He wasn't sick yet. Or at least not as sick as he would get. He was sitting in someone's house on campus, I don't remember whose, enthusing about the linguistic collisions in mixed areas of Canada where English and French speakers were in contact a lot. He'd been at a gas station and heard someone say "Checkez-vous les brakes, s'il-vous plait."
(He also told about how someone he barely knew had once called him and said "I've got this guy here and he only speaks French. Can you help?" The thing was, my friend--I'll call him Wilhelm, since in real life he does have an explosively German name, although you'll have to get that Freikorps wet dream out of your mind right now because he has long wavy brown hair and the most endearingly mongrel face--the thing was, Wilhelm *barely* spoke French at all. Nonetheless, he manfully went to the apartment and tried to help, and between his goodwill and a dictionary, they did finally get the severely misdirected Frenchman where he was going.)
"'Checkez-vous les brakes, s'il-vous plait,'" repeated Wilhelm, rolling it around on his tongue, wonkishly getting off on its wrongness and perfection.
Two years later I would go upstairs and make a call to him. Through the tube in his throat he would strangle "I love you" and then hang up.
It's funny; we were intensely together when he was sick. I called him every day. It would last three seconds: "Hi, Wilhelm, it's me." "Okay." Goodbye. He was too far gone for anything else. But though our moments together were very brief, they were crucial. For both of us.
Yet when he got better, we eased up, as if we somehow didn't quite belong in each other's regular lives. Funny how that is.
I talked to Joe a lot that year too. I never would have dreamed that Joe would be the one we'd lose. Wilhelm hung by a thread in those days, yet Joe's was already cut.
Funny how that is.
