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CHAPTER ONEPLUTO (THE SEPARATOR)

Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. Pluto is very, very cold.

—NASA

You lie motionless as the respirator lifts your chest up and down. You have been here for seventy-two hours and I haven’t seen your eyes in three days, not since you collapsed. Blue eyes—I’ve fixed their color in my mind. Blue-gray. Already I’ve begun the work of remembering. You seem so restful you could be sleeping but you’re not. The paradox is messing with my mind.

Before you died, this is what I dreamt. In the dream, I can’t take my eyes off yours, your closed eyes. Like Superman, I want to see through your eyelids, beneath the subcutaneous tissue. I want to see your blue eyes once more. Just a thin fold of skin, your eyelids seem unnaturally opaque and won’t let me in. The dream nurse follows her routine, replacing IV bags and resetting devices.

Other dream nurses stop by. Everything is procedural for them, especially dying. They observe the monitors, obsessed with your numbers. I’m watching, keeping an eye on your closed eyelids. Suddenly, they open. It’s a dream but it seems so real. Your eyes open and they’re not blue. What happened to your blue eyes? I think, alarmed. Your eyes are dark and their vitreous body is cloudy with black ink, as if these new eyes are still evolving. I’m shocked. Inky black eyes! The nurse says this is common. I say no it isn’t. My wife has blue eyes. This isn’t normal! My wife has turned into a black-eyed angel, I tell the dream nurse who thinks I’m nutty. But why doesn’t Claire recognize me? At first you don’t recognize me—Who are you? your eyes say—but then maybe you do, I think. I’ll never know and I’ll always remember those sublime, spooky eyes—eyes that hold all our pasts and futures.

But here you are in this awful moment, docked in room seven of bay one in intensive care. Monitors, wires, blinking LEDs keep a watch on you. An oxygen tube runs into your mouth, and beside it a smaller tube which brings in fluids. You can’t pee so another line runs to the foot of the bed where a urine bag hangs. Methodically, a nurse comes by to empty that bag every fifteen minutes, reloading the IV pumps with drugs to stabilize your blood pressure and manage your carbon outtake. There are six rows of squiggly lines on the Philips monitor above your bed, all different colors. Heartbeat, carbon dioxide level, drainage of fluid from the brain, body temperature. I keep an eye on the screen. I want the yellow, green, blue, and pink numbers to mean something. There’s so much invested in pumping air into your still-warm body it’s impossible to think you won’t open your eyes. But you aren’t here.

I close my eyes. Out the kitchen window a chipmunk has leapt up into a pot of basil and is nibbling on my leaves, my aromatic leaves. You like my pesto, despite all the garlic. Are you putting four cloves of garlic in the pesto? you ask. I’m sure two will do. I’m preparing some right now. Flashbacks make me hungry. You’re keeping an eye on me, suspicious, as I’m a garlic fiend. Good food is unthinkable without garlic, I say. In moderation, of course, you say. Here they are, four fat garlic cloves on the cutting board. I just stare at my darlings like a madman. A minimum of four, I say. I’m so stubborn. More if I could but I’m being regulated. You give me a wry look. I toss in a few extra pine nuts and a bit more Parmesan to take off the edge, a concession to my charming wife.

I haven’t made pesto since your collapse. That’s what I’m calling this catastrophe. Collapse. I don’t know what else to call it. The unnameable. In the yard, meanwhile, big pots of basil are going to seed. This is pesto-making season. Instead, I’m reading your last book, a study of the post-Chaucerian poet John Lydgate. I want to tell you this before you go. It’s really a terrific book. Medieval drama. Not poetry but popular theater. Teaching Chaucer the poet was fun, you told me, but he had been rendered elite by the profession. You’re a coal miner’s daughter and like digging in the remote spaces of the archive. You have a nose for that, overlooked things. In the case of medieval literature, that’s popular drama, especially the nonliterary type—mummings, wall hangings, tableaux, ceremonies, seasonal games—the kind of performances and displays that were ephemeral in nature and rarely documented. To the modern eye, these are marginal creations undeserving of critical attention. Even if we wanted to re coup them, we couldn’t, since they are, for the most part, unrecoverable.

You like to rescue things: dogs, furniture, houses, cars—even husbands. You rescued a baby squirrel once. What’s that in your hand? I ask. A baby squirrel, you say. It’s alive? I think so. Where did it come from? It fell from the tree out front. That’s a long fall, I say. How did it survive? A cushion of pine needles at the base of the tree must have broken its fall. The squirrel’s eyes are still closed. You sure it’s alive? Yes, you say. We call it Waldo.

I’m thinking about Waldo as I read your Lydgate, how quickly things of this life come and go. That’s not entirely true, though. It’s funny how the world you describe, which vanished long ago, is so alive in this book. It’s more alive than Waldo ever was in his brief tumble through pine cones and air. It’s evident in the way you reconstruct seasonal rituals and fleeting events. A Corpus Christi pageant in Dungate Hill with skinners (dealers in fur) carrying wax torches, followed by singing clerks and priests. Behind them, with beaming smiles, the mayor and alderman, accompanied by winged minstrels. What a scene—what a racket! It’s vividly recreated on the page, the processions, feasts, pageants, dances, mimes. The way you mix ethnography and literary history is pure art.

The nurses in the ICU have pretty suburban names, like Kelly, who returns to your bedside every twenty minutes. She’s reloading the IV unit with muscle relaxant. You do seem deeply relaxed, but that is because you are comatose, your eyes closed, it seems, evermore. Kelly is brushing your eyelids with a clear moisturizing gel. She does this very delicately, as if tending to her own mother. There’s a clear plastic housing in your mouth that allows the oxygen tube to slide left or right. Kelly moves the hose to the right, but this forces your mouth askew, as though punched in the face. The illusion of tranquility is broken. I don’t say anything, but this troubles me. Kelly turns your body on its side, checking your back and bottom for bedsores. I remember Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, a movie we saw together, when the male nurse Benigno turns the comatose Alicia on her side, massaging her body with rosemary alcohol. Benigno’s care of Alicia is extremely devoted. He talks to her continually, even attends movies he thinks she would have liked and tells her what he saw. He says to Marco you have to pay attention to women, talk to them, be thoughtful. Caress them. Remember they exist. It is good to think of comatose patients as alive and even as aware, medical people say. They speak of an intimacy beyond words.

Medieval culture was more mutable than we think, and rediscovering that mutability is a kind of quest that runs through all of your work. I’m realizing that now as I read your book. The modern urge to categorize the uncategorical is a dynamic you oppose with gusto. How do we read a battle narrative stitched on a tapestry hanging in a drafty castle where the winds howl in January? An epic poem, a performance, a painting, a fancy carpet? And what about mumming, goofy music-and-dance scenarios set to verse? I don’t imagine this was any kind of congenital skepticism on your part but a hard-earned suspicion. I like that: you are not one to jump to conclusions. Me, I leap on conclusions from a great height.

I can’t help thinking that you are also on guard against the hubris of male intellectuals. Another hard-earned suspicion. Or to put it another way, you are trying to protect the otherness of the past from the arrogance of the modern. In your work, it seems like a moral and intellectual imperative. These fragile traces of early English culture, like a mumming from 1427 that barely exists in manuscript form in a library in Cambridge, a poetic pageant that, in performance, lasted all of two hours. Commissioned but performed only once. There is more than a hint of sadness in this. We are both melancholy. We never forgot Waldo.

I remember asking you once: what’s mumming all about? Sounds like fun. Can I do it? Sure. It’s not hard, you say. It’s a lot of guys in masks prancing around and making noise. They drink a lot too. Very frat-boyish. How is that interesting? I ask. How is anything interesting? you reply. The reason for this discussion, you may remember, is a proposition. You want me to come to Philadelphia with you and film the Mummers Parade on New Year’s Day. It sounds cold, I say, as in icy cold. Your puffy jacket, you say, will come in handy. Does it take all day? Probably. I look up Philadelphia’s weather. High of twenty degrees, low of six degrees. Don’t know if my gear can take it, I complain. The camera might freeze. Can’t you cold-proof your gadgets with a muffler or something, like a dog? That makes me laugh, but I’m dragging my fanny. I really don’t like bitterly cold weather. It will give you a chance, you say, to check out the Dock Street Brewery downtown. Hmm, I say.

The nurses hear me whispering in your ears. The late-night shift is puzzled at first but then understands I’m talking to you and not myself. I lift your right leg up and massage your calf, kneading your muscle like bread dough. And then I rub each toe, squeezing your warm flesh over and over. The pathos of the body. Here we are, the living and the dying. Between sleep and death you lie perfectly still. From the continued reports of doctors, those dark messengers, little or no blood flows to your brain. There is no sentience, there is no awareness in you. A tiny glow radiates from under your fingers, though. In your warm hand you are clutching a glowing red light, a secret heat. The smoldering embers of a life lived well, I think to myself, because my mind is so full of sentimentality, as if to make up for your unconsciousness, thoughts you yourself would never think. But the glow, just the glimmer of a medical device, is suggestive. It can’t be otherwise. Through the vessels on the back of your hand blood runs, a normal flow of life, feeding the tendons in your fingers which cling to the red light. You can’t see this, but your body is carefully wrapped in a gauze-like covering. Under your right leg a white towel is folded, elevating your calve to improve circulation. Other parts of your body are propped up on pillows. The nurses are under orders to make sure your blood circulates on schedule to each organ. They want to harvest as much of you as possible.

Your Lydgate study won a prize, as did your previous book, and I can see why. The writing is deft and the thinking so complex that I can’t resist your prose, even though my head hurts. There’s not a clunky moment here. The elegance of your sentences is matched by the cogency of your mind. Such a mind. There are these remarkable passages of painstaking observation, as in Chapter 1, where you discuss the scribe John Shirley and his efforts to copy Lydgate’s dramatic entertainments, followed by a close reading of Shirley’s manuscript, but not in the traditional way. There is no hunting for literary meaning. Instead, you track Shirley’s peripheral jottings, his performance-oriented notes, in order to see how Lydgate’s ephemeral pieces have been remediated in manuscript form. You are curious about the way Ly-dgate’s “dramatic” output was absorbed by his contemporaries. You care less for authors and texts than for readers and audiences. To a nonmedievalist’s eye, the analysis is so rigorous and informed, the logic so precise, as to seem surreal. And all the footnotes. How do you medievalists do this sort of thing? Unlike most academics, you people actually read one another’s books and go out of your way to keep them in circulation. It’s really astonishing how collaborative your field is. I always feel like Ahab when writing, a crazy lonely bastard.

I remember slipping into your study one afternoon while you sat at your laptop writing the Lydgate book. I tried to look over your shoulder—I was curious—but you waved me away. You were guarding your book against my sarcasm. Not before I stole a peek. Porosity of representational borders, I say out loud in a snarky tone. You shoot me an anguished look. That’s some noun phrase, I go on. Porosity. What’s wrong with porous? I ask. Boy, that kind of flak would really piss you off. Can’t blame you. It was a cheap shot. It’s not difficult to deflate academic writing. It’s much harder knowing how the inflationary style actually works in this business—because it does work. You evicted me from your study, banned me for two whole weeks. Milo gave me his I told you so look.

Massive blood clot, they originally thought, a possible effect of transatlantic flight, as we had just returned from Dublin. But the medical people were clueless. By the time they scanned your brain and found blood it was far too late. They sent your lifeless body to the neurological unit at the university hospital. That’s where I found you later in the day. I was taken to you outside the scanning room, just lying there on a gurney. A Middle Eastern neurologist approached me grimly. They had run a complete scan on your brain. He described the results in technical detail, how the bleeding surrounded and inflamed your brain, how the fluids compounded the effect. The inflammation was exerting extraordinary pressure on the brain, choking off blood and oxygen supplies to vital regions. He showed me the CAT scans of your traumatized brain, pointing out the dark-gray areas he identified as evidence of bleeding and other areas that seemed to be dying out. The dark spots were sinister. They multiplied. They were in my eyes and then my brain. I felt shaky, speechless, dopey.

The gist of his awful story was that your mind was brain-dead. Even if we were able to bring her back, he said, which is highly unlikely, she would never be the same. Serious brain injury. Every story the medical people told me about you was darker and more disheartening. Not one of these people held out a thread of hope. And there you were, on your gurney with an oxygen mask and tubes running into your mouth. You were alive but not in any way that was meaningful to the people who loved you.

The intensive care doctor said it was best to gather in one of the meeting rooms. The nurse-slash-social-worker was there and the attending RN. I was unsteady, but being surrounded by medical people only made me feel worse. It seemed like a conspiracy. They wanted me to surrender. The IC guy rehearsed the technical details of your aneurism, only now he called it an unrecoverable brain injury, repeating the scenario that had silenced your mind. By now, I was familiar with the story line. The IC guy provided the distressing details in a grim and attenuated voice. I didn’t like that voice. He seemed to be hiding something, eager to get to the next step: declare you brain dead and prepare your body for diagnosis. As you signed on for organ donation, your body parts would have to be analyzed for reliability.

According to the EEG monitor, however, you seemed to be producing slight residual brain activity. The IC doctor was annoyed by this, since it meant the neurologist possibly would not certify your brain death, at least not until the squiggly lines on the EEG could be dismissed. An inconvenient complication. The IC guy took pains to assure me that what looked like activity was nothing more than noise, that he was confident—yes, he used that word—your brain had conked out, that you were finis. He admitted that it was up to me to decide whether or not to honor your commitment to organ donation. An instinctive dislike grew between us, and I was tempted not to comply. This fellow seemed too eager to lay his institutional hands on your body. His pale shifty blue eyes, his boyish good looks, preppy getup, his University of Wisconsin degree. His ward had already done enough, it seemed to me, with the bundles of wires and tubes, all to no effect, beyond keeping your organs fresh and robust for someone else. He seemed too young and untried to be weighing in on life and death. Beyond repeating the obvious details of your case, he seemed a bit helpless, maybe clueless.

Your face is so still today. The EEG nurse is here. Before attaching two dozen scalp nodes to your head, she draws an X to mark the spot and numbers the electrode placement: F8, T4, A2, Ol, C3, and so on. F for frontal, T for temporal, O for occipital. Even numbers refer to the right hemisphere and so on. I’m telling you this because you might be interested to know that your head is now crowded with electrodes, which are taped to your scalp rather perversely, if you ask me. Over twenty of them. So bizarre. It’s startling to see how small your waveforms are on the EEG monitor. F3, for instance, is almost flatlined. So is F4. T4 and T6, though, reveal more active squiggles. Eighty-six billion neurons sparking such a weak signal in a mind that once produced so many thoughts. These things should be impossible. But hold my tongue or break this heart.

I don’t know if I ever shared this story with you (I’ll tell you now before you leave), but in the middle of my dissertation I tried to switch to fancier prose style, as Nabokov would say, stealing locutions from Lacan and Derrida, those snazzy Frenchmen. I couldn’t pull it off, alas, but I really wanted to sound more showy. My reward was a whopper of a nightmare. The next night I dreamt I was wandering through the mythical labyrinth built by Daedalus of Crete, the master inventor, and came face-to-face with a monster—the Minotaur. I’m not kidding. The Minotaur was really spooky, ghastly, greasy, and ruthless. He stood before me like a giant and held a huge ax in his hand, and then he split me in two, right down the middle. I woke up stunned. Well, so much for a fancy prose style.

My borders, if truth be told, are very porous. The world pours through my dura mater like water. Every way I turn the universe is enticing me. It seduces me. My middle name is Porosity. For instance. I’m at my laptop writing about my grandfather, a cagey Sicilian immigrant. The sentence goes, Raven-minded Joe knew in his dark heart he would never return, but does not end because I’m struck mid-sentence by the expression raven-minded. What on earth is that? I know it came from my brain but that doesn’t mean anything. Meanwhile, you, Claire, are downstairs making dinner. Winter vegetables, tofu, and bok choy. Yum.

I know a little but not much about ravens, so online I go, and that’s when the trouble starts. First of all, I want to tell the difference between a raven and a crow; next I’m learning about ravens in Native American folklore. That’s when you give me the first dinner call. DINNER! My eyes are glued to the screen. I read that the raven is symbolically associated with trickster figures in Native stories—the examples are fascinating. If I were smart, I’d call it a good day’s work and head downstairs for dinner with my honey. Joe is a kind of trickster guy—how true—move on. That’s when you give me the second dinner call. DINNER!!! Okay, I yell, I’ll be right down.

I’m lying. I won’t be right down. I’ve just stumbled on an article about crows and necrophilia and I can’t stop reading. It’s like porn. That’s when you give me the third and last dinner call. This one is an angry scream. I leap out of my chair and run downstairs. Boy, am I in trouble. Your look is daggers. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.” That’s what I should have said. (When in trouble, quote scripture.) Instead, I tell you about the perverted crows. You’re silent. That’s how angry you are. The birds don’t get a rise out of you, not even an eye roll. The winter vegetables are cold, and so is your shoulder.

It’s no big deal, of course, but it kind of stinks that I had fun playing the adolescent one in the family because that meant you had to perform the role of serious adult. I know that upset you. At times, it was a point of tension. Who wants to be an adult? You had better things to do. I’m confessing. It’s my sadness talking, reaching out to you in ways that were impossible when we were together. It’s so sad to see people alone in the hospital.

Even now my mind is butterflying across the page. I really think if you were here, if you weren’t leaving me, I’d toe the line much better. I would even make a bargain with the so-called devil never again to digress—never ever again.

Where was I? Lydgate.

I love the stuff about Lydgate’s mummings in Chapter 2, where you describe his commissioned pageant for the powerful Mercers’ guild in London honoring the new mayor, who was himself a Mercer. I had to look up Mercer (merchants). The ceremony begins with a long introduction in elaborate verse, you explain, that ushers into the hall three mock ships carrying mummers disguised as merchants from the Far East. This is followed by dancing, music, costumed actors casting nets and so forth, and finally gift-giving to gratify the new mayor. It’s like a scout jamboree.

Another nurse has just arrived to reload the automatic IVs. I don’t know her name but she is friendly and goes about her business quietly. I watch her closely as she applies the gel to your eyelids and repositions the ventilator tube, assesses hydration. She drains the urine bag and shifts your body, making sure your head is elevated thirty degrees. Touch and talk is also recommended. The nurses call you by your name—“Claire”—when disturbing your trachea, explaining the procedure. “I’m going to put pressure on the ventilator tube, which should cause discomfort.” They do this to check for a reaction. If you were to cough, well then, you’d be back among the living. I’m learning the routine by heart. Should the IC unit be abandoned in a global panic, I could load the IV bags myself, apply the ointment, reposition your limbs, check for back sores, but I wouldn’t disturb your trachea. I know you’re not here. It’s just your body, your sad body, which you have deserted. If not for me, you would be a stray.

This morning I found a black and yellow quilt that had been stitched together by volunteers affiliated with the IC unit. May you be cradled in hope, kept in joy, graced with peace, and wrapped in love, read the card attached to the quilt. The quilt is lovely, with floral patterns, polka dots, and chevrons, a relief from the banality of beige. I thank the volunteers of intensive care for the two of us. Better this your shroud than gauze and oatmeal.

No one would call Lydgate’s mumming great literature, but its literary qualities are hardly relevant. As a historical document, this particular pageant is a treasure chest, especially in relation to xenophobia, arguably manifest throughout the country. London, like any other big city or port, had a large immigrant population. Aliens and foreigners made up a significant community of others. Dressing up as gift-bearing merchants from the Far East was no doubt a significant gesture. This is how you explain the whole picture:

Anti-foreigner sentiments, which animated the polemics of the late 1420s, are submerged in these performances under a glowing patina of openness, amiability, and generosity—virtues in short supply on the streets of London outside the Mercers’ and Goldsmiths’ halls. But if these foreign merchants are welcomed into London’s guilds, they are at the same time placed in a clearly subordinate position of submission, as gift bearers come to pay tribute to the mayor, the crowning symbol of London’s civic might. What underscores civic power is the mummings’ emphasis on the literary; Lydgate’s verses not only present an example of the poetic arts but also serve to instruct Londoners in a literary aesthetics grounded in a specific use of written English. In so doing, the mumming creates a vision of cosmopolitan vernacularity in which foreign culture is made native.

I’m not going to say anything about vernacularity, even though it’s a doozy, because the writing is smart and elegant and the thinking so graceful, subtle, and informed. The way you wrap your mind around the larger picture—with such precision—seems so effortless it turns me on. It is frankly kind of sexy, your clarity (forgive me). It’s impossible not to be taken in by the integrity of your mind. There is an energy that binds the content of each sentence together, as though the strength of your style were electromagnetic. You were like that in life too, staying on topic, immune to distraction like no other, binding things together. Constantly binding things together. Life seemed vivid and sharp by your side, always in focus. Now it’s just delirious. I feel like a child lost in a vast city seething with strangers. There’s a moral force in your clarity, in your precision. A force that speaks of a will to live. Why was that not enough?

I return home for the night feeling utterly lost. I lie down with your book. It’s not Lydgate that draws me to this work but your mindful way of writing. You did your best to confer on me, Mr. Digressio, some of your magic. Every once in a while I will surprise myself with a flash of clarity, thanks to you. I hope I’m not embarrassing you, by the way. I know how self-conscious you are. This book was not a career move. You were already an accomplished medievalist with a national reputation. You could have easily switched gears and written a book about noise and hearing, as you planned. I was all for that. It’s time for a fun book, I said. No more footnotes. Write a memoir about your ears—your deafness is marketable. Disability studies are big. You are a creative person.

You were tempted, maybe a little, but you wanted to see your commitments through. You had published an edition of Lydgate’s mummings a few years ago, and so it made sense to complete the project by reclaiming the guy, chiefly regarded as a major fifteenth-century poet, for early modern drama. That would mean rethinking medieval drama history and challenging the priority of poetry in canon building, but that made the project even more essential. Such big ambitions.

Confession: last time I wrote an academic book I put in extra footnotes just to impress you. Tons of footnotes. I went nuts. One reviewer called the book erudite. That got a good laugh out of me.

Your last research visit was to the British Library in early July 2016, just weeks before you died. A flare-up of archive fever. It’s what you do best, parsing the delicate script of a scribe’s six-hundred-year-old handiwork. It was a three-day stay in London while I taught in Dublin. One more look at John Rous’s illustrated The History of the Life and Acts of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. This would be the subject of your next book, a rough draft of which awaits its next turn on my thumb drive. This late medieval book is an illustrated biography (presented as a drama) of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick from 1382–1439. It’s made up of fifty-three line drawings with brief comments on each illustration. Beauchamp was a contemporary of Henry V and lived through the Hundred Years’ War, but somehow managed to keep his head. The twenty-eight-page manuscript depicts the earl as a model of pious and chivalrous behavior, as you would say. What seized your attention was the mingling of media and the blurring of genres: narrative, illustration, performance. As such, this text sat squarely within your vision of the medieval as a culture of mutable forms.

I’m looking now at your notes from that archival visit, clinging to all that’s left of your mind. You spent hours inspecting every line and curve in the Beauchamp Pageant, as it’s called. You note:

On F. IV pages have been cropped: see chopping of ascender of H in “Here” and elsewhere in the MS. Another note: light coloring in brown of alternating tiles on flooring in f. 2. Pencil framing of page—border, and separate space for picture and caption—can be seen (except near top where upper border has been cropped). Note that the artist has allowed a piece of architecture to protrude into the space lined-out for words. F. 10: again, drawing intrudes on text, so much so that only 2 lines can be written freely across top of page, with others truncated into left 2/3rds. f. llv: see horses faces.

My favorite note—see horses faces. In all, nearly two dozen carefully written pages of scrutiny (in pencil—no pens allowed in special collections) comprising well over one hundred carefully observed details.

All that attentiveness. It makes me wonder.

How did you begin this day of research? At Gail’s Artisan Bakery in Bloomsbury where, at eight thirty in the morning, you ordered a small cappuccino and pain au raisin. £5.30. Among your notes is a receipt. Your server was Lucyna Sobanska from Poland. If I remember right, this was just two weeks after the UK’s surprising Brexit vote. I’m guessing you chatted with your server about that. Lucyna, of course, has a Facebook page where she lists Gail’s Artisan Bakery as her place of employment. She’s now manager. Your British Library password is 402899. I offer you these details as a reminder that you, Claire, are now the subject of a book—a wife observed.

Speaking of which, remember watching the TV show Fringe together? The X-Files for the twenty-first century, you called it. Our favorite character was dubbed “the Observer.” This was a strikingly bald guy in a black suit and fedora with no eyebrows. He was a time traveler from a vague future keeping an eye on things. Always taking notes. You liked that part best. He was stoic, attentive, thorough, and took terrific notes. You said it’s a shame the Observer is gendered male because the truth is women are more observant than men. I didn’t argue. In our own lives this was obviously true. I said you’re right. In fact, I went on, you remind me a little bit of this guy, except that you’re not bald and your eyebrows are intact. This made you laugh. You have a notebook just like the Observer’s, a little black Moleskine journal. Whenever you visited the British or Trinity libraries, you returned with oodles of notes. It’s where your books started. Had you stayed around a little longer, I would have bought you a fedora. In fact, I did.

Your brain has sabotaged itself and here is your body, warm and tender to the touch. A body without a mind. The nurse inserts needles in your wrists and near your ankles. None of these devices keeps me from rubbing your hands and feet. I stroke each finger. How delicate and fine your hands are, warm and limber. I stand up and place your hand between mine like an expert and trace the curves in your fingernail and the creases in your joints, I track the lines in your palms. Hardly a wrinkle anywhere. Such smooth hands, such exquisite fingers. If this hand could talk it would say beautiful things, and I would listen all day to the words of your fingers. Your calves had not been tampered with so I massage these too, imagining that your unresponsiveness is a sign you have fallen into a deep and pleasurable trance only my hands can produce.

Out for a morning walk. Typically warm in late July but much cooler today, the wind blowing through the trees. Here and there, yellow leaves are swirling down. Soon the changes will be upon us. You would be at my side now, but you’re not present so I will tell you what I see and hear. I stop to listen. The wind whooshes through the trees. A cicada, resting in the shade of butterfly weed, wings its way to the white pine across the street. Just be yond, an orange tabby saunters along the curb and scurries after noticing me. On the other side, a dark-brown and white collie observes all of this quietly from his front porch. Three glossy black ravens swoop low from perches in the tall maples. Everywhere I glance black-eyed Susans look back. On the corner, a mass of zinnias sway to and fro like seagrass. The universe is vibrating with life, I say to you. I know that you aren’t present, but I feel you close by, just as alive as the cicada and the tabby and the birds. But your body is stock-still right now as I rub your pretty fingers. The forced air heaves your chest up and down, as though you were only sleeping.

I’m walking Toby, the neighbor’s dog, and bump into folks who live nearby. The kindness of others. A strange sight, they say, me walking alone down Fairchild Street. Always together, walking side by side, chatting and smiling—you and your wife—they say. We seemed inseparable to others. Funny how we never said that out loud but we both knew. We were indivisible until we died, we thought, and death was far down the road. Toby is happy out and about. But wait, better circle back. I left the weedwacker battery in the charger downstairs. Might overheat. Not taking any chances. I circle back around the block, confusing Toby, and return home. I pull the plug on the charger. Not overheating, it turns out, but I’m not taking any chances. Don’t feel lucky. Have to keep an eye on me, that’s what I’m thinking. Too inattentive at times. What you had to put up with, surrounded by inattentive people up and down the ladder, for whom you covered. You had to offset the world’s inattention. Toby poops. More hugs from kind people. Death is very humanizing, even for me. Pass by Bill the rat terrier. I hate to break the news to you but there’s a large Trump sign in the window. Would not have guessed.

I’m kissing you on your forehead, the only area free of wires, tubes, or nodes, just beneath your bald spot. I didn’t want to tell you this but the neurosurgeons shaved a section of your blond hair. Like me, you are partly bald. They drilled a hole into your skull to insert a drainage tube. A measure of last resort, the procedure was meant to relieve the fluid buildup in a portion of your besieged brain. Too much cerebrospinal fluid from the trauma of bleeding. From the moment you passed out, the pressure on your brain worsened. A ventriculoperitoneal shunt is the absurd name of the thing.

On my walk this morning I see a wolf. He is sitting on a large area howling at the sky. The roof of his mouth is red. Very lifelike. Nearby are two lovebirds and a hawk, and across the driveway a family of fox and dear. Kitschy yard art. The older fox is howling at the sky too. So many animals fixed in place, like a fairy tale, stopped dead in their tracks by some wand-waving crone. Life-size, the wolf seems deep into his howl. I find myself in perfect empathy with him. I understand the meaning of his posture, how he focuses his whole being on this howl. The sound of a wolf can carry as far as six miles in the forest and even farther in open space. The small fox is howling too, encouraged by the wolf. With heads bent back, the animals point their snouts toward the sky, broadcasting their howls to the next town.

I was told a 911 call was dialed from my office yesterday at school. Surprised, I called the department. Who dialed 911? I asked Joelle. The official reported the call came from your office, she said. Two policemen here to investigate. I told them you weren’t on campus, she said. No, I wasn’t there. I was by your bedside. Spooky. The reports of phones dialing 911 on their own are rare but they do happen. “Dying” phones have been known in the past to call 911 by themselves. It’s a headache, said one phone official I talked to. We get thirty or more calls a month from phantom dialers. Cordless phones have this tendency, he said, when their batteries are low. They dial spurious numbers on their own. It’s right out of the movies. My office phone is corded, I told the phone guy. Well, then, I don’t know, he said. Never heard of that before. While I’m on the topic, someone turned over the birdbath in the backyard. I hardly think a rabbit or a squirrel did that. You were the only one I knew who routinely rolled the concrete birdbath over to prevent mosquitoes hatching in standing water. Did you do that?

But I did dial 911 for real just the other morning. You were lying on your back, gasping for air. No light in your eyes. No sign of life but that horrible nonhuman growling, gasping for air. No one can prepare for such a nightmare. I couldn’t find you behind those pale-blue eyes, now suddenly lifeless. Only your body clinging desperately to the singularity of life, the last-resort jerks of a body left behind. Were you gone already? I screamed at the 911 operator. I couldn’t form any sentences, only pieces of thought. Not breathing! My wife, not conscious. Send someone. Hurry. Please. Not breathing! Gasping terribly! And then I tried to breathe into your mouth but this only terrified me more because I didn’t know what I was doing. The 911 operator tried to give me CPR instructions over the phone but I only screamed at her to send an ambulance. Please, now! Not breathing! Send someone! I screamed. I was hysterical. To see the most aware being in my little world so inert, so irreversibly knocked out. I had you in my arms but knew you weren’t there. The fireman and the ambulance came quickly, alarming neighbors. Flashing lights and shrill sirens on a peaceful, pastoral late-summer morning. We were to leave soon for Cincinnati, once I had spoken with the plumber, who arrived exactly when you collapsed, lying on your study floor with your arms spread out in the middle of a yoga exercise. There was no thud. Your brain just exploded.

The cicadas have stopped singing. Most are dead by now, their six-week cycle having ended. The Iowa cicada is known as the scissor-grinder. A lot of rubbing of membranes. I miss their singing. Its passing is the first sign of autumn, the most melancholy of seasons. Summer is when we play at being free of time and all its dire implications. Glimmering sunshine, fireflies, the smell of mown grass, and flowering hydrangeas. Life goes on—until it doesn’t. Then nothing makes sense. Very hot and dry today. The garden looks parched. It feels strange tending the yard without you. I keep waiting for you, behatted and begloved. That’s not going to happen, but this won’t sink in for some time. At any rate, I watched the sparrows prancing under the rain of the sprinkler, and also noticed the sudden appearance of surprise lilies. So erect and pink. Large, naked, two-foot-tall stems burst up with several funnel-shaped flowers. They are sometimes called resurrection lily. I know they are a favorite of yours. That they appear suddenly in the dog days of summer with a splash of paint seems a thing of perfect whimsy. Everywhere reminders of life and death. Ostrich fern, I’ve never heard of that. I read that surprise lilies go well with ostrich ferns.

A new locator has just arrived in a white Ford pickup. All the watermen drive white pickup trucks and he has just marked up the front lawn with exotic symbols and colorful flags. A diamond between two parallel lines (there are several of these) indicates buried phone lines. Some are more elaborate like miniature crop circles. One looks like the astrological sign for Pluto, a little person with its hands up in the air. All refer to what is below the surface, to underground cable and wire lines. They remind me of markings on the shaved parts of your head where two dozen nodes are placed to monitor your brain waves, to search for signs of life inside your failing brain.

The diggers are coming in the morning to excavate, looking for the leak in our waterline. Somewhere it’s leaking. Want to mow the grass before they make a mess. Walked up to Russ’s for gas. Hot and humid. These basic home-care routines are very comforting. Focus on something that does not threaten my grip on life. A nonexistential outing. The mower came a little too close to a bunny warren in the front lawn. One of the bunnies panicked and fled into the street. Ran after the little fellow, circled behind it, scooped it up in my hand. It let out a sharp, terrified squeak. I chucked the bunny back into its hole firmly enough it decided not to come out again. Its mother turned the corner of the house to take a look. Noise of the mower must seem deafening. Began Weedwacking (autocorrect wanted to change this word to medevacking) but ran out of spool. Good, I thought to myself. One more little thing to concentrate on. Was glad to prolong the chore. Calming to sweep the sidewalk and porch. I did this very slowly, like a handicapped person hired out of charity. It’s the big events that show you how easy it is to lose your mind, like an abrupt death. I’m finding it’s little things, like replacing the string spool on a weedwacker, that are keeping my wits together.

It’s a perfect day for digging a hole, Doug says. He’s here with his brother Kenny, a deputy sheriff. Doug is in his early fifties, lean, semibald, with a cheerful mustache, blue eyes, cracker-barrel style. Doug exudes competence. Kenny is younger, squatter. Both have clean, honest faces. The Midwest male at his best. Kenny is operating a small backhoe with rubber track pads, digging two precise holes, one at the stop box by the curb and the other above the sidewalk. Doug turns off the stop box. The good news is that the sound of running water stops, which means the leak is on our side of the curb. Doug will “snake” out the entire line of old steel pipe with chain and backhoe, and then slide in the new blue plastic water pipe. Doug’s teenage daughter drops by on her moped to lend a hand. I have to clear out the corner of the basement where the water valve turns off and lay down old rugs and tarps. The basement now belongs to Doug and Kenny.

This is what they told me about your brain aneurysm, what happened to you Wednesday morning at nine a.m. While you were lying on your back, a balloon-like bulge formed in the wall of your brain artery. Who knows how long that bulge was there, but on Wednesday morning, just as you raised your toes off the ground, the bulge tore open and bled profusely, damaging nearby cells. A brain aneurysm can occur in any artery wall that is weak or has a defect. In most cases, a brain aneurysm has no symptoms until it tears. Blood from a torn aneurysm can block cerebrospinal fluid circulation, leading to fluid buildup and increased pressure on the brain. I am told it is of ten associated with hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, heredity, or a head injury. Did you suffer from any of these? Not that I know of. Did you suffer from any brief blackouts while we were in Dublin? Any neck stiffness, confusion or sluggishness, nausea or vomiting?

About thirty thousand people in the US suffer a brain aneurysm rupture every year. One in fifty people have an unruptured brain aneurysm. That’s one every eighteen minutes. They are fatal in 40 percent of cases. Of those who survive, about 66 percent suffer a permanent neurological deficit. Four out of seven people who recover from a ruptured brain aneurysm will have disabilities. The median age of an aneurysmal hemorrhagic stroke is fifty years old. There are typically no warning signs. An estimated 50 to 80 percent of all aneurysms do not rupture during the course of a person’s lifetime. You, my dear wife, were one of the unlucky few. One last gruesome factoid, and then I’ll rub your toes. There are almost 500,000 deaths worldwide each year caused by brain aneurysms and half the victims are younger than fifty.

If only I could pile up numbers until numb. It doesn’t work that way.

Doug and Kenny have finished repairing the watermain leak without tearing up the sidewalk or the burning bush. Ironically, the two holes they’ve scooped out resemble recently dug graves. One for you and one for me. It’s plenty warm but the holes look mighty cold.

You and I by the lake. What a beguiling idea. It’s dark and chilly out. That summer in the Adirondacks, just before we married, we took the canoe out late at night, drifting across the smooth lake. You, me, and the cat, Ulysses. We listened for birds and watched the dark sky. The yodel-like cry of loons and shooting stars, every night. The cat had a thing for canoes, wouldn’t let us embark without him. You marveled at the vastness of space. Where is everyone? you said. Must be elsewhere, I replied. Can you imagine hurtling through that emptiness in a rocket? I asked. So unimaginably alone out there, you said. Makes me dizzy.

Pluto is now called a dwarf planet after being shunned by astronomers. Pluto, they said, didn’t dominate its neighborhood. It was too small. Besides, its orbit is messy. Here one moment, there the next. When Pluto was originally discovered eighty-some years ago, it was thought much bigger, several times larger than earth. As a matter of fact, Pluto is smaller than the moon. Not that any of this matters—but I do feel a twinge of sadness for Venetia Burney, the English girl who at the age of eleven named the newly discovered planet “Pluto” in 1930 after the Roman god of the underworld. She was having breakfast in Oxford one morning when her grandfather described the new discovery. “I think Pluto would be a good name for it,” she said, because Pluto dwelled in a place where sunshine couldn’t reach.

She finished her muffin and thought no more of it. In 2006, the year astronomy demoted Pluto, Venetia’s husband died—a double whammy. I mention this because Venetia’s dad, like you, was a classicist. I have a strange affinity for classicists. Don’t know why—just do. Even before we met. The American astronomers in Flagstaff, the site of the discovery, had no idea what to call the new planet—Planet X, perhaps—so they were glad for advice. In Hindi, Pluto is know as Yama, the god of death.

Gustave Holst composed The Planets between 1914 and 1916, several years before the discovery of Pluto, and so that planet was missing from the original work. Earth was missing too, since Holst was primarily attracted to the astrological aspects of the planets. This might explain the curious naming scheme for the seven movements: Mars, the bringer of war; Venus, the bringer of peace; Mercury, the winged messenger; Jupiter, the bringer of jollity; Saturn, the bringer of old age; Uranus, the magician; and Neptune, the mystic.

What an odd way to think of the solar system. Rather anachronistic for a modernist. Holst, we are told, was an avid reader of Alan Leo, a theosophist and modern astrologer. The chapter scheme of his 1912 The Art of Synthesis (Mercury, the thinker; Venus, the unifier; Mars, the energizer; and so on) obviously spoke to Holst, who imagined his suite as a spiritual journey, the order of the planets symbolizing life from youth to old age. He wasn’t really interested in the actual dynamics of the solar system, like gamma ray bursts and galactic drift.

In 2000, British composer Colin Matthews was commissioned to rectify the omission of planet nine from Holst’s work by adding another movement to the original. He called the new suite “Pluto, the Renewer,” and—voilà—Holst was astronomically correct. Or so everyone thought. Just days later, however, Pluto was deplanetized and Holst’s work was in error again.

The Renewer?

After 45,000 years of dying, we still don’t know what death is, what it points to. We only know its signifiers, the stink of corpses, the stillness of flesh, closed eyes. Your death will disturb every part of me. I want to throw things at it. We throw symbols at death. No sooner is the loved one gone than we send frantic messages. We overwhelm the dead with messages. The deeper the pain, the greater the frenzy. I will heave planets at your death, big ones like Jupiter and Saturn, giant symbols. Who cares what they mean—as long as they’re big. That’s lame but it’s all I can do.

A strange thing occurred when you lost consciousness, when you let out that horrible gasping sound. That inhuman sound coming from you, nothing I’d ever heard before. I went blank and a strange darkness flickered between my eyes—and stars, faraway stars, I think. Just a fraction of a second but I saw distant stars and dark space. When I opened my eyes I knew a part of me was gone. It was like I’d run away from myself. Where did I go?

Dreamt of you last night. You’re in a new apartment with up-to-date furnishings, the minimalist modern style you’ve always liked. Nice sofa, coffee table, double bed. Lively colors. No walls, though. Unbounded space. You show me around, but you don’t know quite how things work here. You stop to look over a slim manual. I want to help but you say not necessary. You’re still in your white-striped exercise outfit with a dark top, the one you wore on that terrible morning. Neither of us knows what’s really going on, why we are both here. Seems perfectly ordinary, though, as if you’re away on fellowship somewhere, maybe North Carolina, and I’ve come for a visit. I look at the manual. I don’t really understand it. And then you say, I am here a whisper away. I look up, surprised. We were inseparable, you continue. I guess such happiness comes at a price.

The dream stays with me through the next day. I want to hear your voice again but it’s just me alone. I feel like a Viking, put out to sea with only his sorrow, who must sail past the dead to some kind of beach landing. If this were a film you’d hear only the sound of creaking wood and the distant cries of storm petrels, and the groan of hands on rope. You are full of tubes and wires and your brain is slowly, quietly dying. I am terrified. I begin babbling, as we often did on walks, telling you how pretty your fingers are and that the plumber has not dug up the burning bush, as you feared. Last night, a ticket lady at the movie theater offered me a senior citizen discount. Worried now I will fall into sudden old age. I feel untethered. I could float into orbit. What keeps me grounded if not you?