Gods and Doctors

This nonfiction by R. Renee Branca is the companion piece to “All You Need is Blonde” published in Cagibi Issue 22. The stories explore the unlikely but deeply impactful relationship between the author and her closest friend from its beginning in the early 1990s to its end 30 years later. An extended version of both “All You Need is Blonde” and “Gods and Doctors” is included in her forthcoming collection.

The subject of insurance comes up and, for a very tense moment, I think my husband is about to let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, I think at him, hoping he’ll read my mind. He’s always thought in images instead of words; sometimes he can’t read the room. More than once we’ve left a party with him apologizing to everyone, having spilled some secret best kept to himself. He would’ve made a good graduate student, my husband: As soon as we got the results, he began researching, making phone calls, inquiries, while I sat alone outside in the garden trying to get my head around this, to fathom the shape of it. Now he’s about to tell you all the things he’s learned, the treatment possibilities and financial implications. He has to realize I’ve had no opportunity to talk to you about this. We’d only been alone a few minutes before he joined us.

“Will you tell him?” he asked me as we walked here.

“I don’t know,” I said, doubtful I could work this organically into a conversation with someone I hadn’t seen in thirty years. I anticipated this meeting would be awkward enough, and I already have a dozen appointments set up over the next two months. The first MRI is scheduled for the narrow window my insurance allows, the day after we return from here, three weeks from when I called.

Perhaps he does read my mind. At the last possible moment, my husband switches gears, brings the conversation back to you as a psychologist and the scarcity of psychiatric care in your country, relating it to what it’s like for us back home. “Having a life-threatening illness is one thing. But if you’re having a mental health crisis, our insurance—it’s like putting a Band-Aid on cancer,” he concludes.

You and my husband have the same name, spelled the same way. When I break my own rule of never checking my work account while on vacation and notice you’ve replied to my two-week-old invitation, I wonder why he’d be sending me a message this way when he’s upstairs in our room. But then I realize it’s from you, not him, and I think, Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.

I read the message a second time, a third. It’s the first I’ve heard from you in fifteen years; I’m unsure how to respond. If you haven’t made other arrangements already, I would be happy to meet you and your husband for dinner or drinks. I think back to when that leisurely email was sent. In my garden, early June, with my legs stretched out across the wooden swing and laptop open, my husband in an Adirondack chair beside me. Conscious of the hard-built happiness of my life, his part in it.

Nine years together on the twenty-first of this month. Twelve if you count the time we dated. Fifteen if you consider how long we spent as friends.

And you and I, how long, really, were we friends? The only evidence now is a box of cards and letters sent over years. An undated history in the pictures of my photo album. You never dated your correspondence, only put page numbers in the corners. My chronology of what happened to you is scrambled before email. A laconic accounting of something once so consequential.

This trip is planned around promising locales for my husband’s photography. I saw on our itinerary that we’d spend four days in your city. I wondered what the chances were of running into you randomly, on the street, inside a restaurant. Wondered if we would recognize each other, as if time had made no alterations to either of us in the last thirty-two years. Like we could simply step back into those old lives of ours, as if one of us had just left the room for a moment while the other paused the music, waiting.

If you saw me, and knew me, would you be uncomfortable? I tried to push the thought away—the chances of any encounter were so slim. What would it matter now anyway? But still, I felt uneasy, and decided to nip it in the bud: At the very least, you’ll know we’re there. You could leave town if you felt you had to.

I told my husband my intentions.

“Why?” he said, feigning sulkiness. “I don’t want to hang out with one of your old boyfriends.”

“He’s not an old boyfriend,” I said, and this is true. I was glad of it. We couldn’t have been friends for all those years after; I couldn’t write to you now, inviting you to meet us, if you had been. My husband knows who you are, and though I don’t speak of you often, haven’t heard from you since before he and I met, he’s aware you were Important Once. And that’s enough.

“Besides,” I add, “he probably won’t answer.”

I don’t believe in premonitions, despite my mystical bent. But I read the draft once more, and added After this trip, I am unlikely to find myself in your country again before I hit “send.”

You can’t know it, but the woman who sent you that invitation two weeks ago is not the same one reading your response now. All lives are subject to such quick change. That woman thought she was just going hiking in Scandinavia with her husband; that she was fine. Seven days later, in her doctor’s office, she knew there were questions she should’ve been asking: intelligent, calm inquiries about all the possibilities besides the one she’d just been given. But the only thing that occurred to that woman to say, stupidly, was “I’m only forty-six,” as if her doctor didn’t know this already, the patient chart opened on the monitor in front of her. As if being forty-six would somehow exonerate her. Exonerate me.

And I remind myself for the thousandth time in the last seven days that I’ve done everything I can. That what happens now is in the hands of the gods and doctors.

Except this, I realize. I can choose this.

I decide I want to see you.

When we arrive in your city, my husband and I walk along the waterfront. The harbor is filled with cruise vessels and pleasure boats. Clouds form overhead, threatening rain that never falls. Hanseatic buildings stand sentry to the east, painted red, yellow, and white, like the uniforms of imperial soldiers. Everywhere, signs in English, restaurants with outdoor tables all the way to the water’s edge. From a nearby speaker system, I hear a black metal cover of “I Don’t Wanna Be Me.” Twenty years ago, I heard this song from the front row of the Trocadero Theater, Peter Steele so close to me I could see the beads of sweat forming on his hands and face. My only opportunity to see the band live—he died of sepsis a few years later. “This song title is a little too ‘on the nose,’” I can almost hear you say. Steele was only forty-eight. The age you are now.

Every so often, my fingers move to my abdomen, pressing into pain. Like a runner’s cramp, but in the center of me, radiating out. So familiar now—it’s been happening for months. Less an alarm bell, more like a clock ticking. I try to rub it away, continue walking. An old runner’s trick you taught me years and years ago. Another faint reminder of you.

We pass by shop windows, bright with desire. In one I see a confectionary display: marzipan shaped like fruits and musical instruments. Once, in Vienna, coming out of a shop like this one, a bag of marzipan in my hand, I bumped into a tall blond carrying a violin. Within an hour we were wandering the city, fingers intertwined, intoxicated with this tiny romance, bright and quick as the day. His last day there—he was moving on to play at a wedding in Germany, a funeral in Czechia, before returning to his family farm in Slovakia. As we stood on the platform at Hauptbahnhof, kissing passionately—publicly—as if we’d been lovers for years instead of strangers mere hours ago, he said, “Come with me. Please.” This is how women go missing, I thought, envisioning my passport photo stapled to a dusty Interpol file. I was so young, in Europe for the first time, half in love with him already. My body hungry, my heart wanting this adventure, this story to tell. With my Eurail pass in my pocket and my half-eaten bag of marzipan in my backpack, my hand still holding his, I boarded that train.

The marzipan in the window: shaped like things it isn’t, the taste deceptive, illusory. One kind of sweetness disguised as another. I love my husband dearly, love the life we’ve built together, but I’ll never again cross borders in the darkened cabin of an overnight train, held by a beautiful stranger. I try to remember what it was to be that woman, the one who did these kinds of things. It’s like trying to recall the words to a song I once knew well but haven’t heard in years. On the edge of the tongue; no closer.

A young man passes my husband on the sidewalk. Seventeen or eighteen, very tall and thin, awkward in the way he moves. Hair so blond it’s almost like straw. He looks so much like you did as a teenager he could be your son, though I feel sure you, like me, did not have children.

But what really stands out are his clothes: a shirt with swirls of neon clashing with the chevron pattern of his printed canvas pants. I know, instinctively, he’s not from this city; he must come from someplace smaller, more provincial. I see the name of your former town, where you lived with your parents, in my sloppy, rounded teen-girl scrawl, on the airmail envelopes of the letters I sent you. Nærbø. Skjærpebakken 2A. I haven’t thought of this in thirty years, locked away with the rest of the ephemera buried in my brain, now suddenly churning up.

The boy’s caught my husband’s eye. Quick as a snakebite, the shutter is pressed, the boy now the subject of a portrait he’ll never know was taken. Forever seventeen. “What on earth is he wearing?” my husband asks. An image of you comes to me, standing alone in the hallway of our high school, with the clothes of a foreigner.

“My friend used to dress exactly like that,” I say, “when he first came to America.”

“You’re kidding,” my husband says.

“Just in the beginning,” I tell him. “He got better.”

You’ve suggested we meet at a bar close to our hotel. Considerate of you, since we haven’t yet picked up our rental car. I hope there’s no dress code; I didn’t think to ask. I’ve packed nothing suitable, no clothes for going out to dinner, no contact lenses, no makeup—I even forgot to bring a hairbrush in the turmoil leading up to our departure. The night before we left, my suitcase lay open on our bed, as I tried to concentrate on what was needed for a trip like this, to make it resemble the kind of adventure we had in the first years of our marriage, for my husband’s sake. But my mind wouldn’t cooperate, locked in a loop of intrusive thoughts.

It shouldn’t be me.

I’m the wrong gender. The wrong age.

Healthy diet. Lots of exercise. No smoking, no drugs, no drinking. So low-risk the doctors weren’t even looking for this, found it by accident while searching for something else.

I felt so angry: Five minutes of the evening news could show me a dozen other people, much older than I am, more malicious, actively destroying the world, the people in it. Points racking up against the God I already don’t believe in: more proof people don’t get what they deserve.

I wondered if I did this to myself. I thought of exposures, times when I was less than cautious. Decades of hormonal birth control. Urban explorations in my twenties through abandoned hospitals and factories. Ten years teaching darkroom photography. How many times did I wipe up a chemical spill without wearing gloves? Work for hours with no respirator in that poorly-ventilated processing room? Contaminants breaching the barriers of my lungs, my skin.

I went quiet inside, still holding the shirt I’d been folding in my hands. I looked at it and for a second had no idea what it was, why I was holding it. What the point of it was, this piece of cloth I planned to carry across an ocean.

When my husband came into our bedroom, the suitcase was still open on the bed. I was on the floor. The feeling of betrayal was so intense in me: I wanted to divorce myself from this body I could no longer trust. I felt him lower himself to lay beside me, no easy task—his disintegrating spinal disc from an old football injury, a shoulder aching from a surgical repair after a terrible break. His own body, so much stronger than mine ever was, wearing down. I felt the wooden floorboards shift a little beneath his weight. I pictured my half of the closet with empty hangers on the rod, saw him standing by the sink in our kitchen, alone on a Sunday morning, making coffee for one. He reminded me we didn’t know everything yet. That it might still be okay because we didn’t know. Not understanding that was what made it horrible—the best that could be said is that we didn’t yet know the extent of it.

My body wanted to cry but I wouldn’t allow it. For so much of my life I’ve been unkind to myself this way, compassionless.

We lay like that on the floor until it was time to leave for the airport. My husband got up first and closed the half-packed suitcase, took it out to the car.

In our hotel room I sifted through my clothes, making the best of it. Dark linen pants, a clean blue top. The white coverup I use for savasana. I catch my reflection in the window of a shop as we pass. I could be a suburban soccer mom, leaving yoga class, on her way to a trendy wine bar to gossip with girlfriends over a glass of Ageno. I smile, despite everything, imagining your shock: This is so not who you’ll remember. I do still wear lots of purple and black, at home, in my normal life. But this is what you’re going to get.

My normal life. I think of my friends back in New York. Before the scan, they made me a care package. Included with the herbal teas for insomnia and bath salts for the pain they were sure was “just an ulcer” was a Miskatonic University t-shirt: an inside joke about Lovecraft and all the terrible things that befall academics like us in his pulpy undead space-monster stories.

Lovecraft. Forty-six. Intestinal cancer.

My friends don’t know. I’m scared of their own helplessness in the face of what’s happening to me; their grief. How they’ll react, not wanting them to treat me differently, see me differently: something other, something sick.

They’ll ask me what they can do and I’ll say Nothing, nothing. The ones who won’t be satisfied, they’ll want to do a ritual, try and heal me. They’ll put crystals on my chakras, wave smoldering bundles of white sage over me, chanting nonsense to the moon or whatever other god might be listening, might intervene on my behalf. And I’ll let them, surrounded by all that helpless, ineffectual love. “I prayed for you,” you told me once, during a bout of my paralyzing depression. I was talking about dying, scaring you. I’d have scared myself, too, if I could’ve felt anything. “Do you know that? I prayed for you, and I’m the fucking atheist. Remember?”

I do remember. How do I know your prayer didn’t work? I’m here now, aren’t I, coming to see you?

The place you’ve picked is on the corner of Østre Skostredet, right in front of us. The streets are crowded with people this evening. We weave our way forward. A few yards before we reach the door, my husband is distracted by a sudden commotion on Domekirkgaten, two blocks ahead. Like a sighthound coursing a fox, he darts away from my side, camera poised.

“Where are you going?” I call after him, suddenly anxious.

“I’ll be right back!” he shouts, before he melts into the people and I can’t see him anymore. He’s done this a thousand times: “Right back” could be seconds or hours.

I wasn’t planning to meet you alone, though it’s unclear if I shouldn’t. This is Northern Europe, not the Middle East. I’ve visited countries where this would be improper; although I know this isn’t one of them, I still feel strangely self-conscious. Uneasy. I check my phone.

It’s time. Shit. I look at the entrance, see the sunlight hit the arch window above the narrow door. My insides feel like water, like smoke. I take a breath and pull the door open.

In the corner of my eye, you stand up and the movement is so familiar that even before I can see you clearly, I know it’s you. You were so much like me (even if we did have our differences). Maybe I sought and found my reflection in you, you wrote to me once. At the time I didn’t agree, but as I look at you now, the changes to your face, and eyes, and hands, I feel those changes in myself. We both work at universities, where students are eternally eighteen while we get older every term. Of course we are aware of the passing of time, but this is different. Visceral. It is like seeing a reflection. Truer than mirrors.

Seeing you now come toward me is like watching an actor in a film playing a version of himself, years after the story he’s telling the audience has ended. Like a clever Halloween costume, you’ve dressed up as your future. I remember your intention to go trick-or-treating the year you were in America. “You can’t possibly,” I said. You were already six feet tall and looked like a grown man. To put on a costume and go knocking on doors, begging for candy, was unthinkable. Our little group was already strange. If our classmates found out you were doing this, they would eviscerate you.

But you insisted. “We don’t do it at home,” you said. “I want to experience it just once.” I could sympathize with this: Halloween is spectacular for children. I didn’t want you to never have that feeling.

“At least take Amelia with you,” I suggested, as if your host family’s five-year-old might shield you from the worst our classmates could do. “And let her do the asking.”

So concerned for your social well-being then. Trying to protect you. As if this were possible. I remember last Halloween: a party in a historic mansion. In a darkened parlor, I saw myself projected on a screen. Like age progression in cold cases for missing persons, I watched my hair go thin and gray. Lines formed on my brow, around my mouth and eyes. Flesh sagged and discolored. The image wore my clothes, moved as I moved. A personal portrait: my very own Dorian Gray. At some point I “died,” my eyes closing and my head falling to the side, but the progression continued. My skin began to rot and fall away, leaving behind a skeleton in my decaying black coat. My bones turned yellow, disjointed. In the corner of the screen, a digital counter marking time. This is what would remain of me ninety-seven years from now. Ninety-eight years. Ninety-nine. Then, when the counter reached a hundred, my own corpse suddenly reanimated and leaped out at me—I spilled my blood-colored cocktail on what I hoped was a reproduction Victorian rug. A deft party trick, but this memento mori troubled me for weeks. The two memories conflate. You, trick-or-treating in a world that no longer exists, the person you once were, gone. Me, watching myself suddenly not existing in a world where I still did. Not yet gone. Soon.

“Do you still recognize me?” you ask.

You haven’t lost your accent—you still have that trait of emphasizing certain words while hurrying through others. Your articulation is flawless. I’m sure even your parlance will be up-to-date.

But there is one difference, and I notice it immediately. When I came to New York, I worked hard to lose my Hoosier pitch, wanting to sound nondescript, placeless. But it can never go truly extinct in me, coming out even now on the rare occasions when I’m drunk or angry. By the end of your year with us, you’d developed it too, the slight Midwestern pronunciation to your words, rural mid-America evoked, regardless of what you were saying.

That’s gone now. Our shared heartland: It left no permanent mark.

“Oh, yes,” I answer. “I would know you even in the dark.”

“There’s one imaging center for the entire county,” the scheduler said. “Most people have to wait a lot longer than that. You’ve got the good insurance,” a phrase that made me wonder what the “bad” insurance was like. The “no” insurance. So many of my literary idols, I realize, died young: the Brontës, all before age forty; Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty-eight; Jane Austen, only forty-one. Succumbing to now-treatable illnesses, all of them victims of the times in which they lived. I’ve lived longer, yet I’ve done so much less. I feel desperate to make up for this.

“What if I pay out of pocket?” I asked. “Can I get in sooner?” I’ve got money now; I was treating this like a problem money could solve. But as soon as I asked, I wished I hadn’t. There were hundreds of patients ahead of me, every one of them needing to know as much as I did. I thought of that other woman, the one I would’ve been if I’d stayed in Indiana. The loveless marriage to my first husband, the squalid apartment. Waiting tables and tending bar, tutoring students with poor grammar and worse rhetoric. Our lives would be different but the body would be the same: She would face this too. That woman—pushed further down the list because another, with more resources, more privilege, cut the line. It’s been years since I’ve been her, but sometimes I still cast her shadow.

There are no atheists in foxholes, I remind myself. There aren’t many on the tumor registry, either.

I’d forgotten how tall you are—you have to reach down to hug me. As you do, the memories that started as scattered drops become a heavy rain, battering the tin roof of my consciousness, relentless. The way you always had to stoop to hug me, the way I always had to look up to make eye contact, the world not built to accommodate either of us easily. Our trips to Gravity Records—you’d complain the CDs were wrapped in cellophane with no way to hear the music before you bought it—too much like an act of faith, and you an atheist.

“Your country sucks,” you would conclude. I’d retort that my country was a global superpower while yours was…somewhere in Europe? Contributing so much to Western Civilization. Where would we be without A-Ha, alpine sweaters, a constitutional monarchy?

The walks along the railroad tracks, the black-and-white B movies we’d riff through, Mystery Science Theatre-style. That nightmare-generating fucking cardboard cutout of Hannibal Lecter you kept in your room, right next to your bed. A million hours of the Cure, the Pixies, the Clash. Walt Whitman. Robert Frost, whom you called “Bob” like you two were pals. Bob Mould. Hüsker Dü.

Climbing through my bedroom window. Sitting on my porch after dark. Long, late-night phone calls—part therapy, part gossip, part vision quest.

The things we said. The plans we had.

I remember everything. I remember it all.

You were with me when my life was just beginning. And you’re here now. The synchronicity of this is not lost on me. The irony.

The initial awkwardness lasts only a few moments before we’re at a table, beer in front of us, questions about my life surging from you like water tumbling over cataracts. I try to navigate my answers, avoiding boulders and precipices. Our paths were similar: We both left our hometowns for opportunities in better places, pursued advanced studies, eventually took jobs at the same universities where we earned our terminal degrees. Of our band of friends in Indiana, you and I are the only ones to do this. We always were the most alike. Our personal lives follow familiar patterns: Our fathers left our mothers and started new families. We each had long-term, live-in relationships but avoided marriage—me, from my divorce at twenty until I was nearly forty; you, to this day. Neither of us wanted to be parents.

As you tell me how you rescued the houseplants of a faculty member who couldn’t keep them anymore, I think Of course you did. My husband and I did the same thing last fall when one of our professors, after a heart transplant, had to expel everything in potting soil. Your displaced plants are crammed on a tiny apartment balcony somewhere in this city; ours shelter in our basement, under illegal-marijuana-farm grade grow-lights, until the construction on our sunroom is finished.

Nothing you tell me about your life surprises me.

It can’t be this easy. The Universe can’t give me cancer and restore our broken, thirty-year friendship in the same goddamn week, can it? My mind reels with this cosmic calculus: I lace my fingers together around the base of my beer glass, the only fixed point in the universe. Hold it tightly to stop this sidereal spinning-out.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” you say, smiling.

That’s a lie, but at least it’s a pretty one.

My husband blusters into the bar, all excitement and sunshine. He’s captured something good outside, which I’ll see months from now, but for now, he’s ecstatic from the chase. I introduce the two of you and wait to see what you’ll make of each other.

“Fascist jocks rule, honey,” you warned me once, over the phone, in a burst of what you called “feminism.” Some locker-room encounter had you rattled. You wanted to shield me in that big-brother way you sometimes had. “You don’t know who’s gonna treat you like a human being, but until you’re sure—don’t listen to the ones spewing forth promises of eternal love (yeah, I know, look who’s talking, right?). Just don’t come halfway close to any male before you know whether you can trust him or not.”

I don’t know what you thought you were protecting me from. I already had one failed marriage under my belt and was well-versed in the many ways men can hurt women.

My husband is exactly the type you would’ve called a “fascist jock:” a talented varsity football player with a full ride to university—Division 1. Pro-material—the scouts were interested. I know, I want to say to you now, my inner Goth is screaming. Yet there’s so much more to him. He’s an amazing photographer—so many awards they once caused the shelving to collapse. He and I were colleagues and worked together on projects. He was often a guest speaker in my photography classes, recruiting interns from my best students. He snapped a photo of me at my hooding ceremony and used it for the cover of our alumni magazine. On our first date, I was surprised at how funny he was, how much I enjoyed being with him. He brought out a levity in me I didn’t know I had. We had the language of art, of seeing.

“You know we wouldn’t have been into each other at all in high school,” he said then.

“Correction,” I replied. “You would’ve totally been into me. I wouldn’t have given you the time of day.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he agreed. “Lucky for me, then, that we’re not in high school.”

When I married him, it was the easiest thing I’d ever done in my life.

The morning of our wedding, I took the funicular down to Certaldo Basso by myself, with my favorite camera, and shot my last rolls of film. After her marriage to Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway never wrote another poem. Both of us women who could see an ending coming.

Most of the time, anyway.

Dinnertime, though the sun is still startlingly high. The bar has a limited menu; you suggest a different restaurant, with more “authentic” Norwegian food, in the Bryggen area my husband and I explored earlier. You get up to use the restroom while we settle the tab, and as soon as you’re gone, I ask my husband, “So, what do you think?” I remember another time, years ago, when I asked my best friend his opinion of you. I wanted so badly for him to like you. Here I am, once more, awaiting judgment on you from someone I love.

“What do I think of him? Oh, he’s great,” my husband says. I feel happy. “I can see why you two would be friends.”

“Why’s that?”

My husband finishes the last of the beer in his glass. “You’re both nerdy intellectuals. You’re both…I don’t know…morbid. Talking to him is a lot like talking to you.”

“I’m not morbid,” I counter, not disputing the nerdy-intellectual label.

“You’re obsessed with death,” he says, as if he’s forgotten what’s waiting for us at home—a problem for our future selves, not our present concern, “and I’ll bet that guy is too.”

I wonder at that moment if it’s true, if that existential angst I knew in you is still there. If it ever shapes your decisions, flickers around the edges of your mind. “I’m sorry to say that I’ll probably live to be a little more than twenty,” you told me once, the idea of early death (yours, not mine) still romantic to you. You’ll be turning fifty soon. Your body must be changing. You have to be aware of how quickly time is moving, how things are just starting to pull taut at the seams, beginning to unravel. I’m so very aware now.

“He’s nervous as hell, though,” my husband says. “I don’t understand what he’s got to be so nervous about.”

The sleeplessness was—and is—vicious, coming months before the pain, the vanished appetite. An urgent message from body to brain—I couldn’t decode it. Not wanting to wake my husband, I’d pull my exhausted body from our bed, haunt my own house like a restless ghost. That’s all a haunting is—a terrible case of post-mortem insomnia—of dying done improperly. I’d think things like this, wearily sitting at the window of my library in the dark, wakeful and defeated, waiting for dawn.

It doesn’t get dark in your country. My body can’t adjust.

“It’s supposed to be night now,” I say as we step outside, shielding my eyes from a sun that shouldn’t be there.

“Ah yes,” you say, looking up too. “It can take some getting used to.”

But I’ve experienced this before, on a trip to Petersburg during the White Nights. Chasing Gogol, my literary hero, dead at forty-two from faith-based asceticism. Younger than we are, yet more ravaged by life. In my suitcase, I’d packed my English translation of Petersburg Tales and took advantage of the perpetual daylight to scour the streets, finding every landmark, statue and street Gogol had written about, from Nevsky Prospekt to the dome of St. Isaac’s. I searched for the Kalinkin Bridge, where the sleepless ghost of Akaky Akakievich tears the overcoats off the shoulders of the more fortunate. This was difficult, because I couldn’t read the Cyrillic signs—illiteracy, a new and unpleasant experience for me. Eventually, a young Russian who spoke fluent English pointed out on my street map that there were two Kalinkin Bridges, spanning different bodies of water. Unsure which one was Gogol’s, I found and crossed them both, thinking about my teenage self in my Indiana bedroom reading “The Overcoat” and never dreaming I would walk his streets, pursuing him. In my mind, all the while, writing you a letter I’d never send: You’ll never guess where I am, what I’m doing right now. That woman, in a black velvet coat, talking to strangers in a hostile country while hunting for ghosts. The one who could sleep in broad daylight.

As we walk towards Bryggen, I can see why you chose to live here, a pretty college town with an artsy feel. Pastel buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, terra cotta tiling on roofs, vibrant murals painted on the walls of corner shops. Narrow windows opening outwards onto brick streets. I wonder about the lives of the people living behind those panes of glass. I think of their futures. We move slowly, my husband stopping every few feet to capture a scene that interests him. He, too, has his posthumous heroes: Robert Capa, who at forty stepped on a landmine. Robert Mapplethorpe, dead at forty-two, AIDS complications. Diane Arbus, a bathtub suicide at forty-eight.

I think again about my husband’s observation. Are you nervous? I don’t want you to be. I’m not. The observation almost stops me from walking; I’m not nervous. Not anxious or scared. I’m still exhausted—I’ve been awake for more than twenty hours already, after weeks of rough-edged sleep. I’m light from the beer but not nearly intoxicated, like a balloon tethered to the back of a chair at a birthday party. I feel the ground through the soles of my shoes as we walk, my linen clothes against my skin; I hadn’t noticed this before. I’m aware of my hair as it falls against my shoulders, the weight of it, the warmth. It’s as if the volume dial on the world has suddenly been turned up. I hear conversations going on around us, the noise of traffic, the bustling of a summer city in the evening during a busy tourist season. From an open apartment window, someone’s playing “Come As You Are.” The music floats down to us on the street. I remember your call from Norway the day Kurt Cobain died (Twenty-seven. Gunshot). Asking me if it was true. I stood there in my living room, receiver up to my ear, listening to you ask me questions as I watched Courtney Love address the nation on a live television interview. I couldn’t believe it was happening either.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.”

You didn’t say anything for several long seconds, faint static over the line. I felt for a moment like I had closed a book on you while you were still trying to read it: clapped it shut and carried it away with me.

I can smell the unseen harbor, sense the moisture in the air. Somewhere nearby, someone is baking with yeast and sugar. We pass through a momentary cloud of the aroma as we walk by. Cake. I can almost taste it, the memory vivid: something the hospital-appointed caseworker said over the phone, during our first session, the day of the results. “I’m about to go to Norway,” I told her, as though Norway could put a pin in reality, stop everything, temporarily, from going forward just because I’d made other plans. I didn’t need her trite advice: Zen-ish words, I was sure, about accepting things as they are and not how I would want them to be; making peace with my family and that God-I-Don’t-Believe-In. The kind of thing my mother might say. My mother, who also doesn’t yet know, precisely because I want to avoid a conversation like this: her frantic questions I can’t answer, her begging me to pray for her sake, if not my own.

But what the caseworker said was “When you’re there, make sure you eat the cake.” I have a tongue, the ability to taste, and an immediate future in which cake is still possible. I’m capable of pleasure, she said. I should permit myself to experience it.

The pain in my abdomen, for the first time today, isn’t there; or if it is, so many other things are vying for my attention I can’t detect it. The world around us is so brilliant and intense. And alive.

I know you’ve been published, but my husband doesn’t, and I want you to tell him about it. I ask if any of your work has been translated into English. The question is a politeness; I assume it has, but this is a way to give my husband something he could look up. He’ll do that if he likes you; you can talk about something of which you’re proud. Perhaps you’ll feel less nervous, if my husband is right about that.

You say “Of course,” but go on to inform me that for research to have any impact in the world at all, it has to be in English—as if I, too, don’t work in academia, don’t know my native language is the coin of the realm. How do you say “mansplain” in Norwegian? I want to ask you but don’t, not wanting to spoil the evening, not certain my husband would understand why this should matter.

I have publications of my own: single-authored, peer-reviewed articles in top journals. My last acceptance letter forwarded to me at my temporary address. I’d just left Marek. My life would be much harder for a while, but I was prepared for that, considered the price small for the hope of something better. Everything I owned in a friend’s garage, sleeping in her guestroom until I found a place I could afford. I opened the envelope and read the contents: the congratulations, the small suggestions from the editor, the deadline for revisions. All of my research, my books, thrown hastily into cardboard boxes stacked around me as I read that letter. I knew then that this article would be the last one. My trajectory had changed. The scholar, the faculty hopeful; I wasn’t her anymore. And I didn’t yet know who would replace her. If she was someone I even wanted to be.

But I realize you don’t know any of this, that you have no idea about my own scholarship. There’s a twinge of disappointment; it’s not like it would take a deep dive into the dark web to find my work. When we were friends, I had only a tenth-grade education. The two years that separated us were so much to your advantage—more books read, more travel, more knowledge about everything then.

But my title now, the same as yours, is Doctor.

Dinner arrives—all dishes you’ve suggested. For me, baked wolf-fish. I’ve never had it before. I stare at my dinner plate as strategically as if it were a chessboard, wondering how I’ll get this down.

I can’t feel hunger. Missing weeks before I noticed, on a hike in the Catskills, preparing for this trip. At the top of Hunter Mountain, my husband pawed through the contents of my backpack like a hibernating bear awakening to spring, rooting for the Clif Bars and packets of trail mix that had settled on the bottom. “Aren’t you starving?” he asked between mouthfuls. I realized I was not, the sensation of hunger and desire to eat entirely absent, despite the miles-long trek to the summit. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt it; when it was replaced with the radial, dull-edged throb. “Eat something,” he urged, waving a faux chocolate-chip-cookie bar in front of me. “Don’t go all Chris McCandless on me out here.”

McCandless. Starved in the Alaskan wilderness. Twenty-four.

I look at you and my husband, passing a bowl of boiled potatoes between you. If this dinner is long and leisurely, if there’s enough wine, maybe neither of you will notice. I set to work on the wolf-fish.

During dessert (which you also suggested. “Sure, why not?” I responded. How? I thought, but ordered it anyway), my husband says “I’m really getting tired. I think I’m going to go back to the room. You two keep catching up and I’ll see you back there.” You look surprised, but I understand what he’s doing. He likes you well enough, but this is for me. He knows it’s important, and he wants me to have it.

He thinks time may be limited. He’s relinquishing some of his.

I feel like I have grit in my eyes, a rock in my windpipe. I want to pull him to me; tell him I’ll be okay. Reflect back to him, mirror-like, that optimism shining from him, always.

There’s a quick discussion of logistics—do I know where I am? (“I think so,” I say, even though I know exactly where I am). Can I find my way back?

“Don’t worry,” you say to him. “I’ll make sure she gets back okay.” It’s getting cold; the savasana wrap, which was warm before, is now as insubstantial as tissue paper. My husband gives me his jacket, far too big. Once more, I find myself wearing another boy’s clothes as I go out for a walk with you.

“This is very good of him,” you say, and the way you say it makes me wonder if you think my husband normally encourages me to wander off with tall blonds I meet in bars.

“He’s giving me a gift,” I say. I don’t tell you he’s giving you one, too.

“How is your anxiety these days?” you ask, and I wonder if you’re curious as a friend or as a clinician. Anxiety. In graduate school, I was experiencing it and you were studying it. One of the last things we discussed, before everything stopped. My panic attacks were becoming debilitating: forcing me out of an airport before boarding, off a highway before I reached my destination, both times convinced, completely irrationally, that I was about to die horribly. I knew it was illogical, knew it was hurting me, but the fear just demanded too much. The borders of my life drawing closer, my own brain boxing me in. Major depressive disorder, my doctor said, with symptoms of anxious distress.

Depression is like a fraternal twin I’ve been fighting all my life. Anxiety is a step-sibling: a late addition, sudden and unasked-for. A bully.

You sound sincere. I think about how to explain the constant humming white-noise of panic in the background of all my thoughts over the last seven days. My body is starting to break down—one day it will stop working completely and when it does, it will take my mind away with it and I will no longer be.

Be careful, something warns me. You don’t know whether you can trust him or not.

I remember how we once had a semantic debate about whether the words for things were what made them real—how words, or the lack of them, in our native languages indicated different realities for the two of us. At the time, we agreed that they did. This moment is like the box containing Schrödinger’s alive-and-dead cat: As long as I don’t say it, I have this inside me and I don’t have it—I am both sick and healthy. Only when I put it into words and you hear it, when I pull off the lid, will the possibilities collapse.

“What is anxiety,” I say, dodging, “but the fear of death made manifest?” You laugh. Like you used to, you know exactly what I mean.

When we stop for a while, resting together on a bench and looking over the rooftops of the houses in this city where you live, you say, unexpectedly, “I feel guilty…” You look right at me then: “For not responding.”

That unspoken thing, heavy with the weight of all this time.

There had been no fight, no break. Abrupt as an amputation, leaving a phantom pain I felt for years. A part of my life, of me, suddenly gone. I had no idea why, would never know. I have language for other losses: divorced, broken up, passed away, grown apart. But this loss was ineffable, just as our friendship had been.

As you must have known I would, I blamed myself, certain I’d done or said something so appalling, so monstrous the only remedy for you was to sever me completely. I scoured our messages, searching for an explanation, a hint—anything. I sent you apologies, unsure of what for, but convinced I did something. Every letter written to you after went unanswered, like prayers whispered in an empty room.

Until this moment it never occurred to me that it might not be my fault. That it was in you to be cowardly, even cruel.

I see the sentences in your spiky script before the silence: You were one of my closest friends ever. You never did me any harm; far from it. And another: You are still my closest friend. And I refuse to let you go. Words followed by the absence of words. You don’t need to be in love for a man to break your heart, I realize. Sometimes just showing it to him is enough.

You’re looking at me, wanting a response. How much of our lives have we missed because of this? Memories like bullets fired rapidly, scattershot through my brain: things I wanted to talk to you about but couldn’t, letters to you, half-written, unsent and now un-sendable. You turned yourself into a stranger. Why? The only thing that matters, at the end of the day, is what we do to other people. How can you not know this, at this late stage? You, a psychologist?

“I sometimes feel I’ve betrayed everyone who’s ever loved me,” you said, years after you returned home, at the end of another important relationship. I remember how palpable your suffering was an ocean apart from me. Feeling helpless, I wanted to comfort you—all I had were words. I didn’t know you would do it to me too: let go so easily. That closeness, somehow worthless. And you didn’t even tell me.

I always wondered what I would say to you, if I ever saw you again.

And here you are.

I tell you, “Please don’t think about it. That’s in the past.”

The evening is drawing to an end and you walk me down the street toward my hotel. This, too, is so familiar: walking with you toward my room at the end of the day, you saying goodbye before continuing the half-block to your own house. How far did we walk together, side by side, just like this? Sometimes we would sing. Our penchant was for the Pixies—one absurdist song, in particular. What was it that was so delicious to us, so delirious? In one of your letters, you wrote We’ll skip down the street singing “Subbacultcha” once again. I’ll see you. We can make each other laugh again, face to face, share secrets and confessions, comfort and support each other, the way friends do. I try to envision you right now, with your forty-eight-year-old body and your Ph.D. and your mortgage, skipping down the street, singing about jellyroll and sculpture. I try to picture myself skipping—with my tumor and my insomnia—vocalizing the guitar riffs like we used to, imagine my husband looking out the window and seeing us and thinking we’ve both lost our minds. I laugh, and when you look at me to see why, I say, “Don’t worry. I won’t make you sing ‘Subbacultcha,’” as if you should somehow know what I’m thinking. But, to my surprise, you start to recite the words—like you are excavating something from the dust, ancient and fragile in your hands, trying to keep it intact. I try too—haven’t heard the song in years, but the verses are still there, though the order is lost. The two of us, putting together an old puzzle with so many missing pieces.

In the lobby, there’s an awkward moment while I consider what to say. I never imagined I’d have another night of fun with you; I’ve enjoyed myself so much. I don’t want this to vanish again. I know what’s ahead of me in New York. I don’t have the time that, all my life, I took for granted as mine: That I was entitled to a hundred years, or ninety, or even forty-six. That I would be healthy and lively and myself through them all. My illness will change me, is changing me now, and we don’t yet know everything. We hardly know anything at all.

But I know there’s something, and there’s already pain, and it’s probably not going to end the way I want it to. In one of your notes, passed to me as a comfort during some unremembered teenage crisis, you drew a solitary figure, shoulders slumped, a long shadow stretching out behind it. Nothing’s ever what you want, you wrote above it.

This time I still have, however much, I want to share some of it with you. I want to write to you; I want you to answer. Our friendship: one of the most significant of my life, and I have missed you. We still seem so similar, so like.

I’ve no idea how you’ll feel about this; if this is something you’d want or not. Despite this lovely day, I know almost nothing of your life now, or the people to whom you now belong.

“I don’t want to insert myself into your life if there’s no place for me,” I venture.

“What do you mean?”

I think you very well know what I mean, but I say it anyway: “It’s been a really long time. People change. I don’t want to cause any problems for you.” I also don’t want you to cause any problems for me. Don’t want you to put me through another fifteen years of wondering what happened, why I didn’t matter enough to get an explanation. Another fifteen years I don’t know I’ll have.

You say, “Don’t worry about that. Please write to me.”

But then, just a few minutes later, as you lean down again to hug me goodbye, you say, “I wish you nothing but the best,” and something about your cadence has changed, that pattern of speech with which I am so familiar. I have the sensation of being pushed into your ghost story before I’m properly dead. Something in my head says, Feeling guilty about something isn’t the same as being sorry for it. I know, as I hear you say these words, that I will never see you or hear from you again. That I’ll still send you an email, thanking you for the evening, for showing my husband and me a wonderful time in your city. I’ll offer, once more, to be your friend, reminding you how short life is, and you will not respond. I’ll send you the pictures you requested from your time in America, and you won’t acknowledge them when I do. You’ll follow my husband, whom you’ve known a few hours, on social media for months, liking his posts, but you won’t reply to me. My feelings about this are not part of the equation; any pain or disappointment this may cause me is acceptable to you. The time I’m offering, so newly precious to me, isn’t something you want: an obligatory present from a distant relative, two sizes too small and the wrong color as well.

Your reasons for being here tonight are so different from mine: I will never know what they are. Curiosity? Voyeurism? Exorcism?

I’m suddenly so filled with compassion for the both of us, the children we used to be, the people we are now. I think I’m not big enough to hold it all inside of me, to carry it even one step more. I feel grief for the ones we aren’t anymore, grief that I couldn’t love you in the way you wanted me to; that you wouldn’t let me love you in the way I could. I look at you and remember, long ago, you telling me that “love” is such a troublesome word in English: a catch-all, throw-away word that debases the thing it tries to exalt. And I think, You were so right.

About the problem with love, that is.

There’s one moment I’ll keep near me, long after this night is over. It happens as the three of us wander through Bryggen, right before my husband leaves us to our walk. You talk to each other, each of you walking a little in front of me. The sun is still so high despite the late hour; people are moving past the two of you as they walk through the alley, reminding me of water parting for the bow of a ship. I observe this and as I do, I suddenly understand how improbable all this is—from you and I meeting as teenagers in Indiana to this reunion in Norway decades later. Thirty-five hundred miles, most of it ocean, separates my home from yours, another thousand from my street in New York to the street we lived on together. Inside I feel every inch of that distance, every minute of every intervening year, that it took for me to arrive at this moment, now. Like watching the tide recede around three separate islands, revealing an intricate network of shipwrecks and detritus on the ocean floor that links them together. But the islands themselves are us: my husband, you, and me. Every single thing that had to happen in precisely the right order at the exact time—from the nearly unfathomable odds against the three of us being born, when and where we were, and into each of our families. You and I, born into different cultures on different continents, meeting because you wanted to come to America and were randomly assigned to the family two doors down. The randomness of my family being there—we had lived there less than a year. The fact that we became friends at all—how much I disliked you at first, how weird and disturbing I found you—is its own minor miracle.

For our friendship to have lasted after you returned here—without internet, without video, without anything but what that first year had provided—this moment we are experiencing now, all three of us, is only possible because of this delicate chain of events, perfectly executed from the beginning of time until the moment right before the one we are living in. How all moments, every moment, has had just as much intricacy in its formation as this one.

Understanding the magnitude of this—the beauty—almost staggers me. I look at the two of you—you two men with your identical names—the one of you who loved me at fifteen, and by loving me shaped me into the person the other would come to know and love decades later, interacting with each other and laughing together and then suddenly you’re both looking at me. I realize I’ve stopped walking. “Are you okay?” one of you asks, and I can’t tell which. It might even be me that asks, because I understand there really is no difference. I have this strange sensation, like the edges of my life are folding together, the beginning and the end about to crash in on each other. I wonder, if the two of you touch, will you cancel each other out, like matter colliding with antimatter? Will there be a bright flash of light and two man-shaped holes in the universe?

As I’m thinking this, I realize that I really am going to die—that this moment is temporary and I’m temporary within it. The two of you will live, for a short while longer, before you’re both gone too—and though you’ll never see one another again, will never speak or think of each other, you’ll be linked through me. Even my absence will be a presence that binds you. This complete interconnectivity is a revelation: I sense it everywhere, coming from you, my husband, the people walking past us, from me. It’s like electricity, like gravity, like the force that binds atoms together, but it is living: I am humming with it.