The Stye

by Paul Oliver

Edith opened the microwave door with two seconds left on the timer. A clumsy error. She liked to open it exactly one second before the beeps.

Her Hot Pocket steamed. A perfect meal for a Wednesday after- noon. Its grease saturated the paper plate she placed on her lap. She thought it might stain her drawstring sweatpants. The sweatpants were part of her system. A simple system—she bought clothes in var- ious shades of gray, always one size too big. Dark, ill-fitting clothing dissuaded men from looking at her body on the street, and laundry was easier without separating items.

Hot Pockets were another part of the system. Hot Pockets at home, halal carts on the go. Both deserved full marks for affordability and convenience, two indicators of a marketable food product. Her compulsion to identify the benefits of every product was an instinct instilled by her work. She was a freelance infomercial writer.

Her current project required a script for a new product called The Shower Shimmy, a plastic bar, installed parallel to a shower curtain rod, with hooks to hold shampoo, soap, and the like. She didn’t understand the name. She didn’t understand the product. No one seemed to understand the product. But it was her job to assess The Shower Shimmy and highlight its best features. To pay her rent, to buy Hot Pockets, to eat Hot Pockets, to sit on her futon in her gray sweatpants— all these things somehow depended on her ability to write a compel- ling script about The Shower Shimmy. Or at least compelling enough to convince the late-night viewer that leaving the T.V. on was preferable to finding the remote and turning it off.

Edith didn’t own a T.V. herself. A laptop and a phone were enough. But mostly she read books—so many books that her book- shelf couldn’t hold any more. She piled new books on the twin-size bed in the guest room. She called the room a guest room despite a dearth of guests. It had been vacant for two months since her former roommate had abandoned the city for her hometown in Iowa.

Since Edith couldn’t afford to keep the room empty for another month, she had agreed to let someone live there. Someone named Alan. Edith had seen his post on Facebook seeking a room on short notice. To live with Alan, an acquaintance from high school in Salt Lake City, seemed better than to live with a stranger. He accepted her offer but said he would only be in New York temporarily for a visiting teaching position at Columbia’s English department.

A swelling sensation pained Edith’s lower left eyelid. She blinked deliberately, heavily. A stye. She hated styes. A warm compress would reduce the inflammation. She wondered, as her molars mashed a warm gob of Hot Pocket, if she had any clean washcloths to use.

Would she say anything inappropriate to Alan when he arrived? She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and realized she was quite drunk. She had imbibed an entire bottle of wine as she waited for his knock on the door. Although if she said or did anything indecorous, it seemed inconsequential to her. She wanted a purely transactional relationship with him—a monthly direct deposit, an exchange of money for space. But it was very possible she would drunkenly say something sex- ual. In the weeks leading up to his arrival, after she offered the room, she frequently conjured images of him—elaborate fantasies about fucking him in strange places. On the high school football field with a crowd watching, cheering for him, berating her. In a classroom full of his eager Columbia undergrads, bent over his desk while he simul- taneously lectured and pounded. In an unfinished concrete basement with a knife at her throat. She didn’t want to live such scenarios, no, but they got her off, in tandem with her hand, when they played in her head. She liked to smell her fingers after she finished. And usually she forgot to wash her hands before she rubbed her eye.

Prior to the prospect of Alan as a cohabitant, she had a proclivity for her purple battery-powered vibrator, which she dutifully cleaned after each use. But thoughts of Alan incited a primordial imperative to connect her own hand with her crotch. Now only her deft phalanges satiated her clitoris. No longer did inorganic—or foreign organic— objects appeal to her sexual appetite. Edith wanted herself, and she liked to imagine wanting Alan.

She kept looking at herself in the mirror and remembered her high school prom, senior year, with Alan. The Listerine-blue boutonnieres, Alan’s faux-silk tie, the tulle swathes on her skirt. He pressed his semi- hard penis on her hip while they swayed to some unfamiliar slow song. She didn’t mind; she protested later when he parked in the empty church lot near his house and told her to unzip his pants and suck his cock. No, she told him. He pleaded and pleaded. He convinced her to take swigs from a plastic bottle filled with vodka. Edith relented. She remembered his zipper, her wet lapping tongue, her gags, his little moans—these sounds all amplified by the dark silence. Streetlights cast tall shadows and illuminated her bobbing head until it ended. She swallowed and smiled. In the passenger seat on the way home, she kept mute. She vomited at home, alone.

The muteness persisted. She ignored Alan’s texts, his calls, the occasional letter, until his attempts at contact waned and eventually stopped. Their Facebook correspondence regarding the empty room was their first interaction since prom—it was their first communication as adults. She justified it to herself with the pretense of financial desperation, the necessity of a roommate. But, really, she just wanted to see him. To observe him. To know how this man lived. Did he think about that night as often as she did? Would it even be possible to answer that question by seeing him in person? She needed to know. She needed to know what kind of person he was—who he’d turned out to be. She knew the Alan who occupied her mind, the one who emerged nights when she lay awake, unable to sleep. The din of traffic in the dark, the whir of her little window A/C unit, and Alan, Alan, Alan.

* * *

Alan arrived with one suitcase and a backpack. He looked haggard. He greeted Edith with a somnolent half hug. They said hello, and Edith asked about his flight.

Alan had not flown in from Salt Lake City as Edith had expected. “No, actually, I flew in from a writers’ retreat in Marfa. Have you heard of it?” he said. Edith had heard of Marfa, although she’d never been. She knew it was a place for writers and artists to focus,

experiment, and do drugs.

“I’ve heard of it. I’ve never had a reason to go. There’s enough ketamine in New York for me,” she said.

“Ketamine?” Alan sounded confused.

“You know, horse tranquilizer. People snort it. K-holes?” “I’m not familiar with it,” he said.

“Well I read about a writer who did it in Marfa. 10:04 by Ben Lerner. He thought ketamine was cocaine. According to his book.”

“Oh, Ben Lerner. The glitterati pretty-boy.”

“Um. Yeah. Well—sorry. Come on in,” said Edith. She ushered him across the threshold with a sudden gesture. “Here’s where you’ll be,” she said, lifting a large curtain to reveal the book-covered twin- size mattress beside a small dresser.

“Is this—is this the bedroom?” “Yes.”

“This isn’t a bedroom. There’s no door.” “There’s a bed.”

“You said this was a two-bedroom apartment.” “It is. Converted. This is the second bedroom.”

“This isn’t a bedroom. This is part of the kitchen or the living room or something. I don’t even know.”

“Well it’s your bedroom now. I’ll clear the books off the bed right away. Sorry I forgot to do it before you got here.”

“You sent me a photo of a real bedroom. That’s why I agreed to live here.”

“That was a picture of this room.”

“You conveniently excluded the lack of a door from the photo.”

“I’m sorry you don’t like it.”

He squinted. “You have something on your eyelid,” he said. “Looks painful.”

“It’s a stye.”

“How long has it been there?” “A couple weeks.”

“You should put a warm compress on it.”

She had neglected to clear her books from the bed, and she had neglected to use a warm compress for her stye. Pus, or whatever was in there, she didn’t really know, continued to fester. She saw the reddened pustule that protruded beneath her eye in the mirror every morning and every night. Yet she did nothing.

The stye grew for another month after Alan moved in. What had been a red pustule was now a sizable bulge large enough to distort her vision. She pressed it with her forefinger. It felt like a hard lump, about as firm as the rubber eraser on the end of a pencil. She needed to see an ophthalmologist. Someone with sterilized eye-blades and an M.D. Alan’s presence in the apartment exacerbated her compulsion to masturbate. She discovered she liked to see him. She liked to watch him. She watched him pour almond milk into his cereal bowl. She watched him lumber from the bathroom to his room, dripping, in only a towel. She saw his silhouette as he dressed, flashes of flesh where the curtain parted.

The layout of her apartment made voyeurism easy. The breakfast bar in her kitchen faced his room. She often perched atop the wooden kitchen stool and pretended to type an infomercial script while she peered through the slit in his curtain. She responded to any glimpse of his movements with ferocious manual friction. Her drawstring sweatpants easily accommodated a hidden hand. Once, when he un- expectedly emerged, she feigned a fierce itch on her thigh. He seemed oblivious.

Even after memorizing Alan’s teaching schedule, Edith was re- luctant to leave the apartment—she didn’t want to miss a moment of him. To remain omnipresent was the only way to know, with absolute certainty, everything Alan did in her apartment. But one afternoon she noticed an old file on her laptop: an infomercial she had written, about a year ago, for a high-end nanny cam system called PinCam. These nanny cams were not secret cameras in teddy-bear eyeballs; the PinCam system, installed by professionals, recorded footage through nearly imperceptible pinhole apertures in walls. She knew Best Buy sold the system, along with same day installation, and she knew, since it was a Thursday, Alan wouldn’t return to the apartment until around eight o’clock. On the downtown Lexington Avenue line, hurtling to- wards the Best Buy at Union Square, she felt awash in relief.

The store clerk said installation would take four to six hours, and she could access live and recorded footage anytime through an app on her phone. He reassured her installation would be complete before 8:00 P.M. She handed him her credit card—the one she rarely used, only for emergencies.

When the installation crew arrived at her apartment she lay supine on her bed, arm vibrating, fingers tensed, thighs pulsing. She was locked in an airplane bathroom with Alan, his hand over her mouth, his hot breath in her ear—until her door buzzer interrupted everything. She let the crew inside; they clambered up the narrow stairs. Power tools and odd electrical equipment strewed the worn hardwood floors. Three workers total. “Show us where you want the cameras, ma’am,” said the boss. Edith penciled X marks on all three walls in Alan’s room, two in the bathroom (one near the sink, one in the shower), one in the kitchen, and one in her own room. The crew gathered their equipment and went to work.

By the time Alan returned, the cameras were operational, streaming to Edith’s phone. Alan set down paper bags full of groceries in the kitchen. She watched him put the groceries away. He picked his nose and wiped a booger underneath the lip of the countertop. Boogers didn’t disgust her. She never ate her own, but she liked to pick her nose and flick the dry ones.

Alan went to his room. Edith kept watching while he undressed down to his boxer-briefs. She preferred men who wore regular baggy boxers, whose testicles, she imagined, could flap freely against their thighs as they walked. She had read somewhere that men who wore boxer-briefs and regular briefs had lower sperm counts than men who wore boxers. But maybe it was the other way around. She couldn’t remember. She wanted to ask Alan where he bought his underwear. Such intimate garments deserved careful consideration, she believed. She bought her own underwear from a boutique—everything was hand sewn in a southern Italian town with a label to prove it. Her seven pairs of panties were the most expensive clothes she owned. She rarely washed them.

The amount of hair on Alan’s chest and belly surprised her— dense black curlicues. It grew in a sort of T-shape from the band on his boxer-briefs up and outward to his nipples. He was supposed to have smooth, porcelain pectorals and a raw abdomen, all made tacky with sweat. That’s the way she imagined him. Like a boy engorged to the size of a man.

She watched him for the next four hours until he fell asleep, and she continued to watch even as he dozed. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest soothed her; it lulled her to a liminal level of consciousness. At some point during the early morning hours she sleepwalked to the kitchen. Wakeful awareness besieged her just as her hand gripped the handle on the microwave, one digital green second left on the timer. A warm Hot Pocket, her prize.

Alan’s daily schedule determined Edith’s for the next several weeks. When he was at the apartment she was on her phone, entranced by the live feed. Too entranced even to masturbate. She just watched him. She only slept when he slept, and he didn’t sleep much. At three, four, some- times five in the morning, his eyes would finally close. He woke every weekday at seven-thirty and returned around eight in the evening. Edith enjoyed his morning routine the most. That was her favorite part of the day. Tousled hair, bleary eyes, he wandered to the bathroom to shave, shit, and shower. Sometimes he forgot to brush his teeth, she noticed.

Edith found time to work during the day while Alan was at Co- lumbia. The Shower Shimmy people told her they were “extremely dissatisfied” with her first draft and terminated her contract. But she had a draft due soon for another product called Poop Stick, a cheap toilet plunger with some sort of novel functionality she hadn’t both- ered to learn yet. What improvements could be made to a toilet plunger, anyway? she wondered. The inventors were young twenty- somethings, as infantile and boorish as the name they’d chosen for their product. Trust fund babies, probably.

But since she hated her job she rarely felt compelled to do any work. Edith lived in coffee shops with her laptop. Rarely the same shop—she didn’t want people to remember or even notice her. She told herself she would work on infomercials and instead Googled warts and fungus and Staph infections and goiters until she got hungry or thirsty. When she got hungry or thirsty she found the nearest food cart and ordered a lamb gyro and a Poland Spring. Full bellied and bladdered, she’d find another coffee shop and do some more Googling (ways to die, medieval torture devices, what is cloud computing, world record for swallowing billiard balls). She always returned home before Alan. She ate Hot Pockets for dinner.

The days continued this way, unbroken by any substantial con- versation with Alan, or anyone else, really. She eluded him as much as she watched him. But one evening, a foggy Thursday, he caught her in the kitchen.

“Hey, um, can we talk about something? I know I’ve been distant while I’ve been living here. But do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Absolutely,” said Edith. But she wanted to say No and fuck no.

“So, look. I owe you an apology. Long overdue. For prom.” “Oh,” she said. She wanted to fire a nail-gun into her ear. “Yeah. I know. Yeah—I’ve been thinking about what to say, how

to say it, ever since you messaged me about the room here. And I’m going to do a bad job, even though I’ve been thinking about it every day. Anyway. I’m sorry. I had a big crush on you back then, and you looked so beautiful that night—I didn’t know how to handle myself. I’d never been with a girl like that before. And no one told me—I didn’t know. I didn’t know that what happened in the car that night was wrong. It felt good. But it was wrong. The whole thing was wrong. I knew it was wrong when you started ignoring me afterwards. It has haunted me—still haunts me. So I’m sorry. I must’ve made you feel like an object. I’m sorry.” He began to cry.

“You did.”

“I did w-what?”

“Made me feel like an object.”

They sat together in the kitchen, without speaking, while he con- tinued to cry. She watched him cry. When he stopped, he said, “I also need to let you know that I found another place to live. Somewhere that has a bedroom with a door. I found it a while ago, actually. Also,” he pointed at her eye, “you should really get that stye looked at.”

“Mhm. When do you move out?”

“End of the month.” After a pause—“Are we good?” “No.”

“Hm.”

“But,” said Edith, “I didn’t know you thought about those things. I’m glad that I know now.” She went to her room, closed the door, and watched him sit alone in the kitchen.

Alan moved out. Edith didn’t offer to help him with anything. Days of solitude passed, marked only by empty cartons of Ben and Jerry’s. When there were twelve empty cartons, Edith decided to call an ophthalmologist’s office. Her stye hurt, and it was increasingly impairing her vision. She didn’t scream at the receptionist like she wanted to when the receptionist said she needed a referral for an appointment. She calmly explained that her situation warranted attention, that her vision was blurry because of the stye, that if she couldn’t get an appointment she’d probably gouge her eye out with the dirty spoon she’d been using to eat whole pints of ice cream. The receptionist said Let me see what I can do and Edith said Thank you and the receptionist said Okay the doctor has half an hour tomorrow at 3:30 in the afternoon.

Edith arrived the next day at the ophthalmologist’s office at 3:52 in the afternoon. She signed in; she sat on a sticky chair; she followed the nurse when she heard her name. A man in a white lab-coat entered the room.

“Hi hello there, I’m Dr. Rothstein, pleasure to meet you.” “I’m Edith.”

“Hi there, Edith. Get lost on the way here?” “Um, no. No problems getting here.”

“Interesting. Well, you know, your appointment was for 3:30. It’s now,” the doctor looked at his watch, “3:57. Your appointment ends in three minutes.” The doctor produced a jovial smile. “All kidding aside, I should be heading out from the office right now. My son has a little league baseball game that starts at 4:30. He’s the pitcher.”

“Oh okay, I’ll reschedule.”

“That’s an impressive stye you’ve got there.” The doctor bent to look closer. “Yeah, yeah. That’s nasty all right.”

Edith squeezed the thing with her thumb and forefinger. Dr. Roth- stein furrowed his brow.

“Have you been doing that often? Squeezing it like that?” “I guess so, sometimes.”

“You really shouldn’t be doing that. You really shouldn’t. That’ll make it much worse.”

“So when do you want to reschedule?”

“Reschedule? You think I’m letting you leave here with that on your face? No way. Certainly not. You’re here now, and I’m here now, and we’re going to slice that gusher open. I don’t want you to have to come back and get lost again.” The doctor rubbed his chin. “Wow. That’s a gusher all right. What a stye. I’ll be back. You wait right here.”

“Okay.”

Dr. Rothstein returned with a rolling cart which had a tray of stainless-steel instruments on top. He picked up a scalpel.

“You know what this is?” he said, brandishing the blade. “That’s a scalpel.”

“Correct.” He put the scalpel down. “Afraid of needles?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“Good.” He picked up a syringe and said, “Close your eye.” Edith felt the syringe puncture somewhere near the affected part of her eyelid. The doctor left the room again and returned after a few minutes. He held the scalpel and said, “Hopefully the numbing agent has set in completely. This’ll be quick—don’t open your eye.” With an adept motion, Dr. Rothstein sliced open the stye.

“FUCK FUCK FUCKING BASTARD.”

The doctor laughed at Edith’s exclamations. “I guess the numb- ness didn’t set in all the way yet. Oh well, all done now. Hold this cotton pad on it for five minutes.” Edith pressed the pad on her face.

“Sorry for swearing at you.”

“It’s all good, all good. That must’ve hurt. If you hadn’t gotten lost on the way here and arrived on time maybe I wouldn’t have been in such a rush.” The doctor winked. “I’ve got a game to get to. The nurse will take care of you. Bye-bye.”

When Edith removed the pad she saw what Dr. Rothstein meant when he had called her stye a gusher. Blood and pus soaked the pad and oozed down her cheek. She held the pad for five more minutes until the nurse entered and told her she could leave.

She walked to a Dunkin Donuts across the street. She pulled out her phone and found Alan’s name in her contacts. New message. Copy, paste. She sent him a link to the PinCam live feed in her own bedroom.