I had to quit waiting
tables at Bacchus, in Richmond, that summer
because of the hot-and-cold switch. Each time
I reached for a guest’s ice water to refill it,
the pint glass burned my fingertips as if
I traced the copper sides
of a boiling teakettle. And each time I ladled
lobster bisque from the soup warmer
into white melamine bowls,
carried the appetizers to a table, my palms
felt as if they packed the frozen
sides of a snowball. I had to quit
that job. I had to quit giving
blow jobs, too, since my boyfriend’s dick
turned to an icicle in my mouth—
his cocksicle, we called it. Patrick had the same
neurological derangement: If he reached
beneath my arms for a hug, my pits
chilled him like arctic caves. His steaming coffee
tasted iced, he said, so he added real cubes
from our freezer to fool
his tongue. We’d gotten ciguatera,
a rare type of fish poisoning,
in the Dominican Republic, while visiting
La Romana with his father. We stayed
in the small sailboat his dad co-owned
with another orthodontist and kept docked
in Casa de Campo’s marina. The boat
bobbed among the uber-rich’s white yachts,
the resort’s scrappiest derelict. Privately, I sneered at it
to Patrick as we unpacked our bags
in the V-shaped sleeping space in the forepeak
and I saw our accommodations: twin wooden berths
hard as park benches covered
with inch-thick foam. Some vacation,
I muttered. The first night, when we dined
with his dad—the three of us at a table
on the waterfront deck—I glanced down
from the teal waves and white sand to scan
the menu, recalled my biologist father’s warning:
Don’t eat the reef fish. He’d told me
that certain fish feed along coral reefs
in the Caribbean and ingest
marine plankton that contain
a dangerous neurotoxin. Ciguatera
torments you far worse than regular food poisoning—
cramps, nausea, vomiting, but also
chills, muscle aches, fatigue, numbness
in the limbs, and the weirdest symptom
of all: the reversal
of hot and cold sensations. The tactile scramble
can drag on for months. I asked
the restaurant-server if grouper
was “a reef fish,” and the man shook his head,
grabbed my menu. Patrick ordered
the grouper, too. Later, wracked with cramps,
we learned the intimate dimensions
of a small sailboat. All night
we staggered to and from the craft’s
only head. Grouper pooper, we groaned,
moaning on the stiff boards that were our beds
for the next week. We hadn’t realized
how long the symptoms would linger. That last evening,
still weak from fatigue, Patrick and I drove
alone to Altos de Chavón—an all-stone
faux-Spanish-colonial
replica of a Renaissance village
built on a riverside cliff. We wandered its
Mediterranean-style plazas: the narrow
cobblestone streets, the arched porticos,
the cigar shops, the terracotta-roofed
pottery studios, the stone fountains. We stopped
to sip guava juice on a café’s cliff-edge
veranda, then touched the rough walls
of St. Stanislaus pocked with coral,
ash-white, and taupe. The neurotoxin
had initially numbed our hands enough
so we could lace fingers without freezing the tips—
the full-on sensory switch would come. At dusk,
most other tourists left or ducked inside
one of the restaurants, but we remained
in the emptying plaza as lanterns began to glow.
We hoped to see the famed colony
of feral cats crawl from the royal palms
and swarm the limestone. We’d heard the animals
overran the village at night, searching
for scraps. A shaggy troupe
of around twenty calicos soon emerged
from behind a tiered fountain to circle us,
mewling. More leaped down from a red mahogany’s
lowest branch. I feel like the Pied Piper, I said,
but with cats. We called them to us, led the animals—
their claws clicking over cobbles—into the mock-
Grecian amphitheater, then up its panoramic
stone steps until, at the top, panting, we could see
the Chavón River ripple with lights. I only half-noticed,
as I stroked a cat’s back and it arched under my palm,
the fur’s unusually needled sensation, a sort of electric
neural hum. I thought: Just grimy, not
My body is wrong.
Before we flew back to Virginia, Patrick snapped
a photograph of me standing in the shade, grinning
as my hand cups a dangling mango. It’s impossible
to tell from my face that I can’t really feel
the fruit’s cool rind, just a warm
neuropathic ache. It would take
two weeks before I could sense anything’s skin,
three months before I stopped perceiving
each nudge or brush to the extreme,
and wrong. That long summer, ice water
shocked my hands like a fried socket
and a man’s flesh froze at my touch.