The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss

“Love” was such a poor word to describe the tempestuous, tortured, raging, ecstatic tsunami of emotions that threatened to undo him.

Beneath that old canopy of stars, perhaps two thousand feet below me, El Paso and Juárez came alive to the night. The white, sober streetlights of El Paso gave way to the shimmering green lights of Juárez, a tropical and brazen green that seemed to throb and surge, that seemed to say, Ni modo—anything goes.

No one ever seems out of place in a coffee shop.

palaver

My right hand supports the fingers, the fingers of my left hand slide down the ball of the thumb, down that familiar incline, into the groove between the flexor tendons, to the radial artery. If I were a cellist, this would be my fret board.

“Within your secrets lies your sickness,” Dr. Talbott had said to me when I talked to him long after David’s death. If David never sustained a lasting recovery, it was because he never let go of his secret, there were some bars that never came down. His secret is still with him. He still walks alone.

The sky was now blotted out, replaced by a brown-gray canopy, except to the far west where an orange, perfectly round fireball had formed, looking like light at the end of the tunnel.

auscultate

Keep the ball in play. Keep your eye on the ball. Follow through. These were admonitions for both tennis and life, and they spilled over from the one into the other.