In the basement there were ants. Across the cement floor and up and down the cement walls, black ants streamed and feasted on the infinitesimal chunks of carbohydrate that filtered through the floor boards from the kitchen above or arrived some other way in the flaking, mildewing basement.
In the middle of ceiling, a single light bulb cast damp, yellow light, under which, Cooper sat on the floor with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, sweating steadily. Twenty minutes ago the ants had made way for him and altered their maniacal course while he slowly sank to the floor after lurching down the stairs in the dark and yanking on the yellow light. Now, comfortable with his relatively immobile presence, the ants regained their original course, began traversing over his slippers and bare ankles, several of them making their way up his calves toward the creases behind his knees.
Still, Cooper sat, only dimly noting the tickle of the ants on his skin. He was down there for a reason. As he sat, rubbing his sweaty face with the palms of his hands, he struggled hard to recall what the reason was.
He looked at his watch, which he had begun wearing to bed during college when the height of the loft in his dorm room left him unable to see his desk clock unless he rolled halfway out of his bed and risked tumbling to the floor. Even these twenty years later, he still felt embarrassed about how he looked with his watch on his wrist in the middle of the night. The fact that, saving the watch, he slept utterly naked, made the watch even more embarrassing. He may as well be wearing sunglasses, he thought as he twisted the watch in a grinding, friction-inducing circle around his wrist.
It was
“What the fuck…” he said to himself and slumped his head backward onto his shoulders. He stared at the bare yellow light bulb and the tattered pull-string that rested against it. He wondered if the string represented a fire hazard and let the thought pass—would’ve burned by now, etc.
Ants, now a good stream of them, negotiated their way across the lower half of Cooper’s body. They climbed through the hair on his inner thighs and finally into his crotch. Cooper stood up quickly then, brushing them away, crushing them, their bodies rolling over themselves into little antballs, falling to the cement floor as other ants stopped, inquiringly, and then moved on toward the other side of the basement.
Cooper realized, suddenly, that he was shivering violently. Cold sweat continued to drip out of his scalp, squeezing from the pores on his back and chest.
“Fucking freezing,” he said to himself and stepped toward the stairs, the muscles above his knees wobbly, as if he’d been running.
In the kitchen, Cooper left the light off and stood in the center of the room in an effort to determine whether or not the kitchen was warmer than the basement. He wasn’t sure. Despite his incessant sweating, he was very cold.
Cooper opened the refrigerator and guzzled the last swallows of orange juice from the plastic gallon container. Not enough. As he pulled the jug away from his lips he remembered that the reason he’d gone into the basement was to get the “lots-of-pulp” orange juice from the spare refrigerator they kept down there for overstock or large items that didn’t fit into the fridge in the kitchen. Cooper’s kids hated pulp. Theirs was the “no pulp” stuff he’d just finished off. There’d be hell to pay in the morning.
“Fuckin’ A,” Cooper said out loud, appreciating the sound of his voice in the dark room. “They can drink pulp,” he said. Again, he appreciated the sound of his voice in the room. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t alone.
“Who’re you talking to, Dad?” said a voice. It was Nick, the oldest son, ten years old. “What are you doing?”
“Christ, you scared me,” Cooper said, his head now thumping as the sucrose flowed outward from his gut, blood sugar rising vainly with every heartbeat.
“Well, you scared me,” Nick said. “I could hear someone walking around in the basement and I didn’t know what it was.”
“It was me.”
“I know.”
“So it’s go-back-to-bed-time,” Cooper said. Then added, “For both of us.”
“Did you drink all the orange juice?”
“There’s some in the basement.”
“The gross kind?”
“It’s fine. Go to bed.”
“I hate that pulp kind.”
“Whatever—its bed time now. We can fight about it in the morning.”
“I hate that pulp kind.”
“Listen, Nicholas,” Cooper said, his voice shifting down a gear. “I said its bed time now. We can worry about the juice in the morning.”
“Dad, you always drink the rest of the good juice. I hate the pulp kind. All that crap floating around in it.”
Cooper’s head thumped—the price of regained cognition. His ears rang with the pulsing of blood through his carotid artery; the building blood pressure pressed against the skin of his face. He could barely hear.
“Nick,” he said. “I don’t feel very well. You need to go to bed and so do I…”
Then, he was kneeling, the points of his kneecaps stabbed painfully into the narrow birch planks of the kitchen floor. Then the floor was on his face, cool and dusty.
From his sideways-prone position he could see under the refrigerator. There were mats of cottony dust there, shifting like tumbleweeds at his breath. Cooper was interested in the tumbleweeds and puckered his lips and blew on them. They twirled like a tornado in their confined space between the refrigerator and the floor and eventually settled somewhere between them, suspended in space—simultaneously too heavy and too light for gravity to decide what to do with them.
“
“What’s he keep talking about?” one of the voices was asking.
Another answered, “Something about
“What’s that mean?”
“Hell if I know….hell if he knows. He’s really out of it.”
Cooper listened to the voices sailing over him, amused. The dust tumbleweeds rolled and stirred beneath the refrigerator with his every breath. He felt himself laugh, a single, belching laugh, like a hiccup.
“So, give him the Glucogon; what’re you waiting for?”
“Yeah, you’re right; I got it right here. I was hoping the kid would get out of here so he wouldn’t have to see his dad get rolled over and stabbed in the ass with this harpoon.”
“The kid’ll be fine. Give him the Gluc.”
Cooper waited for it, knew it was coming, and then felt it—the stab of the long, heavy-gauge needle in his hip. It hurt. He heard himself making a noise and was embarrassed about it but couldn’t stop. He groaned long and soft—an exhausted, resigned sound, representative of the out-of-control feeling he hated and denied and hid.
“How you dooin’, Nick?” he slurred from his place on the floor, and the dust tumbleweeds danced like dervishes.
“Feeling better, Sir?” one of the paramedics was asking, packing up his things in a plastic generic tackle box. Cooper squinted at him with the one eye he could open. He was young and handsome and confident—cocky maybe, Cooper thought.
“A little,” he answered. “I suppose I’ve been making an ass of myself.” The words were still coming out slow and thick—his mouth not yet fully connected to his brain. “Gimme a sec.,” he said. “Glucogon is kicking in…”
“You’re fine, Sir,” the paramedic said. “We’re in no hurry. We’re going to wait around until you’re ready.”
“And there’s some paperwork,” the other paramedic added.
“Where’s my wife?” Cooper asked, surprised at how alarmed the words sounded.
“She’s got the other kids downstairs. They woke up with all the action; but this guy here won’t budge.” The paramedic nodded at Nick and Cooper saw him giving him a wink, as if they were part of some private conspiracy that didn’t include him.
“Yeah, he’s my guy, alright,” Cooper whispered, his strength ebbing away as his blood coursed hard, working to dissipate the glucose that now saturated his bodily tissues. He imagined his blood as an angry, warring swarm, absorbing, annihilating, killing off the sugar in his cells, leaving the dead skeletons behind as litter, which piled up in heaps to be metabolized later, spit out in tomorrow’s toilet and sweat and water-drinking binge.
“Sir,” the paramedic was saying. “Can I have you sign these for me?”
Cooper’s one eye rolled open, not readily.
“Or should I have your wife do it?”
“I’ll fucking do it,” Cooper said, and sat up, abruptly, surprising the paramedic who stepped back a little, which Cooper liked. “Got a pen?”
“Right here,” the paramedic said, nimbly arranging the pen in Cooper’s rather inflexible grip. He squinted hard at the paper, but the lines of print were like streams of gray fuzz.
“I can’t read it,” he admitted and dropped the pen, heard it rattle on the floor.
“Not a problem, Sir,” the paramedic said. “We can wait.” And then his partner,
“Or we can just have your wife sign,” he said, his annoyance thinly veiled.
“Whatever you want,” Cooper said back, exhaustion rising up in him like a heavy, wool blanket, extinguishing his ability to care about anything but closing his eyes, lying down, going under. “Do what you want.”
And then he was alone in the yellow world between dreaming and not-dreaming, the movements above him vaguely felt, if not seen, the voices audible, if not coherent, the sense of knowing, acute, if not trustworthy. He lay there, the birch floor beneath him, cool and unmoving, everything else a-swirl.
“Dad?” he could hear. It was Nick, he could tell, but responding was out of the question. With all the strength he could muster, Cooper tilted the corners of his mouth, a smile he hoped would say “I’m alright.”
Below, in the basement, the ants kept their march. Their unending line as constant as time, their numbers uncountable, their determination, pure, the world beyond theirs, invisible.
-parnell
From the collection "Sweet Blood and other Stories," a collection of stories in which diabetes is a fundamental character.
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