Later they stumbled into his apartment, took off their clothes and threw them on the floor. He turned his back to her to turn on the light and she bent over to wrestle her feet out of her tights, then she got up and caught sight of his butt. Terrified, she let out a scream. He turned toward her. "Turn around again. What the hell is that?" He had almost forgotten about it. She walked over to him. "Turn around," he just stood there shushing her, grabbing her and kissing her throat, and she searched with her hand for what she had seen and then froze and pulled back, "Have you gotten the bubonic plague? No, stop it! Stop it! There's no fucking way I'm having sex with you when you've got that. . what is it, it must hurt like hell!" He persisted. "It's nothing, come on, Heidi." But Heidi wanted to wash her hands. And she wanted to go home. She forgot her tights. He was pissed. He wanted to screw her so badly, he really needed it.
* * *
A few days later, while he was in a meeting with a Swedish colleague and his partner Stig, it began to hurt so badly that he couldn't concentrate. He squirmed uneasily around in his chair. As the day went on the entire cheek swelled up more and more. In the evening he had a fever. He called Charlotte. He lay on his stomach freezing, and Charlotte said, "Christ, you should see yourself, you look like a baboon." She sighed deeply and carefully laid her hand on his lower back. She said it looked like there was a whole bunch of small boils around the large one. She called their uncle, who was a doctor, and he laughed, joking that he always knew he was a bit of a pain in the ass. Their uncle called the doctor from the emergency room, and when the doctor came at 10:30 and took one look at him, he asked why in the world he hadn't gone to his own doctor a long time ago, and sent him to the emergency room. The boils needed to be cut away.
* * *
And they were. He threw up into a paper bag. The pain was beyond words. Afterwards the nurse put a compress of gauze on it and told him that a home-care nurse would come and change the bandage once he got home. He thought about old people needing to be washed and their diapers changed. They kept him in the hospital for two days, and gave him a round of antibiotics. He lay on his side in the bed, tried to work, dozed, and watched TV. The fever subsided a bit. He insisted on going home. His mother picked him up and he lay in the backseat, quiet and drained. "You just need to concentrate on getting better, honey," his mother said. "Will you please stop it. I'm not SICK," he said. "It's just a mosquito bite for Christ's sake."
He called Stig and told him that he'd be out the next couple of days. He took his pills. Every morning the nurse came, a meticulous, straight-backed woman who looked like she'd been very beautiful once; she pulled the bloody gauze off, washed out the wound, and put on a new bandage. But then the fever went up. He called her Gorgeous. She smiled and shook her head shyly as she took his temperature. He had no appetite, only a constant headache, and in time, pain in his sinuses. After he'd been home eight days, the nurse arranged to have an ambulance bring him back to the hospital for new blood tests. It turned out that he had contracted a staph infection while he was in the hospital. More antibiotics. Then home again. Charlotte came over with soup and red wine. But in the middle of the night he woke up because he couldn't breathe. He roused Charlotte, who had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room with all her clothes on as she usually did. She got up, dazed, and turned on the light. Then she screamed, clapping her hand over her mouth. He was swollen up beyond recognition, his torso, his throat, his face — red, thick, and deformed. Charlotte ran to the phone to call an ambulance, whimpering, hysterical. He tried to get up, but she yelled, "Don't move! Don't move!" In the ambulance they immediately gave him an injection. They took his vitals. Then put on the sirens. He could hardly see out of his eyes. They raced him down the long corridors, and at last they arrived, a sea of anxious faces gathered around him, becoming one gray, blurry mass.
* * *
It was the penicillin. He was allergic to it. The doctor explained to him, "You had a violent allergic reaction. You got here just in time. We have your sister to thank for wasting no time in making that call!" The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder. But the next morning the results of the new blood test arrived, showing that it was clearly a case of resistant bacteria. He yelled at the staff and refused to wear the ridiculous robe, not to mention the underwear. He didn't like the food, he didn't like the smell, everything was disgusting. This place makes you sick, he raged. His room had small low windows. The hospital was built at a time when they all economized on glass. He couldn't stop thinking about this as he lay there. Every time he looked over at the small peepholes and out to the world, he thought about it. 1973. Maybe '75. The oil crisis. All they could think about was saving money on expensive materials like glass. It drove him crazy.
APRIL
He was sick. They sent him home. He came back. Very sick. New medicine. Home. Gorgeous let herself in and rustled about somewhere near him. Her cool hand against his warm skin. Back to the hospital. More tests, a biopsy, blood tests, urine tests. Pus began flowing from his ears, his eyes and nose were clogged and sticky with green gook, he felt nauseous all the time, and eventually got diarrhea, later, blood in the diarrhea. He watched the transparent tube where the sulfa drug went through in drips to his vein at the back of his hand three times a day. His uncle called and demanded to talk to the head doctor. This can't be true. There must be something you can do. There wasn't. "Yes, there is," said Charlotte. "We can hope and pray that you get better." He had no strength to either hope or pray. By this time, he felt like a slab of meat rapidly decaying. But also: It's not true. Denial. Aggression. Later, panic attacks and difficulty breathing. He changed from one medicine to another. And to different types of medicine. The infection spread. He was moved to his own room. He was delirious. Peter visited and took one look at him and cracked up laughing. And he laughed with him, as best as he could, almost grateful for his brother's laughter, his completely ordinary reaction, "Holy shit, you look awful!" But it got worse. And it went quickly. No strength left to sit up, push the call button, scratch his leg, hold a glass of water.