24.

The driver is a pinpoint that hasn’t budged on the screen for five minutes. Then he turns into a wrong street. He can’t find my address. I pace up and down in front of the building, I’d run, but I don’t know where to go first. After another five minutes the app shows him arriving. A Mazda pulls up. The window lowers, he eyes me and asks, tentatively, “Dorian?” I get in and answer, “Yes.” It’s stuffy inside, he’s bald, his arms are covered in tattoos, our sacred homeland. “What’s up? Going to the doctor are we?” he asks without looking back at me. “I’m going to the hospital, yes.” “So, you’re sick?” he is personal and intrusive. A river of others like him is coursing through the city. They pick people up in front of their apartments and in the fifteen minutes you’re in their car they want to know all about you. “I’m going to visit someone,” I hear myself say. I am not. I do not want to find you. What can I be thinking? That I’ll find you in the first hospital I thought of? The one I know inside out? The largest one, the one we went to together? The one where hunks of my flesh are rotting in their dumping grounds? Better I call her mother. “So who’ve you got at the hospital?” He is not giving up. “A friend,” I answer. It’s not you. You’re at home, sore at me. You’re binge-watching TV, reading, writing texts for theater catalogues, irritated by shoddy performances, leaving me to wait, to wise up. “So what’s wrong with the friend?” he asks and asks. I’m feeling sick to my stomach and answer the first thing that comes to mind, so as not to bring on a curse. “Broke his leg.” He works a cigarette out of the pack, looks straight at me and asks, “You don’t plan to report it?” I shake my head. “How?” “Pardon?” I’ve briefly lost track. “How did he break it?” “Fell off his motorbike,” I say. “Like, he got wasted? What does he drive?” You got wasted. I wasted you. I didn’t find the key. I know exactly when I wasted you. The day when we came back from the Mrežnica, I knew you were scared, I knew exactly what you were scared of, but I couldn’t help myself. I was angry at you because we’d missed the parade, I was bitter because we weren’t your first concern, your fear took first place. While we sat there by the river you stared fixedly into the green water, I just wanted us to talk, but suddenly you weren’t looking at me. If we’d at least had a frisbee or badminton rackets we’d have run around a little, our bodies would have come closer through doing something different, that’s what Irena said: “When you find you can’t communicate about a problem, when each of you is in a bad place, maybe it’s wiser not to insist on conversation just then, wiser to do something together, play a game, take a walk, distract yourselves, and when you start feeling better, then you can talk. I didn’t insist, I didn’t, I just went cold. And my cold is immeasurable. It is so freezing cold that everything around me shrivels. And when I touch you with it, you’re gone. When I brought you to the building and you were still silent, that is how we stepped over into the wasteland, you and I, your silence and my chill. Then we lost our way in the wasteland. “I’m not sure I need this,” I said. The first and last time. I didn’t mean it. You looked at me with such horror and surrender that for a fraction of a second I felt pleased. I enjoyed it that you love me that much. This is what wasted you, I didn’t know better. I wanted everyone to see your love, our room wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to show it to everyone. That’s when the germ was born in you, the idea about being wasted, I added weight to the scales you drag around with you, weight that pulled you under.

“What’s this, man, a fricking Latin mass? Yoohoo, we’re here!” Baldie realized he was dealing with a madman, waved his fingers in front of my eyes, and when he withdrew his hand from my face I saw we were there. The white lab coats smoking at the entrance to the green building, diagnoses hobbling through the double doors, people entering, healthy for the last time. The whole building is full of half-goners, ragged and singed flesh, tumors, wrong growths, vertigo, stitches joining torn skin, rotten lungs, all in one place, each one of them having started with the germ of something that, when denied, began growing deep inside them and then mushroomed into a disease. My germ, on the other hand, grew up with me. With my first awareness of myself came the awareness of wrong growth, denial took the shape of my shadow. This is why it was harder for you, you were pure. Your purity is what touched me. At the reception desk sat a sculpture. A female sculpture in her late fifties, an ankle bracelet cutting into the flesh of her leg, her wedding ring buried in flesh, her elbows planted on the table, like all women at reception desks around the world. Her gaze glued to the screen, hoping that the onslaught of the sick would ebb. “Forgive me, I have a question.”

She doesn’t answer, though I know by the way her lips move that she has heard. Three times I spell out your name. You are unreal on my lips, like at the beginning when I mouthed your name in the dark, when I annexed your name to mine so I could get used to how they sounded together. “Family?” she asks with suspicion. I stop before I answer and in that second it becomes clear that I have no right to be at your bedside, we are something not yet legalized even though I feel you are my closest kin. “Sorry, we give that information out only to family members.” “Please, just tell me whether she’s here.” “Sir, we can’t allow anyone from off the street to charge into a patient’s room. What are you thinking? This isn’t a hostel.” I retreat and my black forebodings rise, these feelings nudge me not to the door but up into the wards. After wandering around the floors, I come upon a dark and narrow corridor which opens up before me. On the door frame above the entrance are the words “Intensive Care Unit.” It is empty and quiet, this doesn’t look like you, you fill space differently. It’s dead here. The doors to the rooms are ajar like windows into heaven or the underworld. One or two patients per room. They are lying flat, their heads on a level with their bodies so it’s hard to see who they are from the doorway. I’ll have to take a closer look. Beneath one sheet lies a corpulent body bristling with tubes; I can encircle your waist with one hand, so I breathe a sigh of relief. Short gray hairs poke out from the other bed. You are my Eddie Van Halen, that’s how I tease you in the morning in bed, when you sit up after you wake and your thick blonde tousled hair still hasn’t descended to your shoulders. I leave quickly and step into a different room. There is only one bed here. It’s darker than the previous one. I move quietly toward the bed, under the sheet it’s as if nobody’s there, a slender body kept alive by machines. Just a little closer and then I hear the hurried pounding of clogs on the linoleum. A nurse’s panicked, sharp voice: “What are you doing, who are you? No visitors allowed, get out or I’ll call security.” She is already turning toward the hallway and calling out, “Doctor, doctor!” I want to get just one step closer, but I feel the chaos coming and shoot a last look at the bed. The skin and that hand. Under the long white sleeves of the blouse. The slender wrists and the skin soft to the eyes, so clean it looks polished. That’s why I always thought you must feel better than you do. Only someone wholly untroubled could have such skin. My skin cracked straight away, as soon as someone looked at me cross-eyed, as soon as they addressed me the wrong way or even if I was just feeling like they’d addressed me the wrong way, whenever I went home over the weekend I’d come back with cracked skin all over the middle of my forehead, eyelids and wrists, everything was visible on the outside, I could never keep anything in. But you walked around enveloped in your gleaming mantle, took care to see that I used sunscreen, sat for hours in the baking sun, came running out of the water as if this were nothing, frantically scratched mosquito bites and the red marks from your nails disappeared seconds later. Bare legs and arms, a bare back, the swimming of your bare body through our room, as if the world could do you no harm, I couldn’t get my fill of looking. And that was why I thought you could. I didn’t want to believe there was something unseen going on inside, at least not inside of you, when in my case—everything came down to that and only that.