Chapter Four

Nate

Is it just me or did the films and books make it seem a hell of a lot easier than it actually was to get with someone?

They hardly ever iterated the difficulties of picking up the phone and calling the romantic interest, or the anxiety that came with jumping into something with the romantic interest, or the potentials of feeling the sting of being rebuffed by the romantic interest. No one wanted to watch a romance film that ended up in rejection. Unfortunately for me, I had little else to go on than the relationships of fictional characters, given my limited experience.

I had picked my phone up several times. That was the other fun part that they never taught you. I was definitely sure that I wanted to contact him. It was the choice of which method of contacting him to use that had stumped me. I was unsure as to whether or not I wanted to call or text him. Texting seemed impersonal but calling seemed too personal.

I was sitting at my dining table, which happened to live in the middle of my kitchen like a makeshift island, staring down at my screen. The phone was sitting before me, its screen opened on Carlos’ contact information. I groaned, burying my face in my hands in frustration.

It had been nearly two weeks since our encounter at the bar and I could not get him out of my head. Even worse, I could not help but wonder if Carlos was struggling to get me out of his head in the same manner. That brought about a whole other set of thoughts and feelings, such as the fear that he did not think of me at all. If he did feel the way that I was feeling, however, I was afraid that if I took too long I would give him the impression of disinterest and he would probably forget about the weird guy from the bar who kissed nicely.

The thought of our kiss warmed me. I could feel butterflies in the pit of my stomach and the faintest hint of a blush creep along my cheeks. I took a deep breath, released it, and took yet another. In and out, I told myself. That was all it took.

Before I could agonize over it and waste another moment, I pressed the green dial button. There was no going back after that. I could hear the dial tone from where my phone lay on the table. I picked up the phone and pressed the receiver to my ear.

Ring ring. Ring ring.

I closed my eyes, concentrating on my breathing. Carlos answered on the third ring, his voice richer and smoother than I remembered it being. His accent sent tingles up and down my spine in the best possible way.

“Doctor Carlos Ramirez speaking,” he said.

“Hi, Carlos, this is Nate.”

There was silence on the line, save for the gentle static buzz. I panicked, wondering wildly if he could have forgotten me in the time it had taken me to get back to him. Sure, the night we had met had been different from anything that I had done before and rather special to me, but who was to say that it felt that way to Carlos?

For all I knew, he could have done that sort of thing all the time.

“Nate,” he said. His voice was softer. “I had wondered if you would ever call me.”

I stood from the table, my chair scraping against the tile floor of the kitchen, and released a breath of relief. Play it cool, I told myself. “I’ve been a bit busy.”

“Thank you for taking a second out of your busy schedule.”

Apparently that was too cool. I began to pace up and down my kitchen while we spoke. “I was hoping that you might spend a bit more than a second with me now that it’s quieter.”

“Oh? I bet you would.”

“I mean, if that isn’t what you want…”

Carlos chuckled. Even on the phone, the sound did things to me. I could picture his face in my mind’s eye, the way the cleft of his dimples appeared just above the facial hair on his cheeks and the crinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. “Have you ever been on a roller coaster, Nate?”

“I assume that life doesn’t count as one?”

“It counts. It just wasn’t what I had in mind, cariño.”

Okay, so my heart did a little bit of a flutter thing whenever he spoke Spanish. That was only the second time that I had heard it but I had taken enough Spanish in school to know that he had just called me ‘darling.’ “In that case, I’ve never been on a roller coaster before.”

“There is an amusement park that I have wanted to go to since its opening day. That was quite a few months ago. It is a bit of a drive out of town, about an hour or two.”

“How do I know that you are not about to bury me an hour or two out of town where no one will ever find my body again?”

Carlos laughed again, loudly. “Trust me, Nate. The last thing that I want to do to your body is bury it and I definitely want to find it again.”

My throat was suddenly dry and I swallowed. I had no idea what to say to that. My tongue did not seem to want to work for me anymore.

“Are you alive over there, cariño?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” I said. “When are you free?”

“I was thinking that we go soon. What do you think about this Sunday?”

“This Sunday works for me.” It was not like I had any plans – ever.

“I’ll pick you up. Text me your address, okay?”

“Wait.” I realized. “I thought you did not drive.”

“Oh, I drive. I just don’t have a car.” Don’t worry, though. I’ll have one for us to use on Sunday. I’ll see you then, Nate.”

“See you then, Carlos. I look forward to it.”

“That makes two of us.”

He hung up first.

All sorts of feelings ran through me after that phone call. I punched the air, feeling every bit like a teenager with a crush. I wanted to dance around my kitchen and I could not wipe the smile off of my face. I sat back down after a moment, more excitement than I had experienced for as long as I could remember buzzing through my veins. When the rush inside me had started to die down, I began to feel the trepidation.

My weekly doctor’s appointment happened to be that Sunday, at the break of dawn. No, it was not really at the break of dawn, but it was close enough. I was scheduled for seven a.m. At that point in time, there was nothing to stop me from going to an amusement park with a gorgeous Spaniard but it was only Thursday and a lot could happen in three days’ time. I knew that much from personal experience. I only hoped that things would continue to remain stable for me.

***

My life seemed to be one filled with contradiction.

I had been dreading Sunday as much as I had been looking forward to it. The three days since I had called Carlos had been far more anal—no pun intended—than they usually were. I was careful to follow all of my rules, to take all of my meds at the right times of the day, to get enough exercise. My itinerary was rather specific, although the doctors had allowed me to ease up on the strictness of things in the past few months. They had been saying that I had shown impressive improvement.

I knocked on wood for good measure. When it came to my health, it was best not to leave things to chance. I always felt as though anything could jinx me, including my own thoughts. It was one of the reasons why I did not even like speaking about my ailment to anyone – least of all a certain doctor. There was an irrational fear that talking about it might somehow set it off. A fear that had proven to be rational by experience was the one that I would lose the people that I did talk to about it. I was a walking time bomb and no one wanted to be around me when I finally exploded.

To be honest, I could not blame them. There were times when I did not want to be around me, most especially when the day that I finally exploded came.

Needless to say, by the time I left the house that morning, I was more than a little bit anxious. I tried to remain positive. My mother had once told me that if you sent positive vibes out to the universe, you would receive them. I hoped more than ever that she had been right as I walked to the hospital. My general practitioner’s office was on the ground floor, hiding behind the emergency room. The funny thing was that I usually ended up in the emergency room anyway.

There was an entrance around the side of the place that few people knew about, unless they worked at the hospital. I had been told that the only reason that it had not been removed was because the staff members used it when they went on their smoke breaks. It had always confused me the way even medical practitioners smoked, having seen the effects that cigarettes and nicotine could have on one firsthand. I made my way around to the left side and let myself in through the door, bypassing the emergency room and ending up in the receptionist’s office.

I did not bother walking up to the counter. The woman behind it gave me a small smile. I returned it. Her name was Anna. She knew me well enough to know who I was seeing and why. She saw me every single week. By the time the doctor was free for my appointment, she would have my file ready and on hand for him. I took a seat in the waiting room and picked up one of the magazines off of the coffee table – the same pile of magazines had not been updated for at least three months. I had been seeing a different doctor before that.

By the time I had reached the last few pages of the magazine, which I practically knew by heart, the doctor emerged from his office. He was leading an elderly woman out of it, a smile on his face as they spoke. Clearly she had not received bad news. As she left, she made eye contact with me and smiled. I wondered if she had seen and recognized me from before. It would not be the first time I did not remember someone who remembered me. I was not the best at keeping track of faces. In my life, they came and they went.

“Good morning, Nate!” Doctor Marigold said. He made his way over to where I was sitting.

As he did every week, Doctor Marigold extended his hand to shake mine. I put the magazine at the bottom of the pile of magazines and stood, shaking his hand firmly. It always felt like a test of strength when I shook my doctor’s hand. “Good morning, Doctor Marigold.”

Anna walked around the receptionist’s counter to hand the doctor my file, a brown folder filled with papers and photos and scans. It was thicker than anyone else’s file I had ever seen and I had seen many, what with the amount of time that I spent in hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Doctor Marigold began leading the way to his office, speaking to me as we walked. “How have you been doing, Nate?”

I did not answer him until the door was shut behind us. “I’ve been feeling a lot better lately,” I told him honestly. “It is the same as last time I told you. Nothing has been out of the ordinary. I mean, ordinary people’s ordinary.”

We took our seats on opposite sides of the desk that Doctor Marigold had in his office. It was not a particularly large office, containing his desk, our seats, a bookshelf, and a back room where he held his checkups and examinations. I knew that room better than any – consisting of a toilet, an examination bed, a stool, an office chair with wheels so that the doctor could roll across the room at high speeds, and cabinets full of medical grade equipment like the cups that I had to pee into.

The doctor chuckled at my statement. “Yes, your ordinary and the ordinary of ordinary people are two very different things. That is good to hear, though, Nate. We will go through the standard if that is all right with you.”

“Of course.”

The standard was pretty standard. My file had several questionnaires pertaining to my health, both mental and physical. The first part of the examination was to answer those questions. They were fairly basic. Was I taking my medicine every day? Did I take it at the same time every day? Were the instructions on the bottles and boxes followed exactly?

They continued like that for a while. I knew that with a case like mine, if something were to go wrong and all the bases had not been covered, there was a lot of money to be lost. The file ensured that that did not happen. As far as I knew, they did not miss a thing.

“What about your exercises? Are you finding that you are still able to follow your workout program?”

“In fact, I feel better since I started working out than I did before, Doctor. I know you said that it wasn’t actually possible but it’s the truth. I feel stronger now, mentally too.”

The doctor smiled at me tightly. He did not believe that I should have been following the program I had been following. According to him, it was far too strenuous for someone with my ‘condition.’ It had been a mission and a half to talk him into finally letting me train and even then, we had started off at a snail’s pace. It had taken over a month for my doctor to let me make the workout program more challenging.

What I had told him, however, was the truth. Working out had given me something of a new lease on life. I felt like my own person again. For many years of my life, I had felt frail and pathetic. Granted, there was quite a large part of me that had given up on me but that was beside the point. Just because I was sick did not mean that I had to look sick and the truth was that I had. When things were really bad, there were people who would take pity on me and give me things for free – hello, lady in the diner who paid for my pancakes that one time – or pat my shoulder sympathetically because they believed that I was suffering from something like cancer. It was kind of saddening.

No one wants to feel fragile. I could not cure myself and nor could the doctors, but I could at least try to improve myself. I know what you are thinking. I did not do it for those people who were screaming pity and sympathy. I really did do it for myself. I was tired of struggling to get out of bed in the morning because my muscles felt too weak to lift me up, sick of looking in the mirror and seeing someone who looked like they were suffering from some sort of eating disorder because of all of the bones sticking out.

It took me a while to get to where I was. I was not able to pick up weights or start running just like that. My body was weak in more than one way and it was not until an entire year had passed since my last episode that I had been able to start. The reason was simple. A body needed food to grow. If I could keep down any meal at all, it was a miracle. The miracle happened. One month without finding me hunched over the toilet at least once a day and I approached Doctor Marigold. He had been so impressed with my progress that he finally agreed to let me start training. It had been an incredibly tough journey to grow strong again but I had been prepared to take it and my body seemed to want to let me take it.

Two months later and I felt like a new man. I was not as strong as I wanted to be but my arms were strong, my legs were thick, and my body had become lean. I no longer struggled to lift myself out of bed. To me, I felt as strong as a superhero. It was not about the way I looked, though. I felt better in other ways.

My doctor was doing the check up on me, proving that the way I was feeling was not all in my head. He started with my ears, looking into them. He moved on to my mouth, asking me to stick my tongue out and say “ahhh” while he put a depressor on my tongue and looked on for things that only doctors knew to look for. He brought out his stethoscope and checked my heartbeat, first on my chest and then on my back. He began applying pressure with his fingertips to certain areas of my body, such as the inside of my wrists, and I noticed that he paid particular attention to the places that I had wounded most at the start of it all. He tested my reactions. He shone a light into my eyes and told me to follow it. He checked my blood pressure. Once all of that was done, the doctor took a sample of my saliva, my blood, and my urine.

As I said, it was pretty standard stuff.

“All right, Nate,” he said. He looked through my file and over the notepad that he had occasionally scribbled on. “I think you were right. You’re still on the right track. I don’t know what happened but let’s you and I hope that things stay this way, eh?”

I knocked on his desk. It was solid oak. “Let’s hope so, Doctor.”

“Is there anything you wanted to say?”

This was usually the part where I stood to excuse myself from his office. Obviously that did not happen this time around. “I actually wanted to tell you that I would be going to an amusement park today. I wanted to know if you thought that that would be okay to do. Just to be on the safe side, you know?”

“You are going to an amusement park?”

“Uh… Yeah,” I said. “I kind of have a date.”

My doctor’s eyes lit up at that. I could not help but smile back as he beamed at me. The people who treated me had always felt closer than the others who were in my life. They knew the insides and the outsides of everything that my illness had put me through throughout my life and it was because of that that their happiness for any of my small triumphs was the most genuine. “That is fantastic to hear, Nate. The guy is very lucky. When are you going?”

“Am I going?”

“I see no reason why not.” With a flourish of my file, he added, “Based on everything in here, you are perfectly at liberty to go. I hope that you enjoy it.”

I had always thought that all of that stuff that people said about feeling their heart soaring or their chests were warming up or the knots in their bellies loosening had been a load of rubbish. Of course, no one could really blame me for that. I had had little to no experience in feeling such things. Since the night that I had met Carlos, my life seemed to have been filled with new experiences and feelings. That was how I felt at that moment – my heart was soaring in my chest and a knot that I had not known was present had loosened.

“Thank you so much, Doctor Marigold,” I said. “Really.”

“You deserve it,” Doctor Marigold said. He stood from behind the desk and I followed suit. For the first time since the very first week that I had found myself in his office, Doctor Marigold walked me out of it. At the door, he gave me a pat on the back and shook my hand again. The handshake was a bit more vigorous since he had found out where I would be spending my afternoon. I half wondered which of us was happier that I had managed to get a date, especially as the doctor clapped a gentle hand down on my back.

“I’ll see you again next week, Nate. Please call Anna to make the appointment. You know she gets irritated.”

Irritated was an understatement. I had once called Anna the day that I needed to come in to see Doctor Marigold—it was the last day of the week and I was required to see him at least once—to make an appointment. I could have sworn that Anna was going to decapitate me. There had been murder in her eyes.

I had not made the same mistake since and she seemed to have warmed up to me anyway. I got the feeling that she had probably peeked into my file. It was either that or she and the doctor had spoken about me, to an extent. Doctor-patient confidentiality was still a thing, to the best of my knowledge.

“I’ll see you next week,” I said, shaking his hand.

Anna had been watching the interaction and when I turned around, she had a ready smile on her face. I returned it and made my way out of the practice, giving her a friendly wave before closing the door behind myself.