Over the course of the last two weeks, the woman has given 2 people herpes. Oral herpes—not the really aggressive kind—but herpes nonetheless.
She receives this news in 2 separate phone calls, which come a few days apart. Both men cry when they tell her. Uncontrolled, babyish sobs, in both cases. While she later feels large amounts of guilt, remorse, regret, and so on, for causing them such pain, she’s disappointed to find that, during the phone calls themselves, she mainly feels embarrassed and sexually repulsed by their crying, and clenches her jaw as both of them work through it, and hopes that it will all be over soon.
The first man is sad and non-threatening on the phone, but the second is more upset, and much more aggressive. Shortly after her call with him ends, he sends her a picture of his penis, shot at an angle that’s meant to showcase the oozing sores around the tip. The woman receives and studies this with unexpected interest—the veins, the half-open wounds, the gently sagging flesh—and sees that it’s not totally flaccid, which is of course confusing; and she’s again embarrassed and outright sad to discover that she’s not at all sexually repulsed by this, that the opposite reaction is, in fact, for some reason, slowly taking place.
fuck you, the man writes. bitch.
She chooses not to reply, saves the photo, and deletes all of his texts.
At the doctor’s office later in the week, a blonde nurse or nurse practitioner with bright orange skin takes a swab from the sore at the corner of the woman’s mouth.
“It’s really not a big deal,” the nurse says. “Almost everyone has it.”
“Thanks,” the woman says.
“And this might just be a canker sore.”
“It’s not.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you, though.”
“No problem. Okay.”
The nurse places the swab inside a small vial, sits down on a sort of rolling stool, and begins to type on a laptop. Her teal scrubs pull against her body as she settles into the seat, pink running shoes squeaking against the floor.
Watching her from an examination table, the woman realizes with regret and some level of remorse that she despises this person: her orange and somehow healthy skin, her long yellow hair, her warm and lifeless eyes. She’s probably named Kayleigh, or Maddie, or something like that. She’s probably a nice person with a lovely life who doesn’t deserve this sort of contempt. But even as she accepts and understands these things, the woman finds that she’s unable to repress her feelings of disdain, which are broadly inexplicable. In lieu of an explanation, she senses, in an abstract sense, a link between different involuntary feelings like this one: her fixation with the mangled cock, her disdain for the nurse, her frequent disregard for herself and her own interests, and so on. She felt that all of these things were underwritten by a common force, the same general current of dysfunction, but what was the point of actually figuring that out? Of self-knowledge? Of any of it?
She’s on her back now, a needle in her arm, a long plastic tube transporting her blood into a series of plastic receptacles. As she’s lying there, feeling lightheaded, vision blurring, she realizes that she must look like she’s afraid or in pain, because the nurse is comforting her, delicately touching her wrist, talking to her in a low, soothing voice that the woman, who now feels she’s on the brink of passing out, can barely hear.
It’s okay, the nurse says, almost cooing. Her hair has collapsed around her collarbone in a way that the woman—briefly forgetting herself—almost finds beautiful.
It’s okay, she says again, it’s okay. It’ll all be over soon.