached to touch her, she was gone. And I thought of being in love before, but there was never anyone like her and the feeling that had existed in me before was a tremor; whereas, she was the earthquake. The 9.0 on the Richter scale. They all went away like they were supposed to go away to make way for her.

My God, was she the most beautiful human-being I had ever seen. There was nothing I didn’t adore about her. The way she looked around at people and with a broader view at life. The tone of her voice. Her laugh. Her cough. Her sneezes. Her scent when she forgot to wear perfume. When she didn't have time to shower. The way she bit her lip sometimes and smiled. I bought her a cup of coffee at a nearby café when she had a break several times. And I stared at her and she must have noticed me squinting because she asked if I was losing my sight. 

“I am, slowly. But I am,” I admitted.

“Oh. I’m sorry. My grandpa was blind.”

“No need to be. My only regret is I’m not going to be able to see you. You’re the only thing I ever saw in color.”

“Ever?”

“Yeah. There’s no explanation for that. I’ve only seen varying shades of gray. All my life.”

“So it is all like an old movie to you?”

“Yes. All but you.

“I’m flattered.”

“It means something.”

“What does it mean?” she smiled back.

“Something. Like the Beatles’ song. Something.”

“I love the Beatles!”

“Me too.”

“Do you really have Ebola?”

“Had it. That was last month. It’s gone. I might have the Bubonic Plague, though. So don’t drink after me,” I grinned.

She laughed and took a sip of her coffee. 

“What do you want to do, Cleo? With your life?”

She hesitated. “Only to be in love. Truly in love. And to have fresh flowers on my dining table for the rest of my life. What about you, Joe?”

“I already have it.” I stared at her through foggy eyes and she stared back in a long and perfect moment of silence. I had never been in a more perfect moment in all of my life than I was there looking at her. “It doesn’t matter if I lose my eyesight, or if I die, because I lived this moment, Cleo. With you. And that, I’ll take to my grave.”

She took a deep breath and changed the subject. “Are you afraid when you get sick?”

“No. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

“Are you afraid to die?”

I shook my head and smiled. “I was afraid to die before ever knowing what love felt like. But that fear is most definitely gone.”

She looked at me and it was apparent that she was overtaken by the sadness of my words, or the apparent acceptance of my fate, the finality of it all. I guess, in retrospect, it sounded like resignation, though that was not the intent of my words. I knew I wasn’t going to live a long life. The diseases and all the pills would eventually wear on me and shut down my organs. I guess I was always focused more on the healing part than the getting sick part. But maybe at 36, the optimism and hope of my youth had faded. And despite knowing that I love Cleo and would like to build a life with her, my strange condition made that most impossible. Who would want someone who was sick so often, who would be bed-ridden for months, or on a million pills with all the strange side-effects from dry mouth, to night sweats, to bed-wetting, to tremors, to erectile dysfunction? What had I to offer someone as beautiful as her?

The doctor finally gave the diagnosis – retinas pigmentosa.  He smiled at me like he always smiled and because he said confidently, like he did with all the other diseases, it wouldn’t last. He had all the faith in the world in my immune system. I would fix myself as I always had. But he was eager to know how long it would last this time. He sent me to an eye specialist in town, an oculist, who was equally happy to have me and was eager to observe how my eyes would repair themselves because he was sure that it would reveal some secret about curing blindness in everyone in the world with RP, as they called it. So my full-time job became going to the eye doctor and allowing them to take pictures of my eyes every day. There was a Time magazine article about me. I made the cover. “The Boy No Disease Can Kill,” it said. “How doctors believe The Wonder Boy could hold the cure for everything,” read the subtitle. They paid me a million dollars for the article alone. I was paid another twenty by the medical researchers. There was talk that the pharmaceutical companies would pay much more, but I had yet to speak to any of their people.   

I regretted the magazine article because people treated me differently. I was paid a lot of money to be studied, as I had finally agreed to do so because if I could help other people, it seemed like my duty to do so. It was no longer about me. At least, that is how I justified it when in reality, selfishly, I was in love with Cleo and I hoped that if they studied me, they could cure me. But it became quickly obvious that they had no intention of curing me, nor the slightest clue in how to do so. I was an overpaid lab rat and I was suddenly driven and flown to hospitals all over the world. Yet, still, nothing was in color.  Everything, but Cleo, was in black-and-white.  

I got cards and letters. I got money from people who hoped I held the cure to their kids’ cancer, or their husband’s heart disease, or their brother’s Lyme disease somewhere inside of me, in my immune system, which they must have imagined to be like some magical hot springs. They extracted bone marrow from me so often that the indescribable excruciating pain of it became normal to me, and eventually, I couldn’t feel the thick needle cracking through the bone as it did. Imagine a kid with cancer, they told me. Imagine a grandpa with Alzheimer’s. You can help them, Joe. You can help them. I was blind and lonely. And despite them hiring me a personal assistant who lived with me 24-hours a day and setting me up in a very nice house with all the food and books-on-tape I could ever desire, with all the calls for interviews and for lucrative offers to speak and tell everyone what it was like to have contracted and cured myself of over 10,000 diseases in my lifetime, I was lonely and there seemed to be nothing in this world that would ever change that. I stopped going to the pharmacy, though I wanted to, as I let my assistant handle picking up my medications. She came back and told me that everyone said hi.

I thought she would come. I dreamed of her coming. I dreamed of my assistant being replaced by Cleo, unbeknownst to me until I sat down for dinner and she would sit where my assistant sat and smile at me. And I would know it was her because of the smell of her skin, or the sound of her laugh, or her voice when she asked me, “How’s the soup?” I wish I could have written that is what happened, but I can’t. 

My vision eventually returned and the optometrist people were pleased that he had photographic evidence of a complete reversal of a disease thought to be irreversible. It might take years, he admitted, to determine how it occurred. But he expressed confidence that they would find out. After I could see again, I let my assistant go and went to the pharmacy myself for as few prescriptions as I had ever needed. I was only suffering from pancreatic cancer, so it wasn’t bad. Normally, I had a dozen or more diseases going on at once. I was able to see her again and it was like Christmas morning and she was in color and all else was still not. And she smiled when she saw me, but there was a ring on her left ring finger and she must have noticed me staring at it because the smile faded from her face and she asked to talk to me later on break, if I could stick around for a few minutes. Even though I didn’t suffer from any disease to cause it, I felt like wetting myself, or crying profusely, or vomiting up my guts. 

I shook my head yes and had a seat and read a magazine that was full of advertisements for drugs, nearly all I had taken at some point. And I thought of the billions of dollars that went into fixing people of real and imaginary conditions, but how there is no pill that could ever fix a broken heart, and how there were no words she could say to me that would possibly help me. So I got up to leave, but just as I did, the sterile white door to the pharmacy opened and there she stood smiling at me. 

“It’s nice to see you, Joe.”

“You too, Cleo.”

“Have a coffee with me. For old times.”

I agreed and trailed after her through the drugstore and to the café that was next door. We sat at the table we had sat at many times before and I waited for her to tell me about the ring, but she wanted to talk about me and all the hospitals I had been to and how she read that some doctor somewhere was optimistic that the cures to several diseases I had before would start a domino effect and how they would cure them all because of the research that had been done with me. But I was not interested in any of that and I was lost in a daze and for some reason I remembered when I had polio at seven and my mom took me to that tent where that preacher with the big white teeth stood in the spotlight as my mom wheeled me down through the excited faces of what felt like a million people but was only a few hundred. And that smell of straw and elephants came back to me and I could hear my mother whispering in my ear to go with it. And I could hear the wheels of the wheelchair squeal despite the rancorous roar of the crowd pent up in that giant canvas tent with their hands up in the air. I was getting closer and closer to the preacher who was staring at me with his big gray eyes and his enormous hands reaching out to me. My God, was I scared. 

But Cleo smiled at me and held my hand as the waitress brought us two coffees I didn’t remember ordering. And she put me out of my misery by suddenly asking me to marry her. I might have said excuse me, or I might have fainted, but when I came to she was waiting for an answer and she had a ring to give to me which she said belonged to her grandfather who was in WWII. She said she was wearing her grandmother’s ring and wanted me to wear her grandfather’s now, though it is customary to wait until the marriage. Men don’t usually wear engagement rings, she said. Of course, I said yes, like I got up out of that wheelchair as that preacher howled, “Praise the Lord!” and people screamed like the ghosts of elephants in that old circus tent. 

“After you did what you did, Joe, I knew there was no one else in this world I would rather be with than you. I didn’t know anyone could be that selfless. So I put on grandma’s ring and have worn it, presuming that you would say yes. I didn’t want anyone flirting with me when they saw the empty finger.”

I held her hand and smiled. It felt as though God was rewarding me as greatly as He had punished me. But the punishment was well worth the reward. I would have taken ten thousand more diseases to have her, a hundred thousand more to keep her, and a million more to live a life with her. So in gratitude to God, I donated much of my money to a children’s cancer charity and I kept my job at the post office selling stamps and metered postage for parcels.

Every day I felt better and after the pancreatic cancer went away, I was disease-free and knew that I was not to suffer any further in this life of my strange condition. But still I went to the drugstore to see my future wife, if only to say hello, or to wait for her to have coffee like we had in the past. Sometimes we just walked around the parking lot because she liked to walk on breaks. And sometimes I brought her flowers, and other times I wrote her poems. Flowers of words, I told her. And she smiled and when she smiled, I smiled. And they said one of the effects of the last drug I was on was delusional thought, which concerned me. So I sometimes lied in bed and looked at her through the dark while she slept. I could feel her breath upon my hand and face. And sometimes I gently caressed the side of her face or her hair so I knew she was real and she was there with me. She never disappointed my senses and I am convinced that it was her love that cured me. A People magazine article said: Wonder Boy Cured by Love, Doctors Scratch their Heads. 

          She is color in a colorless world. My only color. And our table is never without living flowers just as our hearts are never without love. This is now our strange condition. To love absolutely with no reservation. We were married on the 4th of July in a crowded canvas tent that smelled of elephants and straw by a tall preacher with big white teeth who howled, “Praise Jesus!” when it was all done.