League Of Mortals

By Duncan Cross

"Cross is a masterful storyteller, surprising us with plot twists, and evoking his world with humor, sly observation and depth. His story will resonate with those who’ve experienced illness at a young age, but equally, it will find its way into the hearts of any reader who has come of age." - Elizabeth Scarboro, author of My Foreign Cities.

"I love this story... the emotions and the realities of illness were presented with such authenticity, and with humor and wit" - Laurie Edwards, author of In The Kingdom of the Sick.

"Duncan Cross's vividly written novel is an addictive page turner for young adults coping with lesser talked about and life altering diseases. It's a refreshing rarity to read about the subject of chronic illness from a guy's perspective."
- Kairol Rosenthal, author of Everything Changes: The Insider's Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s.

"With League of Mortals, Cross captures the chaos and frustration of contending with a disease while young, and tells it in a witty and engaging voice." - Caitlin Caven, columnist for Psychology Today.

League of Mortals is the most honest thing you will ever read about illness: a razor-sharp story told with shocking candor, fierce wit, and deep compassion. Wesley Peary gets sick just before his senior year, and in short order loses his job, his friends, and his fun - everything but his mind. When that goes, too, he finds the only person who can help is in even worse shape than he is.

League of Mortals begins as Wesley gets sick the summer before his senior year. As he shuffles from one diagnosis to another, Wesley befriends Travis, an older boy with a terminal disease. Meanwhile, Wesley contends with his fussbudget English teacher and a girlfriend with hospital issues, each a monster in her own way.

Wesley tells the story as a memoir, looking back to 1994 – when music was terrible, health reform was hot, and the Internet was brand new. As Wesley gets worse, life gets harder - his girlfriend torments him, his English teacher humiliates him, and even his doctors push him to despair. In coming to terms with his illness, Wesley endures the unbearable, commits the unthinkable, and considers the unforgivable. The result is a gripping exploration of life, youth, illness, hope, and death.

Duncan Cross writes 'the best-written patient blog on the web', and has written for Change.org and Kevin, MD. He has contributed to two books on chronic illness, including Laurie Edwards's In the Kingdom of the Sick. He founded Patients for A Moment, the first blog carnival for people with chronic illness. Cross has won several contests and awards for writing, in particular the Muir Prize for Literary Humour from the University of St. Andrews.

League of Mortals is his debut novel, a semi-autobiographical account of his first year with chronic illness. In the book, Cross reveals details of his life that are humiliating, infuriating, and crushing - not simply to shock, but because lives like his are long absent from literature and pop culture. With League of Mortals, Cross at last shines ruthless light on a subject that has been kept in darkness far too long.

Note: because League of Mortals is above all honest, it contains scenes that may upset or offend some readers - including bathroom scenes, adult content, medical procedures, mild violence, and extremely dark comedy. While the content may be appropriate for late teen readers, League of Mortals not intended for young adults, and young readers will benefit from parental guidance.

Smashwords 2nd Edition: fixes typos and formatting problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Duncan Cross
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310351624

Duncan Cross

Duncan Cross writes "the best-written patient blog on the web", focusing on the common experience of illness, shared by all sick people no matter how different their diagnoses. He created 'Patients for A Moment', the first blog roundup for patients by patients, and contributed to two books on chronic illness. His novel, League of Mortals, is now available.

Book preview

League of Mortals

a novel by Duncan Cross

Copyright 2015 by Duncan Cross

Smashwords 2nd Edition

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook, which is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from an authorized retailer. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you, please visit your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Thank you for your support.

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for sallie mae

League of Mortals

Table of Contents

Part I. Get Sick

Part II. Get A Room

Part III. Get Some

Part IV. Get Worse

Part V. Get Better

Study Guide

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

League of Mortals

by Duncan Cross

Part I. Get Sick

1. Pool Party

In my junior year of high school, my girlfriend dumped me right before the prom. I didn't go, even though the tickets were forty dollars each, non-refundable. I just stayed home and sulked and mashed her corsage to pulp. She broke up with me in the sort of manufactured crisis kids use to not admit they've lost interest, which was fine except she made it out to be all my fault.

I remember thinking the world might as well end, because I was lonely and humiliated and out eighty dollars. My mom had bought me a new two-hundred dollar suit and paid to get it altered and I never wore it until months later, but at least the tie that matched the dress was returnable for store credit. I say she was my girlfriend junior year, but really we only dated for about three months. And that was just about the worst thing that ever happened growing up.

Otherwise, it was golden, like when politicians talk about a return to old-fashioned values, and you know they just mean nostalgia for their own childhood when black people were invisible and gay people were a secret. My childhood was that good, though not for the same reasons.

The rest of it started the summer before my senior year of high school. I finished with mostly As and Bs and was a sure thing for varsity water polo next year, and I had a car. College was too far away to worry about, so I was going to spend my summer doing precisely three things: working, surfing, and not much else. Apart from lacking a girlfriend, that was the best possible summer I could imagine. To get it going, I threw my end-of-the-year party. In earlier years this was also my birthday party, but the School Board kept creeping the year up so that my birthday was a couple weeks after the last day of school.

Our house had a pool, the care of which was my responsibility. I spent the last few days before my party cleaning it to tropical clarity: flocculant, chlorine, muriatic acid, and frequent vacuuming and filter cleanings. The pool was pristine; apart from the chemicals, I could have drunk from it. The blue Marzite bottom glowed and sparkled in the summer sun, cool and inviting against the heat – as beautiful as an advertisement. Lots of people in Florida half-ass their pools, letting them get cloudy and streaked with algae. Not my pool – not that summer – and I was proud to share it with my friends.

There was food, too. Mom bought a cake, and not the grocery store kind with plastic icing. She went to an actual bakery, and bought an awesome cake that she set on the snack table with no candles, since I didn't want to be obvious about it. It was like, ‘hey, here's some cake, it's someone's birthday sooner or later – no biggie.' The cake and snacks and large bottles of Cokes and a cooler full of ice were set up in our sun porch, where mom and her friend Mrs. Walker kept an eye on things, just in case we decided to start having a teenage sex orgy. My sister used to babysit my parties, but she was gone for the summer so mom had to be there. Mrs. Walker was just there to keep her company, I guess.

The party started at one in the afternoon, and my friends trickled in over the next hour or so. By that point I had two distinct circles of friends: water polo players in one, nerds in the other. I sat almost alone in the awkward sliver in between. I started out a nerd: school did that, putting me in gifted classes, even though I never felt particularly smart. Some of the kids at my pool party that summer I had known since fourth or fifth grade, and these were people I probably would never have hung out with except that we were in gifted classes together all the way into Boeme High School. It's supposed to be pronounced sort of like Berm-uh, but everyone says Boom. When schools were segregated, it was the white school in Orlando; my dad did three years there in the '60s. The school mascot was the Bomber, so our cheer at sporting events was to shout Boom Boeme Bombers! and clap hands twice to sound like sonic booms, but everybody was always just a little off and so it just sounded like applause. It was still mostly a white school.

Boeme was a typical high school, as near as I can tell, which meant the best thing about it was that at some point you left. It was a boring place if you were not in sports – but I was too short for basketball, too small for football, too easily distracted for baseball. Then right at the beginning of ninth grade, we moved to the new house with the pool, and I discovered I was good at swimming. I tried out for the swim team, but the flip-turn at the end of a lap is tricky; I once knocked my head on the side of the pool hard enough to make myself nauseated. Water polo seemed safer; it was a newish sport in central Florida, so I had no trouble making the team. Then suddenly I was not entirely a nerd, but not quite a jock, either, because the real jocks looked down upon the briefs-clad polo players as not real athletes and – I'm quoting here – faggy.

Labels didn't matter so much at the party. That's not to say it wasn't a little disorienting, seeing the jocks and nerds together in the pool – the former still in tournament form: taut, athletic, tanned, with hair still sun- and chlorine-streaked, legs depilated and smooth. And these were only the male players, since the girls' team didn't show up, because my former girlfriend was on the girls' team, and her teammates all took her side.

Like the other players, I wore my polo swimsuit, which did in fact feel awkward when I first put it on. The briefs made obvious that I was a late bloomer. Even my sister made fun of me. The trick was, if anybody commented on your package, you could just say, it's cold; if they kept at it, you called them 'fag' and walked away disgusted. I am not proud of my use of the f-a-g word, but it was high school in the 1990s and I was insecure.

The nerds all wore trunks, and not all took off their t-shirts to swim; those that did had not a hint of sun upon their torsos. One of the players, a sophomore named Matty, took it upon himself to point this out to a nerd: Dude, your chest is so blinding white, I need sunglasses.

The nerd, Nathan, looked at Matty as if he were an insect. If you want, we can build you a pinhole box. He could see Matty wasn't tracking. Like you would use for a solar eclipse.

Oh, snap, said Matty. Can you show me how that works on your whiteboard, Professor?

As host, I felt obliged: Matty, do you need a time out?

Yo, Wesley, my bad, Matty said.

We swam around for a while, some of the guys splashing the girls, but not really doing anything, until the girls got tired of the pool and adjourned to long chairs on the patio. The thing about pool parties is that they are kind of pointless unless you have a game, and that game was always going to be water polo in my pool, but none of the girls knew how to play. A couple of the nerds played, but not for long, since the game requires treading water for inordinate amounts of time. It was exhausting if you weren't trained for it.

After fifteen minutes, we were down to four of us: Matty, Pete, Kevin, and me. Kevin was an aggressive, strong swimmer, but couldn't hit the goal to save his life. The goal was set up on the deep end of the pool, so every time he missed the ball pounded a panel of the screen enclosure behind.

Damn, Kevin, go easy on my screen, I said after his third miss. I have to fix that shit. It wasn't hard to fix, but I could already see a tear in the corner.

Sorry, bro, he said, as Matty scooped the ball up from the patio and threw it to Pete, who swam the ball to the shallow end while Matty reentered the pool. I let Kevin press Pete, but Pete skipped the ball past him to Matty, who took the shot and scored. Kevin mumbled a 'fuck', and the nerds still watching golf-clapped politely.

Kevin rebounded to me, and I swam it back in to play. Matty was pressing me, but I didn't see any opening to throw to Kevin. I knew I could reliably hit the goal from the point in the pool where I could just touch bottom on tip-toes. Since the pool dropped off sharply from there, Matty was in too deep water to follow. The extra push got me up over Matty's reach, and I threw the ball hard at the net and scored. The spectators obliged with more golf-clap.

Foul, you bastard, said Matty.

My pool, my rules, I said, distractedly. I had ignored my stomach rumbling earlier so I could play the game. With the push-off for the last shot, I felt my pucker give way just a bit, and an unmistakable warmth in my briefs.

I had shat my own pool party.

I looked down and fanned my hands around my trunks, but there was no stain in the water. I told everyone I needed a break, and Nathan volunteered to play my spot. I swam to the shallow end and started up the steps. Karen, a nerd who had chosen not to swim, was sitting on my towel, but I didn't want to get too close in case I smelled funny. Can you hand me that towel? I asked, and she did. I wrapped it tightly around my waist and went inside through the bathroom entrance.

Once inside I took to the toilet and emptied my guts. I remember thinking, I never have diarrhea. While I sat there, I examined the inside of my briefs, which showed a minute amount of fecal material. I wiped it out with toilet paper, then rinsed the briefs under hot water from the tub faucet. Then I wrung out the briefs and slipped back into them. I washed my hands carefully and returned to the patio.

The ethical thing to do at this point was to get everyone out of the pool and hit it with enough chlorine to blister eyeballs. Recreational Waterborne Illness is a constant plague in summer months among young people, and it's largely due to kids shitting in pools. My accident might start a mini-epidemic.

On the other hand, there wasn't that much discharge, and I did keep the chlorine at a solid level. And if I closed the pool, I would have to explain why, to admit that I had pooped myself in my own pool at my own party. And Matty – goddamnit – could be trusted to tell the story to anyone who would listen, which would include the entire polo team, and for the rest of high school people would give me shit about it – Wesley, we're losing – take a dump so they'll forfeit! They would probably give me a nick-name – Wesley Pooey, or something like that. Closing my pool, especially with Matty there, was social suicide.

Instead, I rejoined the game.

Later in the afternoon my dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, and the party dined on the deck sopping wet. I took a hot dog and a toasted bun, but avoided the condiments and ate timidly. Dad noticed. No relish? Is something wrong?

Just a little upset tummy, I said. I'll be fine. Which, it turns out, was more of a lie than I meant to tell.

2. Ducks

My expertise in shat pools came from working as a lifeguard at a county pool in Gravlin Park. After a season of water polo my freshman year, dad fired the maintenance company and put me in charge of cleaning the pool. This gave me a skill – in fact, my only marketable skill, despite eleven years of formal education.

I started working at the county pool the summer before my junior year, but only cleaning it in the mornings. Once I turned sixteen, I was allowed to lifeguard. The pool supervisor, a thirty-something slacker named Joey, paid me ten dollars extra a week because I already knew pool maintenance and could get there early every morning.

I could have earned more money working at a theme park, but I liked the pool. Everyone assumes growing up in Orlando means I lived in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom and ate Dippin' Dots three meals a day. Sorry, but no. First of all, the theme parks are like twenty miles from downtown Orlando. Second, dad was native Floridian from before Disney, and convinced us kids the Mouse House is an awful place. My grandma took me once when I was six, and I peed myself in the Haunted Mansion, so dad was right: awful. I avoided it after that.

What does differentiate Orlando from most places is the many tourists who somehow escape the Disney compound and flip-flop their way into our streets and shops and fancy restaurants. This includes each year about a hundred thousand middle-aged British guys broiled lobster red by the sun, wearing white a-shirts, Bermuda shorts, black socks and black shoes, and telling everyone in earshot, Hullo, I'm on holiday. You wanted to dart them, like feral goats, and send them somewhere to be looked after properly. The only good part of growing up in the galaxy's #1 tourist spot was the occasional stray Northern European woman who decided to topless. When I was 14, the best globalization could offer me was middle-aged Deutscheboob. If some random lady dropped top at our pool, Joey probably would have closed up and sent us all home for the day.

The Monday after my pool-party mishap, I was back at work for the summer. Our pool was open for general swim 9 to 5, and most of the patrons were stay-at-home moms and their kids, plus a few daycares that brought van loads in twice a week. This was before skin cancer got big – now the kids don’t get to go outside except coated in a thick layer of SPF 80 spackle, like little kabuki munchkins.

During pool hours, I was a lifeguard – a glorified babysitter, really. The moms would strap floaties on the kids' arms, then drop them in the shallow end to splash and squeal and pee for a few hours. Meanwhile a massive pump sucked water, dirt, skin flakes, stray hair, and – hopefully – no poop through intakes along the sides of the pool, pushing the water through filters and back into the pool. At night an automatic vacuum crept along the bottom and sides of the pool, slurping up any sunken debris. My job in the mornings was to run the manual vacuum over anything the automatic missed, clean the filters, check the chemical levels, and empty the atrium grate that kept large objects – like condoms – from getting sucked into the filter.

The rest of the day I sat shifts on a chair overlooking the pool, blowing my whistle at juvenile delinquents and chasing everybody out if thunderstorms approached. We never actually saved anybody's life in all the time I worked at the pool, which Joey said was a good thing; we were life-guards, not life-savers. Joey said the day we called an ambulance was the day we'd all be fired, so we were strict about horseplay and had time-outs every shift change to clear the pool.

In my second summer at the pool, all but one of the lifeguards were returnees from the previous summer. Greg and Andrea were students at the local community college; Greg was athletic and dumb, and Andrea was smoking hot and dumb. Nick, the third returnee, came home from a state university to work at the pool. He was cool, and we were sort of friends. The new girl, Kelly, was a senior at Shoreline High School, across town – a smallish blond with brown eyes. Greg and Andrea took their lunch together, while the rest of us sat chair on the pool. Then Joey came out to guard with Greg and Andrea, while Nick, Kelly, and I had lunch. We seized the opportunity to indoctrinate Kelly into pool culture.

So Greg is totally into Hawaii, said Nick, which is why he calls everybody 'bra', but he's never been there. The closest he got was a pineapple his grampa brought him when he was in middle school.

And he and Andrea are... together? asked Kelly. She had the sort of mild Southern accent that made listening to her fun.

Yeah, I said. Andrea is always a bitch to us, so we just ignore her. If she gets upset about something, though, Greg will always take her side.

Last year, Wesley found a used condom in the pool—

The condom had been the scandal of the previous summer, and Nick and I had tried hard to win a confession from Greg. Joey declared the words ‘condom’ and ‘rubber’ off-limits, so we started calling it the ‘duck’, as in ‘rubber duck’, and whenever Greg and Andrea went anywhere together, we quacked at them. They had no sense of humor about it at all. Nick explained all of this to Kelly.

So, just the one condom? asked Kelly, but Nick 'ahem'ed. Sorry, the one 'duck'. Is that the grossest thing you've ever found in the pool?

A drowned squirrel, one morning, I said. A live snake. Last year a kid vomited in the pool. We had to close for the day while Joey and I cleaned up and sanitized.

The duck is somehow grosser, said Kelly.

"Ew, sex is so grody," said Nick, but I think he was getting a thing for her.

All those other things, said Kelly, maybe couldn't be helped. But somebody had to get into the pool, have sex with the, uh, duck on, then take the duck off and then decide, 'I'll just leave it here for someone else to clean up'. That's really gross.

I grant you that, I said. But I will say, getting the duck out was easier than picking chunks of half-digested cheese curls from the filter cartridges.

Dude, we're eating, said Nick.

I'm sorry I asked, said Kelly.

Of course, what you don't see is what's really gross, I said. Little viruses and bacteria, totally invisible. Usually they come from fecal matter – and here I felt a rumbling in my tummy, perhaps the beginnings of a telltale fart – from the little kids. A duck might look gross, but it probably won't make you sick.

I think I’m already sick, said Kelly, putting down her sandwich.

Not to worry, Nick said. Wesley here keeps it clean. Nobody's gotten sick from our pool.

...that we know, I said.

The following weekend I had my official birthday party for friends. I held it at a local sushi restaurant, which was the most sophisticated thing I could think of to mark the beginning of my eighteenth year of life. I invited Pete, Karen, Nathan, and a couple others, and tried to do Nick a favor by inviting him and Kelly in a way that suggested they should come together. I was disappointed when they showed up and left separately, but they did sit next to each other. Kelly had never eaten raw fish before, and kept asking me what everything was, even though it was mostly tuna.

3. Surprise

Apart from one rectal hiccup, my summer got off to a good start, entirely fulfilling my lax expectations. But that hiccup turned out to be a thing, and that thing got worse as the summer progressed.

I'd been sick before, the way everybody gets sick now and then. I had the flu a few times, and a cold or two every winter. During my junior year, I caught strep from a water polo match. One of the other players pushed my head under water, and I came up coughing hard enough to shred my larynx. It hurt for a while, but cleared up with two weeks of antibiotics.

My first inkling that something might be wrong started in the school year. You couldn’t poop in the student toilets at Boeme because they were Superfund disgusting. Kids would skip class t hang out in the bathroom, get bored, smoke cigarettes, spit on the mirrors, piss all over the toilet seats, floors, toilet paper, stuff the sinks and toilets full of paper towels, break the toilet seats off, break the mirrors and so on – you know, normal kid stuff – until male faculty finally chased them out into the open. Then at the end of the day the janitor sloshed pine sanitizer around and tried to scrub away more obscene graffiti.

Worse, the locks on the stall doors had all been removed to keep kids from camping out. The whole school knew the story about the kid who tried to take a dump, but couldn’t hold the door against the other kids and ended up getting a swirlie in his own shit. Nobody remembered the kid’s name, but we all knew to hold tight till we got home. The movement of water in all those toilets flushing right after school ended was probably seismographable.

As summer approached, my need got more urgent, until my asshole started to pucker as soon as I heard the last bell. I would rush home, beeline for the toilet, and poo so hard I felt lighter after – untethered, aloft, free like a cloud. Not until my pool foul did I see anything like diarrhea – just a furious tenesmus and extremely gratifying bowel movements.

After the pool party, I began to suspect I might have a problem. At first that just meant a few extra breaks during the day. I didn't tell anyone, because I was embarrassed to admit that I was using the toilet four or five times a day. Also, I only ever recognized that I had diarrhea when I was in the moment, which then reminded me of the diarrhea song from third grade: When you're walking down the hall and you feel something fall – diarrhea! diarrhea! I saw diarrhea as a single event, rather than a continuing problem; I was having a few of these events roughly continuously, but otherwise it was no big deal.

What made it a big deal was that one day I didn't make it. I was driving home from Gravlin a few weeks into the summer; my belly started to rumble, but there was really nowhere to stop. I told myself I could make it. I kept driving as my guts coiled and squeezed like a python inside me. My forehead went wet with clammy sweat, my lungs snatched shallow breaths, and my hands clenched the steering wheel. I nudged the gas and tried to get myself a few more seconds. When the car jerked to a halt in our driveway, I unbuckled and ran for the side gate, still thinking I could make I – but just steps from the fence my guts emptied into my shorts.

I smelt what I dealt and it turned my stomach, but I could only stand paralyzed as my gut pulsed and cramped. It was mid-afternoon in summer, and everybody else in the neighborhood was at work or locked up tight in their air-conditioned houses. Nobody saw me, but it was still humiliating.

Warm poop dribbled down my leg. I had no idea what to do. As a little kid I would have run inside to mommy and let her clean me up, but I was seventeen years old, almost an adult, with pants full of hot, wet poop. Anyway, mom wasn't home that day.

I took a deep breath. Slowly, I pried one sandal off with the opposite foot and used the bare foot to pry off the other sandal. I picked up the shoes and waddled in bare feet along the path behind the house, my stride shortened by the warm squishes between my butt cheeks. After I unlocked and opened the door to the bathroom, I stripped my shirt off and threw it on the floor.

After checking to make sure nobody was peeking over the fence and high shrubs, I took off my shorts there on the pool deck. I was naked. I spread the swim trunks inside out on the gravel in a flower bed. I used a garden hose to wash myself: I pressed my thumb over the nozzle to increase the pressure, and used it to spray my buttocks, then everything else below the waist. The water was cold and I flinched when it hit my anus and scrotum. It felt good on a hot day, so I sprayed my face and hair, too. I was so used to chlorine from the pool that tap water seemed rain sweet.

When I was rinsed off, I washed the shorts, then the sandals, and then the gravel, trying to soak all the filth into the flowerbed. I hosed off the deck and went into the bathroom before someone saw my naked person and called the police.

I climbed straight into the shower and stood there while the water warmed to scalding, then scrubbed and rinsed myself. I rinsed my shorts still more under the hot spray, then hung them on the towel bar at the back of the shower. After the shower, I turned on the fan to unfog the mirrors. The fan howled; the bathroom was right next to the living room, so my mother had a handyman install a vent fan noisy enough to conceal bathroom sounds.

Mom had a strict rule about no guest towels leaving the downstairs bathroom, so I put on my shirt and walked into the house naked from the waist down, figuring nobody was around to protest. When I opened the door from the bathroom, the cold air hit me in a blast. My nipples hardened under my shirt and below the hem my boy bells shriveled like figs.

I walked around the corner into the living room to see my mother sitting with Mrs. Walker. Mom had her back to me, but Mrs. Walker was facing her. All I could do was cover my crotch with my hands and backpedal. Mrs. Walker looked a little surprised, but Mrs. Walker had plastic surgery that made her always look a little surprised. Mom's reaction was easier to gauge. She started to say my name – Wesley.... – as if to bring me into the conversation, but once she was turned around her eyes registered my error and she blurted my last name like an epithet: Peary!

Sorry, I said, and scurried back into the bathroom.

I heard her say something to Mrs. Walker, probably an apology, muffled through the bathroom door. Then she knocked on the same door and yelled: Wesley, Misses Walker and I are leaving. Your father and I will talk to you about this when we get back.

There's something to look forward to, I thought. I wrapped a guest towel around my waist and waited for the automatic garage door to close on the other end of the house. I must have been in the shower when she came home, which would explain why I did not hear it open. With the garage empty, I walked back through the house to my room, redressed, then lay down. I was worn out. I fell asleep.

4. Eggs

Mom had no idea why I was wandering the house semi-naked, so that evening she, dad, and I had a family talk. Ever since I had grown taller – by two inches – than my mother, she deferred all confrontations to my father, who still had two inches on me.

The problem for mom was that dad was much more laid-back on all fronts. Dad redeferred to mom on the grounds that he had not witnessed the incident, so Mom hinted until it was clear she thought I had committed some sort of perversity on our pool deck. This forced me to admit my real problem, to assure my parents that it was not a moral failure, but merely a lapse of rectal integrity. They insisted that I make an appointment with the family physician.

Dr. Kudafer had a cancellation two days later. I asked Joey's permission to leave work early, and drove home so that mom could take me. When my name was called, a dumpling of a nurse named Bonnie, wearing what looked like pajamas with small, bright teddy bears printed on a blue cloth, had me climb onto a scale.

A hundred thirty-seven, she said, writing it down . That's down a hair.

I was up over one forty since then, I said. I've lost some weight. This was bad news.

I wish I weighed one thirty seven, said Bonnie.

You're not five eight, I replied.

Wesley, mom scolded.

Sorry, I said.

Bonnie fastened a blood pressure cuff around my arm and pumped until my arm ached and my fingers swelled purple, then felt for my pulse. Good, she said, as the cuff deflated in a whisper. Then she took my temperature from my ear, made a note on her clipboard, and left us to wait for the doctor.

Dr. Kudafer was tall and wiry – the halls of his office were decorated with framed pictures of him crossing the finish lines of a dozen different marathons. Except for his glasses, the man was a portrait of perfect health: not particularly handsome, but alive and vigorous. He was the only vegetarian I knew until high school, he never smoked and only drank wine in moderation, and drank green tea instead of coffee. When Dr. Kudafer gave medical advice, it was clearly coming from a man who practiced what he preached to the very letter. And should you go astray, the shame burned in you all through the waiting room, right up to the moment you blurted out your confession: Forgive me, Dr. Kudafer – it's just... I don't like cruciferous green vegetables. Dr. K had me sit on the table in the middle of the room and took over the stool that my mother had been sitting on. My mother stood.

Dr. Kudafer asked for my symptoms, and I told him that I'd been going to the bathroom a lot.

Diarrhea? he asked.

Yeah, I said.

Take off your shirt and lie back, he said. I did so; the thin paper sheet was rough and cool against my skin. I lifted my legs as Kudafer extended the leg rests from the table.

Any abdominal pain? Cramping? Fever? He pushed gently on my abdomen, working his way across, just beneath my rib cage.

Not really. I mean, my guts get cramped up when I have to go.

But going relieves the cramps? Now he was pressing on my lower abdomen. It was uncomfortable, but not painful – that same kind of pressure as when I had to go. He had to push down the waistband of my boxers to get to that part of my belly. My mother turned away. Dr. Kudafer was close to bad touching, and only my faith in his healing abilities kept me from protesting.

Mostly, I said.

Any blood? he asked.

No, I said.

Well, then, said Dr. Kudafer. I don't feel any masses or swelling. We'll do some blood work, take a sample, and maybe order some other tests. You can put your shirt back on.

A sample? said my mom.

Your feces, Kudafer said, speaking to me. You'll do it at home, say first thing in the morning, and bring it in. We should know in a day or two whether there any ova or parasites.

Ova? said my mom.

Eggs, said Dr. Kudafer.

I knew what ova were. Eggs from what?

Intestinal parasites. Roundworms, tapeworms, that sort of thing. It's unlikely, but we have to check. At this point it could be any number of things – a bacteria or virus or some other bug, lactose intolerance, some other dietary cause.

Worst case scenario? I said.

Well, that'd be something like cancer, he said. But that is extremely unlikely for someone your age. If you're not seeing dark blood, we're not going to worry about cancer. Are you still swimming? Dr. Kudafer had given me my annual physical for water polo the past three years.

I work at the Gravlin pool, but I don't actually spend that much time in it. This kinda started before I began work for the summer.

Stay away from it, he said. The most likely cause is some kind of waterborne pathogen.

I knew that already. Whenever one of the other county pools got hit, Joey made sure to tell us. When there was an outbreak at the big touristy water park, I thought he might poo himself. I'll keep the chlorine on the high end.

That might not be enough. Some of these organisms are fairly robust. Keep an eye out for anybody who seems to be spending a lot time in the bathrooms; they might also have it. We won't know for sure what it is until we see that sample. I'll have the nurse bring in the container and the form for your blood work.

Aren't you going to give him something for the diarrhea? my mother asked.

Not yet. You can take any other over-the-counter medicine for it, but I don't want to prescribe anything else until I know what's wrong. If it's a virus, there's not much we can do but let it run its course. If your sample tests positive for bacteria or anything, I'll just call a prescription in to your pharmacy – you won't have to schedule another appointment. All right?

Thanks, I said.

Bonnie will be back in a minute to get you out of here. I lay down on the paper sheet and it crinkled and shifted beneath me. Bonnie knocked on the door seconds later, and entered with a small, clear plastic cup in her hand. She gave me the cup and a set of forms to take to the part of the building where I had to get my blood drawn.

Fill this up so it's at least past the line, she said, pointing to the cup. It doesn't have to be completely full, but don't get any urine or toilet water in it – that will spoil the sample. Any questions? I was flustered enough to think of none.

Dr. Kudafer's office was one of many in a building given over to medical practices. One was the blood lab, where my mom and I went after the appointment. When it was my turn, a technician in a white lab coat sat me in a high-backed, vinyl easy chair and lowered a small desk onto the armrests.

Which hand you write with?

Right, I said.

We'll go left, then.

I extended my left hand, and he rolled up the sleeve of my t-shirt. He wrapped a wide rubber strip around my arm and tied it off in a tourniquet, then gave me a foam ball to squeeze. I watched the veins fill and rise in my skin.

You got good veins, he said. He tore the seal from a plastic container that held a needle and some tubing. Okay, a little stick here. He jabbed the needle into my arm.

Ouch, I sighed.

It's okay – that's it, he replied. I'll just get a little blood and we're done. He wiggled the needle a little, which made it hurt more, and then tapped my arm above the site.

The tech put a rubber-stoppered bottle to the tubing attached to the needle, and I watched it fill with blood. When it was mostly full he removed it and looked at it while tilting it back and forth. He then affixed an adhesive label to the tube and placed it into a bag marked Biohazard.

5. Buttwad

I set the sample cup where it would be handy when I woke up the next morning to go to the bathroom. A good pee had always come first in my morning routine, though usually I just went in the shower, but now I always to poop first thing, too.

With sleep still crusty in my eyes, I took the cup from the counter, uncapped it, and reached it around my buttocks and under my anus. It was awkward, but seemed to work – until a pocket of gas splattered my hands with poop. I yanked my hand out, but dropped the cup in the toilet.

The sample was now contaminated with urine and toilet water, and the toilet had all that and poop in it, too. Maybe I could get another cup, but I could not flush the one that was already in there. Plus, there was poop on my hand.

Well, goddamnit, I mumbled, figuring my next step.

I reached into the toilet with my dirty hand and grabbed the lip of the cup. With my clean hand I flushed the toilet, and still holding the cup watched the fouled water swirl away. I then washed my hands vigorously. Beneath the sink I found a spray can of bathroom cleaner buried behind a wall of maxi-pads and half-empty shampoo bottles – relics of my sister. I sprayed cleaner on a rag and wiped the inside of the cup. Back to square one, I decided to finish my bowel movement without capturing a specimen. Obviously, I needed a better way to fill the cup. I wiped, flushed, and washed, then headed downstairs to the pantry.

Mom caught me. What are you looking for?

A plastic bowl, I said.

Use one of my mixing bowls, she said. What's it for?

I need something to poop into.

Is your toilet broken? she asked.

No, I said, the toilet is fine. Here we go. I found a package of disposable plastic bowels and took one upstairs. I set the bowl down on the counter, next to the cup, and stepped into the shower. The sample would have to wait until my post-breakfast dump.

Meanwhile, I took a shower. The pool chemicals left my hair brittle and dry, so I applied conditioner every day. I kept my hair shortish – too short made it stick up in weird places, so I left enough to run a comb through. My hair, like my eyes, is naturally a shade of light brown too plain to appear anywhere but nature, but in summer it brightened a little from the sun and chlorine. I shaved a couple times a week; my beard still came in too thin and patchy to be taken seriously. Nor did I have chest hair, which was still considered manly at that point.

I was, however, proud of my physique – at least a little, probably more than anyone thought justified. I wasn't beefed like Greg at the pool, and I didn't work out just to watch myself frown in the mirror. I lifted weights for water polo, which added muscle to an otherwise skinny frame. I was taut, but not bulky. Too much brawn was a disadvantage in the pool; muscle sinks. After the shower I toweled off and looked at myself in the mirror. The five pounds I had lost was mostly fat, absent only as slightly better muscle definition.

Once dry, I got dressed: the pool's lifeguard t-shirt, a pair of red swim trunks, sandals, and sunblock. With that on I went downstairs for breakfast. I had reduced my breakfast to a couple pieces of toast, a banana, and a cup of coffee. I compensated by eating more in the evenings, which probably explained the need for double bowel movements in the mornings. Once I finished my toast, banana, and coffee, it was time for another trip upstairs.

The plastic bowl was a lot easier to keep in place without getting poop on my hands, and in a minute filled enough to get past the line in the cup. I took the cup with me when I left and dropped it off at the medical center before heading into work.

Despite my job, my summers were mostly a vacation. I worked because my parents said I had to, and also to have a little extra cash during the year, and also because I liked hanging out at the pool with Nick and now Kelly.

The filter cartridges at the Gravlin pool were large cylinders of corrugated cellulose that had to be hosed clean each morning. I also had to maintain the chemical levels, which meant sampling it with a test tube kit. One solution told me whether there was enough chlorine in the pool by making the water look like pee. The other solution told me the water's PH in shades of blood. Both looked fine, but then I remembered Kudafer had said I might pass my illness through the pool. I added more tablets to the chlorinator. I finished fifteen minutes before the pool opened for the day, as the other lifeguards were arriving to begin work.

Good mornin', Wesley, Kelly greeted me. Any ducks today? There had been seven more condoms in the pool that summer so far. Joey had to ask for a Deputy Sheriff to come by the pool at night, to check things out, but so far had not caught anything. Nick said it must be a couple with a mermaid fetish, or else so whalishly fat they could only do it in the water, which raised the question of how they got over the fence. Kelly seemed most concerned of any of us about the duck count; I chalked her interest up to the product of her virginity times the poverty of sex education in our schools – not that I came out much better. Also, I thought Kelly might have a thing for me, which might explain why Nick got nowhere with her.

Nope, no ducks, I told her. All clean.

Good, she said. If it's Greg and Andrea, it's like they're rubbing your nose in it, knowing you'll have to clean it up.

I don't think whoever it is cares that I have to clean it up.

If it's not some kinda message, why do they keep doin' it in our pool? It doesn't make sense. Course, I say that, but I've never tried it in a pool. She gave me a coy smile.

I struggled for the nerve to ask her out. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow; she's interested in me, as I can plainly see—

Not that I'm in any hurry to try, Kelly said, snapping me out of it.

We've got six minutes, I said. That's just enough time, I guess.

Too late – the swimmers are already lining up, she said, with an exaggerated frown.

I looked over at the gate and saw a small crowd of early risers – mostly overweight women in knee-length jerseys, clutching the chubby little hands of their squealing kids. The pool opened at 9 AM, and by then the cool of morning was already burnt off and the relentless assault of sun on exposed flesh well underway. I slathered on sunscreen before climbing into my chair. Even after a month of lifeguarding, I was still pale by pool standards. The three college kids were all a rich deep brown, and even Kelly – the blondest person there – was tan. Then there was me, with brown eyes and brown hair and skin still peachy-taupe. I never tanned, but only reddened until my skin flaked off in sheets. Mom made sure I always had plenty of sunscreen, and I wore my t-shirt and a hat during my pool shifts.

The pool was L-shaped, with two lifeguard chairs at either end and one on the outside of the bend. Kelly took the shallow end – she liked little kids – and I took the bend, facing her. She wore a red one-piece bathing suit that did nothing for her small breasts, but was fascinating where it curved from just beneath her slim hips down across her thighs. This part only showed when she stood up to yell at a swimmer or stretch, so I found myself glancing over every time she stirred. I decided definitely to ask her out the first chance I got the next day, but beyond that I had no idea.

My past romances had been tense and chaste – even my recent breakup – none had come close to doing it in a swimming pool. I doubted I could even bring myself to do it – it – on the grounds that my religion had informed me that I simply didn't believe in it outside of marriage, much less in a swimming pool. I found Kelly's innuendo intimidating: I worried she actually meant it, and then I'd be stuck. But the flirting was exciting, and I found myself getting more excited about the thought of us in the pool late at night. I had a key, so the fence was no problem.

A sharp whistle blast woke me up. Hey, Wesley – wake the duck up! yelled Nick, who was sitting in the other deep-end chair.

I looked down to see four pre-teen boys playing chicken, one pair wrestling from the other pair's shoulders. I started to stand but realized my trunks might show the rock-hard results of my reverie, which was definitely not okay at a pool full of kids. I leaned forward in the chair and put an arm across my lap. Hey, you guys, I pointed at the violators, out of the pool. Take fifteen minutes on the deck, and ask my permission before you get back in.

The kids climbed out of the pool. Buttwad, one mumbled, as if I couldn't hear him.

I looked over at Kelly; I think she was giggling. I smiled back, then tried to focus on my job.

When we switched shifts – it was my turn at the gate – Joey pulled me aside.

Can I talk to you for a minute? he asked.

Yeah, sure, I said, thinking, 'please don't let this be about my erection.'

I've had a bunch of kids come to first aid today, he said, crying because their eyes are burning. I checked the chlorine and it's too high. Do you know anything about this?

I did add some extra tablets,