Finals week during a particularly difficult semester of your Ph.D program is not a very convenient time to get very sick.
This is the first of three parts. The first part of this was inspired by this post by Myles. A bit of forewarning, this part also involves some mess, more implied than described.
I’ve been working on this for the past few months and it has become incredibly important to me and incredibly important in Cal’s story, and I’m super excited to finally be able to share it :) Part II here.
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It was only a matter of time.
He hasn’t been sleeping well for a while now, really the entire semester. On the rare nights he’s able to get in a good six or seven hours he often wakes up to find he’s cooked something in a bout of somnambulance. This week has been particularly bad, he’s awoken to unfamiliar aloo gobi three separate times. It’s a wonder he hasn’t burned down the apartment. His roommate found him on Tuesday, apparently, peeling potatoes at three in the morning. Said it seemed like he knew what he was doing.
Some months ago a psychiatrist prescribed him a sleep aid, and he tried it for a couple of weeks but during the following days he was always so groggy he may as well have been sleepwalking through his waking life as well. His latest research paper was taking so long he was forced to table it entirely, and what’s more he’d started to wonder why the hell he thought it even mattered what John Locke did or didn’t mean in the first place. Academic burnout looms like a dwindling flame waiting to be extinguished, so vulnerable it may truly be snuffed out by the lukewarm reception of an essay.
He knows it’s good for him, healthy even, to question whether this really is what he wants to do for the rest of his life, to stand in classrooms and lecture halls and pretend he has any idea how to better interpret life’s moral quandaries than anyone else. But things were certainly much easier when his questions weren’t all so inward facing, and he’s about to have to answer fifty multiple choice questions, plus three (or god was it five?) in short essay form, so this in particular is not the best time for existentialism.
“Cal you look awful,” says Malik, as he and Saanvi walk up to where he’s leaning against a wall in the corridor outside the lecture hall.
He zones back in from the coffee he’s been staring at, which he almost never drinks but felt like he could really use today, and he’s glad he got it but mostly because it gave him a chance to grab a greedy fistful of coffee shop napkins. He’d put tissues in his jacket pocket but changed into a warmer coat last minute and thus forgot them, so he’s now using his limited number of napkins as sparingly as he possibly can to deal with the current state of his nose, which is not good.
“I know,” he responds finally. “I’m at peak head cold right now.”
“Oh no!” Saanvi says.
“It’s okay,” he insists with a sniffle. “It’s my last final, so just need to get through it and I’m done.”
“Right,” Malik says, “well it seems like you’re not going as mental about this as I am, so can anybody quiz me? Swear I only remember half of this.”
“Absoh-solutely—” Cal attempts, betrayed by his own wavering breath, eyebrows coming together in shared anguish as he sucks in a needy inhale and uses his free hand to tug at the collar of his sweater, bury his face in it, and wince against sneezes that echo through the hallway.
Thank god for the lid on this coffee.
“Hhuh-USSHHue! UHHH-shue!”
“Bless you!”
Cal pulls his face out of his sweater only for his mouth to immediately fall agape, so he just nods, eyes struggling to stay open through a breathless, “Sorryonemore—” as he again covers his face and stumbles sideways into a third sneeze that’s even more emphatic from his attempt to delay it.
“HRRUSSHHsyue!”
The bless yous are also more emphatic this time, and he coughs through his “Excuse me, thank you.”
“I take it you’re not feeling much better,” Josephine says from behind him.
He turns around, nose still buried in a napkin. “No not really, snffh!” But then he grins. “Also hi Josephine.”
“Hi Rudolph, I see you did not heed my advice about not using napkins.”
“I know, snfff! I am suffering the consequences.”
“This is what happens when you don’t listen to Mum, Cal,” Malik says, and they laugh. An ongoing joke, that one. Josephine and Cal have been dubbed Mum and Dad and are addressed as such whenever either of them fits the stereotype, which, to be fair, is kind of often.
Josephine exchanges greetings and how are yous and mutual casual panic about what promises to be a very difficult exam, but her attention doesn’t stray from Cal for long, which probably has something to do with all the pitiful snuffling.
“Your cheeks are all red too,” she says, and it’s not until she puts a hand on his shoulder that he realizes she’s addressing him, coming to and blinking at her dumbly as if her sentence came at the end of a different paragraph he had to read first.
“Are you running a fever, can I check?”
“Uh yeah, sure,” he sniffles, realizing that perhaps that’s why his usually warm coat feels so insufficient today.
She reaches up to lay a gentle hand to his forehead and frowns and under any other circumstance this would be a little thrilling, to have her touch his face like this, but now he’s distracted because he really would like not to have a fever right now as he takes an exam he was already anxious about, and so Josephine’s diagnosis feels unreasonably like a death sentence. “Yeah, you do feel hot.”
Malik checks to confirm, says, “Oh yeah bruv, that’s definitely a fever.”
Makes sense, checks out. Suddenly he recognizes symptoms he’d been sort of ignoring. “Yeah I tend towards fevers when I’m sick.”
“Aww Caliph, are you going to make it through this?” asks Saanvi.
“I’m gonna do my best,” he laughs, sounding quiet and exhausted and not at all humorous.
Here is the problem with HIST 401: It is all rote memorization of dates and facts, there is no real holistic throughline — no overarching themes to tie all these separate facts into something meaningful, much less something memorable, at least not beyond the information regurgitation that this exam unfortunately encourages. The only not-Philosophy courses they have to take in their doctoral program are three history classes, and they’ve all proven themselves unjustly difficult. Frankly this course has no right to be as hard as PHIL 551.
Courses really should not be purposely hard, there is no reason that should be some academic goal, especially not for a class that satisfies a general education requirement. Not the way to foster passion in history, and in fact Cal didn’t think it unreasonable to consider such a class capable of actively fostering dispassion in the subject for the incoming cohort of history doctoral candidates who have to start with one of the HIST 401 courses their first year.
“That’s because history professors are the most boring people who exist,” Malik had said, and though perhaps judgmental in a reactionary way, it wasn’t an entirely unfair judgment, though Cal’s personal take on the subject is that history professors just often seem to have a hard time translating their passion into their syllabi. Maybe because there’s just a lot of history one needs to cover. Or maybe, he thinks, with uncharacteristic bitterness as he stares at a multiple choice question involving two options of date that differ by a mere 30 years, maybe Dr. Nguyen in particular really is passionate about disparate dates and facts.
Studying for this test has felt a bit like pouring water into a cracked vessel he simply does not have time to fix — every sleepless night steadily leaking some of the course content as he tries to memorize it, demanding the sacrifice of more sleep to replace what he keeps losing, relying on quantity of hours and sheer repetition as a desperate means to hold himself together just long enough to make it through the semester.
Unfortunately Cal's body hadn’t gotten the memo, and started in on the coming apart a couple of days early. He’s sniffling more or less every time he inhales, and his nose feels as if it’s ceaselessly sort of buzzing. And if he pays it a single iota of attention it’s very bothersome, so he tries not to.
He’s only a few questions in, the first time the feeling comes over him, urgent and inexorable. Drawing a shaky inhale, he puts down his pencil, presses a napkin tight to his face, tries and immediately fails to hold his breath. The initial aim is to keep his mouth closed when it happens, but that proves only to give him less control over it, leading to something like a delayed explosion of an “mmMFFSHHUE!” that ends wildly from his attempts to suppress it.
Instead he allows his mouth to open but tries to muffle as best he can — harsh, strangled vowel sounds smothered into submission and followed by shaky little exhaled ‘shyoo!’s as quiet as he can make them, his entire upper body shuddering and trembling with each expulsion, huddling into himself as he weathers fits of two to four that beg to be more resounding than he’d prefer. It reminds him of screaming and/or sobbing into a pillow. Both of which are things he’d kind of love to do right now.
He hadn’t adequately prepared for how effusive this runny nose would be, and soon enough Cal finds his nose never not needing the attention of a napkin. He absolutely did not grab enough of them from that coffee shop, he probably could have taken the entire dispenser and used every one.
His usual please-god-no-don’t-sneeze tactic is also proving even less effective than usual — squishing the back of his hand against his nose does nothing but make him drippier, and it produces a sort of squelching noise he’s not fond of when every sound is acoustically amplified and obvious. He resorts to keeping a napkin constantly pressed very firmly to his nostrils, occasionally placating himself with a wince and a hard back-and-forth rub. But it’s harder to tell whether he’s actually going to sneeze when his nose’s baseline state of being is very tingly, when he’s fending off close calls too many times to count, when it could apparently be brought to fruition just by sniffling a little too hard.
Sometimes when he’s sick like this the urge to sneeze becomes an insatiable thing, an itch only barely scratched no matter how many times his body tries. All Cal wants to do right now is just let the feeling have its way with him; to sneeze, and sneeze, and sneeze, however many times it takes to not feel quite so damn ticklish.
All Cal can do, in this moment, is steadfastly sniffle and continue muffling sneezes that leave him quaking like they're seismic events, blearily blinking himself back into focus as he stares at a scantron that’s lost his attention because the main thing on his mind is the Sisyphean management of overwhelming cold symptoms and trying to make them as unobtrusive as overwhelming cold symptoms can possibly be.
God, why can’t he remember who Mazares is? He’s definitely one of those expendable Median generals but which one? It doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things or even in the scheme of his understanding of ancient Persia but which one??
He will never do this to his students, he will never ask them stray, irrelevant trivia questions on an exam, he will…
Try his best not to let this get too loud—
“uhUHHH!..shyue…” He’ll… “HRRUSH!” -Damnit. He will never ask them— “hh?” any… “HRUHHoo-!” He will never ask his students any question on any test that doesn’t tie into the core concepts of the course as a whole. Everything will have meaning, everything he teaches will be meaningful or at least objectively interesting. He will make an effort to figure out what is and isn’t objectively interesting in case his idea of that is as skewed as Dr. Nguyen’s seems to be.
This is exactly the kind of class Cal wants to teach—an intro course that doubles as a GE credit, something that allows the instructor to take their niche interests and turn them into something less pedantic, more practical, more universal—seen here done exactly the wrong way, the clear picture of a professor who resents having to deal with any student not pursuing his own field. And the confusing language of these questions… or to be fair it’s possible they’re not objectively that confusing and it’s just that he’s foggy from fever, that does seem like a possibility, he is feeling a little addled. For several stupid minutes he tries to calculate how many of these answers he can miss exactly and reconcile that with the number of them he’s confident about, because he needs an overall grade of at least a B in this class for it to count and that is not something he usually needs to worry about.
An hour into the exam his nose is still running terribly, and eventually it gets to the point where there needs to be a place for it to… go. Because he’s not about to blow his nose in here, he's kind of already exceeded the capacity of every last napkin, and in all honesty it is why he went with the turtleneck this morning. It was a worst case scenario plan, and this is a substantially worse case than he thought it would be. A particularly productive sneeze has him pulling the neck of the sweater over his nose and slipping the final sodden napkin into his pocket for good.
He tries not to think about how thoroughly gross he feels as he attempts to exhale lightly through his nose into the fabric on the inside collar, aiming for a silent version of a nose blow that he instantly realizes he cannot actually make silent, so instead he goes with another sadly adapted strategy that involves more pinching and squishing than blowing. He tries not to think about the fact that he can feel the warmth of his own wetness on his neck, and he tries especially hard not to picture what this poor sweater would look like turned inside out.
While for the purposes of this exam they’re staggered out to every other seat, Cal is sure he’s disturbing a fair few stressed classmates with his ongoing little symphony of echoing symptoms, because there is nothing about this cold he’s managing to keep quiet here, and when an especially unquiet series of sneezes jolt him forward enough to jostle the #2 pencil on his desk and send it rolling off, he finds his suspicions confirmed in the incredibly unamused look from the person to his right as he leans over to retrieve his pencil from the nearby vicinity of their shoe. His quiet apology is sharply shushed by one of the TAs in the aisles, and the shush’s subtext is As if you in particular were not making noise enough.
He’s gonna go home and, god willing, sleep for a hundred years.
Cal is one of the last ten students to finish. Finally he hands his scantron and blue book to the proctor with a dejected, pathetic sounding, “Thank you, snff! sorry, umh… wash your hands, probably,” and then walks off to try to never again think about the fact that he just spoke that sentence aloud. By the time he exits the lecture hall, struggling to simultaneously slip his bag back over his shoulder and keep the neck of his sweater held to his nose, Malik, Saanvi and Josephine are waiting for him.
He says, “Sorry, give me a minute,” and hastens to the nearby restroom to sneeze with abandon and blow his nose into toilet paper over and over, for what feels like five minutes and triggers more stray sneezes, and extends over the course of a good third of the roll, because he’s waited an interminable test period worth of time to experience anything like relief so he’s allowing himself this as an indulgence.
Upon leaving the bathroom he sees first Josephine, who puts a hand on his arm and whispers “Sweetheart,” and then Malik and Saanvi who say “Aww buddy,” and a gentle “Hey,” respectively.
As soon as he opens his mouth to respond his breath gets away from him, and he quickly fishes out the rolled up length of toilet paper he just stuffed into his coat pocket and brings it to his face with both hands, the unused portion unrolling almost to the floor and dangling pitifully as he does.
Two frantic, frustrated sneezes, the second of which is essentially just the first elongated and reiterated with more conviction, issued at a volume that suggests his lungs feel the need to make up for lost time, and a correspondingly harsh, strangled quality.
“hh’URRSHHue! h!-HURRRSHHshyiuu!”
It must sound truly miserable because their blessings feel like condolences and Josephine’s hand finds its way to his shoulder and remains there when he makes no attempt to initiate a divorce between his face and this sad mess of toilet paper, because he suspects he will not be capable of doing so with much dignity.
He intends to mutter some mix of ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ and perhaps something like an apologetic ‘Jeez,’ but only manages as much as “Thay-h-EHHG’KSSHHHYOO!” A display so obviously productive he doubts they’re surprised when he follows it up with a stuffily mumbled, “Uhm, m’gonna try this again,” pushes the bathroom door back open with a shoulder and spends another minute or so blowing his nose until he’s mitigated a couple catastrophic seconds’ worth of damage.
When he again re-emerges, Cal finds himself meeting the sympathetic faces of his friends with a half smirk and a single request.
Concerning the inherent difficulty of Josephine. Mildly nsfw for a very brief moment in the gentlest of ways. Catch up on Part I or just dive in here and now.
I am rather fond of this one.
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Josephine comes up, authoritative. “Okay sneezy let’s get you home,” she says, and they part ways with Malik and Saanvi, with plans to meet up at Josephine’s later.
Cal is so distracted by a belated remembrance of the correct answer to a test question he got wrong that he doesn’t actually notice how gray and heavily clouded the sky has become until a startling droplet makes contact with his forehead, and within a minute it’s properly raining.
Josephine looks at him like she feels a responsibility to apologize for the weather herself and says, “This is like the part of the movie where someone’s like ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and then it immediately does purely for comedic effect,” and Cal laughs—so genuinely and heartily that Josephine looks vaguely concerned about it—because the confluence of factors behind this whole day have amounted to nothing less than absurdism at this point and it’s truly come so full circle as to be amusing now.
His coat isn’t helping. It’s an excellent coat, but it isn’t excellent in this context. His stipend money coat, an ‘investment’ that every time he puts on makes him feel a little bit like he’s playing dress-up professor. It’s a double-breasted wool pea coat in a charcoal grey, subtle houndstooth pattern that he’s been complimented on a number of times. But the thing absorbs water like it’s thirsty, and now Cal is wearing the equivalent of a thick, wet, heavy blanket, and it almost seems like some sort of metaphor about the elitism and impracticality of academia that this coat should be somehow too fancy to have a hood, and he feels like a yuppie in the worst sense of the word.
He’s watching Josephine in her Patagonia or Columbia or some other specific location outdoorsy brand jacket with a sensible hood—a little visor-like lip over her face, even, clearly a feat of textile engineering—water rolling off her shoulders while the color of the jacket itself remains entirely unaffected, and he wishes yet again he’d bothered to check the weather this morning.
When she turns to him and says, “Just come to my place and I’ll drive you,” he nods vigorously.
Soon enough his shivering could be described as violent. He misses west coast rain. He was in Oregon for three years and it rained far more often than it does in D.C., but east coast winter rain is a very different sort. It’s the kind that seeps into your bones and makes you wonder how hollow you are exactly that such seepage should be possible, the kind that makes four short blocks worthy of being impatiently counted down, and by the time they’re walking up the steps to Josephine’s apartment, Cal can no longer feel his fingers from repeatedly using them to wipe at his face, nor can he tell whether his nose is still running, but he’s wet and numbed cold everywhere and undoubtedly it’s somewhere in the mix.
As she fishes through her pocket for the keys she looks at him and winces like the very sight of him is painful, and once she opens the door, a shaking, soaked-through Cal christens the threshold of Josephine’s apartment with unmistakably sick sounding sneezes, water misting off of him in every direction as he shudders furiously into a sopping sleeve.
A sound composed entirely of slippery fricatives and unadulterated force.
“ZIIHHSHHoo! HuzZZISSHHOO!”
His eyebrows relax for no longer than a second before they scrunch back together, not attempting to move a muscle otherwise, still hunched in position with an arm over his face, because letting it throw him forward anew would be even more fatiguing. He can feel his lips themselves quivering as another sneeze and then another rip their way through him, spraying through clenched teeth.
“ZHIISSSHiuu! Huhd’SZIISSHHYUE!”
He almost feels faint as he catches his breath, facial features loosened, head reeling as he says “‘Scuse me,” in little more than a whisper, and Josephine’s first order of business is shoving a box of tissues into his hands, for which she receives a stuffy, “Thank you so much oh my god.”
“Okay I can’t see you like this a single additional second, I’m getting you some dry clothes,” she says, kicking off her boots and disappearing down the hall.
Cal looks up from the tissues about four seconds too late and tells a joke to no one, but between his fading voice and chattering teeth he doubts he’d be properly audible regardless. “I don’t—snf!—think we’re the s-same size.”
Josephine’s roommate wanders out then, holding a laptop with so little regard for its safety that it’s no wonder Josephine’s charger is always going missing.
“Oh hi,” she says, as he drips over the floor of the living room.
He stutters through a “Hey D-Devin how are you?”
“Much better than you it would appear, C-C-Cal.”
He’s about to laugh but he coughs instead and Devin says, “I have literally never seen a more miserable sight.”
Josephine comes back with an armful of clothing and says, “I know, I’m working on it,” as Cal folds his wet jacket and she instructs him to just leave it on a chair and come with her and leads him to her bedroom and closes the door behind them.
“Sandros left this one,” she says, passing him a hoodie. “It’ll fit you.”
Cal tugs off his dampened sweater, thinks only for a moment about his momentary nakedness in Josephine’s bedroom, and trades it for the proffered garment — blue and white and bearing the logo of Greece’s national football team.
“I feel like I’ve never seen you wear a hoodie before.”
“I don’t know that I ever have actually. My father had this weird abiding hatred for them and I guess I inherited it, snfff! But holy smokes is this cozy,” he says, pulling the sleeves down over his palms and tucking his hands into the front pocket. “My entire childhood has been put into question.”
“You’re so cute.”
Cal just looks at her, for a moment unsure whether she’s allowed to say that, and then his expression goes vacant, features beginning to wrinkle in agitation.
“Ehhxcuse—” he manages, before he wrenches into two sneezes, audibly wet and insistent, buried into a fresh sleeve. “hiih-ZIISSHHyoo! Hh? …hih’dZIISSHHyue!”
Josephine giggles as he blinks at her through wet lashes. “Breaking it in immediately, bless you.”
“Snff! Sorry, snfff! I’ll wash this I promise,” he laughs, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes, hands still shaking.
She notices. “Your hair’s really wet, I’m sure that’s not helping... Hang on I’ll be right back,” she says, ducking away to grab a towel. When she returns with it Cal moves to extract his hands from the sweatshirt pocket but Josephine says, “No it’s okay I’ve got you.”
He feels like a majestic wild deer has just wandered up to him and so he doesn’t move a muscle for fear of scaring her away. There’s confusion and surprise on his face but also gratitude and adoration as Josephine dries his hair for him in soft, sweeping strokes. It feels extremely nice to be touched by her and he’s always had a weakness for his hair being played with, and he closes his eyes and allows his head to lull, to become pliant under her ministrations. He feels like a puppy she’s toweling off, a very lucky puppy.
The room goes silent save for his measured sniffling, until one particular stroke of the towel feels pleasurable enough to elicit a small moan that is not entirely voluntary.
“That feels amazing,” he mumbles.
He’s not sure her face has ever been this close to his, and when he opens his eyes he does not expect to meet her gaze quite so directly.
She says, “Good I want it to.”
Then she inches even closer and he registers confusion all the way up to the moment her lips collide with his, seven semesters of suppressed sexual tension meeting a final conclusion.
God, Josephine.
Her lips are as soft as he’d always suspected and he breathes her in and she takes the towel off of him and tosses it toward the bed and he does not want to stop for anything but still he pulls back, their foreheads resting against each other.
“Josephine are you sure? I’m… so gross right now, I’m gonna get you sick,” he says, his voice giving out around the edges in a hoarse testament to the statement.
“The semester’s over, I don’t care. And I want this, Cal, if you want this.” She looks into his eyes and he knows she means it and her hands are on his chest and the shiver that rolls through him could be attributed to any number of reasons.
If I sleep with you I might accidentally fall in love with you, he should say, he really should say, but the blood is already rushing away from both his head and his heart, and of course he wants this, he wants nothing more than this, and besides his throat hurts anyway, so maybe it’s best just not to speak at all.
Finally his mouth is on hers and there’s no going back and for so very many reasons this is a terrible, terrible idea.
He kisses her like every movement was pre-calculated, deterministic, inevitable. Wetly clinging clothing that can’t be wriggled out of quickly enough, goosebumps and body hair, excited fingers attempting to be gentle with buttons that open the wrong way. Their sounds at first tentative and timid and then growing together into duetted, breathless ecstasy, and if he could only stop sniffling they might be perfectly in sync.
Her hair falls over both of their shoulders and there is all of her; Josephine in her entirety, limitless Josephine, a vast expanse of her he can touch and hold and stroke and have. He’s overwhelmed by the incredible relief that comes when he doesn’t have to hide his love for her in the recesses of him, when for once he doesn’t have to look away and pretend he isn’t looking he can just look.
She says, “Oh fuck,” more times than he has heard her use the word in the three and a half years he’s known her. He wants to sink his fingers into this moment to keep it in place, to pin her down, to have her for as long as he can, but like everything else about her it’s fleeting and slippery and he’s fumbling for ephemera, mere snatches of Josephine abstracted, the rippled reflection left behind when she’s some moments ahead.
When she comes he feels like he’s coming apart, and when he comes he knows there won’t be any coming back together.
* * *
It was her idea, the open relationship thing. In Cal’s assessment it didn’t seem like a relationship so much as it did like the promise of one. She didn’t talk about him often, except to say strictly relevant things like “Sandros left this one, it’ll fit you.” Whenever she went to see him she’d say she was going to Greece, not going to see Sandros.
It’d be easier if she did talk about Sandros, if she reminded him so Cal wouldn’t have to constantly remind himself, if she said his name so Cal wouldn’t have to think it whenever he felt too much for her. When she leaned her head onto his shoulder, Sandros; when she called him sweetie, Sandros; when she did pretty things and spoke in pretty ways, Sandros, Sandros, Sandros.
Now Josephine is bathed in fading daylight and she wears only two things: an easy smile and a pair of gold hoop earrings.
“You’re about to disappear to Greece for a month,” he says finally.
“Yes I am.”
He’s been sensing that one of these school-break-long visits she might just stay there. From the way she’s described it, it sounds like if she wanted to she could go straight into a teaching position in Athens. And he knows she’s thought about opting out of this whole thing, the overly academic and extremely specific nature of becoming a college professor. She’s mentioned that sometimes she just wants to teach grade school like Sandros does, that she wonders whether that would ultimately be a more helpful contribution. Cal thinks about it sometimes too.
But he finds himself brushing a piece of hair behind her ear and saying, “You better come back.”
He knows that once they graduate they’ll go their separate ways, they’ll live their separate lives, but he’s supposed to have two and a half more years of her here at Georgetown keeping each other afloat through an incredibly demanding doctoral program, and he’s begun to fear he may not be able to stay afloat without her, and if she slips through his fingers now he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
It’s a pointed look, a promise. She says, “I’ll come back.”
Cal has never known Josephine to say things and not mean them, and with her head on his chest he relaxes enough to suddenly be aware of the physical exhaustion that wants to tug him down into the pleasant swamp of postcoital unconsciousness. But just as suddenly a familiar annoyance blooms back to life, and he attempts to alleviate a tickle that’s quickly becoming unbearable by rubbing against his nose with the back of his hand, reminded immediately what a low success rate the tactic has seen today.
Briefly he manages to remain in that liminal space between will I and won't I, but a tempting breath and a feisty flare of nostrils has him mumbling “Oh huh-hang on,” and scrambling for the tissues that he’d thankfully had enough foresight to relocate to the nightstand, eyebrows raised as if it’ll help keep his face from falling.
Josephine gives him space as he just barely manages to crush a tissue to his nose one-handed, head bobbing fitfully forward as he gives in to a series of increasingly expressive sneezes. “IISSSue! Huh-IISSSue! …huh-h? IIXSSSshyue!”
She blesses him and for several seconds he’s stuck in vaguely sneezy limbo, forehead creased and twitching in irritation as he’s seduced by illusory inhales, until his lungs manage at last to grasp one firmly enough to pull from him a sharply vocal, almost pleading “Hhih?” finally shuddering then into a climatic, exclaimed, “IIHHTSH-schue!” that scrapes his throat but scratches the niggling itch. It's chased by a relieved sigh and a sincerely meant, “’Scuse me.”
“Bless you, my goodness.”
“Thank you, snff! Sorry,” he chuckles. “I was really kinda hoping that wouldn’t happen while you were on top of me, snffh!”
“Well I’m not offended,” she says, resettling back into her previous position, and when he finishes fussing at his nose with the tissue and pulls it away from his face she slides a hand onto his forehead.
“Are you checking to see whether you raised my temperature?” he asks, making her laugh. “Because you probably did.”
A melancholy twinge makes its way into her expression though as she realizes his fever definitely is higher. “Ohh,” she coos, “your little face is so hot.”
“Yeah I can feel my pulse kinda throbbing in my cheeks.”
“Aww Cal, poor baby,” she says, and he wonders what it is about this phrase exactly that he should find so touching. The acknowledgment probably, the empathy. The impression it gives of ‘I’m sorry you don’t feel well, so I will be gentle.’ Or maybe that it feels reminiscent of parental energy he didn’t quite get enough of, pacification for the vestigial part of him that needed pacifying, that perhaps sometimes still does. Like a cat that was weaned too early, forever kneading silly paws against phantom teats whenever it feels something soft or warm.
And Josephine is both, so he goes on. “I don’t usually—snf!—get sick more than once in the same year, much less what has it been? Like three times this semester.”
“Sweetie it’s because you’re not sleeping.”
“I know,” he sighs.
She puts a hand on each of his fever-blotched cheeks and says, “Sometimes in class you look so exhausted it makes me want to cry, Cal. I can see how much it’s affecting you. Your whole…” she gestures around him, “your glow has been dimmed.”
He opens up without his usual wasted time deciding whether he should. “To be honest I haven’t been… doing all that well. Mentally speaking.”
“I figured,” she says, doe-eyes rendered doleful. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The corners of his mouth pull upward into a lazy smile. “Honestly you just did, I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.”
She smiles too. “Then why are you trying?”
“Because this isn’t my bed,” he laughs.
“My bed is your bed.”
He doesn’t mean to say “It’s not though,” but that’s what he says. Or at least he didn’t mean to say it so quickly, he didn’t mean for it to sound so much like ‘But you’re not mine for long.’
She responds to both sentiments in a dulcet tone. “Well it is right now,” she says, and kisses him again, and kissing her back is pretty much all the energy he has left in him, and it’s evident as he becomes weak and slow and clumsy beneath her. She presses one last kiss to his nose and cradles his cheek in her hand as he turns his face to settle on the pillow, and all it takes is her gentle permission before he releases his grip on consciousness, with a final, relieved sigh like he’s been freed from carrying something very, very heavy.
When you decide your OC is usually healthy so if you want to catalogue every cold he ever catches you gotta jump around significantly in his timeline.
Anyway Cal is twenty-five in this small story of quiet caretaking and not-so-quiet pining.
- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - —
It’s only been a week and a half, but when he opens a door he wasn’t expecting to hear a knock from and sees her there on the front steps, he realizes that pathetically enough apparently that was all it took to miss her, and then he’s grinning and giddy and not just from the fever.
“Josephine!!”
“Whoa hello, someone started in on the beer early,” she giggles, and steps forward, intending to give him a hug.
“Oh, no I’m not drunk,” Cal laughs, “just sick, also definitely contagious you probably shouldn’t—”
She silences him with an immediate hand to his forehead, and her discovery results in disbelief. “Cal?!?”
“I know,” he says, realizing he probably does look rather drunk as he turns aside to quickly cough into his fist and brings a hand to his chest afterwards and says, “Excuse me, sorry.”
He suddenly remembers why she’s here. “Oh my god we were supposed to study weren’t we?”
“It’s okay!”
“I am so sorry Josephine I should’ve called you, I lost track of… well, everything.” He leans away to cough again and follows it up with a swipe at his nose with the tissue permanently balled into his fist.
And then he takes in Josephine with his full attention — here on his porch with her wide eyed compassion and her parted mouthed smile with teeth so beautifully large that you can only ever really see eight of them at most on the top row and her mane of hair gathered into a braid so thick it must have been a struggle to gather and he doesn’t recognize this purple sweater so it must be new.
It takes him at least a second too long to register the question.
“Caaan I come in for a minute?”
“Yes, of course oh my goodness yes, please do, so sorry, it’s so cold out, snf! Where are my manners?”
“It’s okay!”
“I’m—” he starts, but is unable to get any farther than that, as he brings an arm over his face and the other hand to the wall to steady himself. His breath catches on a ragged inhale and he capitulates into sounds that speak of deep, established congestion and a war-ravaged throat.
“Huh’ZISSHH-JUE! Hh! h’GIZSHHH’jue!!”
He pulls himself back upright, looking at the result on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and less concerned about it than he probably should be. “Nguh, ‘scuse-h-GSHHYUE! snffffh! ‘Scuse me.”
“God bless you…” she says, brimming with concern.
He mumbles a stuffy “Thank you,” and visibly sways on his feet.
She touches his shoulder and softly says, “Why don’t you sit down Cal.”
“Not a bad idea.”
He assumes a safer sitting position on the couch and she keeps a hand on his back until he gets there, which is also honestly not a bad idea, because there’s something unnameable in his sense of perception that feels like it’s getting out from under him.
“My sincerest apologies in advance for this because it’s about to be disgusting,” he laughs lightly, before doubling over and blowing his nose productively a few times, one of which ignites a tickle fierce enough to pitch him forward into a fitful “K’SHHHyue! h-Hih’KSHHYUE!!” followed by a softly mumbled, “Goodness, snf! So sneezy.”
“Bless you,” she says, as he clears himself of as much of the newly resulted wetness as he can, and afterwards straightens up with some leftover snuffles.
“Ay yi yi, I’m sorry.”
“You sound so sick,” she says quietly, still looking him over like there’s something else concerning to be found there.
“Yeah I’m not feelin’ too hot,” he confesses, digging the heel of a palm into a teary brown eye. “Think I might have a sinus infection? I don’t know, I was sick over the break—snff!—and I was getting over it, but then these past couple days I started feeling super sick again, snf! I guess I may have just caught something else on the heels of the first thing.”
“You should see a doctor…”
“I know, snf! I’ll make an appointment. Did you still wanna study?” he asks, lamely but hopefully, because he really does want her here, which is probably a little selfish of him considering he forgot she was coming at all and especially considering he’s about to be rather lousy company.
She smirks. “No offense but I don’t think you’re in the best shape for studying.”
“Yeah I guess that’s probably true,” he admits, but now that he’s seen her he’s feeling needy and the idea of her leaving so soon is kind of making his heart ache. “But if you still want to, you can stay here and hang out? There’s beer and stuff.”
She turns her attention toward the TV, where there’s a paused movie on screen. “What were you watching?”
“Cinema Paradiso, oh Josephine have you seen it? I’m only like ten minutes in, s’nff! I can start it over if you want!”
Cal and Josephine were usually platonic but sometimes the edges blurred. There was fondness regardless. Sometimes, on Cal’s part, maybe too much fondness. He isn’t holding out for her, but he does like her. He does, occasionally, pine, yearn, imagine. And, he’s well aware, a one-hundred-whatever degree fever and Giuseppe Tornatore’s cinematic poignancy were not going to help any of that.
She smiles. “Yeah why not?”
“Yes! You’re gonna love it, snfff! You’re gonna cry like a baby and so am I.”
“Wait is it sad??”
“No no! It’s heartwarming and wholesome don’t worry, snf! I mean it’s a little sad but it’s not—”
“It’s not like… Bicycle Thieves is it?”
“NO, it’s not nearly as sad as Bicycle Thieves, snf! I promise. You’re gonna weep like a child don’t get me wrong, snff! but it’s very uplifting.”
Josephine laughs. “Like a child he says.”
He asks her about her week. Her sister’s two-month-old maintained eye contact with her as she held him, just staring into her eyes for at least a full minute and it was like he was looking into her very soul, and her family was well meaning about accommodating her veganism at Thanksgiving but not all of them fully understood the concept and thus there was a buttered mashed potato incident she fears her aunt felt guiltier about than she needed to.
She asks about his week. He stayed with Naveen’s family which was good aside from the night Naveen’s mother tried to matchmake and invited a potential marriage candidate to dinner who had been told Cal was studying to be a doctor, which while technically true was definitely not the sort of doctor she’d expected, and then there was an awkward phone call with his father and he glosses over the details and summarizes it as being ultimately positive even though once the words leave his mouth he ceases to believe them.
Then Cal seems to suddenly become preoccupied with something in the middle distance, and Josephine glances in the direction of the wall he’s staring at until he explains, “Sorry I think I’m abouttosneeze—”
Nose twitching, a lip tugged upward like a pink curtain lifting to reveal teeth in a panicked mouth — an involuntary display covered hastily by a tissue he all but collapses into, angled as far from Josephine as geometry will allow him.
He’s loud. “huh-EHHHkhue! Hh! HEHHK’KSHOO!”
“Bless you…”
“snfff! Thankyou,” he says, picking his head up but not daring to bring the tissue away, and mumbles through its folds, “God, snf! Making myself dizzy.”
“Ohhh Cal, poor baby,” Josephine coos, and Cal feels his face flush even harder in spite of himself.
He offers her a hazy half-smile and tells her he’ll be right back as he goes to the bathroom to blow his nose where she won’t have to experience it quite so much, and washes his hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon afterward.
When he returns he opens the fridge and says, “I got those IPAs you liked last time — do you want one?”
“Oooh yes please.”
“I did remember you were coming when I was shopping yesterday, I don’t know when it escaped me exactly,” he muses, opening just the one bottle to the satisfying snap-fizz of hissing carbonation and bringing it back to her on the couch.
“I imagine it probably had something to do with this absolutely terrible fever,” she says, again laying her mercifully cool hand to his forehead, but for longer this time. As if she’s trying to memorize in exact detail its creases. A plaintively whispered, “Sick baby.”
Cal couldn’t be sure what it was that ever set it off exactly, but sometimes Josephine would just suddenly start acting especially sweet and being very physically affectionate and they’d either end up cuddling or kissing, or on rare occasion fucking, depending also on factors he couldn’t be sure of. They got along so well and had such an ardent friendship that it was almost like sometimes there would occur a sudden unbearable spike of impossible fondness that could only be assuaged physically.
Now appeared to be one of those times. And for him those times always corresponded with wanting too much from her, more than he knows he should have, more than he’d ask for. On this occasion, the too much he wants is to be able to settle his head in her lap, for her to card her hands through his hair. And he has a stupid vision of wiping a tear from her cheek when the movie eventually makes her cry—in a silly little gesture that might convey ‘You’re the kindest person I think I’ve ever met and your empathy is beautiful to me.’
“Have you taken your temperature?”
“I have not.”
“You don’t have a thermometer?”
“I do actually.”
“Where?”
“Bathroom cabinet.”
She fetches it. Cal hadn’t bothered because as far as he’s concerned a fever’s a fever, but if Josephine wanted to take his temperature she was more than welcome to.
Her response, when she sees the number, is not expressed in words. Just a pout and an empathetic hand to his cheek, coaxing his eyes to close and a quiet sigh to escape him, and as much as he’d like to keep her there forever he can savor only seconds of her touch before he has to break the spell, fold a tissue over his face and turn desperately away from her once again. Thrice again, technically, with tenting eyebrows and shivery sneezes forced to fight their way through the complexities of his congestion.
He sits back up, snatching a long chain of tissues one after the other like a panicked magician resorting to his final trick. Pressing them to his face with both hands, he mops himself clean of the whole messy production, finishing up with a shaky exhale.
Sneezing had indeed become a woozy affair and the congestion is heavy enough to make him constantly sort of breathless and almost claustrophobic, and the combination is so dizzying it’s a wonder he hasn’t managed to faint today.
Josephine appraises him carefully and says, in complete sincerity, “Well god bless your little heart, Cal,” which wouldn’t sound quite the same coming from anyone but Josephine and god he’s so weak for her and maybe always has been or maybe it’s just this stupid fever but he feels simultaneously euphoric and very very unwell and this seems in so many respects like a febrile fantasy he’s conjured and he needs her to touch him again to make sure she’s real.
Please just let her touch him again he doesn’t care how.
They start the movie finally, and once he’s fairly confident she’s enjoying it from her laughter and reactions to little eight-year-old flashback version of Salvatore as he runs around the movie house being mischievous and adorable, Cal’s thoughts drift back to her.
She’d been in a relationship since she studied abroad in Athens, back in undergrad. He was a Greek man named Sandros, cheek-chiseled and curly haired like a marble statue. It was evidently an open relationship. No jealousy, she’d claimed, which sounded incredible, in the not credible sense, but she seemed happy.
It did feel morally grey at times, not on her part but on Cal’s, though Josephine insisted it wasn’t. Even so there was something about carrying out an emotional relationship with someone otherwise engaged that felt illicit at best, and Cal at one point found himself asking for clarification over whether hypothetically an emotional affair counts the same as a physical one or where exactly one crosses the line here.
She said it fell under the same subheading.
Of course he agreed with it in principal. It was a beautiful notion — that if you love someone you should want them to experience as much love as possible, even if it comes from other sources, and there was love there, between them. He loved her, in his way, and she loved him, in hers. Though he knew there was something more profound about the way she loved him than vice versa.
He feels like a drunken stupid Alcibiades in his violet-and-ivy crown, reflecting on the pure nature of Socrates’ companionship by bemoaning the fact that Socrates wouldn’t fuck him and where does such a man get off just going around making people love him and then lying next to them on the couch all night without touching them?
Because so similarly Cal wanted too much from Josephine, his peer but in so many ways his mentor, his Socrates, and it was certainly his own selfish desire that had him asking her to stay here, and there’s some irrepressible, despicable part of himself that will register slight disappointment when that sort of touching would not occur on this couch tonight either.
Not only did Josephine ask for nothing but she didn’t seem to want anything from him. If there were aspects of him she wanted, they were obtained in the normal course of their relationship, they weren’t occupied by imagined scenarios like the ones he conjured at night, or when his mind drifted from a text, or when they sat close enough to so easily picture the feeling of her skin against his. She wanted things how they were, he wanted them how they were not. His love was a desire and his desire an emptiness, and surely there was something metaphysically unfair about the insatiable nature of that desire in the face of such generosity as Josephine displays to him on a regular basis.
In a perfect example of this just now she grabs a throw pillow, places it across her thighs and beckons him, “Come here.”
And yet still he wants to touch her, but he won’t. He will take only this. He repositions the tissue box to be within reach and then lays his head atop her legs, and she welcomes him with a quick affectionate brush of fingers through his hair and he is lucky even to know her, and so much more so to experience her soothing touch and her sweetly spoken ‘Oh Cal poor baby,’ when he’s sick and wanting.
“Gosh, you are just radiating heat,” she frowns. “I feel like there’s an electric blanket on me right now.”
“Sorry,” he smiles.
“No it’s nice.”
“Oh—snf!—wait is it too cold in here?” he wonders.
“No no, hush. Just lie back, sniffles, there you go.”
He could happily drown in her softness and quiet murmured authority.
“Hey Josephine?”
She looks down at him and he continues. “You’re going to be… such an amazing professor, snff! I really hope you know that.”
“Well thank you Cal, so are you.”
“No but I mean it,” he says, looking at her like the world itself will stop spinning if she doesn’t believe him. “If you-h! Oh?”
He stops talking when a persuasive inhale tempts him, and he sits halfway up and brings an expectant crooked arm to his face to just kind of hover there, uncertainly, until he finally releases an unresolved breath, left with nothing more than a goofy look on his face and a vague sense of dissatisfaction. “False alarm, sorry, snff! I feel like I’m about three seconds away from sneezing at all times. Um—snf!—but what was I saying?”
“You were babbling.”
“If you were my teacher, Josephine, you’d be the best one I ever had. I mean you kind of are anyway.”
“You’re delirious, Cal,” she says, but it’s delivered with fondness.
He tended to get sentimental at higher temperatures.
Cal does manage for some minutes to get lost in the film, to let his mind drift from relentless moral philosophizing to Salvatore and Alfredo and the little movie house that could, but soon he starts feeling vaguely carsick from trying to parse sideways subtitles so he just stops reading them.
The other thing is that being tipped to one side this way is making his nose run terribly, so he sits up and says he’ll be right back, again.
“Did you want me to pause it?”
“Nah I’ve seen it before,” he says. “It’s actually kind of my ‘sick day’ movie.”
She says, “Aww.”
In the bathroom Cal wipes the sweat from his face, blows his nose, accidentally makes himself sneeze twice more, then again starts over. He’s being rougher on his nose than he probably should, and while he knows he’s tearing his skin up he’d much rather make his face tender than drip onto Josephine’s knees.
When he returns she offers a belated bless you and he asks her if she has a sick day movie. She does. Meet Me in St. Louis. That might actually be the cutest answer you could possibly have, he says, and then wills himself to stop talking.
“Oh sweetie are you shaking?” she notices, then, voice warm and honeyed like she’s speaking to a child.
“Just the fever,” he explains.
In a single rapid motion she slides the kantha quilt off the back of the couch onto Cal and he blinks in surprise as it lands on him and they laugh and he says oh thank you and drapes it over himself and she sort of tucks in the sides around him like it’s a sleeping bag.
“Josephine solves my problems once again,” he says, and then wills himself to stop talking, but harder this time.
Here with her, and a film he may well have memorized if it weren’t in Italian, he’s suddenly slowed and sleepy and he couldn’t think of a place he feels safer falling asleep and that very much includes being alone.
“I’m thinking about my nephew again since I brought him up to you. About the way he was staring at me.”
Josephine often talked during movies. It used to annoy him, but not anymore. Actually he does it too now, at least when it’s her he’s watching with. He sniffles and turns his head to give her his full attention.
“I feel like I didn’t mention this before but I wasn’t even talking to him really. I said hello but then it was just… mutual staring. Not staring like he was bored or zoning out but like he was completely fixated, fascinated... and I wondered what could possibly be so interesting?”
Perhaps the kindness and goodness in those strikingly green eyes he could sometimes be found staring into for a bit too long himself… How goddamn cheesy, thank god he’s not able to say things like that to her, thank god he’s not someone’s boyfriend tonight, that there’s no one right now who’ll have to listen to him in his wilting floral crown, fever-drunk and waning poetic.
“Maybe he liked the energy about you,” he says, hoping these words to be neutral enough.
“Hm, maybe,” she ponders, and during the pause he diligently studies the angles of her face as she’s lit by momentary television flicker. “But I felt like there must be something he knows that I’ve long forgotten.”
Cal smiles. “Some early, untarnished wisdom?”
“Yeah,” she says, thoughtful. “Whatever it is that makes the simple act of looking into another person’s eyes so apparently profound.”
She might be the most insightful, poetic person he’s ever—oh.
“Did I just… drip beer condensation on your face?”
She did, the cold droplet making contact with his cheek and catching him off guard, reflexively blinking.
“Only a tiny bit,” he grins.
“Oh my god I’m so sorry,” she apologizes, through laughter he joins into and outlasts, and then he has to sit up to cough a few times as a consequence. Her hand finds its way to his back and then helps ease him down when he catches his breath.
Leftover chuckles as they look at each other and Josephine more fully wipes the wetness from his cheek and Cal says, “That might just be sweat at this point-h? Oh wait Joh-h-sephine I’m—”
He pulls her hand away from his face and starts to sit up, forced again to shudder into the sleeve of this poor abused Georgetown sweatshirt before he can get anywhere close to the tissue box as a too-familiar sensation crashes through him like a wave.
“HiihGIZSSHHyue! HIISSHHiuu!”
At this point a wad of tissues finds its way into his hand and if he had time to say ‘You’re an actual angel thank you,’ he probably would, but instead he says, “Thay-” pushes his face into the tissues and sneezes so violently it disorients him.
“ihh-DJIISSHHH!shyue…”
Suddenly his ears hurt like he just got off a plane, and a small whimper he did not mean to set free gets swept out in an exhale.
“Aww sweetie, bless you. You okay?”
“Um—snff!—yeah, I think so,” he manages, through soggy tissues and stuffiness. “Sorry that was loud.”
“It’s okay I’m used to you.”
He gives up on going all the way to the bathroom every time he needs to blow his nose, both because it’s exhausting and because he feels dizzy just lying here at this point so standing would probably not be a very good idea.
After Josephine abandons the empty bottle she settles an arm across his chest and asks, “Is this okay?”
“Oh it’s more than okay,” he says. “Just wish I knew what I did to deserve such treatment.”
“Well it’s very simple, Cal. You don’t feel well and I care about you.”
His eyebrows are imploring and he wonders if she can see it on his face that he fantasizes about her and when he says it back he knows they’re saying different things.
“I care about you too, Josephine.”
“I know,” she says, tapping a finger to his nose, and for a moment he loves her too much again and it hurts, but it passes.
And later, not much later at all, when he drifts off during the movie she’ll very gently kiss the top of his head, and though half asleep he’ll think the word philia, and feel once more the purity of a love that wants for nothing.
No one’s checked out Plato’s more niche works in ages and one should be quiet in a library. [Featuring Cal at twenty-six, before he got his doctorate.]
- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - —
It was, to put it simply, an error in judgment. It was, to put it simpler, very stupid of him. It didn’t matter that he was only there for twelve and a half minutes. It didn’t matter that he encountered it often enough that he really should be desensitized by now. It didn’t even matter that he had more or less tolerated it just fine until his twenties. All that mattered was that his body did not like it.
Dust—innocuous, harmless dust—misconstrued as so threatening it apparently necessitated the full arsenal of his lungs and sinuses. In most circumstances he just found the pure melodrama of his immune system’s massive overreaction to be sort of amusing.
However. There were a few exceptions. Most notably, most commonly, and by far the most inconveniently, libraries — considering that he is, at this moment, a hamster on the wheel of a rapidly diminishing grant while he circumnavigates around his almost-but-not-quite finished dissertation, chasing an ephemeral feeling of doneness he hopes he can wrangle if he just… rereads everything Plato ever wrote… and maybe a quarter of everything ever written about Plato.
Cal, in a library, is sniffly at a baseline. It’s a necessary evil, but he doesn’t intend to be here long and the Dewey decimal system of the philosophy sections at any of the libraries on campus run in mental ley lines through his memory.
It hadn’t occurred to him just how big a discrepancy in popularity there was between the widely read Republic and Statesman and Apology and some of Plato’s lesser known works until he plucks two examples of the latter from the top shelf and the neglect of readers at large takes the form of a miasmic plume of dust motes billowing into the air around him. It takes all of ten seconds for it to start to effect him, and considering he was already vaguely itchy and sniffling to begin with he really does need to get out of here quickly.
He allows himself a throat clear that becomes a dry cough into his fist a couple of times, which does not actually make him want to sneeze any less. He is needy inhales and teary eyes and flaring nostrils and he tries to close his mouth as if that will somehow stop his lungs from taking in tainted air but oh no this is happening isn’t it?
He ducks into a lifted elbow, pressing his nose and mouth firmly into the cotton fabric in an attempt to smother stray decibels, because this is, as a matter of fact, truly one of the worst places to be overcome by a very desperate need to—
“hh-IISSsh!” A throttled hiss through gritted teeth, and he's teetering on the precipice of further interruption, the level of irritation and absolute need reaching the far corners of his control. An immediate gasp and an irrepressible outburst — the effort required to contain the sounds evident in the way it bends him considerably at the waist, the tightness of his grip on the books he’s holding, how violently his shoulders shudder as his breath scissors. Harsh, guttural, barely suppressed and increasing in volume — a chain reaction of desperation.
“hd’IISHH, huh-IIZSSS, IIISS’hue!”
A book sandwiched in the middle of the stack he’s holding slips out from the compression of a forceful grip, and all he can do with his hands otherwise full is to watch in abject horror while it falls to the floor with a ridiculous thud like a slab of concrete. He leans over to pick it up and stops short when he has to bring a hand to his face to try to stop himself from sneezing again, which he does not succeed at and only just has time to catch against a sleeved forearm — dampening the noise into something it sounds like he’s trying to hydraulically compress into his mouth, and much like the book, it escapes from the force of the pressure.
“Hmmffs-SHUE!”
He also drops three out of the four other books he’s holding in the process and whispers an “Oh my god,” directed at fate itself.
A cacophony of hardcover Platonic dialogues clattering to the floor in smug scholarly succession that resounds through the stacks, makes Cal want to crawl into a hole where he can sneeze himself out of existence, and alerts a student worker to hustle over from the Pharmacology section and find him simpering, teary-eyed, holding Lysis the lone survivor like it’d take a case of rigor mortis to pry it away.
The student worker is, he’s pretty sure, named Rebecca¹ and oh also he is, he’s quite sure, about to sneeze several more times because his face feels very ticklish and he’s losing control of what his eyebrows are doing.
“Are you okay?” she asks, eyes wide like she’s just witnessed the greatest workplace disaster of her library assistant career because all things considered she probably has.
However much he wants to answer, Cal, forestalled in a compliant pose of quiet waiting, lungs occupied by a susurration of broken, breathy inhales, is at this moment wholly incapable of taking questions. The final action within his control is to turn his face into his shirt collar before he yields to helpless, repeated allergic capitulations.
“hIISh! d’IISHH! h-! ht’IZSSssyue!”
“Bless you!” Probably Rebecca offers.
“Thank you, gosh I am so sorry,” he sniffles, from between a guilty grin and complexly furrowed eyebrows, looking earnest and maybe dizzy as he smooths a rogue, ink-black lock of hair back into place.
“Is it the dust?”
“Yeah,” Cal says, his entire face an apology as he stoops to gather the books from the floor, “I’m obnoxiously allergic but—snff!—it’s not usually quite this uh, calamitous.”
“I’m so sorry! It seems like those top shelves haven’t been dusted in awhile. That might even be my fault personally, I probably didn’t notice.” She looks skyward—or maybe just shelfward, it’s hard to tell—and says, with an unplaceable affectation, “And once again I curse the fates for only making me five foot one.” ²
Cal chuckles politely.
“I’ll be right back.”
She’s off before he can say anything at library speaking volume. Any attempt to express the magnitude at which he hopes she does not intend to dust the shelves right now would be a woeful understatement. But before he can locate Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum (Selected Papers)³ she returns with a step ladder, a rag, and a spray bottle Cal looks into like it’s the barrel of a loaded gun.
He smiles and tries, “Oh don't worry you don’t have to do it right now!” In fact please don’t.
“I don’t mind! Also I really should, dust can actually damage the books when it sits on the top of the pages for too long! It shouldn’t get to this point.”
He pictures, with no small measure of longing, the blessed blister packs of forgotten Claritin currently sitting on his kitchen counter, and watches in dismay while she pulls books from the shelf one by one, sliding the debris from spine to fore edge to disperse outward into the air.
Oh well-intentioned Probably Rebecca, you’re about to make it so much worse.
Cal rushes to scan through blurry Dewey decimal numbers as the itch assaults his nose with such an unpleasantly ticklish sensation that it prompts a quick involuntary shiver, his body begging for relief that the extensive rubs at his nose with every combination of hand position are insufficient to provide.
He’s pretty sure he can’t even breathe without sneezing so for some seconds he doesn’t dare to, as he stands, twitching and tearing, in the epicenter of what Probably Rebecca has unwittingly transformed into a dusty ground zero. Through allergic tears he finally sees the spine of the last book he needs and begins to make a grab for it but has to stop short, buckling beneath overwhelming irritation because he does technically need to breathe and at the moment that necessitates just submitting to it. There’s time enough to set down the books he’s already holding on an empty stretch of shelving and tuck his nose into his collar, at the complete mercy of uninvited histamines waging a pointless war against Lauinger Library.
“Hh! d’zzhoo— d’ZSSue!” It’s a breathy, high pitched little duo that leaves him even less confident in his ability to pick his books back up again.
“Oh bless you,” she says again, but Cal is not quite finished, his shoulders still quaking with the effort to contain himself, which he is becoming less and less effective at doing.
“hh! HISSue?! …hmff’SSUE, mff’SSYUE! Wow this is a-h-huh? ..Huh’RISHHyue! A disaster, I’m sorry.”
Cal Chowdhury, almost-but-not-quite Ph.D, bathed in unflattering fluorescence illuminating the swirling specks of irritation, reduced to picture of allergic misery by a confluence of factors that Probably Rebecca seems, at last, to recognize her part in.
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I’m making it worse aren’t I??”
Even as he speaks he knows his eyebrows are pinching together and relaxing indecisively and he crooks his arm into position for when he’ll need to fitfully bob into it over the course of any attempt at a sentence. “It’s okay, it’s not… hh’JIZSHh! notyourfault, I’m h-juhhst huh-JIISSHhoo!!” The noise, regretfully, resounds, acoustically amplified into a taunting echo.
Probably Rebecca matches his regret and their apologies topple out atop each other.
“Goodness, excuse me, snff! I am so sorry, that was much louder than I’d have preferred.”
“Bless you, gosh I sincerely apologize, I can’t believe I just stirred up a bunch more dust…”
Cal didn’t know what it was exactly about scholars that influenced them to start replacing phrases like “oh shit,” with “oh gosh,” or using more prudish exclamations like goodness in place of, for example, Jesus, or, of course, the irreverent, all-purpose fuck. All he knew was that the change—for him, and (probably) Probably Rebecca, and the vast, square majority of those studying the more buttoned-up academic subjects—had occurred somewhere along the line, and now here they are sputtering their goodnesses and goshes and apologies to each other like they just collided headlong in a 1950s musical and suddenly this all strikes him as just being unbearably funny.
“It’s okay!” he says, suppressing laughter and hopelessly wiping at the sticky floodwaters of his face with the inside hem of a wilted shirt collar, and hopefully that’s it, the dust seems to have literally and idiomatically settled on this allergic reaction. “Not your fault, I’m just—snf!—unusually sehh… sensitive.”
Yeah no that’s not it—
“HrrRIIHHOO!” A very inappropriate pitch and volume for a library, good lord why is he so bad at this?⁴ And more importantly why is it that the Ward editions of all of these dialogues are this unpopular when they’re objectively the best translations?⁵
They simultaneously say: “Oh gosh, bless you.”
And: “Wow, pardon me, my goodness.”
And Cal picks up his books to leave before he can either laugh or sneeze again.
As for the student worker currently running checkout at the circulation desk, Cal actually is familiar enough with him to be certain of his name: It’s Harry, who takes one amused look at him, opens his mouth to expose a thoroughly pulverized wad of vaguely green chewing gum whose perpetual presence Cal is also familiar enough with to have expected, and says, “Jesus, Chowdhury, are you okay? You look like you’ve been crying?”
“No, just sneezing,” Cal laughs, brushing away the residual tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “Well, snf! and I guess sneeze-associated crying, yeah.”
“Ohh,” Harry says with a smirk of recognition, “was that you?”
It takes a special occurrence for Cal to become bashful, but this is one such occurrence, and he feels his cheeks warm with embarrassment.
“Uhh yeah, snf! it would appear some of Plato’s works have been neglected for some time.”
“Ah, you’re allergic to dust?”
“Obnoxiously allergic yes.”
Harry opens one of the books and waves away the small amount of dust that rises from the action. “Damn, these really are dusty. The last time someone checked this one out was three years ago.”
“It’s a tragedy—snf!—because it’s—”
“Yeah you’re not gonna catch me with that recommendation, mate. I’m a public policy major I don’t have reason to read… ‘Charm-ides.’”
“That’s fih! ..fair…” God please not again. He manages, by the belated grace of some twisted histaminic deity, to get away with nothing more than a relatively small “h-EKX’shhh… h’EKSHhyue!” buried carefully in his elbow as his whole being vibrates like he’s just sustained an implosion.
“Gesundheit.”
Harry looks up to see an all-but-trembling Cal nod in acknowledgement and squish the back of his hand against his nose, determinedly defiant and clearly trying very very hard not to sneeze again, forcibly unknitting his eyebrows as if he can stop it purely by virtue of resisting the proper facial expression, but it does actually seem to work, or at least to buy him some time.
He finally manages a tremulous exhale and a cautious “Th-thankyou.”
Harry goes through the due dates of each book as Cal politely nods and privately prays for this interaction to end as soon as humanly possible, and Harry seems to sense this, because by the time he gets to Euthydemus he just indicates the checkout card and says, “Fuck it, you know how to read.” Cal rewards him with the most grateful look he can possibly muster through features still preoccupied by agitation.
Cal finally exits the library and spots Josephine sitting on a bench outside, reading a book as she waits for him. He’s walking quickly with the back of a wrist held to his nose and far less composure than when she’d last seen him twenty-three pages ago.
“What happened to you?”
A rush of words: “It was very dusty, can you holdtheseforasecond?”
He more or less shoves the books into her hands as he turns around, puts a palm against the wall to steady himself and doubles over, wrenching into his arm to fully succumb, twice, freely, gratefully, finally.
“EyyyYESSHHHOO! EHSHHHOOO!!”
“Whoa, bless you, are you okay?”
He turns to her and brings his hand to his heart as he sighs an exhale of blissful satisfaction with a blearily sincere, “Yes.”
“Did you manage to hold off on that until you got outside?”
He laughs as if she’s in on a joke she isn’t. “Oh Josephine you’re so funny — no I just sneezed so many times in a very quiet library, it was deeply unpleasant.”
She’s laughing. “As loudly as just now?”
“No, no! I mean, I hope not? Still not quiet, probably, but good lord was it a lot of times—”
Absolutely cackling. “Oh no!”
“Books were dropped—”
“Oh my god,” she says, in a voice that has become very high pitched.
“An employee was trying to help me out by immediately dusting the area which was very sweet but counterproductive—”
“Cal oh my god,” she wheezes.
“No one’s checked out that edition of Charmides in three years—”
“Noooo stop.”
“I’m pretty sure I just sneezed myself into next week.”
Josephine is going to take a couple more minutes to recover herself from a fit of giggling, and every time she looks at Cal it only gets harder to stop.
“I’m serious, I am no longer in this week. What day is it? Wednesday? Because it’s Monday for me now.”
- - -
Fᴏᴏᴛɴᴏᴛᴇs:
¹ He’s correct.
² She’s minoring in theater, if you can believe it.
³ Robinson, T. M. (2000). Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
⁴ Reasons Cal is bad at this:
I. Impressive lung capacity
(source: regular aerobic exercise)
II. A tendency to breathe in very deeply beforehand
(source: a long-held, unconscious policy of obedient surrender to the needs of the body)
III. He simply has not spent enough time thinking about it to realize he could be quieter if he didn’t first inhale like his life depended on it
(source: confidence; lack of experience practicing volume inhibition in almost any situation save for libraries, churches, lecture halls, funerals, et al)
⁵ It’s because, statistically speaking, no one cares.
Have recently been digging into Cal’s time at Georgetown so here’s a short Cal/Josephine thing. I’d describe their relationship as something like an ardent Work Marriage. Octobery ivy league vibes, pls imagine Cal in a turtleneck & a tweed blazer, thank u.
- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - —
For the record, she told him he was being dumb before they even left, and now, to no one’s surprise least of all Josephine’s, Cal keeps getting completely derailed by fitful sneezing as they walk, seeming to be caught in a sort of ticklish loop so possessing it prevents him from further forward movement. This is the third time he’s had to stop walking and they’re four blocks from where they started.
His breath snags so sharply it’s almost as if that’s what pulls him to turn away from her, as he slings an arm over his face and founders and crumples into it. Increasingly urgent, but uncertain, trembling, teasing at his breath and tugging at his features. “Eh-h? EyyYESSHHue! ESSHHiuu!”
Josephine blesses him but Cal is still an unfinished portrait of agitation, wavering on the edge of it for a moment and then cresting to capitulation with an even more frenzied collapse, an even more desperately breathy, “h-h-HEHSSHHsue?!”
Yet it’s not done with him — quiet inhales stuttering indecisively, eyebrows furrowing and unfurrowing, alternating between rapid blinking and looking skyward like he's pondering something of profound importance, waiting with folded arm pre-prepared. He usually sneezes with such suddenness she startles at the sound, but today he seems to be having trouble fully grasping the feeling to begin with.
Until finally a hitched breath, a plea, a highly anticipated arrival.
“H-hh? Oh-h-mygod—heh… EHSSHHyiuu!!”
“Jesus… Cal,” she says.
He’s still snuffling into his sleeve, keeping his arm over his face as he slips one of the straps of his bag off his shoulder, only then realizing the logistical difficulty in positioning his other arm at an angle where he’s capable of rifling through its compartments without looking like a wild animal.
“Josephine can you please help me I’m in desperate need of tissues and I’m very pathetic.”
She laughs and obliges. “Wait, where are they?”
“I don’t knoww,” he moans, and he means his tone playfully and he makes her laugh again and it’s levity for them both.
She finally locates them and opens the little travel packet and he asks, “Can you give me like three of them?” and when she presses them into his palm he says something that sounds vaguely like “You complete me,” but is almost too stuffy to interpret.
They’re about to ascend a set of steps when she stops him with a hand to his chest as he scrubs tissues against his misbehaving nose. “You’re sure you’re up to teaching like this?”
“Honestly Josephine, I don’t feel that bad.”
She throws him a look that employs incredulous eyebrows and quiet impatience.
Cal amends his statement slightly. “I mean, clearly I can’t for the life of me seem to stop sneezing, but it’s pretty much only my nose that’s bothering me,” he sniffles. “Plus it’s just a discuhh-h-? Huh? UHHSSH-hoo! Discussion section, sorry, snfff! It’s fifty minutes long, I’ll make it.”
“Right,” she says, swiping a fallen piece of tissue-lint from the lapel of his blazer, “but sweetie I can hardly understand you. You sound like you’re drowning.”
He laughs, congestion audible even through a chuckle.
“And your voice is starting to get scratchy.”
That one, however, is not a possibility he even wants to entertain so he shakes his head and says, “Nuh-uh, nope.”
“Yes it is, Cal.”
“Shh no it’s not.”
“I can literally hear your sore throat.”
“So I’ll get a bunch of cough drops, and some of that kind of tea that coats your throat, snf! what is that called?”
“Throat Coat.”
“Actually?”
“Yes.”
“Easy to remember,” he says, picking arguably the worst moment to clear his throat, because she reminded him of a tickle he was trying to ignore. “I’ll be fine.”
“Well I’m not subbing for you when you lose your voice and have to cancel your classes, because I’ll tell you right now that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
And to no one’s surprise least of all Josephine’s, two days later that is indeed exactly what happens, with the one exception to her premonition being that she does in fact take over two of Cal’s classes.
“Allow me to introduce doctoral candidate Caliph Chowdhury,” Josephine says, as she and Malik enter the study room they reserved. Josephine sets a to-go cup of tea in front of a worse-for-the-wear Cal—who is at this point only capable of looking up from Kierkegaard and mouthing the words ‘thank you’—and continues pretend-introducing Malik to him. Cal is relegated to sniffling over steaming tea and silently listening to her rattle off items from his resume.
“Perfect score on the SAT, graduated with a double major summa cum laude and undoubtedly will again, an IQ he refuses to disclose out of modesty, however, seen here resorting to writing as his only means of communication, having given himself laryngitis in spite of several warnings by fellow members of his cohort, and despite hearing it happening himself every step of the way.”
Cal smiles wryly, scrawls something out across his notebook and hands it to Malik.
“Bruv you need to take a penmanship class.”
“Give it to me I can usually interpret it,” Josephine says. It takes her a moment to decipher Cal’s abysmal handwriting, but when she does she laughs.
This is a perfect example of why IQ tests are meaningless btw.
A quick moment involving Cal & his father Rajesh when Cal’s back in Baltimore, early grad school years. Thanksgiving break, at his father’s house. (Also I need you to know that kshama karen is pronounced kShah-mah kah-reen.)
— - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - —
Typically he has trouble sleeping even under ideal circumstances, a challenge even when posed in perfect position in bed, in total noiseless darkness. Rajesh knows this, if not consciously, he knows there’s something wrong with the image of his son asleep at the desk with the lights still on.
Labored breaths through slightly agape lips, head on folded arms, tissue balled in a loosened fist, nose dripping onto a sweater sleeve. The discomfort shows. Not just from the unintentional physical position or the fact that he clearly can’t breathe through his nose. There’s something uneasy about him — something that still even in sleep isn’t at rest. Furrowed brows and a sort of sorrow in sloping shoulders. Weary in a way no twenty-two year old should be.
Rajesh knows why, it’s the fever Caliph almost always gets when he’s ill. Ridiculous fevers, the kind uninitiated parents will take a child to the hospital for. Made that mistake once—hundred dollar charge for a Tylenol and a prescription for bed rest—never again. Embarrassing, really. Priyanka’s idea, not his.
It’s past one in the morning, and Rajesh definitely heard his son sneezing in here not an hour ago so he hasn’t been asleep long. Pretty late to be up and he’s been diligently studying more or less the whole school break. It’s respectable, Rajesh would admit, even if he isn’t at all happy about the field his son chose to pursue. At least he’s passionate, he’s hard working, enough so to be here in the den instead of in bed, working despite his illness.
Priya would be proud. Priya wouldn’t need a qualifier in order to be proud, she wouldn’t need conditions. She wouldn’t need an ‘at least.’
Truthfully Rajesh only came in to get something from the desk, and he still intends to. He quickly retrieves a leather-bound planner from a drawer, and up close like this the fever is obvious on Caliph’s face — cheeks enflamed into an angry, febrile red, sweat beading from his skin like he just finished a strenuous exercise, a pained look to match. It’s been years since Rajesh has done this, but he doesn’t stop himself from placing a hand on Caliph’s glistening forehead.
“Beta…” he whispers, through an exhaled sigh he can’t seem to stop himself from either, when the touch reveals a raging heat, as it always did, as he knew it would, but still somehow the extent of it is for a moment alarming.
For a moment he second guesses what he logically and medically knows to be true, that the fever isn’t dangerous, that it’ll do its job and resolve itself. For a moment he’s paternal and nervy and for a moment he thinks about trying to find the thermometer he knows they have somewhere. For a moment Caliph is five and burning with fever and for a moment Rajesh is holding him on his lap in a hospital waiting room, knowing they don’t need to be there but glad that they are, just in case.
Caliph stirs then, no longer a child, no longer a helpless thing to be worried over, a grown man who issues a low moan that sounds like a question. Glassy eyes blink open in groggy confusion as he picks his head up from his arm and half-realizes that he’s suddenly awake in the den where he had undoubtedly not meant to fall asleep, skin sweat-stuck to a book page, penned notes an inky blur from sustained contact with a clammy forearm. And then just as immediately as he’s conscious he’s gasping into a punctuated inhale and burying his fevered face into his elbow and sneezing loudly enough that Rajesh knows for a fact he could hear it from any room in the house, because over the past few days he has.
“Huhh’REHHSHHHue! ESSHHHyue!” He slowly unfurls, sniffles, grabs new tissues to press to his nose, starts to say something.
“Kuh-hh-HUSSHHHue! Snffh! Prabhu mere, snf! Kshama karen,” he mumbles, voice so stuffy and muted that at first Rajesh can hardly tell which language he’s attempting.
“Tumhen sone ke lie jaana chaahie.”
“Mmm?” Caliph sniffles, turning his way and blinking at him through heavy, darkened lids, and Rajesh switches to English because Caliph is better in it anyway.
“You should go to bed.”
He doesn’t seem to fully register this either, coughing a few times into a sleeve, rubbing sleep from his eyes, wiping the consequences of an unattended runny nose from his face, perhaps too busy with his body’s demanding tasks to take direction from others. He does lull his head into what could be interpreted as a lethargic nod but then he’s tearing more tissues from the box and sneezing so hard he bends in half and Rajesh resists the urge to scoot his son away from the desk so he doesn’t collide with it.
Since when was he this loud? He's pretty sure Caliph wasn’t this loud before college—first of all he would have made an effort to discourage it—but he can’t recall when the change took place. That first year at Columbia? Oregon? This melodrama was something forged beyond the reaches of Rajesh’s control, maybe beyond the reaches of Caliph’s too, because he doesn’t exactly seem like he means to. Still Rajesh has found himself annoyed every time he’s heard it over the past few days, like the volume is some strange rebellion, something that oddly reminds him of the way he feels like Caliph is slipping from him, becoming a stranger.
The sound scrapes the ceiling and on its way probably his throat — frustrated, strangled, suggestive of struggle. “HurRRUSSSyue!”
Again he attempts to say “Kshama karen,” afterward, again he doesn’t make it through before he’s interrupted by symptoms, again he’s too sick even to apologize.
Stop apologizing, he almost says, because he’s been annoyed by that too over the past couple days, the endless apologizing, kshama karen, kshama karen, kshama karen mujhe maaf keejie. But then instead Rajesh says, “You don’t need to be sorry, for being ill, Caliph.”
Caliph nods and rubs hands roughly over his face, provoking more stray sniffles.
“Sleep it off, beta. Your fever’s too high to be working like this. Get some sleep, yes? You can study when you’re well.”
He nods again, more abbreviated this time because yet again he’s about to sneeze, tucking his face into a tissue, taking an erratic inhale, wrenching into a final exhausted, “HrrRIIHHHue!” Frantic in its force, plaintive in its delivery.
Rajesh starts into the hallway, almost lets the door fall shut behind him, but at the last moment he pulls it open enough to offer two words that mean bless you, that mean I hope you feel better, that, in literal translation, mean, live a hundred years. “Shatam jeevah.”
It takes him by surprise at first, but then with a tired smile Caliph looks in the direction his father’s disappearing to. Catches his eye for a split second and it’s enough. “Dhanyavaad,” he says, as the door to the den gently closes.
