Immune Privilege

Cancer goes blind.

It comes and goes. Always a dark room, but sometimes the door opens slightly. He tries to get by on fluctuations of light. School is a rigid environment and muscle memory gets him through the halls. But the world is always changing. His knees slam into desks pushed a few inches outside their grid. Or worse, into people, you can’t predict people, other teens laughing and leaping in the halls the way he used to. A maze of bodies hyper-sensitive to status and loss thereof.

His sister watches his stupid eyes roll around under his fuckass bob, scanning from side to side, jerking in random directions like a broken doll.

✦

Pentelica has long black stringy hair. Sometimes she dyes it platinum blond with dark highlights, an inversion of her brother’s hair. Until someone points out this is equally as weird as having identical hair.

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She sees him coming out of the shower when he thinks no one is home. Normally she would be grossed out, but there is something universally intoxicating about watching without being seen. A narcotic voyeurism. He looks so slender in just a towel, the white cotton stretched around his torso and exposing his legs, which are shockingly stained with bruises. He can’t even see it, can’t be horrified by his own pain. He’s too ashamed to use a cane.

✦

She starts helping him walk to school. A gentle touch on his back where no one can see. And when they take the subway to the shops, into the loud and crashing crowd, she holds his hand. She likes when something startles him and he clutches, clings, palm moist with fear and anxiety. Needing her.

✦

He hates going out because he’s insecure about his appearance. Can’t check himself in the mirror, but when he touches his acned face, his fingers come away greasy. Dirty as he feels inside.

Finally she sits him down in the bathroom and combs his glossy black hair. Gets the knots out. Smooth the way he likes it.

You look good, she says. And finally he starts smiling again.

✦

His mother’s coworker injected him at a holiday party. No one suspected it was anything but bad luck. Microorganisms occupy the same territory as curses. His eyes turn pink and they call it extreme conjunctivitis, possibly trachoma. The flies are full of chlamydia…

Eyes have immune privilege. Eyes are highly specialized organs which can’t afford the same aggressive response as the greater immune system. In the zoo of the body, the eyes are an office where sensitive paperwork is kept, not dangerous, smelly animals, so no need for face shields or tranquilizer darts. Which makes it the perfect place to test an experimental pathogen.

✦

Brother and sister are like that ocular immune system. Separate from the world and its high-stakes games. But one night they pass each other in the hall and his outstretched hand touches her chest by accident. The stiff shield of her bra, and a meaty density underneath, something almost dicklike in its protrusion, the strange and sacred resonance of it compared to shoulders or nose. He pulls away and taps down the hall, fingers ringing double-time, he knows she hears, and his face is burning—

There were moments before that. The realization that when mom works late and they’re home alone, sister doesn’t bother wearing clothes around the house. Forgets to wrap her towel around her after a shower, or comes back from soccer practice overheated and collapses on the couch with her blouse unbuttoned, grassy sweat breathing from her darkness. Skinned knees thrusting into his nostrils. Sometimes a supermarket perfume, blunt and sugary and activating the entire nebula of what he conceives of as Girl, Other, Exotic, a weird chemical vibration.

Something has changed, like those disorders where the immune system finds the eyes and treats them like foreign tissue. Becomes aggressive toward these once-familiar parts.

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His fork bangs around on the plate, scraping the porcelain as he hunts for the last slice of deviled egg.

Mom is tired, but glad to be spending dinner with them after a long week at the lab. She smells like antiseptic, and in his blindness it hangs over the domestic food smells with a sharpness he can’t quite block out.

“Here,” Pentelica says, feeding him the egg with her fingers.

Mom says, “It’s just so nice to see you two finally getting along.”

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Pentelica covers her acne with star-shaped pimple patches. She decorates him too, the way he never would have permitted before. A pink star on his cheek as his eyes flicker and scry the ceiling. She draws FAGGOT on his face, careful to erase it before mom comes home. She does his makeup, messy lipstick and eyeshadow. “You look so much prettier now.”

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She always figured he was gay. She still isn’t sure.

Intrusive thought: I like girls. I like them so much I want to cut them into pieces.

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His eyes burn with corruption. They are two red rooms in which terrible things happen to his sister. He thinks he is having hypnagogic hallucinations. He prays as ants crawl from his sockets. He prays as they fill with the yolky broth of her developing womb. He prays as she bathes in them, hot springs for her insectile nudity.

“Your eyes look really irritated.” She feeds him a piece of breakfast waffle, after spitting in it. The sun is shining, but not for him.

I’m fine, his mouth says. Slave to deeper suns.

✦

On the couch, a school night. Game paused, low poly crystals spinning in the menu. He disdainfully explained it to her, this herosim he can no longer play. Then he got quiet, soothed by the familiar music, the crunchy piano and string pads. They made it pretty far through the Amaranth Mausoleum before the controller slid to the floor.

She likes that unlike the other boys who can instantly excise the desirable parts of her body, grabbing her breasts or reaching bluntly under her skirt, Cancer has to grope blindly, mapping her with infantile clumsiness, fingers tickling her neck, crawling up into her mouth, forced to chase her if she rolls over onto her stomach, finding something no longer accessible and having to make do with her ass, hunched closely over her legs and feeling his way up, forced to contend with whatever layers of clothing she wore today. Colliding with her bracelets, the sentries of her earrings, zippers or buttons, tight pantyhose with a control top—

That’s right. Use your mouth, blind boy. His shiny black bangs flap up and down in the soft area he exposed; a haircut cerebral and witchy at times, twerpy at others, and tickling pleasantly now as his mouth works like a dog. She’s the seeing eye, and he’s the dog. He’s sucked into her world, smeared across the foggy landscape of her flesh, a worm buried in her folds. His tongue goes deeper and she says, I always knew you were a pervert. A creep. A little freak. This is around when she feels something sticky burst into her leg, the pocket behind her knee, soft except for the tendon twitching into him.

She arches up to look through the window, forcing him to find her again with tingling fingers and tongue. Dangerously close to when mom gets home. But the driveway is still empty. She slaps her ass back into his face, desperate to finish before then. She claws her head, piling her hair up in dark handfuls and dropping it again. She’s almost blind herself, all the blood in her body flowing into the red-hot crux between her legs, branding high PH cunt into his chin as his tongue flares through her anal cavity, sweaty from soccer, sweaty from sitting at a desk in this heat wave. The AC is broken and his eyes are broken and their flesh is burning. He keeps pushing her skirt up as the pleated fabric falls back over his face, and pulling her tights down as they ride up again. Clawing her apart, clawing her open until she finally squirts in his mouth, and the driveway floods with headlights, and she flips onto her back like an electrocuted beetle and squeezes her legs together as the key hits the lock. Cancer jerks back onto the other side of the couch, knees against his chest to conceal the sticky mess in his pants.

“You okay, Cancey?”

“Yeah, mom. Just. Feeling sick.”

She can tell. His face is red and snotty. A high fever to the touch. She has to wipe her hand off. “You’re definitely getting sick.”

I know, he whispers.

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