He claimed to have never had it, though he had never allowed himself to be tested—his fake doctor, who also didn’t believe in it, had given him a recent diagnosis of Spots on his lungs, but rather than attributing it to either the new illness or the sarcoidosis that plagued so many former submariners, had told him he was probably just allergic to the rare black-market African wood (bought from an actual van down by the river) that he had been using to make guitars. Amazing sentence, I thought to myself, as all of the sentences about my father were.
