Etiology

Korda fumbles at the porch. The cat-gate is made of bamboo with rings that hold the sliding rods that catch when he tries to open it. The space is covered with a lawn chair, a brass spittoon, a short folding table that won’t fully unfold, a row of seven small Easter Island figurines, hanging tomato plants, a fly swatter, and a jam jar full of cigarette butts. A corrugated green awning covers the top and vines shade the sides. The floor is slick with rain. It’s a fourth room, he thinks. A hybrid space. They can sit here and talk to the neighbors when they want and have time to themselves when they like it that way. But not on a day like today. Today is cold, as well as wet.

He says, Dora? 

Inside, something mumbles and stirs. 

He says, Don’t get up. 

Inside the door she is half-standing, dark-skinned with dreadlocks or cornrows. Her chin is pierced with a horizontal bronze-colored pin whose ends stick out below each of the sides of her mouth. Her eyes are black and large and seem to never close. Does she have trouble blinking, Korda thinks, for the same reason she can’t swallow? She is wearing a housedress. Her thighs are thick, but her upper body is thin. Korda points at a walker in the corner of the room. 

Do you use that? He asks. 

She says, I just had my knee done. Look.

Oof.

Her husband, Earl, wears steel-toed boots and drives a truck with a Confederate flag. He has strawberry-blond hair that sticks out from under his ball cap. He dips chew. He’s a cracker, Korda thinks, but they seem happy together. Is that a sign of something better? Earl is not home now. Korda pulls the laptop out of his bag and then out of the sleeve and says, Should we start? 

Dora asks, You have any kids, Sammy? 

Sammy Korda is his full name.

Sammy says, Two that I know about. 

That makes Dora’s gut jump and giggle up through her chest and throat. She is sitting in the chair where she spends most of her time these days. She is used to the shape of the chair, but she loses her balance and has to grab the arm to steady herself. Sammy wears jeans with the leg seam on the outside, and his jaw is square. In bed, she thinks, his ass would be white and bony, with fuzz the color of the hair on his head.When he takes off his baseball cap, she says, You look different without your hat.

He rubs the top of his head and says, It’s because I’m going bald. You have kids?

Three, she says.

Where are they? Sammy asks.

Philadelphia, Manhattan, Cortland. The one in Manhattan is a social worker.  

He takes his shoes off when he comes into their home. He is all business, but respectful. He is close to her in age. Kind of like Earl, she thinks, but less rough around the edges. 

He asks, Any kids with Earl? She says, Nope.

Does he have any of his own? he asks.

No.

How long you two been married?

Sixteen years.

That’s longer than a mortgage.

The doctor told her that her throat would be numb on some days. She doesn’t know whether the way her head hurts right now is from the disease or from the debt she and Earl owe Sammy. It started this morning an inch behind her nose and has moved outward, to press against the sides of her head, like those things you use to expand your shoes. You know we going to pay, Sammy, she says. We always do.

Dovyeray no provyeray, he says. Trust, but verify.

I never understand you, Sammy.

You don’t have to understand. Just pay what you owe.

He chuckles, good-naturedly. Dora tries to blink, but her eyelids don’t move. Sometimes, they blink on their own when she doesn’t want them to. A pen is in one of Sammy’s hands, the laptop sleeve in the other. At the bottom of what she can see, his knuckles are knobby and his fingernails are tight-cut. She does not believe that she has ever shook hands with him. Their hands have never even brushed against each other as he handed her a sheet of paper or a pen. She wishes the embarrassment she feels now would carry her away, over the herringbone-patterned home lots, the pole barn, the lake, Canada. Away. Blink, swallow, bend her knee, look directly at what she wants to see. She can’t do any of that sometimes. On bad days, she can’t even complain about what she can’t do. 

Sammy says, You want to be Reagan or Gorbachev?

Dora’s eyes hurt from the dryness. She turns to look around on the table next to her for her eye drops. 

Sammy continues, Between us, we can save the world.

Korda does not sleep well these days. He read someplace that when old people ask each other, You get any?, they mean sleep instead of sex. At sixty, he is at the cusp. He wakes at two or three most nights and lies on his back, sunk into a deep depression. His dreams are lucid. A friend asking him to slice meat off his back with a brush saw, say, or, well, dreads, bright eyes, chin piercings, and a sucking void outside the door of a small, cozy manufactured home. It’s just business, he tells himself. But that is like saying, It’s just sex, it’s just money, or it’s just children. Business is the way we parcel out the world. He says to Dora, I like you guys. I hope you work it out. I know you will work it out. But rules are rules.

The first time Dora saw Earl, he was a tech at the hospital where she was a CNA, before she got sick. He looked like any other cracker boy, but he called her ma’am, he made up reasons to come by her station, and his jeans fit him well. By the time they made it into bed, her mother had already died, so she didn’t have to take him home to meet her. His people lived far away—in Virginia, he said the first time they spoke, then North Carolina, then South, then Virginia again, then California. She didn’t care where they lived, so long as he treated her right. They bought this trailer after they moved in together. She planted the tomato plants on the porch and the lilies in the space between the frame of the home and the hitch. He tore up the floor where it had rotted under the windows and replaced it with plywood and tiles, and then built wood bookcases and a lattice around the porch. When they slept, the cat would come into their room, find a space in the blanket between them, burrow in, and close its eyes. Her kids never came to visit. It was just the two of them, but when the two of them were home, it was the whole world.

Korda remembers that Dee Dee, the manager of the park, had told him that Dora’s problems started when she worked at the hospital. Some local yokel came in and attacked her on the floor where she worked. She had PTSD and then had to take time off. That’s what caused her sickness, Dee Dee said. That’s why they can’t pay. Korda said, Bullshit. She got sick because she got sick. Dee Dee said, But I don’t see how that could have helped. Korda said, Neither do I.

Etiology, Korda thinks. It comes from the Greek, Aetios. He has forgotten the Greek he learned in school. What remains is a few snippets run together and ruts worn by words he repeated to himself when he still remembered them. Menin. Thumos. Glaucopis. Fuck if they were ever useful. Does a dent made by shovel look like the shovel?, he thinks. The cause is not the form.

He opens the laptop and presses the fingertip button.Can I get your wifi password?, he asks.

Dora says, it’s by the TV.

Dora doesn’t know whether she can’t use the app because her fingers are fat or because she keeps forgetting the password. When Sammy announced that everyone had to pay over the app, he said that he would help people set it up. That’s why he’s here. That, and to remind her that she and Earl own him two grand.

It’s not always bad that the disease makes her forget things. One minute, she can have a black cloud around her head,and the next she can be looking at the seams in the wall paneling and happy that Earl will be home in four hours. 

She asks, Should I turn down the TV? 

Yes, please, Sammy says. 

He calls customer service for the app and types into his computer. She notices that when he types, he bangs the keyboard harder than he needs to.

Rules are rules. It is what it is. I do what I have to do. I always speak in tautologies when I do this, Korda thinks. Of course, it is rhetoric. But what isn’t rhetoric?

Dora first noticed something was wrong when the fat cracker boy with the beard came to the hospital, called her the N-word, grabbed her hair, and banged her head against the wall. Her face was numb, her hands were too weak to help her get his hands off her, her knees bent when she wanted to keep them straight, and her feet did not go where she wanted them to go. Then she went home and found it was harder to walk than it used to be. It got so bad that she couldn’t go back to work. When she told the first doctor about it, the doctor said that it was because she was traumatized. Of course I am traumatized, Dora said. Who wouldn’t be? – but something else is wrong, too. It’s not in your head, the third doctor said. They were sitting in his office on the floor below the floor where she used to work, in the hospital up by the lake. I could live here, she thought – it’s the best view in the world. The town at your right, the blue expanse, the far shore and way over on your left – what – Geneva? Waterloo? She had never been to either. Actually, it is in your head, the doctor said – but not the way that usually means.

On the third try, Dora hands the phone to Korda.

You type the password, she says. Capital J, -olene, then the number 2007 and the plus sign. Do I have to change it afterwards, she asks. 

Not if you trust me, Korda says. You might as well trust me. I know pretty much everything you put in the online portal anyhow. 

Dora asks, You won’t come visit no more after I’m all set up? Of course I will, he says, and smiles in a way that makes her laugh.

Her phone is larger than his, long, thick and clunky in a sticky pink case. Icons are haphazardly arranged and only take up a couple of rows at the bottom of each screen. Korda thinks that handling another person’s phone is the most intimate thing you can do. It is as if they handed you the space behind their eyeballs. It is much closer than hopping into bed and playing hump-a-dump.  

Can I do it so I just put my fingerprint? she asks. I’ll forget all this.

I’ll research that, Sammy says.

An email from someone named brandilyon1975@yahoo.com pops up. Korda ignores it and writes the login name and Jolene2007+ on a piece of notebook paper and hands it to Dora. When her finger brushes against his, it is dry and cool. Until then, use this, he says. Ask Earl to help you.

Beyond the cabinet that separates the living space from the kitchen, Korda sees a counter with a coffee maker, an air fryer, and an old-fashioned blender. The furnace is on high; he has to take his coat off to keep from sweating. Only four inches of vinyl, Tyvek, two-by-fours, R-board, and sheetrock separate the space from the outside, but, he reflects, it is a quantum leap between inside and outside.

When someone knocks on the door, Dora struggles to get out of the chair. Korda says, I will get it. The woman on the porch looks past Korda and says, Dora Antonucci? 

Dora says, Yes. 

When he sees the woman, Korda thinks, The process server. The princess of darkness. He asked for court papers to be served last week. He has emailed with her but has never met her. She does not look the way he expected. She could be a second-grade teacher. She is forty or so, pleasant and smiling, with mousey brown hair. I have some court papers for you, she says, to Dora. She tears three sheets of paper off from their corner-stapes and hands them to Korda, who hands them to Dora. The holes left by the staples bother him.  

I am the plaintiff, he says to the process server.

We will be in touch, the process server says.

Of course.

When Korda started in the business, he served papers himself until he learned that that was illegal. He has been chased by guys with baseball bats, pinned to the ground, and doxed. After the process server leaves, he says, That’s the petition and the notice of petition. You will get a court gate shortly. Dora looks at him with her large, unblinking eyes. The most amicable service of papers ever, he thinks. Like my friend who says, I am divorced from the nicest ex-wife in the world.

Sammy says, It’s the next step in the process. You will get a court date soon. 

Dora says, You know we will pay, Sammy.

Of course.

What happens if we can’t pay?

The rules are the rules. I am sorry, but I have to do what I have to do.

Dora wonders if this is what giving blowjobs to guys in cars is like. Maybe some of the guys you would meet would be clean and respectful, as well. You might even want to get with some of them under different circumstances. But you would be down on your luck and you would do what you had to do. That’s just business. These days, getting angry is like blinking– she can try to shout or swear for a whole day and it is as if she lost the body-part to do it and then, out of nowhere, wham, she will start crying and five minutes later, wham, it is gone. Earl will be home in two hours. She will show him the papers. The home is paid for. It’s just the land they don’t own. To think they might lose the home because they don’t own the land and because she got sick. What I really want, Dora thinks, is to burrow under the covers like the cat, and then fly away, over and up the lake and out of here.

As he closes the laptop, Korda says, I’ve shown you how to pay. Now, your mission is to pay. Dora looks at him with the large, deep eyes. He almost doesn’t notice the chin-bar now. 

We will, Sammy, Dora says. You know we will.

Say Hi to Earl, he says.

Is that rain?, Korda asks. Something is making a rushing sound against the roof.

I think it is, Dora says.

Shit.

Outside, Korda puts a notebook above his head to shield himself from the rain as he walks to his car. The rain is full-on, in sheets. The notebook will be cream-of-wheat by the time he crosses the ten yards to his car door. A happy marriage between a white man and a Black woman, he thinks. A well-spoken process server who is almost friendly. A rule of law that works despite everything we do to fuck it up. Sometimes the good guys win. There is reason for hope.