Not carter house
May 3, 2020

Tensions were riding high.

But the conflict was all the make-believe drunk shit, the kind that comes when the silent strong type drinks a couple shots and becomes the talking weird type.

She had not seen it coming. A person couldn’t always tell, with Melvin, what was play and what was actual anger.

Walking on eggshells, Seamus might have said. We’re all walking on eggshells around him.

But Seamus wasn’t offering this observation now. He was standing in front of a tall desk, wearing a headset and waving gloved hands in the air. Ummmuhmmm, he said, about every five or six seconds. Aahhhummmuhmm! Mmuhm! Gutteral stuff, all of it. Maybe fucking. Maybe fighting.

Virtual reality gave her nausea.

And they’d been laughing at him, at Seamus, playing his game, oblivious to his audience.

She was laughing. Melvin was laughing. And then he wasn’t laughing.

I can’t watch this anymore, Melvin said. I can’t sit here. I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to see Him in that get up. I need some space.

Ha ha ha, she said. Ha ha ha.

The news was on a large TV in the corner of a room. A CNN reporter was talking about meat processing plants.

High-production plants are ill-equipped to protect against the spread of an aggressively contagious disease.

The dog barked and ran toward the window. Melvin topped off his drink and coughed into his elbow.

Steve Meyer, an economist with the commodity firm Kerns and Associates, told CNN Business that workers stand about three or four feet apart from one another — short of the six feet necessary to adhere to social-distancing guidelines.

Shut up, dog, Melvin said. Ha ha, he added but he didn’t mean it.

Aahhhummmuhmm! Mmuhm!

Seamus was playing a game that she liked to call Slash Kill Maim 420 The Sequel.

Aahhhummmuhmm! Mmuhm! Seamus’s right arm thrashed wildly in open space as if he were directing a chaotic orchestral tune.

In some other state, a legislator in a Zoom committee meeting was being bothered by his cat. His cat kept coming up to him. Everyone could hear the cat mewling whenever the lawmaker unmuted himself to speak. Then he threw the cat across the room. Everyone saw it happen. The cat hit the floor or wall with a thud. The mic wasn’t muted for the thud.

The madness was all around them.

They’d been stuck here together – her brother, her boyfriend, the pesky rescue mutt — for too long. She knew that. Seamus knew it and that’s what fueled his retreat into the virtual world of his game.

Melvin knew it, of course Melvin knew that this time together, cramped in this house with their barking mutt and each other – that would be hard for a day or two. Let alone a week. Or a month. Or three months.

Melvin pulled long hair out of his face and tucked it behind his year.

I need a haircut, he said. Grumpy Melvin.

Oh grumpy Melvin, she said.  You don’t. You look great. I like your hair long. She said this as a consolation.

Aahhhummmuhmm! Mmuhm! Both of Seamus’s arms jerked like a spastic marionette on crack.

Melvin’s fist balled up. His face was bright with heat. She saw this and moved to touch him, to encase his large firey paw in her small one.

Do you want something to eat? She asked him. In World War I, a contingent of women volunteers baked donuts for the soldiers. This cheered them up. Baked goods and coffee. This was the kind of contribution women could make for their country. The soldiers called the women donut girls.

I can make donuts, she said.

She really just wanted to be left alone. Some nights like this, she imagined pitching a tent in the yard and moving into it. But the nights were still cold.

She mixed up some donut batter.

Later, when she wrote this story, she used the American spelling for donut, five letters instead of eight. The word was tighter cleaner. In this reality. In all realities, really. It’s just a better word.

Aahhhummmuhmm! Mmuhm! Seamus again. The virtual struggle was real or at least realistic.

She used metal tongs to pull fried dough circles from searing fat. She sprinkled these with cinnamon and sugar. She brought a plate to Melvin but about that time Seamus decided he was done with his game. He removed headset and gloves. A sweating smile wrapped around his face, fat lips stretched thin from ear to ear. Weird posthuman grin of an android.

Perfect, he said to her. Donuts. I’m starving.

When he reached for the warm sugary treats, Melvin’s feverish fist connected with Seamus’s face.

That had been a week ago.

—

I’ve been immersing myself in nature. Melvin told her this on her first visit to the Anti-Aggression Healing Vibes Center for the Mildly Covidic. But I don’t know how to make that interesting.

They sat in a garden, six feet apart from each other and six feet apart from other patients. They watched butterflies flitting from hydrangea to rhododendron. Melvin coughed and shivered.

You’ll be coming home soon, she told her partner. I’m asking Seamus to move out. But she wasn’t really going to ask her brother to leave. Melvin wasn’t likely to improve. That’s what the doctor had said. He’d end up on a respirator. With her brother encased in his electronics, it was almost like living alone.

She didn’t hug him when she left. In her car, she pulled sanitizing wipes from a circular plastic tub and scrubbed her hands for four minutes.