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Not long ago-five weeks, six-the last days of March brought what the French call le debacle, ice breaking, the collapse of winter. Here in the Midwest, the ruin is rapid: one day nothing but blue light and air so thin it detonates with the gunshot sound of tree limbs cracking in the cold. The next day it's the debris-filled, coffee-colored waters of the Huron rushing to clear out a season's trash. On the lawn, the thaw reveals soggy thatch, dog shit and candy wrappers-was this what we were waiting for?
There is always the moment when everything changes. The moment things turn and an intactness we don't even know to be grateful for is shattered-the moment of reversal, the one that by definition is its own decline.
I am sitting in an oncology clinic waiting room, waiting for the nurse to mispronounce my name as she always does, as she has done for the fourteen years I've been coming here since I had breast surgery in the spring of my thirtieth year. This is an unplanned, precipitous visit; there's been a change in my breast, and they've pushed aside other office visits in order to see me right away. I'm not sure I'm pleased at all at this preferential treatment, or at what it might imply.
Outside, the lilacs have begun to bloom; I can see them through the clinic's tinted windows, tossing their big heads in a wind I cannot feel or hear. I am encapsulated in a waiting area the color of a cultivated mushroom, the sofas dressed in soft mauve to mimic comfort. Above me, a television bolted to the ceiling quacks cartoons.
When I found the lump this time it was like something already known, awaited. The enemy you've been expecting for so long arrives, and it's a kind of relief. From this point on it will be war, something clear at least. It's such an odd ambivalence-the intimate invader, the body held close but turning against itself. The site of love and nurturance once more become a battlefield.
Sitting here, I tell myself stories: You'll get through this. This isn't the worst. I still have the scar from my breast surgery fourteen years ago. It is like a sliver of moon tracing the edge of my nipple, an ice-white shard of tissue without feeling now, a perfect curve, the kind that leaves no shadow.
I remember the last operation, blissed out on anesthesia until the local wore off, after which came pain so raw I had to gulp the air like a fish to get my breath.
The nurse emerges, stands for a moment peering at her clipboard.
It's spring again.
I want to screw my eyes shut and scream.
*
There is always the moment when everything reverses. I remember once driving across western Colorado, a place called the Yampa Plateau, with the man I loved at the time asleep in the passenger seat of my car. It was late afternoon, and there was a storm rumbling in the belly of the sky over the huge yellow horizon of the plains. I didn't know it then, but he was about to leave me for the second time, had already been making arrangements in secret with his wife. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. But for now I was ignorant and he was asleep-both states as close as either of us would get to innocence-and the sky above the Little Snake River was a vast swollen dusk of rain.
The road ran through the bluffs near the edge of the Elkhead Mountains, past the weird condos of a ski resort, like modern cliff-dwellings, identical stucco blocks the color of toast and a sea of balcony railings, regular as false teeth. The landscape faded back to ranchland, then to plains. The storm held off, just a few crazes of lightning high up inside the thunderheads. We passed through tiny towns made out of dirt and boredom. In one, a woman stood by the roadside and stared as we went past. She looked worn and poor-a sun-cracked, sullen face-but some nameless knowledge was in that gaze, as if she knew that even envy was just so much useless effort.
The land, bruised by the shadows of storm clouds, seemed endless. For optimists, space is about possibility; for pessimists, it is destitute, sheer lack. For someone like me at the time-neither optimist nor pessimist, but ironist-lack itself seemed a possibility, a reassuring sense of impermanence, a way to know how elemental and indistinguishable to the cosmos we are from a seed of gamma grass. There is a luxury in contemplating insignificance when one still feels loved, still feels that life is a horizon. A man is asleep beside a woman. The hour is rich with trust and calm. His soul is clean, her heart still poised toward his, unpierced by what is about to come.
I drove us up through Rabbit Ears Pass, across the lip of the Continental Divide, that defining line, a ridge on either side of which waters flow in opposite directions, heading back to different seas. There is always that pivot, the point of change. To the right of us, Muddy Creek roared its way toward Pueblo and rivers with names like Cucharas, Apishapa, Purgatoire, and then lightning finally split the sky like cracks in glaze, electricity tingled the air, my hair floating, my lover waking to the first huge splats of rain on the windshield.
*
The doctor is gentle as he performs the needle aspiration, a bee-sting of pain just above my right nipple. I can't help noticing that my file is thick as a phone book.
He smiles. "Relax. We'll soon see what this is made of."
I don't want to know what I am made of. I resist this opening, this thaw. I fear what may emerge-what refuse, what dead things, what strange new growth.
*
I tell myself stories. I'm forty-three, have a house, a job, books to write, a life. The season has fast-forwarded again. I sit on my back porch and watch my patch of world change.
That last spring too the transformation had been fast. We had been monitoring a lump I'd found nearly eighteen months before, which for a while seemed to be stable. Then, in five weeks, its size doubled. "We're going in," my surgeon said, as if announcing a military maneuver.
It was all very quick. The forms to sign, the instructions. Then I was lying on a gurney staring at the pre-op lights that looked like landing UFOs, like dishes filled with some new, luminous chemical, while a masked, brisk nurse scrubbed me with orange disinfectant.
Not me-my breast. My clavicle, sternum, ribcage. For the first time in my life I was a body, a thing, being prepared for the knife. I was a system that could fail, a mechanism that could be separated from my sentient self as easily as placing a surgical tent between my gaze and the incision.
Numbed with lidocaine when the cut came I could feel the scalpel only as a dull tug. Robbed of its sting, it was something happening to someone else, a hundred miles away. A nurse was humming the tune from a shaving cream commercial, the only other sounds the click of surgical instruments on a metal tray, the buzz of fluorescence from the lights above. My surgeon's eyes were kind above her mask-
"Later, we'll give you codeine for the pain." What pain? I was a rubber doll, a lump of clay, a gag body like a fake Halloween hand on a car seat. I would never feel myself again.
*
What is the weight of spring wind? Shanju, my Zen teacher asked us once. A koan, a riddle, unanswerable. Spring wind heavy with aroma, freighted with memories. How much does expectation weigh?
*
All that day and the next I wait for the lab results from the clinic. The sky is a haze, the air muggy. Seeds drift like lint.
There's no word by afternoon, so I go to my ceramics class to stay occupied. The unseasonable moisture gets into everything: the walls of my bowl collapse, stray hairs glued to my forehead, my eyelids. From the side, the woman at the wheel next to me looks like a little girl, head bowed, eyes intent on the vase that eludes her fingers. She smoothes her brow with the back of her hand, looks up and smiles to show a glimpse of aging beauty. Even as we kill time it goes on fashioning us.
"Tosca" competes with Miles Davis on a funky radio while our teacher gazes out the studio door at the daylight that glazes and spackles this unfinished world. Slowly, I start over, pull a cylinder upward from its unformed mass. The whirling puck of clay-straight and motionless in the flywheel's hum-waits to take its shape and rise.
I try to focus on concentric things, things spinning outward from a base-thoughts, gestures, memory, family, love, this spinning planet tipped precariously into its seasons, but somehow still centered. I remember the perfect basin of a pond at dawn, swimming with the mist rising in tendrils like steam off tea-colored water, the loons paddling before me, silent after a night of strange music, V's of water trailing them like silver ribbon. A pond round as an eye, and a morning equally concentric: blue iridescence around a dark center.
Like a living being the clay anticipates the next thing, the image of imposed form. Concentrate. I remember climbing the Old Man of Storr in Scotland, high above where a wild sea slavered against the rocks. Around me cold skirls of autumn wind fluting the blowholes of volcanic rock; below me one golden eagle wheeling, tracing circle after circle on the blue body of morning air.
Shape is also what isn't there, my teacher says. A bowl is formed by absence. She holds a straight edge across the lip of clay-watch how the light bends: the test of a true sphere is its shadow. Just so our days: bowls filled with light, cut by the sliver of darkness that defines.
I think about the whorls and spheres of a painting that hangs above my bed, one passionate gash of red bisecting an abstract field of blues. The woman who painted it was a nun. Her sister too had been in a convent, somewhere outside of Pittsburgh, where in 1994 she was found raped and strangled in the woods behind the mother house. Her sister the artist left the order and painted a series of watercolors titled "The Last Things Joanna Saw:" trees, sun, the blue unwinking eye of heaven.
And I knew a woman whose daughter fell from the Cliffs of Moher. The girl was only eighteen, with a group of other exchange students on a field trip to the west coast of Ireland. They'd been on a bus all morning, and in the excitement, the cluster and push of youngsters eager to stretch their legs and see the view, the group bustling up behind her made her lose her footing, pitch unbelievably past the lip of rock six hundred feet over the ocean to her death.
I heard this story twenty years ago, sitting at a linoleum table in the basement lunchroom of the bank where the dead girl's mother and I both worked. Three or four of us sat with sandwiches and salads untouched while this ordinary woman-a teller, like us-revisited that history, quietly imagined the last moment her daughter's foot had contact with earth, and that other last moment, the instant her own life-as a mother, as a woman-stepped off the precipice of grief past which it would fall forever.
The shape under my fingers careens and collapses, floppy as gray leather. Death takes you off-center; once you begin to wobble you cannot right yourself. We tell ourselves stories, spin our way out of this impossible darkness. Our bodies, these delicate envelopes into which life is slipped like a love letter. Outside the studio a grackle lands in a tree, chuck-chuck-chucking, then commits its odd song, a sound like a rusty hinge opening.
I begin again, throw the slick clay. It feels like flesh, like muscle. Inside me is a little fist of fear. When the scalpel draws its fine line, I think red heat will erupt from my body just like that, like going through earth's mantle to its core.
*
After the anesthesia wore off-that first time, that last time, fourteen years ago-I stepped off a cliff of pain. It was like falling through a purple sea, gyrating, my body twisting. The codeine only slurred my mind; the pain was smarter now, not to be tricked. It took up lodging somewhere deeper than my nerves and far beyond the sliced flesh that throbbed beneath bandages. The pain moved in with me somewhere untouchable.
But deeper than that, I felt as if someone had peeled off a layer of my soul. There had been a moment, a segment of time, now gone, in which I had still been whole, undamaged, integral. What was it I wanted back again? Surely not the renegade mass, that filigree of crazy cells that could still write out my life sentence.
The lump had been bigger than the surgeon expected. "This one was a real lollapaloosa," she said. They dropped it in a jar. "Do you want to see it?"
Why did the idea of looking at a rejected part of myself, gray and refracted in formaldehyde, terrify me? I imagined the lump as a tiny brain on one of those late-night movie channels, suspended in fluid, still pulsing its evil, bodiless instructions. Surely that had been worth taking away. But with the invader had also gone the immunity; it was as if being intact itself had once-irrationally, incredibly-been the magic amulet preserving me.
Winter was safety, a string of frozen moments. As if time could drop anchor, could be caught in a fist of ice. Now cottonwoods explode with seed, days regain velocity. Memory rushes past like meltwater, filled with its own debris.
*
When I was a child I wore a gold medallion my mother had brought back from Lourdes, a medal of the Virgin, whom Bernadette called Aquero, "That One." O Mary conceived without sin pray for us who have recourse to thee. My mother visited Lourdes often as a girl. I think she liked the idea of sacred celebrity.
When my parents went out of town, sometimes they would leave my sister and me with the nuns. The cavernous convent was a magical place-gleaming linoleum the color of chocolate, the lurid statues of wounded saints in niches on the stairwells. Each morning at five o'clock the bell would ring for the nuns to come to matins and the same novitiate, Sister Cyrena, would peek into our room to tell us to go back to sleep. We'd lie there gazing at the boughs of the convent's huge pines, blue-black in the dawn light, warm still under the frugal sheets, feeling marvelously in this place but not of it.
It was Sister Cyrena who, one evening at bath-time, insisted on removing my medallion as I was getting in the tub. I resisted-I had never had it off-and when I flinched from her the thing we both feared happened. Together we watched the gold chain snake down the drain, glittering for an instant against the porcelain, then shimmering, shortening, gone, the Virgin disappearing like a yellow lozenge down the dull brass throat of the convent's plumbing.
Never mind, the sister said uncertainly. It was the quaver of guilt in her voice that made me start to cry. A wary child, I recognized that tremor-the nun suddenly no more than a girl caught, expecting to be punished. Her eyes were big and blue; I think I must have frightened her with my sorrow. But in my child's mind I believed she was staring at me and my sudden vulnerability: one minute safe, the next stripped entirely of miraculous protection.
Later, when I was in bed, she came to soothe me. She tried to show me her hair under her cowl-it was meant to be a treat, no doubt, a strange gift, perhaps all she had to offer. I stared at the unkempt tangle, cropped like a boy's, brown salted prematurely with gray-and the raw, unprotected privacy of that gesture made me cry all over again.
*
Vials of Christ's tears, the breath of Judas, dust from the fingernails of Roland or Charlemagne. I think sometimes that faith is a quarrel with the void, conducted in a language unknown to the void. Things in their unwinnable argument with oblivion.
My mother still has two murky bottles of Lourdes water she keeps under a print of Michelangelo's Pieta. In the picture Christ's limbs are elegant as an athlete's, but Mary looks startled, holding this sprawling man's body in her lap-baffled, as if he'd fallen there from the sky. How young she looks, younger even than her son, a mere girl to whom these inconceivable things-motherhood, divinity, this agony of loss-have simply happened.
I know all about what might befall me; I've done my reading. Say the word: cancer. No avoidance for me; I don't want to be surprised. Though maybe research is just a more refined denial, a different form of prayer, pressing bald truth like flowers between the covers of medical journals.
The words are a rune. I recite them and they become the names of exotic plants: hyperplasia, fibroadenoma, epithelial carcinomatosis. When the hospital calls, I will be ready-I know terms, I understand the options, laid out like an algorithm.
But when it finally comes, the news is tricky. The lab results, they tell me on the phone, are inconclusive. Not enough cells? The wrong cells? My doctor wants to operate, an excisional biopsy. "Why leave it in there like a time bomb, since we don't know what it is? In and out. Then we'll be sure."
Time bomb. The body's uncertainty. Black mass going on in this temple. In the shower, my hand travels over my breast-my fingers make a flat raft, pressing, circling inward. There. Hard, like a coin under my skin, a gate of horn. My self, split from itself, fissuring.
*
They want one more mammogram before the procedure, and I descend into the catacombs of the Radiology Department to comply. I get on the elevator with a young mother and her son, the little boy in a wheelchair, his chest arched like a small chicken's. He's wearing a Detroit Red Wings cap, and tubes come out of his arms like electrical wiring.
In Mammography, women are shuffled from space to space-called from the outer waiting room to change into gowns, then to resettle and wait some more in an inner waiting room where the magazines are all about holiday crafts and recipes, and the TV is permanently tuned to "Days of Our Lives." We look like a strange order of devotionals, dressed in our lumpy, pale blue habits, tactfully avoiding each others' gaze. There are brochures about menopause and venereal disease that nobody touches.
The soap opera's plot creeps forward. One by one we are moved again, this time to inner sancta, each woman to her own mammography room to contemplate in solitude the giant glass-plated machine, big as an industrial die-stamper, its cone of radiation lowered, discretely waiting.
Strange how the body as object can become either derelict or sacred. Sometimes less, sometimes more than itself. Odd that the words venery and veneration stem from one root. And how we use fragments to symbolize integrity: Saint Lucia holding her eyes on a plate, the severed breasts of Saint Anne. Ex voto offerings of arms, legs, plastic replicas of kidneys, tiny crutches hanging from church walls. Amulets. Human synecdoche. Parts for the whole.
Poor Bernadette was a girl much photographed as well. They exhumed her body three times, to demonstrate to unbelieving potentates the state of her miraculous preservation. She's on permanent display now, in a glass casket in St. Gildard's in Burgundy, where busloads of curious tourists are unloaded three times a day. Her corpse was washed and dressed by the nuns, her eyebrows plucked, her face made up. Her kneecaps, liver, diaphragm and two ribs have been removed mysteriously over the years, vandalized for relics.
The nurse comes in, Hello-she looks down, reads out my name from her file. This won't take a minute. I expect you know the drill. We slip the gown from my right side; I grasp the machine's plastic handle, feel the nurse flatten my breast against the plate as if it were a knot of dough. Smooth, professional. The glass plates come together like a tool press, pinning me painfully. How many women before me have stood here cursing this machine? The nurse retreats into her safety booth. Not her; she's immune.
The radiation zips through me, and the machine lets me go. I am no longer the object of its short attention, its brief embrace. I am shuffled off through a different door to wait until the nurse is sure the pictures took, then down an unfamiliar corridor, back to the changing room again, out to Cashier's and Referrals, up the elevators, through the lobby and the brilliant turnstile doors, back inexplicably into the blinking sun.
*
Next day the sky is thin-shelled and blue as a wren's egg, and the pear-blossoms that fell in last night's rain have made the lawn look like church steps after a wedding. My pear tree is old; most of its branches are dead. Just a scurf of green along its outer twigs where life will push itself out one more year in a snowfall of flowers, a few diminished bronze globes of fruit. By frost they'll be bursting with juice and taste like everything that combined to make them-autumn sun, July's cut grass, the cold faint nectar of last year's spring wind.
My parents have come in from out of town to be with me for the surgical procedure. They are ensconced in a Mariott Hotel nearby, insisting on leaving me my privacy, calling every hour or two to tell me so. This morning my mother has gone shopping; my father visits with me and we have coffee on my deck. I find myself thinking, ungenerously, that he should be the patient, not me. The backs of his hands are spotted, and his hair has begun to look ghostly-white and insubstantial as mist. It's lonely hearing him talk to himself, watching him comfort himself by arguing medical probabilities with me. The words biopsy, mastectomy scare him, a fact he blatantly tries to hide.
I am not a paper doll, I shout at him. It's 1968, and outside our suburban New Jersey windows a whole hemisphere has been seduced by power. In Saigon, Buddhist nuns are setting themselves on fire; students are smashing glass in the streets of Paris. You can't just move me around the stage of your own inadequacies. I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I am looking for a reaction. He lowers his eyes and turns away, as he has done so many times before.
What is the heft of something evermoving, carrying time on its back? All my life I have invented stories to explain my father's reticence. I am tough to guard myself from too much disappointment. Even now, words shield me. I sit on the deck and think lilac trees, bony as farm women and robin's breast the color of dried blood, the color of Christ's promises. Age, like spring, sharpens all the battle lines. In the merciless May sun, I realize my father is disappearing a little more each day.
*
I think of another spring, an early June hiking the Inyo wilderness in California's High Sierras. In a riverbed above King's Canyon we found the looped cursive of animal tracks-chamois and lynx-first paced, then circling, then intertwined as in a dance. The carcass was gone, not even the slow spiral of a buzzard to break up the flat blue sky.
The friend I was with, a physician I had known since his medical school days, told me stories he'd come across in his research: tropical diseases, viral infections, bacterium that turn you into jelly from the inside out. The wonder, he said, is really that we live as long as we do. Our bodies, such permeable vessels we steer without thinking into the path of strange forces.
This same man, my friend, was a mountain climber who had once been caught in an avalanche while making an ascent of Denali's east face. The team had rigged a guyline across a snowfield, and my friend was halfway to the ridge when he heard above him the deafening locomotive rumble of his death charging at him in the form of a tsunami of snow. All he could do was wrap his arm around the guyline in the seconds before the avalanche hit and cup his free hand over his nose and mouth to buy another minute or two of oxygen before he died.
When the snow covered him, although his eyes were shut, he said the world turned blue. The pressure of half a mountain was compacted over and around him; he felt his ribs bend and crack, and in the preternatural silence after the din of settling snow, he heard one loud pop, which was the sound of his arm, still wrapped in guyline, leaving its socket. In that one moment, of all things, he suddenly realized that he was in love with a woman who until then he had known only socially-he could envision her clearly, in a friend's kitchen in Sausalito, tearing the leaves for a salad, looking over her shoulder and laughing at something someone had said. He could see with such precision her hair, the light on her skin, the very fabric of the skirt she was wearing. What a shit, he thought, to die now.
He felt cold fingers curling around his heart, felt himself blacking out. Just then, the snow, inexplicably, heaved past itself, slid into a second avalanche that pulled on down the mountain and left him free, hanging from the guywire, blinking in the miraculous, sudden sun.
The moment of reversal. Remission. Pardon. The moment after which nothing is ever again the same.
That night in the Inyo the stars were chips of ice in a frozen sky, the Milky Way a spume of light, food from the distant breast of space. We had camped near the trail, a wavering gray ribbon that gradually vanished into the darkness. I asked my friend what had become of the woman. He said after he'd gotten out of the hospital in Anchorage he flew back to San Francisco and went to her.
He told her straight, in words as clear as he could find, about his experience, about his love for her. Everything he'd felt-about death, about his own life-was distilled into that declaration. He stood there like Lazarus and felt the universe coming to a point, a pivot. He thought that at any moment his heart too might give a loud crack and explode from its socket with the pressure, the importance of this change.
But the truth is, other peoples' crises are banal. It's like someone who's just been in a plane crash trying to explain the experience to somebody sitting by a pool. It simply doesn't work. The woman just looked at him blankly, as if she were having trouble placing him. Then she said she already had a boyfriend, and she wasn't interested in a doctor's late hours. She didn't even ask him in.
So he turned around and went back home. But it was odd, he said-as he walked back to his car, it was as if he had stepped out of his own body and was watching himself from a distance: a rejected man with his arm in a sling walking back to his car. He felt no regret and very little involvement. It was the snow's strange gift: the self divided from itself, familiar, foreign, observant.
Years later he met the woman he would marry, and he said it was worth the wait to find the person who could love you back as deeply as you loved them. They'd been together now for seventeen years, had three beautiful children. But sometimes even now, he said, he'd be lying in bed beside her, or be placing his hand on hers just as the lights dimmed in a concert hall, and he would again take that step outside his own life and find himself looking back, watching himself like a third person, loving and being loved.
Perhaps when you step across that threshold once, forever after the doorway stays a little bit ajar. We gazed at the dark silhouettes of chaparral, the luminous crescent of Palisade Glacier. I thought how easy it is to become lost in this landscape, this syntax of wild forms, this journey whose ending is written in a code we cannot understand.
*
Spring is the season for pilgrimage. Chaucer's soft April, his showres soote. Compostela: field of stars.
They say it is about connection: rejoining body and spirit, metaphor and actuality, coupling the inner journey with a real one across time and landscape. Hiking to higher ground.
My mother went back often to Lourdes. Later in life, when she developed masses in her breasts like I did, she flew Lufthansa back to Europe-not to a shrine, but to a spa town with a good surgeon for a lumpectomy, because American doctors in the sixties still thought of radical mastectomy as the treatment of choice. Unsentimental pilgrimage: my mother's own palmer's journey to stay intact.
She was still young then, pretty. Age and disfigurement terrified her. I remember her, still in her thirties, sitting at her dressing table plucking the premature gray hairs from her head until my father joked he'd rather have her gray than bald. As a girl, she'd been afraid of the malades-their rigid, aimless faces, the way they were parked and perambulated all through Lourdes, a traffic jam of stretchers and wheelchairs. But the Virgin, she said, was beautiful-a wonder, that blue sash, those red roses on her tiny feet.
Our Lady doesn't interest me, her crown of stars, her gold-tipped basilica. Instead, I know that for an entrance fee you can walk through the hovel where Bernadette had lived-sixth child of grinding poverty, four to a bed, choleric, tubercular, mud floors, no light, a girl for whom fresh water was enough of a miracle. Why is it she who calls to me, who beckons us all to cross over our sea of self-pity?
They say it is about connection: our momentary troubles dignified as they echo a more timeless via dolorosa. How many thousands have walked these stones, have lain upon these surfaces, asking to be healed? It is to salve the rift between the one and the rest, between moment and history-to cross thresholds worn to a gleam by other traveler's feet, marble softened by millenia of human hands and hopes brushing the knees, the lips, the mitres of saints' statues.
Something imperishable calls to us. Yesterday in a shopping mall, I passed three Buddhist monks standing in front of Radio Shack in robes the color of nasturtium. Without thinking, I bowed to them as I walked past. How they beamed and rebeamed, touching fingertips to lips, to foreheads, to acknowledge the divinity of the human across time, across gender and race, across the space between us.
*
I'm told to fast the night before surgery, like a pilgrim, eating, drinking nothing, no alcohol, no aspirin, no drugs. I have to empty myself out, becoming nothing again but muscle, sinew, bone.
I am instructed to remove all jewelry-if my heart fails and they need to apply the paddles, electricity can arc through silver or gold and burn the flesh beneath it. It surprises me how every ring is weighted with association. With each one I take off I strip myself of a memory that had been bound to me by its precious metal-tokens of love and anniversary. Isn't this divestiture itself a kind of failure of the heart?
Nothing unnecessary, the nurse had said.
*
Seven a.m. My mother can't decide which shoes to wear to the hospital. My father fusses about the books he'll take to pass the time. They are like children going on an outing, my elderly parents. Through the stream of the shower, I can hear them quarreling about who should drive.
We arrive by 7:45. There are already a surprising number of people there; the lobby seems crowded as a bus station. The receptionist points us to the waiting area, explains directions to the pharmacy-for later. She invites my parents to help themselves to coffee and fresh muffins. And you're the patient? She tilts her hairdo at me. I nod. You can have water. The fountain's over there by Chemo.
We find places, settle into the plush, squeakless upholstery. Phones are bleating everywhere. I try to read an article in an old Smithsonian, but my fingers seem to keep turning the magazine's edges to damp pulp. My father blows on his coffee. My mother looks at her shoes, tilting them this way and that as if she's contemplating a purchase. None of us speaks.
After twenty minutes there is sudden activity. A heavyset nurse bustles over with a file, and the three of us stand up in unison.
"Are you the Marcolinos?"
"No."
"Sorry. So sorry."
Awkwardly, we sit back down. We must look interchangeable. A good thing they asked, my father says ominously.
One by one the patients are called away. Their loved ones look immensely left behind-they fiddle or stand, suddenly unmoored, and walk around the lobby or out the silent, automatic doors to pace the curb, trying to stay out of the path of wheelchairs. They look so lost, the healthy, in this temple of disease.
At ten to nine the right nurse finally comes for me. My mother takes my jacket; I kiss her papery, dry cheek. She feels so ethereal. My father pats my shoulder with a frail hand. When did they let themselves get so old? I turn and read my nurse's nametag-Rosaria-then follow her through the large metal doors into whatever's next.
From the waiting room to pre-op is sheer inversion, like stepping through a membrane into an alternate world. The colors change, from pastel plums and pinks to ice white and sterile blue, and the muted gab of Muzak switches to the clink of instruments, the clean hum of rubber wheels on linoleum. After the stale tension of the waiting room, the smells here are brisk and tannic, like there's been a rain. The nurses are friendly without the usual false edge of hospital cheer.
Rosaria hands me a bundle-hospital socks and gown-and it's almost a relief to take off street clothes and assume the shift of the generic, the penitent, bootied and blanketed like a baby, raised into bed, adjusted, tucked, hands laid upon you with skilled beneficence. Soon I'm lying back, warm, listening to patients banter gently with each other in this last, safe space. When do the bacon and eggs get served? I don't know about you, honey, but I plan to go out dancing tonight. Their voices float to me from behind the separating curtains, like the gentle disembodied sounds of souls departed. If heaven has a foyer, it will be soft and transitional as this place, unhurried, sweet and warm as fresh laundry.
Rosaria leans over my bed, asks how I'm doing. Her accent is rich and crisp, her smile beautiful. They will begin to prep me now, she says.
Another nurse cups my wrist, taps the back of my hand to raise a vein. I know this time they will be using demerol. Calm hands attach electrodes, and we begin to see my heart spike and rest in a green line on the monitor.
I try to hold onto this moment, the last one before we fizz into the future. It's this instant before the cut I want to catch-that moment of integrity, eternal, evanescent, forever suspended and forever destroyed by its own definition, erased in its own movement to completion. But I have nothing to hold it with; I am reduced to nerve and tendon, blood pressure, a pulse on a machine. The pilgrims took nothing with them into the journey. A staff, a scallop shell, the hope that they would find provision.
Hands move over and around me, reassuring. I look up at the wide white of a nurse's uniform, at the end of which are Rosaria's eyes.
When will you give me the anesthesia?
She looks down at me, smiles.
We already have.
Then we are in motion, all of us together, a strange processional, the IV rattling like a skinny mendicant, my gurney a white raft, a litter borne forward by gentle, gloved hands. The needle drips its dreams. I think she's under. But I'm not; it's just that the doctors have orange robes and roses on their feet.
It's then that I feel it, cool and fresh, with the sting of snow still in it: blowing the storm clouds over Cucharas, blowing rain into a dusty Colorado town, herding the Arctic light around the sky, rushing down the valley of the river Gave, mysterious freshness, gentling the fixed, lost look of the paralytic. Zephyr combing my mother's beautiful gray hair, stroking her aging body into peace, lifting my father's white wisps and fluttering the pages of the book in his hands until he can no longer look down and away.
In my twilight sleep I feel its soft gust move around and over us as we wheel down the hospital corridor, making the nurses think for a moment of wings and heartbeats not mapped out on a screen, the sleep of someone loved beneath their arms. Under the force of its gentle inspiration, ice shatters, white fields break into blossom. There is always the moment, because every moment is the one beyond which nothing is the same. The weight of spring wind blows open the swinging door, and inside a girl who was me, hair floating, red skirt billowing, is laughing, at the world in motion, laughing at a universe of falling petals.