My brother liked to tell about the times that he had nearly died.

He talked about the epidemic of pneumonia that had killed babies in the hospital the week that he was born.

There was an epidemic that killed babies in the hospital the week Nicholas was born, but that epidemic was not pneumonia. I think it nearly killed Nicholas that what had nearly killed him was, in fact, another killer altogether. One drawback of being born too soon, weeks before he should have been, was that his birth coincided with a week in which many babies born in that hospital perished from an outbreak of what was, at the time, politely referred to as dysentery.

Nicholas was one of the babies saved with tea.

He hated that part of the story. He wanted some dignity in what he called his near-demise. He wanted to have nearly died of something tragic, poignant, stylish, chic.

First he made pneumonia up, then changed that to scarlet fever. He was partial for a while to scarlet fever, partial, that is, to scarlet fever as a thing to have nearly died from. When he learned that scarlet fever was frequently disfiguring, he took up poisoned blood.

He knew better than to be more specific; poisoned blood said all he wanted it to say.

He remained loyal to poisoned blood, until he discovered lactose intolerance.

Nicholas cherished lactose intolerance. He cherished, I think, the notion that his own infant body could have rejected the most basic nutrient. He must have also cherished the notion of carrying his near-death within his own system, the drama of an inborn cause, and he abandoned, I believe without reluctance, the range of the infectious for the sake of the innate.

In some versions of his near-deaths, my brother detailed his salvation by transfusion; in others, he had gasped for breath, for months, in incubation.

Years later, when he would tell his different versions to people we met traveling, when more or less complete strangers in hotel bars would ask if these narrow escapes from death had really happened, my brother had a fixed reply.

“How else, honey,” Nicholas would ask, “do you think I’d be alive?”

When he first came home, saved by tea, our mother told me not to touch him. I thought of him as priceless, antique, Chinese—another museum piece in the house.

I touched him anyway. I blew on his face and watched his eyelids flutter. Between his eyes was a small blue vein to pinch. Once, when I pinched to hurt, he smiled right up at me, and I was sure that he was stupid.

A few years later, he nearly died again; that time, it was pneumonia.