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But no. It was probably just some peacock or baboon or whatever. Or that pitiful excuse for an elephant. She sat up, reached into her cooler for a root beer and shook her head. Tacky, she thought. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

HOPES RISE

I TOOK MY ACHING BACK to my brother-in-law, the doctor, and he examined me, ran some X-rays, and then sat me down in his office. Gazing out the window on the early manifestations of spring — inchoate buds crowning the trees, pussy willows at the edge of the marsh, the solitary robin probing the stiff yellow grass — I felt luxurious and philosophical. So what if my back felt as if it had been injected with a mixture of battery acid and Louisiana hot sauce? There was life out there, foliate and rich, a whole planet seething with possibility. It was spring, time to wake up and dance to the music of life.

My brother-in-law had finished fiddling with his unfashionable beard and pushing his reading glasses up and down the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Peter,” he said in his mellifluous healing tones, “we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”

A hundred corny jokes flew to my lips, but I just smiled and nodded.

“We’re close, right?”

I reminded him that he was married to my sister and had fathered my niece and nephew.

“Well, all right,” he said. “Now that that’s been established, I think I can reveal to you the first suppressed axiom of the medical cabal.”

I leaned forward, a fierce pain gripping the base of my spine, like a dog shaking a rat in its teeth. Out on the lawn, the robin beat its shabby wings and was sucked away on the breeze.

My brother-in-law held the moment, and then, enunciating with elaborate care, he said, “Any injury you sustain up to the age of twenty-one, give or take a year, is better the next day; after twenty-one, any injury you sustain will haunt you to the grave.”

I gave a hoot of laughter that made the imaginary dog dig his claws in, and then, wincing with the pain, I said, “And what’s the second?”

He was grinning at me, showing off the white, even, orthodontically assisted marvel of his teeth. “Second what?”

“Axiom. Of the medical cabal.”

He waved his hand. It was nothing. “Oh, that,” he said, pushing at his glasses. “Well, that’s not suppressed really, not anymore. I mean, medical men of the past have told their wives, children, brother-in-laws — or is it brothers-in-law? Anyway, it’s ‘Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”

This time my laugh was truncated, cut off like the drop of a guillotine. “And my back?”

“Get plenty of rest,” he said, “and drink plenty of fluids.”

The pain was there, dulling a bit as the dog relaxed its grip, but there all the same. “Can we get serious a minute?”

But he wouldn’t allow it. He never got serious. If he got serious he’d have to admit that half the world was crippled, arthritic, suffering from dysplasia and osteoporosis; he’d have to admit that there were dwarves and freaks and glandular monsters, not to mention the legions of bandy-legged children starving in the streets even as we spoke. If he got serious he’d have to acknowledge his yawning impotence in the face of the rot and chaos that were engulfing the world. He got up from his desk and led me to the door with a brother-in-lawly touch at the elbow.

I stood at the open door, the waiting room gaping behind me. I was astonished: he wasn’t going to do anything. Not a thing. “But, but,” I stammered, “aren’t you going to give me some pills at least?”

He held his flawless grin — not so much as a quiver of his bearded lip — and I had to love him for it: his back didn’t hurt; his knees were fine. “Peter,” he said, his voice rich with playful admonition, “there’s no magic pill — you should know that.”

I didn’t know it. I wanted codeine, morphine, heroin; I wanted the pain to go away. “Physician,” I hooted, “heal thyself!” And I swung round on my heels, surfeited with repartee, and nearly ran down a tiny wizened woman suspended like a spider in a gleaming web of aluminum struts and wheels and ratchets.

“You still seeing Adrian?” he called as I dodged toward the outer door. My coat — a jab of pain; my scarf — a forearm shiver. Then the gloves, the door, the wind, the naked cheat of spring. “Because I was thinking,” the man of healing called, “I was thinking we could do some doubles at my place”—thunderous crash of door, voice pinched with distance and the interposition of a plane of impermeable oak—“Saturday, maybe?”

At home, easing into my chair with a heating pad, I pushed the playback button on my answering machine. Adrian’s voice leapt out at me, breathless, wound up, shot through with existential angst and the low-threshold hum of day-to-day worry. “The frogs are disappearing. All over the world. Frogs. Can you believe it?” There was a pause. “They say they’re like the canary in the coal mine — it’s the first warning, the first sign. The apocalypse is here, it’s now, we’re doomed. Call me.”

Adrian and I had been seeing each other steadily for eleven years. We shopped together, went to movies, concerts, museums, had dinner three or four nights a week and talked for hours on the phone. In the early years, consumed by passion, we often spent the night together, but now, as our relationship had matured, we’d come increasingly to respect each other’s space. There’d been talk of marriage, too, in the early years — talk for the most part generated by parents, relatives and friends tied to mortgages and diaper services — but we felt we didn’t want to rush into anything, especially in a world hurtling toward ecological, fiscal and microbial disaster. The concept was still on hold.

I dialed her number and got her machine. I waited through three choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—her joke of the week — before I could leave my message, which was, basically, “I called; call me.” I was trying to think of a witty tag line when she picked up the phone. “Peter?”

“No, it’s Liberace risen from the dead.”

“Did you hear about the frogs?”

“I heard about the frogs. Did you hear about my back?”

“What did Jerry say?”

“‘Get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids.’”

She was laughing on the other end of the line, a gurgle and snort that sounded like the expiring gasps of an emphysemic horse, a laugh that was all her own. Two days earlier I’d been carrying a box of old college books down to the basement when I tore everything there is to tear in the human back and began to wonder how much longer I’d need to hold on to my pristine copy of Agrarian Corsica, 800 B.C. to the Present. “I guess it must not be so bad, then,” she said, and the snorting and chuffing rose a notch and then fell off abruptly.

“Not so bad for you,” I said. “Or for Jerry. I’m the one who can’t even bend down to tie his shoes.”

“I’ll get you a pair of loafers.”

“You spoil me. You really do. Can you find them in frog skin?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “It’s not funny,” she said. “Frogs, toads and salamanders are vital to the food chain — and no jokes about frogs’ legs, please — and no one knows what’s happening to them. They’re just disappearing. Poof.”

I considered that a moment, disappearing frogs, especially as they related to my throbbing and ruined back. I pictured them — squat, long of leg, with extruded eyes and slick mucus-covered skin. I remembered stalking them as a boy with my laxly strung bow and blunt arrows, recalled the sound of the spring peepers and their clumsy attempts at escape, their limbs bound up in ropy strings of eggs. Frogs. Suddenly I was nostalgic: what kind of world would it be without them?