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Oliver’s hand formed a fist; he shook it at his side. Then a motioning nod. “Can we have that?”

Blasco shook his head. “When we finish, it goes off to the microtics lab. Those last dregs get cultured.”

—

Two days after the transplant, a larger room becomes available. It doesn’t feel like such a gift. My white blood cell counts have started crashing, and asking me to get in a wheelchair and take a trip, even if it’s just down the hallway, seems as realistic right now as undertaking astronaut training. “If you don’t change,” a nurse tells Oliver, “you’ll lose the room to another patient.” He gathers up my fall coat, the shoes I wore in here, books I haven’t touched during my stay, my Discman. He spends a good ten minutes taking the pictures from the wall across from my bed, gathers my stray clothes into one pillowcase, my laundry into another.

Arriving with all his gear, Merv sees the half-dismantled room, Oliver sweating. He’s confused, then catches up, and says he’s glad he didn’t show up after I moved. “See that room empty, man, I’d have freaked something fierce.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that he missed the transplant, and Oliver keeps zipped as well, although it isn’t as if Merv is waiting for an update, rather, he is stripping off his bib and gloves, heading out of the room. Soon enough he returns, dragging a number of wheelchairs. Oliver remains inside the room but lugs my travel suitcases toward the doorway. Though Merv’s limp is pronounced, and it’s not easy for him to haul things around, he takes each suitcase, creates a neat stack on the first chair. He and Oliver form a decent team. Both sweat freely, but when Merv takes an album, he looks perturbed. I can sense his impatience. He enters the room now and starts stacking items. Oliver grabs the side of his head and begins pulling at his own scalp, loudly recounting the rules about protective gear—
“Come on, hoss.”
I feel myself looking at Merv, pleading.
Please.

But Merv is oblivious. He grabs one of the trash bags the nurse brought in, places the stacks of posters and pictures and yearbooks inside, and then, in quick, disciplined movements, wraps the rest of the bag, in circular layers, around them. “I’ve wasted more time moving gear than you even know,” he says.

My new room, in comparison to the dungeon closet, is a palace—it could be a large studio apartment—and the far-side wall is essentially a window, with afternoon light filling the large rectangular space, and a view that extends beyond the nearest buildings and water towers. I ask the orderlies to let me sit for a bit on the sunny side, shades drawn. I look out onto the urban sprawl: small old apartment buildings and bigger ones behind them, rooftops and blocked views, spires and towers stacked like toy blocks, juxtaposed, elbowing, sprawling for as far as the eye can see.

Eventually the nurses do their sorry jobs and ease me into bed; the second orderly tends to the Christmas tree. Oliver keeps bringing packed trash bags into the room. He’s sweating freely but will not take a break. Why he’s decided to nail himself to the cross and martyr himself, whether there’s some inner competitive thing he has, I don’t need to figure it out. Merv has seated himself beside my bed, legs extended, and he’s watching my husband with more than a little amusement, now even putting his hands behind his head and stretching out. Honestly, his amusement is infectious. My system is stressed from the room change. I’m happy to have the company. Happier to share moments of absurdity.

“So,” he says, once Oliver is safely out of the room. “You holding up?”

The look I give must suggest he’s insane, stupid as moss. Then I understand. I take my time in smiling at him, doing so without opening my mouth, a fooled Cheshire grin. I feel myself eyeing him, and keep examining him. I am implacable, mysterious.

“Why do you keep coming around?” I ask.

He shifts in his seat, rubs the back of his neck. “Well well then.”

“I don’t mean to offend you.”

“It’s a problem?” He smirks. “I can see he’s wrapped tight—”

“I’ve asked you before, haven’t I? I’m just not sure I understand.”

Is it adrenaline that makes me feel this lucid? I have no answer, but I do feel more alert, much better than earlier. Still, it’s a strain to talk this much; I start coughing. He hurries, offering ice chips, water. My coughing ends, and I thank him, take the glass, sip, feel the cold against the back of my throat.

Right, Merv says. If his only motivation was to help people, why wasn’t he volunteering in a hospital closer to his dad’s place? Why doesn’t he play music for patients on other floors or in other wards?

“Don’t,” I say.

“You need a transplant, you’re getting treated at this hospital, so if there was a pissing chance you were in this ward, I wanted to be here for you.”

My skin crawling, my innards curl.

“Wait.” Now his voice carries a level of authority. “I know you’re not, what,
available
?” He visibly enjoys his joke. “Yeah, bedridden, the radiation, the chemo, that plus the body-wrecking high-end medical procedure—they might have tipped me off. Honest, I’m ashamed of before. When I was laid up in my cast, I kept thinking about the way I’d followed you.
Stalked
you, I guess. The last thing you needed.”

Different thoughts flash across his face. Now his fingers move of their own accord, tapping out the rhythms of some exercise or another.

“A hard cold wind was blowing inside me for a long time,” Merv says. “I knew it, and still let it take me. Told myself whatever, couldn’t stop myself. It was fucked up. I know. Still, even before I was in that cast, this is the truth, when I thought about how you were doing, what you were going through—”

“Mervyn.”

“I took it one way, I know, ran down the wrong road. Maybe I’m on the right one now. A lot of that has to do with you. Lady, I think about your will. Your life force. Reaching out like that?”

He doesn’t have a chance to continue, and I don’t have a chance to answer, for Oliver, with his usual impeccable timing, has returned with another loaded wheelchair. Merv starts to rise, as if ready to help, but Oliver makes a point to proceed as if he does not see him: unstacking the suitcases, leaving the pile just inside the doorway. He wonders whether he should leave some sort of sign at my old room, inform other visitors.

And then he’s leaving again. Merv and I look at each other. We don’t even try to keep from chuckling. I study his perpetually unwashed hair, always falling down in front of his eyes, his unplucked, full brows. Merv again stretches out that lame leg, feels at his thigh. He bends his knee and extends again, almost as if testing the joint, its working stability.

“It’s sweet,” I say. “A very romantic thought.”

“
Insane,
you mean.”

—

My knee touched his, if we are being honest. This was our first contact. While I recovered from my walking laps, we sat and talked in that antiseptic hallway, and our knees touched, and I did not pull away, but allowed my knee to keep touching his. I took my mask down, so it rested around my neck. I tilted my head and moved forward, toward this man—this man I did not know, had not met, until that night. Numb unreality had me, the feeling of entering a new dimension, a place where there were no rules. I pressed my lips against his; he gave nothing in return, a statue, causing me to pull back just a bit. I allowed him a moment. And then my gloved hand cupped the underside of his stubbly chin; I came in for more, and felt him pressing back, acquiescing. His breath was warm and musky, his lips thick, with a supple strength. I took his bottom lip in between my teeth, sucked in its rubbery substance, teasing, gently chewing, and now opened myself, though only a bit, to his tongue. I was the one, directing his hand: taking it from off my cheek, moving it downward, to my breast. I was the one, moving his hand further downward, past the cinched, knotted cord of my bathrobe. Long seconds there. My eyes glassy. I let out a little sound, the fear recognizable in my purr. “That’s enough, I think,” I said, and then took my time, putting my mask back in place, straightening my robe. Me, the demure schoolgirl, without the slightest ambiguity, rising, starting back down the hallway.

—

We are grinning like conspirators. We
are
conspirators. And here is my dear husband, back once again, He Whom Is Conspired Against, on the other side of it all, huffing for breath, his adrenaline receding. However suspicious he might be, the flat truth is, he also is back up, out of his chair, forming a rickety sort of tandem with Merv, the two of them working with a quiet efficiency, putting up half of the wall of pictures. Similarly, they set my clothing into the bureau drawers, hang my coat in the new closet. It is immediately after this last task that Oliver pauses long enough to appreciate the light and space of this new room. He laughs about how tired all this zipping has made him, and says he feels like spending the day in bed, and wants to know can he get in with me, and we do lie together, snuggled in a bed that has been built for one, and the three of us find the cards and play gin rummy. And Oliver stays within striking distance of my point total, and Merv is actually an amateur at cards, which is a bit hard for me to believe—“isn’t there supposed to be all that downtime in the studio?” I ask him—and Merv laughs at himself, and he hangs in as best he can, trying to learn the game, and if Oliver does not join in the laughter, he doesn’t try to trump the guppy straight down the drain, either. And then Tilda surprises us with chocolates and noisemakers, she can’t believe she missed the big event!

Every night a messenger service delivers vials of my blood to a lab in New Jersey, whose scientists examine it and check the numbers themselves and see what I need, and they make up a special mixture of chemicals and medicinal gunk, which gets delivery-serviced to me for the following day. Nurses replace my intravenous tubing every day to make sure there’s no bacteria growth. One nurse absently tells me she wishes she’d bought stock in medical tape. All of them encourage: I should hang in, I should keep hanging in. Friends keep arriving, sitting bedside, strapping themselves in: even Lani, who’s canceled on so many plans, bailed early on so many visits. Face soft and stricken, she presents me with a signed poster from the virtuoso singer-songwriter whose yearly concerts at Town Hall we used to faithfully attend. Underneath the struck, muscular pose the dreadlocked rock star has scribbled my name and
Hang in there
.

And my hair is falling out again, in clumps and balls, also short little gray or black strands, pretty steadily now, floating away and resting on my shoulders, the little clippings that must be dusted off after you get cut and blown and styled, and I can’t pretend this doesn’t send me plummeting, and I suspect something must have happened with my most recent platelet infusion, because I’m itching something fierce, my rash morphing into armies of ants up and down my forearms, and the vise has similarly tightened around my throat, and my feet have swollen into cinder blocks (doctors constantly asking if I feel tingling sensations in my hands and feet; I don’t know what to say, don’t know what answer I’m supposed to give); and, if this isn’t humiliating enough, I’ve started getting the runs, again, really bad, and it’s horrible, unmerciful—I can’t really get anywhere, already I’m so weak that a nursing assistant is supposed to accompany me on all trips to the bathroom—as soon as I feel that little rush inside of me, I’m supposed to buzz, and sometimes the nurse makes it in time to help, but mostly I have to use the basin, and there are the times it doesn’t work out, when the assistant has to scrub my bottom clean, and my sheets have to be changed as well, and it’s infantilizing, I am as helpless as a baby, and I weep at this, I weep so much, can’t help myself, and on top of all this, they have me taking that stupid stool softener more frequently, which doesn’t quite make sense, given that I am shitting the bed three times a day. I write a note to Oliver:
When does it get easier?

Vaginal spotting
is just another way of saying
bleeding
. At least I’m down to two pads a day. Still, I’m constantly telling Simone and Requita and Alvarez that I need more pads, please. I taste blood on the inside of my mouth, and only get the taste out when I swish the special mouthwash to prevent sores or infections. There’s an air pick next to my bed that sucks away phlegm and blood and dead skin. My face and neck bloat further, my cheeks droop around my mouth. I get more estrogen. I get this protein mixture that looks like a big bag of urine. My skin is still sunburned and swollen, only now there are cracks and I’m being told it’s not good to have lots of cracks like that in my face, it means my skin is breaking down, I need to apply a lot of lotions. I have store aisles’ worth of lotions, oceans of lotions, and need to apply more. The remaining strands of hair on my head look like stray feathers on a baby chicken. My hands shake and shake and I can’t stop them. An older physician who shows up for rounds—very neat, with straight up-and-down posture—asks me, Isn’t this view astounding? “If only someone would wash the windows every once in a while,” he says. A nursing assistant is outside my room on watch, sitting on a chair around the clock—in order to help get me to the bathroom, that’s how I choose to think of it. Julie reads the day’s gossip from “Page Six.” I hold her hand and laugh with her and stare at her gorgeous face, and from her expression I know she feels my love for her. When I listen to my mother’s updates about Doe, with every gurgle and noise the deepest well of love opens inside of me. When a resident tells me it’s been six days since I’ve had food or water, I want to ask how she thinks this is supportive, and then I try to remember the last time I could speak for myself, but can’t do it, and just can’t worry about it, either. I can feel my heartbeat through my ears. Machines are being plugged and unplugged around me. The Christmas tree is towering now, its battery packs and level monitors giving off a green glow that filters through the bags and reflects off the windows, imbuing this side of the room with an eerie radioactive hue. Over the hospital intercom, someone says,
Mary Kate, eighteen, needs something for nausea,
and this loops through my head:
Mary Kate, eighteen, needs something for nausea. Mary Kate, eighteen, needs something for nausea.
I grip my husband’s hand.