“You’ll barely feel this,” he said, looking directly at me and smiling. I was scared but calm, the same feeling I would have years later when I kissed Keisha for the first time. He angled the tip of the knife into the pad of my thumb. The cut was no bigger than a pin prick. He pushed his thumb against mine and explained that we were now blood brothers, which meant that no matter what happened, we were bound to one another.
For the rest of game we held hands and when, in the final minute, John Riggins chugged his way across the goal line to put the Redskins up by four, we both jumped up and screamed, arms raised and whooping. As the clock ran down, my uncle stood in front of the TV doing the Hog dance, and I thought, as I had the day before at the river, that we would go on and on like this.
It’s hard, when thinking of Roger, to isolate one image from another. The problem is that these images do not add up to a whole. They are partial. Like him, it is tempting to say. But that wouldn’t be quite right. He was as whole any of us, but he worshipped his own gods. More times than I can count, I’ve been asked why I went into medicine. By admissions committees, professors, now students. Each time, it’s Roger’s face—a young grinning heartbreaker a moment away from trouble—that comes to mind. But that’s never the answer I give.
God forbid you bleed a little, Emily would say. She thinks I live in a bubble because I go to cocktail parties at which someone is invariably talking about his wine collection and someone else is casually relating how she met the Obamas. Emily hated these parties as much as she hated the fact that I sometimes like them. More and more often, we would arrive late and depart early to hang out at the bar where she works.
When she left, Peter suggested that I get a pet. A companion animal, he means. With her gone, my apartment is as blank as a hotel suite. Emily somehow took the charm with her. Now the salvaged chair in the living room exudes a whiff of wreckage rather than warmth. The bookcase she painted pink has lost its whimsy and looks like it belongs at a Head Start. The thriving plants and the sunlight streaming through open windows and her photos clustered on the walls—that was all her.
She left home and Alabama at sixteen. The great escape, she calls it. From there, she worked her way west. The word hope is tattooed on the inside of her forearm. She got it in rehab. Several of her friends have the same tattoo. Just talk to me, she would say, coming up behind me while I worked at my desk, her arms around my chest, her hand on my heart. I wouldn’t look up. We’re all gonna die, Alex, no matter how many journal articles you read tonight. Come to bed, she’d say, naked and tangled in our sheets. Or, later, come out with me, her jeans tight, her lipstick fresh. That I kept studying was a problem.
The one photo she left behind is of Peter. In it, he’s standing outside his parents’ brick rancher in Durham. He’s wearing a gray t-shirt and his eyes are staring straight at the camera. She took it at three in the morning when the moon was nearly full. Somehow she got the lighting on his face right. Looking at it feels like being with him. Behind him, the lawn was meticulously cut, his father’s handiwork. The house was dark and shuttered except for the porch light, its glow competing with the moon’s in the photo.
It was the night of my med school graduation from Carolina. She and Peter had flown in together from San Francisco; late that night, after dinner with my family and then drinks at a bar, Peter had asked if we could drive by his parents’ house. He hadn’t been home since his dad kicked him out back when we were in college. Emily was the one who suggested he actually get out of the car. She snapped thirty, forty shots, her voice soft as she coaxed him from the edge of the lawn to the front stoop. That was six years ago now.
The week she moved out, I lived with Peter and Felix. From their guest room, I could see my building’s front door. I spent more hours than I care to confess watching for signs of Emily’s return. I also logged into her email and read the horribly love-drenched messages she and the tycoon were exchanging. I got as far as writing a message to the tycoon from Emily’s account cancelling a weekend trip to Sonoma. When I called Peter asking him to edit it for believability he ordered me to turn the computer off. I ’ll be home in an hour, he said.
I was high that week. Which meant that when I wasn’t stalking Emily, I was eating Fritos and chocolate icing by the spoonful. I don’t have an addictive personality, so I can get high twice a year or every morning and it makes no real difference. People like to put addicts in a separate category, on the other side of a bridge so long you cannot see its end. But, more than anything, the patients I see feel familiar to me. I don’t need to know why Weasel has relapsed six times, or why another patient, an oncologist who has been positive for ten years and has an undetectable viral load, spent last weekend on a meth-fueled binge on a gay cruise. I differ with the twelve-step orthodoxy on this point. I don’t believe these things require exhaustive explanation. They are simply the risks we each choose, not so different really than boarding a plane or deciding to live on the West Coast.
More and more, I hear people talking about the big one as if they can somehow stop it. Even Peter and Felix have a survival kit. Assembling it was on their wedding planning to–do list, a state of preparedness somehow linked to matrimony. From deep in the bowels of FEMA’s website, they downloaded an Earthquake Survival Guide, which promises to keep you safe for the first thirty-six hours. That’s how long they think it will take to get aid into the city. This coming from the geniuses who didn’t even know there were people in the Superdome.
So now a plastic garbage can on wheels sits in their backyard, filled with glow sticks, canned food, blankets, cash, a first aid kit, and gallons of water. I can’t imagine pushing that thing through the busted streets of an apocalyptic San Francisco and trying to outrace death. If the earth splits open at these coordinates, I will either fall through or stand on the rim and administer first aid.
Emily. Weasel. Roger. Peter. Felix. Love. Death. Risk. All these pieces fit. My seeing Emily yesterday morning means nothing more than that we are still in each other’s orbits. But it also distracted me enough that I missed a patient’s allergy to an antibiotic and prescribed it to her. Danger Mouse caught my mistake. Near misses are what I’m talking about here.
On January 30, 1983, I turned eight, and the Redskins kicked off against Miami in the SuperBowl. Although it was a school night, my parents let me throw a party. I invited Peter and Keisha and requested that they each dress as a Redskin. We made an unlikely trio—me, a female Joe Theismann, Peter a faggy, reluctant Art Monk, and, in Keisha, a Darrell Green with braids.
We spent the pre-game show assembling a SuperBowl shrine out of my Legos and Redskins curios. Its centerpiece was a battery-operated talking Redskins helmet. Peter was bored out of his skull but perked up slightly when he saw the cheerleaders’ routine. We watched the game in near silence on our thirteen-inch black and white Zenith, its rabbit ears wrapped in foil. My father sat in his recliner, working on a beer and trying to stay awake. Every few minutes my mother, who hated football, cheerily inquired if anyone had scored. My brother was asleep in the room we shared.
When Theismann scrambled on a third and ten and slid for a first down during the second quarter, I thought of Roger, and how, had he been there, we would have high-fived. Minutes later, when the Dolphins cruised into the lead with a seventy-six yard touchdown pass, I muttered “Shit.” On either side of me, Peter and Keisha giggled but my parents failed to react. “Fuck,” I said, this time more loudly.
“Watch it, young lady,” my father said, raising his eyebrows. I scowled at him.
He’d kicked Roger out of our apartment. Twice that week, I had found my mother crying at the kitchen table and the night before the SuperBowl, she and my father had fought again as they’d baked my birthday cake. My mother wanted to give my uncle one more chance; absolutely not, my father had said. But it still seemed possible that Roger would show up at half-time, just as it seemed possible that the Redskins would score twice and hold the Dolphins scoreless for the rest of the game.
Going into the