The Cure for What Ails You

From infancy, my lungs have been trash. Even with surgery, my lungs topped out at half-normal capacity. After a game of tag or a swim in the neighborhood pool, I’d have an hour’s worth of coughing to pay for it. If you’ve never had an asthma attack and found yourself trying to breathe like you’re sucking in a milkshake through the thinnest straw imaginable, then you can’t know what I mean.

A few years out from college, my mom shipped me this drug she said would help and told me to keep it hush-hush. My mom was a scientist in R&D at a big pharmaceutical company, one of those ultra-large ones you never hear about since they source their discoveries through other companies so their billionaire investor doesn’t get any blowback if one bad reaction leads to a “nonviable human.” So of course I didn’t ask questions. I simply unwrapped the inhaler, threw away the instructions, and inhaled.

From that first breath, I felt euphoric. You know the way your lips tingle from certain spices, as if they’re on the edge of bursting into flames, like how smoldering paper glistens with a golden line of light slowly eating its way inward? That’s how my lungs felt, in a good way. No, in the best way.

I closed my eyes so I could savor it, that feeling of my lungs not just working, but expanding more fully than they ever had before. I was in my apartment, just luxuriating in how easy it was to breathe, when I heard a girl’s voice ask, right next to me on the couch, “You okay, hon?”

My eyes shot open to find a stranger sitting beside me, exuding calm concern. She had a thick book open on her lap, her graceful finger holding her place. My expression must have startled her, because she leaned over and put her hand on my leg, her eyes narrowing, her brown hair falling over her face in wayward strands unbound by the scrunchie collecting the rest in a bun.

And instead of pulling away from the stranger’s touch as I should have, I felt comforted, her fingers warm and welcome. She was a stranger, but familiar, too. Her green eyes were huge, the color slightly washed out, red freckles in the irises the sign of some inherited genetic disease, surely, but she’d resigned herself to the possibility years ago, even if I hadn’t.

Even if I hadn’t what? I thought. I didn’t even know this person.

She leaned in to kiss me, and I still didn’t know her, but I recognized how her lips moved on my lips, and when she pulled away I knew it was because, if she didn’t, she was afraid we’d have sex right there on the couch and she really wanted to finish that book tonight.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Just asthma.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You never mentioned you had asthma.”

“I don’t,” I responded, confusing her more, and in the moment I said it, it was true.

I took a deep breath. I took another. On the third, I felt my lungs tighten, the organs straining against their own deformed nature.

Asthma.

Coughing, it all came back, the shortness of breath I didn’t even understand as shortness of breath, because I’d never had lungs that worked as they should.

“Sorry,” I said to the girl on the couch. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

But she wasn’t there. A tightness settled in my chest like heartache.

It was too late to call my mom and ask about the drug. I’d do it tomorrow, I promised myself. My lungs felt better, but nothing like in that dream. Hallucination? Drug-induced trip? I didn’t know what to call it. I wanted to leave the inhaler on the coffee table, not touch it again until I had to, but I cradled it in the palm of my hands that night as I slept. In the half-sleep before I really woke up in the morning, I found myself caressing it like a lover.

Over the hot, nearly burnt black coffee that I’d always told myself cleared my lungs of the gunk I’d cough up throughout the day, I pondered the inhaler. I didn’t taste the coffee. I touched my tongue to the uncapped mouth of the inhaler. I didn’t call my mom. I pushed down the canister and let the chemicals breathe their way into me.

“Honey?” I said. The girl was there in front of me across the table as she’d been since we sat down to eat breakfast. Her name was Siobhan and she was my girlfriend.

“Honey?” I repeated.

“Do you want honey, Honey?” Siobhan asked, the joke old and practiced and well-loved, like a sweater worn-thin with use.

I nodded and she poured, the sweetness melting into both the coffee and the air.

I was with her a little longer this time. We didn’t talk except to confirm dinner plans after work at our favorite local restaurant. I went to refresh my coffee from the pot and, without turning, knew she was gone. My body felt like a wrung-out rag. Oxygen refused me. The world was, again, pushing me out of it like a splinter.

Maybe then I should’ve called my mom.

And yet, if this was a side effect, I didn’t want to get rid of it.

I ate as much breakfast as I could stomach.

The inhaler was heavy in my hand.

I emptied my lungs, pressing them flat inside me, and pumped the inhaler, breathing in, breathing in, breathing in and holding my breath until my vision started constricting, the world blacking out, and as it did, I heard her voice asking, “Honey? Are you okay?”

I’d never been better, and never would be.