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She was touching her nose with a wadded Kleenex. Her tears were real. “I’m not on drugs,” she said.
    “Of course you aren’t,” I said.
    “It’s usually what people think,” she told me, “but it’s worse than drugs. I get crazed for a while, then it passes. Can you forget it?”
    “Sure I will. Don’t worry,” I said.
    “I don’t know why I do these things,” she said.
    “Your arm is almost completely healed,” I told her. I lifted her wrist and stretched her arm out towards me. She tugged against my pull, but she relaxed as I cradled her elbow in my palm. The raw patch had calmed and a new field of pink had surfaced, hairless and glossy. I wanted to mention the ancient statuary in Greece. I had seen marble limbs discolored, worn concave at the wrist and fingertips, marred by centuries of human touch. Unchecked, these habits of adoration can wear away their subject. To tell her this might sound too much like a tour guide’s expert monologue, and already Pamela had pinned her napkin beneath her plate and was standing up from the table. How would I say, “Sit down, let me describe these treasures”?

  LANE
    I t was the end of summer. I was living in a seaside town where the rent was cut to nothing during the off-season. I had a good part-time job delivering propane tanks. The tanks were heavy and I enjoyed the physical work. The truck was old and had character; I grew to expect its misfirings and to enjoy the low warble of its engine. I liked the people I saw on my job. They were busy hanging wash or shaving with cold water since their gas had run out, and they were always pleased to see me. I had much time to think about my life. Mostly, I thought about a woman. I saw how the end of an affair is an end to the suspension of disbelief, a lot like the close of a circus act when we see the sword swallower collect his array of knives. Thelights go up and we see the nets and wires which we had not noticed before. The tent is dismantled, fluttering down, like the huge dusty petals of an inverted flower.
    For the past few years I had been studying medicine, but I was dependent on financial aid, which had become increasingly difficult to arrange, and I decided on a year away from the university. It wasn’t that I didn’t fare well or didn’t have the stomach for it. After working with cadavers, and having numbered and labeled their remnants, I was at ease with the great stillness they presented to me. Nothing upset me, really. Blood, with its broad spectrum of reds, from Campbell’s soup to valentine satin, had become an ordinary sight. The abscessed sacs and tumors and the wild geometries of accidental lacerations could not unnerve me. Surgical instruments steamed and wrapped in sterile towels had once excited me, but they started to look like silverware wrapped in linen napkins at a place where I used to work as a waiter. Only once, when I was required to dissect a single hand, did I find myself skittish, unable to concentrate.
    There is nothing that represents the soul more than the hand. To find the digital arteries and nerves I had to peel back thin, elastic ribbons of muscle from each finger: the “flexor profundus”; the “flexor sublimis”; the “flexor ossis metacarpi”; and so on. These strips of muscle, snipped and flayed open, gave the hand the appearance of a party-popper.
    I felt uneasy, even in the glaring light. These shredded bands of muscle had once represented the human touch. But I didn’t leave my studies over something like that. I thought that maybe I wasn’t entirely interested in a medical career, and I needed some time to think about it.
    Lane had invited me to spend another weekend with her. Our relationship remained undefined, and these weekends were nerve-racking to me because I never knew what to expect. Although on the surface it was casual, even comfortable in a disappointing way, I was edgy. It was like registering for the draft; I was pretty sure I wasn’t going