It’s in the “templates,” as he and his staff call them: the schedule for the narrative, with our travel dates; the list of his positions on issues, which I’m supposed to know even though I won’t parrot them, and a partial list of planned public appearances, both with Lena and me and without us; the breakdown of campaign employees by job description, plus key volunteers. All this is supposed to be memorized before our next stint in Alaska.
It’s so repellent that I hadn’t looked at it after a cursory glance, but here it is. The templates are connected to my laptop’s calendar, which I don’t use for anything else, with events assigned to months or weeks or days. The events pop up, color-coded, and I can’t take them off again—I tried once and it gave me a message about contacting the administrator.
Apparently I don’t have permission.
The developments connected to my father, and therefore my extended absences from Anchorage and Ned’s campaign, are lime-green bars extending across several different blocks of days on the calendar.
They’re labeled like this, on various dates:
LYMPHOMA STAGE 3. DIAGNOSIS, PROCESSING
TREATMENT MODULE 1: SURGERY, CHEMOTHERAPY
TREATMENT MODULE 2: RADIATION
METASTASIS: BONE MARROW, CEREBROSPINAL FLUID
And there’s one I didn’t notice before, a little further on.
PALLIATIVE CARE/MEMORIAL SERVICE
“Lymphoma Stage 3” is assigned to this month, the month we’re in right now: February.
I called Ned, I left a voicemail for him asking how he knew, but I strongly doubt he’ll tell me anything at all.
He typically has his staff email me when information needs to be exchanged; he and I don’t communicate.
“STAGE 3,” said my mother, on the phone again.
I’M PASTING IN an email I got from Kay, strange and dense. I think she may be bipolar.
You said you wanted to hear everything I know. So OK. So I have trouble explaining how I know it & what it is—writing isn’t my thing. I mean I was more the organic chem type!!! I used to get visions of like resonance structures & chair conformations & stuff, when I was holdig Infant V. But so. You know how I told you we r the only ones it leaves, what I meant was, it doesn’t leave the whales or the crocodiles, it doesn’t leave the plants & the trees, & that’s not because, like, theyre dumb. Theyre not. Deep language is in all living things but all the others, it stays with. Only not humans. Its because the other things, apes, cats, even the grasses in a field, don’t live just for themselves. They live for the group. They live for all, this whole of being. We used to be like that to, once a long time ago, once in our evolution, I don’t know when but once. But slowly it chaged & now we live for ourselves. So the deep language does’nt stay with us when we get our own, our surface language, you coud call it. We split off from it then & are forever alone. God leaves us Anna.
God leaves us.
I can’t tell how much is rumination or fabrication, whether some is intuition, how much she was given to know. In short I’m not sure if she has much authority.
But I’m keeping her message. I read it over in quiet times.
MORE GUESTS ARE leaving the motel, Big Linda reports, all vowing to keep in touch—I’ve started to check in on the Listserv, where so far Navid’s the only one absent. Regina and Reiner have gone back to their professions in the city, and Gabe has decamped too. He cited the needs of a lonely Bedlington terrier, pining away under the care of a neighbor back at the condo he shares with Burke, who’s soon to follow him home.
And what did they accomplish with the meetings? I get Navid’s impatience, though I wish he’d been nicer to Kay. Unlike me, the rest of the guests knew about each other before they came—they had an earlier version of the Listserv. They’d already exchanged messages containing much of what they’d say later, alongside the table of watery coffee and stale cookies. So I was the only new element. And they can’t have got much from me.
I never illuminated anything.
I account, on my fingers, for all the elements of these events I keep failing to understand. I wish I had an abacus—confusion like this calls for a deliberate, manual counting, a ritual of organization. Digits or beads, bones or a rosary. Even assuming there does exist an ambient language that underlies life, what some people call God, others possibly photosynthesis or humpback song or the opinions of a dog, I have the same questions that I always did. I want to know why I heard it, and why through Lena; why it fell silent when she slept; why it departed when she said her first word. I want to know not only its rules but its purpose, but all of that remains opaque to me.
There are the practical questions, too: How did I know to go to the motel? How was Ned able to find me? How did John know to contact him, when I took my car in to his shop?
And how did Ned know my father’s diagnosis?