(Note: This is the epilogue to a mostly-completed novel; if you’re interested in some of Hugo’s earlier adventures, then you can click here.)
I might be dying. You always thought that Hugo would die in a stupid accidental fire—one that Hugo himself set out of sheer absent-mindedness and maybe, in the last moment, he’d fallen in such a way that he’d landed with a chimney poker stabbing him in his asshole or something like that—or as an unsuspecting bystander in a heroic shootout between communists and police or as a result of falling face-first into a mountain of elephant shit or whatever. Nope. There’s still time, but it looks like I might just die at the age of forty of a completely preventable disease. In France. With a nurse for a girlfriend. Probably, all I had to do was to go to the doctor once in a while. Niveen told me. I knew it. I was finally getting my life together. Maybe if I hadn’t been getting my life together, then I wouldn’t have even found out. For the first time, I’d started exercising at the gym a few times a week. I’ve now been doing that for almost a year. Getting healthier? Welp. I don’t know; maybe it’s nothing, but I might be dying. I can’t even die in a noteworthy way. In my life, I’ve sucked up everyone’s resources and given nothing in return. I thought that I finally might make good. Oops.
This morning, I woke up, got ready to go to class, participated in a good seminar. I’m a PhD candidate at an obscure university on the West coast of France. You probably never heard of it. Not because I’m an academic hipster but because this is a shitty university. I’d applied to École Normale Supérieure a few times over the years, making small and large revisions to my application. I’d hoped to work with The Next Big French Philosopher™, but at some point, you have to give up on your dreams and your self-worth. My research topic is on the rituals of French housemice—very Althusser mixed with Foucault mixed with Bourdieu mixed with Latour. Finally, I focused my application more on the rituals and less on the mice, and I got into this third-tier university. Luckily, the EU enthusiastically funds me with some grant money. Dieu merci for cultural studies. After the seminar, I went to get bloodwork done at the clinic near campus. I’d had to starve myself—they require that you fast for at least 12 hours. I was fucking hungry. I would’ve eaten a pinetree. The whole thing lasted five minutes. She gave me a red bandage to keep me from bleeding too much from the inside of my elbow. In 2022, leftist academic walks around wearing a red armband. Sounds right. The nurse gave me a lollipop as though I were four fucking years old. I put the lollipop in my mouth and sucked.
Things between my girlfriend and me had been weird for a few days. She texted me and told me in the sweetest possible way that she didn’t want me to make the two-hour drive up the coast to see her for the weekend. I couldn’t blame her. I went to therapy. Kamala (my therapist) agreed that Niveen (my girlfriend) had been gaslighting me. Niveen is very sweet, but maybe that’s part of the problem. She never has to apologize to anyone. She’s perfect. She’s too perfect. She’s bad at apologizing. Instead of being an expert apologizer (like I am), I guess, she sometimes scurries (like one of my housemice) through convoluted alternate realities in her mind and convinces herself of something that never happened. Then, she gets upset at me for accepting the reality that came from the past, from conversations we’ve had, that’s written in black-and-white, that holds together all the facts that we bring to bear. Great. She has moments when she says, in her painfully cute, but all-too-cliché Algerian French accent, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I misremembered.” She looks up at me, half-smiling, half-pouting with that crimson fig of a slightly-oversized mouth; big chocolate marble eyes; high cheekbones and little pointy chin; tightly-curled jet-black hair. I almost feel bad for her in these moments. Poor thing. She’s right. She’s trying her best. She just misremembered. Look at how cute she is—like a little Algerian French nursemaid sexnymph. Who wouldn’t love this angelic woman? Ugh. Of course, not long after her doe-eyed recognition of her possible misrememberance, she finds a plausible explanation and runs with it. She speaks so slowly and softly. She sounds like a victim of a genocide, but not in an unhinged way—almost the opposite: like when someone’s been through so much that they seem unable to assert themselves enough to ever be mean or unfair to anyone. I can picture her saying, “I just want to hug tout le monde sur la terre and feed them and make them happy.” It sucks. Anyway, so, I left therapy. I sent Niveen a voice message to let her know that I loved her and that I just wanted us both to feel safe and to be able to talk about our feelings. I saw that I’d missed a call from a local number.
I figured that this mystery call had to do with my bloodwork. I went home. I got a text. I’d received a message in the health portal. I opened it and read:
I called you and tried to leave a voicemail. The partial results of your bloodwork came back extremely abnormal. You seem to have a blood disease. Please go to the hospital as soon as possible.
Dr. Jain
She left her phone number. I called. She said that my white blood cell count was astronomically high and that she was very concerned. She said that I needed to see a blood pathologist. She suggested that she call around and find me an appointment for the next 48 hours. She asked if I’d been feeling any symptoms. “Nothing crazy,” I said. I’ve been coughing for six months, there’s sometimes a little bit of blood in my shits, I had erectile dysfunction for two or three weeks that magically went away, I think that I once tore my ACL and so that sometimes feels uncomfortable, I’m constantly dehydrated and a little bit tired, the soles of my feet hurt, and I’ve been wheezing a lot lately, I thought.
I sent Niveen a screenshot of the message. She called. Niveen is an infirmière. Since my sudden weird changes in heartrate had begun pretty much immediately after I’d received my COVID booster, and I’d heard that the booster could cause myocarditis or pericarditis, I asked her if I maybe had one of those. She said it was unlikely. I could hear the nervousness in her voice. Niveen is usually unshakable. Even when she’s unreasonably mad at me, she never sounds nervous. She always seems confident and calm. She asked to see my charts. I said that I had no idea how to get them. She suggested I look in the portal or that I ask the doctor when she called back about the appointment. I messaged the doctor. Then, I found the charts in the portal. I sent them to Niveen.
I asked her again if I had myocarditis or pericarditis. She said that more likely was some form of leukemia, but that wasn’t likely, either. I didn’t really react at first. Suddenly, I might be dying. I said that I’d probably rest for a bit. Maybe I need rest. I watched some Instagram videos about the aftermath of a then-recent US school shooting. I’d moved from the US in part to escape my home country’s irrational carnage, but I still tuned into the news more than was healthy. It made me sad. I texted Niveen, asking if I’d die. She said, “No.” I told her that I was scared. She called me again. I started pathetically crying. She asked if I wanted her to drive down to see me. I told her that I didn’t want her to come since she didn’t want to see me that weekend. I could hear that she was in the car. I said that I should just let her go.
“Why? Why don’t you want me to go if you’re sad?”
“I don’t want to bother you. You’re obviously busy. I don’t want to keep you from going to the gym or whatever you’re doing. Don’t you need to go?”
“No, I’m just going to the hardware store to get some nails. As long as you let me off the phone before they close in the next… three hours, it’s fine. No rush.”
She said that, if I wanted her to come comfort me, then she’d come. I told her that I wanted her to come. She asked if I wanted her to get me a pizza and some pumpkin pie. “There’s no pumpkin pie in May,” I told her. She laughed. She barely knew what pumpkin pie was. She asked if I wanted Neapolitan or Sicilian and what toppings. “Pepperoni and mushroom.” She laughed, even though those are the best toppings. I told her to get half of the pizza the way she wanted. I asked her to bring chocolate. I asked her what most likely ailed me. She said that she had never seen a white blood cell count that high, so she was confused. Hmm… She told me that she needed to charge her electric car, but she’d be to my place in a few hours. She suggested that I try to sleep since I was tired and that I meditate.
I sat on the couch, playing Candy Crush for a few minutes. I went to my room, laid in the bed, opened my dilapidated laptop, and started watching a long video by a political YouTuber. He pointed out how the most popular conservative YouTuber’s attempts to blame Democrats for the Replacement Theory conspiracy theory were mostly just repackaged white nationalist rhetoric. Seemed right to me. I live near a lot of Le Pen disciples. It’s awkward. Of course, an américain dating an arabe probably doesn’t bug them too much. They’d rather we just both leave. However, the cheese and wine there are excellent. Life is all about trade-offs. Fuck.
I’m really infected by the couple economics classes I took in my youth. Or, maybe it’s just all the capitalist metaphorical language in everyday US English. Fuck. I turn off the video even though I’m getting exactly the cathartic political release/angry vilification that I seek. I need to get ready for Niveen to arrive.
I go to the local Carrefour. I wanted to get Niveen the coconut water and popcorn that she likes. We’re gonna watch It’s a Wonderful Life. She hates old movies and especially black-and-white movies. Okay, I said she’s perfect, but no one’s really perfect. I walk in. It’s chilly. Carrefour is always fucking chilly. Do I need to start carrying around a blanket? Am I gonna have to do chemotherapy? What would I look like bald? The popcorn is in the same aisle as the chips and nuts. In France, you have like three or four options of these kinds of things, so Carrefour is about a fourth the size of Safeway. That’s probably not why. I only took a couple econ classes. I choose the butter option for the popcorn. I get some garlic salt and paprika. The coconut water is near the produce, so I get her bananas. She likes bananas. I like the thought of her eating bananas. I feel guilty for that. It’s weird, though. I’m in a Catholic country, but I often feel that I feel far more guilty than these people do. Do US Catholics feel more guilty than French ones? I feel like Irish Catholics feel guilty, but they’re kind of secretive about it. The whole thing about Freud and the Irish, I guess. Or, maybe it’s that I now think of the Irish as that way because of the stupid Freud thing.
As I walk through the grocery store, I feel that thing you feel when your grandfather dies or something. You find out from a family member. They’re probably not crying, but they’re performing the most somber tone they possibly can. They speak real low and slow. They choose words like “sorry,” “loss,” “gone,” “unfortunate,” “time,” “better place,” “rest,” “painless,” etc. It’s supposed to be comforting. You get off the phone, and either you started crying halfway through the call or you don’t start crying until a minute or two after you get off the phone. It’s a torrent. The tension washes out of your face and your shoulders and your hips and you’re sad but you’re relieved. At some point, the crying has helped you release something and maybe even the fact that the grandfather (or whoever) isn’t suffering offers a little solace.
I look at these little French faces, grimacing as they try to choose the right aubergine or smiling as they talk to their partner or telling their little French kid to shut the fuck up or whatever. They look at me and maybe they’re annoyed that I’m there. Maybe I’m moving too slow or I’m in the way. Maybe they can smell my “American” sensibility. Some fat lady’s standing on one side of the aisle and her kid is dancing in the middle of the aisle. “Pardon,” I want to say, but the lady notices and pulls her daughter in toward her. I feel guilty for having been annoyed. Maybe partly because I can’t blame someone for not noticing everything that’s going on all the time and partly because the way that she pulls the child toward her plump body looks the way that it looks when a mother pulls her kid toward her.
I say “her” because French people really don’t seem to be into the new gender politics. I mean, I’d refer to the mother as “they” and “them,” but these French people would be offended, so I either offend the US people or I offend the French people. Since I live in France and I’m a coward, I follow les gens.
But, none of them know that I’m probably dying. They’re happy or they’re preoccupied because their coworker wore the same shirt as them at work or they’re wondering who’s going to win Eurovision or they’re figuring out PSG’s ideal starting eleven or whatever. They’re focused on optimizing their recycling regime. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to look wealthy (even though the wealthy can, with their eyes closed, detect the low-class). They don’t know that I’m dying. And, I don’t know which one of them recently had their grandfather die. They’re just buying bananas and cornflakes and aubergines and trying to get their kids to shut up long enough for them to get their groceries after an annoying day at work when their coworkers were stressing them out with their trips to Ibiza or whatever. Most of life is a lot of petty bullshit. Most of life is also the failure to recognize when someone’s dying in one way or another or when someone close to them has just made them feel crushed. Like Frank said, “That’s life.” But, the truth that Frank didn’t allow himself to say was that not everyone always gets back in the race.
Back home, I put away the groceries, taking some of them to my room for Niveen. I lay down and put on a guided meditation video that Lily sent me a while back. It’s a good meditation video. Lily lives in England, so the lady guiding the meditation is British. It makes the woo-woo shit feel more dignified—as though Victoria herself had maybe been rubbing cheap crystals on her earthly (divine?) flesh. My eyes are closed. I try to relax. I let my legs lay flat. I cross my hands over my chest. I listen to this nice lady’s voice. Do I have cancer? Stop thinking. I listen some more. I never feel my root chakra, but now, it’s like my root chakra is yelling. I wanted to do some good in this world. What about my daughter? What about her social anxiety? Is her mom doing a good job? I’m not so sure. I wanted my baby to go to therapy. I was planning to get partial-custody in the next few months and to pay for my girl to get regular therapy. Now, I’m gonna leave the world having contributed really nothing. I try to relax. “Let the loving-kindness flow into you.” Sounds nice. Let’s do that. My heart is pounding. I feel the acid tingling in my skin. I’m like a razorblade made of meat. Where’s my crown chakra? Am I meditating right? I feel 5% more peaceful than before. That’s really not at all peaceful. I stop the meditation video to go pee.
Niveen’s pulling up. I can hear her electric vehicle. It looks like an electric shaver or a dildo from the future and it sounds like a spaceship. She got the white version, which makes it feel more like Kubrick’s 2001. Or A Clockwork Orange. In the end, is there a difference? I walk out to meet her at her car. We kiss. She’s smiling, making her dimples visible (her right dimple is always deeper than the left one). The Neapolitan pizza is in the trunk (which opens and closes like a 1960s spacepod) with a couple pains au chocolat. We walk into my place, holding hands.
We lay on the bed for a minute. She jokes about the fact that I might be dying. She gets away with this kind of thing, and I love her for that. We go up and start to eat the pizza. We talk about how bad she is at apologizing. When we talk about this stuff, she looks like a prisoner. She feels that I’m right and she feels that it’s unfair. She’s scared but she’s humbled. She wants to protest, but she knows that she shouldn’t. She’d prefer if people could just accept that she’s an adorable angel 99% of the time and let the 1% slide. After all, she lets everything slide with everyone, for the most part—the one exception being when people misjudge her intentions. How can you be mad at me when I was trying to be so sweet? she seems to want to ask. It’s hard to blame her. I don’t blame her. Of course, I also want to have lots of sex with her. I’m not the angel here.
We bring down some popcorn and set up her laptop. We start watching It’s a Wonderful Life. You know the first scene, with the bell? Fuck, I’m excited. She’s gonna love this. You know, because she’s so sweet and George is so sweet. It’s so well-written and Stewart’s “Aw, shucks” charm is perfect for this role. It’s a fucking crazy movie, but it’s so good. I mean, the gender politics aren’t good, but it was made in the mid-1940s. I don’t know if that’s a good excuse. Probably not. (Does the movie imply that George actually fucked Violet in the scene in his office?) But, she keeps laughing during the movie. It’s all the “Aw, gee” and “Holy mackerel!” I get it. I mean, it is funny. And, she seems to like the movie, but she’ll always fall asleep in a movie masterpiece because she’s a philistine.
Her little black curls barely keep from covering her eyelids like windowpanes. Her lips are parted, but barely. How can I be mad at this adorable little piece of shit? I pause the movie.
“What?” she asks.
“You falling asleep?”
“A little.” As though, there’s a way to fall asleep “a little.” I kiss her forehead and grab the laptop. She immediately knocks the bowl of popcorn off the bed and starts laughing—cracking up. If she owned a Da Vinci, she’d spill acetone on it and then start laughing. And, she drives a $400,000 spaceship everyday. I mean, she’s responsible both financially and socially. It’s just funny to me.
I set her laptop in an inconspicuous spot by the lamp where I think that she won’t step on it and cause an explosion and burn down the building. I turn out the lights. She tells me that she likes the movie. She kisses me. She presses her lips hard against mine. She lightly drags her nails across my chest. I see what’s going on here. We make love. We kiss. We cuddle. We tell each other sweet things and sassy jokes. We fall asleep in each other’s arms and don’t separate until morning.
We get up in the morning. I eat a couple slices of leftover pizza. She’s off from work today, but she’s gonna help run a Zoom meeting from home. She drives us to the little café a few hundred kilometers down the road. As we walk from the car to the café, I notice that the sky is grey—all these deathclouds hanging over our heads. I’m probably dying, and my beautiful, sunny little French beachtown is grey. Seems right. We get inside and pick out a table. I say something to Niveen, and she’s confused. That beautiful mouth hangs slightly ajar; I’m just staring. I lean in, “If you leave your mouth open too long like that, you just make me horny.” She smiles.
I order a black coffee and a croissant. The café isn’t far from the university campus, and for the moment, they’re playing some Gainsbourg song. Niveen laughs a little and puts in those little wireless earbuds that match her fascist spaceship. I pull out my laptop to look up who to vote for in the upcoming election, but I get distracted by the question of whether Mercury is in retrograde. It is! I’m dying because Mercury is in retrograde! I fucking knew it.
Niveen’s working on something. I have no idea what. As I ask her what she thinks is the most likely thing causing the high white blood cell count, she’s gently rubbing her thumbs over her clasped hands and her eyes widen slightly. She might even be starting to sweat. She says that she doesn’t know because she’s never seen a white blood cell count that high. I ask her what the range might be from the most innocuous to the most life-threatening. The most life-threatening, she says, is probably leukemia. Great. I have cancer. Eventually, she leaves to go back to my flat. I think about how I have a couple little gold keys and she has a little digital fob to get into her place. Sometimes, this world is strange to me.
I figure out all my voting shit and I get started on my research. The Cultural Lives of Mice, Rats, and Chipmunks, by Valerie Prévost. Fuck, this is so good. Did you know that rats sometimes rub their hands before eating but most housemice don’t? I’ve been thinking that I want to argue that there’s something really Catholic about rats whereas mice seem more Protestant. Of course, while the French are plenty religiously Catholic, they’re not so culturally Catholic, I don’t think. That’s an issue that’s really outside my research, though.
Niveen gets back to the café, and we have a couple salads. Niveen is the only French person who dislikes sparkling water, so I have a Perrier and she has a sugary soda. She’s a nurse, but she prefers sugary drinks over sparkling water. She refers to my sparkling water as “flavorless” sparkling water, as though she’s never tasted a sparkling water before.
We arrive to the hematologist’s office, and the doctor, Maria Krostag, greets us. She’s maybe 5’10” (182 cm or something) and lean. She’s probably 55 and she has long blonde hair. She speaks to us in a German accent that seems thick for how long she must’ve lived in France by now. She leaves us in the examination room and someone checks my vitals and stabs my finger. Maria comes back and says with a big Kansas smile, “The good news is that there are a lot of non-life threatening possibilities for what’s going on!” Uh-oh. She explains some other things that I don’t totally understand. Niveen’s face looks very focused: her brow is furrowed, she nods her head and rubs her chin. Without losing any of her overflowing cuteness, she looks a bit like a sexy medical professor or something. I can almost imagine her: “Nurse, please hand me the hemoglobin cytoblast spectrometer plasmaray. By God, we’ve done it! People will now live to 150!” Maria looks in my mouth (Why does every doctor in every field look in your mouth? Why do they all insist that you drink lots of water? “Oh, yes, your leg is badly broken. You’ll need to drink lots of water.” “Your brain seems to be seeping into your pancreas. Drink plenty of water.”). She listens to my heart, to my lungs. Normal. All is good. She feels my lymph nodes. All good. But, my mom had a lymph thing. “Interesting,” but it doesn’t make a dent. She rubs and probes my stomach with her cold German hands. She stands more erect. “You see, I can feel your spleen. Normally, a spleen is tucked under the ribcage, but yours is much larger than that.” Gently pressing halfway between my ribcage and my pelvis, she adds, “I feel your spleen all the way down here.” Maria slinks away to check my blood smear. Niveen wonders what could be associated with high white blood cell count and enlarged spleen. She Googles it and shows me, but she just shows me the first-page results without really reading anything. The Kansas grin re-enters the room.
“I have good news! It looks like you have something that’s very treatable and everything should be fine. I think you have chronic myeloid leukemia. Basically, the DNA sometimes switches letters in certain places, causing the bone marrow to produce white blood cells of different shapes and this enlarges the spleen. Now, I know that the leukemia word is scary, but nowadays, most people who get treated for this live long, normal lives. If you’re going to get a leukemia, this is the cancer you want to get! You take a pill once a day, get some tests, and not much else. If all goes well, you probably won’t really have side effects and within a few years, you won’t even have to take the pill anymore. The worst-case scenario is that you’d have to get a bone marrow transplant, but that’s unlikely, and you’re young enough that it probably wouldn’t be a big problem. In the meantime, we’re going to do some tests to confirm that this is what’s going on, and we’ll get you a bone marrow biopsy. I’ll order the medication in the meantime so that we can get you started on it as soon as I get back the results of the biopsy to confirm that it is what we think it is. Most likely, everything’s going to be just fine.”
I’m gonna fucking die. I’m gonna try the medication, and she’s gonna tell me that it’s not working. Or, she’s gonna get my biopsy and realize that I actually have something much worse. I’m gonna end up bald, vomiting, always tired, always cold and clammy, alone. I’m gonna die in the night and my nurse is gonna find me the next morning. Four people will be at my funeral. I was finally starting to get my life together. What’s gonna happen with my daughter? Will she keep struggling socially? Will she go to therapy? Will this make things better or worse for her? Will most people remember me as someone who was kind of an asshole and who said and did some problematic things, but not much else? Will they mostly just remember my well-publicized failed suicide attempt from all those years back? I’ll probably die with shit in my pants. Bet on it.
Sexy professor Niveen keeps talking with the doctor, asking her questions, half-smiling at me every few minutes. They keep asking if I have other questions. “If I take this pill and it works, then there’s a 50/50 chance that I won’t have to someday take it again?” She answers, but I can’t really pay attention. I’m gonna die, I keep thinking. She mentions that, if we’re planning to have kids, I won’t be able to have kids for as long as I’m on the medication. After I get off of it, then it’s fine if we have kids, but not until then. This is fine, I guess, since Niveen doesn’t want kids, anyway, but it does make me a little sad. I think it’d be nice to have kids with her. Maybe I could finally be a good dad to someone. Oh, well. I rub my hands over my stomach. I can feel my spleen like a pigskin beneath my epidermis. I suddenly have the sensation that it might just pop out like the scene from Alien. Niveen gently smiles at me. They expect me to say something. “I don’t have any more questions right now.” In the next few days, I’ll get tests done and we’ll set up my biopsy.
We go back to my place and pack our things to head up to Niveen’s Stepford apartment complex. We cuddle for a while. She makes some cancer jokes, kisses me. She tells me that everything’s going to be okay. We get in the car, but I realize that I forgot something in the apartment. She’s parked in the middle of the street. I come out with the books that I need, and a neighbor passes by, asking how I’m doing.
“I just found out that I’m very, very, very, very, very sick.”
“Sick of people?”
“Physically sick, but I should be okay.”
“You think any interesting thoughts lately?”
“Oh, I dunno. I’m heading up the coast with my girlfriend right now. How was your day?”
“Oh, it wasn’t good, but it was effective.”
“You got stuff done?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He looks at the spaceship. “Do you know whose car that is?”
“Yeah, that’s my girlfriend. I should get going.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Have a nice night.”
“You, too.”
We drive up the coast, and she makes sure to play a lot of Radiohead for me. She offers me snacks. Niveen basically insists that snacks are a love language. The middle console of her spaceship contains various little packages of fruits and nuts. I tell her that she’s a mom. She’s always taking care of everyone. Her home is like a snack smorgasbord arrayed for visitors—plenty of reserves in the cupboard. She loves kids. She’s really good with them, but she doesn’t want children. It seems like some galactic tragic irony. I fall asleep in the car. We get to her place and unpack our stuff. We decide to eat some Ethiopian food.
The Asian boy at the counter is efficient, curt. It almost seems like he’s joking. The restaurant smells of strange chemicals, and it’s making Niveen nauseous. She orders vegetables and chicken, even though she usually doesn’t eat meat. We sit at a little table along the street. I ask her to remember one time when we’d made love that really turned her on. She thinks for a minute. “Umm…” She can’t think of anything. “I’ve slept with you so many times and each time was so good that I can’t think of any.”
When she and I had started dating, she’d been dating a couple other guys. Recently, when we were having sex, she was bouncing on top of me, and I asked her to recall a time with one of them that had turned her on. She immediately started to whisper in my ear about a time with the Spaniard—the same Spaniard she’d had sex with four times on their first date (which was while she and I were dating) and who she’d said had made her come each of those times. She can tell I’m upset, and she asks me why.
“Well, I think you know why, but I also don’t want to have my fears confirmed,” I say.
“I don’t think you have any reason to be upset,” she responds.
We go into the housewares store, and she’s being weird. She keeps trying to change the subject, telling me jokes, saying almost completely random things. She asks again. I say basically the same thing as before. She says, “You know I love having sex with you. I prefer having sex with you over Tomás or Michel or anyone else. I think you’re very sexy. What’re you worried about?”
We get through the checkout. I carry out the aquamarine cake stand and the red plaster vase. We walk down the paved road to her mid-rise complex. I say, “You know, you told me you would call me that night, but you had sex with Tomás, instead. We broke up in part because of him. Before having sex with him, you told him, ‘If you keep that up, I’m gonna have to have sex with you.’ You had sex four times and he made you come each time—some of them multiple times. You might prefer to have sex with me, but I can’t help fearing that you find him sexier than you find me in some way. I mean, it’s not that I expect you to think I’m the sexiest man in the world in every way. I know I’m not a combination of Brad Pitt and a pornstar or something. I realize that this is just my ego, just my narcissism. I can get over it on my own, but it makes me feel bad that you can’t think of one single time with me. You’ve had sex with me a hundred times and him five times, and you can instantly recall a time with him and not one with me.” She pauses for a second.
“I can think of one with you.”
“That’s not the point. It doesn’t matter.”
“Look, I’m not the sexiest woman in every way, either.”
“Well, that’s not the point,” but really, I think that she’s absurdly sexy. “I keep telling myself that I can’t expect you to think that I’m the sexiest guy. Maybe you find Tomás sexier in some way. I should just be okay with that.”
“I don’t, though. I find you sexier. You probably made me come every time we had sex. You’re worried about something that’s not real.” No one talks for a minute. “I Know It’s Over” plays in the background.
“Okay, I’m sorry. I believe you.” Her head tilts. She hugs me.
“We didn’t break up because of Tomás.”
“It was partly because of him.” She kisses me. She usually looks at me while she kisses me.
We restart the movie. It’s about halfway through. After a few minutes, she softly says something in an unnaturally high voice, but I don’t know what it is.
“What?” I ask.
“Your beard—it’s poking me.”
I ask her if she’d rather I shave it. She says she doesn’t care. I tell her that I grow it for her. I’d rather shave at least once a week. She says something about Tomás, but I half don’t hear it and I also cut her off, “No, I don’t want to know anything about what Tomás looks like.” She rolls her eyes.
After twenty or thirty minutes, she falls asleep again. I move her laptop again. I come back to bed and kiss her. Her eyes are closed; her mouth forms a crescent. She asks how I am.
“Happy and hard,” I say.
“Oh, really?”
She reaches down and pulls like an arm attached to a water wheel or something. We make love again. I stay inside her for a minute, and she says, “Get out! I know what you’re trying to do!” I laugh and roll over, sighing.
She lays her head on my chest, and I ask, “How’d you like fucking a dying man?”
She smiles and, in that saccharine, high-pitched voice, says, “You definitely don’t fuck like a man who’s dying.”
Lately, I’ve been experiencing a kind of vertigo. I used to always take my health for granted. Before this year, I’d never gotten sick more than once in a 12-month span. I was healthy. I’d see other people who were unhealthy, and feel that we were different, that we lived different lives. I lived on one side of the line—free to do as I pleased, free from care—and they lived on the other side of the line.
Some of them worried. They would sometimes go to the doctor. They would miss class or miss work. They had little cases of pills. They would hold their heads down and speak quietly. They might have a little cough. People looked at them sympathetically, sad for what they were going through. I had nothing to do with that. I felt lucky. I was grateful, but also, I was never even really scared that I’d be on that side of the line because I had always been on the other side of the line and I was sure that the line wouldn’t come and get me any time soon. Now, I’m on the other side of the line.
Working out, eating healthy, no family history of cancer, never having been a smoker, no real reason to worry. But, I’m dying. My body is killing me. It’s attacking me. My DNA is confused, and my bone marrow is shooting out white blood cells like Oprah yelling to let everyone know that they’re getting a car or whatever. My body thinks that it’s doing me a favor. It’s so proud. Like the dog who brings you a dead rabbit. You’re welcome! But, my body is actually killing me. It’s Grendel, innocently fumbling about, killing.
I never had to worry before, but now, I’m on the other side of the line and I’ll never return to the good side of the line. Once you’ve been a sick person, you can never again go back to being someone who’s never had to worry about their health. That’s me, now. I’m over there. Forever.
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