The next morning Mukey awoke semi-delirious, encrusted in partially hardened goop. He was in an unfamiliar world of pink frills and lace, which turned out to be his sister Louise’s canopy bed.
“Sorry,” Louise whispered. “I was trying to be quiet.” She was grabbing hangers draped with girly clothes from her closet.
“What the crap am I doing here?” Mukey asked. His voice was so scratchy it scared him.
“Mom wanted you near her room so if your coughing gets so bad you have to go to emergency, she’ll know.”
It stung to hear his parents’ bedroom referred to as his mom’s room. Mukey didn’t remember coughing, but his throat felt raw. Lou the calico cat (named by Louise of course) was curled up at his side. On the bedside table, in addition to Louise’s kooky crystal ball, were a glass of water, a remote, two boxes of Kleenex, and some neatly stacked books. He tried to get up but felt weak.
“I didn’t see any books in your room so I put some of mine there.” Louise was staring down at him with concern. Mukey had never seen her look at him like that before.
“I don’t read books. And I don’t want to be in a girl’s room.”
He had an uneasy feeling about Pukey.
“Louise, has Pukey come by looking for me?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?” His voice faltered.
“I haven’t seen him.”
Mukey felt an urgent need to find Pukey and say something to him that would make him laugh his unique sad-eyed laugh, to set out on an adventure together… but he was trapped. Other than his heart, which was thumping like never before, the rest of him felt like a corpse.
“You can watch my TV if you want,” Louise said.
Something must really be wrong with him for her to be so nice. He turned on the TV. Close-ups of volcanos spewing lava. Impressive, but he craved stillness. He patted Lou the cat, watched him expand and contract as he purred.
Sometime later, Mukey awoke from a dream in which he saw people’s feelings. His dad’s were blurry popcorn-like flickers. Pukey’s were dappled watery purple. It felt deeply sad and surreal. Louise’s sugarplum-fairy bed must be making him dream like her.
When he tried to get up, his limbs ached and his brain felt bloated. Boogers dangled like ratty socks on a clothesline as he stumbled to his own room. He took the dragonfly lure out of the tackle box, brought it back to Louise’s room, and put it under the pillow. It would be a secret lifeline that kept him from drowning in girlworld.
Mukey was in a dazzling place dotted with radiant beings.
“Sorry!” Louise whispered. “It’s impossible to open this chest of drawers quietly.”
The dazzling place was gone. Lou was on the bed. He was getting fat lying around so much, but Mukey enjoyed the company. Huge green eyes. Splotches of orange, black, and white. Mukey wondered if Pukey and his dad had forgotten about him and just gone on with their lives. He wondered if they knew how sick he was. He’d lived his life never suspecting this kind of aching loneliness was so close at hand. Maybe they’d visited him while he was asleep.
Lou came over and licked his hand. Lou now seemed to be the closest thing he had to a friend.
“I think Lou scratched your neck,” Louise said.
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Don’t you know the cat’s a girl?” Louise said, piling ruffles into her arms.
“No he’s not,” Mukey sneered.
His sister was four years older than him but imbecilic. Pretty, sort of, but with a hollow face, as if her heart were not strong enough to fight the force of gravity and pump blood up to her head, an impression that was strengthened when you tried to talk to her, which Mukey did less and less. Fortunately for her, the brain-dead look was in vogue, and she made money modeling for Homer’s department store, which she spent on books about paranormal stuff, and clothes, in addition to the clothes Homer’s gave her. Clothes were bursting the seams of her room.
A different set of seams were threatening to burst with last night’s glass of water. Mukey ran so quickly to the bathroom that he collapsed into the wall when he reached the toilet. After peeing he felt strangely depleted. Looking in the mirror, his lips were faintly blueish, and there was snot, in squished and partially solidified form, mashed into his face, hair, and pajamas. There were two tiny blobs of blood on his neck. His mouth was full of goop that demanded to be spat out. On the way back from the bathroom he noticed that his sister’s clothes were now strewn across his room as well. But she had given up her room with a TV for his room with no TV. She had a decent side.
He wished he’d stayed in the bathroom longer because there was a whole backlog of gunk in his mouth that didn’t show up until the first load had been spat out.
“Ho-ly! Louise, wanna see a glob of yellowish-green phlegm the size of your eyeball?”
“Don’t wipe it on my bed,” Louise said.
Mukey sighed. Pukey would have been eager to see it. He fondled his dragonfly lure. “Hey Louise, did you move my tackle box?”
“Huh?”
“It was on my dresser. Dad gave it to me.”
“I moved some stuff. Sorry.” She gave him a concerned look.
Mukey felt well enough to sit up in bed and watch Beavis and Butthead reruns, but they made him miss Pukey even more. He had a growing premonition that Pukey wasn’t missing him nearly so much as he missed Pukey. He clawed his fingernails into his skin to overpower the sting in his heart. To distract himself from wondering what Pukey was up to he picked up one of Louise’s books. The only one not about vampires was Spirit Guides and Inner Light. “See not with your eyes, but with your inner eye,” it said. “Your third eye, located in the middle of your forehead. It sees through superficial appearances to the intrinsic essences of things.” It said a person’s Third Eye is particularly prone to cracking open when they’re sick. There must be something wrong with me, Mukey thought, if he was finding this crap interesting.
“What kind of sickness do I have?” he asked his mother when she came in the room.
“Pneumonia.”
“Can a person die from that?”
“No. Not usually. Have you been scratching your face?
“I don’t think so.”
“Hm.” His mother’s brow furrowed.
This was his life: sleeping most of the time, dreaming of intricate otherworldly places, waking up coughing in a slovenly fever, with no idea what time of day it was or even what day it was, feeling abandoned. Occasionally his sister or (less often) his mother would be staring anxiously at his snot-covered face. He was too hoarse and sniffly to talk much. A wave of loneliness came over him whenever someone left the room, but at least he was no longer expected to follow whatever the person had been saying, or respond. Sometimes he stared into Louise’s crystal ball, since it was next to the bed, and he didn’t have energy for much else.
One time, much to his amazement, he realized that he was witnessing, within the crystal ball, an alternate version of the cat torture afternoon in which he was heroically forcing the twins to stop what they were doing and set the pets free. He picked the crystal ball up to take a closer look. The scene inside shifted, and what actually happened started playing itself out in all its gory detail. He dropped the crystal ball, and it rolled off the bed and fell to the floor with a loud thump. His body was unbearably hot, but his teeth were chattering.
“Goodness, what was that?” he heard his mother say.
