I’ll try again to describe that reaction that filled me with anxiety. When I entered our apartment, I glanced at the familiar objects around me, thinking at the same moment that all those objects were imprinted with the movement of Sanja’s hand. She had put each object in its place and it was the movement of her hand that had maintained those objects’ sheen. That thought was dangerous because I was, unconsciously, seeing a world without her, just the movement of her hand. That’s what brought on this anxiety, the swelling around my heart.

Her invisible veins, her punctured arm, so much blood taken for innumerable tests, so much pain from the needle . . .

In the 1980s, she had been allergic to everything: pollen, dust in books, and probably me. Twice-weekly injections kept her allergies under control. Her body was a living wound. My Frida Kahlo. It seemed as though she could only survive in a world without plants. It’s true that in her late childhood, her pre-allergic period, she didn’t get along with plants either: she refused to drink tea . . . Every morning her parrot, Charlie, would repeat the only sentence he knew how to pronounce: “Drink your tea, Sanja! Drink your tea, Sanja!”

When we moved to D.C., her allergy returned for a while—because of the swirling winds that spin dust and pollen around in the basin between the Atlantic and the Appalachian chain—and she had allergy tests. The doctor in Vienna scratched four long rows on her back with needle pricks (testing for all possible kinds of allergy) and for a while she bore those scars on her left shoulder blade like Angelina Jolie’s tattoos.

But where is the pain from her past now? And where is the pain I concealed?

The woman who takes her blood at five in the morning announces herself from the doorway loudly enough to wake us: “Blood work!” She’s called Dora Castro.

Today Sanja’s right arm is numb, so she no longer feels the needle prick. And I’m glad it doesn’t hurt her, but I’d like it to hurt her. All my senses have gone haywire.

This evening we are doing qigong in the ward with Asim, a doctor who believes in traditional Chinese medicine. A nurse came in and found us in the middle of our exercises, which resembled a sacred tribal ritual, and she left the room, walking slowly backward so as not to disturb anything. And later, when she came back to take Sanja’s pulse, she made my day by asking: “Are you a Native American?”