Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

Merv grimaced, shook his head at the memory. “I couldn’t wait to get away. Man hates himself that much, big mystery why I’m an alkey.”

Realizing what he’d said, Merv gauged his companion’s reaction, received nothing, Alice remaining inscrutable.

“Whaddaya think,” he said. “Another go-around?”

—

Not another go-around. Another lap was too much, but she wasn’t ready to get back to her depressing room, either. So he placed one hand on her shoulder, another on her hip, and eased her down into a metal folding chair. “Please assure me you haven’t been roaming the halls to pick up chemotherapy patients,” Alice said.

Some sort of timer must have gone off during their walk, because the overhead lights were blessedly dimmer, which furthered the hallway’s already somber feel. Sneakers were squeaking around the near corner, some nurse laughing with another. “It’s fine with me if you are, ” Alice continued. “At least that’s original. It’s actually the most warped, high-concept, black screwball comedy imaginable.”

Mervyn’s hair was in need of weeding and trimming. His flannel shirt was missing a button at its collar; its opening showed a concavity. He was looking down, and his smirk had transformed, more of a wince, as if he were sucking on a sour lozenge. Checking on her from the corners of his eyes, he began revealing information whose beats were all too familiar: nonexistent blood counts, an enlarged spleen, demands from the emergency room doctor that he be admitted to a hospital right pronto.

The emergency room doctor told him the two main candidates for his illness were lymphoma and AIDS. What does anyone do when you hear this, he recounted. He recalled the numbness. Pretty much in shock when they finally admitted him to this place, putting him in a private room. Two orderlies in blue protective outfits then erected a plastic bubble around him. He watched it go up. The next three days, his father basically sat vigil at the side of Merv’s bed, staring with cloudy eyes and a hangdog face. Friends came by, and from the way they looked at Merv he understood they all assumed he was about to die, were trying to remember his face for future lyrics and songs and shit.

From around the corner, the squishy sneaker sound was again audible. Presently, Carmen said There you are, and asked if they were having a nice talk, if anyone needed some tea. Carmen laughed as if she’d delivered the funniest joke in the annals of stand-up, but also had a look on her face as if to say, I ain’t getting shit. Alice asked how Carmen’s night was going and Carmen answered that the Rangers had won, so she was fine. She then took Alice’s vital signs, and made sure Alice’s port and catheters were secure, and that there was no surrounding puffiness in her arm. Carmen let Alice know she shouldn’t stay out in the hall for too long, and reminded her to keep her mask secure, and said more pills were ready back in her room. Alice nodded and waited for her to stop yapping and leave so Merv could pick back up with his series of blood tests, his biopsy, his numbers beginning to stabilize, the suspense he’d felt while waiting to find out which probably terminal disease he was going to lace up the gloves against.

Trying to get his mind straight, Merv had taken inspiration from sports figures at press conferences who answered questions about play-off scenarios by saying : We can only focus on the game in front of us. He’d also found solace because his probability for AIDS wasn’t huge. Needles freaked him out. And he’d weaned himself off sex with guys for money back when he was a teenager, ha ha, so check that off the list. But he did generally dread having a stray puck of his slip past any woman’s metaphorical goalie, and took steps to protect himself there. Although, granted, you still had that nightmare scenario: things having gone too far to head to the drugstore, and so you roll the dice and, atom bomb, lives blown straight to shit. In his head Merv had seen a slimy condom being pushed backward off his reddened member, and he’d wondered if that had been the one that had busted or leaked. He’d remembered being drunk, begging, He hated those things, it was like fucking in a bag, he’d be careful, he promised.

He acknowledged to Alice what anyone with half a cerebral cortex already knew: a huge reason any guy got involved with playing rock was to get laid, then insisted that it wasn’t like he was the greatest cocksman of his era — and not for a second did he believe he had AIDS. Still, for three days, while he’d lain in that scratchy-ass hospital bed, he’d argued with himself. On the one hand, there were memories: the swell of a particularly full and round apple bottom uncovered by a sheet on a lazy morning; being ridden insanely hard and having a moment of eye contact and the two of them breaking out, laughing; a closed-lidded beauty in profile, the rictus of a smile forming along her pouty lips; his private stash; his most intimate carnal moments.

He didn’t mean to be gross or sexist. He didn’t want to come off to her as a pig. Probably some of those women had been promiscuous; Merv refused to believe, for even a blink, that any of them had been, you know, dirty. And still he hadn’t been able to stop himself from zeroing in on likely candidates: the girl with beautiful jet-black hair down to the middle of her back who’d had the strange deal where even in ninety-five-degree heat she’d refused to go without tights (maybe that was why she never smelled fresh); the depressed, Rubenesque, screaming tiger in the sack who’d been training to be an opera singer, and who afterward had lain in bed, smoking a jay and rambling guiltily about her boyfriend in France (two nights later she’d answered her phone and spoken French in low sexy tones; an embarrassed Merv never called again).

Some part of him still clung to the idea that getting AIDS from a blowjob was impossible. But maybe that was one more piece of bullshit musicians told each other? And if it had been AIDS, then two days after the blood tests, wouldn’t the doctors have come in and told him already?

In that hospital bed he’d regained enough energy to get squirmy, but at the same time being in bed for so long made anyone doze, so he’d be alternating between fading in and out of consciousness and feeling jittery, and starving. Now and again he’d wondered about what had happened to that goddamn art chick, if any of the guys had told her about him getting admitted and being at death’s proverbial door. Eventually, Merv had started addressing the next logical issues: how to prepare himself for the confirming news, how bad his cancer was, what kind of road lay ahead.

But could he tell Alice something?

“Whole time, I never felt like something foreign was growing inside me. It just didn’t.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Alice said.

—

This morning, a few of his compadres had visited, started up this little jam session: Donovan with an acoustic, a flask making the rounds, popped beers frosting on the window ledge. Merv had been eyeing those beers something fierce: what better reason to get plowed than learning you have some spooky life-threatening shit? Except that if he did really have spooky life-threatening shit, he’d better make some good decisions, so maybe his head needed to be clear. The part of him in favor of being clearheaded had a slight lead on the part of him that was shouting, BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT. Then that warning knock that wasn’t any kind of warning. Cue the white-coat fucknuts. Marching into the room like they were on fast-forward. Making a nice straight line across the wall right opposite Merv’s bed. The attending took his place in front of them, goddamn marching band leader, and reported that Merv didn’t have cancer, or AIDS. He had a disease so rare the oncologist never heard of the damn thing, was forced to research it.