I fell asleep before we got around to any sex.
Anna had scheduled an early morning scuba class without telling me.
Vin had us in full wet suits—the tanks, the weight belts, everything—sitting on our knees at the bottom of the deep end of the pool. We had to remove every piece of the scuba apparatus, including our masks, hold our breath, then put it all back on again. Afterward, Vin said I was behind in my workbook and had better get cracking.
“Why haven’t you finished the workbook?” Anna wanted to know.
“A date with a belt sander took up my time.”
Driving home, I felt a chalky tickle in the back of my throat, like I was getting a cold.
“Don’t say you are getting a cold,” Anna said. “If you tell yourself you are sick, you allow yourself to be sick.”
Her phone went off and she took the call hands-free; it was one of her clients in Fort Worth. A fellow named Ricardo told jokes about color templates, making Anna laugh as she pulled into my driveway. She stayed in the car to finish that call. I went inside.
“We have to go to Fort Worth,” she announced when she finally came into my kitchen. I was making chicken noodle soup from a packet.
“Why?” I asked.
“I have to hand-hold Ricardo through a presentation. That is not soup, by the way, that’s a sack full of sodium.”
“I’m allowing myself to be sick. Soup will help.”
“That shit will kill you.”
“I have to go to Fort Worth with you?”
“Why not? You aren’t doing anything. We’ll stay overnight and see the sights.”
“Of Fort Worth?”
“It will be an adventure.”
“My nose is running and I feel like a hive of bees are swarming in my head.”
“You can make it stop if you stop saying such things,” she said.
In response I sneezed, coughed, and blew my nose into a tissue. Anna just shook her head.
Here are the sights I saw in Fort Worth:
The huge airport. Jammed with so many travelers it seemed like the Texan economy had collapsed and the population was fleeing.
Baggage Claim. Under renovation and therefore a place of chaos and borderline fistfights. Anna had checked three suitcases, which were among the last to come shooting down the chute.
A bus. Painted all around in huge letters that said PONYCAR PONYCAR PONYCAR. PonyCar was a new travel option in competition with Uber and the rental companies. Anna had a voucher for a free weekend—why, I don’t know. The bus took us to a lot filled with tiny cars also painted with the PonyCar logo. I have no idea where PonyCars are manufactured, but they are clearly designed for small people. The two of us and our luggage had to be squeezed into a vehicle sized to fit the two of us and one-third of our luggage.
The DFW Sun Garden Hotel. Not so much a hotel as a collection of efficiency suites and vending machines meant for business travelers with limited expense accounts. Once we were in our little room, I lay down. Anna changed into professional clothes while she was on her cell phone with Ricardo. She waved goodbye to me and was out the door, trailing her professional rolling bag behind her.
In a fog due to my lousy health, I could not get the TV to work. The cable system had a menu unfamiliar to me. All I could get on screen was the Sun Garden Hotel Channel, which showed the glories and wonders of all the Sun Garden Hotels in the world. New branches were opening soon in Evansville, Indiana; Urbana, Illinois; and Frankfurt, Germany. I could make no sense of the phone system, either. I kept getting the same main voice menu. I was hungry, so I dragged myself down to the “lobby” to shop in the vending machines.
The machines were in a separate little room shared with a small buffet table that held bowls of apples and dispensers of breakfast cereals. I took some of each. One of the vending machines sold pizza by the slice, another offered toiletries, including a few cold remedies. After four tries at getting the machine to accept my crinkled twenty-dollar bill, I bought some capsules, some pills, a few single-dose liquids and something in a small bottle called Boost-Blaster! that bragged of its megadose of antioxidants, enzymes, and whatever good stuff is in Swiss chard and certain fish.
Back up in the room, I made a cocktail of two of every purchase, tearing off the safety foil, figuring out the childproof caps, and chugging down the Boost-Blaster! in one pull.
I woke up with no idea where I was. I heard a shower running. I saw a crack of light from under a door and a stack of textbooks on the nightstand. The bathroom door flew open in a flash of illuminated steam.
“He’s alive!” Anna was naked, drying herself off. She had already been out for a run.
“Am I?” My cold was no better. Not at all. The only new feeling I had was wooziness.
“You took all this stuff?” She waved at the small desk littered with the debris left over from my self-medication.
“Still sick,” I said in feeble self-defense.
“Saying you are still sick makes you still sick.”
“I feel so rotten your logic actually makes sense.”
“You missed it, baby. Last night we went out for organic Mexican food. It was Ricardo’s birthday. There were about forty of us and a piñata. After, we went to a racetrack and drove miniature hot rods. I called you, texted you, but nothing.”
I grabbed my phone. Between 6:00 p.m. and 1:30 in the morning AnnaGraphicControl had called and texted me thirty-three times.
Anna started getting dressed. “You better pack. Gotta check out of here, and then go to Ricardo’s office for a meeting. To the airport from there.”
Anna piloted the PonyCar to an industrial park somewhere in Fort Worth. I sat in the reception area, feeling horrible, blowing my nose again and again, trying to focus on a book about astronaut Walt Cunningham on my Kobo digital reader, but I was just too foggy. I played a game on my phone called 101, answering true/false and multiple-choice questions. True or false: President Woodrow Wilson used a typewriter in the White House. True! He hunted and pecked a speech on a Hammond Type-o-Matic, hoping to drum up support for World War I.
After a long sit I needed some air, so I took a slow walk around the industrial park. Every building looked the same and I got lost. I found my way back when, luckily, I spotted a parked PonyCar that turned out to be ours.
Anna was there, cooling her heels with her clients, waiting for me. “Where were you?”
“Seeing the sights,” I said. She introduced me to Ricardo and thirteen other textbook executives. I shook hands with none of them. I had a cold, you see.
Returning the PonyCar was as effortless as promised, but the courtesy bus to the airline terminal took forever to show up. To make our plane, Anna and I had to run through the DFW airport like two characters from a movie that was about either wacky lovers on vacation or federal agents trying to stop a terrorist attack. We did make the plane, but not in time to get seats together. Anna sat up front, I was way in the back. My clogged ears were killing me on departure and hurt even more hours later on descent.
On the way to my house, she stopped at a liquor store for a small bottle of brandy. She had me drink a large shot of the booze, then put me into bed with a pillow tuck and a kiss on my forehead.
I was ill, pure and simple, with bedrest and liquids being the only remedies, as has been the case with colds since the first Neanderthal came down with the sniffles.
Anna, though, had her own ideas. For two days she was on a mission to cure me sooner rather than gradually. She had me sit naked in a chair with my feet in a tub of cold water. She wired up my limbs to something akin to an EKG machine, made me take off any metal I was wearing, which was none, then flipped a switch. I felt nothing.