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He laughed, a little.

“
Really now?” She did her best to bat what was left of her lashes. “Who could say no to such a studiously and meticulously unkempt nature? That undernourished and malodorous body?”

Again he smirked. “That’s me. Your generic, by-the-numbers, brooding antihero.”

Alice’s hand on her pole halted their progress. “I’ll admit,” she said, a bit winded, but sounding happy. “I’d stop you on the street.”

“There we go.”

“To settle a question about my income tax.”

Hers was a mischievous yelp, score for her side. The musician felt at his jaw as if smarting from a slap. “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t really blame her, leaving that freak-ass situation. Funny thing is, I
am
the responsible one. Rest of the band’s out chasing tail, I’m the idiot hauling their gear.” He stared at the floor, thrummed his fingers at the exposed knee in his jeans, as if for emphasis. “I mean, I’m old enough to understand how much of a cliché it is:
guy playing rock music.
Do this long enough, you better get some kind of comfort level with reality.”

“So that’s your angle?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the smart sensitive one? The good man left behind?”

He considered this. “I got one for you. Singer I used to play with. His girlfriend told him,
I can’t come over, I’m on my period.
Swear to God, Donovan goes back
: You’re not bleeding out of your mouth, are you?
”

Alice snorted. “I might have gone out with that man.”

“It’s not even that he tells the story, you know? It’s that
he likes
telling that story.”

“But not you,” Alice said.

Staring away, down, Merv seeming to concentrate on the wheels of the units. He tapped out the opening of an exercise for the piano, his fingers dancing in rapid, minor movements.

“Honest and revealing is your thing,” Alice said.

“Dunno.” His face stayed serious. “We’d have to discuss it over ice cream.”

A current ran through her stomach.

“Oh, you’re more into gelato?”

“Please, either way….Wait—
that’s
how you work?”

The deadpan gave way to mischief, a scraggly grin. “I’d ask you to get some with me.”

A gasp, only with an upturn at the end, something near delight. “It sounds safe and nice.”

“And innocent,” he said. “Don’t sleep on innocent.”

“A creamy cool treat,” Alice thought aloud.

“Only you’ve got licking.”

She caught on: “Mouths and wetness.”

“Throw in a daddy issue—”

“Well.” Alice’s voice made clear this discussion was completed. She looked at him for a time. “You may not look like much—”

“Yeah. But I’m actually less.”

It was his turn to let loose, a full Cheshire smile. She laughed, leaned into him with her shoulder, nudging him just a bit. The musician flipped some kind of interior switch, became intensely alert, his arms extending, ready, just in case. After a moment he understood the nudge had been a form of approval, saw she was steady.

Still he asked, “You okay?

“You know,” he said. “It’s good to vent to a stranger. I guess.”

Moving into another right turn, a bit slower and more carefully this time, Merv concentrated on the rollers of each IV pole, guiding them in a wide arc, making sure all their wheels stayed on the linoleum. Once this had been negotiated, and it was clear Alice was not going to be giving in to his particular strangerness, that no venting would be forthcoming, he started again. “That ice cream line usually gets me in the door. Not that I’m Mr. Great Pickup Artist Bullshit Guy—back when I drank, I used to
really
be something. Only, it got to the point where I’d get a girl home, and I’d be thinking:
You fucking pig. I can’t BELIEVE you fell for my shit. How can you be so stupid you’d let ME fuck YOU?
”

Merv grimaced, shook his head at the memory. “I couldn’t
wait
to get away. Man hates himself that much, big mystery why I’m an alkey.”

Realizing what he’d said, Merv gauged his companion’s reaction, received nothing, Alice remaining inscrutable.

“Whaddaya think,” he said. “Another go-around?”

—

Not another go-around. Another lap was too much, but she wasn’t ready to get back to her depressing room, either. So he placed one hand on her shoulder, another on her hip, and eased her down into a metal folding chair. “Please assure me you haven’t been roaming the halls to pick up chemotherapy patients,” Alice said.

Some sort of timer must have gone off during their walk, because the overhead lights were blessedly dimmer, which furthered the hallway’s already somber feel. Sneakers were squeaking around the near corner, some nurse laughing with another. “It’s fine with me if you
are,
” Alice continued. “At least that’s original. It’s actually the most warped, high-concept, black screwball comedy imaginable.”

Mervyn’s hair was in need of weeding and trimming. His flannel shirt was missing a button at its collar; its opening showed a concavity. He was looking down, and his smirk had transformed, more of a wince, as if he were sucking on a sour lozenge. Checking on her from the corners of his eyes, he began revealing information whose beats were all too familiar: nonexistent blood counts, an enlarged spleen, demands from the emergency room doctor that he be admitted to a hospital right pronto.

The emergency room doctor told him the two main candidates for his illness were lymphoma and AIDS. What does anyone do when you hear this, he recounted. He recalled the numbness. Pretty much in shock when they finally admitted him to this place, putting him in a private room. Two orderlies in blue protective outfits then erected a plastic bubble around him. He watched it go up. The next three days, his father basically sat vigil at the side of Merv’s bed, staring with cloudy eyes and a hangdog face. Friends came by, and from the way they looked at Merv he understood they all assumed he was about to die, were trying to remember his face for future lyrics and songs and shit.

From around the corner, the squishy sneaker sound was again audible. Presently, Carmen said
There you are,
and asked if they were having a nice talk, if anyone needed some tea. Carmen laughed as if she’d delivered the funniest joke in the annals of stand-up, but also had a look on her face as if to say,
I ain’t getting shit.
Alice asked how Carmen’s night was going and Carmen answered that the Rangers had won, so she was fine. She then took Alice’s vital signs, and made sure Alice’s port and catheters were secure, and that there was no surrounding puffiness in her arm. Carmen let Alice know she shouldn’t stay out in the hall for too long, and reminded her to keep her mask secure, and said more pills were ready back in her room. Alice nodded and waited for her to stop yapping and leave so Merv could pick back up with his series of blood tests, his biopsy, his numbers beginning to stabilize, the suspense he’d felt while waiting to find out which probably terminal disease he was going to lace up the gloves against.

Trying to get his mind straight, Merv had taken inspiration from sports figures at press conferences who answered questions about play-off scenarios by saying
: We can only focus on the game in front of us.
He’d also found solace because his probability for AIDS wasn’t huge. Needles freaked him out. And he’d weaned himself off sex with guys for money back when he was a teenager, ha ha, so check that off the list. But he
did
generally dread having a stray puck of his slip past any woman’s metaphorical goalie, and took steps to protect himself there. Although, granted, you still had that nightmare scenario: things having gone too far to head to the drugstore, and so you roll the dice and, atom bomb, lives blown straight to shit. In his head Merv had seen a slimy condom being pushed backward off his reddened member, and he’d wondered if that had been the one that had busted or leaked. He’d remembered being drunk, begging,
He hated those things, it was
like fucking in a bag, he’d be careful, he promised.

He acknowledged to Alice what anyone with half a cerebral cortex already knew: a
huge
reason any guy got involved with playing rock was to get laid, then insisted that it wasn’t like he was the greatest cocksman of his era—and not for a second did he believe he had AIDS. Still, for three days, while he’d lain in that scratchy-ass hospital bed, he’d argued with himself. On the one hand, there were memories: the swell of a particularly full and round apple bottom uncovered by a sheet on a lazy morning; being ridden insanely hard and having a moment of eye contact and the two of them breaking out, laughing; a closed-lidded beauty in profile, the rictus of a smile forming along her pouty lips; his private stash; his most intimate carnal moments.

He didn’t mean to be gross or sexist. He didn’t want to come off to her as a pig. Probably some of those women had been promiscuous; Merv refused to believe, for even a blink, that any of them had been, you know,
dirty.
And still he hadn’t been able to stop himself from zeroing in on likely candidates: the girl with beautiful jet-black hair down to the middle of her back who’d had the strange deal where even in ninety-five-degree heat she’d refused to go without tights (maybe that was why she never smelled fresh); the depressed, Rubenesque, screaming tiger in the sack who’d been training to be an opera singer, and who afterward had lain in bed, smoking a jay and rambling guiltily about her boyfriend in France (two nights later she’d answered her phone and spoken French in low sexy tones; an embarrassed Merv never called again).

Some part of him still clung to the idea that getting AIDS from a blowjob was impossible. But maybe that was one more piece of bullshit musicians told each other? And if it had been AIDS, then two days after the blood tests, wouldn’t the doctors have come in and told him already?

In that hospital bed he’d regained enough energy to get squirmy, but at the same time being in bed for so long made anyone doze, so he’d be alternating between fading in and out of consciousness and feeling jittery, and starving. Now and again he’d wondered about what had happened to that goddamn art chick, if any of the guys had told her about him getting admitted and being at death’s proverbial door. Eventually, Merv had started addressing the next logical issues: how to prepare himself for the confirming news, how bad his cancer was, what kind of road lay ahead.

But could he tell Alice something?

“Whole time, I never felt like something foreign was growing inside me. It just didn’t.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Alice said.

—

This morning, a few of his compadres had visited, started up this little jam session: Donovan with an acoustic, a flask making the rounds, popped beers frosting on the window ledge. Merv had been eyeing those beers something fierce: what better reason to get plowed than learning you have some spooky life-threatening shit? Except that if he
did
really have spooky life-threatening shit, he’d better make some good decisions, so maybe his head needed to be clear. The part of him in favor of being clearheaded had a slight lead on the part of him that was shouting,
BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT.
Then that warning knock that wasn’t any kind of warning. Cue the white-coat fucknuts. Marching into the room like they were on fast-forward. Making a nice straight line across the wall right opposite Merv’s bed. The attending took his place in front of them, goddamn marching band leader, and reported that Merv didn’t have cancer, or AIDS. He had a disease so rare the oncologist never heard of the damn thing, was forced to research it.

Blechette’s. Originated in Eastern Europe and Russia. Sourced in the inbreeding that Jews in shtetls had to do over generations, these inbred cells that over the decades kept being crossbred. About a thousand living people diagnosed, worldwide, and there were probably more except, as the doctor and Merv had learned, it was a tricky disease to identify. Some Blechette carriers could live their entire lives without knowing they had it; others would die early and nobody’d know the root cause. The telltale indicator being something you saw only if you knew to look, explained the doctor. But looking usually happened when you tested for other things, and those other things kept not showing up, and via the process of elimination, way toward the bottom of your list, you tested something called the chitotriosidase activity in blood cells—known as your chito count, which was how this Mensa society had solved this mystery.

Being afflicted with Blechette’s meant being born without a minor, cell-producing enzyme in your bone marrow. The effects started early and increased as you got older, and once they accumulated, the lack of these helper cells in a bloodstream, as well as in key organs, could be, ah,
problematic.
This was known as a progressively degenerating disease. By the time most patients hit their twenties, their spleens had grown to at least eight times normal size, so one side of the stomach looked fatter. Other internal organs also could bulge, making you look pregnant or deformed. Scarring on your kidneys was an issue, and manifest in lots of night trips to the bathroom. An overactive spleen reduced your platelet count, made it harder for your blood to clot, so Blechetters bruised and bled—nosebleeds, bleeding gums, heavy menstrual flow, all that. The disease also lessened the number of white blood cells, meaning anemia was a problem. Bone disease became more likely, your bones turning brittle as they aged, osteoporosis going rampant, your spinal canal thickening with calcium deposits. One common result was losing control of your legs and sexual organs. They told Merv about one hulking guy—six feet five, exercised every day—whose spinal cord disintegrated to the point where if his car was tapped from behind, just a little fender bender, dude would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, so if there was anything he wanted to do with his life, doctors told the man to go and do it. Without any help, the average life span for the sufferer of Blechette’s was forty-one years. Merv was twenty-eight.