Nude Men

whisper.) “Time for what?” asks Henrietta, feigning ignorance.
    “Is it time for the death and dying of the yet yet?”
    The parrot sometimes startles us with complex sentences. “It’s not funny,” says Henrietta to the parrot.
    “The yet yet?” says the parrot.
    “No, death.”
    “Death! Death!” shrieks the parrot, flapping his wings, excited at hearing someone other than himself mention his word.
    Henrietta squeezes his head with her thumb and forefinger, which always makes him stop. “I want to love him,” she says, “but he makes it very difficult.”
    The parrot calms down and goes back to purring loudly.
    “I do care about her,” I finally say. “But a lot of things have happened.”
    “Therefore you will not cry.”
    “I might not,” I concede, but I don’t bother trying to convince her that it’s not because I don’t care about Sara but because I feel as though I have cried out all the tears in my body.
     
    P eople start to clap when she’s walking down the street.
     
    I take Sara to the specialist. She smells rotten. The fruit in her, which previously produced the sweet smell, has rotted. She is past due. The key was to die before the fruit rotted. Poor Sara. I can smell it. It comes out in her breath when she talks.
    The doctor tests Sara and then tells us the test was successful, and that therefore there is a possible cure, with a fifty percent chance of success. I look at Sara. She looks at me, her eyes wide. We simultaneously get up from our chairs and hug each other.
    “Will my beard go away?” Sara asks the doctor, while we’re still hugging.
    “Yes,” he answers.
    “The stubble and everything?”
    “Yes. You will be exactly as before.”
    We talk to the doctor some more. I am frisky, fidgeting, and wagging my tad. Once everything has been said, the cure is given to us in a little bottle, and Sara and I decide to go eat some ice cream in the coffee shop across the street. Walking out of the doctor’s office, we talk excitedly to each other, about Sara’s possible future, about things she’d like to do if she lives, except that she doesn’t say “if,” she says when she lives.
    In the hallway, she flips her coin in the air and catches it over and over again, absentmindedly, just for fun. “Now I can really flip the coin to see if I’ll live or die,” she says. “It really is a fifty percent chance now.” But she doesn’t look at the coin when it lands.
    While we wait for the elevator, she says, “I suddenly have a very strong craving for pear ice cream. Why don’t they make pear ice cream?”
    Outside, she says, “When I live” (notice the “when”) “do you think there’s a chance you could ever love me, in a few years?”
    “I don’t know. We shouldn’t think of that now.”
    “Tell me, Jeremeee,” she says, yanking my arm. “Like when I’m seventeen and you’re thirty-five, or, if that’s still too young, when I’m eighteen and you’re thirty-six?”
    I don’t answer, hoping she’ll change the subject.
    “So, do you think? Why not, huh?”
    I am trying to think of a reply. I must call Lady Henrietta to tell her about the incredible fifty percent news, which will make her ecstatic. I will call her as soon as we get to the coffee shop, which is right across the street we are now crossing.
    “Tell me! ” She yanks my arm on “me.”
    I laugh, a bit exhausted. We are now crossing it, that street across which the ice cream is and, more important, the phone is also.
    “Jeremy, I’m se rious. Don’t you think you could ever be in love with me? I love you.” Sara is holding my hand but lagging behind me, making me pull her a bit as she dreams about her fifty percent chance of a future, which is now, suddenly, yanked away from her by the same car that yanks her hand out of mine.
    Sara gets hit by a car and dies. That’s in other words. Run over by it. Instantly. Without suffering. Her body twitches.
    I am screaming. Everybody is screaming and crying. Sara is silent. There is blood everywhere, except on the little white elephant that is gleaming up at me, spotless, from Sara’s neck. So familiar. So disconcerting.
    The doctor—the specialist—is now in the street, and he pronounces Sara dead.
    As I bend down over her, a voice inside me repeats: “Oh really? Oh really, Fate, oh, really?” I am bending down over her, confused. Something went wrong. I don’t get it. It’s like reading a novel, and something happens, and you