I’m at CVS, looking at a nail polish called “enuf is enuf.” The color is annoyingly not red. Coral? No, it’s too orange, too enthusiastic. I can’t figure out what to call it, which is maybe why they had decided on “e-nuf is e-nuf.” But why the hyphen? Why insist on isolating the “e”? I put the polish back.
I wander back to the pharmacy, where only one out of four counters is staffed. The line is five deep.
Moline is a small, stagnant nightmare town full of tractor dealerships and angsty young people trying to escape the farm life of their German homesteading grandparents. I can’t stand this place, but at least I only spend four nights a week here. The other nights my company flies me back to Boston, where my girlfriend lives. I only have to be here Monday through Thursday, trying to sell John Deere the multi-million-dollar software license that my company makes. We’re on a pilot project, developing a way for them to predict equipment failure on any machine they’ve ever made. John Deere stands to save millions on warranty claims.
After work, I usually waste time walking the aisles of the CVS near my hotel. I rarely buy anything—a packet of Pokémon cards for my son, some mints, chocolate-covered coffee beans for the long hours, microwaveable pizza rolls if I’m already drunk from a client dinner meeting.
I’m here tonight because a week ago I woke up and discovered that my inner thighs had started turning white. Not chalk-white. White-girl white. My girlfriend told me the mottled pattern was growing on my back, too, the beechwood caramel slowly taking over the mud brown of my skin. She tried to scrub it off in the shower but it clung to me. She made a joke about how we’d have to break up if I turned white because she didn’t date white girls, as a rule.
My doctor told me it was fungus, overgrown and hyperactive, living on my skin. She prescribed me selenium sulfide, which is what I’m at CVS to get. But there’s only one woman working the entire place, and she’s been on the phone for the last ten minutes.
I hear my name on the intercom, so I put back the anti-aging cream I’m reading and go back to the counter.
Yesterday, in my girlfriend’s apartment in Boston, I lay on the floor and watched the rain outside. Through the streetlamps, the rain looked viscous and gold-dyed. Water pooled in a stream just beyond the porch. I played with the stem of a snifter full of Mississippi Mud. The sky flashed from slate gray to periwinkle with each lightning strike. My girlfriend lay behind me, tracing the patterns of dappled color on my back. She whispered that she loved me. I pressed a hand to the cold window and watched the lightning.
“Your order’s on the way,” the CVS pharmacist says. “Probably another ten minutes. Insurance card?”
“I’ve already given it to you.”
She looks around. She walks away.
Later, in my hotel room, I spread the thick, sandy selenium sulfide over my inner thighs and back. I open my work laptop and call up our prototype software. The mixture has to dry on my skin for ten minutes. I spread a hotel towel over a chair. On the laptop, I can use GPS to track any John Deere combine or tractor anywhere in the world. I type in Iowa City and watch the combines sleep in cornfields outside of town. I find a tractor in France that’s moving diligently through little rows of barley. The medication dries on my thighs.
When I step out of the shower, I find a good-night text from my girlfriend. I have to be up in six hours to get ready for work. But I put on some clothes and head out to the gay bar. There’s a drag show tonight, and in this town, I’m new meat and all the girls want to buy me drinks. I come back to my hotel room drunk. The little tractor is still moving somewhere outside of Orleans, harvesting barley. I tell it good night and put it to sleep.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two hybrid chapbooks (I Once Met You But You Were Dead, which won the Split Lip Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest; and Dominant Genes, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Contest), two forthcoming graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one forthcoming collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram.
Photo by Johnny McClung