by Sal Tinajero
She supposed it was a Saturday when Ezra began coughing up body parts.
Nadine was having dinner with him, a potluck of a night where she made pasta and he made scones. She figured something was off when he hardly ate half his plate. She took note of it but said nothing. It wasn’t her business, after all.
They resigned themselves to watching TV, Nadine slipping in a tape of The Evil Dead. She didn’t think the movie was all that great, but Ezra thought Bruce Campbell was too hot for his own good. So, when they were more than halfway into the movie and Ezra had yet to make mention of how Bruce’s jawline could cut glass, Nadine knew something was off.
She didn’t know exactly what was wrong until he began choking. She reared behind him on the sofa and slapped his back as best she could. She batted and pounded and swatted, until out came a hand.
It was the size of an infant’s, with nubby nails and padded fingers, all humanity ending at the wrist, fleshy and unwounded. A single horsehair string stemmed from its base and trailed back to Ezra’s mouth.
They stared at the hand, in all its slobbery, mucus-covered glory.
Ezra and Nadine understood immediately, sharing a sentiment that was only indicative of Ezra’s soon-ending life:
“Holy shit.”
Out came another ring of curses and cries from Ezra, him crippling to the ground, wailing in anguish. He swore at the sky, blaming his family, berating himself, screaming at his dick for what had happened. He turned to Nadine, his face sopping with tears, pleading to not tell anyone. He needed time. That’s what he needed. He needed time to explain this to her and himself and his family.
“Please, Nadine,” he said. “Please don’t tell anyone.”
Meanwhile, Nadine just sat, staring. She didn’t know what to make of it. She’d heard of such things before, sure, but never thought she would see it. The virus was well-known, a disease transmitted through sex. Maybe it wasn’t Ezra’s fault.
She thought back on all the times he’d come to her house, talking about the first boy he kissed. The first man he had sex with. The other men he had sex with. The discussion never made Nadine uncomfortable before, but now, with this blatant act of his sexuality, an intimate action of spewing human body parts on the table, it was an unprecedented note of vulnerability Nadine never asked for. It left her stomach churning and hollow.
What else could she do but stare?
“Nadine?” Ezra asked.
She finally looked at him. Really looked. His face was red, almost purple, cinched tight by grief and fear, a look Nadine had never seen planted on him. He was mourning his death before it even happened.
“Ezra,” she said, “what did you do?”
“I didn’t ask for this,” he replied, folding deeper into himself.
Tears pricked at Nadine’s eyes, threatening to topple over. “I know.”
They fell silent, coiled in their own thoughts, dreams, and hopes that would never come to fruition, at least not together.
And then, “What can I do?”
Ezra looked up at her, a glint of hope finally infiltrating his gaze. He hiccuped, took a breath, and said, “Help.”
*
Turned out “help” meant visiting Ezra’s apartment each night and retrieving any appendages he regurgitated before tossing them in a bucket. She had to bring the bucket to her home, because Ezra, quote, “Can’t stand the sight of them.”
When she asked why she had to collect the limbs in a bucket instead of tossing them into the garbage disposal like any rational person, Ezra simply said,
“It doesn’t feel right.”
So far, the disease hadn’t ravaged him too harshly. There was the hand from their dinner, a green eye from breakfast, a liver from work, a nose from an afternoon nap, and seven teeth from a night terror. Each bore a single horsehair stemming from the base of them, slick and long, sometimes wriggling around in the bucket against anyone’s wishes.
Nadine did all but complain or judge. Or, at least, tried her best not to. She didn’t know what it was like to undergo such trauma. She didn’t want to imagine such things, but it was her duty to take care of him. Now, the question was, what was the best course of action?
She offered some possibilities of care, but Ezra rejected the notion of going to a hospital. After months of watching news feeds with endless reports of KE victims being denied care, isolated in hospital beds, tossed into dumpsters instead of morgues, sometimes even being cast to ditches for fear of infecting other patients, Ezra perceived his options as limited.
He explained that he’d already lost plenty of friends to the disease, and in witnessing the mix of familial and platonic abandonment, he couldn’t fathom coming out to them about his condition. He hadn’t even told his parents he was gay, Nadine knew, but she couldn’t comprehend this logic. She could only figure he was scared and had to recognize Ezra’s wishes weren’t hers.
She took it upon herself to understand the disease. She went to the local library, a shabby thing with shelves practically swallowed in dust, as were the rolls of microfiche in the back.
A librarian, a man with black hair and a name-tag with “Steven” engraved in plastic, checked her in and asked if she needed help looking for anything in particular.
She hesitated, only for a moment, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. “I’m looking for any research about viruses. The more recent, the better.”
Steven nodded. “Follow me.”
He guided her to some especially rancid racks of biology textbooks and studies. Some volumes were missing, massive gaps in the shelves glaring back at her like broken teeth.
“We have a few things from ‘80 and ‘81,” Steven said. “Haven’t gotten too many new volumes over the past few months. A lot of people have been curious about how these things work, especially with KE running around.”
Nadine smiled, a tight and limp thing barely reaching her eyes.
Steven didn’t notice. He merely grasped a couple thick books from the shelves, handing them to Nadine one by one, until, “I think that’s all for now. Everything else is either out or doesn’t exist.” He grinned, peering at the lofty stack in Nadine’s arms. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Will do.”
Nadine flipped through chapters, finding what little existed about KE.
She found KE stood for Kronotic Effect, the newest of STDs that ventured into humanity in some godforsaken way. It’d been named after Kronos, a Titan in Greek mythology, who’d eaten his children—the Olympian gods—for fear of losing his reign. Then Zeus, the sky god, tricked Kronos into eating a rock, ultimately resulting in Kronos coughing up gods and people. This later devolved into Kronos dying at the hands of the very people he tried to stop.
The most common bit of information was how it ran amok with gay men. This, Nadine already knew. It wasn’t a secret, nor was it jarring when she found it in this book. But what was jarring was finding the man who’d discovered KE calling it an impurity, intended as a punishment for men who slept with men. It wasn’t his fault that it’d happened, but gay men should’ve been watching out for themselves. They should’ve been safer. They should’ve stopped having sex and understood that the world didn’t work that way. KE was “God’s way” of killing the true plague.
“Fuck you.”
“Oh sorry,” came from behind her.
She whirled around to find Steven holding a Styrofoam cup.
“You’ve been here a while,” he said. “Thought I’d bring you some water.”
“Thanks,” Nadine said. “Sorry. Just… research can be frustrating.”
“I get it. I practically barricaded myself here back in college. Library science isn’t easy.”
Nadine rolled her eyes. “Library science?”
“What? It’s a real thing.” Steven laughed, like a chime. Not the cutest sound, no, but enough.
“Alright, I believe you,” Nadine said, “for now.” She took the cup and sipped. “Thank you.”
Steven would come and go every few hours, checking in on her every now and again, asking if she needed anything. During one of the many moments Nadine had to finally pull herself out of her readings and walk amongst the shelves to temper her frustration, he’d offered her water, a chat, a smoke. He was clingy, sure, but not in a threatening way. She’d met men like that in college, where any offers of kindness were met with ultimatums of sex or a kiss or a drink, but Steven wasn’t like that. He seemed genuine, cute, and touched by enough geek that she could mix well with.
As day sank into night, Nadine checked out what books she could, drove to Ezra’s house, and found he’d, quite literally, coughed up a lung.
“That’s new,” was all Nadine said, grabbing a napkin and folding its contents into it. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like shit,” Ezra said.
He looked it, too. His skin had taken on a graying pallor, hefty bags swelling beneath his eyes. Nadine could already tell this was not going to slow anytime soon. She’d hoped, silently, that Ezra was somehow immune, experiencing a few regurgitations before it fled his system. It seemed such things were not so.
“Is there anything I can do?” Nadine asked.
Ezra shrugged. “Can we watch a movie?”
Nadine obliged, offering to make dinner. It was a fruitless effort, for she knew Ezra’s appetite was limited. However, Ezra agreed and so, she made what she could muster from his kitchen, which was a bowl of popcorn, chicken noodle soup from a can, and pear spears.
“This isn’t the feast I was expecting,” Ezra said, after Nadine joined him on the couch.
“Just appreciate it,” Nadine said, not an ounce of spite bleeding into her voice.
They sat there, gnawing on pears and noodles, watching The Shining in expectant looks, not even flinching when the dad barreled an axe through the door. It wasn’t that moment that brought on Nadine’s trembling hands or bated breath. It was each moment she saw the rot. There were so many corpses, so many flashes of blood, so many times that freaking kid said “redrum” like it was a game. Each time there was mention of ghosts or chopping people up or a bloodbath, Nadine couldn’t help but think of Ezra.
She knew he was dying, and so did he. They were supposed to act as if nothing was wrong, but Ezra was being flipped inside out and they couldn’t do anything about it. Nadine needed resolution. She needed a cure. She desperately wanted something that would end his suffering, as well as hers.
But there was nothing.
She finished her bowl of soup and tossed it onto the coffee table. She laid her head on Ezra’s shoulder, lightly so as to not rupture any new organs to come spewing out of him. There were a few minutes of peace, where Ezra’s breaths matched hers. She could hear the thrum of his heartbeat through his shirt, a steady, strong thing that gave her relief. He wasn’t dead—not for a while, at least.
The phone ringing pierced their veil of calm
“I’ll get it,” Ezra said.
Nadine sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, realizing the movie was well into its end credits. She grabbed a handful of popcorn and shoved it into her mouth, looking over to find Ezra in his kitchen, heaving silently.
She darted over, grasped the phone away from him before he could upchuck something, and said, “Hi, sorry, this is Nadine. Ezra’s a little busy right now. Bad food poisoning. Who is this?”
“Oh!” came a voice from the other end of the receiver, a woman, sounding wounded and concerned. “Hi, Nadine. I’m his mother, Constance.”
Nadine paled.
“I was just checking in,” Constance said. “I haven’t heard from him in a while, and I just wanted to see how he’s doing. But food poisoning? Is he alright?”
Nadine hesitated. “Yeah. I’ve been taking care of him. I think you’ve just caught him at a bad time. It’ll be best if you give him a call in a few days, maybe?”
“Okay,” said Constance. “Well, tell him I called, and his mom misses him.”
“Will do,” Nadine said, settling the receiver back into its holster.
She found Ezra in the bathroom, spittle dripping down his chin, plopping onto the wriggling head in his sink. It was missing a jaw, eyes, teeth, ears, a nose, and hair. It was bare, a string whipping around from where the nape of its neck should’ve been.
“It’s moving more than the other ones,” Ezra said, his eyes not moving from the sink.
Nadine wanted to help, but she couldn’t pull her gaze away from this gasping, wheezing thing. For a brief moment, all she could think was, There’s a fucking baby head in his sink.
She snapped out of her shock, grabbed a trash bag from one of the cabinets, and trapped the head before knotting the drawstrings closed.
They stood there, silent, before Nadine told Ezra his mom called. She asked if he needed anything before making her way home. He said no, so they said their goodbyes and hugged before Nadine up and dusted.
When she arrived at her apartment, she tossed the head and lungs into the bucket, the tails lashing out and coiling around each other. Before Nadine’s eyes, the horsehair tails knotted together and attached to where they were intended to be, knitting each appendage together into a haphazard body, a half-formed face. Most parts fit together in odd synchronicity, the tails settling and nestling against one another, quaking breaths rattling its pink lungs, before stilling altogether.
It was Nadine’s turn to vomit.
*
The following afternoon, Nadine was in the library, Steven near the back, rearranging shelves. She sat at a table near him, far enough to focus without rejecting the notion of conversation.
Nadine scoured through some of the textbooks, trying to understand just what the appendages had done the night before. There wasn’t much, as it came to most things involving KE, but there were theories. Someone wrote about how these limbs upchucked out of victims of KE were to construct another body, an infant. There was no specificity if it meant their consciousness moved from one diseased body to an uninfected one, or if these infants were anything living at all. Other theories involved ghosts trying to build a host to possess, alien parasites roving around inside victims, and the infected being flipped inside out, all things Nadine deemed bullshit.
The only other theory worth considering was that they were nothing. These patchwork children could’ve been nothing but what was left of the diseased. They could’ve been husks, final manifestations of what was ravaging their bodies. Only one thing seemed true, though: once these bodies were complete, the KE victim was dead.
She was rifling through some pages of a new volume exploring how viruses operated, paying special attention to ones that later transformed into autoimmune disorders, when Steven said hi.
She glanced up, smiling. “Hey.”
“Research going well?” Steven said, gradually sliding books into their respective slots.
Nadine shrugged. “It’s alright. How’s your library science?”
Steven swiped invisible sweat from his forehead. “Exhausting. Really takes it out of you, you know?”
Nadine nodded. “A librarian’s job is never done.”
“Exactly.”
Nadine and Steven shared a smile, falling into a comfortable bit of silence.
“Hey Nadine,” Steven said, “would you want to grab dinner sometime?”
Nadine looked up from her page, muffling her grin. “Depends on where we’re going.”
Steven said, “I was thinking a movie and pizza this Sunday.”
“Sounds like a date.”
The few more hours she could afford to spend at the library were great. Steven found reasons to traverse to the back of the library, whether that be triple-checking barcodes and placements or reorganizing books and dusting them, ultimately resulting in long talks between Nadine and him. She, strangely enough, liked him. He’d worked at the library for a few years, took a special interest in volumes dating before the 1940s, and took walks with his cat after especially long and arduous shifts.
Steven was unfathomably, infallibly, normal.
This was what Nadine needed.
Nadine leaned on this thought when she arrived at Ezra’s apartment, finding him unconscious on the couch with a foot, stomach, and forearm slithering out from his mouth, with his face, now blue, affixed in pain.
She bolted to his side, yanking out any stray strings and tossing them to the ground, slapping his cheek and pleading for him to wake. When he didn’t, she lifted him to his feet, positioned her hands in the proper formation, and compressed against his stomach. She pressed once, twice, thrice—
—and out came a full leg, along with a viscous spray of blood.
Ezra gasped for breath and screamed, one that grated against Nadine’s eardrums as she tried to settle his nerves. Tears spilled down Ezra’s cheeks, blood trailing down his lip and over his chin. He collapsed into her arms, heaving and weeping with indecipherable words.
It took minutes before he could finally muster, “My boss found out.”
Nadine’s heart stilled.
“It’s getting worse,” Ezra said, wailing into her chest. “A knee came today. A clavicle, too.”
Nadine held him closer, revolted at what she’d seen. There was no hiding it. No matter how hard she tried, she could never divorce the disease from Ezra. It all seemed just too entrapped in one another, like Russian nesting dolls. The moment Nadine found one ounce of normalcy, one figment of something not spiraling into insanity, she unearthed just another piece of chaos.
“It’ll be okay,” Nadine said, not believing herself. “You can live with me.”
Once Ezra’s cries settled into whimpers, he said, “I called my parents today. They know everything.”
This was momentous. Or should’ve been. Nadine should’ve felt relief, fear, a flickering strobe of panic running over her, but she felt nothing, only Ezra’s hot breaths against her neck.
“Okay.”
Their night was bleak and quiet. Nadine slipped on a pair of gloves, something she figured she’d need after the head incident from the previous night, and collected the body parts from the floor, slipping them into another garbage bag. She could hear them knitting together, silently hoping Ezra could too. She wanted him to know what she was doing for him. She knew it was selfish, for he was her friend, but he needed to know to what extent she was willing to go for their relationship.
Ezra ate chicken broth and lemongrass tea, as did Nadine in solidarity. Nadine slipped Airplane! into the VHS and just let it roll. There was no conjecture or objection, merely silence. There was no use in it. There were no calls, nor were there fights. They just sat, letting the movie trample them.
*
Days passed, and Nadine canceled her date with Steven. Ezra’s condition had gotten exponentially worse and showed no sign of relief. He, now unemployed, was holed up at Nadine’s apartment, where she found herself more often because of him. When other calls came in, most likely from family or friends, she wouldn’t answer. There was no way to explain just what Ezra was undergoing and, as a result, Nadine was experiencing.
Now, Nadine’s life was cleaved cleanly between work, home, and the library.
Steven did not have a shift on Friday, so Nadine was free to scour textbooks without distraction. She found the incubation of most viruses varied, anywhere from one day to years, and there was no standing research on how long it took for KE to enter the system, or if there was any way to prevent it. It simply said “safe sex” without any more precaution, whether that be diet or specific condoms or lube. It was all just vague, hopes of some reader instantaneously knowing what that meant without any proper instruction or teaching.
Nadine tossed the book to the floor and cursed it quietly.
She pressed her palms to her eyes, thinking of all that she was before this. She recalled tennis matches, an incessant stream of volleys and courts of girls wearing those stupid skirts. It was her life. She received scholarship offers, so many that they all just blurred together. As each piled upon another, she, in an adolescent bout of rage, accepted an offer to a school in Colorado. She didn’t know why she chose Colorado of all places, but she did.
That’s where she’d met Ezra—sophomore year, Intermediate Spanish. Neither of them was fluent, but that’s where it all began. They moved to San Jose—each without the other knowing until they were already packed and had separate apartments—rebranding themselves in a new state, a new city, a new life. She always knew Ezra was gay, and San Francisco wasn’t too far off, so it was finally his chance to be unapologetically him.
Then, only two years later, this.
Nadine collected her things and returned to her apartment, tossing her keys onto the island before assessing Ezra’s infant. It was precariously pieced together by the horsehair strings stemming from the appendages, looking like a poor reconfiguration of Frankenstein’s monster. Seams and scars trailed each of its joints, sometimes coming loose and reaffirming in spontaneous intervals.
It gaped at Nadine from its seat in the corner, still missing an eye, hair, and some teeth.
Nadine moved to check on Ezra on the couch. His skin now matched the color of wool, swollen undereye bags bruising his sunken cheeks. He’d lost a concerning amount of weight over the past several days, but Nadine couldn’t find a steady diet that wouldn’t result in him running to the bathroom and upchucking it all for the sake of another toe or kidney.
She checked his pulse, placed a finger beneath his nose, and took his temperature. All seemed normal, but Nadine knew better.
She was worried, yes, but often found herself wondering when it would all be over. She wanted him to find peace, sure, but she also couldn’t live like this. Even as he watched Nadine undergo the pain of keeping him alive, Ezra couldn’t seem to digest the concept of outside help.
She spent another hour researching through old books, sometimes leaving her love seat to take the ringing phone off the receiver and snapping it back in place. She found almost nothing, just as it often led to with books like these.
She chewed her cheek, an unprecedented amount of rage billowing into her veins.
She dug into her coat pocket and found a slip of paper with Steven’s phone number on it. He’d given it to her a couple days prior—on a day when Ezra had coughed up a penis—and Nadine needed release, so she and Steven made out in between the Business and Economics sections of the library—a pair of shelves known to not draw much traction, at least not enough to fear getting caught. She’d been waiting for the right moment to use it. Now, with Ezra deep in slumber, it seemed as good a time as any.
Nadine picked up her phone and dialed, waiting for three full rings before Steven answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Steven, it’s Nadine,” she said.
“Nadine.” His voice slipped when he said her name, smoother, warmer. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to know if you’d like to hang out,” Nadine said, toying with the telephone cord. “I can head over to your place, and we can watch a movie.”
Silence. Then, “Y-Yeah, totally.” He said his address, a place not too far of a drive from where Nadine lived, and asked when she’d be there.
“Half an hour,” she said.
“Great,” he said, a smile caressing his answer.
Half an hour later, Nadine was knocking on Steven’s apartment door and he welcomed her in. She hardly glanced at the décor. All she cared about was the curve of his lips, the curl of his hair, the blue of his eyes. It wasn’t much longer when her lips were on his, his hands on her waist, them in bed, and Nadine falling asleep next to his bare body.
*
Nadine woke to the sound of Steven’s phone ringing. He was gone from the bed, answering it. She winced at the bitter taste of sleep in her mouth, trying to remember what day it was, when—
“Nadine, it’s for you,” Steven said.
She meandered to his kitchenette, bringing the phone to her ear.
“Nadine Danvers?” said the voice on the line.
“Yes?”
“Do you know an Ezra Alexopoulos?”
Nadine’s heart leapt to her throat. “Who is this?”
“This is Dr. Bramwell from Kaiser Permanente. Ezra has been admitted to the ICU. You’re his emergency contact, but you weren’t responding. Melinda Rodriguez brought Ezra in and had another number she said we should try. We need you here immediately.”
Without answering, Nadine sprinted to Steven’s room, collecting any clothes she could find and flung them on. She batted away Steven’s offers of driving her to the hospital and hurried onto the road.
When she found Ezra, she was relieved to find she wasn’t too late. Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez, neighbors Nadine had barely uttered any words to, were sitting at his side, the patchwork infant beside them, looking too finished for just the few hours she’d been gone. They filled her in, but with the sensation of her head being plunged underwater, she only gathered some flighty details. Something about hearing Ezra’s agonizing coughs from next door, his screams being something intolerable, finding a slip of paper on the island, calling an ambulance.
Nadine bent at Ezra’s side and cried, clutching his hands in hers. She wondered if he’d wake, if he’d feel her and know it was time to speak, but he didn’t. He simply wheezed, until something clogged his throat. The Rodriguezs panicked, having never seen this, but Nadine was calm, waiting until a heart with tendrils plopped onto the hospital bed, leaping away onto the infant.
There, just as the heart knit into place, Ezra flatlined.
*
Ezra’s funeral was fine. No one wanted to speak of the misery he must’ve endured, or of the dreadful way he’d gone. Nadine only held those secrets, and she wasn’t willing to unearth them just yet. However, because she’d been Ezra’s caregiver in his final days, she had the burden of choosing what to do with the infant.
She turned to his parents for consultation, but they merely shook their heads, ignoring the problem altogether. She considered burying the thing with Ezra, but the only image that came to mind was the creature suckling on Ezra’s corpse. Finding no other viable option besides research or incineration, she decided to study it.
In Ezra’s memory, she thought.
It wasn’t too long after the funeral that the thing began molting. Perhaps molting wasn’t the best word for it, but rather, sloughing off all flesh and replacing it with stone-like tissue. It halted inhaling and exhaling, and its tethers fell slack within its body, no longer wriggling or undulating subcutaneously. It had now stiffened, the tissue tightening to something like porcelain, hard yet fragile.
There were moments when Nadine wondered if she’d made the right decision in keeping it. Of course, came the stretches of drunken nights where she screamed at the infant, blaming it for all that had happened, all the pain and grief she had to endure because of it. She scolded the infant for killing her best friend, for not listening when she had plead for it to stop. She berated it for not cooperating with the other doctors and scientists, so that they could find a cure, or a treatment, or a fucking miracle so that all of this could one day end.
But it never replied. It just sat there like a sack, staring at her with Ezra’s stolen eyes. It watched her as she crumpled day in and out, trying to understand just what made the infant tic, but no new revelations came.
There wasn’t anything to learn besides what she already knew of the disease. No matter how long she spent gazing at the putrid, dead remnants of Ezra, she couldn’t come to anymore conclusions. The infant was simply dead, a final grimace to a weeks-long agony, and there wasn’t any more to it.
Not long after this epiphany, the White House announced they’d be unveiling a monument in memory of all those dead to KE. They were to set up these infants of disease alongside each other, over three thousand illness babies on small pedestals. It was something that would be talked about for decades, a mark on American history that could never be ignored.
On this day of unveiling, Nadine flicked on the TV and hoped the live broadcast would air soon. Setting Ezra’s infant beside her was almost like Ezra being there himself, watching this malady finally garner the attention it deserved. It stared blankly with Ezra’s green eyes at the TV, beholding no light that could’ve sat there.
Nadine’s phone rang, but she didn’t answer. Steven had been calling her non-stop after Ezra’s death, but she couldn’t face him since that night. The mere thought of his voice sent her stomach churning.
She watched the broadcast as fleets of infants were unveiled, each depicting the ravaged decay of disease. She let the anguish, fear, and dread fill her. Upon gazing at the infants, the echoes of disease, memories flooded of the days and nights with Ezra, of all the library visits, of Steven, of tennis, of Russian nesting dolls.
A lump formed in her throat, resulting in one cough, two, and up came an eye, sitting quaintly in her palm.
