are and I are walking through a museum. The museum is an
old palace, all the paintings are in rococo gold frames, all the other visitors are
wearing tall powdered wigs and immense dresses, frock coats, and breeches.
They don't seem to notice us as we pass. We look at the paintings, but they aren't
really paintings, they're poems, poems somehow given physical manifestation.
"Look," I say to Clare, "there's an Emily Dickinson." The heart asks pleasure first;
And then excuse from pain...She stands in front of the bright yellow poem and
seems to warm herself by it.
We see Dante, Donne, Blake, Neruda, Bishop; linger in a room full of Rilke,
pass quickly through the Beats and pause before Verlaine and Baudelaire. I
suddenly realize that I've lost Clare, I am walking, then running, back through
the galleries and then I abruptly find her: she is standing before a poem, a tiny
white poem tucked into a corner. She is weeping. As I come up behind her I see
the poem: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die
before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
I'm thrashing in grass, it's cold, wind rushes over me, I'm naked and cold in
darkness, there's snow on the ground, I am on my knees in the snow, blood drips
onto the snow and I reach out-
"My god, he's bleeding-"
"How the hell did that happen?"
"Shit, he's ripped off all the electrodes, help me get him back on the bed-"
I open my eyes. Kendrick and Dr. Larson are crouched over me. Dr. Larson
looks upset and worried, but Kendrick has a jubilant smile on his face.
"Did you get it?" I ask, and he replies, "It was perfect." I say, "Great," and
then I pass out.
TWO
Sunday, October 12, 1997 (Henry is 34, Clare is 26)
Henry: I wake up and smell iron and it's blood. Blood is everywhere and Clare is
curled up in the middle of it like a kitten.
I shake her and she says, "No."
"ComeonClarewakeupyou'rebleeding."
"I was dreaming..."
"Clare, please..."
She sits up. Her hands, her face, her hair are drenched in blood. Clare holds
out her hand and on it reclines a tiny monster. She says, simply, "He died," and
bursts into tears. We sit together on the edge of the blood-soaked bed, holding
each other, and crying.
Monday, February 16, 1998 (Clare is 26, Henry is 34)
Clare: Henry and I are just about to go out. It's a snowy afternoon, and I'm
pulling on my boots when the phone rings. Henry walks down the hall and into
the living room to answer it. I hear him say,
"Hello?" and then "Really?" and then "Well, hot damn!" Then he says, "Wait,
let me get some paper-" and there's a long silence, punctuated once in a while
with "Wait, explain that" and I take off my boots and my coat and pad into the
living room in my socks. Henry is sitting on the couch with the phone cradled in
his lap like a pet, furiously taking notes, I sit down next to him and he grins at
me. I look at the pad; the top of the page starts off: 4 genes: pert, timeless!, Clock, new
gene-time traveler?? Chrom-17 x 2, 4, 25, 200+ repeats TAG, sex linked? no, +too many
dopamine recpts, what proteins???... and I realize: Kendrick has done it! He's figured
it out! I can't believe it. He's done it. Now what?
Henry puts down the phone, turns to me. He looks as stunned as I feel.
"What happens next?" I ask him.
"He's going to clone the genes and put them into mice."
"What?"
"He's going to make time-traveling mice. Then he's going to cure them."
We both start to laugh at the same time, and then we are dancing, flinging
each other around the room, laughing and dancing until we fall back onto the
couch, panting. I look over at Henry, and I wonder that on a cellular level he is so
different, so other, when he's just a man in a white button-down shirt and a pea
jacket whose hand feels like skin and bone in mine, a man who smiles just like a
human. I always knew he was different, what does it matter? a few letters of code?
but somehow it must matter, and somehow we must change it, and somewhere
on the other side of the city Dr. Kendrick is sitting in his office figuring out how
to make mice that defy the rules of time. I laugh, but it's life and death, and I stop
laughing and put my hand over my mouth.
INTERMEZZO
Wednesday, August 12, 1998 (Clare is 27)
Clare: Mama is asleep, finally. She sleeps in her own bed, in her own room; she
has escaped from the hospital, at last, only to find her room, her refuge,
transformed into a hospital room. But now she is past knowing. All night she
talked, wept, laughed, yelled, called out "Philip!"
and "Mama!" and "No, no, no..." All night the cicadas and the tree frogs of my
childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin
look like beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass
of water I held to her crusted lips. Now it is dawn. Mama's window looks out
over the east. I sit in the white chair, by the window, facing the bed, but not
looking, not looking at Mama so effaced in her big bed, not looking at the pill
bottles and the spoons and the glasses and the IV pole with the bag hanging
obese with fluid and the blinking red led display and the bed pan and the little
kidney-shaped receptacle for vornit and the box of latex gloves and the trash can
with the biohazard warning label full of bloody syringes. I am looking out the
window, toward the east. A few birds are singing. I can hear the doves that live in
the wisteria waking up. The world is gray. Slowly color leaks into it, not
rosy-fingered but like a slowly spreading stain of blood orange, one moment
lingering at the horizon and then flooding the garden and then golden light, and
then a blue sky, and then all the colors vibrant in their assigned places, the
trumpet vines, the roses, the white salvia, the marigolds, all shimmering in the
new morning dew like glass. The silver birches at the edges of the woods dangle
like white strings suspended from the sky. A crow flies across the grass. Its
shadow flies under it, and meets it as it lands under the window and caws, once.
Light finds the window, and creates my hands, my body heavy in Mama's white
chair. The sun is up.
I close my eyes. The air conditioner purrs. I'm cold, and I get up and walk to
the other window, and turn it off. Now the room is silent. I walk to the bed.
Mama is still. The laborious breathing that has haunted my dreams has stopped.
Her mouth is open slightly and her eyebrows are raised as though in surprise,
although her eyes are closed; she could be singing. I kneel by the bed, I pull back
the covers and lay my ear against her heart. Her skin is warm. Nothing. No heart
beats, no blood moves, no breath inflates the sails of her lungs. Silence.
I gather up her reeking, wasted body into my arms, and she is perfect, she is
my own perfect beautiful Mama again, for just a moment, even as her bones jut
against my breasts and her head lolls, even as her cancer-laden belly mimics
fecundity she rises up in memory shining, laughing, released: free.
Footsteps in the hall. The door opens and Etta's voice.
"Clare? Oh-!"
I lower Mama back to the pillows, smooth her nightgown, her hair.
"She's gone."
Saturday, September 12, 1998 (Henry is 35, Clare is 27)
Henry: Lucille was the one who loved the garden. When we came to visit, Clare
would walk through the front door of the Meadowlark House and straight out
the back door to find Lucille, who was almost always in the garden, rain or shine.
When she was well we would find her kneeling in the beds, weeding or moving
plants or feeding the roses. When she was ill Etta and Philip would bring her
downstairs wrapped in quilts and seat her in her wicker chair, sometimes by the
fountain, sometimes under the pear tree where she could see Peter working,
digging and pruning and grafting. When Lucille was well she would regale us
with the doings of the garden: the red-headed finches who had finally discovered
the new feeder, the dahlias that had done better than expected over by the
sundial, the new rose that turned out to be a horrible shade of lavender but was
so vigorous that she was loathe to get rid of it. One summer Lucille and Alicia
conducted an experiment: Alicia spent several hours each day practicing the cello
in the garden, to see if the plants would respond to the music. Lucille swore that
her tomatoes had never been so plentiful, and she showed us a zucchini that was
the size of my thigh. So the experiment was deemed a success, but was never
repeated because it was the last summer Lucille was well enough to garden.
Lucille waxed and waned with the seasons, like a plant. In the summer, when
we all showed up, Lucille would rally and the house rang with the happy shouts
and pounding of Mark and Sharon's children, who tumbled like puppies in the
fountain and cavorted sticky and ebullient on the lawn. Lucille was often grimy
but always elegant. She would rise to greet us, her white and copper hair in a
thick coil with fat strands straggling into her face, white kidskin gardening gloves
and Smith & Hawken tools thrown down as she received our hugs. Lucille and I
always kissed very formally, on both cheeks, as though we were very old French
countesses who hadn't seen each other in a while. She was never less than kind to
me, although she could devastate her daughter with a glance. I miss her. Clare..
.well, 'miss' is inadequate. Clare is bereft. Clare walks into rooms and forgets
why she is there. Clare sits staring at a book without turning a page for an hour.
But she doesn't cry. Clare smiles if I make a joke. Clare eats what I put in front of
her. If I try to make love to her Clare will try to go along with it...and soon I leave
her alone, afraid of the docile, tearless face that seems to be miles away. I miss
Lucille, but it is Clare I am bereft of, Clare who has gone away and left me with
this stranger who only looks like 