DEATH IN TUNIS, IN PARIS, IN ROME

“What precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise in temperature reveals.”

Virgina Woolf, On Illness

Yet Tunis provided a great surprise to us upon arriving. Fumbled ourselves from scattered exclamation points, we were dazed stumbling out among peasants workers soldiers and party orators. Among the contacts of new sensations, stirring faculties and parts dormant, passages underscored by choral faces. Among the rhythmic montage of a strange city, mysteriousness of fresh love or youth. Of travel. Listen to men spin murky vapor stories in parlors, while driving taxi cabs, on our way to find the hotel, from adjacent booths in no-light cafes. Laughing with the shadows. We find friends in the city lights, yet my discomfort steadily increases, ricocheting off bottle-tops and bread-crumbs and cigarette butts. And though it had not pitched into pain yet, or the glowing-hot tragic volumes it would become, it was the sense of racked sinuses and constant pressure and generational doom I felt coming on. It was hot terror at the country I could still see in my rear-view. I could feel all the awful parts of that place in the rock and shudder of my own body. The soil which sprouted.

My exhaustion greater, day turning roaming wicked night, falling in with miserable devils, their silver lankiness beckoning us into the stumbling crowd. Shuffling toward dawn, toward brightening, toward the daytime, toward glorious birth! You found them amusing and wanted to stay. Yet none for me. I would have been ashamed to yield to my own faults, to my own exhaustion. Instead, pulling myself through a churning night, searching the loose psychologies of artists, of troops massed in the heart of the city, of stacks of measured espresso cups and quiet drumming, over a chestnut shallow basin I find a slight reprieve from the cloud of bog-mist in my lungs. The opening of some song, tolling of steady bells, punctuating the speech around me with a climax of beautifully planted violinists and singers. I wander passed the statues that look like victims of atomic concrete bombardment and gold plates in the shadows. I cough, strange pain in the upper part of my chest.

Mina rejoins me the second night, only sound her heart beating. She takes a cigarette between her lips, the world seems just chilly blues and throttled lives. The empty street is intelligible, she says, and there is a flash of quivering headlights across our bodies, rolling across Mina first then myself, then the large plate-glass window of a pharmacy and the greasy quack druggist inside. A group of cameras photographing in succession: by-products of light and laughter and the falseness of mirrors. Words omitted produce significant connections. Like held breath and smoke plumes. Shrunk and wrinkled. Tattooed and rose-mountainous. A city alive around us. Shit-scared, filleted by my own dagger- imagination, terrified of this place I hardly know or recognize.

The woman who ran the hostel was stacking pamphlets in the corner when we arrived the first night; wearing pink-topaz ornaments, flicker of small white fog cypresses through half-shut eyes like cracked back doors, casting erotic shadow motifs on the walls and her face. When we arrive back at the hostel the second night she is simply reading a book. She smiles at us and greets us, and I attempt a genuine smile in return. How mangled must my face be in this moment.

Entering the room, one of the few private suites in the building, and with the first jolts my whole body begins to ache. It starts in the shoulders, slowly pulsing up into the neck, a run down my spine like the fingers of a keyboardist, like jumping the ridges of cheap cardboard. Laying in bed, Mina falls asleep against my shoulder, the book in her hand splayed open. Trying to cough but not wake her. She shifts, her eyes flutter gently, then calm static. Fully reluctant to move her head and look at me. Cough cough. Dinted silver and thick eyes. Sprawled on the bed, she is every inch the authoritative soldier, in the room clean and hot and laundry-ecstatic. Cough cough. Feel the strings of tendons above and below the lungs, surrounding them, feel constricting flesh, cords of dark felines through the rain, the draining away of the formerly confident rhythm of my muscles, my health. Feel the way the little goldish rays of lamplight penetrate the skin. Feel the full weight of the history of my organs.

In Amsterdam we found neon blips and fogs of people, thunder of hooligan noise from open pub-faces and slender tram tracks. Fragments of voices joining jokes of bruises and corks and plastic bubbles in the murky canal water. The toll on my health from crowds’ cries, disfigured street incantations, the biting broad sides of seas, was palpable.

In Paris, the squelch of dusk, a wash of cremation’s fading pulse, a streamer of yellow ribbons, feeling an urge of shimmering flanks and moving feet. Electrical waves passing through radios or dogs barking. Dale and dun, perfumed smoke the smell of morphine mixed with honey mixed with the smell of meat on a tarp. Meanwhile, I am no longer coughing, no; I am spitting. The purest dreams and the bright sunlight filtering out happy pictures, just the etched edge of memories. Picture everything missing bits of color, conjure it so clean, live the image in your mind. I brought it up effortlessly. It came in little spasms, regular intervals of ivy leaves the color of burnt copper, the plume of a normal afternoon. French revolutionaries projected onto smoke, laughing nitrate ghosts. There’s a little mother in all of us, violent luck and sickness, she says to the packed theater.

In the boarded-up warehouse we find a rave, with any number of protective goggles and transplant surgeries well under-way at this point, and I begin to feel faint. I find my way out into the city, alone, Mina off in the spiral space of her business, detective work or mind melding, among scraps of bands, waves of frequency, sweat and phenomena.

Retina of the eye viewed in glass, watch the way the pieces shift and move together. Tinkering among the background noise. I drift, and am swallowed up in the optical mass of the city sights. I cough again, translated into dirty French, an uncanny lewd detail, an indecent tattoo. Sensation so peculiar that at first it is a diversion, but quickly I am disgusted by the unfamiliar taste it leaves in my mouth. Revolving camera drunk, back-ward motion sidewalk and building fronts.

A few drops later, finally landed in Rome, I had a hemorrhage. It happened—dull massacre, silent field-corner of concrete and tidily-winks, walking James Cagney laboriously veranda, out-of-breath, inhaled more deeply than usual, darkness at the distributor’s office, mad fools and suddenly it came. It filled my mouth.

My first impulse was to hide the blood from Mina. All misplaced words and a shy licked gold/brown about me. A shock-shop fog. Marbles through the firebox of Roman streets, spurs and funeral pyres in every flash of window-reflection, I wandered as truly no one, faithfully kneeling on or bent toward the street every handful of steps, vermilion blood-flow over the handkerchief and horns twanging, echoing across the storefronts, snowy-sounding kettle drums, the soft power of church music, strings of voices from alleyways, fingering a hole in the pocket of my coat in between fits.

Sick? One voice broke through the chop and froth of the others. Strange child at my feet. The timbre of his voice a little cardboard model of an oak chest, fake strength in thin walls. The greyscale divergent nature of his face, all reds and blues and greens, all rough clever choices, the potentialities of fresh flesh. A smile in two-tones, Rachmaninoff run up and down, eyes to ears to symptoms of television sickness.

The young boy, overripe and soft, standing in front of me turbid and dream-soaked, in front of the apothecary’s stall.

Do you need something, mister? His voice again, it seems to come before the lips begin moving.

I wonder aloud: Can you even help me?

Are you in very great pain? A man steps from within the stall, out of the murky shadows. The voice sounds like the child’s, and suddenly I am unsure which of them spoke aloud.

I’m starting to be...I tell them, wincing and shuddering. Sweat is now complementing the cord tightening.

It’s my chest, I tell them. Maybe I’m just getting a cold...

The apothecary proceeds to explain that colds aren’t often accompanied by the crimson Rorschach adorning my handkerchief, the left edge of my mouth. I see sunshine mixing with gasoline, my head burns, my body soaked all over with cooling moisture, sticky and gently coating my entire frame. Plagued by intolerable thirst. The apothecary tells me not infrequent of the dry type, the suffocating glittery type. Airy, narcotic. The type to touch you with finger fragments of decay, plush green sofas turning to summer herbs type. The type that gets mistaken for orthodoxy. The most malignant form of the contagion. The type that wavers between rotgut and boneshucking like vending machine prizes. The form that shrivels it all up, ganglionic, that last piece of discount sushi on the sunset side of town.

The apothecary leans in, speaks quietly now. The form that leaves one passing hoarse, azure hours from two-hundred-mile battle-front to battle-front. From each dead-ripe-fruit lunatic carved or peeled from the bone. A bad scene, my friend.

I feel like sitting down on the small, wavy sidewalk.

I have something that will help, he tells me.

I don’t want it.

He smiles. Trust me, my friend, I think you will.

Until four in the morning I was in agonizing delirium, and on our mouse-run hostel suite bombardment was opened, to me a deluge of gas shells, and pain, reserve lines had been dug too far forward. Feeling the body lose power to expel water just like he said, radically unsound distribution of forces, secreted by the blood-vessels. It shrivels. Front lines are occupied, deadlocked, pocked hoarse with cries from panzer grenadiers and convulsions to artillery bombardment to convulsions, blood grows thick like pitch and combined with corn starch in home bathwaters. Halted in Rome, the western front, suffocating in a few hours, odd limbs, skull, broken rifles, bread rations and a green complexion. A bad bed in a run down hotel room. I reached for the small vial the apothecary had given me.

I drew in breath, broke off in the middle of it poesy humming many tongues and heavy layer of mist, stretching out rigid and I thought then I lay dead. Mina came in and poked at me, still unsure if I was sick or exaggerating.

“Oh, come on, you big baby. It’s just a cold.”

by Kyle Wright

Kyle Wright is a Chicago-based writer and musician. He is the author of the chapbooks Videodrome and mindfuck (@rly srs lit) and the novellas In Control (2021, Bizarro Pulp Press) and Dead Meat (March 2023, Journalstone.) His work has appeared most recently in JAKE and Defunkt Magazine. He has surfed couches across Europe, lived on a mountain in Colorado, worked as a wedding DJ, and sliced loaves of bread for ungrateful rich folk. He lives with his partner and their cat, Chickpea.