The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson Page A

she put Jim’s novel down. Now her face was burning. She went upstairs and found a thermometer and took her temperature.
    The fever went away, but after a few days it came back stronger than before. She was home from school when Jim’s first letter came. He had typed all across the back of the envelope. “I am now the only, sole, exclusive warehouseman at a furniture store,” he said. “I make $5.65 an hour.” He described his sister’sgarage, and said he was going to buy a car from her neighbor when he got his first paycheck—a 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Gray. The envelope itself was empty.
    Kitty kept the thermometer by her bed, more out of curiosity than anything else. She stayed in her nightgown all week while her fever spiked and abated and spiked again. The pain was intense at times, but listening to Jim’s cassette tape helped. The sound traveled over a secret frequency, from a different basement room in a place she’d never seen. The hum of the bass and the cymbal’s tinny crash answered the dull and sharp sensations in her abdomen and organized them into a kind of music. On one song—a long one that she played over and over—the synthesizer dropped notes around her like falling stars.
    Mail came every day. Jim sent lyrics, dreams, a letter to Dear Abby that he had copied out in his own handwriting. She burned with fever while she read them. Sometimes the words ran together and re-formed into other words. At the beginning of the second week, she got a letter in response to one she had sent, apparently, answering questions she didn’t remember asking. “There are several schools of thought as to what the last word of “Real Life in California” will be,” he wrote. “A note exists in which I determined to end with the word “Oh,” which is used throughout the book to denote moments of special grief—just that word on its own. Oh.” He said he had borrowed money against his first check and bought the Valiant, and that he was tuning it up. He said he thought she would like California.
    Later she remembered standing in the kitchen, talking to Windex. “Oh Kitty,” the little gray cat said. “You’re moribund.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?” she asked.
    And then she was being helped into an ambulance. A roommate had found her passed out on the kitchen floor. At the hospital, a nurse said they were going to test her blood pressurelying down and then sitting up. Kitty watched the cuff inflate and dimly felt it tighten around her arm.
    â€œGood news,” the nurse said. “You don’t have to sit up.” She put an IV needle in the back of Kitty’s wrist and taped it down.
    â€œPelvic inflammatory disease,” explained the doctor sitting by Kitty’s bed. He clasped his soft, pudgy hands in his lap. A crucifix hung on the wall behind him. Kitty imagined an assembly line: factory workers in hairnets nailing little Christs to their crosses. The bed next to her was empty. Someone—one of her roommates, probably—had brought her some things: pens and a notebook and Jim’s boombox.
    â€œYou’ll need to stay here for at least four or five days,” the pudgy doctor was saying, “so we can give you antibiotics and fluid. You were very dehydrated.” He stood up. “You should be feeling a lot livelier in a day or two.”
    â€œCan you plug that in before you go?” She pointed at the boombox. “And close the door?”
    When she was alone, she pressed play and listened for a minute with her eyes closed, waiting to see if the tape worked on her like it had under the heavy blanket of fever, then picked up the notebook and started a letter.
    â€œHow is the Valiant running?” she wrote. “Come get me.”

The Searchlite
    Kitty stood across the street from the Searchlite Lounge on Western and Fountain, just north of the 101 freeway. It didn’t