emotional tone. “What is the treatment like, Lou? What will happen?”
I open the packet I have brought. We are not supposed to discuss the treatment since it is proprietary and experimental, but I think this is a bad idea. If things go wrong, someone outside should know. I did not tell anyone I was taking my packet out, and they did not stop me.
I begin to read. Almost at once, Lucia stops me.
“Lou—do you understand this stuff now?”
“Yes. I think so. After Cego and Clinton, I could read the on-line journals pretty easily.”
“Why don’t you let me read that, then?I can understand it better if I see the words. Then we can talk about it.”
There is nothing to talk about, really. I am going to do it. But I hand Lucia the packet, because it is always easier to do what Lucia says. Marjory scoots closer to her and they both begin to read. I look at Tom. He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head.
“You’re a brave man, Lou. I knew that, but this—! I don’t know if I’d have the guts to let someone mess with my brain.”
“You don’t need to,” I say. “You are normal. You have a job with tenure. You have Lucia and this house.” I cannot say the rest that I think, that he is easy in his body, that he sees and hears and tastes and smells and feels what others do, so his reality matches theirs.
“Will you come back to us, do you think?” Tom asks. He looks sad.
“I do not know,” I say. “I hope that I will still like to fence, because it is fun, but I do not know.”
“Do you have time to stay tonight?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Then let’s go on out.” He gets up and leads the way to the equipment room. Lucia and Marjory stay behind, reading. When we get to the equipment room, he turns to me. “Lou, are you sure you aren’t doing this because you’re in love with Marjory?Because you want to be a normal man for her? That would be a noble thing to do, but—”
I feel myself going hot all over. “It is not about her. I like her. I want to touch her and hold her and…
things that are not appropriate. But this is…” I reach out and touch the upright end of the stand that holds the blades, because suddenly I am trembling and afraid I might fall. “Things do not stay the same,” I say.
“I am not the same. I cannot not change. This is just… faster-change. But I choose it.”
“‘Fear-change, and it will destroy you; embrace change, and it will enlarge you,’ ” Tom says, in the voice he uses for quotes. I do not know what he is quoting from. Then in his normal voice, with a little joking voice added, he says, “Choose your weapon, then: if you aren’t going to be here for a while, I want to be sure to get my licks in tonight.”
I take my blades and my mask and have put on my leather before I remember that I did not stretch. I sit down on the patio and begin the stretches. It is colder out here; the flagstones are hard and cold under me.
Tom sits across from me. “I’ve done mine, but more never hurts as I get older,” he says. I can see, when he bends to put his face on his knee, that the hair on the top of his head is thinning, and there is gray in it.
He puts one arm over his head and pulls on it with the other arm. “What will you do when you’re through the treatment?”
“I would like to go into space,” I say.
“You—?Lou, you never cease to amaze me.” He puts the other arm on top of his head now and pulls on the elbow. “I didn’t know you wanted to go into space. When did that start?”
“When I was little,” I say. “But I knew I could not do it. I knew it was not appropriate.”
“When I think of the waste—!”Tom says, bending his head now to his other knee. “Lou, as much as I worried about this before, I think you’re right now. You have too much potential to be locked up in a diagnosis the rest of your life. Though it’s going to hurt Marjory when you grow away from her.”
“I do not want to hurt Marjory,” I say, “I do not think I will grow away