14.

Everything has changed, it’s a whole new ballgame, I’m jumping out of my skin, don’t know where to start. This is what they mean by happiness, I think.

See what a bit of good news can do to a guy? I count four clichés in just that last paragraph. I’ve turned into a sap, running down a hillside, tossing dandelions, tra-la-la-ing. This is why you can’t trust a cheerful man’s view of the world: it’s clouded by laughing gas.

I’m a balloon that never left the ground before. All right, a blimp. I’ve been chained down, but today the chains broke. Up I go, swimming toward the light. Wheeee!

How different everything looks from up here. There’s more green than I ever suspected. It’s not so bleak a planet after all.

The morning gave no hint of the changes to come. I dressed in the bathroom, for privacy. By the time I opened the door, Davit had already left for Sophia’s house. My thought at the time: If Eka doesn’t tell him what’s going on, I may have to. Otherwise he won’t spend a minute with his mother, and then it’ll be too late.

Bob played basketball with Garrett—a favor to Cindy, who had to go “out.” Eka and I used our time alone to tape another interview. Though I lost faith days ago in my ability to write her book, and though I yearned to take some aspirin and climb into my own bed, I questioned her diligently about her life as a home health aide, and learned some things I hadn’t heard before. Her agency said she was entitled to two hours off per day, when the client napped or watched TV, but she usually didn’t take the time because she worried that Mrs. N would hurt herself. “I say to her, ‘Don’t get up, please, stay just here,’ but she don’t listen.” The doctor said Mrs. N should exercise, so Eka took her for a walk every day; she always wanted to turn around before they got halfway down the block. “Each day, she says, ‘I can’t do this,’ but I say, ‘You can, you can.’ She is more strong than what she believes.”

Scribbled notes, furtive glances at her pale wrist with its subtle blue veins. I kept badgering myself to ask her to marry me—wishing for a gaze that said, Yes, what is your question? Ask and I will say yes, no matter what—but couldn’t meet her eyes long enough to receive encouragement.

It wasn’t just the standard failure of nerve. I didn’t ask because I dreaded what it would be like to share my basement with her and Davit after she said no.

Lunch. The bacon fell out of her BLT. Mrs. N’s chair scraped the floor loudly above us. Eka said she wished she could have tried fashion design as a career.

The unspoken question swelled in me like a tumor, until I couldn’t bear to sit with her. Citing a just-remembered dental appointment, I fled, and spent the next hours at the Newark Museum, viewing colonial silverware and twentieth-century pottery while urging myself to forget my fantasy of connubial bliss.

She was on the phone when I returned. She seemed stressed, but relieved to see me. “Now my friend comes— yes, we can go to hospital. Yes, we come now.”

Dr. Oh wouldn’t say why he wanted to see her again, only that it was urgent and he would meet us at his office. By then it was past three, on a Saturday afternoon; I was terrified.

“How did he sound?”

“Very serious.”

I imagined him telling me confidentially, She’s going to die this week; you have to have her admitted. In case I’ve been wrong about God’s existence, I prayed: Don’t let her die. Then, in case God turned out to be a legalistic bastard, I revised my prayer: Let her get better. But if she can’t, then don’t make her suffer through a long, agonizing death. And don’t punish her because this request is coming from me.

Dr. Oh had on a magenta polo shirt and neat black slacks. He sprang to his feet as we entered—the reception area was deserted except for him—and shook Eka’s hand vigorously, then mine, less so. After leading us to his office, he commanded us to sit, and spewed his report while pacing. “I knew it couldn’t be the mercury. The chelator brought the levels down, and you were still tremoring. But there’s another toxin that produces the same symptoms. I wrote a paper on it. Have you ever heard of parathion? It’s an insecticide—an organophosphate. Farmers use it all over the world. When the runoff gets into a river, and the river is used for drinking water, or if people eat fish from it, some will develop your symptoms.”

I couldn’t understand why this had him so agitated. One poison or another—what’s the difference?

“I did a broader screen than the first one, I took blood cells and centrifuged them down, looking for an enzyme called cholinesterase, which is inhibited by this toxin. Guess what? The lab called me just before—and they confirmed that you don’t have mercury poisoning.”

He beamed, and seemed to expect us to cheer; we must have disappointed him. Eka watched him, uncertain, her head bobbing.

He came alongside her, put a hand on her shoulder, and laughed. “Your condition is reversible. You’re going to get better.”

While we tried to absorb that, he took what looked like a ChapStick and a Magic Marker from a drawer.

“These are auto-injectors, atropine and 2-PAM chloride. As soon as I administer them, you should start to feel the difference. I’ll also give you 2-PAM pills to take home. You’ll take one a day for five days, just to be thorough. By the end, you should be back to normal.”

He didn’t waste time. After ordering her to roll up her pant leg, he swabbed the side of her thigh, then squatted, held the first injector like a pen, and pressed it into her flesh. Eka looked at me like a confused fawn as the needle went in. Dr. Oh held the injector in place for a few moments— “You’re allowed to breathe,” he told her—then carefully withdrew it and massaged the site.

“This doesn’t happen often,” he said. “I’ve only corrected a mistaken diagnosis one other time. And that case was incurable.”

After he’d repeated the procedure with the second injector, he asked how she felt.

She looked like she might cry. “I have fear I understood wrong what you say. Please say again, slow.”

Dr. Oh grinned, beside himself. “You’re not going to die. Your tremors will go away. You’ll have a normal life. The medicine will make you better.”

Without asking whether or not she understood, he went to the electric keyboard on the table behind his desk, and expertly played a yearning, Russian-sounding waltz. Maybe he meant to evoke Dostoyevsky, sentenced to death, hauled before the firing squad in his pajamas, then pardoned at the last moment, a cruel Czar’s terrifying lesson: You were to die, but I, in my mercy, let you live.

Or, perhaps he generously meant to provide our story with a sound track. Tragedy defeated at the last possible moment, leaving the two lovers an unexpected future together.

As we waited for him to finish, Eka’s head kept nodding—sobbing, I thought, but no, it was still her poisoned nervous system. I put my hand on her back, and felt her bones, her breathing, her heat.

“I want to see you again in two days,” he told her, “to make sure the medication is working.”

“Please, you have tissue?” she asked. He handed her one, and she wiped her eyes.

I asked for one, too. Just in case.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, fervently sincere. Searching in vain for a more eloquent tribute, she added, “Thank you.”

Delirious with joy—thunderstruck—I was tempted to thank God. But, as always, there was a shadow. An hour before, she might have married me, but with half a lifetime miraculously restored, she will almost certainly hold out for someone better.

“How could they get it so wrong?” I asked Dr. Oh, funneling anxiety into outrage at the incompetent ER docs who’d handed her a false death sentence and then almost fulfilled their own prophecy. “She would have died if she hadn’t come to you!”

He seemed to find both my praise and my blame-throwing distasteful. “It was a difficult distinction to make. Many specialists would have gotten it wrong.”

I’ve noticed this about doctors. The terror of malpractice is so pervasive, they shut down the first hint of accusation, even when the criticism is aimed elsewhere.

“Still . . .” I grumbled.

“What’s it like?” I asked her in the car. “To think you’re dying and find out you’re going to live?”

We had just left the parking deck and turned onto Lyons Avenue. The sun was a pale region in a watery gray sky.

She put her hand on my upper arm. “How it feels? Grateful. To you, Angus. You saved me.”

A van vacated a parking space at the next corner. That was enough of a sign for me. I pulled into the empty spot and, without hesitation, without dithering, unbuckled my seat belt, ignored the steering wheel pressing into my side, and leaned over to kiss her.

She didn’t pull away, didn’t turn to escape. Instead, she made her lips soft. I kissed her for maybe fifteen seconds, until a muscle in my neck cramped from twisting.

It’s been years since I kissed anyone, and longer since I wanted to. The awkward position distracted me, but those soft lips: I never dared hope for such an extravagant gift.

Back on the road, I asked how she wanted to celebrate.

She shook her head. Her wet eyes shone. “Davit—I call him.”

That was her celebration. She called her son and spoke to him quietly, in Georgian. At one point she guided a stray lock behind her ear with one finger. It was the gesture of a teenager—of a woman from whose shoulders old age has been lifted.

“He babysits with Sophia,” she explained. This amused her: “My baby babysits.”

Smiling, sniffling, she blew her nose.

“My mother, I will see again.”

That burst the dam. Sobbing followed.

I kept driving. It seemed like the right thing to do.

If I ask her to marry me, why would she accept? She’s young(ish), attractive, and can work to support herself. She has a son to love and take care of. Why would she marry an obese, unemployed pessimist? Gratitude has its limits.

Her book is unwritable now—you can’t tell the tale of a lovely woman poisoned by pollution if she recovers—but also unnecessary. The emergency is over.

How Bob took the news:

Overcome, he hugged her and cried with her. Why didn’t I think of that?

She’s resting, watching House on my bed. (There goes the tormented physician with his cane, limping and snarling. How nicely he incarnates the hidden suffering of us all!) Now Eka will stop twitching, regain her strength, study, and become a nurse. And I . . . ?

If I lose eighty pounds, exercise, give up misanthropy, and find a job, maybe there’s a chance.

(Yet here I am, eating Little Debbie Swiss Rolls as I type.)

The last time I tried to get myself in shape, by walking in Branch Brook Park, my knees hurt so much that I had to sit on a tree stump, because I couldn’t reach a bench.

Okay: this time I’ll join a Y and swim instead.

Am I willing to relinquish laziness, scorn, and overeating in exchange for her company? Let’s say she accepts my proposal. Could I really behave myself forever? I’d have to submerge my opinions, my antisocial impulses, my fundamental nature.

And then there’s the other matter. Can I accept her, for the rest of my life?

Can’t stay long. She’s waiting for me.

Davit visited with her briefly when he came home. I found him sprawled across the foot of my bed while she, resting against two pillows, listened to him dotingly.

“What did he do all day?” I asked after he’d excused himself.

“Sophia babysits on three children. He made clay food with them.”

On TV, a righteous detective grilled a slimy, darting-eyed worm. Eka asked, “Angus?”

Her gentle tone heralded a tender rejection, I assumed. She’d thought about my kiss, and wanted me to know that, although she never will forget the too many helps I give to her, her feelings on me don’t go like that.

“Yes, Eka?”

“You don’t have to sleep on floor tonight. The bed is big for both.”

So you see, I’ve been proven wrong once again. I wish I could freeze-dry the elation, to nibble on in leaner times.

Why am I typing this instead of lying beside her? Because I had to tell you.

Wish me luck.