Fresh Complaint. Jeffrey Eugenides

a week until she’s feeling better.

      Sometimes Robbie brings his girlfriend, a Canadian gal from Montreal who breeds dogs for a living. Della doesn’t ask much about this woman, though she is friendly to her face. Robbie’s private life isn’t her concern anymore. She won’t be around long enough for it to matter.

      She picks up Two Old Women from time to time to read a little more, but she never seems to get through the whole thing. That doesn’t matter either. She knows how the book ends. The two old women survive through the harsh winter, and when their tribe comes back, still all starving, the two women teach them what they’ve learned. And from that time on those particular Indians never leave their old people behind anymore.

      A lot of the time Della is alone in the house. The people who come to help her have left for the day, or it’s their day off, and Bennett is busy. It’s winter again. Two years have passed. She’s almost ninety. She doesn’t seem to be getting any stupider, or only a little bit. Not enough to notice.

      One day, it snows again. Stopping at the window, Della is possessed by an urge to go outside and move into it. As far as her old feet will take her. She wouldn’t even need her walker. Wouldn’t need anything. Looking at the snow, blowing around beyond the window glass, Della has the feeling that she’s peering into her own brain. Her thoughts are like that now, constantly circulating, moving from one place to another, just a whole big whiteout inside her head. Going out in the snow, disappearing into it, wouldn’t be anything new to her. It would be like the outside meeting the inside. The two of them merging. Everything white. Just walk on out. Keep going. Maybe she’d meet someone out there, maybe she wouldn’t. A friend.

      2017

AIR MAIL

      Through the bamboo Mitchell watched the German woman, his fellow invalid, making another trip to the outhouse. She came out onto the porch of her hut, holding a hand over her eyes—it was murderously sunny out—while her other, somnambulistic hand searched for the beach towel hanging over the railing. Finding it, she draped the towel loosely, only just extenuatingly, over her otherwise unclothed body, and staggered out into the sun. She came right by Mitchell’s hut. Through the slats her skin looked a sickly, chicken-soup color. She was wearing only one flip-flop. Every few steps she had to stop and lift her bare foot out of the blazing sand. Then she rested, flamingo style, breathing hard. She looked as if she might collapse. But she didn’t. She made it across the sand to the edge of the scrubby jungle. When she reached the outhouse, she opened the door and peered into the darkness. Then she consigned herself to it.

      Mitchell dropped his head back to the floor. He was lying on a straw mat, with a plaid L.L.Bean bathing suit for a pillow. It was cool in the hut and he didn’t want to get up himself. Unfortunately, his stomach was erupting. All night his insides had been quiet, but that morning Larry had persuaded him to eat an egg, and now the amoebas had something to feed on. “I told you I didn’t want an egg,” he said now, and only then remembered that Larry wasn’t there. Larry was off down the beach, partying with the Australians.

      So as not to get angry, Mitchell closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. After only a few, the ringing started up. He listened, breathing in and out, trying to pay attention to nothing else. When the ringing got even louder, he rose on one elbow and searched for the letter he was writing to his parents. The most recent letter. He found it tucked into Ephesians, in his pocket New Testament. The front of the aerogram was already covered with handwriting. Without bothering to reread what he’d written, he grabbed the ballpoint pen—wedged at the ready in the bamboo—and began:

       Do you remember my old English teacher, Mr. Dudar? When I was in tenth grade, he came down with cancer of the esophagus. It turned out he was a Christian Scientist, which we never knew. He refused to have chemotherapy even. And guess what happened? Absolute and total remission.

      The tin door of the outhouse rattled shut and the German woman emerged into the sun again. Her towel had a wet stain. Mitchell put down his letter and crawled to the door of his hut. As soon as he stuck out his head, he could feel the heat. The sky was the filtered blue of a souvenir postcard, the ocean one shade darker. The white sand was like a tanning reflector. He squinted at the silhouette hobbling toward him.

      “How are you feeling?”

      The German woman didn’t answer until she reached a stripe of shade between the huts. She lifted her foot and scowled at it. “When I go, it is just brown water.”

      “It’ll go away. Just keep fasting.”

      “I am fasting three days now.”

      “You have to starve the amoebas out.”

      “Ja, but I think the amoebas are maybe starving me out.” Except for the towel she was still naked, but naked like a sick person. Mitchell didn’t feel anything. She waved and started walking away.

      When she was gone, he crawled back into his hut and lay on the mat again. He picked up the pen and wrote, Mohandas K. Gandhi used to sleep with his grandnieces, one on either side, to test his vow of chastity—i.e., saints are always fanatics.

      He laid his head on the bathing suit and closed his eyes. In a moment, the ringing started again.

      It was interrupted some time later by the floor shaking. The bamboo bounced under Mitchell’s head and he sat up. In the doorway, his traveling companion’s face hung like a harvest moon. Larry was wearing a Burmese lungi and an Indian silk scarf. His chest, hairier than you expected on a little guy, was bare, and sunburned as pink as his face. His scarf had metallic gold and silver threads and was thrown dramatically over one shoulder. He was smoking a bidi, half bent over, looking at Mitchell.

      “Diarrhea update,” he said.

      “I’m fine.”

      “You’re fine?”

      “I’m OK.”

      Larry seemed disappointed. The pinkish, sunburned skin on his forehead wrinkled. He held up a small glass bottle. “I brought you some pills. For the shits.”

      “Pills plug you up,” Mitchell said. “Then the amoebas stay in you.”

      “Gwendolyn gave them to me. You should try them. Fasting would have worked by now. It’s been what? Almost a week?”

      “Fasting doesn’t include being force-fed eggs.”

      “One egg,” said Larry, waving this away.

      “I was all right before I ate that egg. Now my stomach hurts.”

      “I thought you said you were fine.”

      “I am fine,” said Mitchell, and his stomach erupted. He felt a series of pops in his lower abdomen, followed by an easing, as of liquid being siphoned off; then from his bowels came the familiar insistent pressure. He turned his head away, closing his eyes, and began to breathe deeply again.

      Larry took a few more drags on the bidi and said, “You don’t look so good to me.”

      “You,” said Mitchell, still with his eyes closed, “are stoned.”

      “You betcha” was Larry’s response. “Which reminds me. We ran out of papers.” He stepped over Mitchell, and the array of aerograms, finished and unfinished, and the tiny New Testament, into his—that is, Larry’s—half of the hut. He crouched and began searching through his bag. Larry’s bag was made of a rainbow-colored burlap. So far, it had never passed through customs without being exhaustively searched. It was the kind of bag that announced, “I am carrying drugs.” Larry found his chillum, removed the stone bowl, and knocked out the ashes.

      “Don’t do that on the floor.”

      “Relax. They fall right through.” He rubbed his fingers back and forth. “See? All tidy.”

      He put the chillum to his mouth to make sure that it was drawing. As he did so he looked sideways