VIVO!

It is hotter than hell the August afternoon that we meet the salesman.

We’re cleaning out the garage because it’s our last weekend at home before the chaos of a new school year begins, when he strolls up our driveway. I’m too busy cleaning cobwebs from around the paint cans to notice where he comes from or if he stopped at any of the neighbors’ houses before ours. Suddenly, there he is, pulling a worn brown suitcase, whistling a gospel tune I recognize from church.

My wife is inside grabbing cold bottles of water, but my ten-year-old son Jeremy is in the garage with me, testing the air on his bike tires. As the salesman approaches, I wipe sweat from my brow and don’t even bother with a smile when I meet him in the driveway. Reluctantly I shake his hand—which feels like an unspoken invitation—when smiles with a mouth full of bright white teeth and introduces himself as Herald.

Doing some cleaning? he asks, and I say we are. He, of course, has just the thing, and do I mind if he gets out of the sun for a minute so he can show me? I do mind, but I don’t want to be rude and set that kind of example for my son, who finally seems interested that we have a visitor.

I step back, keeping myself between Herald and Jeremy as Herald loosens the collar of his sweat-stained blue polo shirt to cool his chest and wheels his suitcase inside the shade of the garage. He makes small talk while he unzips the suitcase, and I grudgingly answer the questions he asks to get to know me and my family’s cleaning needs.

You know, we’re really not looking to buy anything, I warn because it needs to be said before Herald gets too far into his pitch. He insists I’ll change my mind when he sees what his miracle spray can do, and he stands and holds out a generic plastic bottle of purple liquid with the word Vivo! in block letters written in black marker.

Sweat runs like a slough down the center of my back. It’s too hot for tact or pitches or wheeling a suitcase through a neighborhood of people who buy their Windex from Walmart like everyone else. I thank him again, and suggest he try the Murphys two houses down on the other side of the street. With four kids, they probably have a lot of messes to clean up.

I’ll do that, he says, but right now I’m interested in you.

I shift in my sandals at the gleam in his eyes that freezes the sweat on my spine. My stomach suddenly feels sick for reasons I can’t explain other than his attention on me feels like I’m slowly being flayed, skin peeled back until this man—this salesman—can see straight into my soul.

I’m about to insist that he leave when my wife comes out with bottles of cold water and Herald’s face lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree. Trish is so friendly, she doesn’t break stride, offering the salesman fresh water and a seat on a camping chair that she pulls from the rack where we had just piled them away for the year.

Herald chats with Trish about the weather, and Jeremy about the new school year, all the while glancing around until he finds a scuff on the old beer fridge and says it’s time for a demonstration. He sprays his purple cleaner on the ancient scuff, lets it run down the yellow metal for a few seconds, then whips a rag from the back pocket of his khakis and wipes the scuff away.

My wife claps, Jeremy laughs, and I put my hands on their shoulders and move them away from where they are huddled around the fridge. Herald stands back and smiles, obviously proud of his product, and proclaims that this is only a taste of what his miracle spray can do.

Speaking of taste, he removes the spray nozzle from the bottle and puts his lips to the rim. My wife cries out for him to stop, but he’s already swallowed a few hearty glugs and if he’s about to keel over and die, there won’t be much we can do about it. Herald wipes the sheen off his upper lip with a triumphant grin.

All natural, he says. Completely non-toxic.

I tell him I don’t think we’ll be drinking it, and my wife is clearly relieved that we won’t have the dead body of a salesman on the garage floor. Jeremy is utterly fascinated and reaches for the bottle, but I step in before Herald hands it to him. I thank the salesman for the demonstration and insist we aren’t interested. Even though my wife and son look like they want to argue, they stand by while I urge Herald and his suitcase back out to the driveway.

Like any good salesman, Herald is persistent and keeps pushing the spray bottle into my chest. He insists that it’s a free sample because once we see what else it can do, we’ll be calling the number on the back of the bottle, begging for more. I highly doubt it, but my wife steps in and gladly accepts the sample bottle of Vivo!, thanking Herald for stopping by.

The salesman is leaving when he looks at me again in that way that makes me feel exposed and vulnerable, like a blind baby rat without hair or any way to defend myself. I step into the shade of my garage as if my home will protect me from this man who hasn’t threatened me in any way. This man who smiles and heads to the Murphy’s house with a wave.

***

A few days later I’ve forgotten about the salesman and the bottle of Vivo! underneath the bathroom sink. Jeremy has started school and my wife and I prepare for the cooler days of fall. Two weeks into the new school year, tragedy strikes our neighborhood. Three kids have gotten sick and ended up in the ICU at the local hospital. Two of them are Murphys from two houses down, and the third lives a block west and had to be hauled off in an ambulance.

My wife, a nurse, sees the horror firsthand. After working a double shift, she comes home for a quick shower and a coffee, and collapses into my arms in tears. Kids are on ventilators, near death, she says. The doctors don’t know what to do—they’ve never seen anything like it before. The kids came in with debilitating stomach cramps that presented like gallstones. Then they started sweating, but they weren’t spiking fevers.

They were freezing to death.

Body temps dropping a degree an hour until they needed heated blankets and infusions of warm fluids to stay alive. Trish says everyone is nervous and the CDC is getting involved in case it’s some kind of pathogen. She insists we keep Jeremy home from school and away from other kids for a while. Jeremy is still asleep, but she goes into his room and begins sobbing all over again, hugging our confused son who seems angry to be woken up so early, then lets his mother climb into bed beside him.

When he learns he won’t be going to school for a while, he complains that he’ll get kicked off the football team, but Trish is adamant, and I agree. It’s safer if he stays home until they find out what this…illness is.

***

After a few days, goons in hazmat suits canvas the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking if anyone is sick and warning of a potential neighborhood quarantine until the CDC figures out what we were dealing with. Trish keeps going to work—they provide personal protective gear to all the essential workers—and comes home exhausted with haunted eyes from watching desperate kids cling to life and parents helpless while their children waste away.

Because that’s what starts happening after a few days in ICU. The kids, their tiny bodies, are drying up. No amount of intravenous hydration can keep up with the inexplicable loss of water. The kids are dying. A week after the first were admitted, two more fall ill in the cul-de-sac behind our house. The quarantine seems imminent the day that Charles Murphy, our neighbor with two kids in ICU, comes barreling down our road like a bat out of hell, taking out his mailbox as he screeches to a stop in his driveway.

He runs into his house for a few seconds, then comes rushing back out, carrying something in his hands that I don’t see from the front window. Then he’s gone again. I text Trish and tell her what happened, assuming that one of his kids has passed away. When she replies a few hours later, she tells me that both of his kids had, miraculously, started to improve.

I’m eager to share the good news with Jeremy, who’s spent the last few days holed up in his room, sulking about missing football and friends and being—god forbid—bored out of his mind. Instead of finding him sprawled out on his bed, eyes glazed, and face buried in his iPad, he’s standing next to his closet, and rushes to hide something in his hands when I walk in.

He wipes his mouth and cusses at me for not knocking. I know better than to bust in on a preteen boy under normal circumstances, but these are extraordinary…and I seem to have caught him doing something unsavory or he wouldn’t be so upset.

Jeremy won’t fully turn and look at me as he shields something against his chest. I step into the room and ask him what he’s doing, and he claims it’s nothing. My worst fears kick in and I immediately think drugs, so I grab him by the shoulder and spin him around. He drops what he’s holding, and I look down as the bottle of Vivo! spills purple liquid all over the carpet.

My son tells me not to freak out. The salesman said it was non-toxic. He drops to his knees and picks up the bottle, grabbing a sweatshirt from his desk chair to soak up the spilled cleaning solution. I’m staring at him like I don’t recognize my own son because I don’t. He couldn’t have been…

Were you drinking it? I screech, and he scrambles away with the bottle clutched to his chest, his cheeks turning red like I caught him masturbating instead of slugging a chemical.

I thought you were smarter than that, I say, shaking my head and swiping the bottle from his hands. I tell him to finish cleaning the floor, and he hollers that he was just bored, and all the kids are trying it. I want to bark back the adage my old man used to bark at me—would he jump off a cliff if all the other kids were doing it?—but something about what he said strikes an uneasy cord in my chest that hums while I dump the rest of the Vivo! down the bathroom sink.

He reminds me, again, that it’s non-toxic, that the salesman drank it, but my fingers shake as I turn the bottle over for a list of ingredients, or something to reference so I can call poison control. All I find is a phone number and a smiley face written in black marker, and I remember that this is a sample bottle. Still, it seems illegal to leave a chemical with a family without anything describing what it is, and I curse myself for not paying closer attention before. I’d been so keen to get rid of the damn salesman that I never looked at the bottle and never asked any questions that might be helpful now that my son has ingested god only knows how much of this shit.

I try calling Trish. Someone at the hospital may know. She picks up after two rings and I tell her what happened.

For a moment, she doesn’t say a word. Then she asks if I’m kidding. I tell her I’m not. Then she tells me to hold on and puts me on speakerphone with—of all people—Charles Murphy.

Thought your boy was too old to fall for it, Charles says wryly.  He sounds both exhausted and wired, a man at the end of his rope. After a heavy sigh, he mutters, These fuckin’ kids.

My wife is crying in the background. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I sense I’m not going to like what Charles Murphy has to say. He starts going on about what an expert business plan it is. Then he says he hopes I still have some left. I’m going to need it.

Some what? I demand. The cleaning spray? Will someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?

Another sigh. Charles says he doesn’t know for sure—he didn’t even know until today that two of his boys got into the stuff…that purple miracle cleaner. When it finally came out, Charles Murphy had raced home to grab the bottle and called the number on the back. The salesman answered. He said he’d send a case right away, and suggested signing the Murphy family up for a lifetime commitment—a fresh case every thirty days, delivered rain or shine, and on every major holiday.

I’m waiting for the punchline of whatever Charles is trying to say when Jeremy comes out of his room clutching his stomach. He’s pale and says his guts hurt, and he crumples on the hall floor before I can grab him. I holler through the phone that I have to get Jeremy to the hospital, and Charles says that it’s not doctors I need now. It’s Herald.

The fucking salesman? I scream. Over Jeremy’s moans, I hear Charles explain that once a person ingests as much as a drop of Vivo!, they’ll need to drink it forever…or they’ll wither away and die.

So, I guess you’ll need that lifetime supply deal too, Charles says wryly.

My son’s skin already feels cold and clammy. The empty bottle of purple cleaner is on the bathroom counter. I can see it from where I hold Jeremy on the floor.

I don’t have any left, I mutter—to Charles and myself as understanding finally settles in and I remember the salesman’s parting words.

He said once I saw what else it could do, I’d be calling the number, begging for more.

That lousy, no-good, motherfuck—

I tell my wife we’re coming in because Jeremy will need help until we can get a new bottle. Charles, in all his wisdom, urges me to place my order before I do anything else.

And I’d better put a rush on it.