So I knew.
We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the inflection
of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions. He thought--what I
thought.
"Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away."
"It's in a bad spot."
His instruments gagged me for a minute or two, brought tears in my
eyes, probed at revolted mucosae. "Yes, Phil. And there's a lot of it.
You didn't notice--anything--?"
"Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down anyhow. I have a serial
to correct."
"Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one of those rank
lymphoid things. Radium blots them out. X-ray. Radioactive cobalt,
these days, perhaps. But--"
But.
We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind thing: "We're
both--forty-six."
He meant that we shared the hazards of time together. He also intended
to start me thinking of all I had been and done, seen and known, felt
and expressed, in four and a half decades of life.
His clock ticked.
His phone rang.
The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery of a woman's
voice. And Tom, with the cultivated patience that masks a physician's
irritation, told her to take the "pink medicine" every two hours
instead of every four.
The elixir alurate, I thought.
That brickbat on the safety valve of America: barbital.