Bibi realized she was awake when she heard the nurse talking with a nurses’ aide. She wasn’t able to open her eyes or speak. She could only listen. One said, “She’s exhausted, poor thing.” The other took her pulse, seemed to be satisfied, and let go of her wrist. Bibi realized that she was breathing shallowly, making a sound like a soft snore. They must think she was asleep. No one witnessed the violent seizure when it felled her earlier. They pulled the sheet and blanket up to her neck. She tried to tell them it wasn’t sleep that held her quiet, but something worse. The words formed in her mind, not in her mouth. She heard the nurse and the aide leaving, then a mortal silence.
She lay mute and blind and limp, unable to be sure whether she was lying on her back, on her chest, or on her side. No muscle in her body would respond to her command. A remembered fragment of verse came to her, its source for the moment forgotten: A condition of complete simplicity. She was indeed in a condition of complete simplicity, and although she should have been frightened, she was not. Valiant girl she would be, as she had been for so long, plucky and intrepid and stalwart. Lionhearted.
A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)…
With the second line of verse, she recalled the source: Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot.
She took some comfort from the fact that though her body seemed to have seceded from her soul, her mind remained clear and still part of her kingdom. Fragments of other Eliot lines came to her:
Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered…
Bibi drifted away once more into a nothingness that might have been a more solemn oblivion than mere sleep.
Later she revived in a panic, acutely aware of the severe decline in her condition. Paralysis. Blindness. Her tongue cinched into a knot that would not allow her the grace of words. She had gone downhill faster than rhyming Jill after she tripped over the idiot Jack. Suddenly the Big Question was whether chemo and radiation made any sense in her case, or whether the better course of treatment, the more humane course, would be to give her a box of morphine lollipops and let her suck her way out of this world in some hospice run by kindly nuns. Valiant girl or not, she wanted to cry for herself, but if she wept, she could not feel the heat of tears or the tracks they made down her face.
She woke again in the night, and this time she could open her eyes and see by the dimmed lamp above her bed. The orientation of her body became obvious to her, as well: She was lying on her right side, facing the first—still empty—bed, and the door at the farther end of the room.
That door opened and a man entered, backlit by the hall light as he approached. Even when the door eased shut behind him, closing off the light, he remained a silhouette. Bibi saw the leash as he arrived between the beds. Earlier someone had put down the railing. The dog stood on its back legs, forepaws on the mattress, favoring Bibi with the fabled smile of its breed: a golden retriever. Perhaps more than any other breed, goldens had unique faces, and although for a moment she thought that this was Olaf, it was not.
This was just some Good Samaritan with a therapy dog named Brandy or Oscar or whatever. These days, hospitals were veritable dog parks, with hordes of well-meaning people trying to make the sick and the depressed get with the uplift program. She had seen others like these two since being admitted as the poster girl for aggressive tumor maturation, and they were all sweet, the people and the dogs, though she declined their determined efforts to help her find the giggles in gliomatosis.
Her left hand lay palm-down upon the mattress. She could see it but not move it.
The dog began to lick her hand, and at first she couldn’t feel that canine caress. Soon, however, her sense of touch returned, and the warm wet tongue working between her fingers filled her with a wild hope. To her surprise, she broke her paralysis, moved the hand, and repeatedly smoothed the fur on the retriever’s noble head.
As she petted the dog, their eyes met. She knew that hers were dark and unrevealing, but the retriever’s were so gold and luminous and deep that its gaze stirred something within her. That lustrous stare awakened the slumbering child that Bibi had once been, the easily enchanted girl who, in recognition of inevitable adulthood, had taken a page from the book of bears and had hibernated through a long winter.
When the dog dropped from the bed, Bibi said, “No, please,” but the visitors moved away.
At the door, as he opened it just wide enough to slip out into the hall, the man turned to look back, still just the outline of a man, and said, “Endeavor to live the life….”