Inexplicably, Michaela has been unable to access Gerard’s computer file for she seems to have an “invalid” password for him though (she would swear) this is the password that Gerard has always had, as well known to her as her own.

  What a nightmare! The Human Brain and Its Discontents is an ambitious history and critique of the ethics of experimental science in America, on which Gerard worked for more than five years; it is the first exploration of the subject, and required immense research in numerous libraries and research centers, interviews and meticulous note-taking as well as the preparation of a lengthy bibliography which, Michaela can see, is far from complete.

  There is even a new section near the end of the manuscript on the ethics of linguistic anthropology, with an emphasis upon the linguistics of extinct and endangered languages.

  In this fascinating chapter Michaela learns that there are nearly seven thousand languages in the world of which approximately one-half have fewer than three thousand speakers–which classifies them as endangered.

  If a majority of speakers of a language are elderly, the danger of extinction is compounded.

  If a language is written, it will endure (to a degree). If a language is primarily spoken, it can endure only so long as there are living persons who speak it.

  Michaela wonders: What would it be, to be the last living survivor of a language?

  In a couple, there must be one who outlives the other: the survivor.

  Among the indigenous North American languages which Gerard discusses in his book are those spoken by the Comanche, Hopi, Blackfoot, Arapaho, and the Taos Pueblo; Gerard seemed to know a good deal about the Kiwaan language, spoken by less than one hundred Pueblo Indians in the Santa Tierra highlands. He’d applied to the Santa Tierra Institute in order to research indigenous Indian cultures in northern New Mexico, a field entirely new to him.

  Linguistics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience—and philosophy (Spinoza). Somehow in Gerard’s brain these came together. Michaela hadn’t understood but had no doubt that Gerard did. She’d been impressed that, at this point in Gerard’s career, at his age, Gerard was expanding his definition of scientific experimentation to include linguistics. The ethics of the appropriation of “subordinate” cultures by the predominant (White) culture.

  Then, in Santa Terria, illness had ravaged him almost immediately. He’d never driven to visit the Pueblo sites, so far as Michaela knew he’d never made contact with Taos Pueblo speakers of Kiwaan. They’d taken just two hikes into the desert and only one hike in the San Mateo State Park. Gerard’s very being—physical, mental—had been appropriated by cellular invaders.

  At the start, his condition had been misdiagnosed. His symptoms had been misleading. The low-grade stomach pain, that had not yet emerged as excruciating, had been misdiagnosed by the oncologist as mere constipation, forestalling by weeks the crucial scan that would reveal urethral cancer. By which time it was too late for surgery . . .

  Oh, why was she tormenting herself with this story again? Again, again, and again this story with so many possibilities, yet with an ending inevitable as a cul-de-sac: inevitable as a sack over the head, blinding, suffocating. Michaela recalls screaming at Dr. N___—What is wrong? Why are you so slow? Why don’t you start treating him?

  Or, possibly she’d only imagined screaming at Dr. N___. Wanting to scream, but the words had stuck in her throat.

  Save him. Save my husband. Save his life!

  Why are you doing so little? Save his life!

  Surely it was malpractice, this delay. But Michaela was too exhausted to feel vindictive, and had not the energy or the spirit for investigating. There’d been no autopsy. And now, mere ash.

  In an urn, in the bedroom! Mere ash.

  She would bring it back with her to Cambridge, she supposed. The urn in the soft cloth sack, the ash inside the urn, seven pounds two ounces all that remained of Gerard McManus.

  Not possible. Michaela is sure.

  As it is not possible, that Michaela will ever return to Cambridge, Mass. She is sure.

  In lightly falling rain, rain faint as mist, beneath an umbrella at a café table Michaela is trying to make sense of Gerard’s argument in lengthy paragraphs, dense prose. The tone of academic writing is discursive, argumentative: a point is being made, against (assumed) opposition. The effect is of a hammer being hammered. Page after page Michaela reads, taking notes. (Are these pages numbered correctly? Michaela wonders if something went amiss with the printer.) She is fighting a headache, staving off the moment when she will give in, and take a Tylenol; pill-taking seems to her a weakness, as it had seemed to Gerard before his illness.

  Michaela is intrigued by Gerard’s research into extinct and endangered languages. She recalls now his conversations with friends about such languages, and his discussion of a story by Borges, with a poet-friend; Michaela hadn’t known enough to participate, and regrets now that she hadn’t asked Gerard questions. Had he been disappointed in her, as he’d been disappointed in his first wife, by her failure to ask appropriate questions? He’d had an adequate reading knowledge of several languages including French, German, and Italian; he hadn’t known any Native American languages, Michaela was sure. His interest in the Kiwaan language was entirely new.

  Trying not to succumb to anxiety. She is her husband’s only hope. His post-docs are busy with their own projects, his editor at Harvard University Press isn’t a specialist in the history of science and has expressed gratitude to Michaela, for whatever help she can provide.

  Gerard McManus had been one of Harvard’s most distinguished faculty members, he’d been awarded prizes, fellowships, elected to the National Science Academy and the American Philosophical Society, yet these honors had never been quite enough. He hadn’t been a vain man, not one who craved superiority over his colleagues and friends, but (Michaela has reason to think) he’d been frightened of his own mortality and may have believed half-consciously that the more distinctions he received, the more he was singled out and honored by the world, the more likely he was not to die as others did.

  Michaela hears herself laugh. Or no, Michaela hears herself sob.

  “MA’AM?”—A WAITER HAS APPROACHED MICHAELA, hesitantly.

  A young Mexican-American waiter, it seems. Evidently the café is open. Or has just opened. The waiter regards Michaela with a wary smile as if his experiences with White women tourists has not always been pleasant.

  But Michaela doesn’t look like a tourist. She doesn’t even look White, she thinks. If you look closely her skin is smudged, sullied.

  She isn’t sure how long she has been seated at the table. In her entranced state time moves unpredictably: with glacial-slowness, then in quick leaps and pleats, as if someone is leafing impatiently through the pages of a book. She has made her way through a portion of the manuscript but much of it will have to be examined a second time, and probably a third; she makes little progress, for she keeps finding more problems.

  The morning he’d said quietly as one might report the temperature:

  “I’m so much weaker than I was yesterday.”

  Michaela turns the oversized man’s watch on her wrist hoping to see the time but the exact time eludes her.

  “Ma’am? Is something wrong?”

  I am not ma’am. Please.

  But of course Michaela is ma’am. Michaela is a White woman, and Michaela is ma’am. The waiter is no more than twenty-five years old. Whoever she is, she hasn’t been twenty-five for a decade or more.

  “Would you like to order something now, ma’am, or would you like to wait for your friend to return?”

  “‘Friend’? What do you mean?”

  The waiter glances about the terrace with a quizzical half-smile. As if there is someone in the vicinity of whom he has lost sight. A handsome boy with a narrow fox face. Sideburns, a small mustache. He might be as young as twenty—younger. Michaela wonders what the wary dark brown eyes see, seeing her.

  “Was someone here with me?” Michaela is trying to remain lighthearted. Exude an air of caprice. As if she is just joking with him, not menacing him but simply joking with him, not altogether serious.

  “Excuse me, did you say—you saw someone here with me?”

  Hesitantly the waiter says yes. He is not so certain now.

  “What did he look like?”

  The waiter smiles uneasily. For possibly this is a joke. A White woman’s sense of humor? He explains that he hadn’t seen her companion very clearly.

  “It was a man?”

  A man, yes.

  The waiter seems anxious to escape. No drink order seems to be forthcoming. He is torn between sympathy for the solitary White woman and a simple wish to escape her.

  “Was he tall? With dark, graying hair? A little older than I am? Was he—did he seem—”

  The waiter shakes his head quickly, don’t know, ma’am.

  Michaela has more questions for the young man but he slips away from her. Disappears into the café. The afternoon sky has darkened, flashes of lightning illuminate the sky like livid veins. When she looks more closely, she sees that the café is darkened, there is a closed sign in the window.

  43

  Clinic

  My guess is that it crawled into your ear when you were sleeping.

  Size of a pencil point!—got the damned thing out with a surgical tweezers.

  Trouble is, you waited a long time before coming in here, ma’am.

  Did you think it would just go away? An infection, so close to the brain?

  44

  Grief Counselor

  Like a burst artery it has spilled out into the world.

  What had been the unbearable, now spilled out into the world.

  The old dream of childhood, now it is spread out about you.

  Cannot breathe except you breathe in the unbearable.

  THE BEARDED MOUTH MOVES, GRAVELY. Through a cicada-shrillness words come in broken pieces.

  “. . . natural for you to grieve, Mrs. McManus. Your husband has been gone for less than four weeks . . .”

  Delicate hesitation at the word gone. You sense that the bearded mouth is reluctant to utter such a blunt word as dead.

  “. . . but very good for you to keep busy as you have been. Preparing your late husband’s manuscript for the press . . .”

  As if you are a child, a precocious child, in fact a socially maladroit child, needing to be encouraged to behave as other, healthier children behave by instinct.

  As if you’ve accomplished anything significant with Gerard’s mangled manuscript. These weeks!

  “. . . from all that I’ve heard Dr. McManus was a remarkable person, in fact I’m sure that I have read some of his . . .”

  It is the lipstick-mouth that smiles at the bearded mouth. Polite, encouraging. Behind dark-tinted glasses (mildly bloodshot) eyes are hidden from view so that Dr. M___ cannot exactly engage with the client.

  Polite smile to encourage the gray-bearded mouth Dr. M___ who means well. For middle-aged drum-bellied grief counsellors displaying framed certifications from the American Association of Health Care Professionals and a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of New Mexico on their office walls require encouragement too.

  A man of Gerard’s approximate age. You should be inclined to be sympathetic.

  “. . . sounds like a very interesting and important book, a ‘history of the ethics of scientific research,’ indeed very interesting, Mrs.—Michaela! Your husband would be relieved that you are going to assure its publication . . .”

  How dare you speak of my husband. You did not know my husband.

  How dare you condescend to me. You do not know me.

  “. . . ‘grief-support group,’ meeting once a week . . . several persons—indeed, widows—who have lost their spouses recently . . .”

  Given to understand that as a widow you are not alone.

  Though (in fact) you are utterly, terribly, and irrefutably alone.

  “. . . important to remain in touch with your emotions, not to deny, suppress, avoid . . .”

  Words of logic, common sense. Marketing of banality. Grief, mourning, need to keep active, see friends. “Support system.” Not become a recluse.

  You would appear to be in a near-catatonic state. Numbed, hypnotized. Glassy-eyed hearing these words meant to console, reassure—resign yourself to the unbearable.

  Yet: your heart has begun beating erratically. Like fingers drumming on a table.

  “. . . strongly recommend that you have a physical examination . . . caretakers for the gravely ill almost always neglect their own well-being.

  “And if I may, I would also like to refer you to a pharmacologist . . .”

  A wave of nausea comes over you at the thought of a physical examination: your battered body further violated, something metallic and sharp shoved into your pelvis, blood drawn from your arm (mysteriously) bruised already as Gerard’s arms were bruised for weeks, fresh bruises overlapping with faded bruises.

  As for a pharmacologist—why, when you already have a (secret) cache of drugs at home to cure yourself of your deep unhappiness?

  “. . . excuse me, Mrs. McManus?”

  You have been staring into space blank-faced, hypnotized. Catatonia a kind of ether suffused through your being.

  Waking yourself with a start, as from a bad dream. Rising to your feet too restless to remain seated facing the grief counselor at his teakwood desk.

  Quick to assure the startled Dr. M___ that you don’t intend to leave his office just yet. But feeling a need to be on your feet, move about a little, reanimate your numbed legs.

  “. . . of course, Michaela . . . whatever makes you comfortable.”

  But you, on your feet, moving about the office, seem to be making Dr. M___ uncomfortable. His eyes follow you, warily.

  You wonder what Iris Esdras, who’d made this appointment for you with Dr. M___, has told him about you. Not adjusting to her radically altered circumstances. Not cooperative with anyone who offers to help her. May be self-harmful, suicidal. Has refused to vacate the Institute-owned house and return to her home in the East.

  As a widow you wear white like a bride, refuse to wear black like a vulture. White linen jacket, white linen trousers, pale pink silk shirt, silk scarf knitted at your throat. Impersonating the self-assured woman you’d (once) been.

  Showered that morning at 5:00 A.M. rinsing away the rancid smell of animal panic, shampooed and roughly brushed your hair with Gerard’s hairbrush brought back from the hospital with his things. Touched by how the brush now mingles your hair and Gerard’s hair, silvery, gray, white, coppery-brown, dark-brown hairs tangled together . . .

  It is part of your impersonation that you have manicured your (short, blunt) nails before coming to the grief counselor. You have applied makeup to your sallow skin, lipstick to your pallid lips. A Maybelline brow-pencil you’d discovered discarded in a public lavatory you’d brought home to artfully darken your eyebrows.

  You intend to try. You do not intend to give up.

  Your wedding ring has become too large for your finger, slips and slides about it. (Gerard’s wedding ring you wear on a thin silver chain around your neck, hidden inside your clothes.) And you are wearing your husband’s oversized wristwatch that slips and slides about your wrist impracticably, usually you can’t see the time.

  Which is anyway widow-time: out-of-time.

  Waiting, on your feet. How long? Telling yourself for Christ’s sake breathe.

  Because you are waiting. Anguish, anxiety of waiting. Continuous state of waiting, expectation. Dare not sleep.

  Waiting for—what?

  Waiting for what has happened, to happen. The worst that can happen. Or, waiting to learn that it has not (yet) happened.

  All this while Dr. M___ continues to speak in his voice modulated to placate the (secretly) anxious and (secretly) suicidal even as, in a pose of nonchalance, you have gone to stand at a window overlooking the parking lot.

  Why? No one has summoned you.

  Except: three floors down, a figure, a male figure, materializes out of the sun-glare.

  Peer between the slats of the partly-drawn blind. Suddenly shocked, senses alerted.

  A man of Gerard’s height, bearing.

  Is it—? No. Not possible.

  You are stunned, transfixed. Staring between the slats of the blind as your heart begins to accelerate wildly.

  “. . . why don’t you look this way, Michaela? You might be able to concentrate better on what we are saying . . .”

  But all of your concentration is fixed upon the lone figure in the parking lot: a man of Gerard’s approximate age, height, bearing. He is wearing clothes that are not immediately familiar to you—khaki shorts, a short-sleeved patterned shirt. On his head a baseball cap of the slate-blue color of Stellar’s jay’s feathers, which is new to you also. But then, you have not seen Gerard in several weeks and have no idea what he might be wearing by now; it would be natural for Gerard to buy a hat like this to protect his eyes from the New Mexico sunshine though on principal Gerard doesn’t much care for hats, and certainly not baseball caps . . . And the light is so glaring, you are (probably) not seeing colors clearly, everything seems bleached-out.

  “Michaela? Is something wrong?”—there is an edge to Dr. M___’s kindly voice as if even the grief counselor may be losing patience.

  You are distracted, you scarcely hear. Alarmed that the man in the baseball cap has turned to walk away indifferent to you staring at him from a third-floor window, not fifty feet away.