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that—and no one was going to rewrite my own history.
    “It’s adult onset. Your pancreas is deteriorating.”
    “You might find yourself getting more tired than normal. You might have nausea or vomiting, and polyphagia, polydipsia and polyuria, and prickling of the skin.”
    “Your body will have trouble forming scars if you cut yourself, that’s another problem.”
    “You are going to have to take care of yourself, Mr. Miró-Puig.”
    Taking care of myself meant giving up, first of all (the doctor had enough empathy to ration the bad news), fried potatoes, nuts (innocent nuts!), sweets, alcohol (the doctor knows that the list of exceptions here will be long), tobacco (I don’t smoke), meat and seafood binges, and bingeing in general (even lettuce has too much carbohydrate): all the things that provide an ounce of bodily pleasure. Sure, he didn’t put a limit on sex, but your departure had left me without an accomplice—though toward the end our bedroom hadn’t exactly been a carnival—and I wasn’t feeling up to finding a girlfriend.
    “There’s no cutoff date for this, Joan-Marc. You’re going to have to behave—
fer bondat,
forever.”
    I knew I should be pleased, and not just because he’d moved to a first-name basis, which does make disease less intimidating; my muscle tissue had survived, and 30 percent of the light could still pass through my arteries. We’d caught it in time, problem detected, I was alive and they didn’t even have to slice me up like a chicken. I would go on breathing, and I still had a good thirty-two years or so left.
    “It’s not a reversible situation. You’re going to have to say good-bye to certain habits and replace them with healthier ones.”
    It was unfair: so many carnivores loose in the streets, so many people who’ve never spent five minutes considering the industrial torture techniques used to fatten up the animals whose cadavers are filleted into their servings of filthy protein. And yet, it’s the conscientious guy who suffers, the guy who’s practically vegetarian and whose worst sin was being a bit greedy when it came to fried tubers and sugary trail mix. It was asking a lot of me to kill the hours between cooked vegetables and a seaweed salad by snacking on tomato slices.
    “Some habits must go for good.”
    Of course it was bad—terrible—that you’d left me, and that financial worries crowded my doorstep, but it was that visit to the doctor that really brought me to despair. Obviously I rebelled at the prospect of spending the rest of my life watching through a thick pane of glass as steaming plates of delicious fried foods paraded past. But I need more to explain my utter collapse: I stopped writing to you, I stopped pairing my socks, ironing my clothes; I left the house with a slovenly beard and unkempt hair, I wore the same shirt for a week, I forgot to brush my teeth. I found myself sitting down on the toilet like a little girl, sniveling, unable to face my problems. I woke up in the middle of the night, closed my eyes and imagined my heart like a dry bean beating behind my ribs: shriveled, timid, wrinkled. I had attacks of rage while stretched out on the sofa. I lost all confidence in my body. My defenses against hypochondria were peeling off like damp parquet tiles. What would be next? My hands started sweating when I thought about how the consciousness I was so comfortable in, the only point in the whole grand universe where I was capable of living, could just give out at any moment. I got despondent every time I thought about that doughy muscle, coated in blood, beating to the rhythm of instructions screen-printed onto a DNA helix before I left my mother’s womb. It wasn’t only that my arteries were clogged, making me chronically ill in the eyes of Western doctors—after all, if you looked at me with a more discerning eye, I was healthy. My diabetes wasn’t the kind the kids at school had: I could exercise, argue, touch a woman; I would