When I came in, Katie was sitting on the couch, a cigarette in her hand, pointing skyward.  A bored look on her face.  A magazine open on her lap.  The apartment smelled so bad I felt as if I’d been knocked backward, almost falling back through the doorway in disgust and surprise.

That smell was horrible.  And she wasn’t supposed to be here.

Wednesday early afternoons were my time to be alone, without her heavy footfalls and her constant need to talk and her loud music and the TV always on.  My one day off work, classes ending early.  Wednesday was my time to have the apartment while she was at class at the other campus.

She looked up lazily from her Cosmo.  ”Hey.”

The greeting was more of an acknowledgement that I was there than a greeting.

“Hey,” I choked out, trying not to breathe in too deeply for fear of gagging on the smell.  Like rotten eggs mixed with rotten everything else you could imagine.  ”Aren’t you supposed to be at class?”

She shrugged slowly, her cigarette making listless patterns of smoke against the sunlight from the closed window behind her.  ”I decided not to go.  Fuck it.”

“Ok,” I breathed out, making for the window.  ”It smells awful in here, by the way.  What is that?”  I threw open the window.  ”It smells like something died in here and then rolled in garbage.”

She stared at me, her eyes empty.  She must have just woken up.  She was prone to sleeping until 5:00 on the few days a month she didn’t work or have class.  Given that it was noon, she couldn’t have gotten up too long ago.  ”I don’t smell anything,” she said, looking back at her magazine.

“How can you not smell that?” I demanded.  ”It’s rancid.”

“Must be the cigarette,” she mumbled, turning the page slowly.

“Yeah, by the way, when did we decide it was ok to smoke in the living room?”  I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice but I couldn’t tell if I succeeded as I walked toward the kitchen.  The smell got stronger as I got closer.

“I didn’t think you’d mind one cigarette,” she said, her voice still empty of emotion.

“I don’t mind,” I said through gritted teeth.  ”It just smells really bad in here already.  The cigarette doesn’t help.”  I eyed the sink.

Nothing terribly nasty in there, just a few empty plates.  Must be the fridge.  I hadn’t been home much lately, so it was possible something had gone bad without my notice.  Katie wasn’t exactly the cleanly type, and she was always working, too, so if something had escaped both of our notices it would be no surprise.  I just couldn’t believe it had gotten so smelly so fast.

I held my breath and opened the door a few inches.  Even with my breathing stopped, I could smell it.  I don’t know how.  It must have been the fetid nature of the air itself, sticking to my skin and coating my nasal passages.  Whatever it was, I almost threw up as soon as I got the door open.  I closed it immediately.

“Jesus Christ, Katie!”  I leaned on the counter for support.  ”That’s disgusting!”

I looked under my arm to see her head slowly rise up, smoke curling out of her mouth.  ”What?”

“The refrigerator!  It’s fucking foul in there!”

She craned her neck a little to get a look at it.  ”What’s foul?”

“The fridge.  The whole fridge.  Oh, God, that’s nasty.”

“I don’t smell anything,” she said, her head lowering toward the magazine again.

“You don’t even have to smell it!  Just look at this!”  I shielded my face with one arm and pulled the door open with the other, standing safely behind its bulk as I yanked it wide open.  I kept my slitted eyes on Katie.

Her face remained blank.  No change of expression.  ”Look at that,” I yelled, trying not to vomit at the idea of the rotten food particles that must have been coating my hands and arms as I stood there.  ”How do you explain that?  How did we not notice it?”

She shrugged.  ”I haven’t been around much,” she said, dragging on her cigarette.

Unable to stand the idea of the stench, I closed the door again. “Neither have I, Katie,” I said, trying to keep my temper in check. Neither of us was around very often.  I hadn’t even seen her for three days.  ”But that is inexcusably disgusting.  Help me clean it.”

She nodded and leafed through her magazine.

“Katie, seriously, I can’t stand the smell in here.  I’m going to get changed and put on some gloves and start cleaning.  I can’t do this by myself.  Please help.”

She nodded again, taking another drag.  ”Sure, I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said absently.

I went to my room, my mind racing to find an answer as to how the fridge could have turned into a cesspool overnight.  Granted, I’d been at Jerry’s a lot recently and hadn’t been eating at home much, but I was usually home once or twice a day, and I hadn’t smelled so much as a whiff of rotten food before this afternoon.  And now…  I shuddered to think of the scene in that fridge.

I tied a handkerchief around my face to keep the mold spores out of my nose and mouth and headed to the kitchen.  Put on a pair of rubber gloves, grabbed the bleach and the Lysol, steeled my mind, and opened the fridge.

Sweet Jesus, it was like a month-old corpse had exploded in there! There was mold of every imaginable shade, colony configuration, length of hair, and putrid smell in there, on every surface.  Every container of food was rank, everything spoiled.  Fingers of mold wriggled from Tupperware, up walls, around the wires of the racks.  Fur-coated mold colonies, bright pink and black and green.

Mushy vegetables, bubbles of fungus on cheese, chunks in the milk.  I took periodic breaks to hold my gag reflex.  I couldn’t imagine how everything had gone so bad so fast.  Probably something large had spoiled and the mold had spread to everything else quickly.  But so quickly!  Jesus!

I’d been at it for some time, my mind occupied by the sheer amount of mold and ruin, before I realized that Katie was not helping me.  This was not unexpected, as she generally put off cleaning her room or the bathroom or anything else in the apartment until I had complained and bitched at her at least five times.  She was notorious for leaving wookie-sized hairballs in the shower drain and for letting the piles of clothes in her room surpass her in height before doing laundry. But this was a job too big for me to handle, and given that she had very likely been home more than I for the past week, I wasn’t about to let her get off easy.

“Katie!” I yelled through my handkerchief, “come here and help me. This is awful!”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I heard her intone vaguely.  ”I’m reading.”

“Katie, please come help me.  I’m about to pass out from the smell.

“It’s probably the chemicals you’re using,” she said.

“No, it’s the fucking mold.  Come here.  Now.”

I heard a slow rustling from the couch as the magazine was closed and the pajama pants moved.  A sigh of resignation.  I rolled my watering eyes.  Drama queen.  She shuffled up behind me, smelling of cigarettes.  I was grateful for the smell, given what I’d been dealing with.

“Look at this!”  I gestured toward the open fridge with my bleach-soaked sponge.  ”How does this happen?  Everything in here is bad.”

She stared for a minute, eyes still vacant.  How could she not be surprised by this?  ”That is pretty nasty,” she murmured.

“To say the least.  Please help me clean this up.”

She stared at the fridge for a while, not moving.  I eyed her carefully.  The look on her face was barely even an expression.  She seemed not to be taking anything in, or even thinking.  Just staring, because her eyes were open.  ”…did you go out last night?” I asked warily.

Her head turned toward me but her eyes stayed in the fridge.  ”No.”

Katie wasn’t a crazy party girl these days.  She worked too much to go out often.  But for a few years she had been notorious on campus for drug abuse and absurd bar antics.  I squinted at her.  ”You sure?  You didn’t get trashed or something?  You look hungover or… something.”

Suddenly she seemed to snap to attention.  Her eyes found mine.  They were suddenly filled with tears, injured.  ”I’m fine.  I didn’t go out.”  She turned on her heel and walked back the hallway.  Her door didn’t slam so much as close a little too quickly.

She must have done something stupid last night.  Ecstasy, maybe.  That general ennui the next day, the inability to care about anything, the vague depression.  Probably ecstasy. I went back to cleaning the fridge.  I wasn’t about to go ask her what was wrong – conversations like that with Katie tended to last for hours, and there was no way I was leaving this thing to rot any longer because she was having a freakout after letting the fridge go to the dogs.

I grabbed a container of too-chunky cottage cheese with my gloved hand.  A little inured to the smell and sight of mold at this point, I turned it over in my hand.  It has expired three days ago.  Bizarre.  Given, dairy products are usually pretty dead-on with their expiration dates, but three days shouldn’t be enough for this kind of rot.  

I threw out the cottage cheese and reached for the jar of salsa. Green and black mold all over the crust at the top, creeping down the sides, floating on the chunky red surface.  Curious, I turned it around.  The expiration date was three days ago, too.  Strange.  Then the eggs.  I’d been avoiding them for fear of vomiting inside my handkerchief, but now I was curious.  Three days past expiration. The milk.  Three days past. The butter.  Three days past. The bagged salad.  Three days past.

What the fuck?

Every item I pulled out of that fridge was three days past its expiration date.  How did we manage to buy all these?  I knew for a fact the salsa had been in there for a week or two before we got that cottage cheese.  Which had been there before we got the eggs and the milk.  How did three different shopping trips yield the same exact expiration date?

“Katie?,” I yelled toward the hallway.  ”Come here and see this.  This is weird.” I didn’t hear anything from her room. “Katie?”

Nothing still.  She must be all kinds of burned out from last night, I thought, and went back to cleaning.

She never came back out of her room to help me.  I cleaned the whole damn thing.  It took me two hours until I was satisfied it had been cleaned out adequately, and every single thing had an expiration  date three days past.

 

      *               *               *               *               *               *               *

 

The next evening I came home with new groceries.  Katie was sitting in the same place she’d been the day before, this time watching reruns of Full House, a lit cigarette between her fingers.  A bowl of cereal sat, mostly uneaten and very soggy looking, in front of her.  She had that same blank look on her face, as if there were absolutely nothing going on in her head.  The apartment still smelled pretty nasty, but I figured that couldn’t be helped with the amount of spoiled food that had recently been in it.  I had used a gigantic amount of bleach and half a bottle of Lysol “All Purpose Cleaner” in the process of cleaning it out, but the smell lingered.

“Hey Katie.  I got some food.  Just a couple things, but enough to tide us over.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly, obviously not taking in anything I had said.  The smoke curled over head as the laugh track played. 

I went to the kitchen to unload my grocery bags.  It seemed to smell more like disinfectant than rotten food over here.  The smell must have soaked into everything else in the apartment.  Great.  I’d have to Febreeze the whole damn place.  Not that I wouldn’t need to anyway, with Katie chain smoking.

I put away the few items I’d gotten and opened up a cup of yogurt, plopping down on the couch next to Katie.  She didn’t even look at me.  One of the Olsen twins was doing something unbearably cute on the TV. The crowd made the appropriate “aww” noise, and the set switched to a commercial.  Katie dragged on her cigarette.

We sat in silence, watching something ridiculous about a new diet pill that sounded suspiciously like meth.  I decided to force a conversation.

“So, what’s up?  How are you?  Did you go to class today?”  She turned slowly toward me, exhaling smoke.  Only some of it blew into my face.  

“No,” she murmured.  Her voice was barely audible.  ”I don’t think I’ll go any more.”

“…you mean… at all?”

She looked past me, her lips pursed but her eyes showing no sign of actually thinking.  ”I’m not sure,” she said after a few minutes of silence.

“Katie,” I started, but then stopped.  How to proceed with this conversation?  ”Do you want to tell me why you’re not going to class anymore?”

She sucked on the cigarette again, exhaled.  ”I just… don’t think I’ll go.  Too much… stress.”  She was talking like she was in a dream or under water or stoned out of mind.  But she didn’t seem to be in any of those three states.

“Katie, you’re in your second year of grad school.  You can’t just stop.  You’re almost done.” 

She shrugged and looked back at the TV.  A talking gecko.  A smile flashed across her lips, so tiny and so quick I barely noticed it. Still, her eyes showed nothing.

I laid a hand gently on her knee to get her attention.  ”Katie, is everything all right?  Are you ok?”

“I’m fine.”  She didn’t look at me.  ”I’m ok.” Silence again.  Full House came back on and we watched it together for a few minutes, she not seeming to take in any of it, not laughing at the contrived jokes or reacting to the cuteness or even making fun of the family values.  I was just trying to think of what to do or say.  Something was obviously very wrong. 

I reached for my yogurt absently and put a spoonful in my mouth.  I gagged and ran to the kitchen, spit the yogurt out into the sink and forced my stomach to hold down its contents.  Ran the cold water and stuck my mouth under it.  ”Oh, holy shit that was nasty!”  I gargled some water.  ”That yogurt’s bad!”  Unsurprisingly, no response from Katie.

I went back to the living room and picked up the yogurt.  The expiration date was a good week away.  ”What the hell?  I just bought this.  How is it spoiled already?”

Katie didn’t respond.  I stuck the yogurt in her face.  ”Look at this,” I demanded.  ”I just bought this ten minutes ago.”  I pointed at the expiration date.  ”It’s not even close to being expired.  But this shit is spoiled.  What the hell is going on with food in our apartment?”

Katie shrugged again and tilted her head to look past the yogurt to the TV.  I let out a breath, frustrated and confused.  ”Don’t you think this is a little strange?” I demanded.   “Katie?”

She turned toward me again, took a drag of her cigarette, and slowly, ponderously, automatically, ground it out in the ash tray which, I noticed now, had at least ten butts in it.  One cigarette, my ass.

She looked steadily at me for a minute.  ”Those expiration dates don’t mean anything, Lynn,” she said very seriously. “They’re wrong most of the time anyway.  It’s just some bad yogurt.” She grabbed her bowl of cereal and started eating methodically.  I shook my head and got up to throw my yogurt out, then turned back.  ”Wait,” I said, “where’d that milk come from?”

“I bought it this morning,” she answered, staring at the TV.

“It’s not bad, is it?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said, slurping up the soggy flakes.  ”Everything’s not bad.”  I watched her for a minute, grossed out that she could be eating cereal that soggy.  I’m a crunchy cereal purist myself.  Hers was so soggy with milk that it seemed to just pile up in the bowl, in chunks of… Wait… I leaned toward her.  

“Katie!  What are you doing?”  I grabbed the bowl from her and sniffed it.  The overpowering odor of rancid milk hit me in the face.  ”This shit is bad!  Look at this milk!  Smell it!”  I felt my stomach churn violently.  “Oh my God, how can you eat this?”

“What are you talking about?”  She tried to grab the cereal back from me but I held it high.  ”It’s fine, Lynn,” she said methodically.  “I was just eating it.”

“This milk is spoiled, Katie.  You’d better go make yourself throw up or you’re going to be really sick really soon.”

She stared at me again, no annoyance showing in her eyes or expression, just that blank stare.  Autopilot.  ”Lynn, I wouldn’t put spoiled milk on cereal, and I wouldn’t eat it.  I bought that this morning, it’s perfectly good.”

I lowered the bowl down to her level and pointed into it.  ”This milk looks like cottage cheese, Katie.” I spooned up some milk with no cereal.  Chunks everywhere.  I held my breath.

Katie stared at it for a while.  No expression.  Finally she shrugged again and turned back to the TV.  ”It tasted fine,” she said, reaching for her cigarettes.

“Katie,” I said firmly, grabbing the cigarettes from her and standing between her and the TV.  ”Go make yourself throw up.  You’re going to be sick if you don’t.  I’m serious.  Do it now.”

She stared at me for a minute, blank, and then without a word got up and went to the bathroom.

I shook my head as I emptied my yogurt and her cereal into the garbage.  How was everything in our apartment going bad?  This was so bizarre.  Did we have some kind of bacteria in the air or something?  Maybe I should call the landlord.

Curious, I opened the fridge and checked the half gallon of milk.  Expiration date more than a week away.  Strange.  I opened it up and sniffed it cautiously.  It smelled fine.  I couldn’t see any chunks floating inside. How had Katie’s been spoiled?  I wondered if in her strange funk she had poured herself cereal sometime the day before, with the spoiled milk, and had eaten today.

Thoughtfully I pulled out another carton of yogurt from the fridge.  Expiration date a week from today.  I opened it.  Smelled it. Everything seemed to be in order.  I carefully got a spoon and put the

tiniest speck of yogurt to my tongue.  It tasted ok.  I tried a bit more.  Still tasted fine.  I must have just overreacted earlier, I thought.  Katie was just acting so strange, and the food all going bad just seemed to add to it.  Must have just been a freak yogurt, and she must have poured herself the cereal yesterday.

I hoped she was ok. 

I sat back down in front of Full House and ate my yogurt.  Katie emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later and took her place silently on the couch beside me, lighting up a cigarette.  I didn’t say anything, figuring that making oneself vomit warranted an indoor cigarette.  She was so out of it she wouldn’t have heard me if I’d asked her to put it out anyway.

On Full House, DJ was bitching about something.  DJ was always bitching about something.  She was the crappiest character on that show.  I put a spoonful of yogurt in my mouth.  It was bad.

I spit it back into the container.  Stirred it up.  Chunks where there shouldn’t be chunks.  Bad smell.  It was bad.  How was it bad?  I had just eaten half of it and that half was good.  How had it suddenly gone bad?  I looked at Katie.  She was still vacant, staring at the TV.  Showing no signs that she had noticed me spitting out my yogurt.

Showing no signs of anything.

Was I crazy?  Was I imagining that everything was going bad around me?  Maybe she was normal and I was just hyperactive and insane.  I looked back at the yogurt.  No change.  Still smelled terrible.

Still chunky.  Still spoiled.

I looked back at Katie.  No change.  Still staring straight ahead. Eyes blank.  Not thinking.  Not caring.

Back at the yogurt.

…I’d eaten half of the yogurt before Katie sat down, and it had been fine.  I’d eaten one bite after she sat down and it had been bad.  She said she’d bought milk that morning and poured it on her cereal.  The milk in the carton was fine.  But the milk in her bowl had been bad. I hadn’t really traced the bad smell I’d noticed when I came in, but it hadn’t been strongest in the kitchen.  It had been strongest in the living room.  Where Katie was.

I watched her drag on her cigarette.  It burned down very fast. 

“Katie…” I started but stopped.  How could I phrase the question in my head? Her eyes flickered in my direction but she didn’t turn toward me.

“Katie, why is everything around you going bad?”

Her head snapped around and her eyes opened wide.  There still seemed to be no emotion in them, no understanding, but they were wide, wide open and she was paying attention.  ”What?”

“This yogurt is bad, Katie.  It only turned bad when you sat down next to me.  I checked the milk in the fridge.  It’s fine.  But the milk in your cereal was bad.  What the hell is going on?”

She blinked at me but said nothing.

“Why does it reek in here when all the bad food was thrown out yesterday and I disinfected every inch of the fridge?  What is happening?” She said nothing and her gaping eyes signaled no change of heart.

“That’s it,” I announced.  ”I’m going into your room.”

I was up and off the couch before her sluggish hand could reach my arm.  I heard a soft whimper from behind me as I tore down the hall, knowing that in whatever bizarre state she was in, she wouldn’t catch me.

There was an awful smell coming from the back of the hallway.  The closer I got to her room, the worse it got, not exactly like rotten garbage and not exactly like a dead animal, but a strange  combination of the two.  And cigarettes.

By the time I reached her door I almost didn’t want to go inside, but I was on a roll.  I threw open the door to her room and retched.

It looked the way I expected the Crypt Keeper’s sleeping chamber might.  Mold covering the walls, slime dripping from every surface, cobwebs lining the ceiling. Rot and ruin everywhere.  I covered my mouth and ran to the bathroom across the hall, vomiting everything I’d eaten for days.

When I was finished I took another peek into Katie’s room but could hardly stand the sight.  I stormed back into the living room.  ”Katie, what the fuck–”

But she was backed into a corner, trembling, her eyes suddenly reading an emotion: panic.

“Katie?  What’s happening here?”  I spoke and moved slowly.  If she’d had a knife I believe she would have stabbed me, with that wild look on her face, her whole frame trembled and seemed ready to spring. 

“Katie.  Why is your room…?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  You’re crazy.  Get away from me.”

She said it all so fast it barely registered.  I advanced on her slowly.  ”Katie, tell me what’s happening.”

She was silent and still except for her shivering.  I got within a few feet of her and almost grabbed her but stopped myself.  What if I touched her and she was covered with slime too?  Or if she disintegrated in my grasp?

She saw me lunge forward, however, and turned like a cornered animal, scrabbling at the wall as if she could climb up it.  As she jumped upward I saw something black, something square, like a tattoo, on her side.

She landed and turned toward me, grabbing the bottom of her shirt and pulling it down to cover the shape.  Here eyes met mine – manic, wild, desperate.

I backed up a foot or two.  Held up my hands to show I meant no harm. “Katie, what is that?  On your side – what is it?”

She just shook her head and kept her hand tight on the bottom of her shirt.

“What is it, Katie?  Does it have anything to do with all this shit that’s been happening?”

She shivered and fidgeted but said nothing.  ”Katie, show me what it is.”

She shook her head.

“Show me.”  I advanced on her.  She was too panicked to know what to do, so she just shrunk into the corner, slowly crouching down, making herself as small as possible, her eyes pleading.

“Katie, I have to see that.  Please just show me.  I promise I… I promise I won’t hurt you.”  The look in her eyes said she didn’t believe me, but she seemed helpless to stop her hands as they slowly lifted her shirt on the left side…

A barcode and the words:  ”Expires: 3/29/07″

There it was.  An expiration date right on her side.  The same expiration date that had been on every piece of food in the fridge. Three days before I’d come home to her on the couch. She’d expired.   Spoiled.  Rotted.  Gone bad.

I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.  Backing up slowly, smiling reassuringly, waving my hand to distract her eye, I said, “Don’t worry, it’s ok.  Everything is going to be fine.  Don’t worry.  I’m going to get you something to… help.”

Once I got far enough away and she hadn’t moved from her crouch in the corner, I turned and ran to the pantry.  Grabbed one out of our box of giant black trash bags.  Grabbed the rolling pin.  Hid the rolling pin behind the bag.  Crept back out into the living room.

She was still in her corner, hunched over as if she were crying, but there were no tears flowing and no sobs issuing from her.  She was just bent over, despondent, empty of tears or emotion, but she knew she was done.  She knew what was coming. 

Still, she fought me off for a few minutes.  She heard the bag rustle and looked up like a deer in headlights, took a defensive stance.  I rushed her and she dodged me a few times, but she knew she had to go.

Eventually I knocked her down with the rolling pin, bagged her up.  It took me an hour or so to gather my strength and resolution, but I did it.  It can be tough throwing out a friend.