In the month or so since my return from Marfa I had presented a range of symptoms Andrews assured me were almost certainly psychosomatic responses to the upcoming test: headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness in my face and hands. I feared the test more than dissection because I feared the surgery more than death. So clearly could I picture the cardiologist walking in to inform me that the speed of dilation required immediate intervention that it was as though it had already happened; predicting it felt like recalling a traumatic event.
She pressed the wand hard into my ribs; I started. “Sorry, sweetheart, we’re almost finished,” she said, addressing a child within me. A few minutes later: “Okay, the doctor is going to want to review this,” and she left the room. Why was she in such a hurry to fetch him?
Never forget that you can put your clothes back on and leave the institution before the doctor arrives to read your future in your organs, the modern haruspicy that exorbitant insurance barely covers. You can say it’s all a hoax and walk out into the unseasonable warmth and take your chances with an asymptomatic idiopathic condition incidentally discovered. Whether cowardly or courageous, that’s a choice, and I was tempted on my plastic table. A few millimeters of growth and they’d open me up with what I imagined as a straight razor. I looked at the screen, which had a frozen image of my heart and arteries, and, in the upper right hand corner, saw the flashing numbers: 4.77 cm; 5.2 cm. Cold spread through me; if either were a measure of aortic diameter, I’d be in surgery within days.
I did walk out, but only to get Alex from the waiting room. She followed me back in and I told her I thought it was bad news, had seen these numbers. She hushed me and we waited; a screensaver took over the monitor: WASHING HANDS SAVES LIVES scrolled across the black in red. The real-time lunar communications lacked a sufficient delay; nobody had ever left the earth except to enter it.
He entered smiling. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a purple tie under the white coat. He shook our hands and said, “Let’s take a look.” An endless minute later: “Everything looks okay. You’re showing 4.3.”
“But the MRI said 4.2,” Alex said before I could, her notebook open on her lap. One millimeter in that period of time could indicate imminent surgery.
“The echo has a wide margin of error. Those are equal values.”
“How can 4.2 and 4.3 be equal values?” I asked, relieved he had said there’d been no change, scared because the numbers expressed one.
“What we can see here is that there hasn’t been change beyond the margin of error of the echocardiograph and we’ll watch you closely as it progresses. If it progresses.” I wasn’t happy that if was an afterthought. “Understand it is most likely not changing that rapidly.”
“But what if it’s already changed a millimeter?” I asked.
“Then it will continue to change and we’ll get it on the next test.”
“So 4.3 might mean more than 4.3, might mean 4.3, might mean 4.2,” Alex confirmed.
“Yes.”
“So we’ve learned nothing except that it isn’t ballooning?” I sounded angry, felt nothing.
“We have demonstrated some minimum of stability,” he said. Then, when we didn’t say anything: “This is good news.”
“This is good news,” Alex confirmed. He shook our hands and left to help patients with less virtual conditions.
Two days later at NewYork-Presbyterian I masturbated before Amateur All Stars 3 into a specimen cup. They washed and placed my suspect sperm in Alex and then the two of us walked across the park to Telepan for her birthday dinner. She was thirty-seven. The author was 4.2 or 4.3. They’d given her mom months. We had Nantucket Bay scallops at market price on the strength of my advance. We would supplement IUIs with coitus during the period of ovulation or vice versa, both to maximize our chances and, although neither of us said it, because we could then narrate conception, if it occurred, as at least potentially independent of the institution.
Two days later I was ending or at least suspending my sexual relationship with Alena because Alex could not for a complex of reasons reconcile our intermittent intercourse with my having another active partner. We were at a basement bar in Chinatown that felt, but was not, candlelit, an effect of paper shades. I explained that I needed to break it off to prioritize my unromantic sexual friendship even though these relationships were not, save for this hopefully brief period of trying to conceive, mutually exclusive. I knew she would be angry.
But she wasn’t angry. “Are you sure you’re not upset?”
“Not at all.”
“Hurt?”
“No.”
“Jealous?”
“Jealous of your having scheduled sex with a friend before visits to a clinic?”
“Not even wistful or something?”
“I never really know what wistful means, exactly.”
“I mean like melancholy longing. Nostalgic.”
“You want me to be nostalgic already?”
“You could anticipate nostalgia.”
“I could long to be nostalgic. Yearn for the time when I will yearn for the past.”
“I’m glad you’re not unhappy.” I was unhappy.
“And then in the future I can yearn for the past when I yearned for the future when I would yearn for the past.”
“Okay, I’m glad you understand.”
“Totally. By the way, I’ve barely seen you in eight or nine weeks. Our relationship was already on hiatus.” Somehow it had never occurred to me that this conversation was perfectly unnecessary. Suddenly, instead of trying to let her go, I felt like I was trying to get her back.
“When she gets pregnant or I quit helping her, maybe we can — check in.”
“Let’s be sure to check in.” She laughed. “But this doesn’t get you out of writing the catalogue essay.” She had a big show coming up at a Chelsea gallery.
Several sidecars later we were saying something like a real goodbye. We were near the D stop on Grand Street, nobody out except the rats. She was meeting someone uptown and I was going home. It felt like her nails might break the skin on the back of my neck. It was the sexiest kiss in the history of independent film. I felt horrible descending the steps to the downtown platform because I knew I’d hardly ever see her again.
But when I walked onto the platform, there she was, waiting across the tracks for the uptown train. One or two other people waited far down the platform, a man in a hooded sweatshirt was passed out or had passed away on one of the wooden seats, but otherwise we were alone, having just said our passionate farewell, staring at each other’s ghost in the quiet tunnel. You know the embarrassing experience of saying goodbye to someone only to learn they’re walking in your direction, meaning the social exchange has to extend beyond its ritual closure, at which point there are no established mores to guide you? I’d ended things aboveground only to resume them below it, electrified rails charging the distance between us. She stared at me calmly and — involuntarily, idiotically, awkwardly — I waved and walked farther down the platform.
But wait: I had supplanted the closure of that kiss with a clumsy half wave that would resonate back through and color her memory of me; that couldn’t stand. I walked back toward her but now she was facing the tile wall, scanning a movie poster. I called her name not knowing what I planned to say and, to my surprise and confusion, she wouldn’t turn around; no way she couldn’t hear me unless there were earbuds I couldn’t see. Was she crying and didn’t want me to know? Was she angry? Was she expressing indifference or smoldering intensity? I could see the yellow light of a train deep in the tunnel to my left, rails beginning to shine as it approached. I sprinted up the stairs and down the uptown side; as the train roared into the station across the platform, I reached her, which meant it never happened, waking the next morning in the Institute for Totaled Art.