His wife had called him morbid.
The girl said the city wasn’t meant to be seen but tasted, right down to the cat-piss grime on the Pasquino, where radicals had been pasting complaints for centuries. Her tongue on the stone wasn’t what Tom meant by romanticism, but he let her guide him down the narrow streets of the Jewish Ghetto to the red-garlanded door of Sora Margherita, where they squeezed into seats next to a birthday party: the boy, his older sister, his parents, a half-dozen older relatives, none of whom paid attention to the guest of honor but argued about football while the child motored a small car along the edge of the table. The waiter brought them handwritten menus, and Tom tried to measure how long a silence would prompt him to talk of Daphne. Deflect one failing with another.
“Do you want to be more religious than you are?” she asked.
“Why would I?” If religion was loyalty, he wanted, just now, exactly the opposite.
“I mean, does being in Rome thrill you at all, in that particular way.”
He took a larger sip of wine than he intended and let it swim around his teeth. Her face shone as if she’d never heard of a committee meeting, as if she lived in a grove, as if the inevitability of relational disappointment didn’t apply. “You mean being around all these churches—”
The fried artichoke came out upside down on a plate, looking like someone had smashed it against the dish in a fit of pique. It wasn’t technically in season, and Tom wondered what hydroponic fields these vegetables came from, and whether ostracods were thriving in the greenhouse runoff, and what the point was of studying something that was everywhere—or if everywhereness was the point. The artichoke was oily and sharp and made Tom’s mouth squeeze.
“There’s something in Corinthians,” she said. “If there’s a natural body, there’s also a spiritual body.”
“So you’re religious.”
She sucked on a leaf. “Heavens, no. I’m a moralist.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” The thought of a quarrel thrilled him; he and his wife couldn’t even fight when falling apart.
The boy’s car zoomed across the table at them and toppled her glass of wine. The women in the birthday party leapt to their feet, trading apologies with soft slaps to the boy’s backside, and the Janiculum girl reassured them, and all the men just watched.
When the waiter had brought a new tablecloth and two plates of tangled cacio e pepe and the family had swept out of the restaurant, nearly leaving the boy, who’d found a safe spot under a bench, she leaned toward him, her teeth faintly pink, and said, “It means I get all the guilt with none of the reward.”
The tingling in his hands and the periods of dizziness, of headaches that felt like a novice was taking core samples from one ear to the other, hadn’t subsided. One night he stumbled on his way home from the grocery. A carton of tomato sauce flew into a bush, and two persimmons rolled rosily away. After a pause, the children across the street continued their game of tag, and Tom stood up to look for the gap in the sidewalk, or the rock, or the invisible trip wire of fishing line. His leg sent a humble message to his brain: It was me. I just went.
He collected the groceries he could see in the failing light and limped homeward, feeling betrayed. He spent the next few hours researching his symptoms, including the ones that were obviously unrelated (a raw tongue after consuming pineapple; double-jointed thumbs), and concluded that he had an inoperable brain tumor, or he had the rare but treatable Japanese Moyamoya disease, or he was suffering from medium levels of stress, like all healthy Americans. He knew that the mountains of North Carolina, where they’d taken Daphne for spring break, harbored Ixodes scapularis, the small-headed brown vector for Lyme. (In his wife’s family, ticks were known as devil’s buttons.)
After a night spent half-asleep, his subconscious caught in the traitorous networks of his arteries and nerve endings and columnar bone cells, he woke to an out-of-focus dawn, a breakfast of fette biscottate with apricot jam, and a nine a.m. phone call to the Aventino Medical Group, recommended for their multilingual staff.
Tourists are always imagining themselves mid-demise. They could squeeze him in at four. He packed a bag with collection cups and left the apartment, not wanting to ferment in his own suspicions. He picked his way down the ramps and stairs that led to the river plain, passing a feral budgerigar that was camouflaging itself as a piece of trash. In Trastevere, he wandered without direction, hunting small fountains. He hoped the moss-lined basins in front of churches and down back alleys would offer some comparative levels of manufactured chemicals. He scooped a cup from the shallow pool below the lion’s head at the Fontana del Prigione, from the white marble palm of the Fontana di Ponte Sisto, from the ancient Fonte d’Olio outside the basilica, where he jostled through a clutch of guitarists to lean past the open shells. At the birth of Christ, it’s said, oil sprang unsummoned from this spot. A fourth cup from the half barrel behind the mopeds at the Fontana della Botte, and then it was on to the east bank.
Only when he sat did his left leg begin to shake. Not perceptibly, he was sure, but with that particular internal jag that felt like an open current. Passing through the culinary circus of Campo de’ Fiori, he’d picked up a slice of potato pizza and decamped to one of his favorite fontane along Via Giulia: a wide-eyed man with a slow dribble from his mouth. The water that now blended into his beard used to be wine, in the heyday of luxury fountain engineers. But when Tom sat on the curb beside him, the mascherone was just a surprised paleness in the moss. A wall lizard ran across the stone nose. The sun hit Tom uncomfortably, creating flares. A tangerine house looked fuzzy. A dog trotting by came in and out of focus, his legs expanding and contracting, as though a bubble had formed in the corner of Tom’s eye. He balled up his trash, nestled it between collection cups in his bag, scooped from the tub beneath the dazed man’s face, labeled it, marched onward.
He took a slow path through Rome’s misshapen center, looping past the low bowl where ancient columns shivered in the heavy traffic, snaking along the chain of people waiting to put their hands in the mouth of Verità, climbing out of the miasma of exhaust and myrrh into fresher air, mounting the hill of the Aventine. He entered through five tall arches, and a woman named Mariateresa smiled at him in a holy way and handed him a set of forms.
“My codice fiscale?” he asked, pointing at a line.
“Leave blank,” she said.
The form asked about his symptoms. This was when he could decide he’d been exaggerating—malingering, even. So he sometimes felt more tired than normal, or light-headed when he stood up fast; he was nearing forty. The shakes could be too much caffeine, or not enough, or sugar. The starry vision and headaches and occasional lurches of memory were no more than him being overworked, as his wife always warned. But because he was dutiful even in his mutiny, he listed all of them, alongside their likely and innocent explanations. At least the doctor would see that he knew the limits of his own limitations.
He turned in his homework, stared at the magazines without picking them up, watched the receptionist field a series of calls. The only other person in the waiting room was an old woman in a black housedress, flesh-colored tights, and puffy black sneakers, the kind worn by members of a dance team. She was resting her chin in one hand; the other hand tapped a short cane against the carpet. The tapping was metronomic.
Mariateresa, with lifted brow and dimpled cheek, said, “Signore?”
He started up. The woman ceased her tap.
Dr. Tromba was his mother’s age, sharp of face, with a swoop of steely hair and a neat white jacket. She directed him to the vinyl examining slab, and he sat like a schoolboy, hands in his lap. Her English had a slight French inflection, and he imagined young Tromba misbehaving in a Swiss boarding school, harboring a crush on the pimpled son of a baron, envisioning herself as a modern dancer or a slalom champion, but never quite as a neurologist.
Her brow didn’t furrow at his symptoms. She mentioned the tests she’d like to run, asked a
few questions. No, he hadn’t been urinating more than normal. No, he didn’t have trouble swallowing. No, he didn’t consider himself depressed, certainly not more than the average person. What did that mean? Oh, run-of-the-mill emotional complexity. He could at times feel worthless, because let’s be frank, what can our worth be in a universe where our lives are brief polluting flashes in the cosmic pan? No, he wasn’t attempting humor; he was attempting humility. He was a scientist. Ah, she saw now.
She asked him to stand, to walk, to touch various parts of his face; she looked in his ears, shined a light in his eyes, rapped his knees with a mallet. She pushed him gently to see how easy he was to knock over. She wrote up a menu: basic bloodwork and an MRI, with the option for others down the road, depending on what they found. He imagined the technicians as sixteenth-century explorers in lead vests, tunneling into the jungles of his nervous system.
“At this point, we’re just ruling things out,” she said.
“I’ve looked up some of this online,” he said. “Of course.”
Her placid face did not indicate her disapproval.
“Exhaustion, that’s the easy one. Lyme is trickier, but manageable, right? What’s the worst, is what I’m wondering. What am I crossing my fingers against.” He despised the tone in his voice, the neediness.
“The very worst,” she said, “is that you will die, without explanation, as soon as you stand up from that chair.”
He was not too far gone to ignore the fact that he’d concocted an image of the Janiculum girl that had very little to do with her reality. In his version of her, the one magicked out of the loose filaments of his own desire, she was spontaneous to his methodical, open-hearted and fierce to his diffident, the whetstone that makes the iron blade sharper. Delusion, of course, is the carrier for love.
He admitted this to her—so much easier here, in the hot afternoon on the Piazza di Spagna, his confessor with a neon spoon in her mouth, than in the dark booths of his Catholic youth.
“It’s chemical,” she said, unconcerned. She dipped back into her gelato. “I thought you were a scientist.”
When she reached to wipe the stroke of strawberry from his mouth, her slow thumb sent a dizziness into his bones. His wife had mechanically cleaned his face countless times, but like she was a mother, like he was a dog. Probably every beginning was like this; maybe none could be counted on to endure. Her hand smelled of violets and Parmesan.
To protect himself, he kept not asking who, in fact, she was.
The house where Keats died was cool and quiet, and they climbed the staircase like wading into water. From the window of the first landing he looked onto the hordes of shorts and sandals. Upstairs the rooms were small, book-lined. He studied the cases of relics—Milton’s hair, a shard of Shelley’s jaw—and the Janiculum girl disappeared into the far bedroom. He followed her. A narrow bed in a narrow room: a single fireplace, a window onto the Steps, a march of painted roses above. She had laid her cheek on the marble of the mantelpiece. He unconsciously brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
“This sort of thing makes me unbearably sad.” She lifted her head and rubbed a circle in the marble with her hand. The soft Rs of her accent seemed designed for melancholy. “Severn would prepare Keats’s dinner here. Bread or fish and milk. He was so hungry—constantly hungry.”
“Why is it sadder when someone famous dies?”
“All the blood he spit up, and Severn just mopping up after him, writing letters, playing Haydn, buying fish.” She moved to the window and pressed her nose against the glass.
“You like to touch things.”
“It’s the only sense that leaves a mark. To know that his nose, his cheek—”
“I doubt he went around leaning his face on every surface.”
She turned back to him with disappointment. “Grief’s fed by the imagination. I can most imagine what it was like to be my mother, so I was saddest when she died. I knew probably ninety percent of what it felt like to be my mother dying. I know Keats’s mind a little less well, but well enough to put myself in that bed and want to tear out my heart because I knew all the blood coming out of me wasn’t going to be put back in, and the woman I loved most in the world I’d never see again, and all my elegant thoughts would perish with me, and all I wanted was a roast beef sandwich but my friend kept leaving anchovies on the mantel like I was a goddamn cat.” She touched the short post of the bed, just above the sign that prohibited it. “And most of the people who die every day I don’t know at all, so.”
He imagined the poisons of Rome bursting forth from cars and chemical plants and fabric factories, then settling like invisible ash on the city again, misting down onto the water, filtering onto the cilia and pseudopodia of mindless microorganisms. He ran his fountain samples through their battery of tests.
As he was heading out, stuffing papers in his satchel, he saw a commotion from the high window: Aldo and a young woman—Gabriella, according to his gleeful shouts—were tussling in the grass while undergraduates walked by unconcerned. She bit at his shoulder, and he flipped her on her side. They circled each other on hands and knees like children playing at beasts. Tom watched, his arms raised on the windowsill, for too long. When they had worn themselves out, Aldo sat by her prone form and patted a drumbeat on her calves. Tom felt a quick surge of yes, he could live here forever.
Dr. Tromba had given him an address for a clinic on Viale di Villa Massimo, north of the university, that had a better imaging department but a higher language barrier. He moved from point to point at the nurses’ gestures and didn’t question the nodes and cords that were being strapped to his skin. Perhaps this was the pleasure people felt at spas, abandoning their need to know. Only when they slid him into the tube did he begin to feel some tightening in his chest. Now he was aware of too much: that the magnets around him were organizing the water in his cells, and his coerced molecules were following orders. Gadolinium had been injected in his bloodstream and was banging on the doors of his brain. Somewhere in his body, abnormalities could be lighting up the technician’s screen. Chemicals where they shouldn’t be. Too much water; an absence of water. Absences of fat, of myelin. Of consciousness. What if he were a waterless soul, not a human at all but some spirit who was being sucked back out of the world again, punished for his lapses in judgment, those infidelities. What would the spots on his scan show? [My fingerprints.] A tumor in the shape of a heart. The plastic tube, too close, let out an electric jang jang that threatened to drive Tom mad.
They sent him home after the MRI; there was no one to pick him up. Back across the river, he climbed 256 steps from the flats of Trastevere to the plateau of his own neighborhood and up to the third-floor eyrie of his apartment, stopping to buy a cluster of greens and a wedge of fresh ricotta. The greens he stirred idly around an oiled skillet, and the ricotta he put on a plate, and with a single fork he moved between these elements of his supper, the sky beyond the open window gradually sagging, the terrace across the way empty of life, two parakeets crying from a phone tower.
“I don’t understand what it is.” Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hair still uncut and wild. She’d pulled her T-shirt up over her nose, a bandit with a taste for Metallica.
“It’s Clinically Isolated Syndrome.”
“A symptom?”
“Syndrome. That’s the name of it.”
Tom thought her face had frozen on the screen, her eyes focused a half inch below his in that disconcerting webcam way, but then she blinked. A beam of morning sunlight from the window was cutting across her bed, piled high with notebooks and stuffed horses and what looked like a raccoon skull, and when she leaned back, her forehead was illuminated. He’d asked his wife to hold off; she said she’d rather tell Daphne he was sick than wait till he was dead.
“What does it mean? Does it hurt?” She rubbed beneath her chin, her thumb and forefinger feeling under her ears.
In the box that showed what she saw, he was a dim face in a dusky room. T
en o’clock in California; her stomach would be filled with pancakes. With her sleepy eyes and the shaft of sun and her haloed head, his screen looked like an annunciation.
“I’ve had some sort of episode in which I’ve lost myelin.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a combination of— It’s like a buffer around the nerves. So the axons don’t lose their electrical signals, like wrapping wires in plastic. It doesn’t matter. CIS, that’s what they call it, is when you have one of these episodes, and if you have more—”
“What?” She had leaned forward again, out of the sunbeam. How ugly, to hear these words crowd out of his mouth; he wanted her bright voice, her young complaints.
“That would be multiple sclerosis.”
“Is that MS?” She’d covered her eyes now, so there was nothing left but hair.
They couldn’t tell him when the initial episode had happened (Have you recently been dizzy for twenty-four hours?), and no, his daily brushes with pain weren’t subsequent episodes; he’d know if the next one hit. It’s just a matter of time, they said. Meaning not inevitability, which he first thought, but duration.
“It’s one of those things that’s so hard to really say for certain whether you have it, and this is just a first kind of foray down the path toward a place where they could make that diagnosis. CIS is dipping your toe in the water, that’s it.” What a failure of a father, incapable of matching a vocabulary to a situation. “If they don’t see any brain lesions on the MRI, there’s only a twenty percent chance of developing MS—which could take years, even if it does happen—so it’s not something to be worried about.” He waited for her to verify that his MRI hadn’t shown any lesions (it had shown lesions, little mounds of snow in the darkness of his brain), but she was entirely still again. “Baby?”
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