Free The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff Page A

we can talk about later, your friend can live a healthy life. It'll take her a year or so of total rest, though, until she recovers to the point when she can go back to work. I want to put her on a clinical trial, monoclonal antibodies. Expensive, but she's perfect for it."
    "Not possible," said Sully. "She's a journalist. She's one of the greats. Or will be. She's totally driven."
    "Not only possible," said the attending. "But absolutely necessary. If you'll excuse me, I have to go check on my other patients," she said, and scurried off.
    Sully had put his head between his legs and now was breathing deeply. Great wings of sweat had feathered over his back. "It's okay, Sully," I said. "I can hold down the fort if you need to go."
    "No," he said and wiped his face, smiling a shaky smile. "You're not her only friend, you know."
    "I know," I said, and squeezed his hand, but there was still a little something in that hospital hallway, a dark, hard button, between us, and I couldn't understand it.
    When Clarissa awoke in the afternoon, sane and furious ( Where the hell am I, she growled), I was the one to tell her about her disease. Sully had gone home to gather some things for her stay in the hospital, and in the meantime I had charmed a medical student into using his laptop to do some research.
    So I told Clarissa many people lived happily with lupus for years, that the word came from the rash across her face; lupus, in Latin, meant "wolf," and the way it spread had reminded oldtime physicians of a wolf's muzzle. I said it was also a constellation and another name for a fish, a luce or a pike; I said the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary was circa 1400 from Lanfranc's Cirurg., whatever that was, and recited it in my bad Chaucerian accent: Summen clepen it cancrum, & summen lupum.
    "But it's definitely not cancrum," I said. "Lupum we can fight."
    "Oh, so it's a good life-threatening condition," she said grimly, tiny in her sheets, her curls wild around her head. "Hooray, lupus!"
    I told her about what she was likely to feel, the joint pain, the fatigue, the course of treatment options. About the famous people who'd had it: Flannery O'Connor (A good disease is not hard to find, Clarissa had punned then, her face lighting up), and perhaps even Jack London ( Jesus, that's ironic, she'd said. Wolves.). I said that it was an inherited disease and asked her if anybody had died unexpectedly in her family history.
    "Other than my parents maybe-maybe-not falling off Norwegian fjords? No," she'd said. Then, "Yes. My nana just up and died when she was forty." I looked at Clarissa, who rubbed her eyes wearily. "She had rashes, too," she said, softly. "And arthritis."
    I told her, cringing now, that she wasn't allowed to go back to work until she was healthy. It was a measure of her sickness that she didn't fight what I said. She put her head back against her pillow, and closed her eyes, and I assumed she was asleep and left.
    She was in the hospital for a month, until her infection left her kidneys and brain, until her pleurisy subsided. I filled her apartment with vases of purple lupine--a macabre joke--and she laughed with tears in her eyes when she saw the flowers. On the day she went home, I sat with her, watching movies, until she turned and told me that she knew the class I had to teach was in an hour and if I booked it I could get to Stanford with time to make photocopies. She told me all she wanted to do was to sleep, and Sully would be home in a few hours, anyway.
    "No," I said. "I'm staying here."
    "Yes," she said, and fixed me with one beady eye and began saying puns so fast it was all I could do to gather my stuff to get away. "A dyslexic man walks into a bra," she said. "What do you call cheese that isn't yours? Nacho cheese," she said, and escorted me down the elevator. I gave Clarissa a kiss on the head as I climbed into my car. "This is retarded," she said, sneaking a cigarette on the street, and blowing the