Everything I drank tasted fine, but it seemed sometimes that water flowed a bit too slowly from the bottle, swished a bit too heavily in my mouth. It was barely noticeable. I was probably imagining it. But it was just weird enough to mention to my camping buddy Eli.
“Your bottle’s gone bad, I guess,” said Eli. “Just get a new one.”
“My bottle’s gone bad?”
Eli nodded sagely, the way he did when he was talking out of his ass. But the next time I was at the store, I dropped a brand new metal bottle into my cart. I’d been dragging my old one on backpacking trips since I was a kid, long enough that I knew the exact shape and weight of it in my hands. Over the years, it’d collected dents and scrapes and stickers and memories.
• • •
The new bottle was fine, but it wasn’t my bottle. Eli shook his head at me for fussing, but that didn’t change the fact that it was too hefty, a bit too wide; it didn’t settle quite right in the backpack pocket. Within a month, I pulled my old bottle back out again. There was comfort in the way it fit into my hand and mutual history in the way the lid unscrewed. I’d come to think of it as an extension of me, never too far out of arm’s reach. It still seemed somehow off, though, the way water came out. I tried scrubbing the old bottle more thoroughly, used a brush to get the inside edges, rinsed with soap and water and shook it up, then scrubbed and swished again. I peered into the mouth. Couldn’t quite see to the bottom, but the water looked clear. I shook it around, and it sounded okay. Stuck my finger in and swept around the edges as far as I could reach.
Some sliminess, maybe, and—what was that. The tip of my longest finger just brushed something, too briefly to make out anything but the impression of movement. I looked into the bottle again, and there was nothing. I tilted the bottle towards the light. There, there, nearly invisible: a wisp of a tendril, clear, like a glass noodle—or an irregularity of the fluorescent light’s reflection on the wet interior—disappearing into the shadows of the bottle.
Ugh, ah. Some kind of worm, a parasite of some sort. Now that I had seen it, I knew what to look for. Around one edge of the bottle, there was a faint tracery of clear tendrils: fleshy, glistening. Interconnected too—a web with a center I couldn’t quite see. Probably it had been there for months or years, and I’d been drinking water tinged with its filmy secretions for longer than I wanted to think about. Lucky I hadn’t been sick, although I felt sick now.
I pictured that thing resting, hidden at the bottom of my bottle, and every time I took a trusting sip, nearly invisible arms slithering up the slick sides, reaching to caress my lip. Or even further: the inside of my cheek, the backs of my teeth, the underside of my tongue. The arms were so thin, so like water itself; there was no way to know how often it had touched me, been inside my mouth, what secret intimacies it had stolen.
I threw out my bottle, got rid of the new one I’d bought too. Got a plastic see-through bottle and checked it regularly for anything strange.
But maybe it was too late. There was a subtle texture to the inside of my cheek that I had never noticed. I could trace the not-quite smoothness with my tongue, and maybe the lines formed similar traceries, a similar weblike pattern hidden in the pocket between cheek and gum. It was barely there, really, just flesh on moist flesh. I wasn’t sure. Was it the parasite, or was it my own veins, or just the natural topography of my buccal membranes? I forgot about it most of the time but got into the habit of probing at that textured spot. Even if it was the parasite, I couldn’t lift the tendrils with my fingernails or a wooden tongue depressor, though one time I scraped until I bled.
“There,” I said to Eli, “right there. Can you feel it?” If he could feel it too, if it wasn’t just in my own head—
He laughed, incredulous. “What, you want me to poke around inside your mouth?” But when I asked the third time, he sighed and let me guide his blunt finger past my lower lip, far enough to catch on the little fold of tissue that rooted my tongue so that I gagged before I could stop myself, and then he wouldn’t try again, scared he’d gone too deep. His fingertip when it left my mouth was wet with my saliva.
If something was there, it was adhered tight, like it had become part of my skin, like it was breathing through my circulatory system.
• • •
The water I drank, from my new clear bottle, from the tap or from plastic restaurant cups, felt sluggish in my mouth. I wasn’t sure that it was just in my head, but I told myself it was. What had water felt like before? Like this, surely.
On our next camping trip, Eli and I tried out a new trail, expecting a six-day hike. We looked up the weather forecast beforehand and planned to just miss the coming heat wave by a day. We pushed too far on the fifth day and lost the trail in the dark. Stupid, so stupid. Searching for the way back, I tumbled down some dusty ravine, landed wrong on my ankle, and heard the snap even before the pain hit. Eli heard my shout and came stumbling—and falling—right after me. We tried and failed to scramble back up, increasingly desperate and clumsy. We couldn’t. So then we lay there, the two of us, on our backs. There was little hope of making it back to the trail on our own. We waited to be found and rescued.
You get used to someone when you’ve known them for half your life, when you’ve spent weeks on end together, just the two of you. You walk together in the same combined cloud of body odor; their smell is your smell. The shape of them, the colors of their gear, the way they move become as familiar to you as the taste of your own mouth. They become an extension of you. Sometimes you’re silent together, sometimes you talk. You talk about everything, and then you run out of stuff to talk about, and you talk about nothing.
So we talked until it was hard to tell whether we were talking about nothing or whether we were talking through delirium. But eventually we talked ourselves out, and then we just lay there again, empty of options.
The thing was, I couldn’t move, but I didn’t feel weak the way Eli obviously did. I could see him fading hour by hour. He slurred his words more and more, moved less. I rubbed his shoulders, scratched his scalp, propped him up as best I could, but his fatigue was taking over. Though I was rationing our water, I gave him as much as I dared. Soon he was so weak he couldn’t keep his head up, and he lay most of the day with his eyes closed, defeated, just waiting. I was thirsty, but there was a sliminess at the back of my mouth that I’d gotten used to, and when I felt parched, I could sweep my tongue over that spot and pick up some moisture.
This thing, who knew when it had first taken root? All these years of hiking: breathless, precipitous scenery above and below, bursting with life and suffocatingly alone except for Eli beside me. Filling up wherever we could, from puddles and trickles of streams and waterfalls. Maybe it had passed from the waters of the earth into my bottle, then found a host in me because I could provide something it needed. It had lengthened on my backwash all this time. And maybe it was helping me out too, somehow.
I’d kept my new bottle clean, made sure the creature wasn’t growing there. But what made everything I drank so viscous? Perhaps it was secreting some nutrients I needed, proteins that were keeping me nourished. Possibly, unnoticed and unappreciated, it had been sustaining me all this time. Maybe—and this was the slimmest hope—maybe it could be transferred; it could give Eli some of the sustenance it had shared with me. It was all I had.
I put Eli’s head in my lap. “Eli,” I said, “open your mouth, get your mouth wet.” I didn’t think he was entirely conscious. I tipped the last drops from my bottle through his cracked lips, but I knew that wasn’t what he really needed. I knew where the creature resided now.
I took a moment to look at his face, the skin of his eyelids thin and dry, his lips peeling. And then I leaned over and kissed him, as thoroughly as I had ever kissed anyone. His mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to the inside of his cheeks. I pressed at the roof of his mouth, toward the corners of his teeth, as deep as I dared. Hoping, praying that I hadn’t been imagining all this time.
• • •