Nor does it seem evident to Michaela that Gerard’s condition is improving or is likely to improve.

  In their old familiar life which was the life of just a few weeks before quaint in retrospect as a nineteenth-century daguerreotype Michaela’s gentle, gentlemanly husband never spoke harshly to her, never impatiently. Never glared at her as if he scarcely recognizes her.

  “. . . speaking with a Chinese accent? Are we in Beijing?”

  Delirium. Michaela has been warned that Gerard might lapse into delirium after days of the oxycodone dripping into his veins.

  Drugging, doping. Opioids: opium. A choice between excruciating pain and confusion, grogginess. Delirium is the official medical usage but it seems to Michaela a misleading term.

  Really it seems to Michaela that her husband is increasingly entangled in dreams. Disturbing dreams. Like a man in quicksand, valiantly struggling, yet unable to pull himself free as a man trapped in a dream cannot open his eyes though he senses—knows—that he is dreaming.

  “. . . without a translator. Train tickets to—is it Uzbekistan?”

  Michaela hadn’t traveled with Gerard to Russia, East Asia, Africa. Most of Gerard’s travels had taken place before their marriage. Now she feels the pang of a double loss: her husband is drifting from her yet he is drifting in the company (she supposes) of another wife, young children.

  “. . . my passport? Have you seen it? Where is my passport?”

  In such a state of delirium the usually reasonable Gerard McManus does not wish to cooperate with the medical staff. He does not want more blood extracted from his bruised and battered arms. Especially he does not want to swallow a gallon of ill-tasting GoLYTELY to clear his colon for a colonoscopy and he does not want to endure a catheter in his penis. No! He does not want to be lifted onto yet another gurney and wheeled away descending seven vertiginous floors to Radiology for yet another CAT scan.

  How many tests, scans, biopsies has the patient endured! Yet treatment has not yet begun to shrink the cancerous tumors.

  Soon! We will zap the small tumors with radiation. And then—

  Michaela has tried to comprehend why the aggressive treatment of Gerard’s cancer which Dr. N___ has promised, or has seemed to have promised, hasn’t begun. As she has tried to comprehend why dapper bow-tied Dr. N___ waited so long before discovering the urethral tumor dismissing the patient’s complaint of pain . . . Why, why on earth, an oncologist neglecting to test for a tumor in the stomach or abdomen after complaints of pain, now the tumor has grown too large to be surgically removed.

  Yet: one more test is needed. Kidney, biopsy.

  Unbelievably, one more test. After so many.

  Soon then, possibly tomorrow after the results of the biopsy are known: the first of the radiation treatments will be scheduled.

  Is that definite?—Michaela asks plaintively.

  Is that a promise?—an edge to Michaela’s voice.

  Searching the seventh floor for Dr. N___ who has been more than usually difficult to find in recent days. He is a tall thick-bodied man with a face impassive as a death-mask and through the eyeholes of this mask small shiny-dark eyes peer warily. Though Michaela ran breathless to the hospital arriving by 7:00 A.M. it seems that Dr. N___ had already made his rounds and had departed.

  Wanting to fall to her knees to plead with Dr. N___. Save my husband!

  Wanting to clutch at his arm, scream into his face. What are you doing! Why are you waiting! Start the treatment now! Today!

  Not good for Michaela to allow herself to despair. Especially not angry despair.

  Not good for Michaela to attempt to leave Gerard’s room if he isn’t asleep.

  Gerard cries: “Wait, where are you going? Don’t leave me here! Don’t abandon me! You’re my wife, you can’t abandon me! Drive the car around to the front! It’s in the parking garage where I left it. Here are the keys . . .”

  Michaela tries to explain to her excited husband that she is only going downstairs to the cafeteria for a few minutes. She is not leaving the hospital, she is not leaving him. But he can’t (just yet) leave the hospital. The treatment for his condition has not (yet) begun.

  “. . . but what is my ‘condition’? What are you talking about? Nothing has been explained.”

  “Yes, darling. It has been explained . . .”

  “Nothing has been explained! What are you saying!”

  Gerard has been told this information in excruciating detail as well as having endured it but Gerard seems to have forgotten much that has happened to him since being admitted to the ER. He becomes impatient with Michaela if she speaks slowly and he becomes impatient with Michaela if she speaks too quickly. And when Gerard does hear her it seems that he must be confusing the elusive Dr. N___ with his longtime Cambridge internist Dr. T___.

  Another time Michaela explains. But within a few minutes Gerard asks the same questions. Makes the same demands.

  “D’you remember where we left the car? In the parking garage? Please go and get it—I don’t have any shoes. They won’t let me out of here unless you help me. Call for a nurse, I’ll start the discharge procedure. Here are the keys . . .”

  Michaela is struck to the heart seeing: Gerard fumbling his fingers against the front of the hospital gown searching for a pocket, and car keys in the pocket, except (of course) there is no pocket in the hospital gown, and there are no car keys.

  . . . RUNNING, IN THE HOT WIND. Running until she stumbled. Until tears streaked her face. Until her heart burst, she could run no farther. She ran until her guts ached. She ran until both legs cramped, she cried aloud in pain. Until the throbbing artery in her brain burst like a constellation. She ran out of the hospital, blindly she ran along a roadway. She ran in a place unknown to her where the air was thin as a razor blade and did not nourish her fainting, failing brain. She ran from his incredulous and accusing eyes. She ran from the broken capillaries in his eyes. She ran from her husband’s fingers groping for car keys in a nightgown pocket that did not exist. She ran out of the pathos of his pleading words.

  Michaela, don’t leave! Don’t abandon me, stay with me.

  If you abandon me something terrible will happen to us both if you abandon me . . .

  20

  The Experiment

  Moments of lucidity. Even now in the Final Days in the gathering dark of rushing waters are islands of sudden bright coherence.

  Staring at a cup of meds held out to him by a nurse, mouth softened into a curious smile: “D’you know, Michaela—I don’t think the protocols of this experiment were designed with me in mind.”

  Close by at his bedside Michaela laughs for (she senses) that Gerard has said something witty. In the seventeenth day of the vigil Michaela is beginning to lose her sense of what is humor.

  Still, she will jot these eccentric words down in a notebook of mostly empty pages. Wanting to recall, cherish, repeat to those who’d known and admired Gerard McManus.

  I don’t think the protocols of this experiment were designed with me in mind.

  Another time, Gerard speaks with Michaela earnestly about Spinoza.

  Not for the first time of course. Many times over the years Gerard has spoken of Spinoza with Michaela, always earnestly, and with an air of almost boyish elation. Contrasting the “agnostic” rigor of Spinoza with the “empty abstractions” of Kant and Plato. Spinoza, the very emblem of the solitary, fiercely independent soul.

  In the role that came naturally to Michaela as the admiring younger wife Michaela listened politely to Gerard at such times without really comprehending much of what he said. Now, years later, as Gerard speaks from his hospital bed, in a diminished voice, yet still earnest, urgent, enthusiastic, Michaela tries to listen more carefully and yet does not really understand.

  In the notebook writing:

  Changed my life. Because changed my way of thinking—the nature of thought.

  All things are completed, finite. Contained within eternity. (Spinoza)

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

  Happiness is a finite quantity in so far as it is a phenomenon of time, space, & circumstance; but happiness is an infinite quantity in so far as it is a phenomenon of the soul (Eternity).

  No idea what this means! Nonetheless Michaela inscribes it carefully in her notebook.

  NOT CLEAR WHAT WORDS MEAN. If you are losing the one person in your life whom you love, and who has loved you.

  One morning regarding her calmly over the front page of the New York Times which (Michaela sees in horror) he is holding upside down without realizing. How without his glasses reddened indentations are exposed in the tender skin at the bridge of Gerard’s nose and his eyes appear enlarged, the irises dilated.

  “My dear wife! You aren’t sorry you married me, are you?”

  Michaela laughs uneasily, what an absurd thing to say.

  “You are my wife, aren’t you? ‘Michaela’!”

  Smiling at her. As if delighting in her. But who is her? The name “Michaela” sounds questionable.

  “Of course I’m your wife, Gerard. Why are you saying such things? You’re frightening me . . .”

  “You aren’t disappointed, I failed you by dying?”

  “You—you haven’t failed me . . . You haven’t died.”

  Michaela speaks quickly, faintly. It is frightening to her, the way her husband continues to stare smiling at her as if he has never seen her before.

  “You will be coming with me, then?”

  “Coming—where? Home?”

  “Not home. No.”

  “Yes of course I’m coming with you.” Then, not sure what she has agreed to: “Coming with you—where?”

  “To the place they will be taking me.”

  Gerard speaks slowly, matter-of-factly. His eyes are gray-blue, the color of stone. The skin about his eyes is slack, white.

  “There is room in these places for ‘husband and wife.’ You are my wife. There is room for you.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “But you do. Yes.”

  RETURN TO THE RENTED HOUSE, collapse on the (unmade, unlaundered) bedsheets.

  Exhausted cry yourself to sleep rumbling in something like an open boxcar along a rutted road, jolting your spine, jaws clenched, clammy-slick with sweat, thinking—So this is Hell; but I am not even there yet.

  As something crawls into your ear—tiny venomous insect, myriad fluttering legs—almost, you can feel these legs—and you wake in terror so extreme you can’t scream.

  21

  Orpheus, Eurydice

  Since Gerard’s eight-month residency at the Institute runs through August, and they have tickets to return to Boston on August 30, it is quite reasonable for Michaela to purchase opera tickets for August 2, the opening night of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice.

  Not an impulsive decision exactly but Michaela finds herself at the Santa Tierra Arts Pavilion where the opera theater is located, which she has not visited before, something like a pleat in time and she has had a break from the hospital, less than an hour, she will allow herself fifty-five minutes, must start back within ten minutes, walking swiftly, running.

  Thank you, darling! One of my favorite operas.

  Thank you for your faith in me. That I will be still alive.

  Certainly Gerard will still be alive, it is not possible that Gerard will not be alive to attend the opera with his wife Michaela. Billions of human beings alive on that (future) date August 2, why not then Gerard McManus. And why not then seated beside Michaela. Once you are born, Michaela reasons, the odds are in your favor to survive.

  Before you are born, especially before you are conceived—the odds are decidedly not in your favor.

  Therefore, absurd to worry!

  Michaela thinks that Gerard, who has a layman’s interest in architecture, will be impressed with the Santa Tierra Arts Pavilion that has been designed to blend with the local architecture of adobe, stucco, sandstone, glass. The Santa Tierra Opera House, featured on the cover of numerous magazines, is a particularly striking building, so constructed that the majority of its banked seats face the San Mateo Mountains, west of the city; performances are timed to begin just after sunset, in the afterglow that precedes dusk.

  Thank you for such beauty, Michaela. I love you so much.

  The mistake that Orpheus makes, turning to look back at Eurydice and in that instant dooming Eurydice to Hades forever, is an innocent mistake, Michaela thinks. Therefore, terrifying.

  She hopes not to make any mistakes. Leading Gerard out of Hades.

  Still, it isn’t clear what a mistake might be, in life. For in life there is no script, no score. No accompanying music. There is no author, thus no authorial intent.

  It should not have been a mistake to come to Santa Tierra, New Mexico. Yet, Michaela cannot help but think that if they’d remained in Cambridge, Gerard would not be hospitalized now.

  High-altitude air, thin and unnourishing. Dust and grit borne on the ceaseless wind, absorbed into the tender pink tissue of lungs.

  Coughing fits, a blood clot. (Bacterial) pneumonia.

  Yes, but the metastasized cancers must have begun months before.

  Cancerous cells, the body turning against itself.

  If there is God, cancer is God turning against humankind.

  Why?—because that is the nature of God.

  Michaela is becoming light-headed adrift in the crowded city square where there appear to be only couples, families. Packs of tourists of whom some are speaking foreign languages.

  She and Gerard had planned to hike to the historic district of Santa Tierra together from their house on Vista Drive, a distance of several miles. They’d planned to visit the Spanish mission at San Gabriel, a local church notable for its painted Mexican murals, the Black Eagle Antique Indian and Ethnographic Art Show, the Fiestas de Santa Tierra, the Burning of Skli. (Michaela has learned that the surpassingly ugly, obscene carving of a female figure with a gaping mouth, gaping vagina, fingers like curved claws, which she’d hidden from view in the rented house, is in fact meant to be a likeness of Skli, a Native American goddess of creation and destruction.) Especially Gerard had looked forward to hiking in Cold Spring Canyon in the foothills of the San Mateo Mountains and along the banks of the Rio de Piedras; he’d spoken of visiting the fabled Pueblo Abode of the Dead in the mountains, accessible only on foot. All these he’d marked with red-ink asterisks in the Lonely Planet guide. So much for the couple to explore, like newlyweds!

  How long ago that seems, now.

  Without Gerard at her side Michaela is disoriented, off-balance. Like a captive creature that has thrown off its leash she feels guilty in this public place strumming with life.

  A captive creature that is also an experimental animal. The door of her cage has been left open and without being aware of what she is doing Michaela has wandered out of the cage . . .

  Aware of random eyes lighting upon her, gliding over her. Snagging on her like hooks in flesh. Though she has made no effort to present herself as female, still less a sexual being.

  She is thirty-seven years old. She has outlived her youth.

  Lanky-limbed, with a narrow upper body, narrow hips. Her lower lip feels swollen as if it has been bitten. Her tongue feels swollen. Her hair, once abundant, glossy, a rich chestnut brown, is now sand-colored, dry; brushed behind her ears and kept in place by a slightly frayed straw hat pulled down low over her forehead. So long Michaela has avoided examining her face in a mirror, she scarcely recalls what she looks like.

  My beautiful wife! Kiss me.

  It has been some time since Gerard has uttered these words, that burn now in Michaela’s heart. She is faint with longing, remembering the man’s look of stricken rapture that had so moved her at the time when they’d been newly in love.

  Futile, to be recalling these words now. Cruel.

  Missing Gerard! So badly.

  Wishing she could slip her arm through his as she did sometimes when they were walking. Take his hand, hold his hand. The most precious intimacy between them (Michaela thought) had been such simple wordless gestures—more spontaneous than their lovemaking.

  To be held. Protected. Assured—I will never abandon you.

  Michaela feels a moment’s vertigo, imagining Gerard’s arms closing about her. A sensation of horror, that this might never happen again.

  Wanting nothing otherwise. If not that, then nothing.

  How estranged Michaela feels, in this popular tourist area of upscale boutiques and shops. For there is nothing here that she wants, that can be purchased.

  Navajo jewelry, silver and turquoise. Bright-colored hand-woven rugs, glazed pottery, quilts and blankets. Exquisite carved wooden birds, animals, grotesquely exaggerated human figures. Why were animals respectfully depicted, while human figures were made freakish?

  We hate and fear our own kind. We know our own kind, their black hearts.

  Vendors call to her. Michaela smiles politely at them but doesn’t linger. If Gerard were beside her they would visit some of the shops, especially those with craftsmen’s workrooms attached. They would examine the many carved objects, sculpted figures. Gerard would probably want to buy one of the humanoid figures, some of them prankishly deformed, as in a parody of Native American iconography.

  Repugnant to Michaela, to encounter replicas of the demon-gods whose likenesses she has hidden in her house. The Scavenger God Ishtikini with his coarse black “human” hair sprouting from a grotesquely large skull, swollen potbelly and skinny erect penis . . .

  A label explains Ishtikini takes many forms. Ishtikini is not what he seems. When you think of Ishtikini, think again.

  Without Gerard there is really little that interests her in the world of arts, crafts, gifts, objects. Nothing that could give her a moment’s pleasure. Gerard had given her numerous gifts over the years and no doubt here in Santa Tierra he would have selected silver-and-turquoise jewelry for her, which she would have worn with much pleasure. But without Gerard, what meaning did jewelry have? What meaning did anything have?