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Michaela could not comprehend: her (genial, reasonable) husband quite enjoyed Michaela asking him about many facets of his life, dating back to early childhood; but he resisted a certain sort of attention that suggested weakness, infirmity, aging. A sort of attention that suggested prying, prurience. Unclothed in Michaela’s presence, Gerard wasn’t self-conscious in the slightest—but he would flare up in annoyance if Michaela discovered something about him that might be considered a health issue, a medical problem. For Gerard was not a husband who welcomed a wife’s maternal solicitude. He was the dominant personality in the marriage, by their tacit agreement.

  Days in succession Michaela was forced to listen without commentary to her husband coughing this new, harsh, hacking cough that pained her to hear. As if something had crawled into his chest and was choking him to death—that humanoid figure squatting on her chest.

  Drawn by the heat of his blood, it was. One of the squat demon-figures that dwelled in the rented house . . .

  Go away! Leave here! You are not wanted here.

  Something terrible will happen to you, if you remain.

  But where could they go? They’d only just arrived in Santa Tierra. Their house in Cambridge was rented through August. Gerard would never have consented to give up his appointment to the prestigious research institute, that paid its fellows more than the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

  Undermine a man’s pride, you risk injuring his vanity. And a man is his vanity.

  Each morning Gerard was eager to get to the Institute office to which he’d had his console computer, boxes of books, papers, documents shipped from Cambridge. It was touching to Michaela, how enthusiastic her husband was about his work, as if he were, not a distinguished historian of science, but one of his own post-docs. (Michaela had acquired an academic appointment for the spring term also but a less distinguished one, teaching a weekly memoir workshop at a branch of the University of New Mexico, for a modest salary; she had no office nearby, and would not have required one in any case.)

  It was a twenty-minute walk from the hillside house to the Institute campus, on a flagstone walkway that descended to the quadrangle of buildings of surpassing beauty and strangeness, made of scorched-looking desert rocks, untreated wood and poured concrete, tall vertical glass panels in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright. Gerard’s office in a newer building overlooked a courtyard reminiscent of a Zen garden of polished black stones, dwarf cacti, waxy colorless flowers that looked artificial—yet, Michaela discovered that these were in fact living flowers when out of curiosity she stooped to pinch a petal and it fell at once to the ground, bruised.

  How strange!—Michaela recoiled, as if she’d unwittingly killed a living thing.

  In this season of hot searing winds by day that blew ceaselessly by night with a high-pitched whistling that insinuated itself into the very coils and honeycombs of the brain like a rare parasite.

  7

  The Man Who Never Dreams

  He has claimed that he never dreams. You have told him, maybe you just don’t recall your dreams.

  He insists: it’s analogous to amnesia. If you don’t remember an event, it hasn’t happened.

  What isn’t imprinted in the brain cells doesn’t “exist”—it hasn’t really happened.

  You protest: But of course it has happened! If you feel pain, you have felt pain . . .

  No. If there is no recording of the pain in your brain it didn’t happen—to you.

  It may have “happened”—to a living sensate being. But if your brain didn’t record it, and you have no memory of it, it didn’t happen to you.

  8

  Respite

  And then it is revealed to you: it has not (yet) happened.

  Whatever it is that will happen, that will tear your life in two, not clearly and cleanly as you might tear a sheet of paper along a folded edge but roughly, horribly, as you might tear a leg or an arm from a living body, has not (yet) happened.

  What relief! Still your husband is lying more or less as you’d left him the previous night in his hospital bed on the seventh floor of the Santa Tierra Cancer Center.

  Quickly you see: potted begonias from the Institute, on a windowsill; a bouquet of carnations you’d brought Gerard yourself, wilting in a plastic vase; a wicker basket of fruits you’d brought for Gerard, mostly untouched; several days’ accumulation of the New York Times and such professional journals as Science, Nature, Journal of Neuroscience; on the bedside table a stack of Gerard’s books, notebooks, offprints as well as his laptop and cell phone. Nothing has changed in the nighttime hours you’ve been away—a relief!

  And yet, for a moment you stand in the doorway of room 771 staring at the figure in the bed. Is this your husband, or is he a stranger?

  An older man, of an age beyond fifty, propped up against pillows in his bed, a sprawl of notes, printed pages, professional journals about him though he doesn’t appear to be perusing them. Slack-bellied, listless in a hospital-issue gown. Both arms bruised, an IV tube attached to one of the arms.

  The face, of an alarming pallor, especially about the eyes; stiff graying hair, white-stubbly jaws, vacant/melancholy gaze in the instant before he sees you and the eyes sharpen into focus: “Ah, Michaela! My love.”

  My love. Hearing these words you feel your heart suffused with joy.

  Still alive! My husband is still alive.

  9

  Wait

  Of course you want to summon his family. His (adult) children. But quickly he says no.

  “Not yet.”

  “But—when?”

  “Just not yet.”

  He is not an alarmist. (You are the alarmist.)

  Gerard McManus is not a person who seeks attention, wishes to interfere in the lives of others. Hesitant to contact his (adult) children for fear (you sense) that they will not rush to see him in faraway New Mexico unless it is made to appear (not by him: by you, the alarmist) that the situation is urgent.

  “We can wait. If it’s a false alarm, we don’t want them here.”

  “But—wait how long?”

  “I’ll tell you. Wait.”

  AS HE’D REFUSED TO WEAR a hospital gown, initially. Insisted upon his own clothes: short-sleeved blue shirt of a fabric that never wrinkled even when slept-in, much-laundered jeans, white cotton socks. And when he was sitting in a chair, or walking about the corridor hauling the IV gurney behind him, sandals.

  Five days, a week he’d hold out. Bravely. Stubbornly. Until finally it became expedient to surrender his own clothes, switch to hospital-issue clothing. By this time the patient was too sick to care much for appearances.

  Still you would not have guessed: your husband would never wear his own clothing again.

  You would not have guessed: your husband would never call you on his cell phone again.

  You would not have guessed: your husband would never see his (adult) children again.

  10

  Spinoza

  Gerard’s heavily annotated paperback copy of Spinoza: Ethics you have brought to his hospital room at his request. As Gerard has wittily observed, he is working against a deadline.

  This remark you hear, you smile to hear, you do not wince to hear, as Gerard has alluded to a deadline several times since being hospitalized.

  In fact, the copyedited/revised manuscript of The Human Brain and Its Discontents is due back at the Harvard University Press within the month.

  Gerard has been working intermittently on it for weeks but has been slowed down considerably by “these circumstances” as he calls the inconvenience of being hospitalized.

  It is essential for Gerard to check quotations from the Ethics against quotations scattered through The Human Brain and Its Discontents. For this he has enlisted your help going through the hefty manuscript searching for yellow Post-its that reference Spinoza.

  Try to listen to Gerard speak of Spinoza in some slantwise relationship to cognitive neuroscience but you are distracted this morning, you absorb little of what he says. It is the voice, or nearly the voice, of Gerard McManus’s public persona, that dazzles audiences with such startling and original insights but all that you will remember afterward is a skein of nonsense syllables that mean absolutely nothing to you.

  “Every (physical) substance is necessarily infinite. Every (non)physical substance is necessarily finite.”

  Your head fills with static. Infinite, finite!

  All that is crucial is the next lab report. What is the patient’s white blood cell count, what is the patient’s degree of oxygen intake, what is the patient’s creatinine reading.

  What is the “progress” of the tumors.

  The first time you’d heard Gerard speak in public he’d told an onstage interviewer that reading Spinoza’s Ethics at the age of eighteen, a university freshman, changed his life forever: “Every molecule of my being.”

  As later, reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein would further alter his life: “Made me the person I am today.”

  A boastful sort of humility, it had seemed. Yet sincere.

  Yet now you want to protest, angrily—No. That is not true. Your parents who loved you made you what you are. Those who were tender with you when you were vulnerable, and protected you, and hid from you that they protected you, and those who love you now, and are protecting you now—these have made you what you are. Not men you never knew, who never knew you. And not books.

  11

  Bed of Serpents

  In damp rumpled bedclothes unable to sleep and when lapsing into sleep discovering yourself in a bed of writhing serpents that causes you to wake in terror—Oh! Oh God.

  Throwing yourself from the bed, one of your knees striking the hardwood floor—God help me . . .

  TERROR OF SLEEP.

>   Terror of lying sleepless through the night.

  12

  The Vigil II

  But there is no beginning.

  And there is no end.

  RUN! MUST RUN! DOWNHILL/UPHILL. TO/FROM the Santa Tierra Cancer Center, Buena Vista Boulevard, Santa Tierra, New Mexico.

  A tangle of snakes pursues you. Churning writhing snakes clammy-skinned against your arms, legs, naked belly.

  . . . dreamt that I was lying in a bed of serpents, woke screaming and terrified and what d’you think it must mean? That I’m afraid of something, I suppose.

  ACCUSTOMED TO REHEARSING LITTLE ANECDOTES with which to entertain Gerard when Gerard is in a mood to be entertained.

  As through your life from a time before memory you have presented yourself to others through little anecdotes—“Stories.” The pitch of your voice tends to lightness and airiness at such times; you do not wish to suggest to your listener(s), or to anyone, that you take yourself too seriously.

  Who does she think she is?

  Thinking she has a right to live!

  Occasionally you require advice from your husband, or sympathy; your husband is very good with advice, but he is warily good with sympathy as if he has learned (from his experience as a parent?) that immediate and unqualified sympathy may be counter-productive, encouraging weakness in others.

  And so you take care never to appear self-pitying to your husband, for Gerard has little patience with self-pity in others as in himself.

  But now since Gerard has become ill, preoccupied with his own mortality, you have no one to whom you might tell such entertaining anecdotes.

  No one to whom you can define yourself. No one to take note of you.

  If there is no one to hear the narrative of our existence do we in fact exist?

  What bravado in such statements composed in a void for no one to hear, no one to admire.

  If there is no one to admire us, do we exist?

  And the corollary: If there is no one to love us, do we merit existence?

  Tormented by such thoughts. Invaded by such thoughts as by an infection in the blood.

  Run! Must run!

  Never stop running.

  IN THE EARLY MORNING she walked swiftly downhill to the Cancer Center and in the late night she walked (less swiftly) back up to the house from the Cancer Center.

  Good to be exhausted! Good.

  Conscious of her lungs filling/emptying. Tissue-sacs. Razor-thin air that yielded a paucity of oxygen to her brain.

  When not at her husband’s bedside the wife is consumed with anxiety that something terrible will happen to him in her absence.

  Yet, once a week on Thursday afternoon Michaela teaches a three-hour memoir workshop thirty miles away at a branch of the University of New Mexico in suburban Albuquerque.

  It is a terrible risk for her. Slipping into another dimension—impersonating another self.

  Not the desperate self, the desperate wife flailing arms, legs, in an effort to keep from drowning.

  Managed not to miss a single class since Gerard was hospitalized and indeed rarely mentions the class to Gerard who may have forgotten that Michaela has any sort of occupation outside his hospital room.

  Not wanting to think that Gerard may have forgotten, may be in the process of forgetting, exactly who Michaela is in his life.

  A second wife can only be—well, second.

  The first wife is the mother of the children. In the deepest area of the husband’s brain, first wife/mother must be irremediably imprinted.

  None of this does Michaela wish to think about. Especially when she drives along the congested freeway in the leased, unfamiliar car in a trance of suspended panic hoping not to have an accident at such a fraught time.

  But my husband is very ill, in a hospital.

  I can’t die and leave him!—he would have no idea where I am.

  A grim sort of pride Michaela is taking, determined to complete the course and not disappoint the students. Determined not to make excuses for herself, not to inform anyone associated with the workshop of her husband’s condition. Not the director of the writing program who’d hired her; not the fifteen students, most of them older, who’d enrolled in the course. For the workshop has become precious to Michaela, a lifeboat bearing her aloft in a churning treacherous sea.

  Terrible to be so far away from Gerard for more than five hours. She has instructed the nurses to call her on her cell phone if there is an emergency.

  During the three-hour class Michaela doesn’t turn off her cell phone. Often distracted by what seems to her a vibration issuing from the phone, a plea for her attention that, when she surreptitiously checks, turns out to be nothing.

  Yet even when she isn’t in Albuquerque Michaela isn’t always at Gerard’s bedside. Nights she spends alone in the hillside house. Gerard lapses into a fitful opioid sleep at about 11:00 P.M. after being given his nighttime medication and so the nurses urge Michaela to go home, to try to sleep, too.

  Your immune system will crash if you don’t sleep. Then you will become sick, too. Then you will be no help to your husband or to anyone, Mrs. McManus.

  Mrs. McManus! Already the name is beginning to sound like a rebuke.

  A SEASON OF HOT GUSTY WINDS by day, stony chill by night like the interior of a mausoleum.

  In the early morning the sky is suffused with an iridescent deep purple like an exquisite bruise, that gradually lightens in the east. On most nights the moon is so prominent in the sky, Michaela can make her way up the hill to the (empty, darkened) house without needing to use Gerard’s little flashlight.

  The glass-walled Institute-owned house is built on a steep hillside, cantilevered over a shallow ravine in which dwell nocturnal creatures with eyes and teeth that glisten by moonlight. Nighttime insects throb and pulse in the ravine loud as madness.

  By day Michaela has an occasional glimpse of gaily plumed birds amid foliage in the ravine, said to be domesticated parrots that had escaped captivity and become wild. If she listens carefully she can hear their excited shrieks.

  By night Michaela is very tired and rarely looks in the direction of the ravine. Lights inside the house throw reflections onto the floor-to-ceiling windows of a ghastly-white face bearing little resemblance to hers.

  And in the morning, returning to the Cancer Center. Hurry!

  Whether she has slept or not. Fuck sleep, who needs sleep—a coarse ribald voice close beside her ear.

  Get your ass moving, girl. Downhill.

  Once in motion, momentum will carry you. Law of gravity, inertia.

  Lungs filling/emptying/filling with air. First principle of life: Breathe.

  She has come to fear/hate the ceaseless wind from the desert. Tasting grit on her lips. Breath sucked away by the wind. Taking refuge in the refrigerated hospital.

  H’lo ma’am—the (morning) receptionist nods and smiles yet insists that Michaela sign the ledger as she has signed it unvaryingly every morning since Gerard was admitted to the Santa Tierra Cancer Center.

  MICHAELA MCMANUS 771 ONCOLOGY (DR.) GERARD MCMANUS

  As if (Dr.) will make a difference! Still, she must try.

  Keeping him alive. Alive! My husband.

  In room 771 it is wonderful to see how oxygen seeps silently into the husband’s nostrils through a translucent plastic tube.

  Wonderful to see that the husband is alive, and breathing.

  “Gerard! Hello.”

  Grips the husband’s hand which grips hers in turn, but belatedly. Not wanting to see how in recent days Gerard’s reflexes have slowed, even his vision seems to come more slowly into focus. His tone is likely to be reproachful: Asking why is she late?

  Trying to explain, she is not late.

  Where has she been?—Gerard asks. Visiting her friends?

  No friends here. Not one.

  Gerard is distressed that he can’t seem to read very well lately. Print swimming in his eyes. God-damned medications affecting his eyesight and making him groggy so would Michaela please read to him? Small-print articles in Science, Nature, American Journal of Neuroscience & Cognitive Psychology. Front section of the New York Times.