Everything Changes

anticipated him and steps forward to block the door. “Listen,” he says. “Mistakes happen. I’m sure you would never consciously leave someone to sweat out biopsy results for an extra three days if he didn’t have to. I know you’re upset, but there are larger issues here, don’t you think?” He pulls his cell phone off his belt and extends it to the doctor. “Make the call, okay?”
    Sanderson stares at Jed for a second, and then pulls out his own cell phone, walking into a corner of the room to speak in privacy. My heart pounds out a patter of distressed Morse code against my chest and the air becomes oppressively thick, like I’m inhaling syrup, as I wait for the doctor to get off the phone. I try to form an instant prayer, a single coherent message with impact, but when I think of God, I picture this book about creation and the Garden of Eden I had when I was a kid, where Adam had dark eyes and reddish hair and Eve was a brunette with cherry-red lips and these wide blue eyes that looked so naÏve that even as a kid, you wanted to just shake her and tell her that any fool could see the serpent was up to no good. God was presented as a ray of tapered light beams emerging from the clouds like a special effect, but the kid I was didn’t get that. Instead, I associated the picture of Adam with God, and at this very moment I realize that the image of God I’ve been carrying around since childhood is actually the crudely rendered drawing of Adam, complete with his fig leaf briefs, and that’s who I’ve been praying to on those rare occasions that it’s occurred to me to pray, and the implications of this case of mistaken identity are briefly staggering from a theological point of view.
    Sanderson flips his phone shut and comes over to face me, his expression utterly inscrutable. He will speak in the next moment, but this one seems to be frozen, we can’t get out of it, and I can see the dark pores in his nose as if I’m looking through a magnifying glass, the round follicles of his beard, the scattered razor nicks around his Adam’s apple. There’s time to follow each individual wrinkle in his skin and to discern the cracks just forming beneath the surface, the tentacles of a burst capillary in his left eye.
    “Your biopsy was negative.”
    Norm throws his arms around the doctor in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet, while Jed lets out a strangled whoop and pounds my back. Inside me, doors open and close, armies advance and retreat, and as relief floods the streets, my vital organs vibrate, morphing and reorganizing, adapting to the new reality. “What a team!” Norm says exuberantly, leaving the doctor’s reluctant embrace and throwing his arms around Jed and me. “Are we good or what?”
    “We came, we saw, we got our asses kicked!” Jed says, laughing along with Norm.
    Sanderson nods at me. “It’s most likely just some aggregate blood vessels,” he tells me. “If the hematuria continues, we can remove them, but it will probably just resolve itself.”
    “Okay,” I say. “Thank you very much.”
    “You’re welcome,” he says. “Now, why don’t you guys go home and get cleaned up.” He offers up a small smile as he leaves, proving that even uptight pricks like him aren’t immune to the pleasures of bearing good news.
    The nurse procures three club sweatshirts and orders us to exchange them for our wet shirts, an act of hospitality that seems incongruous until an officer of the club steps into the room with three liability waivers for us to sign. Norm makes a show of scrupulous perusal that causes the officer to shuffle his feet nervously, but ultimately we sign the waivers and leave the club, this time through the front door.
    “You see?” Jed says, throwing his arm around my neck as we walk back to the car. “No cops, no cancer. It’s all good.”
    I smile and nod, all the while wondering why it doesn’t feel that way at all.

Chapter 30
    “I don’t get it,” Jed says to me. “You just found out you don’t have cancer. So why do you seem less than thrilled?”
    We’re having a late celebratory lunch at Cafe Luxembourg. Norm, exhausted from the day’s prior excitement, asked to be dropped off at the brownstone for a shower and a nap, instructing us to bring home a doggy bag.
    “Of course I’m thrilled,” I say.
    “You look thrilled,” Jed says sarcastically. “You haven’t even called Hope to tell her the good news.”
    “Hope isn’t aware that there’s