Water of Life
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 3
The first thing to go was his sparkle, and it went quickly. It wasn’t that he felt hungover or depressed. He was simply, once again, the unenhanced version of himself. While Water of Life Coleman had been just outgoing and teasing enough to be liked but never obnoxious, the old Coleman was too diffident to flirt. He was now ironical rather than comic, slyly observant instead of broadly satirical, and socially tentative where before he’d been deft and sure of himself.
He was unsurprised to discover that he couldn’t bully his souped-up persona back into service. Spontaneity is not to be hired. The Coleman Stillworth no one had seen since his first days at the firm and all but forgotten was back, always polite and kind if a bit melancholy, efficient, round-shoulderedly dedicated to his work but no longer the life of anything beyond the careful nurturing of his modest ambition.
Looking in the mirror, he noticed that his healthy glow had quite departed, replaced by the sallow complexion acquired from fifty hours a week in a fluorescent-lit office. More than one of his colleagues remarked on his “pallor,” which he attributed to “whatever bug is going around,” and since there was always a bug going around, he was believed. He smiled through his hurt at his secretary’s comment that he seemed under the weather. So all those years in Minneapolis, that was how he’d appeared to others: permanently under the weather.
But it wasn’t long before he actually started feeling unwell. His stomach was now chronically upset and delicate, he was bothered by head and neck aches, and he’d begun to break out in angry red rashes that would erupt on his chest, legs, neck, and back and itch ferociously, then just as mysteriously disappear, leaving behind tingly, sensitive skin.
He was run-down, his bones ached, and all his joints seemed to grind against one another, as if the synovial fluid had drained away overnight. He felt twenty years older, and was taking the maximum daily recommended dose of over-the-counter pain pills, with little relief.
After more than a week of sleeping poorly and wondering what was wrong with him, he saw a doctor. She asked the usual questions, about changes in diet or contact with unusual substances in the last few weeks, but the only thing he could think of was having stopped drinking Water of Life. He merely mentioned that for the last three months he’d been drinking something billed as unusually pure mountain spring water, and then had run out, noting that the problems had begun when he returned to drinking both “ordinary” bottled and tap water. The doctor discounted the connection.
“Some of your symptoms strike me as allergic reactions,” she said. “which couldn’t be triggered either by drinking ordinary water or by stopping drinking something billed as purer than anything you’ve had before. Unless it’s polluted with contaminants or pathogens, water is neutral. It can’t cause the kind of problems we’re seeing here. But the joint and bone aches sound more like Lyme Disease. Do you have a dog? Been in any wooded areas in the last three months?”
“No dog,” he replied. “I live in a condo, spend most of my time in an office downtown, and haven’t lived in this area long enough even to know where the parks are.”
The doctor wrote him prescriptions for Prednisone and an antibiotic, not because she knew what was wrong with him, but because steroids tend to be efficacious in a broad range of inflammatory problems, and antibiotics would address Lyme Disease, if he had it. Coleman took the steroid as prescribed, which reduced but didn’t eliminate the incidence of rashes and joint pain. He didn’t fill the antibiotic prescription.
The Water of Life delivery truck always seemed to arrive on the first day of each month, and with no need to exaggerate how ill he felt, he called in sick that Tuesday. When the alarmingly loud two-beat knock sounded, he rushed to answer the door. The delivery guy, a squat, thick-bodied young man, was already halfway down the hall, pushing a hand truck with four empty bottles loaded and strapped, and moving with surprising speed for someone who wasn’t running. If he even noticed that one of the bottles wasn’t carrying the company logo, he didn’t seem concerned.
As Coleman quickly carried in his precious bottles, he noticed that another delivery of Water of Life had been made five doors down the hall. He walked up close enough to read the number on the door, then retreated to his condo.
He loaded a bottle into the dispenser and drank a large glass, almost laughing aloud with pleasure and relief, for the effect on his mood was immediate. His medical problems also resolved, if less quickly, and within a week the rashes had disappeared, the bone and joint pains were gone, and his stomach stopped giving him fits. He was glad to be well again, but also deeply troubled.
The doctor was wrong. The culprit was indeed Water of Life or, rather, the absence of it. In five months, he realized, his body had become so thoroughly acclimated to the first truly pure water he had ever drunk that every other water supply available — the contaminated, if potable, run-off of a poisoned world — had now become toxic to him. Couldn’t the allergic reactions be his body’s violent rejection of what he’d been drinking his whole life?
He supposed it was possible that if he were to voluntarily give up Water of Life and force his body to readjust to the compromised product coming out of faucets and filtration plants, then the painful symptoms of rejection might slowly vanish. But could he endure the time it might take to achieve, well, what to call it? Recontamination? He would find himself back where he started before his first taste of Water of Life. The professional and social success he’d enjoyed since then, his happiness and well-being, would be no more than a bitter memory. No, he couldn’t give it up now. Maybe later, but not now, when a promotion was being dangled just out of reach.
More than once in the coming weeks, he had the experience of unthinkingly drinking something — coffee, iced tea, or an alcoholic drink in a restaurant, and the resulting flare-up of allergic symptoms made him realize just how irrevocably his body had embraced the purity of Water of Life. He could wash and shave with tap water, even cook with it, as long as he first filtered it through a costly system he’d had installed under his sink, and then boiled it for several minutes before using it, but he could only drink Water of Life, at $3.13 a glass.
He heard through Sheku, the building’s loquacious concierge from Sierra Leone, that several incidents of bottled water theft had been reported in recent weeks, and he almost mentioned the switched bottles that had been so medically costly to him, but kept silent. The fewer people who knew about his account with Water of Life, the better.
The following month his bill came with an apologetic letter from Mr. Chowilawu:
As one of our most loyal and valued customers, I wanted to reach out to you personally, Mr. Stillworth, and explain why it has become necessary to raise our monthly rate for ten gallons of Water of Life to three hundred dollars. A drought of long duration in the western states has drastically reduced the flow of the springs from which we draw our water, forcing us — very much against our will, I assure you — to take less than our usual allotment and leaving us no choice but to offset the travel expenses and salaries of our dedicated mule drivers with this regrettable increase.
When the rains come — as they surely must — and the springs replenish, then we hope to bring our rates back down to something more in line with our customers’ expectations. If this latest adjustment happens to exceed your budget, we will entirely understand if you choose to close your account. That said, we hope to continue providing you with the finest water our Mother Earth has to offer.
Sincerely yours,
William Chowilawu
So there it was. A scant two months after the last increase, he would now be paying thirty bucks a gallon. He thought he detected a subtle tone of mockery in Mr. Joined-Together-by-Water’s prose, but couldn’t be certain, and it hardly mattered at this point. The hook had been set. Now that any other drinking water literally made him sick, his choices were limited. He could drink less water and more milk, pure fruit juices, alcohol, but he couldn’t quit Water of Life. His health, his career, and possibly his life depended on it.
He didn’t know how many other families in the building were in the same fix he was, but some of them, he thought, must be living close to or beyond their means, and others on a fixed income, and their situation was more dire than his was, at least for the moment. Especially if the price continued to rise.
Which it did, every other month.
It was more than a year later, and Coleman had gotten the raise he’d been hoping for, that barely covered his monthly expenses, of which his Water of Life bill accounted for a significant percentage. He and the people up the hall — and probably everyone else chained together by water — now stood by their doorways for hours on delivery day, glancing at each other with both suspicion and commiseration, guarding against thefts that were now commonplace. The perpetrators were almost certainly other Water of Life drinkers; who else would have any knowledge of its seductive power and ever more outrageous price per glass? He had recently had an extra bolt lock installed on his door, fearing a break-in while at work.
One evening around eight o’clock — it was late May and already getting steamy in Washington — he was eating a take-out pizza and a homemade salad carefully re-rinsed with his filtered, then boiled and refrigerated tap water, when he heard a hesitant knock on the door. In the fish-eye distortion of his peep hole, he was surprised to see the pallid features of Julie Bartel.
Copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey Greene
