Gina didn’t believe Sam when he said he’d discovered mold inside the air duct.
“What do you mean, mold?” she said from the couch, not looking up from her phone. “It’s probably dust.”
Sam got down from his perch on the bar stool.
“I’m going out,” he said, then went to Walmart and bought painting masks and rubber gloves and vinegar. Within 20 minutes he was back, reexamining the duct in their condo with a flashlight.
“It’s everywhere,” Sam said. “Come look.”
“That’s okay,” Gina said. She was reading a really interesting New York Times article. Besides, Sam was always on about something. If it wasn’t mold it was chemicals, or bacteria, some foreign agent that would consume his brain and make him unrecognizable to the people he loved if he didn’t root it out and kill it first. He’d recently stopped kissing Gina because she didn’t use mouthwash. Her mouth was a bacteria incubator, he explained. She hadn’t wanted to do anything about it.
“No kissing, fine by me,” she’d said, then shut her incubator mouth and went to sleep.
Sam put on the white mask and gloves and took off his shirt so it didn’t get contaminated. He looked like a sexed up exterminator. He asked Gina to hand him paper towels, which she did without looking up. Then he scraped mounds of white dust into a trash bag before dousing the whole duct with vinegar. Finally he returned to the ground from up above, sweat glistening on his forehead.
“Phew,” Gina said. “Glad it’s over.”
“It’s not,” Sam said. The remaining mold was now volatile, loosened from where it had clung to the walls. If he turned the air conditioning back on, it was going to shoot out everywhere and fill their lungs. Did she not realize how dangerous that was? So he left it off.
The whole condo became hot and began to smell like vinegar. Finally, Gina looked up from her phone.
“Can you turn the air on?”
“I just explained why we can’t do that,” Sam said. “We need to get a hotel.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Gina replied. “If it’s mold then it’s probably not the toxic kind. Most mold is harmless.”
“Okay,” Sam said. He went to the bedroom and began to fill his suitcase with clothes.
“So you’re leaving me to die then?” Gina said, for even though she had no inclination to join him, she felt vaguely that this was not how boyfriends should behave.
“You don’t want to live, you just want me to die with you,” Sam said, then walked out into the night, alone.
Gina got up and turned the air on. Nothing flew out, of course. She settled back into her article, where a scientist was explaining why moose numbers were dwindling in Vermont. Even if there is mold, she told herself, I’d rather breathe it in alone than share a hotel bed with him, have another argument and not get any sleep.
Sometimes Gina wondered how things had gotten so drab. Sam used to kiss her like he was eating a dense piece of chocolate cake, take her on walks and lift up rocks and show her salamanders he had found, cupping them in his hands as they breathed rapidly, afraid. As she reminisced, her throat began to itch. Psychosomatic, she thought.
The next day, Sam came back with a mold remediator, a muscly guy in a wifebeater who seemed like the no-nonsense type.
“Oh good,” Gina said. “Are you going to fix it? My boyfriend won’t spend the night until it’s gone.”
“A little mold never killed anybody,” the mold remediator said. Finally, someone with sense, Gina thought.
The mold remediator told them to leave for an hour while he sprayed a chemical into the duct that would slowly starve the mold. Then it would be good as new.
Relieved, they waited, walking around the neighborhood. It was October and still extremely hot. They talked about the lack of seasons, how that made Gina sad but Sam didn’t mind.
When they returned, the mold remediator was gone and the condo smelled violently chemical, like a Sharpie.
“Please just try,” Gina said to Sam, though the smell had already given her a headache.
“I can’t,” Sam replied.
Gina opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could, something lurched inside the walls and the air conditioning came on with so much force that the grate flew off. Chunks of white dust shot out all around them like snow, snow that tasted bitter, burning their lungs and eyes.
Sam lunged for Gina, who stood frozen under the duct, white flecks landing in her eyelashes and hair. She blinked as if just waking up, then followed him, coughing, down the stairs, into the car, all the way to the hotel, where they showered until they were red and raw and brushed their teeth and gargled mouthwash and spat it out again and again like a lifetime of nightly rituals. Then they put on fresh white hotel bathrobes and closed the curtains and got into bed even though it was the middle of the afternoon. The sheets felt good on their bare, clean skin.
After a little while, Sam gave Gina a kiss. As he leaned over her, his minty breath cool against her lips, she wondered for a second if she should refuse him, give him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, what the hell, she thought. There wasn’t much else to do in the dark room. They had no home to go back to and nothing else to destroy, only each other’s bodies, breathing, like the beginning.