Best Australian Yarn: Fried Eggs in the Morning by Dan Kaufman

Oh god, the helplessness kills you. You met in a pub – she was vibrant, buzzing, you were irresponsible, avoiding commitment … but she looked like an Amazon. She was taller than you, her legs looked like they could crush you, she … You were smitten. One year later she’s in bed, without the strength to sit up, barely able to speak, and you have no idea what to do. She became ill a week after you proposed, two months after you moved in together. Doctor after doctor had no idea, batteries of tests proved nothing. She could barely string thoughts together, so you – someone who considers washing dishes an achievement – had to do the thinking for both of you. Should she be in hospital? You don’t know. The only thing that comforts her is being in her own bed. Should you try to figure out what’s going on yourself? You failed chemistry and biology in school, you can brew your own beer but that’s the sum total of your medicinal skills – and yet you hit Google in desperation. Nights spent drinking bourbon and searching, finding disease after disease that match her symptoms. Writing them all down, swallowing fear and liquor. Depending on what debilitating disease it actually is, the outcome’s either death within a year or a lifetime of barely living. The helplessness beats you down, but there’s something else, something worse. Something you’re ashamed of. You’ve become a monster. Sure, you play the good Samaritan, like a bad amateur actor, driving her to specialists, helping her to the bathroom, pretending to have a soul. But deep down? You resent it. You resent how your carefree life turned into this. Making her fried eggs in the morning when you barely know how to use the stove top. Giving up your job, your social life, any life, so you can look after her. You miss going out, and relaxing, and having nice breakfasts in cafes, and you keep thinking of what your life would have been like if, as with almost every woman before her, you had simply kept this to an affair. Everything was so nice and simple before you met her – shallow, sure, but simple – and like a child you desperately want a time machine. What made you think you could handle a relationship? Even your parents didn’t think so. They laughed – after a few drinks – at how you couldn’t even tolerate housemates, much less a partner. You weren’t built for commitment, for responsibility. They didn’t use the word selfish, but ... you know. You know how everyone but your fiancée sees you. You’re not a serial killer, you don’t wish anyone harm – but you’re hardly man of the year. A normal, healthy relationship would have been pushing it, you were ambitious, but … You wanted what others had. You wanted affection, you wanted love, you wanted to see if you were capable of something more. So you took a chance. A normal, healthy relationship would have been pushing it, but this … The phrase “I didn’t sign up for this” is cowardly, but it haunts you nonetheless. So does its pathetic partner, “I just can’t do this”. These phrases come and go. Sometimes they seem weak, and you can push them away, ashamed of yourself – other times, unable to find hope, you’re swallowed by darkness. It’s after these other moments, which become more frequent, that you truly realise how limited you are. You ought to be taking care of her, and yet you can’t move, you can’t feel, you’ve completely shut down. Instead you just sit, almost catatonic, while your partner lies in the other room. After a while, you begin Googling more than mere symptoms. “Am I a bad person?” is one search. “Is depression normal for caregivers?” is another. So when you march to a specialist, a list of Googled diseases in your hand, it’s partly out of selfishness. If I cure her, you think, maybe I’ll gain my life back. Did I mention you’ve become a monster? You interrogate a specialist who humors you – “I already tested for that,” the specialist keeps saying, a sarcastic smile playing on her lips – until one question makes her pause for thought. “Did she recently have a filling removed?” the specialist asks, eyes narrowing, after you mentioned how your partner became far worse after her last dental visit. “Yes,” you say. “Yes! Why?” Heavy metal poisoning. It turns out we all have heavy metal poisoning to some degree, we just don’t know it yet. If you smoke, you inhale lead, cadmium and nickel. If you eat sushi, then good luck with the mercury – and don’t get me started on those inner-city community gardens. What were you thinking growing edible produce on what was once industrial land? The question isn’t whether we have heavy metal poisoning – the question is how much. Do you get migraines after a few wines? That’s your body unable to deal with the toxic burden. Sensitive to light, smells, are you increasingly moody and tired? Now you know why. Those old metal fillings are more toxic than we realise. If you grind your teeth when you sleep, if you eat something acidic, you’re releasing trace amounts of nickel. So removing them might sound like a great idea, but it’s hard to do safely. You can ask for a dental dam, but your body absorbs nickel more through inhalation than swallowing. In other words, dental dams are as useless in the dental chair as they are during sex – which is why your fiancée’s body, already riddled with other metals, suddenly shut down as the nickel flooded her organs. So now comes the fun part: treatment. This involves taking drugs that bind to the metals, drawing them out of the organs where they’ve been lurking, so they can be excreted. This may sound good, or as good as excretion can sound, except all the poisoning symptoms are now multiplied as the metals come up to the surface – and on top of that, the drugs take out everything good as well. All the zinc that’s needed to be calm and rational, all the magnesium needed for muscles to work, all the selenium, lithium, molybdenum and other crucial elements that most people barely know even exist, much less need to function – it strips them all out. Imagine being hung over, sleep deprived and hormonal all at the same time and multiply that by ten. That’s what treatment is like. It also works. Slowly, though, so that it takes a month until she can shuffle to the toilet without you, and several months and countless bed sores until she can spend half her time on the sofa rather than passed out in bed. You sneak out once in a while to see your friends, regaling them with bad jokes about how you ought to be wearing a nursing uniform. Your suicide jokes don’t go down as well. Best keep them to yourself. One night, the depression’s so bad that after you tuck her in and go to the kitchen for a beer, you instead sink onto the floor near the fridge. Part of you is self-conscious – you’re perfectly capable of sitting on a chair, you’re just embracing the melodrama of sitting on the floor, of acting out your despair to an audience of yourself – but the other part … And then something catches your eye. Amongst all the magnets and postcards and take away menus there’s a photo on your fridge, right down the bottom near the freezer. It’s of your fiancée as a child, sitting on her father’s lap eating an ice-cream. You find yourself drawn into this other world: the sepia tint, the outdated brown and green furniture, the father’s moustache. What hits most, though, is how cute, how innocent, the little girl – your fiancée – looks. The little girl is smiling, her eyes fixated, wide with joy, at her ice-cream. You keep looking at the little girl’s face, over and over. There’s not a trace of malice or cruelty on it – nor is there on your fiancée’s face as an adult. That’s one reason you proposed to her – she’s the sweetest person you ever met. You study the photo, her expression, her intent joyous focus on the ice-cream. You think of how she looked at you like that when you proposed to her in the park, and you think of her now … And that’s when, for the first time in your life, something cracks within you. That’s when you start bawling like a baby. Sitting on the floor, unable to control it, you’re consumed by grief – not for you, this time, but for her. You feel awful for that little girl in the photo, for your fiancée lying helpless and suffering in bed. You bawl for god knows how long and when you finish you go to her bedside, kiss her again and again on her forehead (she’s half asleep and has no idea of what’s happening), and you swear to yourself you’ll become a better person. And … with the exception of many ungracious asshole moments since then … you do. You smile more when you serve her breakfast, you change her sheets more often, you even read online recipes on how to fry eggs so they’ll taste better. You also feel worse for how you acted before – for all those times you lost your patience, for demanding she sit up in bed so she could take her pills, for feeling disgust when egg dribbled down her chin. What was wrong with you? You begin caring for her in ways you’ve never felt before. When you escape to be with your friends you now worry about her, not out of guilt but out of love, and you feel bad that you’re trying to enjoy yourself when she can’t. You no longer want to be with your friends in a bar – you want to be with her in a bar, smiling and laughing and flirting. You want her to become better not for yourself but for her, and every time you see relief on her face, not to mention a smile, your heart sings. After a lifetime of assuming you were broken, possibly a sociopath, you might actually be becoming a real person. It sounds like a cliché but as the months turn into years your relationship strengthens. You get a part time job; she starts interacting with the world again. You take her to cafes when she has the strength – she holds your hand. But your headaches have gotten worse. In the past you shrugged them off as hangovers, like most drinkers do, but your fiancée now insists you see her specialist. Remember how I said everyone has heavy metal poisoning? Turns out that drinking hard spirits every day of your life isn’t good for you. Who knew? What happens is your liver’s so busy handling the alcoholic toxins that it can’t process anything else – and so the mercury from your tuna, the nickel from your cutlery, the lead from the paint on your charming 1920s apartment window sills that have cracked – bury themselves in your organs instead. Your metal levels are through the roof, you scored the trifecta: nickel, mercury and lead. So now here you are, lying in bed, your brain toasted from treatment. Your head throbs, you sleep 18 hours a day, and your fiancée – one day you’ll marry, when you’re both feeling better – has brought you fried eggs and insists you eat them. Her voice is firm: she’s telling you what to do. Yet there’s a kindness in her eyes, a sweetness, that most people don’t have. That you didn’t have. Grateful, you do as she says. You are so lucky to be with her.

Best Australian Yarn: Fried Eggs in the Morning by Dan Kaufman

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