When did I grow so old? she thought, reaching for the lines on her face. Is this what I’ve become?
She dwelled on that thought for a moment and then shook her head to clear it. She recalled something her first Mother Superior used to say: “The ability to compartmentalize is a necessary fabric in the thread of any good nun’s cloak of invincibility.” It was advice—given to her when she was still Angela Marie the novice—that Sister Benedict would turn to again and again. To be a nun was to be in a state of perpetual conflict. Discipline and obedience locked horns with compassion and forgiveness, self-imposed poverty was a source of mockery in a society driven almost entirely by consumerism, and chastity and desire could never be reconciled.
The Sister considered herself above base instincts like desire and materialism, but in the end, she was human, and some days, one or the other would tug at her conscience. As a young novice she would mention these things in confession, but the penance was always the same—a few Hail Marys, a few Our Fathers, and her soul was clean. As she grew older, she knew enough to mete out her own punishment, and kept her darkest thoughts to herself.
When she saw her aging face, with its harsh mouth, squinty eyes, and not-so-subtle facial hair on the television screen, the Sister acknowledged the sin of vanity, turned off Life and Death, and recited “Hail Mary, full of grace” over and over again.
As was always the case after such episodes of weakness, the Sister approached her canonical responsibilities with renewed vigor.
The next morning, she cajoled Jared Stone out of bed and insisted that he get some light exercise. “The mind is nothing without the body, Mr. Stone,” she told him.
“But, Sister, I’m so tired.” Jared was too weak and befuddled to remind the Sister that his doctors—her doctors—had ordered bed rest. The crew in the truck, who like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz were watching everything, knew that Jared was supposed to be in bed. But the sight of Jared pleading with the Sister, and ultimately trying to do some light stretching and a few push-ups, made for much better television than just watching the man waste away.
When Jared was safely back in bed, panting and gasping until he fell asleep, the Sister went through the rest of the house to see how else she could help.
***
Glio explored the entire network of Jared’s outward-facing nervous system. He rode the brachial plexus to the musculocutaneous nerve to the radial nerve to the ulnar nerve to the median nerve in the tips of Jared’s fingers, reveling in the cool cottony touch of Jared’s pillow. He pushed off from the gustatory cortex and traversed the highway of nerves leading to the tightly bunched fungiform papillae on Jared’s tongue, nearly exploding with joy at the sensation that was oatmeal. He came as close to the outside world as he dared in the nerve endings at the very edge of Jared’s nostril—a flirtation with the termination shock of his host’s corporeal being—momentarily repulsed by the smell of disease, not realizing, at first, that he himself was the root cause.
From the top of Jared’s scalp to the tip of his pinky toe, Glio had explored Jared like Magellan circumnavigating the globe. There was only one place left to go: the optic nerve.
Glio, having been imbued with emotion from Jared’s memories, was frightened. Hearing the world, touching the world, tasting the world, and smelling the world were not, he was certain, the same as seeing the world. But curiosity was a powerful master.
Feeling his way from the medulla oblongata to the visual cortex, Glio arrived at the lateral geniculate nucleus, the point of no return. In the way a six-year-old is filled with terror at the top of a large waterslide, so, too, was Glio at the site of the optic nerve; a swirling rope of ganglia spiraling into the brightest light Glio had ever seen. It was too late to chicken out now.
He jumped in.
A moment later, Glio was looking at a blinding red light with no definition and no form. He realized he was looking at the inside of Jared’s closed eyelid. The membrane of tissue was thick enough for its host to experience darkness. But to a being like Glio that had never known real light, it was paper-thin.
Glio desperately wanted to see the outside world, only Jared was resting, and thin though it was, the eyelid was an impenetrable barrier. Glio needed a plan.
Having spent months inside Jared’s head, he had come to know every twist, turn, and fold of his host’s brain. And Glio had grown large. What the doctors thought were twenty-four distinct tumors was really one large organism, the seemingly individual growths connected by strings of microscopic cells. While Glio’s attention was focused on the optic nerve, his tendrils simultaneously reached everywhere else. He would force the eyelids to open.